CHAPTER SEVEN

Luther
From Student to Monk

I
t was the peak of summer, the second day of July 1505, when a twenty-one-
year-old student found himself overtaken by a storm outside the Saxon village
of Stotternheim. As he feared, the heavens unleashed their worst fury; lightning
flashed all around, and a blinding bolt struck so close to him that he was blown off
his feet. Shaken to the core, he did what he had been taught to do: he bargained
with heaven, crying out, “Help, St. Anne, I will become a monk!”
The student was Martin Luther, who had recently earned a master of arts degree
at the University of Erfurt and was aiming to become a lawyer. He had already bought
the books he needed for his legal studies, including an expensive student edition of the
law code of the sixth-century Roman emperor Justinian. His father Hans, who had paid
for the books, was quite eager to have a lawyer for a son. But the lightning bolt changed
it all. Two weeks after making his vow in the thunderstorm, Martin Luther entered the
monastery of the Augustinian Hermits at Erfurt, despite his father’s stern objections.
Some of Martin’s friends bid farewell forever at the cloister door. Like all who became
monks, Martin would be leaving the world behind. Or so everyone thought.
What if Luther had become a lawyer instead of a monk, or what if he had been
struck and killed by lightning in 1505?
Ironically, the young man who became a monk after making a vow to a saint
would eventually renounce vows, monasticism, and the cult of the saints. He would also
attack the Catholic Church as the seat of the Antichrist and bring it to ruin in many
places. Martin Luther was not wholly responsible for ending the hegemony of the Catholic
Church in Western Europe. He was but one of many reformers in his generation, some
of whom pressed for more radical changes than he was willing to accept. And he was far
from the first to challenge the medieval status quo. But he has earned a special place in
history and casts a longer shadow than other reformers of his age for many reasons. In his
day, he was the one who lit the fuse, so to speak: the first whose cries against corruption
reached far and wide and struck deep chords among all sorts of people, the first to exploit
134 rotestants
the medium of printing in new ways, the first to obtain a large following at home and
abroad, the first to secure firm political support, the first to make himself an untouchable
archenemy of the Roman Catholic Church, and the first to capture the imagination and
the hearts of vast multitudes.
Granted, much of what he accomplished came as a surprise to him and much
of what was ascribed to him was not truly his to claim, but that does not diminish his
significance. By the sheer force of his personality, and by sheer luck too, Luther was the
first to succeed where many others had failed. He challenged the supremacy of the pope
and the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church, he redefined religious authority and
church-state relations, and he changed the focus of Christian piety and ethics. He man-
aged to prevail against the pope and the Catholic Church on a scale previously unknown,
in spite of brutal opposition. And he died in bed at the age of sixty-two, a victim of nature
alone rather than sword, scaffold, or flames.
But how does a monk become a reformer, or how does he turn into a heretic in
the eyes of his church? In the case of Luther, one must retrace his steps and first follow
him into the monastery, for it was his vow and all it entailed that led to a profound
crisis in his life—an inner struggle and a search for truth that eventually transcended his
person and led to the unraveling of Western Christendom. Indeed, this may be one of
the most peculiar aspects of the Protestant Reformation: that it should have been set in
motion by one monk’s spiritual odyssey.1
Yet, no great mystery lies hidden in this turn of events. Luther’s titanic role in
history was shaped by the intense symbiosis that existed in his day between religion and
the civic order, an interdependence so thorough that a challenge to any one aspect of
religion, no matter how seemingly trivial or narrow, could have an immense impact on
the whole of the social fabric. Hence, a commonplace theological disagreement between
two clerics—a “mere squabble of envious monks,” as Pope Leo X allegedly called Luther’s
initial challenge—could quickly ignite a revolution and change the world.

From Monk to Scholar

Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben, a mining town in Saxony.
The printing press had been in existence for thirty years already, and literacy was on the
rise. Martin the schoolboy grew up with printed texts at hand as he attended schools in
Mansfeld, Magdeburg, and Eisenach. At the University of Erfurt (1501–1505) young
Martin gained a liberal arts education that exposed him not only to the ancient classics,
the church fathers, and the traditional medieval scholastics, but also to the via moderna,
a relatively new philosophical tradition that would give shape to much of his thinking.
In brief, though Martin was aiming at a career in law, he had unintentionally prepared
himself to be a religious reformer: his master’s degree at Erfurt prepared him for his later
work as a theologian and polemicist, and his entire education had exposed him to the new
means of communication made available by printed literature.
 l ther rom st dent to mon 135
But along came the fateful thunderstorm and the vow. If one lingers over this
pivotal moment in his life, much can be learned about who Martin was and what he
would later reject.
First, the structure of the vow itself needs to be explained. By striking a bargain
with heaven—“Help, St. Anne, I will become a monk!”—Martin followed the norms
of late medieval piety. Praying for favors from heaven most often involved two steps:
invoking the right patron and promising some sort of exchange.
Why did Luther need a patron, and why did he call on St. Anne? Heaven was
viewed as a royal court, much like any on earth, and prayer itself was tailored to fit
that image. Everyone in Luther’s day knew that to obtain favors from any earthly ruler,
patrons and intercessors had to do the bidding on behalf of clients. Consequently, it
was commonly assumed that just as no one would dare implore the king directly, no
one should go straight to God. This conception of heaven and of prayer that Erasmus
had vigorously lampooned was obviously part and parcel of the worldview of the Luther
family. St. Anne had long been a patron invoked by miners, and Luther’s father was in the
mining business. What better patron could he hope to find?
What about the vow itself? Why would such a promise be deemed necessary in
prayer? As in the case of patron saints, the history of this practice was ancient, older than
Christianity itself. But its existence was reinforced not just by the weight of tradition: it too
was suggested by commonsense observation of the way in which earthly courts and patrons
worked. In the ancient world and in medieval Christendom alike, all client-patron relations
demanded an exchange of goods, services, or homage: the fulfillment of vows was crucial
and utterly unavoidable. In brief, reciprocity was essential: one always had to do something
in exchange for favors rendered. Erasmus also poked fun at this conception of heaven and
prayer, not only because it seemed to ignore the intercessory power of Jesus Christ, but also
because it seemed to lessen the majesty and generosity of God and the saints. As Erasmus
saw it, all this bargaining made heaven far too much like earth and God as small minded as
any greedy merchant. But Luther was unaffected by Erasmus in 1505, and he did the only
thing he thought would help him survive the storm: he struck a bargain.
But why vow to spend a lifetime in a monastery, where he would have to fulfill
three more vows, those of poverty, chastity, and obedience? Obviously, such a decision re-
quires having some preconceptions about monasticism, as well as its value in the economy
of salvation. And Luther surely knew what he was doing. When faced with death and
utter terror, Luther, like all of his contemporaries, would most likely think of what it took
to earn God’s favor on Earth and eternal life in heaven. At that awful moment of death,
or near death, with one’s eternal fate about to be decided, one had better be prepared to
go to the right place, even to make the ultimate sacrifice of surrendering one’s life totally
to God. Death was the doorway to three other worlds, according to the teachings of the
church: hell, purgatory, and heaven. And this cosmic geography seems to have been as
real to Luther as the lightning bolt that knocked him off his feet. In other words, Luther’s
vow was inextricably linked to his conception of the afterlife.
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Hell was a place to avoid, but it nonetheless exerted a strong pull on the whole
human race, including baptized Christians. It was the place to which all temptations
led, the potential outcome of each and every sin. It was the abode of Satan, devils, and
humans who had died unrepentant with the stain of mortal sin on their souls. The road
to hell was easy enough to find and follow, for it was imprinted in the base and unavoid-
able instincts of the human race: the church had a very long list of sins that counted as
“mortal,” and some of them were very difficult to avoid, such as lying or getting drunk or
coveting one’s neighbor’s wife, or even having sexual intercourse with one’s own spouse
on a Sunday. The seven deadly sins were especially hard to avoid, for they involved at-
titudes as much as actions, and they could not easily be extinguished: pride, envy, greed,
anger, lust, gluttony, sloth. Hell therefore lurked close for everyone, especially in an age
with relatively short life spans and a high mortality rate. Those who died unprepared were
most likely headed straight for the flames of hell, which theologians believed was under
the earth’s core. God’s justice demanded such a punishment.
But justice was not the sole attribute of God. He was also merciful, ostensibly,
and eager to save humans. Hence the existence of purgatory. Purgatory was believed to
be located directly above hell, heated by its fires, and to be the temporary abode of the
vast majority of Christian souls, who needed to pass through purgatory and be purified
before being admitted into heaven. This painful cleansing was necessary not only because
moral and spiritual perfection was rare and venial sins common (that is, lesser sins that do
not merit hell), but also because it was believed that all sins committed in one’s lifetime,
whether small or large, required a commensurate penance or penalty. In other words,
even when a sin had been forgiven, it still had a penalty attached to it: sins had to be
paid for either in this life or the next. It was also believed that sins made one impure and
thus incapable of facing God directly. The length of time required for one’s purification
varied according to the severity of one’s sins and also to the rituals performed through
the church on earth on one’s behalf, but by Luther’s day an otherworldly reckoning of
time had become widely accepted that measured suffering in purgatory by thousands of
years. The most widely recognized formula proposed that one day’s suffering on Earth
equaled a thousand years of suffering in purgatory. Three theological assumptions upheld
the reality of purgatory for Catholics in Luther’s day: first, most Christians led less-than-
exemplary lives; second, a lifetime on Earth was not sufficient to cleanse one from the
stain of sin or to pay the penalties owed to God; and third, God could not require
absolute moral perfection from the fallen human race. God’s mercy demanded that here
had to be some chance beyond this life to make up for one’s failings.
Heaven was the best place of all, of course. Heaven was the abode of God, the
good angels, and the saints. Only those whose souls were pure could get there, that is,
only those whose souls were free of the stain of sin. In Luther’s day, it was a foregone
conclusion that hardly anyone entered heaven upon dying, since the entrance require-
ments called for a degree of virtuous living unattainable by most men and women. The
formula was rigorously simple: heaven is gained only through the very best behavior.
 Fearsome justice. Depictions of the Last Judgment were difficult to ignore in medieval Europe,
especially for town and city dwellers, since many churches had at least one such image. Martin
Luther claimed that this scene terrified him when he was a monk, for it reminded him of his sinful-
ness and of the fate that he deserved. This 1505 woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien is true to form:
we see Jesus the divine judge sitting on a rainbow, separating the just from the damned on the last
day. The just rise from the dead to eternal bliss, while demons drag the damned to hell for eternity.
On one side of Jesus’s head is a lily, which symbolizes his mercy, on the other is a sword, which
symbolizes his justice. Brother Martin, who focused on the sword, and on his own inescapable
sinfulness, could not bring himself to look at the Last Judgment scene in his monastery’s refectory.
138 rotestants
Heaven required not only the avoidance of sin, but also the performance of many good
works and a full possession of the seven virtues: faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice,
temperance, and prudence. This was an unquestioned assumption, so deeply woven into
Luther’s culture that even the rudest of peasants were made aware of it, in myriad ways.
In brief, Luther was not at all alone in believing that hardly anyone ever breezed through
the gates of heaven at the moment of death.
Ultimately, salvation hinged on one’s behavior and one’s attitude toward one’s
behavior. This assumption is perhaps the most basic theology grasped by all Catholic
Christians of Luther’s day. The church’s theology of salvation—its soteriology—was more
complex than this simple proposition, and it was the subject of many scholarly debates.
Yet, even in its most sophisticated and erudite formulations, Catholic theology taught
that the salvation effected by Jesus Christ through his church on Earth ultimately hinged
on what one did or did not do in this life. Christ saved one from sin and damnation,
yes, but one’s behavior determined whether or not one would gain heaven, or how long
it might take to get to heaven from purgatory. Theologians had many ways of speaking
about this process and many elaborate approaches and fine distinctions, some clear and
others blurry, and there were points on which they could not agree, but the bottom line
was simple enough to understand: God is eager to save you, and he does offer you help
through the sacraments, but it is ultimately up to you to cooperate with him, to do the
right thing, and to earn your salvation.
Brother Martin accepted all of this in the same way that any educated person in
our century accepts the unquestionable fact that the universe is made up of atomic and
subatomic particles and that the earth orbits the sun, and that this sun is a relatively small
star that will flare out in a mere five billion years. And in similar fashion, Luther also
accepted the fact that the surest way to heaven was the monastic life.
Monasticism was a way of life that was already more than a thousand years old
in Luther’s day. It had come into existence very early in Christian history, and formed an
integral part of the whole in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Christian monasti-
cism is a way of life that seeks to provide a straight and narrow path to spiritual and moral
perfection. The path followed by monastics is one of self-denial, of constant warfare
against “the world, the flesh and the devil,” as monastic writings would put it. The aim
of the monastic life was to grow in holiness, to train oneself in making right choices, to
become ever more like God and thus to ready one’s soul for heaven. The path to holiness,
however, was narrow, steep, long, and filled with innumerable pitfalls. The closer one
drew to God and the holier one became, the more one would be assailed by soul-wracking
temptations and torments at the hands of demons.
No one should underestimate the presence of the devil in monastic culture: the
Great Fiend, the Evil One, the Tempter, the Father of Lies was no metaphor. Monks and
nuns and many other people in the Middle Ages—including Luther’s family—seemed
utterly convinced of the devil’s presence in their midst. Take, for instance, the following
 l ther rom st dent to mon 139
narrative from Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century English hermit who claimed to
be in close touch with God:
The devil returned with his heat and his stench, and kept me very busy. The stench was
vile and painful, and the physical heat was fearful and oppressive; and I could also hear
in my ears chattering and talking. . . . And so they occupied me all that night and into
the morning, until it was a little after sunrise; and then all at once they had all gone
and disappeared, leaving nothing but their stench, and that persisted for a little while.2
Luther would have similar tales to tell later, even after he was no longer a monk.
Temptation and struggle were only one face of the coin, however. Something in-
finitely better awaited those who persevered, and monastic culture codified this progress
in three overlapping stages. First came purgation, or cleansing, much like that undergone

