Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind

Dedication

To my mother

and

To Ann, Larry, and Judith

for their invaluable help

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part I: Early Struggles

  1: The New Europe

  2: Miner’s Son

  3: Candlelight Studies

  4: Penance and Dread

  5: Breakthrough

  6: The Vow in the Storm

Part II: Discoveries

  7: Back to the Fathers

  8: Angry with God

  9: Renaissance Tour

10: Self-Righteous Jews

11: A Blueprint for Europe

12: The Gate to Paradise

13: Annus Mirabilis

14: A Friar’s Cry

Part III: Rumblings

15: For the Want of Greek Type

16: A Drunken German

17: Unbridled

18: Onto the World Stage

19: Uncommitted

20: The Great Debate

21: The Viper Strikes

22: Thunderclaps

23: Bonfires

24: Faith and Fury

25: Will He Come?

26: Judgment at Worms

Part IV: Agitation

27: The Martyr’s Crown

28: Outlaw

29: Was Nowhere Safe?

30: Satan Falls upon the Flock

31: The Pope of Wittenberg

32: The New Gospel Spreads

33: True Christian Warfare

34: A Shower of Stones

Part V: Rupture

35: The Gospel of Discontent

36: Uprising

37: The Murdering Hordes

38: Fatal Dissension

39: Invasion by Scripture

40: Vandals

41: The Crack-Up

42: Madness

43: Enemies of Christ

Aftermath: Erasmus

Aftermath: Luther

Origins and Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Photos Section

About the Author

Also by Michael Massing

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Toward the end of the year 1516, Erasmus of Rotterdam, then living in the Low Countries, received a letter from George Spalatin, the secretary to Frederick the Wise of Saxony. After expressing his esteem for the Dutch humanist, Spalatin explained that he was writing on behalf of an Augustinian priest, whom he did not name. The priest had read Erasmus’s recently published annotations on the New Testament—notes on the Latin translation known as the Vulgate—and had two concerns. One related to original sin. Erasmus, the priest believed, had misunderstood Paul’s position on this doctrine and urged him to read Augustine’s commentary on it, which, he felt, would set him right. He also objected to Erasmus’s understanding of works. Erasmus seemed to feel that Paul, in rejecting the performance of works, was referring only to rites and ceremonies when in fact he meant works of all kinds, including the keeping of the Ten Commandments. The priest wanted to make sure that Erasmus understood this, since, given his great prestige, he might otherwise lead people astray.

The priest was Martin Luther. Thirty-three years old at the time, he was a little-known friar and Bible professor in the eastern German town of Wittenberg. He had just completed a long series of lectures on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, delivered in a weather-beaten hall to a small group of clerics and students. Erasmus, who was about fifty, was Europe’s most celebrated scholar. Kings, dukes, and cardinals all vied to bring him to their lands. He was an associate of Pope Leo X, a friend of Henry VIII of England, and a councilor to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was also Europe’s bestselling author. Thanks to his mastery of the new medium of print, Erasmus was the first person in Europe able to live off the income from his writing, and at the Frankfurt book fair every spring and autumn, his books regularly sold out.

Several times a week, Erasmus received a bundle of letters from around Europe, providing news, offering praise, seeking his opinions. He was unable to respond to them all, and he paid little attention to the complaints of the anonymous priest. The following October, however, Luther would post his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg, challenging the Roman Church’s practice of selling indulgences. These certificates, by remitting the penalties imposed on sinners for their transgressions, reduced the amount of time they had to spend in purgatory before being admitted to heaven. To Luther, they seemed to turn repentance into a form of barter, and he proposed his theses as an invitation to debate. No one accepted it, but within weeks his protest appeared in print, and as copies circulated around Germany, he became a household name.

Initially, the Church ignored the impertinent friar, assuming the matter would blow over, but Luther—tenacious, blunt, fearless—spoke out ever more forcefully against what he saw as Rome’s laxity, venality, and exploitation of ordinary Christians. And many of those Christians—burdened by tithes and fees and the sanctions imposed for not paying them—rallied to his cause. As opposition surged, Rome finally moved to silence Luther, but the harder it tried to suppress him, the more outspoken he became, until finally he was questioning the authority of the pope himself. No ecclesiast, however lofty, he declared, could tell a Christian how to behave or think. By the summer of 1520, the threat posed by Luther had become so great that Pope Leo X signed a bull threatening to excommunicate him if he did not appear in Rome and recant. Luther responded by burning the bull. Demanding an independent hearing, he finally got one in April 1521, when he was summoned before the Imperial Diet of the German nation, meeting in Worms. Standing before the emperor and a phalanx of imperial and ecclesiastical officials, Luther refused to retract what he had written, declaring that he could not act against his conscience.

This moment, when a lone individual appealing to his conscience stood fast before the highest authorities in the land, is considered by many a milestone in Western history—the moment when the medieval gave way to the modern. Luther’s defiance would inspire a broad revolt against Rome—the Protestant Reformation—that would break the thousand-year hold of the Church on the spiritual life of the West.

It would also push Erasmus off the historical stage. In just a few years, the Dutchman would go from being Europe’s most renowned thinker to a largely ignored figure, scorned by both Catholics (for being too critical of the Church) and Protestants (for being too timid). After his death, in 1536, Erasmus was all but forgotten as Europe experienced a century of religious strife. Even today, his works are only sporadically read, and his ideas receive scant attention. They deserve to be revived. For Erasmus was an architect of the Northern Renaissance. While Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were revolutionizing Western art and culture, Erasmus was helping to transform the continent’s intellectual and religious life. In some ways, he represents the path not taken. At a time of rising nationalism, he was a committed internationalist. In an age of persecution and incessant war, he urged tolerance and promoted peace, and he argued that religion should be more about conduct than doctrine. Erasmus was, in short, the leading exponent of Christian humanism, extolling human dignity, modest piety, and brotherhood in a world gripped by zealotry, rancor, and sectarianism.

