Pope Leo sent Luther an ultimatum: recant, or be excommunicated. The stubborn German was now too angry to care. He replied with a pamphlet, written in German – so that everybody could read ii criticising the Church and proposing reforms. Leo replied with a hull of excommunication. In German cities, Luther’s pamphlets were burned publicly on the orders of the bishops. In Wittenberg, defiant students burnt the pamphlets that denounced Luther.
The emperor of Germany – and of Spain, the Netherlands and many other places – was Charles V, the man who had financed Magellan’s voyage round the world and would later finance Pizarro’s conquest of Peru. He certainly had the power to suppress Luther, and the inclination as well. But he was also in continual need of money. And if the German princes – many of whom were ‘protestants’ – withdrew their support, his position would be seriously weakened. So when the pope appealed to him to suppress Luther, he could only reply, unhappily, that it would be done eventually, but that for the moment they must proceed with caution. It was decided that Luther should appear in front of the German parliament – the Diet – when it met at Worms in April 1521.
Luther was accompanied by a cheering crowd of two thousand when he came to Worms. But in front of the Diet, he was obviously nervous. When asked whether he stood by all he had written, he asked for time to think it over and was given an extra day. But when he returned the next day, he replied firmly that he would be glad to recant if he could be shown his error. Then he left the Diet to decide whether he was a heretic. Under the gaze of Charles V, they decided that he was. But by that time, Luther had disappeared, apparently kidnapped by bandits. In fact, Frederick the Wise had ordered him to be taken to the Wartburg Castle for his own safety.
Luther spent a year in the half-empty castle, and whiled away the time by translating the Bible into German. Meanwhile, his revolt spread. Monks and nuns left their monasteries and married. Priests began to recite the mass in German. Reformers began smashing sacred statues in churches (which, after all, was nothing new – the early Christian Church had also had its iconoclasts). Finally, public disorder in Wittenberg grew so dangerous that the townspeople asked Luther to return. Ignoring Frederick’s order to stay in the castle, he went back in March 1522. The disorders subsided. Luther was allowed to continue with his work unmolested.
And, without any further effort from Luther, the new ‘protestant’ movement snowballed. This was not entirely a compliment to its spiritual conviction; the German princes soon realised that, if they became Lutherans, they could lay their hands on the wealth of the Church – particularly of rich monasteries. In a few years time, Henry VIII would make the same discovery. Then there was a general social dissatisfaction, of the kind that had caused Wat Tyler’s revolt in England. Religious revolt tended to develop into primitive communism – as it had in Bohemia after the death of Hus. So the name of Luther was used to justify two diametrically opposite revolutions.
Things came to a head in south Germany in 1525, when the peasants revolted, plundering castles and cloisters. They wanted their share of the immense wealth they imagined to be in the hands of the Church and the aristocracy. Contemporary pictures show them guzzling wine and eating the monastery’s trout and chickens. An evangelist named Thomas Muntzer, who believed himself to be the new Daniel, led one group from Mulhausen. Nearly six thousand of them were surrounded by a professional army and massacred. The peasants had appealed to Luther, but he was horrified to hear his name used as an excuse for pillage and murder; he wrote a pamphlet ‘Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants’, in which he advised the princes to ‘smite, slay and stab’. At the time he wrote it, the bloodshed had not started; by the time it appeared, mobs of peasants were being wiped out all over Germany. The peasants cursed Luther as a traitor to their cause.
Yet Luther’s opposition to the peasants was a guarantee of the survival of his Church. If he had lent his name to the revolt, the nobles would have set out to destroy Protestantism. As it was, they regarded him as an ally. In 1526, the Diet passed a law saying that each German state could make up its own mind whether to be Protestant or Catholic. Three years later, Charles V tried to force them to change their minds, but it was too late. Protestantism was now ‘legal’ in Germany. Luther’s part in the drama was now played. He married a nun who had escaped from a convent, had six children and died at the age of sixty-three, nearly thirty years after he had accidentally started a revolution by nailing up his ninety-five theses.
During those early years of the Lutheran revolution, no one seemed a more unlikely candidate for conversion to Protestantism than England’s Henry VIII. To begin with, he was not even remotely interested in religion. Henry liked to regard himself as a kind of ideal Renaissance man: a fine athlete and horseman, a good shot with a bow, a skilful tennis player and a very passable poet and composer – his courtiers naturally assured him that he was equal to the best. He was interested in theology in an amateurish kind of way, largely because friends like Sir Thomas More encouraged him to believe that he was a profound thinker. (It was More who wrote most of the book against Luther that led the pope to call Henry ‘Defender of the Faith’.) In short, his character had certain distinct affinities with that of Nero. He was also as spendthrift as Leo X. During the course of his life he wasted his subjects’ money building twenty or thirty palaces and vast ships that would not sail. When he had squeezed all the money he could get by way of taxes, he debased the coinage so that inflation rose steadily during his reign – by the time his daughter Elizabeth came to the throne prices had risen by four hundred per cent.
He began his career as king – at the age of twenty – with a truly Machiavellian stroke. His father’s chief tax collector was John Dudley, a conscientious civil servant who was, naturally, much hated by the people. Henry achieved easy popularity by having him arrested and executed on a trumped-up charge.
His troubles with the pope began six years after he had been acclaimed Defender of the Faith. Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain who had sent Columbus to America; diplomatically, it was an excellent match. But Catherine provided her husband with no male heir. Henry had frequent affairs with ladies of the court, and Catherine pretended not to notice; but when, in 1526, he met the nineteen-year-old Anne Boleyn, he had begun to think it was time to look for another wife. He asked his lord chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, to approach the new pope, Clement VII, about a divorce.
Clement – the former Giulio de Medici – was not a man to make up his mind quickly. Besides, he had other problems on his mind. He was tired of the Emperor Charles V marching his troops through Italy whenever he felt inclined, even though Charles could point to a treaty with Leo X to justify it. Besides, the Vatican was expected to disgorge money for the emperor’s soldiers, and the pope felt this was totally against the laws of nature. Encouraged by the French king, Francis I, he declined to pay any more and created an alliance of Italian cities to fight the Spaniards. It was a tragic mistake. Francis I failed to send the army he had promised. Charles V had no money to pay a good professional army and had to raise an army of ruffians with promises of plunder. Too late, Clement tried to buy them off. On 6 May 1527, the mercenaries threw scaling ladders against the walls of Rome and burst into the city. The result was the most horrifying sack of Rome so far – worse by far than that of Alaric. It was simply murder, rape and torture, and it went on for months. They killed pointlessly, without reason. They were determined to get paid if it involved dismantling every house in Rome and torturing every man and woman to force them to give up their hidden treasures. As far as Rome was concerned, it was the end of the Renaissance. In fact, it was very nearly the end of Rome. And this violence was not the fault of Charles V – who tried hard to stop it – or the vacillating pope. The blame must be laid squarely at the door of Martin Luther. Most of these mercenaries were Lutherans who were delighted to try to destroy the ‘eternal city’. They regarded it as a duty as well as a pleasure to rape nuns, to throw priceless statues into cesspools, to slash religious paintings, to stable their horses in St Peter’s. For these Catholics were robbers and plunderers and deceivers; they deserved to be exterminated. The sack of Rome of 1527 was an expression of the new religious spirit of the north.
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