Devils and the holy man. Monastic culture stressed the omnipresence of the devil and the
constant torment of his temptations. Genuine holiness, it was commonly believed, involved strug-
gling with demons. In this image from the late fifteenth century, Martin Schongauer depicted a an
account from the fourth-century Life of St. Antony, by St. Athanasius, which details how the great
father of Christian monasticism was physically abused by a horde of demons. Martin Luther would
have been familiar with this and other such narratives, and with visual representations of them.
140 rotestants
by souls in purgatory. It was a basic step, and an ongoing process, never fully left behind.
Purgation would be accompanied by an overlapping second stage, illumination, in which
one gradually began to see more clearly and directly the true nature of things and to
experience the love and presence of God directly. If one continued on the right path, a
third stage could also be ultimately reached: union, that is, an intense bonding of the
human soul with God, a state of total bliss, a foretaste of life in heaven.
In theory, monasticism was supposed to breed mystics, that is, men and women
who would experience God’s presence directly, or even join their souls with God in an
ineffable embrace. As expressed by the great scholastic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas,
“The contemplation of divine truth . . . is the goal of the whole of human life,” and such
a goal could best be achieved through the renunciation of the world and the embrace
of the cloistered life.3 It mattered little that monasteries often fell short of their goals,
or that the number of acclaimed mystics who reached the zenith remained relatively
small: these lofty goals remained fixed, as if in stone, in the Rules every monastery was
supposed to follow, Rules that constantly reaffirmed the promises of the monastic life. A
twelfth-century monastic text long attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux summarized
the potential benefits of the monk’s life: “Is not that a holy state in which one lives purely,
walks more cautiously, falls more rarely, rises more speedily, is consoled more frequently,
dies more confidently, is purified more quickly and rewarded more abundantly?”4 Luther’s
culture tended to assume that men or women who embarked on the monastic path could
actually become holy, that is more God-like than other humans, less prone to sin, more
capable of genuine love of God and neighbor, perhaps even able to converse with God or
perform miracles. In other words, they could perfect themselves and become saints.
And when he joined the Augustinians at Erfurt, Luther settled for no goal other
than the very summit, or at least he claimed so when years later he boasted, sarcastically:
I was a good monk, and kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever
a monk got to heaven by his monkishness it was I. All of my brothers in the monastery
who knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer, I would have killed myself
with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work.5

So it was that Brother Martin set off on the path to holiness and love of God. He
tells us that during his first few years, the devil left him alone, and he was able to make
progress. After taking his vows, he was ordained a priest and said his first Mass in May
1507. But soon enough he was overcome with doubt and temptation, overwhelmed by his
own sinfulness, and his fear of God’s wrath. Such painful introspection was part and par-
cel of the monk’s quest for God, an essential component of purgation and illumination.
In fact, much of monastic life was focused on awakening such an intense awareness of sin:
it was only by scrutinizing one’s behavior that one slowly inched towards heaven. But in
Luther’s case, by his own admission, the only illumination he found was an ever-clearer
vision of his own failings and of the infinite distance between him and God. “I was a very
 l ther rom st dent to mon 141
pious monk,” he would say years later, in 1533, “but I was sad because I thought God was
not gracious to me.”6
Luther’s demons wormed their way into his mind, reminding him of his short-
comings, filling him with doubt, despair, and anger. Satan spoke to him directly: “God
doesn’t want to forgive you.” Relentlessly, the demons needled Luther: “Behold, you’re
weak. How do you know, then, that God is gracious to you?” Luther would reply out
loud: “I have been baptized, and by the sacrament I have been incorporated in Christ.”
But the demons had a way of twisting things around for him, and even of using Holy
Scripture itself to sink him further into despair, saying: “That’s nothing, for many are
called, but few are chosen [Matthew 22:14].”7
Luther’s demons were inseparably linked to his understanding of God. This
was his ultimate torment, to see his own sins as God must see them, to hear his own
conscience damning him, to feel the divine wrath he deserved. It was an unbearable,
unending dark night of the soul in which every attempt to please and love God led away
from him. A wise confessor upbraided Luther: “You are a fool. . . . God is not angry with
you, but you are angry with God.”8 These words apparently struck home. Years later,
shortly before he died, Luther would say:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with
an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my
satisfactions. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and
secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God. . . .
I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.9

This “fierce and troubled conscience” (saeva et perturbata conscientia) brought

Luther to the brink of madness, through awful bouts of despair, or Anfechtung, a German
word that has no English equivalent. For Luther, Anfechtung was an affliction inseparable
from temptation, yet even worse: it was doubt, panic, despair, desolation, and rage all
rolled into one abysmal experience, a downward spiral leading into hell itself, which made
Luther think that God had abandoned him forever and that God’s promises were false.
“In our hearts He begins to become a liar,” said Luther, admitting that the anguish made
him wish for annihilation.10 Worst of all, he was living a life wholly dedicated to this aw-
ful God, who would some day judge him. Images of Christ terrified him, and especially
those that depicted the Final Judgment. So did the consecrated host, and Corpus Christi
processions. Unable to withstand the thought of Christ as judge, rather than as redeemer,
Luther could find no solace in the Mass, or in the iconography that surrounded him.11
Monasteries had ways of handling cases such as Luther’s. Overactive consciences,
obsessive-compulsive scrupulosity, and feelings of despair were as old as monasticism
itself, and a necessary experience for all monks, to varying degrees. Since the days of the
desert fathers, the greatest safeguard against wrong turns with such introspection was
the assigning of older and more experienced monks as spiritual directors to novices and
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Brother Martin. Luther the Augustinian monk, gaunt

and tonsured, as sketched by Lucas Cranach the Elder
in 1520.

young monks. When Brother Martin was transferred in 1511 from Erfurt to the new
university town of Wittenberg, where the Augustinians had established a cloister, he
was lucky enough to find a highly placed and well-skilled adviser, Johann von Staupitz
(1469–1524). Luther would later say of this dean of the faculty and vicar-general of the
Augustinians, “If it had not been for Dr. Staupitz, I would have sunk into hell.”12 Once,
at table with his family and students, Luther would go further: “I got nothing from
Erasmus. Everything I have came from Staupitz.”13
Since Brother Martin was so troubled by sin and his unworthiness, Staupitz
first advised that he seek forgiveness in the sacrament of penance. Going to confession
helped Luther, but only to a point. Luther began to confess his sins frequently, often on
a daily basis, and sometimes in great detail. He analyzed every sin, every motive, every
circumstance, scrupulously. His fellow priests grew tired of hearing his obsessive confes-
sions. Some even began to avoid him on purpose. Johann von Staupitz, a very patient
man, exploded one day: “Look here,” he said to Luther, “if you expect Christ to forgive
you, come in with something to forgive—parricide, blasphemy, adultery—instead of all
these small faults.”14 But this advice was useless to Luther. His anxiety was not over the
magnitude of his sins, or their sheer number, but over whether they had been correctly
confessed. What about unrecognized sins? Or forgotten sins? What about his motives,
especially? After all, a good act committed for the wrong motive could count as a sin—for
example, performing an act of charity out of vainglory. Motives were so hard to discern
correctly. And confession was no cure for Brother Martin.
But Staupitz was not stumped. The intensity of Luther’s despair may have been
unusual, but it fit into a well-understood pattern in monastic culture. Staupitz knew that
Brother Martin needed to busy himself with tasks other than self-scrutiny, so he ordered
 l ther rom st dent to mon 143
him to obtain a doctorate in biblical studies. Luther complained that he was much too
fragile and unstable for such work, but Staupitz would not back down and Luther had no
choice but to fulfill his vow of obedience. And he fulfilled it with a vengeance, becoming
one of the best-known interpreters of the Bible in all of Christian history.
In October 1512, at the age of twenty-eight, Luther was awarded his doctorate,
and he soon began teaching at the University of Wittenberg, where he lectured on the
book of Psalms, analyzing and interpreting it as any good biblical scholar of his day
would, to discern the various levels of meaning in the text, aided by all prior interpreters
in the Christian tradition. Studying the Bible was a complex and demanding undertak-
ing, and also an ancient task, full of tradition. Luther the expositor of the Holy Scriptures
did not just have to engage with the text of the Word of God: he also had to familiarize
himself with the way in which that Word had been read by the great fathers of the church
and medieval scholastics over the previous fifteen centuries. In true Renaissance fashion,
Luther also adopted the approach that was very much in vogue in scholarly circles: the
desire to return ad fontes, to the pure sources, and to allow the text in the original lan-
guage speak for itself.
As Luther began teaching at Wittenberg, he was not some Renaissance pur-
ist, convinced that he had to scrape away from the original text all of the glosses of
earlier generations like barnacles off a ship’s hull—and especially those of the medieval
scholastics—nor had he yet reached any revolutionary conviction about discarding such
traditions altogether, but he had definitely picked up on the humanists’ assumption that
it was infinitely better to engage with the Bible directly than to always read it through its
interpreters. Moreover, as a monk who taught other monks and clerics, Professor Luther
was not just a scholar engaging with an ancient text on a purely intellectual level: he was a
servant of God who was trying to engage with God’s Word existentially, to bring himself
and others to eternal salvation. Everything was riding on each and every one of those
words he analyzed in God’s book, literally as well as figuratively.
It stands to reason, then, that as he worked his way through certain books
of the Latin Vulgate Bible, Luther began to find a solution to his spiritual crisis. We
cannot pinpoint exactly when Luther achieved his breakthrough, or, as his monastic
brethren might have said, his transition from purgation to illumination. According to
Luther himself, a gradual awakening took place in his early teaching years, as he lectured
on the psalms (1513–1515), and St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (1515–1516) and letter to
the Galatians (1516–1517). Although Luther’s principal focus was the interpretation of
these biblical texts, his exegesis was influenced not only by his learning, but also by his
spiritual training. Luther himself never denied that dimension of his engagement with
the Bible. In fact, it is thanks to the books he left behind, with his notes in the margins,
that we know what he read during this critical period, and that we are able to see how
he drew on these other sources for his interpretation of the Bible. We know that he first
read broadly and deeply in the works of St. Augustine in 1509–1510 and those of the
Augustinian nominalist theologian Gregory of Rimini, and that he used Jacques Lefèvre
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d’Étaples’s Psalterium quincuplex while teaching the psalms in 1513. We also know that
in addition to consulting many patristic and medieval Bible commentaries, he pored over
the sermons of the fourteenth-century German mystic Johannes Tauler in 1515–1516,
and the works of the fifteenth-century scholastic theologian Gabriel Biel in 1517. In addi-
tion, he edited an anonymous fifteenth-century mystical treatise known as the Theologia
germanica in 1516, which he would later publish and promote as a foreshadowing of
his own “Wittenberg theology.” From his friend and associate Philip Melanchthon we
learn that he was so influenced by another nominalist theologian, Pierre D’Ailly, that he
memorized some of his texts.15 D’Ailly (1351–1420) was not just a nominalist, but also a
conciliarist, that is, a proponent of the theory that supreme authority belongs to church
councils rather than to popes.
In sum, then, we know that during this critical period Luther was heavily influ-
enced by five major traditions: (1) the theology of St. Augustine, which stresses the total
corruption of human nature by original sin, and proposes that it is only through God’s
grace that we are saved; (2) the scholarly tradition of Renaissance humanism, with its
stress on returning to the Bible as the chief authority and its commitment to the study
of texts in their original language; (3) the Rhineland mystical tradition, which stressed
the paradoxical concept of Gelassenheit, or letting go, a radical abandonment of the self
to God in which one passively allows the divine to redeem the human self; (4) the late
scholastic via moderna, or modern way, also known as nominalism, which stressed the
radical otherness and total freedom of God and the absolute necessity of accepting all
propositions about God and salvation by faith rather than by reason; and (5) the concili-
arist movement, which denied that popes were the ultimate authority in the church.
It was while lecturing on the psalms, those ancient, emotionally charged Hebrew
prayers, that light first dawned for Luther. All it took was one brief passage: the first
verse of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In a blinding flash
of insight, it dawned on Luther that this anguished question bridged the Old and New
Testaments, for those were the very same words spoken by a desolate Jesus on his cross
(Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). If Jesus was divine and sinless, Luther asked, why would
he have to suffer and die on the cross? Why would he have to cry out in anguish? Could
God feel forsaken, as Luther himself did? Could God Almighty suffer Anfechtung too,
that all-consuming despondency that seemed worse than death itself? Since the answer
was obviously yes, it meant that Luther’s despondency—his feeling of being forsaken
by God—had been taken on by Jesus Christ, by God himself. So, the paradox was the
solution: by becoming human in Jesus Christ, God had had taken on not just all sin, but
also all of the alienation that flowed from it. This fact meant for Luther that Anfechtung
was necessary for salvation, that it had to be felt because it was shared by Christ, the
savior. “They are damned who flee damnation,” Luther would say, “for Christ was of
all the saints the most damned and forsaken.”16 Ultimately, then, he who hung on the
cross feeling totally deserted was also he who would pass sentence at the Final Judgment:
Jesus, the terrifying Divine Judge who could justly send everyone to hell was not stern
 l ther rom st dent to mon 145
and wrathful after all, but rather a compassionate savior. Somehow, all of humankind’s
inescapable sins were made null and void by Christ’s suffering, and especially by his
feeling forsaken and alienated.
Luther had made a breakthrough, for he could now trust God’s promise of salva-
tion: God who willingly suffers the ultimate pain of being human could not be a liar, or
an exacting judge. But Luther had yet to figure out the “somehow” in this redemptive
formula. How is one saved, precisely? He was still especially troubled by the fact that
genuine righteousness was impossible. “For many days and nights” he meditated on what
St. Paul meant by justitia Dei, which in English can be translated as “God’s justice” or
“righteousness.” How can a just God overlook sin? How can any sinful human be made
righteous, or just, when sin is unavoidable? His greatest breakthrough came as he was
wrestling with the Latin text of Romans 1:17: iustus autem ex fide vivit, “Moreover, the
righteous shall live through faith.” Suddenly, in the library of his cloister at Wittenberg,
up in a tower, he had found the key to the mystery of salvation:

Then I began to understand that the righteousness of God [justitia Dei] is that by
which the righteous live by a gift of God, that is, by faith, and that the Gospel reveals
that a merciful God justifies us by faith with a passive righteousness, as it is written,
“The righteous shall live through faith.” This made me feel as if I had been born again
and passed through open doors into paradise itself. All of Scripture appeared different
to me now . . . and I then began to love that term I used to hate, “the righteousness
of God” [justitia Dei], as the sweetest of all. Thus, Paul truly became my gateway to
paradise.17

Luther would quietly absorb the effects of this so-called tower experience for
several months, incorporating its insights into his teaching and his spiritual life. Gradually,
throughout 1516 and much of 1517, he began to develop a new hermeneutic, that is, a
new way of interpreting the Bible, and also a new soteriology, or theology of salvation.
Convinced that all of theology should rest on the Holy Scriptures and that the key to the
entire Bible could be found in the apostle Paul’s epistles, and especially in his letters to
the Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, Luther began to formulate a theology in which
salvation became a question of pure faith rather than specific behavior, turning constantly
to Paul’s texts, and especially to those that contrast the damning power of God’s law with
the saving grace of the gospel.