In his books and essays, Erasmus laid out a program to reform and revitalize European culture. His Enchiridion Militis Christiani (The Handbook of the Christian Soldier) became a manual for Europe’s growing middle class as it sought a form of inner spirituality more fulfilling than the performance of formal acts like going to confession or visiting a shrine. The Praise of Folly, with its barbed put-downs of pedantic theologians and self-seeking princes, helped puncture the pretensions and excesses of Europe’s ruling elite. The Adages, a thick compendium of aphorisms culled from ancient Greece and Rome and explained in lively essays, did more than any other work to revive interest in classical culture. Erasmus’s treatises on education helped shape Western pedagogy for centuries, and his Colloquies—colorful dialogues and sketches based on everyday life—offered sharp observations on the customs and conventions of sixteenth-century Europe.

Above all, Erasmus revolutionized the study of the Bible. At the time, the Vulgate was the source of all teaching and doctrine in the Western Church, its language consecrated by centuries of tradition and decree. Prepared during the waning days of imperial Rome, it was a Latin translation from the original Greek (in the case of the New Testament) and Hebrew (in the case of the Old). And its accuracy was coming under challenge. Many of its words and phrases seemed to diverge from their original meaning, and misspellings and other errors had been introduced by nodding scribes. Intent on correcting it, Erasmus spent years struggling to learn Greek so that he could read old manuscripts of the New Testament in its original tongue. In 1516, after much toil, he came out with his revised edition, which included a Greek text, an emended Latin translation, and annotations explaining the reasoning behind his changes.

Erasmus’s new New Testament, offering scholars and exegetes a comprehensive apparatus for reading the Bible anew and arriving at their own interpretations, set off an explosion across Europe. It was to the study of Scripture what Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (first printed in 1543) was to the study of astronomy. Just as the Polish astronomer shattered the idea that the earth was the center of the heavens, so did the Dutch humanist seek to bring Scripture down from heaven to earth. From that point on, the Bible would be seen by many as a document that, though divinely inspired, had been fashioned by human hands and which could be deconstructed and edited in the same manner as a text by Livy or Seneca.

It was this work that prompted Luther to approach Erasmus. At that point, Luther was a great admirer of the Dutchman and eagerly followed his writings. And he shared Erasmus’s diagnosis of what ailed the Catholic Church. Later, in fact, Erasmus’s conservative critics would accuse him of having laid the egg that Luther hatched. At an early point, however, Luther went his own way. Where Erasmus was skeptical, temperate, and undogmatic, Luther was ardent, volatile, and uncompromising. At the age of twenty-one, he had entered a monastery in the hope of overcoming a deep spiritual crisis. Convinced of his utter worthlessness before God, he intently searched the Bible for a new way to him. He found it in Paul’s epistles. Luther’s famous discovery of the doctrine of justification by faith alone while reading the Epistle to the Romans would become the foundation of his challenge to Rome and the core of the new Protestant faith.

Erasmus, who had similarly entered a monastery at a young age but left it to see the world, was interested less in faith than in works; a Christian, he held, should in all things seek to imitate Christ. While Erasmus stressed the capabilities of man, Luther exalted the power of God. Where Erasmus sought to reform the Church from within, Luther proposed a more thoroughgoing transformation. Eventually, the widening differences between the two men flared into a bitter competition, with each seeking through tracts and pamphlets to win over Europe to his side. Their rivalry represented the clash of not just two intellectuals but also of two worldviews—the humanist, embracing the common bonds of humanity and the diversity of cultures and viewpoints within it, and the evangelical, stressing God’s majesty and Christ’s divinity and insisting that all recognize those truths as supreme and incontestable.

These two schools remain with us today. The conflict between Erasmus and Luther marks a key passage in Western thinking—the point at which these two fundamental and often colliding traditions took hold. The struggle between them continues to shape Western society. On one side are Erasmus-like humanists: seekers of concord, promoters of pluralism, believers in the Bible as a fallible document open to multiple interpretations, and advocates of the view that man is a fully autonomous moral agent. On the other are Lutheran-style evangelicals who seek a direct relationship with God, embrace faith in Christ as the only path to salvation, accept the Bible as the Word of God, and consider the Almighty the prime mover of events.

The continuing influence of these two outlooks can be seen in the divergent paths taken by Europe and America. Since World War II, Europe has embraced a creed founded on many of the same principles as Erasmian humanism. The European Union embodies many of Erasmus’s core ideals. Luther’s ideas, meanwhile, have found their most fertile ground in America. The one-fourth or so of American adults who are evangelical in orientation seem in many ways Luther’s offspring.

Traditionally, John Calvin has been considered the Reformation figure who has most shaped American life. His teachings about predestination, grace, salvation, and the elect are widely seen as having strongly influenced early American society, leaving a permanent imprint on the country’s spiritual, cultural, and political life. This perspective owes much to Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he argued that the Calvinist preoccupation with salvation led early Americans—anxious for signs that they had been saved—to embrace such godly virtues as industriousness, asceticism, and thrift. Becoming engrained in the American way of life, such traits helped nurture the capitalist spirit.

Weber’s thesis has given rise to a massive literature both pro and con. Whatever its merits, The Protestant Ethic has had the effect of highlighting Calvin’s influence in American life. Yet Calvin got many of his ideas from Luther. It was Luther who developed the doctrine of predestination that was so central to Calvinism. It was Luther who developed the revolutionary idea that Christian authority rests not with popes, councils, or tradition but with the Bible. And it was Luther who insisted that all Christians should have the right to read that document on their own. Luther further held that once a Christian has determined the Word of God, he must tirelessly proclaim and promote it, even in the face of scorn, mockery, and persecution.

Later in life, Luther backed away from some of these principles. Enraged by the peasants’ uprising of 1525 and their invoking of his writings, he increasingly looked to the princes to ensure both the survival of the Reformation and his own physical safety, and he jettisoned some of the more populist elements of his program. More generally, Luther rejected actions aimed at effecting broad social or political change based on one’s religious beliefs. By contrast, Calvin in Geneva sought to remake society in line with his theology—to build a heavenly city on earth. His followers in subsequent generations similarly sought to transform the world according to biblical principles. This was true both in Europe and in America, where the New England Puritans sought to create a biblically based community. Luther eschewed all such activism.

