No modern nun would be caught dead fleeing a convent in the middle of the night, hidden among herring barrels and transported in a wagon pulled by a team of horses over a bumpy dirt road. Escaping in a convertible, hair flying (cropped though it may be), is the only way to go. So it was for Patricia O’Donnell-Gibson (who, as we learned in chapter 1, lives today with her husband in southern Michigan). For Katie von Bora, however, a horse-drawn wagon was the only convertible available. Unlike Katie, Patricia entered the convent at seventeen on her own accord. Stories of devout missionary nuns had sparked her own sense of calling. But she soon began to realize that the cloistered life did not suit her. After six years, and with the knowledge of her mother superior, Patricia left her life as a nun behind.1 For Katie, the risks were higher, and the culture shock far greater.
Sending a girl off to a convent at a young age with the assumption that she would take her vows in her mid-teens does not automatically lead to spiritual maturity. Indeed, there is widespread evidence that many nuns throughout the Middle Ages had discovered that monasticism was not necessarily the way to find union with God. Martin Luther cynically suggested that “if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I.”2 Implying that no one had exceeded him in performing the dutiful works of a monk—works that in the end would count for nothing.
Katharina left no comparable negative reflections of her years as a nun. In fact, she would later imply that she was closer to God as a nun than living in the world. Indeed, the only hint of dissatisfaction is that she simply agreed to the escape plan. There is no indication she was the instigator of the plot or even was in on the planning committee. Unlike Luther, who led the charge as a religious revolutionary, she may have joined the jail breakers for freedom, and no more. We do know she respected Magdalene von Staupitz, the oldest of the runaway nuns. As early as 1516, “Magdalene had received some of Luther’s writings and had eagerly imbibed the Reformed doctrines,”3 writes J. H. Alexander. She appears to have been the instigator of the plot, and somehow she secretly convinced eleven younger nuns to join her. She must have known them well. Even just one of them who had second thoughts could have derailed the entire scheme.
Years ago, I interviewed Kenneth Lanning, who was then heading an FBI task force investigating claims of satanic ritual murder. Many of the accounts featured fantastic conspiracies involving dozens of people. It’s possible to keep secret a crime involving one person, he told me, but as soon as two or three or a dozen are in on the conspiracy, the odds of secrecy are progressively and drastically reduced. In the case of the escaped nuns, we have a dozen in on the plot. This story is truly amazing. Twelve nuns having pledged themselves as virgins, Jesus their spouse, all remain tight-lipped—not one backing out or getting cold feet.
We so easily imagine that the nuns planned their getaway and snuck out in the night, summing it up as an exciting and amusing caper. We forget how truly astonishing were the conspiracy and the successful escape. This was, in fact, one of the most stunning jailbreaks in history. How, we wonder, were they able to so perfectly plan and execute this clandestine plot? In most of the accounts of this daring feat, men from the outside are given credit, while the cleverly executed scheme of the nuns is passed over. One online site sums up this “extraordinary stunt” as a passive activity of “having the ladies smuggled out.”4 Hardly.
Another mystery is why not one of those nuns later recorded what had gone on in the secret planning sessions and on the night of the escape. Or maybe someone did. What if there actually exists a scrap of paper containing two journal entries penned by Katharina, one undated, the other dated April 5, 1523? It would be a most valuable discovery. We would certainly pore over every word. And here we have it. First, a one-sentence lament before she escaped: “My spirit grieves at the thought of ending my days in this dreary place—dead, while yet I am living.”5 And the second, a detailed reflection on the getaway:
It was Easter Eve in the year 1523 . . .
Slowly the twilight fell upon the earth . . .
The night was damp and cold. A bitter wind drove the ragged clouds across the face of the moon, whose pale beams threw ghostly shadows upon the earth. In the forest the trees groaned and creaked, their branches tossed by the gale.
A great wagon, loaded with barrels, moved slowly along the road . . .
Again the screech-owl shrieked. No other sound was heard, save the creaking of the branches in the wind. In wild haste [we] slipped down, and crept along the wall . . .