From Scholar to Rebel

Had Luther been limited to teaching other monks, his transformation might have had little
effect on others outside the cloister. But Luther was much more than a monk. He was a
busy priest who not only taught university students at Wittenberg, but also preached and
ministered to a rural congregation in a nearby village. Being involved in pastoral work, he
had to apply his theology to everyday life in the messy, sinful world of his flock. Luther
146 rotestants
simmered, his anger rising against a whole range of church practices that seemed wrong
to him, or even abusive. What upset him most of all, across the board, was the way the
church focused on punishments, or penances, as the means for the ultimate forgiveness
of sins. Such theology ran counter to his newly found insights about the saving power
of faith, and more than once, Luther’s critiques began to surface in his sermons. By the
fall of 1517, the thirty-four-year-old Luther was a rumbling volcano, ready to erupt. And
all it took to make him explode was one traveling preacher, his awful sermons, and one
issue that conjoined the church’s theology of salvation with its ritual. The preacher was a
fifty-two-year-old Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel. The issue was indulgences, and
the rites that supposedly alleviated the suffering of the souls of the dead in purgatory.
Concerned about the potential harm embedded in Tetzel’s message, Luther decided to
challenge him, and in so doing he took a most fateful step.
Johann Tetzel’s preaching and all the circumstances surrounding it summed up
much of what was ailing the late medieval church. It is no mere accident, then, that when
an obscure monk named Luther attacked a relatively insignificant preacher named Tetzel
over a seemingly minor theological issue, pandemonium ensued so quickly. When the
layers of corruption surrounding Tetzel and his sermons are peeled back, one by one, the
dynamic of the unexpected crisis becomes readily apparent.
Tetzel, an undistinguished Dominican, had been assigned to distribute in-
dulgences throughout Germany by Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz (1490–1545) and
Pope Leo X. Bishop Albrecht was a member of one of the most powerful noble families
in the Holy Roman Empire, the Hohenzollerns, and was the son of the margrave of
Brandenburg, one of the seven imperial electors. Albrecht had acquired the archbishopric
of Mainz—the primatial see of Germany—by wheeling and dealing. Like many of the

The high cost of simony. Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz and

Brandenburg, sketched by Albrecht Dürer in 1519. The
debt incurred by Cardinal Albrecht in the purchasing of
high church offices unintentionally sparked the Protestant
Reformation. This question has long been asked: if Cardinal
Albrecht had not promoted indulgences in Saxony to pay
off his debts, would Martin Luther have ever emerged to
challenge the religious status quo?
 l ther rom st dent to mon 147
younger sons of powerful families, Albrecht had been pushed into a clerical career at
a very early age, and in 1513 he had been named bishop of two sees simultaneously,
Halberstadt and Magdeburg, even though he was much younger than the age of thirty
required by church law. When the see of Mainz became available the following year, he
was determined to add it to his collection, and he literally bought the office by offering to
pay an installation fee of ten thousand ducats out of his own pocket. Since the diocesan
treasury of Mainz was low on funds at that time, and no other candidate had offered to
pay as much as Albrecht, the bishopric was gladly handed to him.
But Albrecht had two obstacles to overcome before his installation as archbishop
of Mainz: first he had to borrow the ten thousand ducats; then he had to obtain per-
mission from Pope Leo X to hold three bishoprics simultaneously, something that was
contrary to church law. To ensure that the pope would grant him this favor, Albrecht
offered to pay another ten thousand ducats to Pope Leo X, to help him complete the
building of the new basilica of St. Peter in Rome, the very expensive project that had been
launched by his predecessor, Pope Julius II. Asked to make his contribution up front but
unable to come up with the cash, Albrecht borrowed the funds from the House of Fugger,
the pope’s exclusive banking agents in Germany. It was the Fuggers who had negotiated
the amount of the contribution in the first place, so they were more than happy also to
arrange for the loan, at high interest, at a sum total of twenty-six thousand ducats. And
Pope Leo X was also more than happy to allow Albrecht to pay off his loans by granting
him the right to dispense plenary indulgences in his lands for a period of eight years. It
was a very sweet deal through which everyone profited at every level, even in the afterlife.
One half of the amount collected would go to Pope Leo X—in addition to the thousands
of ducats already collected from Albrecht—for the building of St. Peter’s Basilica; the
other half would go directly to the Fuggers, to pay off Albrecht’s massive debt. Leo would
get funds for his building project; the House of Fugger would collect its loan; Albrecht
would get to hold three bishoprics, with all their income, and gain the imperial elector’s
seat that came with the see of Mainz; the faithful would be given the chance to obtain a
full and perfect remission of all penalties for sins, either for themselves or for their dearly
departed relatives in purgatory.
The Fugger loan was, understandably, not to be mentioned when the indul-
gences were offered. Technically, by the letter of the law, the indulgences were granted
solely in exchange for contributions to the building of the new St. Peter’s Basilica in
Rome. Indulgences were never bought and sold, even when money exchanged hands;
rather they were ostensibly offered in exchange for acts of piety, charity, and penance.
Since that was the case, the donations to be collected in Germany were carefully strati-
fied according to class and status, under the assumption that all should be able to af-
ford this wondrous opportunity: at the top of the social hierarchy, monarchs, princes,
and bishops were expected to contribute twenty-five florins; higher clergy and nobility,
twenty florins; lower clerics and nobles, six florins; merchants, artisans, and burghers,
three florins; everyone else near the bottom of the heap, one florin, or even a half or a
148 rotestants
quarter florin; at the very bottom, the poor could ostensibly obtain their indulgences by
praying and fasting.18
The indulgences offered through Albrecht were extraordinary, and rare to come
by, for they were plenary, or full, indulgences, which meant that they canceled out all of
one’s sinful debts. Partial indulgences, which remitted only a certain fixed amount of suf-
fering in this life and the hereafter, were routinely available through a variety of means,
such as pilgrimages, acts of charity and devotion, almsgiving, and prayers and fasts. By
the late Middle Ages, certain acts and rites had been assigned a very specific value in
terms of years to be shaved off one’s sentence in purgatory, according to that formula
that one day’s suffering on Earth equaled ten thousand years in purgatory. These meticu-
lously calculated partial indulgences were readily available everywhere. In Wittenberg,
for instance, where Luther lived and worked, the Saxon prince Frederick the Wise, the
founder of the university, had amassed a relic collection in his chapel that surpassed all
others in Germany for its indulgence potential. His chapel, which contained more than
nineteen thousand relics—including bones from great saints such as Jerome, Augustine,
and Bernard, and treasures such as some the Virgin Mary’s hair, the swaddling clothes
of baby Jesus, a thorn from the crown of thorns, and a twig from the burning bush of
Moses—was a spiritual treasure trove. Proper reverence shown to these relics on those
days specially marked for such purposes by papal decree could reduce one’s stay in purga-
tory by an amazingly precise 1,902,202 years and 270 days.19
Johann Tetzel was an experienced indulgence peddler, well known by the papacy
and the House of Fugger, and he seemed the perfect man for the job. Though barred from
preaching in Wittenberg by Prince Frederick the Wise, who would never allow any com-
peting indulgences near his relic collection, Tetzel circled the area, sometimes so closely
as to draw some of Luther’s parishioners. Luther not only got to see the indulgences they
proudly showed him, but also heard them describe what they had seen and heard. What
his parishioners told Luther enraged him. Tetzel followed the same routine as he made his
way from town to town, preaching the same sermon, more or less. He would always make
a grand entrance, accompanied by the right officials, and stage a solemn procession to the
best open square, holding high the papal coat of arms on a cross, prominently displaying
the pope’s bull of indulgence on an ornately trimmed velvet cushion. Then, as soon as a
large enough crowd had assembled, he would launch into his sermon.
Exposing a yawning abyss between official theology and popular piety, and
dredging up nearly every guilt-inducing, pocket-picking pitch through which he could
hawk indulgences to an anxious laity, Johann Tetzel earned Luther’s wrath by preaching
these words to many a Saxon crowd in 1517, on behalf of Pope Leo X and Archbishop
Albrecht of Mainz:
All of you, run for the salvation of your souls. . . . Listen now, God and St. Peter call
you. Consider the salvation of your souls and those of your loved ones departed. . . .
Listen to the voices of your dead relatives and friends, beseeching you and saying, “Pity
 l ther rom st dent to mon 149
us, pity us. We are in dire torment from which you can redeem us for a pittance.” Do
you not wish to? Open your ears. . . . Remember you are able to release them, for as
soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. Will you not then for a
quarter of a florin receive these letters of indulgence through which you are able to lead
a divine and immortal soul into the fatherland of paradise?20
In late autumn 1517, as All Saints’ Day approached, Professor Luther sprang
into action. Since that feast, 1 November, was one of the few days out of the whole year
when indulgences were granted in return for the veneration of Frederick’s relic collection,
Luther chose 31 October—All Hallows’ Eve—as the day on which he would publically
challenge Tetzel. Wittenberg would be mobbed with indulgence seekers. What better
time to challenge the itinerant indulgence hawker to a debate on indulgences? To spark
controversy, Luther did what every academic was trained to do: he drew up his theses for
debate, all ninety-five of them, in Latin. Old legends tell of Luther nailing his theses to

Fateful indulgences. Johann Tetzel and his sermon are featured in this crude woodcut by an
unknown artist. Tetzel holds the papal bull of indulgence in his right hand, its margins ringed by
wax seals that confirm its authenticity. Lay people eagerly deposit their coins in the indulgence
chest he has brought along. The text includes Tetzel’s most infamous pitch: “As soon as the Gulden
in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs.”
150 rotestants
the door of the castle church, but historians have cast serious doubt on this iconic story.
What Luther did for certain was to send letters—and the theses—to his Augustinian
superiors and to other church authorities. Whether Luther “posted” the theses by nailing
or by mailing makes little difference, in the long run. What matters most is the furor
ignited by them.
In all likelihood, Luther had the ninety-five theses printed up so they could be
distributed widely, since he knew that Tetzel could not set foot in Wittenberg. Sending
copies to his superiors and to Archbishop Albrecht and other bishops and notables was
the best way to attract attention and begin a debate in the public sphere. We have no
surviving copies of a first print run, but there are copies of many other editions, printed
immediately afterward in both Latin and German, produced by presses in locations as
widely scattered as Leipzig, Magdeburg, Nuremberg, and Basel. This quick proliferation
of Luther’s theses is highly significant, for it shows clearly how instrumental the new
technology of printing was to the spread of his message. From the very start, Luther
availed himself of the printing press as means of addressing the German people directly,
and the printers rushed to meet the reading public’s demand for Luther as a best-selling
author. It was a perfect symbiosis, the kind all authors and publishers still dream of.
Luther proved himself not only savvy about the potential of the printing press,
but also very daring. Sending a copy of his ninety-five theses to Archbishop Albrecht
took nerve. So did telling the bishop how to do his job. “The first and only duty of the
bishops . . . is to see that the people learn the gospel and the love of Christ,” wrote Luther.
“On no occasion has Christ ordered that indulgences should be preached. . . . What a
horror, what a danger for a bishop to permit the loud noise of indulgences among his
people, while the gospel is silenced, and to be more concerned with the sale of indul-
gences than with the gospel!” It mattered little that he spoke of himself in this letter
to Albrecht as “a grain of dust” or “the least of all men.” Even his self-debasement was
brash and laced with threats. “I beg Your Most Illustrious Grace to accept this faithful
service of my humble self,” said Luther. “I, too, am one of your sheep.” Were he to ignore
his advice, added Luther, Archbishop Albrecht would suffer “the greatest disgrace.”21
Albrecht did what any bishop would have done under the circumstances: he sent a copy
of Luther’s ninety-five theses to Rome. Pope Leo X did nothing in response. According to
tradition, the pope supposedly dismissed Luther as a “German drunkard,” and brushed
off the whole controversy as a “monkish squabble.”22 In the meantime, as the leaders of
the church went about their daily routines, unconcerned about yet another intraclerical
spat far from Rome, Luther’s fame and popularity kept growing in Germany and beyond,
especially with lay people.
That Luther should have caused an uproar among the laity with something as
dull and academic as ninety-five theological propositions shows that he had hit a raw
nerve. The theses themselves touched on those fine points that scholastic theologians
excelled at debating, but embedded in the text were all sorts of questions and complaints
that any lay person could understand. In fact, in some of the theses Luther goes so far as
 l ther rom st dent to mon 151
to quote the laity. Many of the theses assumed a clever rhetorical stance that was superfi-
cially deferential to the pope, but really laid the blame for the corruption of Christendom
directly on the papal office. For example, take thesis number 50: “Christians are to be
taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence preachers, he would rather
that the basilica of St. Peter were burned to ashes than built up with the skin, flesh, and
bones of his sheep.”23 Or take the series from number 81 to 91, in which Luther cleverly
assigns all the blame for abuses on bad clergy rather than the pope, yet points out that
the laity hold the pope responsible and uses their voice to question both indulgences and
papal authority. The first two of these bombshells pack quite a punch:

81. This unbridled preaching of indulgences makes it difficult even for learned men
to rescue the reverence which is due the pope from slander or from the shrewd
questions of the laity,
82. Such as: “Why does not the pope empty purgatory for the sake of holy love and
the dire need of the souls that are there if he redeems an infinite number of souls
for the sake of miserable money with which to build a church? The former reasons
would be most just; the latter is most trivial.”24