In the Calvinist stress on the community, however, the place of the individual got lost. And it is here that Luther’s influence in America seems so fundamental. His insistence on the right of lay Christians to read Scripture on their own; on the critical importance of the individual’s faith in Christ; on the need to stand alone and accountable before God; on remaining true to one’s spiritual convictions in the face of formidable obstacles—all seem aspects of an evangelical perspective. In their commitment to a highly individualized faith based in Christ and Scripture, America’s evangelicals seem—however unconsciously—to be following the path blazed by Luther five centuries ago. Examining his life can help shed light on the origins of modern-day evangelicalism. And studying Erasmus’s life can help unlock the origins of modern-day humanism.

The Protestant Reformation is one of history’s most well-chronicled events and Luther one of its most written-about figures. Most biographies of Luther, however, focus narrowly on his life and character, his circle of associates, and events in Wittenberg. The broader European setting of Luther’s revolt, and how his ideas roused a continent, are often neglected. Most biographies of Erasmus, meanwhile, while offering much useful information and analysis, are aimed at specialized audiences. The most readable of them, by Stefan Zweig, appeared more than eighty years ago. Furthermore, while books about Luther and Erasmus invariably touch on their famous rivalry, few place it at their center. Concentrating on that rivalry offers an opportunity to explore the complex relationship between two great historical movements, the Renaissance and the Reformation.

In what follows, I describe the parallel lives of Erasmus and Luther, their gradual entanglement, and their eventual estrangement. A journalist by trade, I have approached the subject much as I would a newspaper or magazine assignment. Rather than visit a far-off land, I have traveled to a distant century. As with many assignments, the cultural setting often seemed foreign, but I felt I was able to bring a fresh eye to well-trodden terrain (mindful all along of my debt to the many historians who have gone before). Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history; in writing about the Reformation, I am preparing perhaps the five-hundredth. Throughout, though, I have often felt the same surge of excitement I have had while reporting a good story.

I have tried to convey that excitement. One of the most striking things about the sixteenth century is the passion with which people debated ideas, and this book is as much about the ideas as the people. In researching the lives of Erasmus and Luther, I have undertaken my own journey back to the sources, and I offer sketches of some of the remarkable figures I encountered along the way, including the Apostle Paul, the inspirer of Luther; Augustine, the most influential Catholic thinker; Jerome, the temperamental translator of the Bible; Thomas Aquinas, the indefatigable Scholastic systematizer; Petrarch, the first great humanist; Lorenzo Valla, the disruptive Renaissance iconoclast; Johannes Reuchlin, the embattled champion of Hebraic studies; Erasmus’s close friend Thomas More; Luther’s collaborator Philipp Melanchthon; the runaway nun Katharina von Bora, whom Luther married; the publishers Aldus Manutius and Johann Froben; the radical reformers Andreas von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer; Jan Hus, Luther’s Czech forerunner; Huldrych Zwingli, the father of the Swiss Reformation; William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible into English; and John Calvin.

I have also tried to describe what it was like to live in some of Europe’s leading cities and towns, from London and Paris to Basel and Rome. The Eternal City’s transformation in this period from the shrunken, malodorous wasteland it had become during the Middle Ages into the cultural and historical showcase it is today is one of the subthemes of my book. In my conclusion, I try to trace the modern-day echoes of the rivalry between Erasmus and Luther—between humanism and evangelicalism—and show how that competition continues to shape our world.

Part I

Early Struggles

1

The New Europe

For religious tourists wanting to see the cities associated with the rise of the Reformation, the itinerary is well established: Prague, the home of Jan Hus; Zurich and Geneva, the citadels of Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin; Erfurt, where Luther studied and became a friar; Worms, the site of his stand at the Imperial Diet; and, of course, Wittenberg, the reformer’s longtime center of operations. Yet there is another city that, though absent from such tours, played a key part in incubating the ideas that helped set off the great religious upheaval that transformed Europe: Deventer, in the eastern Netherlands.

Today, Deventer seems indistinguishable from thousands of other orderly, prosperous towns that dot the map of Western Europe. In its well-preserved center, pedestrians stroll along cobblestoned streets, peering at shop windows that display elegant prints, fine handicrafts, and high-end housewares. The Brink, the town’s long, narrow central plaza, is bordered by cafés and restaurants that in warm months fill with tourists and locals who wash down sandwiches with the local pilsner. Deventer’s public squares are graced with tasteful modern sculptures, and every August it holds an open-air book fair that is one of the largest in Europe. Of the four churches that were operating on the eve of the Reformation, one now serves primarily as an arts center and another as an events space—by-products of the ongoing de-Christianization of Europe. The larger of the remaining churches—the vast Grote of Lebuinuskerk—was once affiliated with the Catholic Church and called St. Lebwin’s. In 1580, however, it was taken over by Calvinists, who stripped the interior of all altars and statues and whitewashed its walls, and it remains a Protestant sanctuary. The church’s lone tower houses a seventeenth-century carillon that serenades the town with everything from Bach to Havah Nagila.

Across from this church stands a trim three-story building. In the late Middle Ages, the site was home to a renowned Latin school, which, run by St. Lebwin’s, attracted students from hundreds of miles around. Among its prominent alumni was Geert Groote, a pious deacon and itinerant preacher who in the late fourteenth century founded the Devotio Moderna (Modern Devotion), a lay movement that stressed the inner spirit over formal rituals. Another graduate, Thomas à Kempis, summed up Groote’s ideas in The Imitation of Christ, a manual of piety that urged Christians to withdraw from the world and seek a direct relationship with God. From the moment it appeared, in the early fifteenth century, the Imitation found a huge audience. (It remains popular, ranking as the most widely read devotional work after the Bible.) From its base in Deventer and the IJssel valley, the Devotio Moderna spread throughout the Netherlands and into western Germany, becoming the most important reform movement in northern Europe.

The spirit of the Devotio Moderna pervaded St. Lebwin’s. And it left a deep mark on the school’s most famous alumnus—Erasmus. Though he would later condemn the school’s instruction as barbarous, it was here that, in addition to learning the rudiments of Latin, he absorbed the earnest piety of the Devotio Moderna. The building that now rises on the school’s site features above its entryway a depiction in colored glass of Erasmus writing on a piece of paper the names of Groote, Kempis, and others associated with the school. Above him are the words Non Scholae Sed Vitae Discimus—We learn not for school but for life—a saying of Seneca’s that reflected Erasmus’s own outlook.