After a few hours, when the sky grew rosy in the east, and the first fiery ray of the Easter sun broke upon the earth, new life stirred [us] with irresistible force, and as with one voice, the exultant strain burst forth from [our] lips:
“Christ the Lord is risen
From His martyr prison,
Let us all rejoice in this,
Christ our joy and solace is,
Kyrie eleison.”6
Alas, these are the translated words of Armin Stein, taken from his contrived Victorian-era novel, hardly Katie’s plainspoken German. Disregard the creaking branches, the screech owls, squeaking wagon wheels, and ghostly shadows. Indeed, by the time the bone-weary nuns arrived in Torgau, they were frightened and dirty, and all they must have wanted was a bath and a bed. And sadly, no scrap of paper has been discovered that even hints at their hardship. If ever written down, we must remember that women’s written words counted for little and often found their place amid the trash.
The nuns had no doubt learned as much about Martin Luther and the Reformation through the grapevine as did the average person on the street. On her own initiative, Magdalene apparently had contacted Luther requesting his help in executing their plan for escape. He had called for this very kind of subversive activity, probably never imagining he would actually be expected to become involved in this conspiracy to commit a capital crime. Although Luther had insisted family members should be the ones to free their daughters, arguing that it was “a godly action and perfectly safe,” it was, in fact, a very dangerous activity; a year after these nuns had escaped, a man elsewhere in Germany was executed for this very crime.7
Now Luther, having barely escaped the death penalty himself (hiding out at the Wartburg Castle for nearly a year), was risking his life again. Having returned to the Black Cloister and facing an impossibly hectic schedule, he now felt obligated to set in motion a plan for someone from the outside to assist the runaway nuns. Did he ever shake his head and say with a sigh, Good God, what have I gotten into? Did he even know exactly where the convent was located? Was he told it was on an isolated tract of land, a distance of more than seventy miles of rough roads through heavily forested terrain? But it was a small world. He was well acquainted with the brother of the nun who initiated the escape, and he just happened to know of a trusted vendor who made deliveries to that very spot.
Leonard Koppe was a merchant and city councilman who resided in Torgau, located roughly between the convent and Wittenberg. He agreed, with the help of a nephew and a friend, to take the risk of kidnapping the nuns, though not without a certain amount of persuasion from Luther. Luther insisted that nuns should, if they wished, simply be permitted to depart from the convent in an honest and orderly way. It was therefore a Christian act of mercy to kidnap a nun, which became a key part of his reform. Catholics, however, considered the breaking of a vow a mortal sin, and kidnapping a capital crime.
Although a far lesser story of conspiracy, the kidnapping of Clare of Assisi is an interesting comparison. Clare was born some three hundred years before Katie. She was a seventeen-year-old daughter of nobility who surreptitiously made plans to be kidnapped by Francis, who was more than a dozen years her senior. Though she did not hide in a wagonload of herring barrels and did not escape on Easter, she did make a run for it on Palm Sunday. Headed in opposite directions, both young women connived in underhanded schemes—Katie abandoning the cloistered life, Clare embracing it. In the centuries since, the names Francis and Clare have been bound together, as though Saint were their first names. So also Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora, though minus any association with sainthood. Despite his involvement in kidnapping a young woman, it is interesting that Francis, second only to the Virgin Mary, is probably the most popular saint—and garden statue—today.
Had the twelve nuns who escaped the Marienthron convent each been asked to give a reason for fleeing, would they have agreed with Luther that it was impossible to be chaste in the convent? Or would they simply have admitted that they wanted out of the dull and dreary life they were living—that the grass was greener on the other side of the high fence, that they wanted to be part of the action, and that they desired a family of their own? Bumping along on the rutted roads, however, the future may have seemed very uncertain—feelings of excitement tangled up with fear and second thoughts.
For Protestants today, if they ever contemplate this episode of the Reformation, it is a grand salvation story. If we were to view Martin Luther as the Christ figure, the nuns represent the twelve disciples: Magdalene von Staupitz (the Peter figure), Else, Lanita, Ave, Margarete, Fronika, Margarete, Katharina, Ave, and three others so obscure they remain nameless. Like these nuns, the twelve in the Gospels were less than faithful and were often gripped by fear and uncertainty.
