In 1514, Fugger made a loan to Albrecht of Hohenzollern, scion of the family that ruled the area around Berlin. The scheme to repay the loan triggered one of the most important events in history, the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation had many causes—Vatican corruption, lustful priests and church meddling in secular affairs all fed the rebellion against the Catholic Church. But Fugger lit the fuse. He midwifed the famous St. Peter’s indulgence, the church fund-raiser that promised salvation for cash and prompted Martin Luther to write his Ninety-five Theses.
Fugger loaned to Albrecht to finance the sale of yet another clerical office. This time the job in question wasn’t parish priest or church deacon. It was one of the most powerful positions in Germany, archbishop of Mainz. Among the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire, the Mainz bishop was the most powerful because he ran the imperial diets. He had one vote—the same as the others—but set the agenda. This gave him more authority than anyone in Germany except the emperor. His English equivalent was the Lord Chancellor. But King Henry could remove Cardinal Wolsey on a whim. The emperor could not touch the elector of Mainz. Mainz was the only city besides Rome allowed to call itself a Holy See. In 1514, Uriel von Gemmingen became the third Mainz elector to die in the space of ten years. The city had borrowed a huge sum to buy Gemmingen the job. The debt load exhausted its credit. Whoever took over for Gemmingen needed to find another way to pay.
Three candidates came forward to become bishop. The elector of the Palatinate suggested his little brother. Maximilian suggested his own nephew. Albrecht of Hohenzollern suggested himself. Despite being underage (he was twenty-four) and underqualified (no university degree) and technically ineligible (he already had two bishop seats—Magdeburg and Halberstadt—when the limit was one per customer) Albrecht had the best chances. Why? Fugger stood in his corner. Albrecht could pay whatever it took.
Pope Leo X, the pope who sanctioned charging interest for loans, would decide the contest. He was a corrupt pope in a corrupt age. Born Giovanni de’ Medici, Leo was the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo had three boys. He said one of them was good, one foolish and the third shrewd. Giovanni was the shrewd one. Lorenzo raised Giovanni to become pope. He paid to make him a priest at age seven and a cardinal at fourteen. Offering some fatherly advice, Lorenzo instructed Giovanni to save his money and tend to his health. Giovanni observed the latter, devoting himself to hunting for the benefits of fresh air. But he loved to spend money and, upon becoming Leo X, squandered the papal treasury on the most extravagant coronation Rome had ever seen. He gave money to strangers on a whim and hosted parties where prostitutes looked after the cardinals and servants brought food on gold plates. He wrote to his brother: “God has given us the papacy. Now let us enjoy it.” For him, Albrecht’s pursuit of Mainz offered an irresistible payday.
Albrecht borrowed 20,000 florins from Fugger to cover the fees. After stopping in Augsburg to get the loan documents, Albrecht’s men went to Rome to collect the money from the Fugger Vatican office and win Leo’s approval for the appointment. Dr. Johannes Blankenfeld headed Albrecht’s delegation. In addition to representing Albrecht while in Rome, he and the others spent their time wandering the halls of the Vatican buying clerical offices for themselves.
The mission went smoothly until Matthaus Lang, the bishop of Salzburg, objected to Albrecht’s accumulation of posts. Lang was one of Maximilian’s top advisors and the bishop who crowned him in Trent. Lang’s protest gave Leo an excuse to raise the price. Here the story took a strange twist. Blankenfeld later recounted how an unidentified figure approached him in the Vatican halls and spelled out Leo’s terms. The pope wanted 10,000 ducats (a ducat equaled 1.4 florins) for his blessing. And he wanted the money deposited into his own bank account, not the Vatican’s.
The mysterious middleman was probably Fugger’s man Zink because only Zink, among all the people in Rome, knew enough about German politics and papal administration to be a credible go-between. Zink may have asked Blankenfeld to keep his name out of the records because of the sordid nature of the matter. In any case, Blankenfeld confessed surprise at the size of the demand, but not at the request itself.