In the public mind, Erasmus is associated not with Deventer but with Rotterdam, the city of his birth. In midlife, he would add its name to his own, becoming Erasmus Roterodamus—Erasmus of Rotterdam. Prior to World War II, there was a small house in Nieuw-Kerk Street in central Rotterdam whose facade had an inscription stating that the famous Erasmus had been born there. (The building, along with much of Rotterdam, was obliterated by German bombs on May 14, 1940.) The house was a short walk from the Nieuwe Maas, one of the branches of the Rhine as that river reaches the North Sea. Erasmus would later note with pride that he was born between the banks of the Rhine. In addition to being a vital commercial artery connecting the North Sea with Central Europe, the Rhine was a flourishing cultural corridor, and Erasmus would spend much of his life traveling along it.

Today, a tall bronze statue of Erasmus stands in a plaza in front of St. Lawrence’s church, not far from the site of the house in Nieuw-Kerk Street. Produced in the early seventeenth century in the midst of the Eighty Years’ War, it has somehow managed to survive centuries of unrest, war, and indifference. (During World War II, it lay buried in the courtyard of a local art museum.) The statue shows the Dutch humanist in a full-length fur-trimmed mantle and a canon’s cap, examining the pages of a thick folio-edition New Testament (no doubt his). A Latin inscription on the pedestal proclaims him the first man of his age, the most outstanding citizen of all citizens, and one who rightly attained an immortal name by his eternal writings. The florid tribute, however, is belied by the bleak surroundings. The plaza is secluded and bordered by unsightly storefronts—a reflection, perhaps, of Rotterdam’s ambivalence toward its famous son, who left it at an early age and rarely returned.

The statue has an odd feature. On the front, it gives Erasmus’s year of birth as 1469; on the back, it says 1467. At various points, Erasmus himself gave each of those years (as well as 1466) as that of his birth (while never wavering on the day: October 28). The confusion reflects the chaotic circumstances of his parents’ lives (about which little is known). His father, Gerard, the second-youngest of ten children born to a couple living in the town of Gouda, some twelve miles east of Rotterdam, was well educated, having learned both Latin and Greek. His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a physician in the North Brabant village of Zevenbergen. She and Gerard became intimate, and she gave birth to a boy named Pieter. Nearly three years later, Margaret again conceived. The couple wanted to marry, but Gerard’s parents would not allow it. Gerard—seeking, perhaps, to escape their disapproval—left for Rome, where he supported himself copying manuscripts of classical authors. When Margaret was ready to deliver, she was taken to Rotterdam, where her mother lived. The boy would be named Erasmus, after one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. He would later add the name Desiderius, longed for in Latin.

Erasmus would never know a normal family life. Not only had he been born out of wedlock; his father at some point became a priest. Europe was full of the children of priests, and the Church considered them nonpersons, barring them from holding certain offices and from receiving various perks except when dispensations were granted. Whether Gerard became a priest before or after Erasmus was born is not clear, but in any case Erasmus would always feel anxiety and shame over his illegitimacy.

He spent his first few years in Rotterdam in the care of his grandmother. When he was around four, his father arranged for him to attend primary school in Gouda. With a population of around 10,000, Gouda was among the largest cities in Holland. It was laced by canals and dominated by the ornately turreted town hall that still stands on its marketplace. Every Thursday, farmers from surrounding villages came to sell the buttery cheese for which Gouda even then was known. It was even more famous for its high-quality beer, which was shipped to Flanders in exchange for grain.

Its school was less distinguished. Erasmus, whose writings on education would change the course of Western pedagogy, drew heavily on his own experiences as a student, and from his first days in Gouda, they were overwhelmingly negative. The main subject was Dutch, and the instruction was unrelievedly monotonous and harsh. The headmaster, Pieter Winckel, was a selfish, narrow-minded man who administered the rod for the slightest infractions. Such severities, together with what Erasmus saw as the coarseness and provincialism of the locals, left him with a lifelong distaste for Gouda. Greasy of mouth and palate was his tart description of its residents. In 1478, when Erasmus was ten or so, his mother, wanting more for her son, took him sixty-five miles east to Deventer and its famous Latin school.

In many respects, Deventer remained a medieval town. Its narrow streets echoed with the clang of hammers and shriek of saws, the shouts of vendors and barks of town criers. Opening onto the streets were the workshops of carpenters, tailors, locksmiths, apothecaries, shoemakers, and bakers, each trade with its own quarter. Houses rose helter-skelter along the street, their upper stories protruding over the lower and blocking out the sun. Most were ramshackle wooden structures, the windows covered by oiled paper or pigskin and the roofs made of thatch. Here and there stood the more stately residences of merchants and patricians—multistory timber houses with panes of glass and roofs of tile. Like most medieval towns, Deventer (which had a population of 8,000) was encircled by thick walls mounted by towers, made necessary by the ever-present threat from criminals, marauders, and enemy armies. On a daily basis, however, the main danger to public order came from within. With taverns on every corner and drinking the main pastime, drunkenness was rampant, contributing to the high rates of crime and violence that were endemic features of medieval life.

Walking around Deventer, the young Erasmus would have had to watch his step. Like most medieval towns, it lacked even the most rudimentary sanitation, and streets served as sewers. Butchers slit open cows and pigs in front of their shops, letting the blood run into the gutter; fishmongers dumped fish heads and rotting stock into alleyways; tanners emptied vats of the acrid solutions of urine and dung they used to turn animal hides into leather. Chickens, goats, and pigs all roamed freely, depositing their waste in the street; when it rained, the excrement mixed with offal, carcasses, moldy cheese, and rotting vegetables to form a muddy, putrid mess. Chamber pots were routinely emptied from second-story windows, creating a hazard for passersby. The thatch on roofs was an ideal breeding ground for rats, and lice and fleas were so abundant that not even dukes or bishops could escape them. Despite the presence of bathhouses, people often went weeks without bathing, and underwear was changed perhaps once a fortnight.