Hidden beneath the covered herring wagon, the nuns could not have imagined themselves as twelve disciples. They were perhaps as embarrassed as they were relieved to find a safe haven, first in Torgau and the next day in Wittenberg. How does an exhausted nun in full habit (or a nightgown) alight gracefully from a wagon with sideboards? What a spectacle it was—a spectacle captured in Wittenberg by a student writing to a friend: “A wagon load of vestal virgins has just come to town, all more eager for marriage than for life. God grant them husbands lest worse befall.”8 The term “vestal virgins” may have been used to add a touch of humor, but these nuns were nothing like the ancient Roman beauties—virgins who tended the eternal fire of Vesta, goddess of hearth and home. Katie, like most of the women in the wagon, would soon enough lose her virginity and become a very down-to-earth goddess of hearth and home.
Hardly had the news gotten out when the backlash began. Catholic leaders and laypeople alike deplored the kidnapping of nuns. Indeed, the backlash continues today. The website Catholic Apologetics Information contains an article by Michael Baker, titled “[What] Was Luther Really Like, After All?” in which he cites a common quotation by Jacques Maritain, a twentieth-century French Catholic philosopher:
After a rape of nuns which took place on the night of Holy Saturday, 1523, Luther calls the citizen Koppe who organised the exploit, a “blessed robber,” and writes to him, “Like Christ, you have drawn these poor souls from the prison of human tyranny. You have done it at a time providentially indicated at that moment of Easter when Christ destroyed the prison of His own.” He himself was surrounded by nuns thus restored to nature. His [wife] Catherine Bora was one of them. It is curious to note that a base contempt for womanhood is the normal price of this war against Christian virginity.9
In a letter to George Spalatin several days later, Luther described the nuns as a “wretched group.” Pleading for financial aid, he continued: “I feel very sorry for them . . . This sex, which is so very weak by itself and which is joined by nature, or rather by God, to the other sex, perishes when so cruelly separated.”10 (He did not yet know the strength of Katharina.) After they had arrived safely, Luther thanked Koppe, commenting that his part in the rescue of the nuns would long be remembered.
We read about the predawn escape, but little appears to be known about those left behind. Soon afterward, however, the abbess and abbot contacted Elector Frederick, complaining that his subjects had been responsible for ruining the convent. He responded on June 13: “Since we do not know how this happened and who incited the girls from the convent to undertake this, and since we have never dealt with this and similar matters before, we leave it to their own responsibility.”11
It was considered a tragedy that the convent in Nimbschen had “lost half of its residents within two years” (twelve on Easter 1523, and three more on Pentecost; still others followed soon after). The situation wreaked havoc on this small convent and elsewhere: “At the end of 1525 there were only twenty nuns in Nimbschen . . . Throughout the country, the ‘exodus’ had begun.”12 And with the exodus came exaggerated stories of monastic abuse.
In fact, over the centuries, accounts of nuns liberated from convent prisons were matched only by claims of kidnapped nuns who were loath to leave. Through generations, the stories multiplied and in the process created serious religious tension—and not just in Europe. In 1834, the story of Sister Mary John, who had purportedly attempted to escape, fueled the burning down of a convent outside Boston. Two years later, a bestselling book appeared that claimed to be a true story of a nun in Montreal: Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed. Convents were worse than common brothels, Luther had declared. The fictionalized Maria is depicted in full habit holding her baby. Not that nuns never had babies. But these lurid stories sparked fires of rage.