Luther appealed to the laity on three levels. First, he agreed with some of their
complaints, implicitly and explicitly, giving them voice within the theses. Second, he
spoke of indulgences as a form of clerical abuse, and he raised questions about the price
the laity was asked to pay for their salvation, arguing that “the treasures of indulgences
are nets with which one now fishes for the wealth of men” (thesis 66). More specifically,
Luther let the laity speak directly in thesis 86 against the pope’s new basilica in Rome,
citing their complaint: “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the
riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather
than with the money of poor believers?”
Third, Luther questioned the intercessory role of the papacy and the clergy, or
even boldly proclaimed a more direct relationship between each person and God, saying
that “every true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ
and the Church” (thesis 37). In some of the theses, Luther went as far as to hint that the
clergy abused the laity by making them pay for God’s forgiveness, something that came
directly from God himself and was already theirs. In thesis 28, for instance, he said,
“It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be
increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone.”
In thesis 52, he was even bolder: “The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain,
even though . . . the pope himself, were to stake his soul upon it, this is granted him by
God, even without letters of pardon.”
Siding with the laity and giving voice to their complaints, Luther turned himself
overnight into a reforming leader and a German national hero. A cleric himself, he lashed
out against corrupt clergy and the abuse of power, arguing that salvation was to be found
not in the indulgences they constantly peddled, but rather in God himself, directly. Still
152 rotestants
very much a pastor at heart, Luther also complained that indulgences made salvation
seem cheap and easy to come by, therefore leading the laity astray and causing them to
stay mired in their sins. The ultimate danger of indulgences, Luther argued, was their
power to lull Christians into a false sense of confidence: “They will be condemned eter-
nally, together with their teachers, who believe themselves sure of their salvation because
they have letters of pardon” (thesis 32).
Pastoral concerns and theological arguments of this sort were the centerpiece of
the ninety-five theses, but there was much more to Luther’s challenge than mere theology.
This first salvo from Luther addressed some of the most intense concerns of the laity and
even gave voice to them directly. It would prove to be an embryonic manifesto of Luther’s
reforming agenda and a testament to his popular appeal. It would also prove to be a
prophetic warning. “To repress these arguments and scruples of the laity by force alone,
and not to resolve them by giving reasons,” Luther argued, “is to expose the Church and
the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christians unhappy” (thesis 90).
Without fully realizing it, perhaps, Luther was letting Leo X know that his enemies were
there already, among those unhappy German Christians, and that he, Professor Luther,
would be more than willing to lead them.25
Within less than a year of the publication of the ninety-five theses, Luther would
no longer be an obscure monk or professor, or even a gadfly in Pope Leo’s eyes. Instead,
he was a dangerous opponent, possibly among the most formidable of all the enemies that
any pope had ever faced from within the church itself. The speed at which this change
took place was a surprise to everyone.
Johann Tetzel had little to do with the events that followed the posting of the
ninety-five theses, even though his fellow Dominicans awarded him a doctorate so he
could take on Luther as an equal in rank. All he could do was to threaten: “Within three
weeks I shall have the heretic thrown into the fire.”26 Undaunted, Luther kept up the
battle against indulgences by writing directly to Archbishop Albrecht and by preparing a
simplified version of his views in German, for the common folk. Thanks to the printers,
Luther soon became a household word throughout Germany, although what kind of word
depended on the household. While some hailed him, others cursed.
From the very start, Luther was able to carry on this work with the support of his
fellow Augustinians and his prince, Frederick the Wise, whose delight in relic collecting
was suddenly eclipsed by the presence of a superstar on the Wittenberg University faculty.
In 1518, at a chapter meeting of the Augustinians in Heidelberg, Luther was warmly re-
ceived as a celebrity not just by his brethren, but the Count Palatine, who proudly showed
off his chapel and castle and invited Luther to dine with him. At Wittenberg, Prince
Frederick likewise ignored all cries of heresy and carefully guarded his prize professor,
promising him constant protection and ensuring that no one would drag him to Rome,
under any circumstances. Luther’s students, as one might expect, also rallied around
him. When the newly minted Doktor Tetzel published his own countertheses against
 l ther rom st dent to mon 153

Powerful patron. Elector Frederick the Wise

of Saxony (1463–1525) was Luther’s sponsor
and protector. Without Frederick’s support,
Martin Luther would have never survived
unscathed, much less launched a successful
revolt against the papacy.

Doktor Luther, students at Wittenberg got their hands on about eight hundred copies and
gleefully tossed them into a bonfire.
Encouraged by this support, Luther pressed on with his critique of indulgences,
and with new assertions that distanced him further from orthodoxy. Step by step, very
rapidly, he began to question other key teachings in 1518, such as the supremacy of
the pope and the infallibility of the Vulgate Latin text of the Bible. One did not have
to read much of what Luther was publishing to catch his drift. Holy Roman Emperor
Maximilian was so horrified by some sermon excerpts he read that he immediately asked
Pope Leo X “to stop the most dangerous attack of Martin Luther on indulgences, lest
not only the people but even the princes be seduced.”27 It did not take long for Luther
to be summoned to Rome, on suspicion of heresy. Once more, the protection offered to
Luther by Frederick the Wise saved his life, for thanks to the prince’s efforts, Luther’s
case was transferred from the papal court to Germany. In October 1518, one year after he
had posted his ninety-five theses, Luther had his first formal confrontation with church
authorities, at Augsburg, when he faced the papal legate to Germany, Cardinal Tommaso
de Vio (1469–1534), better known by his religious name of Gaetano, or Cajetan.
Rome had sent one of its biggest guns against Luther: Cardinal Cajetan was
master general of the Dominican order and one of the leading theologians of the day.
A reform-minded ecclesiastic and top authority on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas,
Cardinal Cajetan also had firsthand experience in dealing with heresy, for he had
154 rotestants
previously investigated the case of the controversial Italian friar Girolamo Savonarola
(1452–1498). Luther’s three meetings with the cardinal were painfully strained. At their
very first encounter, Cajetan immediately asked Luther to recant what he had been saying
about indulgences, and Luther refused. Instead he lectured the cardinal, quoting the
Bible in support of his belief that one is saved by faith in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, not
by the purchase of indulgences. When Cajetan pointed out to Luther that his rejection of
indulgences went against church doctrine, as spelled out in the papal decree Unigenitus of
1343, Luther refused to accept the cardinal’s judgment and appealed to be heard instead
by the theological faculties of Basel, Freiburg, Louvain, or Paris. Cajetan responded by
pressing Luther further on the issue of papal authority, focusing on the decree Unigenitus.
Luther responded by rejecting the authority of the pope, arguing that Bible was the su-
preme authority, not papal decrees. When Cajetan pointed out to Luther that the pope
was the chief interpreter of scripture, above councils, and above everyone else in the
church, and that all papal decrees were therefore to be accepted as scripturally based
doctrine, Luther rejected that proposition, arguing that the pope blatantly abused biblical
texts and denying that the pope’s authority trumped that of the Bible. Cajetan, the expert
on heresy, knew that it was useless to continue, and he ended the interviews. “I am not go-
ing to talk to him again,” Cajetan said to Luther’s spiritual adviser, Johann von Staupitz,
who was also present: “His eyes are as deep as a lake, and there are amazing speculations
in his head.”28 Knowing that the worst was yet to come, Staupitz released Luther from his
vow of obedience to the Augustinian order. It was not quite an excommunication—not
yet. But Staupitz knew excommunication was inevitable, and he felt compelled to protect
his order from the stigma of producing and harboring a heretic.
Luther left Augsburg knowing he had reached the point of no return. Until his
meeting with Cajetan he had always excused the pope from responsibility for the church’s
ills. Whether or not that had been a rhetorical ploy did not matter any longer. From
October 1518 on, Luther became convinced that the papacy was an unscriptural human
invention, and that it was because of the popes themselves that the church had become
thoroughly depraved. Undaunted by all the threats that began to reach Wittenberg, and
buoyed by the enthusiastic support of many colleagues and of thousands of readers all
over Germany, Luther pushed his challenge even further, writing openly against the pa-
pacy. By March 1519, Luther had begun to associate the pope with ultimate evil, saying:
“I do not know whether the pope is the Antichrist or his apostle, so does he corrupt and
crucify Christ, the truth, in his decretals.”29 As Luther’s thinking became ever more radi-
cal, Prince Frederick continued to protect him, fending off all potential threats, appealing
to Rome for yet another hearing in Germany. Writing directly to Pope Leo X, Frederick
pleaded: “Luther’s offer to debate and submit to the judgment of the universities should
be considered, and he should be shown in what respect he is a heretic instead of being
condemned in advance.”30
Unable to obtain the kind of debate he wanted, Luther accepted the challenge
of a neighboring theologian. Johann Eck (1486–1543), professor at the University of
 l ther rom st dent to mon 155
Ingolstadt, had been writing against Luther since the posting of the ninety-five theses,
even though the two men had once been friends. Unlike Cajetan, who was Italian and
older, Eck was a fellow German of the same generation as Luther. Eck’s challenges had
been a thorn in Luther’s side from the start. Safely ensconced at Wittenberg, where he had
the support and admiration of many colleagues and students, and where he constantly
received reports of how well his writings were selling, Luther had come to believe in
his challenge of the papacy as a very German and very young reform movement. Two
of his colleagues at Wittenberg confirmed this for him: one was a professor of Greek,
Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), a nephew of the brilliant and controversial humanist
Johann Reuchlin; the other was Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541), pro-
fessor of theology and chancellor of the university. Melanchthon, a gifted scholar and
a very popular lecturer, had quickly become Luther’s closest friend and associate, and
his staunchest supporter. Karlstadt was Luther’s senior colleague, though he was slightly
younger. He had joined the Wittenberg faculty in 1511, while Luther was still a student,
and as chancellor, he had actually awarded Luther his doctorate. Karlstadt had also been
an outspoken critic of church abuses for many years, and he instantly recognized Luther
as a kindred spirit. Given the close friendship that he developed with these two young
colleagues, and how openly they supported him, Luther could not help but think of Eck
as a traitor of sorts—the potential friend and colleague who had turned against him on
his own turf—and as someone whose authority needed to be challenged.
Johann Eck was eager to take on Luther in person. He had already attacked him
in print, and had grappled with Karlstadt too, after Karlstadt published his own attack on
indulgences. In the spring of 1519, then, Eck baited Luther by arranging for a debate with
Karlstadt at the University of Leipzig. Eck’s ploy worked. In July 1519, Luther, Karlstadt,
Melanchthon, several other professors, and two hundred axe-wielding students set out
from Wittenberg. At Leipzig, the town council had assigned seventy-six armed guards to
Eck. The potential significance of this contest pleased the sponsor and moderator of the
debate, Duke George of Ducal Saxony, a relative and constant rival of Luther’s Prince
Frederick.
Karlstadt was prepared for what he considered his debate, but on the road to
Leipzig, he was injured in an accident, and as was common in his day, he was subjected
to a bloodletting—the cure for all ills, including sprains. Weakened by the loss of blood,
Karlstadt proved weak against Eck, stumbling in his arguments, straining his memory,
constantly flipping through the books he had brought in search of supporting texts,
and reading from them at length, causing many in the audience to fall asleep. Eck was
pleased by Karlstadt’s fumbling, but he really itched to take on Luther himself, and when
he finally got his chance, the sparks began to fly. Luther was quick and articulate, and able
to cite texts by chapter and verse straight from memory. The opening topic—whether the
papacy had been established by God or man—could not have been more controversial.
Luther began by arguing that the papacy was a humanly devised institution
that had evolved over the centuries. Skilled at proving the errors of his opponents, Eck
156 rotestants
immediately accused Luther of agreeing with the teachings of John Wycliffe (1320–1384)
and Jan Hus (1369–1415), both of whom had been condemned by the church. Bringing
Hus into the debate was a winning move on Eck’s part, not just because there were
still rebellious Hussites in nearby Bohemia, but also because Hus had been declared a
heretic by the Council of Constance rather than by a pope. Luther denied the charge
of “Bohemianism,” but also lost no time in arguing that the Council of Constance had
made an awful mistake in burning Hus at the stake in 1415. Many of Hus’s teachings
were “plainly Christian and evangelical,” argued Luther, adding that Hus was especially
right in denying the authority of the papacy and in defending the supremacy of scripture.
Switching from Latin to German, so he could be understood by everyone in the audience,
Luther boldly burned yet another bridge behind himself:

No believing Christian can be coerced beyond holy writ. By divine law we are
forbidden to believe anything which is not established by divine Scripture or manifest
revelation. . . . I assert that a council has sometimes erred and may sometimes err. Nor
has a council authority to establish new articles of faith. . . . A simple layman armed
with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it.31

Eck had forced Luther to admit that he was in league with a known heretic.
Even more important, he had also made Luther admit that he rejected the authority of
councils. Could anyone now doubt that Luther was a heretic? How could anyone remain
a faithful member of the Roman Catholic Church and believe that Bible-clutching simple
laymen had more authority than popes and councils? Luther had sealed his fate, but the
debate dragged on; until Duke George called it off at the end of the eighteenth day, Eck
mined Luther for heretical nuggets relentlessly, pressing him on a variety of points, forcing
him to grapple with his own statements and come up with definite conclusions. Luther
rose to the challenge and followed his logic to startling ends, and he defended himself
tenaciously, as if he were arguing with the Antichrist or the devil himself. Before it was all
over, Eck had extracted a treasure trove of heretical statements from Luther. Aside from
denying the authority of popes and councils, Luther had also redefined the one remaining
authority he respected, the Bible, rejecting the scriptural authenticity of certain books of
the Vulgate Old Testament, those so-called deuterocanonical or apocryphal texts from
the Hellenistic age that had been written in Greek rather than Hebrew. Among the texts
Luther would no longer consider part of the Bible were the two books of Maccabees (ca.
100 B.C.), the sole place in the Vulgate Latin Bible where mention is made of prayers
for the dead, and the ultimate biblical proof text for the doctrine of purgatory. Finally,
Eck kept hammering away at Luther with several versions of the same question, which
happened to be something that Luther had already asked himself many times: “Are you
the only one that knows anything? Except for you is all the Church in error?” Luther’s
swaggering reply to that question could be taken as his definitive epiphany and the mo-
ment he willingly abandoned the Catholic fold:
 l ther rom st dent to mon 157
I am a Christian theologian; and I am bound, not only to assert, but to defend the truth
with my blood and death. I want to believe freely and be a slave to the authority of no
one, whether council, university, or pope. I will confidently confess what appears to me
to be true, whether it has been asserted by a Catholic or a heretic, whether it has been
approved or reproved by a council.32
After his debate with Eck, Luther knew exactly where he stood, and it was not
at all a comfortable place to be. Luther was aware that in the eyes of the church he kept
attacking, he had become a rebel and a heretic. As if sent by Divine Providence, letters
from Bohemia arrived at Wittenberg after Luther’s return from Leipzig, and along with
them a copy of Jan Hus’s magnum opus, De ecclesia (On the Church). “I agree now with
more articles of Hus than I did at Leipzig,” Luther would say, after reading Hus’s book.
Divine Providence and good spying had also seen to it that copies of the Bohemian cor-
respondence ended up in Eck’s hands. In these letters, Hussite leaders encouraged Luther
to stand firm. It was redundant proof. Eck already knew that Luther was a worse threat
than Jan Hus, and that is precisely what he told the pope.
Everyone now prepared for the inevitable bull of excommunication from Pope
Leo X, the flames, and the stench of Luther’s roasting flesh.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

Luther
From Rebel to Heretic

T
hat Luther was never burnt at the stake had as much to do with his strong
personality as with the political circumstances that kept him out of the
hands of his enemies. Despite spells of introspection and Anfechtung, which
continued to assail him until his dying day, Luther had more than the
requisite backbone for defying pope and emperor. Take, for instance, his
words in 1521 to Hieronymus Emser, an opponent he addressed as “the goat of Leipzig”:
I am and, God willing, shall remain a stable, proud and fearless spirit in my defiance
of you, Eck, the pope, and your mob, even the devil. With God’s help I shall defy and
despise you as senseless and blind minds and poisonous liars. . . . But I refuse to debate
very much about whether I am a proud man, since this concerns not my teaching but
my own person. I have said more than once that anyone may attack my person in any
way he pleases. I do not pretend to be an angel. But I let no one attack my teaching
without a counterattack, since I know that it is not mine, but God’s.1
Yet as indispensable as this prophetic bluster was to his survival, and as important as his
message was for his success, there is no denying that Luther would owe both his survival
and success to a unique set of social conditions and political circumstances. Before con-
tinuing with the narrative of Luther’s rise to prominence, then, we must pause to examine
the landscape he inhabited as a German, literally and figuratively.