Through this foul loam, however, the buds of a new civilization were poking. Deventer was one of many thriving towns in the northern Netherlands. (The Netherlands then comprised not only the modern-day country of that name but also Belgium, parts of northern France, and Luxembourg—an area also known as the Low Countries.) Along with northern Italy, the northern Netherlands was the most highly urbanized region in Europe, with some twenty walled cities of between 5,000 and 15,000 inhabitants. As Erasmus later observed, No other region can be found containing so many towns in such a small area. Admittedly, they are of modest size, but they have an incredibly attractive appearance. As the French historian Fernand Braudel has observed, towns are like electric transformers. They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge human life. The northern Netherlands was thick with such transformers.

It’s remarkable that these catalysts would emerge in such a backwater—a term literally applicable in this case. Most of the northern Netherlands was at or below sea level. From the north and west, the North Sea surged relentlessly in, flooding plains and feeding lakes. The many rivers crisscrossing the region regularly overflowed, inundating farms and pastures. Beginning in the thirteenth century, though, Dutch farmers, seeking to contain the waters, banded together to construct an elaborate system of dams, dikes, floodgates, and drainage canals, with windmills used to pump water from the land. The large tracts thus reclaimed, called polders, were divided up among those who had contributed labor. Unlike the rest of northern Europe, where feudal relations prevailed, this region had a rough social equality, with many independent farmers living in humble homes and working small plots of land. The increase in agricultural productivity freed people to move off the land and into towns, which became marketing centers for farm and dairy products, especially cheese.

These towns, in turn, established commercial ties abroad. And here the water proved a boon, facilitating links to the outside world. In the first half of the fifteenth century, the Dutch developed a fleet of seagoing vessels that enabled them to dominate the bulk-carrying trade as well as the herring grounds of the North Sea. The building of ships, their equipping and manning, the provision of sails and rope—all became thriving industries. The resulting prosperity made funds available for schools, teachers, and books, which in turn facilitated the rise of a dynamic new class of educated urbanites. These burghers—magistrates, merchants, notaries, accountants, teachers, lawyers—were proud, curious, public spirited, and eager for a new design for living. Erasmus would spend much of his life trying to provide it. He would, in effect, become the most articulate spokesman for this new urban class.

In Deventer, the signs of the new Europe were everywhere visible. In 1477, Deventer got its first printing press, and the town quickly became a top publishing center. Its location on the IJssel River gave it ready access to both the Rhine and (via the Zuider Zee) the North Sea, and ships were constantly putting in with wood from Germany, grain from Poland, dried fish from Norway, and wine from the Rhineland. Along with these goods, the ships and their crews brought new ideas and perspectives, adding to the intellectual ferment.

Finally, there was St. Lebwin’s. The school had eight grades and two hundred or more students in each, for a total student body of around two thousand. It had one great mission: teaching how to write and speak good Latin—the passport to a better life. Latin was the medium in which commercial contracts were signed, government communiqués issued, university lectures delivered, international affairs transacted, ecclesiastical business carried out. Those proficient in Latin could also participate in the animated intellectual life that was beginning to take root across borders, regions, and nations.

At St. Lebwin’s, the curriculum in the lower grades was dominated by the traditional medieval trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Of these, grammar predominated. Unfortunately, instruction in it remained mired in the old ways, with textbooks that were hopelessly dull and arcane. They included the Pater Meus, an exercise book for declensions; the Tempora, a similar guide to conjugations; and the Catholicon, an etymological dictionary that was so obscure and convoluted that Erasmus would call it the most barbarous book in the world.

Because printing was still in its infancy, only the instructor had books, and students sat on the floor around him as he dictated a text slowly enough so that each could take down every word; he then translated and commented on that text. Students were forced to memorize the inflections of nouns and verbs reflecting the various cases and moods, and when it came time to recite this information, the school rang with horrific shrieks of pain, as Erasmus put it. Some of the teachers had such uncouth manners that even their wives could not possibly feel affection for them, and no useless, disreputable scoundrel was disqualified by general opinion from running a school.

The torments inflicted on the students were not limited to parsing and conjugating. Teachers as well as parents beat children savagely for the smallest violations, to the point of blinding, crippling, or even killing them. Schools, Erasmus observed, were like torture chambers, in which one heard nothing but the thudding of the stick, the swishing of the rod, howling and moaning, and shouts of brutal abuse. Was it any wonder, then, that children come to hate learning? Anyone caught speaking Dutch—even in the school yard—was subject to a fine, and boys were encouraged to inform on one another. The students themselves engaged in ugly hazing rituals in which young men of good families were forced to undergo outrages fit for executioners, torturers, pimps, thieving Carians, or galley-slaves. Erasmus would later become a strong opponent of corporal punishment in schools, condemning it as not only inhumane but also ineffective.

In this cruel and unforgiving world, Erasmus had to make his own way. And, while trudging through the endless dictations and dreary exercises, he made a key discovery. Like other Latin schools, St. Lebwin’s offered readings of classical writers, such as Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Terence. Meant to serve as technical models, these readings were usually provided in the form of excerpts and abridgments, without much attention to content or style. As he read them, however, Erasmus was struck by how much their Latin differed from that taught in the school’s primers. In the centuries since Rome’s fall, the language had constantly evolved to meet the practical needs of daily life. While helping to make Latin a living language, these changes had robbed it of much of its elegance and concision. When Erasmus read the poets and playwrights of ancient Rome, he felt transported from his sordid surroundings into a world of harmony and light. As he later wrote, a kind of secret natural force swept me into liberal studies. My teachers might forbid it; even so, I furtively drank in what I could from such books as I had managed to acquire. He was so taken with Terence that he learned many of his plays by heart. His greatest love, however, was poetry, and he strove to compose odes after Horace and elegies echoing Virgil. A polished aesthete seemed in the making.

At St. Lebwin’s, though, Erasmus was exposed to another cultural current that would leave a permanent residue of moral earnestness. Deventer was permeated by the spirit of the Devotio Moderna, the movement of Geert Groote and Thomas à Kempis. The town was home to several houses run by the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, as the movement’s followers were called. They were easy to spot: they wore plain clothes, kept their eyes on the ground, uncomplainingly helped their neighbors, and occasionally uttered short prayers, called ejaculations. The Brethren had close ties to St. Lebwin’s, and from them the students picked up the precepts of the Devotio Moderna. In the IJssel valley as a whole, communities of bakers and cooks, teachers and tailors inspired by its teachings were trying to lead lives of apostolic simplicity. The movement’s rapid spread attested to the growing hunger for more personal forms of piety than those offered by the medieval Church.