In a later meeting, the unknown figure raised the demand to 12,000 ducats because, he joked, there were twelve apostles. Thinking quickly, Blankenfeld offered 7,000, arguing there were only seven sacraments. They settled at the original 10,000. This brought the total to 34,000 florins, or exactly double what Mainz had paid to install Albrecht’s predecessor Gemmingen. Fugger transferred the money to the pope’s account. With that out of the way, Albrecht had to come up with a way to repay Fugger. His men had an idea. They suggested a church-financing device called an indulgence.
The faithful regarded the pope as heir to St. Peter and God’s representative on earth. As such, he could wash away sins. The pope could take the meanest sinner and, with a blessing, secure him a place in heaven and save him from purgatory. Faith in the pope’s redemptive ability gave him his power. The eleventh-century pope Urban II exploited this faith as a recruiting tool in the First Crusade. He offered soldiers forgiveness in the form of letters written in Latin and marked with a papal seal. The letters were called indulgences because Rome used them to indulge wickedness. Pope Urban expanded the program to include donors to the crusade, not just the fighters. Anxious to escape damnation, the people gave generously. The idea caught on. Bishops sold indulgences to build cathedrals. Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony, joined with the church on an indulgence to rebuild a bridge across the Elbe.
Leo liked the idea of the Albrecht indulgence right away because he understood better than anyone the ability to fleece the faithful. He summed it up with another of his arresting statements: “How very profitable has been this fable of Christ.” But he and Albrecht had to take care. While churchgoers could support a crusade or a construction project, even the most naive would question the bailout of a banker. The plotters needed a cover story. They found one in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Pope Constantine had built the original St. Peter’s in the fourth century, choosing the site then occupied by the Circus of Nero. Charlemagne kneeled on its floor in the year 800 for his crown. By the sixteenth century, the old wooden structure teetered near collapse. Julius II broke ground on a replacement made of marble, planned to be as grand a structure as anything on earth. He ran out of money before he could finish. Leo took up the project and recognized St. Peter’s as perfect for indulgence financing. Peter was a martyr for Christ, one of the apostles and the founder of the church. Who could refuse him an appropriate resting place? Publicly, Leo would declare an indulgence for St. Peter’s. But it was as much an indulgence for Fugger. Behind the walls of the Fugger Palace, the pope and Fugger would split the money. St. Peter’s would get half. Fugger would get the other half.
Once Fugger and Rome settled on a price and put the plan in gear, a pudgy Saxon priest dressed in black led a solemn parade into the mining town of Annaberg, near the Czech border. The priest’s name was Johannes Tetzel, and he was the greatest of the indulgence peddlers. He and his crew carried Bibles, crosses and a large wooden box with locks on the side and a picture of Satan on top. A priest held aloft a velvet cushion with a gold braid. The cushion carried the pope’s indulgence order. Fugger auditors trailed the priest. The city’s notables met the parade with lit candles. As the group marched toward the city’s church, solemnity gave way to excitement. Bells rang in the steeple. The townspeople, from the elderly to the schoolchildren, dropped what they were doing. Not much happened in Annaberg and they would have been happy to see anyone. They found these visitors particularly thrilling because they knew they brought with them God’s greatest gift: the gift of salvation. The excitement turned into a frenzy inside the church. The organ boomed and the people sang full-throated hymns. The visitors lifted a giant red cross affixed with the papal banner. “God himself could not have been given a more magnificent welcome,” wrote a witness.
After silencing the crowd, Tetzel spoke. He started slowly, laying the groundwork for his pitch by explaining indulgences. He had come to raise money, he said. The pope—God’s agent on earth—was building a magnificent church to honor St. Peter. He needed them, the good people of Annaberg, to help by buying his certificates. Tetzel said these magical letters cancelled every sin. Steal from a widow? Kill a baby? Deflower the Virgin Mary? Indulgences absolved them all. He helpfully offered a progressive fee schedule. Kings, queens and bishops should pay twenty-five florins. Counts, barons and cathedral directors should pay twenty florins, merchants three and workers one. Prayer sufficed for those with no means. He told the audience that a customer could buy an indulgence for himself, his wife and even dead relatives. He played off guilt as much as self-interest. “Open your ears,” he said. “Hear the father saying to his son, the mother to her daughter, ‘We bore you, nourished you, brought you up, left you our fortunes, and you are so cruel and hard that now you are not willing for so little to set us free. Will you let us die here in the flames?’ ” He summed it up in a jingle: “As the penny in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”
Tetzel said a lot that day. He went beyond the salvation offer and promised riches. The mines of Annaberg, he said, would fill with silver if the people gave their support. But one thing he didn’t mention was Albrecht and Fugger. As far as the listeners knew, Tetzel worked for St. Peter’s and St. Peter’s alone. The Fugger agents setting up a table made from a wine barrel knew better. One of them unlocked the box with Satan on top and prepared to collect the cash. He kept the box near his feet to guard it.