Luther’s Germany
Luther’s Germany was one of the most politically complex places on earth. For starters,
there was no nation called Deutschland or “Germany” even though millions of people
shared an identity as “Germans” and spoke versions of a language that could be identi-
fied as Deutsch, or “German.” Luther, like Jan Hus before him, lived within the highly
paradoxical political entity known as the Holy Roman Empire, which, as all wags knew,
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 159
was neither holy nor Roman, nor an empire. Nor was it wholly German. Though com-
posed mainly of German-speaking states, this empire also included a wide array of peoples
with other identities and languages, including Alsatians, Bohemians, Slovaks, Slovenians,
Hungarians, Moravians, Poles, Croatians, Jews, Gypsies, and others yet. In existence since
Charlemagne was crowned Imperator Romanorum by Pope Leo III in 800, the Reich, or
empire, was an extremely loose confederation of very different states, cities, and towns, all
ostensibly ruled by Charlemagne’s successors, who took the titles of king of the Germans
and Kaiser, or Caesar, and were normally chosen by seven electors, each of whom ruled
his own territory. In Luther’s day, the seven electors, known as Kurfürsten (electing dukes)
were the count palatine of the Rhine, the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the mar-
grave of Brandenburg, and the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier. The existence
of three ecclesiastical electors who were also civil rulers pointed to one of the most salient
characteristics of the empire: its constituent principles derived as much from Christianity
as from ancient Germanic customs. It was the Heiliges Reich, or “Holy Empire,” after
all. Needless to say, the boundaries between church and state were often neither easily
discerned not readily agreed on, and constant jurisdictional conflict was also one of the
empire’s chief characteristics.
A bewildering array of overlapping and often conflicting authorities made po-
litical life in the empire somewhat chaotic at times, but also allowed for a great deal of
local independence. The emperor was no mere figurehead, since all of the entities in the
empire owed him allegiance, but his power as Kaiser was severely limited, not only by
local entities, but also by the Imperial Diet, or parliament, a heterogeneous assembly that
met irregularly whenever and wherever the Emperor convened it. Although the office of
emperor was not hereditary, during the empire’s long history some families such as the
Hohenstaufens (1138–1208, 1212–1254) had occupied the imperial throne as dynasties.
At the time of Luther’s birth in 1484, one Austrian family, the Hapsburgs, was in fact
on its way to becoming one of the longest-lived dynasties in the history of the empire,
but at that time their hold on the throne still seemed precarious. As a child, Luther lived
under the rulership of Frederick III (r. 1452–1493), the last emperor ever to be crowned
in Rome. As a young man, Luther was a subject of Frederick III’s son, Maximilian I, who
ruled from 1493 to 1519. As a hunted heretic and reformer, he would be a constant thorn
in the side of Charles V, Maximilian’s grandson and successor.
The constituent states of the empire ranged as widely in size as they did in in
political structures, and their ever-shifting and often noncontiguous boundaries could be
maddeningly illogical. Nonetheless, it was an orderly sort of chaos. Though there were
numerous variations and exceptions to their governance—all of which lead experts on
the empire to quibble over classifications—most of the states within the empire could be
classified under three basic types: territories ruled by the nobility, territories ruled by the
clergy, and imperial free cities.
Territories governed by titled nobles, such as princes, dukes, counts, landgraves,
margraves, and in some cases kings, tended to be hereditary dynastic states. Because of
 N

MECKLENBURG

BRANDENBURG

MUNSTER

NETHERLANDS
HESSE SAXONY

LUXEMBURG
BOHEMIA

LORRAINE
BAVARIA
AUSTRIA

BURGUNDY
STYRIA
SWISS CONFEDERATION
TYROL

SAVOY

MILAN 0 50 100 150 mi

0 100 200 km

Lands ruled by Charles V

Burgundian inheritance
Hapsburg inheritance EN GL A ND
Holy Roman Empire
GERMANY
NETHERLANDS Brussels
LUXEMBURG Prague
B O H EM IA
N
Vienna
F R A N CE BURGUNDY
AU S TR IA

Milan
L
GA

SPA I N ITALY
RTU

Toledo Barcelona
PO

SARDINIA Naples

0 100 200 300 mi SICILY

0 100 200 300 400 500 km

Charles V and his European empire. No European ruler since Charlemagne in the ninth century
had ruled as vast an empire as that of Charles V. Adding the lands he also claimed in the New
World, his empire rivaled that of ancient Rome. But the authority wielded by Charles V differed
from place to place, and was weakest in the Holy Roman Empire, that impossibly complex
assemblage of principalities, duchies, prince-bishoprics, and free cities. Charles was constantly
engaged in conflicts with neighboring rulers too. His nearly total encirclement of the kingdom of
France helped make King Francis I his bitterest and most constant foe for decades. The aggressive
northward advance of the Ottoman Turks from the Balkans toward Austria was another of his
major preoccupations.
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 161
the endogamous marriage code of the higher nobility, these lands always remained in the
hands of the same circle of families, even though the boundaries and dynasties of these
states were ever in a state of flux from one generation to the next. Sometimes, territories
might be subdivided among different branches of the same family. The University of
Wittenberg was in one such territory, Ernestine Saxony, which was the seat of one of
the seven electors, and was ruled by one branch of the House of Wettin, known as the
Ernestine line. Luther’s prince, Frederick the Wise, was one of the most powerful nobles
in the empire, but being a lifelong bachelor, he had no direct heir and therefore no firm
territorial claim to the electorship, which was coveted by his Wettin relatives. Next door
to Ernestine Saxony lay Albertine Saxony, which was ruled by the another branch of
the Wettins, known as the Albertine line.2 When Luther arrived in Wittenberg, that
“other” Saxony next door was in the hands of Prince Frederick’s cousin, Duke George
(1471–1539), the sponsor of the 1519 Leipzig debate between Eck and Luther. Relations
between the two Saxonies, which had always been strained, would become much worse
after 1519, given religious differences between the cousins Frederick and George.
The second type of territories, those ruled by bishops, could not be hereditary,
since the clergy’s vow of celibacy prevented them from having wives or legitimate chil-
dren. But the higher clergy were drawn almost exclusively from the noble class, and
ecclesiastical offices and territories therefore often cycled and recycled through the hands
of the same families that ruled the other states as titled nobles. In Luther’s day, abuses
were common when it came to episcopal succession in such highly prized territories.
A typical example is provided by none other than Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, of
indulgence fame. A scion of the Hohenzollern family—the margraves and electors of
Brandenburg—Albrecht was the consummate office and title collector, who managed
to win a second electorship for his family by purchasing the see of Mainz. While all the
higher clergy were considered princes of the church, only the Reich had prince-bishops
such as Albrecht, who held secular and ecclesiastical powers and ran both church and
state with a single office. To further complicate matters, the two jurisdictions of every
Fürstbischof, or prince-bishop, such as Albrecht, did not necessarily coincide on the map,
for a bishop’s diocese was often much larger than his secular territory, and his secular
office might not include the very city in which his cathedral was located. Such was the
case in Cologne, for instance, where the prince-bishops had no temporal jurisdiction and
resided in nearby Bonn. This discontinuity of jurisdiction explains why Frederick the
Wise could turn away Johann Tetzel from Wittenberg, even though Archbishop Albrecht
had sent him to preach all over his diocese. The most prominent prince-bishops of all
were the three electors: of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, near the empire’s western boundar-
ies, in that thin sliver of German soil that had once been colonized by Rome.
Cologne, just mentioned, was representative of the third type of territories, the
imperial free cities, each of which had its own government and was subject to no lord other
than the emperor. Because of the peculiar history of the empire, many such cities dotted
the map, especially in southern Germany. Imperial cities had originated in the Middle
162 rotestants
Ages, especially from the eleventh century on, as various emperors granted independence
to urban areas that had been part of their personal estates. From an original handful, the
number of imperial cities continued to grow throughout the later Middle Ages. Some
were simply granted their status; others purchased it or fought for it, or simply seized it
in chaotic times. Given that conflict and warfare were endemic in the empire, imperial
cities might also lose their status too, either when they were absorbed by territorial lords,
or when they willingly placed themselves under some lord’s protection. To be free and
remain free, a city had to be prosperous, for running a small urban state was an expensive
proposition, especially in times of war, plague, or famine, which could always be expected.
Strictly speaking, the term freie Reichsstadt, or imperial free city, applied only to seven cit-
ies that had won independence from their ecclesiastical lords—Basel, Strasbourg, Speyer,
Worms, Mainz, Cologne, and Regensburg—but it was used interchangeably with the
original, simple Reichstadt. In 1521, at the Diet of Worms, eighty-five such city-states were
listed as “Free and Imperial Cities (Frei- und Reichsstätt).3 Such usage of the term made
sense, for all imperial cities were really autonomous and politically independent from
the states that surrounded them on all sides: they were like small islands of representative
government scattered over a large sea of autocratic rule. A popular refrain summed up
this complex situation, Stadtluft macht frei: “city air makes you free.” Though each city
had its own constitution, most of them had very similar governmental structures. All
imperial cities were ruled by a town council or by a collection of councils. Each council,
or Rat, was composed of elected representatives who served terms of specific length; those
who could vote were usually male property owners. All imperial cities were oligarchies,
their councils composed of a few patrician families and of representatives from the city’s
merchant class and trade guilds.
No two imperial cities were alike in terms of structure, or wealth, or power
and influence. Some had more political privileges or a greater ability to stave off outside
interference; some had a richer cultural life or higher literacy rates. Some had more
churches and monasteries, or bigger churches and monasteries. Wealthy cities such as
Lübeck, Nuremberg, and Augsburg could rival much larger states, commanding armies
and waging war—with either well-paid mercenaries or their own homegrown citizen
soldiery. But a small state can accomplish only so much, no matter how affluent it is.
Imperial cities thus made alliances with one another, to protect their rights and privi-
leges collectively, and these leagues, or Bünde, could carry a lot of weight in times of
crisis. In 1489, when Luther was a small child, the political clout of the imperial cities
was formally recognized at the Diet of Frankfurt (one of those occasional parliamentary
gatherings called by the emperor), where their right to be represented in the Diet was
formally recognized. In the last decade of the fifteenth century, when Luther was still
a student, the representatives of the imperial cities gathered even more strength and
formed their own voting block at the Diet, which then split into two benches, or cham-
bers: the Rhenish and the Swabian.
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 163
Another salient characteristic of the imperial cities was their intense religiosity,
which derived from the high concentration and close proximity of churches, monaster-
ies, charitable institutions, and confraternities within their walls. Urban environments
provided greater access to formalized religion than rural settings, simply by virtue of the
fact that cities were crammed with clerics, ecclesiastical institutions, and lay religious
associations. City air did not just make people free; it could also make them more devout,
or at the very least, more aware of the presence of the sacred. Conformity in religious be-
havior was a necessary and routine part of everyday social life. One German historian has
gone as far as to argue that the imperial cities can be characterized as “sacred societies” in
which the boundaries between the sacred and the secular were so porous and evanescent
that the average burgher, or town dweller, found it hard to distinguish between material
welfare and eternal salvation. “In such towns,” Bernd Moeller has argued, “the civil com-
munity was confused with the religious. In principle, we should not even consider them
separately, for they coincide.”4 Given this intertwining of the spiritual and temporal, and
the many ills that plagued the church in the early sixteenth century, it stands to reason
that imperial free cities would prove a fertile ground for religious reform movements.
If the political structure of Luther’s Germany was difficult to manage or compre-
hend, so were relations between the temporal and spiritual authorities. Conflicts between
church and state were endemic everywhere in Europe, but in the empire the tension and
confusion was heightened by the political complexity of the civil state. To a consider-
able extent, church and state had a greater chance of butting heads in Germany for two
reasons: because the secular powers had so much relative autonomy, and because the
church was so tightly integrated into the political structure. Whether a locale was ruled
by a duke or a city’s Rat made little difference, insofar as relations between the temporal
and the ecclesiastical realms were concerned: within the empire every political authority
needed to deal with the clergy on the local level in much the same way as the monarchs
of much larger centralized nation-states like France, Spain, or England. In other words,
the contact between every secular authority and the clergy in its domain could be very
direct and intense, and the possibility of the secular power extending its power over the
clergy even greater. That it was relatively easier for smaller states to gain greater control
of their clergy is proved by the imperial cities, which had already begun to take over the
distribution of church offices by the end of the fifteenth century, and were pressing hard
to make their clerics full citizens who paid taxes and could be tried in civil courts.5 Given
that the great monarchs of the centralized states were all busy trying to gain control of
their national churches at this time, it stands to reason that the lesser rulers would also
follow this model and perhaps be more successful at turning “the” church into “my”
church or “our” church. The existence of prince-bishops further complicated matters
in myriad ways in the empire, chiefly because they had dual identities, blurred the line
between church and state, and already exercised the kind of control over the church that
most secular rulers craved.
164 rotestants