As the fifteenth century drew to a close, the Latin Church was completing seven centuries as the dominant institution in northern Europe. Its spires defined the skyline, its bells tolled the hours, its calendar determined the rhythm of work and rest, and its courts had jurisdiction over everything from inheritances and interest rates to blasphemy and adultery. The Church even determined what one could eat: there were almost seventy days during the year when adults were required to fast (i.e., abstain from meat and other animal products like milk and cheese). There were an additional forty or fifty feast days when the faithful were expected to abstain from work and to fast the night before. Through the seven sacraments, the Church ruled over the key passages in a Christian’s life, including baptism, confirmation, marriage, and last rites. When not hosting services, churches served as community centers, with parishioners stopping by to close deals, hear the latest news, arrange celebrations—even hold trysts.

Most of all, the Church offered hope and consolation in a treacherous and unforgiving world. Fires and floods, famine and war, epidemics and contagions, brigandage and riots all helped to make daily life a tissue of anxiety and dread. Stark memories remained of the Black Death, the outbreak of plague from 1348 to 1350 that had carried off an estimated 35 million people—one-third of Western Europe’s population; entire villages were wiped out in a catastrophe not equaled before or since. The plague remained a constant threat, and dysentery, malaria, influenza, typhoid, diphtheria, and St. Anthony’s fire (which blistered, deformed, and killed its victims) were all rampant. As many as one of every three women died in their first childbirth; as many as one of every four children died before the age of one. Desperate to ward off such calamities, the faithful sought whatever protection they could. The Church responded with an array of customs, practices, and institutions that were both broadly popular and, increasingly, loudly criticized.

Veneration of the saints was one such practice. By virtue of their exemplary lives, the saints were believed to be endowed with a special ability to intercede with God through Christ on behalf of the devout. St. Christopher offered protection to travelers. St. Nicholas could help rescue children from danger. St. Barbara offered protection against sudden and violent death at work, and St. George could help one from falling into the hands of the enemy. The Fourteen Holy Helpers stood ready to relieve a variety of debilitating conditions, from plague and epilepsy to headaches and toothaches. And every occupation had its own patron—Crispen for leatherworkers and Cecilia for musicians, Honoratus for bakers and Bernard for candle makers.

Across Europe, shrines to the saints proliferated, and roadways were filled with crowds of pilgrims heading to them. While Jerusalem and Rome were the most hallowed destinations, Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain was the most popular. In its magnificent Romanesque cathedral there lay (it was said) the remains of the apostle James. Four roads originating at different points in France passed through the Pyrenees to join the nearly five-hundred-mile camino to the town, located just inland from the Atlantic Ocean. Around the cathedral’s altar rose piles of abandoned crutches, model ships, and wax replicas of limbs, eyes, and breasts, all bearing witness to the saint’s miraculous ability to heal and rescue.

The popularity of a shrine depended on the quality of its relics. These included bones, teeth, strips of flesh, locks of hair, and articles of clothing, all offering physical proximity to the saint’s prowess and prestige. Churches boasted slivers of the True Cross, shreds from the tablecloth of the Last Supper, thorns from Christ’s crown, patches of his swaddling clothes. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the trade in relics soared as the market was flooded with shriveled body parts whose authenticity could not be verified. While St. Elizabeth of Hungary lay in state, in 1231, a crowd of worshippers tore away strips of the linen enveloping her face and cut off her hair, her nails, even her nipples. Fourteen churches in Europe claimed to have the head of John the Baptist.

By far the most venerated figure was Mary. Though receiving only minor mention in the New Testament, the Virgin Mother in the late Middle Ages became the center of a fervent cult that revered her as a source of mercy far more approachable than the righteous Father or the judging Son. All over Europe, chapels and shrines displayed jars and vials of Mary’s milk, the viewing of which was said to speed one’s wishes to God. Hundreds of churches were consecrated to Mary, ships were named after her, and stories multiplied about her miraculous intervention in the world on behalf of the troubled and bereft.

Meanwhile, the Mass—the centerpiece of Catholic worship—was invested with all sorts of wonder-working powers. People raced from church to church to be present at the Eucharist, when the bread and wine were transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Christ, for witnessing it was considered a means of accumulating merit in the eyes of God. On their deathbed, many noblemen and merchants—worried about the agonies they might face in the afterlife—left all or part of their possessions to their local church to create an endowment for the saying of Masses on their behalf that could speed their passage through purgatory.

Through such bequests, churches and monasteries grew wealthy. Many cloisters amassed large estates, turning abbots into landlords who saw the laity as tenants to be managed rather than souls to be cured. Even the Franciscans, whose rule stipulated that they go barefoot among the poor and support themselves by begging, became rich and built imposing friaries. Bishops and cardinals behaved like secular princes, maintaining lavish courts and meddling in political affairs. Some monasteries kept large packs of hounds, which were allowed to run wild and which ate the food that should have gone to the poor. At all levels of clerical life, absenteeism grew, concubinage spread, and tales of ignorance multiplied.

The papacy, meanwhile, was in utter turmoil. In 1305, a Frenchman, Clement V, was elected pope. He had his coronation in Lyon, then moved to Avignon in 1309. So began a period of papal exile that came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity. During it, the popes remained subservient to the French king, and the Holy See became notorious for its nepotism and simony (the sale of offices). When the Babylonian Captivity finally ended, in 1377, the Church plunged into the Great Schism, during which there was a pope in Rome and an antipope in Avignon, each with his own college of cardinals and profit-seeking curia; at one point, there were not two pontiffs but three. By the time the Church again had one Holy Father, in 1417, its sacred aura had been badly tarnished.