Tetzel and the auditors traveled the countryside for months, taking the act to Berlin, Braunschweig, Görlitz, Jüterbog and other cities. No place was safe. Lauingen, a little town near Augsburg, received two visits. Tetzel met resistance in Saxony. When he tried to return to his home state, guards stopped him at the border. The Saxon duke, Frederick the Wise, considered the St. Peter’s indulgence to be competition for his own fund-raising scheme. Frederick’s business was relics. He kept the world’s greatest collection in a palace in Wittenberg. The 19,000 items included what was purportedly a tooth from St. Jerome, a branch from the burning bush and a crust of bread from the Last Supper. The church promised forgiveness to those who saw the items. Pilgrims traveled to Wittenberg and paid to have a look. Relics were valuable and counterfeits were everywhere. Fugger sometimes trafficked in fakes made in Italian workshops. Whether Frederick had fakes didn’t matter. The church certified his thorns, teeth and bones as real. That was enough for the pilgrims who came to see them.
In Saxony, there lived a thirty-three-year-old scholar from a mining family who had once studied to be a lawyer. Some later remarked on his debating skills and called him The Philosopher. Others remarked on the clarity of his speaking style and called him the Wittenberg Nightingale. In the nineteenth century, Carlyle put him alongside Napoleon and Shakespeare and declared him a “Great Man.” But for now he was just a humble academic known around Wittenberg as Martin Luther.
Luther had heard about Tetzel from Saxons who had gone out of their way to buy indulgences. Barred from the duchy, Tetzel put them up for sale just over the border in Jüterborg in the state of Thuringia. Reports of the sale reached Luther. The campaign outraged Luther and the consequences of his outrage shook Europe to its foundation. Luther recognized indulgences for what they were—a scam Rome invented to cash in on popular fears of damnation. Luther found the St. Peter’s indulgence all the more offensive because it targeted Germans. The indulgence peddlers left France, Spain and other countries alone because these places had rulers strong enough to stand up to Rome. They refused to let people like Tetzel into their kingdoms, particularly if they were shipping indulgence proceeds out of the country. Germany was too fragmented to resist and let Rome have free rein. Germany had long been the venue for some of Rome’s worst abuses, and Luther could take it no longer. Enraged by what he heard about Tetzel, he composed ninety-five arguments against indulgences, his famous Ninety-five Theses. Item 67 told it straight: “The indulgences, which merchants extol as the greatest of favors, are in fact a favorite means for money-getting.”
Luther timed publication to coincide with All Saints’ Day, the one day of the year when Frederick opened his relic collection to the public. Wittenberg would be full of pilgrims eager to see the holy teeth, bones and thorns. Wanting to make a splash, Luther nailed a copy of his list to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral on Halloween, the night before the holy day. All the pilgrims would see it. He also sent it to highly placed individuals, including none other than Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. Luther was ignorant of Albrecht’s role in the scheme and hoped to persuade him to stop Tetzel. The letter speaks to Luther’s naiveté. His remarkably sycophantic language speaks to his low social standing and the prevailing etiquette.
“Father in Christ and Most Illustrious Prince,” he began, “forgive me that I, scum of the earth, should dare to approach Your Sublimity. The Lord Jesus is my witness that I am aware of my insignificance and my unworthiness. May your highness look upon this speck of dust and hear my plea.” After referring to the “racket of indulgences,” he found his nerve. He told Albrecht, “It is high time you looked into this matter,” and asked him to “utterly suppress” the indulgence campaign. Albrecht never responded. But he did send a copy to the pope.