Luther’s Emperor
In addition to living in a highly fragmented place with an intricately complicated political
landscape, Martin Luther also happened to live in a time of great political turmoil, when
the empire was ruled by a dynasty with vast ambitions and more territories and challenges
than any single ruler could handle adroitly. To understand how the Protestant Reformation
began in Germany in 1517, one must take all of this complexity into account.
At the turn of the sixteenth century, when Luther was still a student, the politi-
cal landscape of Europe had begun to change at a very fast pace. As has already been
discussed in chapter 1, the most significant change of all was the rise of the early modern
nation-state and the gradual eclipse of the medieval feudal order. Another significant
development that immediately changed the balance of power in Europe was the expan-
sion of some of its states to other continents, most notably into Asia and the Americas. In
Europe itself, maps were being redrawn quickly and dramatically, for different reasons.
Looking out from Germany, at Europe’s other states, Luther might not have
noticed any of these developments, but they nonetheless affected him. To the far south-
west, Portugal and Spain were leading the expansion of Europe at an incredibly fast pace.
“Spain,” that collection of kingdoms that had been recently united by King Ferdinand of
Aragon and Isabella of Castile, was leading the way on many fronts—as detailed earlier
in chapters 1, 5, and 6—including the centralization of authority, the development of
state bureaucracies, and the reform of the church. Spain was also colonizing other worlds
and about to become the wealthiest of all European states thanks to silver and gold from
the Americas.
Directly to the west, France was quickly centralizing under the direction of the
Valois dynasty while it also engaged in wars of conquest in Italy, which it had invaded
in 1498. Italy itself was under siege, and reeling from the turmoil of war, especially in
the regions north of the Papal States. Although Italy was still the unquestioned cultural
leader of all of Europe, and the epicenter of the church, many of its very wealthy and
ever-feuding city-states had fallen on hard times. Venice remained the “serene republic,”
la serenissima, fabulously rich and largely unaffected by this turmoil, but nonetheless
constantly challenged throughout the eastern Mediterranean by the Ottoman Turks.
Between Germany and Italy lay the Swiss Confederation, a fiercely independent
mountainous enclave of prosperous urban and rural states that seemed to be the antithesis
of the emerging centralized nations and could best be described as a smaller-scale Holy
Roman Empire without an emperor. Between France and Germany lay smaller territories
that were among the most prosperous in Europe: the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and
Burgundy, all of them under dynastic rule.
Across the English Channel, in the British Isles, England was still recovering
from civil war, but the Tudor dynasty’s hold on the throne remained firm. As ever,
England and France remained bitter rivals. To the north, in Scandinavia, and to the east,
in the Slavic lands, the pace of change was slower. But to the south and southeast change
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 165
was alarmingly constant and fast paced, for the expanding empire of the Ottoman Turks
kept creeping northward up into the Balkan Peninsula, toward Austria, Hungary, and
Germany, an awful, seemingly unstoppable menace.
No dynasty in all of Europe was directly connected to more of these develop-
ments than the House of Hapsburg, the rulers of Luther’s Germany. Relatively quickly,
within three generations (1452–1515), this dynasty had managed to acquire more ter-
ritories through marriage than anyone would have thought possible, or desirable. In brief,
the Hapsburgs excelled at expanding their reach in Europe through a shrewd nuptial
strategy that mixed their blood with that of some of the most powerful ruling families on
the continent, thus allowing them to stake claims to many thrones. This shrewd process
of linking Germany to nearly all of Western Europe through marriage was already well
under way when Luther was born in 1484. By the time Luther got to Wittenberg in
1512, one young Hapsburg—the grandson of Emperor Maximilian I and the Catholic
Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella—stood poised to become the most powerful
ruler in all of Europe, perhaps even in the whole world. A matter of statecraft rather than
romance, dynastic marriage alliances had always been part of life for Europe’s ruling
class: quite often these attempts to entangle bloodlines were complex deals that involved
treaties, alliances, and mergers between ruling houses. Given the close identification
between ruler and state in feudal Europe, dynastic alliances were one of the surest ways
to link destinies, secure peace, improve commerce, and expand the power and influence
of the families and states involved in the deal. Sometimes, dynastic marriages could create
new hybrid states, as happened when Ferdinand of Aragon (1452–1516) married Isabella
of Castile (1451–1504) and their kingdoms were joined to form “Spain.” The Hapsburgs
excelled at this kind of deal making. How they managed to acquire more thrones than
any other dynasty in a relatively short time was no mystery, but it was certainly dazzling.
It began in 1452, with the marriage of Frederick III (1415–1493) to Eleanor
of Portugal, and it continued with the marriage of their son Emperor Maximilian I
(1459–1519) to Marie of Burgundy (1457–1482), which linked all the possessions of the
sprawling Duchy of Burgundy to the personal lands of the Hapsburgs in Austria. Then
their son Philip the Bold (1478–1506) married Juana (1479–1555), one of the daughters
of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and better known as Juana la Loca, or
Juana the Insane, for she became totally unhinged when her husband died. Though
the handsome Philip died young, he and Juana had managed to have six children, who
included two boys, Charles (1500–1558) and Ferdinand (1503–1564), who stood in
line as heirs to an astonishing array of thrones and titles. Who would inherit what, and
when, was never set in stone. A lot depended on circumstances at the time that each of
the potential thrones became vacant. Ironically, his mother’s madness—a wild card of
the worst sort—allowed all the pieces to fall into place for Charles. When his maternal
grandfather, King Ferdinand, died in 1516, while Luther was lecturing on Paul’s letter to
the Romans at Wittenberg, young Charles found himself ruler of more territory than any
monarch since Charlemagne.
166 rotestants
Combining his father’s Burgundian possessions with his grandparents’ Spanish
lands, Charles had inherited the Netherlands, Burgundy, Alsace, Castile, Aragon, Naples,
Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Isles, the Canary Islands, and all of the rapidly growing ter-
ritory claimed by Spain in the Americas. As a direct descendant of Eleanor of Portugal,
he was also related to the Avis dynasty of that kingdom. As if all this were not enough,
in January 1519 on the death of his paternal grandfather, Emperor Maximilian and as
Luther began to deny papal authority, Charles also acquired all of the vast Hapsburg pos-
sessions in Austria and Central Europe and instantly became the prime candidate for the
throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Charles was poised to rule over more territory than
anyone in all of human history up to that point, at least nominally, if Spain’s overseas
possessions were taken into account.
Charles of Burgundy, as he was known in Castile, was ill prepared to become
King Charles I of Spain, not only because “Spain” had been recently invented by his
grandparents, but also because he was an inexperienced sixteen-year-old who knew none
of the languages spoken there. Charles had been reared at the Burgundian court and in
Flanders by his paternal aunt Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, and knew
only French well, his mother tongue. Though he had received a fairly good education
and was as expert in chivalry and Burgundian court life, his Latin and Flemish were very
poor, and he knew next to nothing about cultures other than his own. When Charles
arrived in Spain to assume the throne in 1516, an awkward teenager with a prominent
jaw, he immediately raised hackles with his ineptitude and his insensitivity to Spanish
customs. Relying almost exclusively on Flemish and Burgundian courtiers, Charles alien-
ated the Spanish nobility and could not help but make one mistake after another.
Charles was equally unprepared to become Holy Roman Emperor, for he knew
little about the empire’s complexities and spoke none of its tongues, not even German.
Moreover, given how much territory he already governed, Charles was too powerful and
too thinly spread out. The addition of the imperial crown to his collection was a risky
step. In a hotly contested election, many power brokers, both within and without the
empire, looked for an alternative to Charles. In Spain, many nobles opposed Charles’s
candidacy, fearing they would end up with a negligent foreign ruler. At Rome, Pope Leo X
was adamantly opposed to Charles, knowing very well that powerful emperors always
mean trouble for the papacy, in one way or another. The strongest opposition of all came
from the French king, Francis I (1494–1547), who did not want to see his realm hemmed
in on all sides by Charles. Within the empire, opposition to Charles was also strong for
many reasons, ranging from internal power politics to the fears similar to those expressed
by the papacy, the French, and the Spanish. Two electors whose lives intersected with
Luther’s initially opposed Charles: Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz and Frederick the Wise
of Saxony. Frederick, in fact, was a himself a contender for the imperial crown, encouraged
by the pope; Pope Leo X would, however, eventually throw his support behind Francis I.
Although a French king was a most unlikely candidate for the position of Holy
Roman Emperor, Francis I quickly seized the opportunity to compete with Charles for
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 167
the crown. With the pope’s backing, Francis and his supporters lobbied the electors ag-
gressively, painting Charles in the worst possible light as the bungling son of a madwoman
who was already overwhelmed by his responsibilities in far-off Spain. Charles counter-
attacked by portraying Francis as a power-hungry tyrant who would ride roughshod over
traditional German liberties. And while the imperial throne stood vacant and all of the
empire’s high nobility focused their attention on the election for seven months, between
January and July 1519, none of the empire’s elites seemed to give a second thought to
Martin Luther, or to the outrageous things he was saying and publishing, or to the pam-
phlets that were already streaming forth in great numbers from Germany’s many presses
in support of him.
Thanks largely to the lobbying efforts of contender Elector Frederick the Wise,
who expected a marriage deal with the Hapsburgs between Charles’s sister Catherine
and his nephew, Crown Prince John Frederick, the seven electors voted unanimously for
Charles on 28 June 1519, just a few days before the Leipzig debate between Johann Eck
and the Wittenberg theologians Karlstadt and Luther. So it was that Rey Carlos I, king of
Spain and all its overseas possessions and ruler of the Netherlands, Burgundy, and Austria
became also Kaiser Karl V, Holy Roman Emperor and ostensibly the most powerful man
on earth. As Holy Roman Emperor, Charles would also be blessed—or cursed—with the
ultimate responsibility for silencing a troublesome monk and professor from Wittenberg
who seemed hell bent on destroying the unity of the Catholic Apostolic Church.
On 23 October 1520, almost three years to the day since Luther had posted his
ninety-five theses, Charles was crowned in Charlemagne’s sublime eighth-century Palatine
Chapel at Aachen by two of his electors, the archbishop of Trier and the archbishop of
Mainz. Crowning was a sacred ritual carried out by the church, which confirmed the
divine origin of a monarch’s power and sealed the intertwining of church and state. It
was such a key ritual that some early medieval theologians had actually counted it as a
sacrament. Having two bishop-electors seal this link between the spiritual and temporal
realms made the crowning of Charles even more powerfully symbolic. Given the lofty
ideals represented at that ceremony, it was doubly ironic that the archbishop of Mainz
at that time was Albrecht, the very same elector who had opposed Charles and the very
same pluralist bishop who had commissioned Johann Tetzel to preach and distribute
indulgences in Saxony so he could pay off the loans with which he had bought his office.
Albrecht was now even higher in the church hierarchy, having been raised to cardinal by
Pope Leo X the previous year. Cardinal Albrecht was thus now a member of the Roman
Curia; in addition to electing Holy Roman Emperors and crowning them, he could also
elect popes. Short of becoming pope or emperor, one could rise no higher in sixteenth-
century society. Short of pure satire, neither could history have been more ironic.
Emperor Charles V was typical of many rulers of his day: pious yet overtly prag-
matic all at once. At first unable to address most of his subjects in their own tongues,
the practical Charles gradually learned several languages—at least to some degree—and
made it possible for some historians to believe that a quote attributed to him was genuine:
168 rotestants

The young emperor. Charles V, around the

time when he became Holy Roman Emperor.
This portrait by the Flemish School was given
to King Henry VIII of England and remains
in the Royal Collection. The artist has made
no attempt to hide Charles’s prominent jaw,
a characteristic trait of the Hapsburgs, which
many of his descendants would also inherit.

“I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”6
Although he would have several extramarital affairs and sire two illegitimate children,
wage many wars of conquest and also oppose the pope himself on several issues, and even
bear the ultimate responsibility for the sack of Rome in 1527, Charles was also a man
of faith who held deep religious convictions. He had been brought up to be a faithful
Catholic Christian who believed that the “one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church”
mentioned in the essential prayer known as the Creed was the church led by the pope at
Rome, and that it had never, ever ceased to be the very church founded by Christ himself.
He was a “modern” man too, trained in the life of the spirit by the theologian Adrian
of Utrecht (later Pope Adrian VI), a disciple of the devotio moderna, that broad-minded
mystical movement in which Erasmus of Rotterdam had also been steeped. Charles V,
the emperor who would one day resign all his titles and retire to a monastery, committed
himself wholeheartedly and at great expense to maintaining the unity of Christendom
both as an ideal and as a matter of imperial policy. But something huge stood in the way
of Charles’s ultimate goal: the revolt begun by Martin Luther, that irksome monk who
would be the bane of his existence.

From Rebel to Heretic

While all the nobility of the empire were distracted with the issue of the German emperor’s
succession, Pope Leo X was busy preparing his bull of excommunication against Martin
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 169
Luther. “Arise o Lord [Exsurge Domine], and judge thy cause,” read the first line of this bull,
“the wild boar from the forest seeks to destroy your vineyard.” Issued at Rome on 15 June
1520, this document listed forty-one “ancient” errors that Luther had revived in Germany,
like some “restless evil, full of deadly poison.” This wording was standard procedure against
all heretics, for the accepted thinking on theological error was that it had but one source,
the devil, and was also of one piece, linking all heretics together. Luther and his followers
were interpreting the Holy Scriptures “just like heretics have done since ancient times,”
charged Leo, “inspired only by their own sense of ambition, and for the sake of popular
acclaim.” The bull roared against Luther and anyone who agreed with him:
We condemn, reprobate, and reject completely the books and all the writings and
sermons of the said Martin Luther, whether in Latin or any other language . . . and
we forbid each and every one of the faithful of either sex . . . to read, assert, preach,
praise, print, publish, or defend them. . . . Indeed immediately after the publication
of this letter these works, wherever they may be, shall be sought out carefully . . . and
burned publicly and solemnly in the presence of the clerics and people. As far as Martin
himself is concerned. . . .We can, without any further citation or delay, proceed against
him to his condemnation and damnation as one whose faith is notoriously suspect and
in fact a true heretic with full severity.7

Getting this document up to Saxony took three months. Since Luther received news
of the bull long before it ever reached him, and he was given sixty days to recant upon
receiving it, he knew for several months that he had a sword hanging over his head. In a
separate letter, Pope Leo also issued clear instructions to Prince Frederick the Wise. “We
can no longer allow the disease-ridden sheep to infect the whole flock,” said Leo. “We
exhort you to persuade him to return to sanity, swallow his stubborn pride, and receive
our clemency, along with God’s. . . . But if he persists in his madness, put your authority
and power to work, and take him prisoner.”8
Seizing Luther would not be easy, and Frederick knew this. The church itself
had no power to lay hands on heretics, and no means of doing it; their capture was the
responsibility of secular authorities. By now Luther had won a great following at all levels
of German society, and he had many noble friends besides Frederick. He had become a
German hero, a champion of German liberties in the eyes of many. This was part of his
appeal: it was not just Luther’s theology that excited his followers, but also his firm stance
as a German against the “Romanists.” Luther had the support of many powerful nobles
who pledged to fight for him, such as Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen. While
the threat of capture and execution enveloped Luther, the knight Ulrich von Hutten,
wrote to him:

Long live freedom! . . . I hear that you have been excommunicated. If this is true, how
great a man you are! . . . Stand firm. Do not waver. . . . You will have me by your side,
no matter what comes our way. Let us defend our common freedom. Let us liberate our
oppressed fatherland. We have God on our side.9
170 rotestants
And it was not just nobles who had been won over by Luther. Burghers in the
cities and students had also joined his camp. Those carrying the bull Exsurge Domine to
Saxony were supposed to publish it in every city and town where they stopped and to
see to it that Luther’s texts were burned. The two men chosen for this task, Girolamo
Aleandro, former rector of the University of Paris, and Johann Eck, Luther’s debating
nemesis, encountered stiff resistance nearly everywhere in Germany, especially from stu-
dents, who rioted and threatened them with physical violence, or burned anti-Lutheran
works rather than those of Luther. With the people and his many noble supporters at his
side, Luther stood firm during this tense time, writing and publishing a series of explosive
texts that marked a complete break with Rome. As the clock ticked on his deadline to
recant, Luther blasted away with lightning speed, laying out his call for reform in three
hastily written but eloquent treatises.
The first of these salvos, An Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,
appeared in August 1520. Its argument was an echo of the voices of Wycliffe and Hus and