The all-too-real account of Margaret de Prestewych dates to the late fourteenth century. The setting was Lichfield, England, more than a century before Katharina was born. “It is satisfactory to know,” writes Eileen Power, “that one energetic girl at least succeeded in making good her protests and in escaping from her prison.” At eight, she was deposited at an Augustinian convent against her will. “She remained there, as in a prison, for several years,” insisting she would not willingly take vows that would exclude her from her rightful inheritance. When the day came, “she feigned herself sick and took to her bed. But this did not prevent her being carried to the church” by those who stood to benefit by her losing her inheritance. She was “blessed by a monk, in spite of her cries and protests.” She escaped “without leave and returned to the world, which in heart she had never left.” She married and in 1383, with the pope’s consent, she was officially released from the order.13
Katie’s escape was not quite so dramatic, and in the next two years, while living in Wittenberg, her trail grows dim. And why would anyone take particular notice of her? She is simply one of nine “wretched” nuns trying to make her way in the outside world, three having already gotten off the bus in Torgau. For a time, she lived in the home of Wittenberg’s well-to-do city clerk. Here little is known of her, apart from a romance gone sour. The family with whom she lived had friends, the Baumgärtners, in Nuremberg, whose son Jerome had studied at the University of Wittenberg under Philip Melanchthon and Martin Luther. Jerome arrived back in town in the late spring of 1523 to visit with friends, including the family Katie was living with. Close in age—Jerome was a year older—they spent time together. Words were spoken, yea, more than words—sweet nothings and future plans for life together. He was expected back at his parents’ home, but promised to return to Wittenberg soon.
There are serious biographers and ordinary wags who suggest that Katie was plain-looking, proud, and difficult to get along with. It would seem that Jerome clearly thought otherwise, or believed that such minor matters did not cancel out her otherwise fine attributes. He arrived back in Nuremberg to share his good news.
However, when Mom and Dad Baumgärtner learned of the plans, they were truly upset with their son’s choice—a runaway nun without an estate or even enough money to support herself? Even at his age, the approval of parents was a requisite. So, did he travel back to Wittenberg to clarify the circumstances? Did he send her a compassionate and sensitive letter explaining how his hands were tied? Actually, Jerome was a cad. He did not even answer Katie’s several letters. What could she do? Martin Luther to the rescue. A letter dated October 12, 1524. Prestigious professor and singular Reformer, his involvement would surely carry weight: “If you want your Katie von Bora, you had best act quickly, before she is given to someone else who wants her”14—as though eligible bachelors were lined up at her door. If jealousy would not stir Jerome, Luther turned to pity, saying she was brokenhearted and still in love with him. If not pity, surely the student should heed his distinguished professor, who would be most pleased by their marriage.
In the meantime, Katie had left the home of Jerome’s family friends (who apparently did not intervene on her behalf) and moved to another home hardly beyond earshot in the town of Wittenberg. Here she would have been unaware that she was residing with a man who would become a famous artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder. Cranach was a wealthy nobleman, remembered today as a prominent sixteenth-century artist. But to the folks around Wittenberg, he was a town councilman, a three-term mayor, and the CEO of a prosperous art workshop attached to his large, remodeled home. Who knew his art would be widely displayed on the Internet a half millennium hence?
Around 1510, Cranach had married Barbara Brengbier, daughter of a distinguished mayor, and in the years that followed, she would give birth to two sons and three daughters—with Martin Luther agreeing to be godfather to both the oldest son and youngest daughter. Welcomed into the Cranach home, Katie was anything but idle, quickly plunging into housework and child care. At that time, the five children ranged in age from three to eleven.
Historian Steven Ozment extracts an interesting tale out of one of Cranach’s works, painted shortly after Katie has become Frau Luther. The setting is a baptism:
Thickly ringed around the baptismal pool are some of Wittenberg’s most important women, there from the ranks of both the living and the dead. Mixed into the throng are the wives of the city’s theologians and pastors: Katherine Luther and the late Barbara Cranach, the living Katherine Jonas and Walburga Bugenhagen.
The most prominent, yet least seen, of those women is surprisingly Barbara Cranach (d. 1541). The viewer beholds only her imposing, centerfront backside clothed from neck to toe in the brocade and furs of a rich person. If local gossip is to be believed, she earned this anonymous cameo by repeatedly complaining that her husband had “never painted her.” Whatever the truth of the story, her nagging seems to have [backfired]” because “her husband’s blunt portrayal [of her] as a clothes-horse left her still not properly seen in a work of art, and thus not truly painted by her husband.15
How, we wonder, did Barbara treat Katie the impoverished nun? There is no evidence she was recommending her as a wife to their close friend Martin.
