John Wycliffe was another spiritual reformer, the religious equivalent of Petrarch, expressing the same craving for simplicity and deeper purpose. It was on a visit to Bruges in 1374, as an ambassador to the papal court, that he was shocked by the worldliness of the Catholic clergy. The impulse that drove him was identical to the impulse that drove the abbots of Cluny and St Francis of Assisi – a desire to give people a sense of religious purpose. In Rome, he might well have started his own religious movement within the Church and ended by being canonised. But he happened to be an Englishman who lived in a time when the pope was a pawn of the king of France, and England was at war with France. John of Gaunt used him as a pawn in his own political machinations. So Wycliffe, by a historical accident, became the first ‘Protestant’. He happened to concentrate his attack on what was, for the Church, a particularly dangerous point: the notion that the consecrated wafer does not really turn into the flesh of Christ. For Wycliffe, it was self-evident nonsense. But for the Church it meant that, if the blessed sacrament is a fraud, then a priest is not necessary to administer it. The priest would be superfluous. This is why the Church wanted to burn Wycliffe – who, fortunately, being in England, was beyond its reach. Besides, with two popes, the Church was too divided to do much harm.
The Bohemian reformer Jan Hus was less lucky. He was deeply influenced by Wycliffe, and ten years after Wycliffe’s death (in 1384) was delivering lectures at the University of Prague in which he called for Church reform. The Church leaders were horrified, but the common people agreed it was a time for change. In 1410, the archbishop of Bohemia became so incensed at the constant use of Wycliffe’s name that he had two hundred copies of his books burnt on a bonfire. But two years later Hus became rector of Prague University and went on repeating his heresies. There were, he pointed out, now three popes claiming to be the head of Christendom – not all of them could be infallible.
In 1414, the Church itself recognised that this farce of too many popes had to be brought to an end as quickly as possible; so a council of bishops was convened at Constance. Hus was asked to go and explain himself. He refused until the Holy Roman Emperor, who also happened to be king of Bohemia, gave him a solemn promise that he had nothing to fear and a safe conduct. Hus went to Constance, and was immediately arrested. Dragged into the council hall, he was ordered to renounce his heresies. He refused, although he knew it meant death. The Church made this as horrible as possible by burning him alive. The Church council went on to declare Wycliffe a heretic in retrospect and ordered that his bones should be dug up and burned.
The Council of Constance finally healed the breach within the Church; Martin V was made pope. He proclaimed a crusade against Hussites and Lollards (Wycliffites), and an army marched into Bohemia, where the murder of Hus (and his friend Jerome of Prague) had aroused powerful national feelings. But three ‘crusades’ all failed to break the resistance of the Bohemians; their land was ravaged; all kinds of atrocities were committed; but the invaders were driven out.
In Italy, crime had become as commonplace and as widespread as in England before the Black Death. In its state of constant war, things could not have been otherwise. In Parma in 1480, the governor was intimidated by threats of murder into throwing open all the public jails and letting out the criminals; the natural consequence was an epidemic of burglary and murder – some houses were even besieged and demolished by the armed gangs. One priest called Don Niccolo de Pelagati carried the materialistic principles of Pope Rodrigo to an absurd extreme. On the day he celebrated his first mass he also committed a murder, but received absolution upon a suitable payment. He then began a career of crime that included killing four men and marrying two wives, with whom he travelled. As the historian Jacob Burckhardt says in his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy: ‘He afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried others away by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food and shelter by every sort of violence.’ Don Niccolo was caught and hung up in an iron cage outside San Giuliano in Ferrara in 1495. Yet he had done nothing that Cesare Borgia had not done on a far larger scale.
In the year 1500, Pope Rodrigo Borgia declared a Jubilee, a year in which all pilgrims who made the journey to Rome should receive total absolution for their sins. The idea, we may recall, had been devised by Pope Boniface VIII, who needed croupiers to rake in the coins from the tomb of St Peter. In 1500, Rodrigo Borgia needed money for Cesare’s wars and decided that some new attraction should be provided. He ordered that a special door, a Holy Door, should be made in St Peter’s, and circulated the story that it had always existed but that it was bricked up after every Jubilee and reopened a century later… The result was that the Jubilee of 1500 brought in larger sums than ever before, all of which instantly vanished into the Borgia coffers.
The Jubilee also involved a minor drawback that the pope had overlooked. Pilgrims who arrived in Rome and discovered that it was virtually a sixteenth-century Las Vegas or Monte Carlo – a city geared to making money at top speed – were bound to feel disillusioned about the Church. They were bound to compare these Roman churches with their small church at home, with its underpaid priest. Why should Rome be the automatic recipient of a river of gold? It was the feeling that had fuelled the Hussite revolt of a century ago; now it began to smoulder again.
In the year 1510 a young German monk named Martin Luther came to Rome on a mission to the pope. The man on the papal throne at the time was the Rovere – Julius II – who had imprisoned Cesare Borgia. Julius lacked Rodrigo Borgia’s charm; he was a man of strong opinions and fiery temper. But he was the kind of pope Italy needed at the time. His method of dealing with the French invaders – encouraged by Rodrigo – was not to call for a crusade but to put on armour and lead his troops into battle. In ten years, the ‘warrior pope’ drove the foreigners from Italian soil. It was Julius II who hired a young man named Raphael to paint murals in the papal palace, and Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (The two had endless clashes – one day the pope was heard roaring from the top of a ladder: ‘Do you want me to throw you off this scaffolding?’) He also wanted to complete St Peter’s, and this required an enormous sum of money. Rome hummed with the sound of priests gabbling masses at top speed and hurling money into their coffers.
At twenty-seven years of age, Martin Luther had his own problems. He was a manic depressive who experienced sudden fits of deep misery, even of panic. Convinced that he was under direct assault by the devil – he still experienced twinges of sexual desire – brother Martin longed to feel confident about his own salvation. The prospect of a journey to Rome – to ask the pope to settle some minor religious dispute – filled him with immense expectation; surely the sight of the bones of St Peter, of the actual stairs that Jesus had climbed to appear before Pilate, of the crown of thorns and the fragments of the cross, would dissipate the fog of indifference that numbed his senses?
In the event, Luther was enough of a realist not to be too horrified at the reality of Rome; but he was disappointed. The priest who heard his general confession did not really seem to understand; he certainly didn’t care. Luther wanted to say mass at the entrance to the Sancta Sanctorum chapel, but it was too crowded, and irritable priests muttered ‘Passa, passa’ – ‘Move on.’
All the same, it was not the journey to Rome that undermined Martin Luther’s faith. He knew that religion is a spiritual reality and that the man of God must learn to see through the world of matter as if it were made of glass. When he returned to Saxony – this time to the monastery at Wittenberg – this feeling was confirmed by his new vicar, Johann von Staupitz, who was a mystic. He had read the writings of the great German mystics – Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, Mechtild of Magdeburg – all of whom taught that the soul can achieve ultimate union with God. But all mystics have passed through a ‘dark night of the soul’, a period in which they were unable to feel, even to pray. ‘If it had not been for Dr Staupitz,’ said Luther, ‘I should have sunk in hell.’