Luther, saint, and prophet. Despite Luther’s theological emphasis on the sinfulness of all human
beings, and despite all his efforts to portray himself as no less wretched than anyone else, Luther’s
followers did not hesitate to depict him as a saint, especially as his Catholic opponents stepped
up their attacks against him. These two images invest Luther with the iconographical symbols of
sanctity. On the left, a woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien (1521) depicts Luther the monk, with
a halo and a nimbus, and, in case anyone should think this insufficient, the Holy Spirit (as dove)
is suspended over his head. This was one of the most popular, best-selling images of the young
Luther. On the right, Daniel Hopfer copied Lucas Cranach’s portrait of Luther in his doctor’s cap,
aglow in holiness and divine inspiration, indicated by the nimbus around his head (1523).
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 171
as simple as it was revolutionary: whenever the church cannot reform itself because of the
corruption of the clergy, it becomes the responsibility of the secular authorities to clean
house. To suggest that the church should be subject to the state was a radical departure.
Throughout the Middle Ages, in all its conflicts with secular rulers, the church had
developed a very sophisticated theology that defended the supremacy of the papacy and
the superiority of the spiritual over the temporal. Stressing the point that this theology
was unscriptural, and therefore wrong, Luther struck at the root of all claims for clerical
superiority and papal supremacy. Advocating a total leveling of authority, and grant-
ing the secular rulers the power to cleanse the church, Luther redefined the dynamic of
church-state relations:

All this is nothing but mere ordinance of human invention. It follows, then, that be-
tween laymen and priests, princes and bishops, or, as they call it, between spiritual and
temporal sons, the only real difference is one of office and function, and not of estate.
. . . Therefore I say, forasmuch as the temporal power has been ordained by God for
the punishment of the bad and the protection of the good, we must let it do its duty
throughout the whole Christian body, without respect of persons, whether it strike
popes, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, or whoever it may be.10

In addition to theologizing, Luther also made specific recommendations, urging

the German nobles to take over the German churches. In a very long list filled with scores
of specific proposals, Luther asked for a total revamping of the church and of popular
piety. Some of these changes were immense. Six proposals, in particular, pointed toward
the creation of a very different church and a new kind of piety. First, Luther urged the
creation of a German national church, proposing that all clerical appointments, including
those of bishops, be taken away from Rome, and that the pope be stripped of the right
to interfere in German church affairs. Second, he suggested that the clergy be allowed to
marry, on the grounds that all vows, including that of celibacy, were wrong and marriage
was a natural right of every man and woman. “The pope has as little power to command
this,” argued Luther, “as he has to forbid eating, drinking, the natural movement of the
bowels or growing fat.”11 Third, he called for the abolition of masses for the dead. Fourth,
he asked for the calendar to be stripped of all feast days, proposing instead that the only
proper celebration should be the Sunday Eucharist. Fifth, he called for the destruction
of all rural shrines and places of pilgrimage and the abolition of the cult of the saints.
Sixth, he asked for a reform of the universities in which the study of the Bible would be
central and scholastic theology would be driven out. In addition, Luther also called upon
the princes to reform society, offering some specific suggestions such as putting an end to
begging and prostitution, and banning extravagant dress and excessive eating and drink-
ing, which, as he put it, “gives us Germans a bad reputation in foreign lands, as though it
were our special vice.”12 In sum, Luther spelled out his vision for a renewed and reformed
Germany, and also made it very clear that it was up to the nobles to effect the changes
that were so sorely needed: “the Christian nobility should set itself against the pope as
172 rotestants

Luther’s message simplified. This woodcut from the early 1520s depicts the leaders of the Roman
Catholic clergy as wolves who are raiding Christ’s sheepfold. The wolf with prey in his mouth
wears the papal tiara, and the other wolf a cardinal’s hat. The apostles Peter and Paul stand watch
on the hilltop. A very Lutheran St. Peter holds a Bible, rather than the keys to heaven, in his hand.
Immediately to the right of St. Peter are some goats, who represent the damned, a visual reference
to the Last Judgment, when Christ will separate the sheep from the goats—that is, the saved from
the damned. Luther stands courageously in the lower right-hand corner, preaching to the sheep,
saving them from their ravenous clerics. In the text below, Luther exclaims: “Beware, you sheep,
run not away from him who hangs on the cross. Let this wolf run his course, he will sell a kingdom
in hell. He has eaten many a sheep, and is to be accounted as equal to Satan. The shepherds have
become wolves. . . . The flock that they should shepherd is scattered, strangled by false doctrine.
This greatly saddens my heart, as I see the great harm visited upon Christendom by pope, cardinal
and bishop. . . . Thus I preach and teach and write, even at the cost of my life.”

against a common enemy and destroyer of Christendom, and should do this for the salva-
tion of the poor souls who must go to ruin through his tyranny.”13 Moreover, throughout
this treatise Luther constantly referred to his opponents as “Romanists,” underscoring the
nationalistic dimension of his proposal and denying outright the universalist claims of
the Catholic Church with a single pejorative noun. And he wrote in German, and saw to
it that it would be printed and widely distributed.
Two months later, in October 1520, Luther fired off an even stronger round
against the so-called Romanists, in a treatise provocatively entitled On the Babylonian
Captivity of the Church, in which he took on the subject of the sacraments and explored
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 173
the place of ritual in the church and society. As he had done with his Address to the
German Nobility, Luther used this tract to point out what he thought was wrong among
the Romanists and to outline his vision for a reform of church and society that was fully
“evangelical,” that is, in full conformity with Jesus’s teachings in the gospels. The premise
of the treatise is boldly expressed in the title: Rome was the new Babylon, the tyrannical
power that prevented God’s people from living and worshiping as they should. In the
same way that the ancient chosen people had to endure exile in Babylon, so now did
Christians have to endure the despotism of a heathenish false church. The true church,
argued Luther, was no longer visible: all one could see was a corrupt church that suf-
focated Christians with far too many unnecessary burdens. To prove his point, Luther
turned to the sacraments, those key rituals that defined Christian life in medieval Europe.
As always, Luther minced no words:
To begin with, I must deny that there are seven sacraments, and for the time being
maintain that there are only three: baptism, penance, and the Eucharist. All three have
been subjected to a miserable captivity by the Roman curia, and the church has been
robbed of all her freedom.14

In one fell swoop, Luther thus wrote off four sacraments as unbiblical: confirmation,
marriage, ordination, and extreme unction. Not much later, he would add penance to the
list, reducing the sacraments to two: baptism and the Eucharist. Luther was too good a
theologian to overlook the connection between faith and worship: he thoroughly under-
stood the Latin adage lex orandi, lex credenda, which sums up the fact that the way one
prays determines what one believes, and vice versa. He was also too good a theologian not
to know that by tossing out four sacraments he had crossed yet another line, denying a
sacred dogma that had been confirmed in 1215 by the Fourth Lateran Council.
A month later, in November 1520, Luther penned and published what many
think is his ultimate manifesto and the clearest formulation of his theological vision, a
compact treatise titled On Christian Freedom. This text was written expressly for a large
lay audience, in German, and it left no doubt about where Luther was headed. Part
polemics, part devotional text, part theological disquisition, Luther’s Christian Freedom
tackles the central subject of redemption, seeking to answer the question that drove him
to the edge of insanity in the cloister and prompted his attack on Tetzel: how one is
saved, or, as Luther rephrases it, how one becomes acceptable in the eyes of God. Luther’s
answer is very complex and full of paradoxes, but it is such a rhetorical masterpiece that
its effect was immense. Luther begins with two paradoxical statements: “A Christian is a
perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all,
subject to all.”15 As he unpacks this conundrum, Luther relies at every turn on his most
basic hermeneutical principle: that Christians should be guided by Holy Scripture alone,
sola scriptura, the term that had already become the chief battle cry of his war against the
Romanists. Then, relying very heavily on Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans, he
articulates a second key principle: that one is saved by faith alone, sola fide.
174 rotestants
The two principles alone do not explain the whole of Luther’s theology, but it is
impossible to understand Luther and the whole Protestant Reformation without them.
The sola scriptura principle led Luther to scrutinize all theology and piety according to his
interpretation of the Bible, and to reject anything he judged as nonbiblical. The sola fide
principle, which Luther claimed was the true, biblically centered way of understanding
how Christ saves from sin and death, was paradoxical, but reduced to its simplest ele-
ments it boiled down to this: salvation is never earned; it is simply and freely granted by
God to those who have faith in the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ. “It is faith alone which
worthily and sufficiently justifies and saves the person,” Luther thundered. “A Christian
has no need of any work or law in order to be saved since through faith he is free from
every law and does everything out of pure liberty and freely.”16
As Luther saw it, largely through his interpretation of St. Paul’s theology in the
New Testament, one is saved not by one’s own good works, or by penances, but by Christ’s
sacrifice on the cross, through which God chose to overlook the sins of the human race.
One is saved by faith alone, not works, and there is nothing one can do to obtain faith.
Faith is purely and simply a gift of God. This meant that the Catholic Church was dead
wrong in asserting that no one could go to heaven until their souls were spotless, for
sinlessness was impossible to attain, and no one could ever hope to make satisfaction to
God for their sins. Salvation was paradoxical: every Christian who had faith was at once
righteous and sinful, simul justus et peccator. Standing accepted theology on its head,
Luther redefined the meanings of goodness and holiness:
The Christian who is consecrated by his faith does good works, but the works do not
make him holier or more Christian, for that is the work of faith alone. And if a man
were not first a believer and a Christian, all his works would amount to nothing and
would be truly wicked.17
It would take Luther several more years to fully articulate this paradoxical theol-
ogy and turn it into a consistent ethic, but he did understand most of its implications
very clearly. Above all, Luther grasped how this theology necessarily redefined the role
of the church and its clergy. If one was saved by faith alone, sola fide, then one was one
saved by grace alone, sola gratia. Salvation came directly from God to each believer on a
one-to-one basis, not through any intermediary. All Christians were therefore equal, and
the clergy could not claim a special status for themselves:
Lo, this is the inestimable power and liberty of Christians. Not only are we the freest of
kings, we are also priests forever. . . . Thus Christ has made it possible for us, provided
we believe in him, to be not only his brethren, co-heirs, and fellow-kings, but also his
fellow-priests. . . . Injustice is done to those words priest, cleric, spiritual, ecclesiastic,
when they are transferred from all Christians to those few who are now by a mischie-
vous usage called ecclesiastics.18