The rampant anticlericalism of the late Middle Ages was reflected in two of its greatest literary works. In Boccaccio’s Decameron (written in the early 1350s), a group of young Florentines fleeing the plague take refuge in a secluded villa and tell one another stories to pass the time. Clerical lechery and hypocrisy are recurrent themes. In one of the most famous tales, a monk—approached by an innocent young woman saying she wants to get closer to God—offers to show her how to put the devil back in Hell; he then deflowers her. (She so enjoys the experience that she repeatedly asks the monk to put the devil back in Hell.) In The Canterbury Tales (begun in 1387), thirty or so pilgrims travel from south London to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury cathedral. Of them all, the Pardoner, a seller of absolution for sins, is by far the most corrupt; he freely acknowledges that the relic bones he sells come from pigs, not departed saints, and that he pockets the proceeds rather than hand them over to the Church. Instead of feeling remorse over such ruses, he takes pride in their ingenuity.

Chaucer’s pilgrims capture the paradoxical status of the late medieval Church. On the one hand, they are willing to endure the discomfort of a sixty-mile journey over rough roads to visit a shrine and take advantage of its supposedly miraculous powers—a reflection of the strength of popular piety. On the other, a cleric entrusted with the sacred power of pardon is shown to be given over to greed and deceit. By the late fifteenth century, the Church seemed more mighty—and compromised—than ever. And the voices of dissent were growing louder.

Four such voices—commemorated in the great Reformation monument in Worms—helped prepare the way for that religious transformation. Erected in 1868, the monument shows a statue of Luther atop a pedestal, with the four forerunners seated below. All four questioned the practices of the medieval Church, driven by their conviction—drawn from reading Scripture—that it had strayed too far from the spirit of the apostolic church. Peter Waldus was a twelfth-century merchant from Lyon who gave away his possessions, donned plain clothes, placed his wife and daughter in a convent, and preached repentance to the urban masses. Around him there formed a band of followers, called Waldensians, whose resolute rejection of devotional practices not mentioned in the Bible led to intense persecution by the Church. (In 1545, hundreds of Waldensians living in villages in southeastern France were massacred on the order of King Francis I.)

John Wyclif was a fourteenth-century Oxford don who, going around barefoot in a long russet gown, attacked the Church for its temporal holdings and urged it to distribute its wealth to the poor. In addition to producing a flood of theological and polemical tracts, he inspired a group of disciples to translate the Vulgate (Latin) Bible into English. After his death, in 1384, his followers, called Lollards (from a Dutch word meaning mumblers), met in secret to read the Bible in English and keep alive the principle that Scripture should be the sole foundation of a Christian’s life.

Wyclif’s greatest disciple, however, was found not in England but in Bohemia. Jan Hus was a professor of theology at the University of Prague who, through reading Wyclif and the Bible, became an outspoken advocate for reform. Excommunicated, he retreated to the countryside, where he turned out a series of tracts in which he condemned the entire framework of the Roman Church, including the papacy, as not sanctioned by Scripture. For such views, Hus was summoned before the Council of Constance in 1414. He was offered a safe-conduct, but upon his arrival it was revoked, and the following year, after refusing repeated demands that he recant, he was burned at the stake.

No less unfortunate was Girolamo Savonarola, a charismatic Dominican friar who drew overflow crowds to the church of San Marco in Florence with fierce denunciations of clerical dissolution and apocalyptic visions of the city transformed into the New Jerusalem. After the exile of the Medici, in 1494, Savonarola became the city’s de facto ruler. During carnival season, he organized a bonfire of the vanities, into which were fed musical instruments, playing cards, risqué paintings, women’s toiletries, and other supposed symbols of moral decay. With Florence placed under a papal interdict and Savonarola’s lurid prophesies failing to materialize, the population turned against him, and in 1498 he was hanged on the same spot on which the bonfire had burned the previous year.

As all these cases show, Rome demanded full compliance with its authority and was willing to use savage means to enforce it. Yet there was another forerunner of the Reformation who managed to escape persecution and who—though absent from the Worms monument—played a critical part in preparing the way for change.

As a young man, Geert Groote (born in Deventer in 1340) liked the good life. A wandering scholar, he moved from town to town in search of books, conversation, and women. At one point, though, he fell ill and, worried about his fate in the afterlife, felt intense remorse at the many years he had spent gratifying his desires. Recovering, he decided to start afresh. He opened his house to several poor women, burned his large collection of books on magic, and studied the Bible and the Church Fathers, especially Augustine, whose struggles to control his fleshly impulses seemed to mirror Groote’s own. Groote spent two years in a Carthusian monastery, fasting regularly and praying into the night. Having found a living faith, however, he wanted to share it with others and so left the cloister.

Embarking on a roving ministry, Groote urged his listeners to disdain worldly honors, shun external observances, and nourish the spirit within. Like Christ, they should endure their trials in humble submission and extend their love for him to their fellow man. While reproving the clergy for their indolence and dissolution, Groote steered clear of doctrine and expressed respect for the pope. His concern was for the inner development of the individual rather than the sacramental power of the Church. The best way to reach God was not through rites like baptism or confession but through an inner kernel of devotion. Inviting young people into his home to study the Bible, he put them to work copying manuscripts while urging them to return to the Gospels.

At the time of Groote’s death, in 1384, some of his followers were living in simple piety in the home of the vicar of St. Lebwin’s church in Deventer. As word of the community spread, others came to join it. They were attacked by the mendicant friars, who insisted that living in common without taking monastic vows violated Church canons, but for these disciples the whole point was to have a holy life outside the cloister. Like-minded communities began to form throughout the IJssel valley. Under the banner of inner renewal, the Devotio Moderna spread westward throughout Holland, southward into Flanders, and eastward into Germany. A parallel network of houses for women also arose. These communities became known as the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life. Because some members preferred a more structured environment, a monastery founded on the principles of the Devotio Moderna was established near Zwolle, not far from Deventer, and by the mid-fifteenth century dozens of branches had arisen throughout northwestern Europe.

From one of these monasteries would emerge Groote’s most influential disciple. Thomas à Kempis was in his twenties when, in the early fifteenth century, he entered the monastery of Mount St. Agnes near Zwolle. He would remain for nearly seventy years, copying and composing devotional tracts while wrestling with his longings, urges, and doubts. Over time, he compiled some two thousand homiletic statements (about half of them from the Bible) that offered comfort and inspiration. These became the basis for The Imitation of Christ. Influenced by the medieval mystics, Thomas urged readers to achieve union with God by shunning the outside world and cultivating the inner spirit. The Kingdom of God is within you, he wrote, quoting Christ. Forsake this wretched world and your soul shall find rest. Learn to despise external things, to devote yourself to those that are within.

Habit and tonsure, he declared, profit a man little; a change of heart and the shackling of the passions make a true monk. Rather than run off to distant shrines and kiss sacred bones, the truly religious stay at home, work hard, and pray intently. They disdain wealth, forswear honors, avoid gossip, shun the company of the powerful, and resist the impulses of the flesh. We should not take pride in our deeds or consider ourselves better than others. And we should spurn all learning that does not deepen our relationship with God. On Judgment Day, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done; not how well we have spoken, but how well we have lived. There was but one path to salvation and everlasting life—through the cross. By taking it up, a man can make his own life one of Christlike mortification.

Thomas’s vision of internal purification through surrender to God strongly appealed to educated Europeans who felt unfulfilled by rote prayers and sacramental rites. Initially circulating in manuscript form, The Imitation of Christ was copied by hand and passed from cloister to cloister. The first printed edition appeared around 1473; nearly fifty more editions appeared by the end of the fifteenth century and another sixty-five during the sixteenth. Thomas More would call the Imitation one of the three books everyone should own; Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, read a chapter a day and regularly gave away copies. Translated into hundreds of languages and appearing in more than five thousand editions, the Imitation remains the bestselling Christian book after the Bible.

Erasmus would not be among its admirers. He was never one for spiritual contemplation. Nor did he place much value on austerity and self-denial. Most off-putting of all was Thomas’s disdain for secular knowledge. Do not desire the reputation of being learned, Thomas wrote—but Erasmus desired little else. Later in life, he would dismiss the Brethren of the Common Life as small-minded and provincial. Whereas Thomas taught withdrawal from the world, Erasmus yearned to enter and experience it. Yet while he was in Deventer, and without being quite aware of it, he was being imprinted with the movement’s ideas about inward religion, simple piety, and imitating Christ, and he would carry them with him as he moved into the outside world.

Toward the end of his stay in Deventer, Erasmus caught an exciting glimpse of that world. In 1484, when he was seventeen or so, St. Lebwin’s received a visit from the humanist scholar Rodolphus Agricola. A native of Frisia on the North Sea who had been schooled by the Brethren, Agricola had joined the flow of northerners to Italy in search of Renaissance enlightenment. For ten years he had read the Roman classics, studied Greek, and written books on rhetoric and logic. Returning home, he embarked on a lecture tour promoting the New Learning, as the revival of interest in classical culture was called. Despite his association with the Brethren, Agricola had little sympathy for their piety and asceticism. He was a bohemian who loved food, fame, and conversation. At the same time, he considered himself a devout Christian intent on practicing the spirit of the Gospels, and he sought to harmonize classical ideals and Christian precepts in a creed he called the philosophy of Christ.

Agricola, Erasmus later wrote, was one of the first to bring a breath of the New Learning from Italy to the north. Agricola’s leading disciple, Alexander Hegius, became the director of St. Lebwin’s by 1483, and he immediately began reshaping its curriculum, phasing out the old textbooks and introducing instruction in Greek—something very uncommon in secondary schools at the time. Erasmus would get a taste of that language, but otherwise he was not able to take advantage of these changes, for he was nearing the end of his stay at the school. In his six or seven years there, he had completed courses in logic, physics, metaphysics, and morals and had become so familiar with Horace, Ovid, and Terence that he could recite large sections of their works by heart—a firm educational foundation, despite his later complaints about the school’s mediocrity. Most important, Erasmus had been exposed to two parallel but competing currents—the secular ideals of classical culture and the pious values of the Devotio Moderna—and he would spend the rest of his life trying to combine them.

In 1483, Deventer was hit by the plague. The outbreak became so severe that magistrates fled the town, friends avoided one another, and some residents took to sleeping in haystacks in the surrounding countryside. Among the hundreds felled was Erasmus’s mother, Margaret. His father, Gerard, who had returned from Italy and was now living in Gouda, summoned Erasmus and his brother Pieter there, but he, too, soon died. Now in his late teens, Erasmus was suddenly without parents or prospects. His future lay in the hands of three guardians who had been appointed by his father. As he made his way back to Gouda (probably in the summer of 1484), Erasmus had one overriding wish—to continue his education.

2

Miner’s Son

On the outskirts of the Saxon town of Eisleben in central Germany rise a series of mammoth slate-colored mounds. Standing along roadsides, behind apartment buildings, and next to shopping malls, they look otherworldly and vaguely sinister, as if they had once served as the altars of an ancient cult. In fact, they are refuse heaps, consisting of discarded rocks from the region’s mines, which once formed the backbone of the local economy. Between Eisleben and the Harz Mountains about forty miles to the north, there are hundreds of them. The taller mounds rise about four hundred feet and come to a point, giving the appearance of pyramids. The shorter ones are half as tall and flat on top. These date back to the late Middle Ages, and some were no doubt present during the time of Martin Luther. He was born in Eisleben, in 1483, and the heaps offer important clues about the world in which he was raised.

Like many great historical figures, Luther was fond of citing his lowly origins. Both his father and his grandfather, he liked to say, had peasant backgrounds. This is misleading. While Luther’s distant forebears were indeed peasants, his father’s parents were not. Rather, they were independent farmers who lived in Möhra, a hamlet of about sixty families in Thuringia in central Germany. Their eldest son, Hans Luder (as the family name was originally spelled), married Margarete Lindemann, who came from a prosperous burgher family in nearby Eisenach. According to the strict inheritance rules of Thuringia, the Luder farm was to pass intact to the youngest son, Heinz. Hans—unhappy at the prospect of working for his younger brother—decided to strike out on his own. The area around Eisleben, about ninety miles to the northeast, was experiencing a mining boom. It had begun around 1470, when the demand for copper in Europe took off (stimulated by a growing market for copper and bronze pots for cooking). Mansfeld, the county in which Eisleben was located, was one of Europe’s top producers of both copper and silver, and Hans hoped to take advantage.

Several months after he and Margarete arrived in Eisleben, their first child, Martin, was born, on November 10, 1483, in a house located a short walk from the town’s main square. Finding work in Eisleben proved harder than Hans had expected, and