Luther was quick to point out that although all Christians were equally priests,
not everyone could “publicly minister and teach.” This qualification did not make his
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 175
theology of the priesthood any less radical, however. Luther had stripped the clerical state
of the special ontological status it claimed, and even gone as far as to redefine its proper
name. True clerics were not “priests” who dispensed grace, forgave sins, or offered the
Eucharist as a sacrifice. Christ had offered the ultimate sacrifice, once and for all, and he
had also made all Christians share in his priesthood. Clergy were ministers, servants, and
stewards of the Word, pure and simple. It was only for the sake of order in the community
that some Christians took on the role of “serving others and teaching them the faith of
Christ and the freedom of believers.”19
This talk of freedom and equality was heady stuff, printed in German for all to
read. That Luther was still in the process of articulating his highly paradoxical theology
mattered little to his readers. It also mattered little that the text was focused on seem-
ingly recondite theological issues, for the social and political dimensions of the theology
were easy enough to grasp. “A Christian is a perfectly free, lord of all, subject to none,”
said Luther. Taken literally, this statement was downright dangerous. Equally dangerous
was its inversion: “A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Both
statements were a challenge to all hierarchies, civil and ecclesiastic. In sum, the text of
Christian Freedom was unlike anything anyone alive at that time could have ever read.
Provocative to the core, its subversive tone was hard to miss and easy to misinterpret.
In November 1520, when Luther’s sixty days expired, he was formally excommu-
nicated. But since it was up to the civil authorities to arrest Luther, and Frederick the Wise
was squarely behind Luther, fending off all potential enemies, Luther’s life was spared, at
least for the time being. In August, Luther had already appealed to Emperor Charles V
for a hearing. As he waited for a reply to his request, he penned his response to Pope Leo,
in two versions, in Latin and German. The Latin text was provocatively entitled Against
the Execrable Bull of the Antichrist. The German text, which differs substantially from the
Latin, removed the execrable from the title, but contained just as much antipapal vitriol.
In it, Luther fumed against “the Roman Antichrist and Doctor Eck, his apostle,” heaping
scorn on the bull of excommunication, mocking his foes, and exposing the pope as “God’s
enemy, Christ’s persecutor, the destroyer of Christianity, and the true Antichrist.”20 The
Latin version, too, brimmed over with rage and a stark dualistic imagery:
I consider whoever wrote this bull to be the Antichrist, and it is therefore against the
Antichrist that I respond. . . . Whether authored by Eck or by the pope, this bull is
jam-packed with of the worst of the worst: impiety, blasphemy, ignorance, impudence,
hypocrisy, lying—in sum, it is Satan himself and his Antichrist. . . . You, then, Leo X,
you lord cardinals of Rome, and the rest of you there at Rome . . . I call upon you to
renounce your diabolical blasphemy and brazen impiety, and, if you will not, I and
all who worship Christ shall all hold your seat as possessed and oppressed by Satan
himself, and as the damned seat of the Antichrist.21
To underscore his defiance, and to demonstrate the strength of his following, Luther
and his students at Wittenberg made a bonfire into which they threw the bull of excom-
munication and the Corpus juris canonici, the text of the church’s canon law.
176 rotestants
Since Luther’s prince refused to lay a finger on him, and no other authorities
seemed willing to challenge Frederick the Wise, it was up to the new and very young
emperor to take care of Luther. Aware of the urgency of this matter, and eager to avert
a war among his princes over Luther, Charles V called for a meeting of the Imperial
Diet at the city of Worms, and summoned Luther to attend. When the time came, in
April 1521, Luther had every reason to fear for his life, despite Frederick’s military escort
and promises of protection. Not only the emperor himself would be at Worms, but also
most of the temporal rulers and highest ecclesiastics of Germany. All in all, the danger
was undeniable, no matter how much support there might be for Luther. When Charles
and his retinue arrived at Worms they were quite surprised to find that the city seemed
overwhelmingly in favor of Luther: placards defending him were everywhere, and the
book stalls overflowing not only with his texts, all recently printed, but also with images
of Luther, poems in his honor, and other tracts and pamphlets critical of the Romanists.
Pope Leo X had sent two legates to Worms (and both would later be elevated to cardinals):
the humanist scholar Girolamo Aleandro, who held the official post of papal nuncio, and
Marino Caracciolo (1468–1538). Aleandro wrote to Leo: “Nine tenths of the people here
are shouting ‘Luther!,’ and the rest of them shout ‘death to the papal court!’”22 When
Luther entered Worms, after being received as a hero in town after town along the way
from Wittenberg, more than two thousand people clogged the streets and squares merely
to get a glimpse of him.
Charles V knew what he had to do. He had not summoned Luther to discuss the
merits of the bull Exsurge Domine. The pope had already spoken. According to the oath
he had sworn when crowned emperor, Charles was obligated to serve as the court of last
appeal for his subjects. Luther deserved his final chance to be heard, but not much else.
“That man will not make a heretic out of me,” vowed Charles. Luther expected much
more than another chance to recant, but he was in for a rude disappointment. Instead
of being asked about specific points of doctrine or being allowed to debate openly, when
Luther finally stood before the emperor, he was simply shown a stack of twenty-five of his
books, and after each of their titles had been read out loud, he was asked whether he was
ready to renounce them all. Luther stalled, and begged for a recess.
On the following day, 18 April 1521, Luther faced the emperor and the Diet
again, in a hall so tightly packed with people that no one but Charles V had room enough
to sit down. Luther did his best to distinguish between the different types of texts he had
authored, but at one point, when he made mention of how the “papists” had corrupted
the church, Charles V—according to one account—impatiently grumbled that Luther
should simply shut up and state whether or not he would recant.23 Undaunted, Luther
continued elaborating on the “evil and tyranny” with which Rome oppressed the German
people, playing his nationalism card in a room brimming over with German princes.
“I cannot escape my duty to my Germans,” he said, refusing to recant and revealing a
possessive attitude toward the whole of his own “poor miserable people,” and an exalted
sense of prophetic mission that put him on a par with the emperor himself. Believing
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 177
he was there to speak for all Germans, Luther addressed the princes and the emperor as
equals. A double-barreled final question was put to him: did he really think that he was
the only one who understood the Bible correctly, and was he really willing to assume
that his knowledge and judgment surpassed that of all of the famous theologians and
churchmen he rejected? Given one last chance to repudiate all of his books without excep-
tion, and to repent for his attacks against “our holy Church, and against the councils,
decretals, laws, and rites that our forefathers upheld and we still adhere to today,”24 Luther
refused. His reply was as brief as it was bold:
Since then Your Majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer. . . .
Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of
popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to
the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience
is neither right nor safe. God help me, Amen.25
Some accounts printed right after the Diet of Worms added the phrase: “Here I stand;
I cannot do otherwise” at the end, even though these words do not appear in any of the
official transcripts. Whether it was uttered or not makes little difference: the phrase would
forever be linked with Luther, as the ultimate summation of his appeal to his individual
conscience.
After adjourning that day’s meeting, Charles gathered with six of his seven elec-
tors and several princes, and told them exactly what he thought, in French:
A lone friar whose opinions contradict the past thousand years of the Christian reli-
gion, down to our own day must surely be wrong. Therefore I am totally determined
to commit all of my resources against him: my lands, my friends, my body, my blood,
my life, and my soul. For not only I, but you of this noble German nation . . . who are
preeminent defenders of the Catholic faith . . . would be forever disgraced, along with
our successors, if by our negligence not only heresy but the mere suspicion of heresy
were to survive.26
Charles V agreed not to arrest Luther then and there, but rather to honor the promise he
had been made of safe conduct back to Wittenberg. That said, however, he also set out to
make Luther an outlaw of the empire, and in the Edict of Worms he proclaimed Luther
fair game for anyone who wanted to hunt him down. Luther’s safe conduct undermined,
he was now literally outside the protection of the law. Then, at the eleventh hour, Frederick
the Wise, who had refused to sign the edict, decided to take matters into his own hands:
he arranged for Luther to be “kidnapped” and spirited away in such a manner that no one
would know for sure whether he was dead or alive. While Luther was on his way back to
Wittenberg, protected by the emperor’s safe conduct promise, a gang of armed knights
nabbed him with a show of force and took him to one of Frederick’s castles, the Wartburg,
near Eisenach. Frederick was cunning enough to instruct the kidnappers not to tell him
where Luther had been taken, so he would not have to lie about his knowledge of Luther’s
whereabouts. Charles V fumed, but he could do nothing. Someone had apparently taken
178 rotestants
it upon himself to either kill or shelter Luther, but no one could finger the culprit. Safely
hidden behind the Wartburg’s ramparts, Martin Luther shed his religious habit, grew his
hair and beard, and assumed a knight’s identity under the name George. It was a total
transformation, and a successful ruse. Given the labyrinthine complexities of the Holy
Roman Empire, the emperor could be easily hoodwinked and thwarted, no matter how
much he wanted punish a heretic.
Luther was gone from the scene, but the momentum that had built under his
leadership could not be easily stopped. So, while Luther spent time in hiding as an outlaw
under an assumed identity, other forces quickly filled the vacuum he had left behind. One
man’s campaign against perceived corruption, waged largely through the printing press,
became a much broader and much more extreme rebellion against the status quo. With
Luther in hiding, momentous changes began to take place. The Protestant Reformation
as we know it began in earnest, as what had been theretofore limited to the printed
page began spilling out into the churches, palaces, guild halls, households, streets, and
battlefields of a civilization no longer bound by a common faith.

Beyond the Hiding Place

Charles V and all who opposed Luther knew all too well that his condemnation at the Diet
of Worms might have come a bit too late, for they could not help but notice that Luther
seemed to be everywhere, embodied in his followers, his voice amplified and echoed in
hundreds of texts and pamphlets, as well as in sermons, and conversations in taverns and
public squares.
The link between the printing press and the sudden expansion of open dissent
against the Roman Catholic Church was hard to miss, for it was not just texts by Luther
that were cranked out, but also hundreds authored by others, many written not just
by learned clerics, but by laymen from different walks of life, with concerns specific to
their class or profession. The production of pamphlets (Flugschriften) and broadsheets
(Flugblätter) spiked in tandem with Luther’s growing disdain for all things papal and
Roman. Many of these publications, cheaply produced and very affordable, not only
echoed Luther’s defiance, and that of other dissenting clerics, but also put a more practi-
cal spin on it, digesting his radical rejection of the status quo, popularizing it, giving it the
accent of the common man and woman. As the layman Lazarus Spengler confessed in a
1519 pamphlet: “To my mind, and as I think any rational man will easily see, Luther has
removed such scruples and errors [abstaining from meat on Friday] with sound Christian
evidence of holy, divine Scripture; and for this we owe him well-earned praise and
thanks.” Spengler’s pamphlet precluded subtlety and any mincing of words. It was—as
its subtitle openly boasted, “a beautiful, true, and gallant confirmation of Martin Luther’s
teaching.”27
Luther and his close associates had no control over this literature, so, strictly
speaking, whatever is found in this flood of pamphlets cannot always be identified as
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 179
“Lutheran,” even though it extended Luther’s reach and presence. Nor can it be attributed
to any single region or specific social class. But it can certainly be called anti-Romish
and “evangelical,” that is, fiercely committed to the promotion of a biblically centered
religion, to the dismantling of the Roman Catholic Church, and to a program of change
that had social and political issues very much in mind. Most of this literature was not
theological, though it touched on theological issues. Its sharpest edge was always practical
and its tone sarcastic.
German pamphlet literature was devoted to exposing the corruption, error, and
abusive power of the Roman Catholic clergy and to contrasting it with the liberating
ethos of the new evangelical message. Whether written in rhymed verse—for easier
memorization—or in plain prose, the evangelical pamphlet aimed to reach the laity, first
and foremost.
Simplification was the chief objective of pamphlet literature, and polarization
its preferred idiom. Tirades against the pope, “fat monks,” and “horned bishops” often
assumed center stage. Identifying the pope as the Antichrist and the Catholic Church as
the devil’s abode was the genre’s most vital simplification. As one preacher put it in 1522:
“Christ has his church and the Antichrist also has his church . . . and in that church the
devil is worshiped, and the laws of the Antichrist are held in higher esteem than God’s
laws.”28 Liberation was the key promise of the evangelical message. One pamphlet prayed:
“O Christ, redeem us from the darkness of the Antichrist at Rome who instead of caring
for his flock rather trammels it with his tyrannical laws.”29 Jörg Vögeli, a layman from
Constance, stressed the uselessness of these nondivine laws:

How much divine favor can you expect to gain from mumbling the canonical hours,
endowing great benefices and churches, ringing many bells . . . or by smearing the fore-
head with oil, which is called confirmation, and other such human inventions, when
speaking with all tongues, chastising the body even unto death, giving away all earthly
goods, and having faith strong enough to remove mountains cannot make one pleasing
to God in terms of the sure faith and love of God and man which are required?30

Taken as a whole, early evangelical pamphlets contrasted the “unnecessary”

burdens of the pope’s church with the liberating power of the gospel, and did so with a
specific set of changes in mind. The most significant issues were these: the promotion of
biblically based preaching; the abolition of confession and fasting, and of clerical celibacy
and monasticism; the abolition of masses for the dead; the reduction of clerical privileges,
coupled with increased lay control over the clergy; the dismantling of existing episcopal
bureaucracies; the redistribution of the church’s wealth; and the creation of new social
welfare programs. Nationalistic grievances against Rome and Italian clerics also figured
prominently.
And the attack on Rome was not limited to words: the evangelicals invented the
satirical cartoon. Never before in history had images been put to such use, as a medium
of dissent. Images could be found in texts, as illustrations. They could also be reproduced
180 rotestants

Luther’s Catholic opponents

individually, as broadsheets. Some of these contained brief texts; others relied exclusively
on the image to carry the message. In the sixteenth century, as in our own day, mes-
sages were astutely and very effectively delivered through images, and especially through
caricatures. In a time and place with much higher illiteracy rates, the images might have
been even more instrumental in winning hearts and minds than any text.
Images of Luther abounded. Many portrayed the rebellious monk as a saint and
prophet, replete with halo and nimbus, or with the holy spirit hovering overhead. Luther’s
Roman opponents could be belittled, mocked, even dehumanized. One cartoon turned
his chief opponents into animal characters worthy of the Disney studios.
One broadsheet depicts Luther’s Catholic opponents as beasts, and the text as-
sociates each of these figures with the attributes of the corresponding species. From left to
right, we see Thomas Murner (the cat), Hieronymus Emser (the goat), Pope Leo X (the
lion), Johann Eck (the pig), and Jacob Lemp (the dog). Thomas Murner, who challenged
Luther head on, is depicted as a cat because murr was a German equivalent of the English
meow, the sound made by a cat. Luther took to calling him “Murr-narr,” or “Meow-fool.”
Emser is a goat because his family coat of arms displayed a leaping goat. Luther opened
one of his responses to Emser with the phrase: “Dear Goat, do not butt me!” The text
corresponding to Emser attributes randiness to him, and it reads, in part, “Ah, virgin
goat, you stink so awfully of chastity in your long beard.” Pope Leo X, who is also labeled
as the Antichrist, is naturally associated with a lion because of his name, and is typified as
cruel and ferocious. Johann Eck, one of Luther’s earliest and most formidable opponents,
is lowered to the pigsty and is ascribed swinish habits. Jacob Lemp, the least of these
 l ther rom r e el to her etic 181

Contrasting Christ and Antichrist

opponents, was more involved with the Swiss Reformation than with Luther, and had
lost out to Zwingli in the 1523 Zurich disputation. He is portrayed as a snarling dog
more than willing to fight for the bone he is holding. Image and text combine here to
ridicule these Catholic churchmen and theologians, bringing them to a subhuman level.
Theology is beside the point here.
One extremely popular pamphlet, The Passion of Christ and the Antichrist (1521),
with illustrations by Lucas Cranach and text by Philip Melanchthon, reduced the evan-
gelical message to thirteen pairs of woodcuts that contrasted Christ and the pope.
In the twelfth panel of the woodcuts Christ expels the money changers from the
temple. On the opposite page, the pope/Antichrist usurps God’s throne in the temple.
Instead of cleansing the temple, he pollutes it, greedily collecting money in exchange for
indulgences, dispensations, church offices, and other favors. Although Melanchthon’s
text spells out the lesson to be learned, carefully and precisely, his words are rendered
unnecessary by Cranach’s images. The thirteenth and final panel depicts the ultimate
contrast: while Christ ascends to heaven, the pope/Antichrist descends to hell.
Antipapal and anticlerical sentiments could be depicted in even more graphic
terms, with offensive imagery. Linking the devil to the pope and all Roman Catholic
Contrasting Christ and Antichrist

The origin of monks

 l ther rom r e el to her etic 183

Cochlaeus and demons

clergy was a common theme. In another image, On the Origin of Monks and the Antichrist,
a devil in a latrine gives birth to monks, and the monks are then thrown into a boil-
ing cauldron, stirred, stewed, and turned into the pope/Antichrist (a homunculus easily
identified by his triple crown).
Despite its religious context, visual anti-“Romish” propaganda could convey
messages crassly, linking scatology and eschatology, all for the sake of simple folk. For
instance, Johann Cochlaeus, the Natural-Born Apostle, Prophet, Killer, and Virgin of the
Holy Papal Stool, one of the most obscenely outrageous of all Reformation images—the
very epitome of smear tactics—reduces the work of Johann Cochlaeus to fecal matter. In
this image, the devil defecates into Cochlaeus’s mouth, and Cochlaeus, in turn, excretes
books out of his rear end. As devils gleefully dance in celebration of this process, a monk
and a prince pick up the books, and a crowd of bystanders—some covering their noses—
look on in disgust. The image speaks for itself: the text, aside from identifying the central
figure, brings the Reformation to the lowest possible level.
With images like this, and texts that were equally unrestrained in their sim-
plistic reduction of theological fine points and in their portrayal of demonic and divine
antitheses, the evangelical Reformation message reached a wide audience, as no message
184 rotestants
had ever done before: compared to what had been possible with Wycliffe and Hus, for
instance—which amounted to furtive whispering, or to lobbing small homemade in-
cendiary devices—this was saturation carpet bombing. To a great extent, the medium
became the message, but in the process, that message was also simplified, made less
theological and more down-to-earth, and, as some have argued, more focused on release
from perceived oppression than on salvation by faith alone.
Luther himself was not responsible for all that was printed, or even a fraction of
it, but he was inextricably connected to it, and he benefited from it. That connection,
however, also had the distinct disadvantage of being unmanageable.