Had Luther previously been disingenuous in his claim to Jerome that there were others who wanted her? Might he have been referring to himself? Some have speculated as much. Indeed, Katie was a real catch. Although she “was not a regular beauty,” according to James Anderson, “both Erasmus and [Jesuit] Maimbourg . . . eulogize her as possessed of . . . a dignity, without affectation, about her air and manner, which at the very first sight commanded respect.”16 From a letter written by an observer at the time, we learn that Luther “took a wife, from the noted Bora family, a girl of elegant appearance, 26 years old but poor.”17
Exactly when Luther began contemplating getting married himself is not known. But in a letter to George Spalatin in the spring of 1525, he wrote, “Do not wonder that a famous lover like me does not marry. It is strange that I, who so frequently write about matrimony and get mixed up with women, have not yet turned into a woman, to say nothing of having married one.” He jokes about losing two potential “wives” to others. “The third I can hardly hold on to with my left arm, and she too may soon be snatched away.”18
All this time, there had been no word from Jerome. Were the Wittenbergers surprised when news came some two years after he had jilted Katie that he was marrying the fresh and nubile valley girl Sibylle, fourteen, pretty, and rich? The breakup with Katie turned out to be his loss, her gain—though she still may have been in no mood to recognize it.
Luther’s efforts to find Katie a husband had been aided by others, including his colleague Nicolaus von Amsdorf, who almost appears to have been auctioning her and other nuns off rather than simply arranging marriages. To Spalatin, he had recommended “the best-born among them,” sister of his uncle Dr. Staupitz, whom both he and Luther regarded very highly. “But,” he continued, “if you wish to have a younger one, you shall have your choice of the fairest of them.”19
With help from others, Luther had successfully found husbands for the nuns who desired marriage—all except for Katie. In his mind, after the Jerome debacle, any good Christian man would do, even the elderly pastor Casper Glatz. But Katie was not about to be pushed into the arms of a man for whom she had no affection, no doubt still pining for the man she loved. When Amsdorf had earlier written for financial support from Spalatin, he had commended the poor nuns with “neither shoes nor clothes” as “fair, fine, all of noble birth, and none of them is fifty years old.”20 Katie was in her mid-twenties, and she made it clear to Luther that the much older Casper was not suitable.
A marriage to Nicolaus Amsdorf, however, was a different matter. And so we move on to the next soap-opera episode in “As the World Turns.” She considered him a suitable spouse and suggested as much to him, adding that if he were unwilling to take the plunge, she would be willing to consider Martin Luther himself—another old man, some sixteen years her senior. This is a stunning turn of events. If anyone previously had not recognized the true grit of this former nun, it would become glaringly obvious when she herself proposed marriage, not to one but two men, both renowned figures of the day. It was a bold move, and it worked.
At this point, the wheels are in motion. Had it been a hard sell on her part? Was she aware of his misgivings at the time? Did she ever learn that he married her out of pity? Years later, in 1538, he reportedly boasted that his first choice of a wife (thirteen years earlier) was not Katie, but Ave von Schönfeld, who had been snatched up by a Prussian physician. But when Katie was left with no other suitable prospects for a husband, he agreed to marry her out of pity. Though she was arrogant and proud, he soon realized she was a most reliable wife.21
Although he may have married Katie out of pity, Luther was prompted to take a wife for other reasons, as he colorfully confessed: to “please his father, rile the pope, make the angels laugh and the devils weep, and would seal his testimony.”22 And he was strongly encouraged by friends as well, including his ardent supporter Argula von Grumbach, who was convinced that his marrying would dispel scandalous rumors. But Luther was reticent, as he wrote to George Spalatin late in 1524:
I thank Argula for what she writes me concerning my marrying. I do not wonder at such gossip, for all sorts of reports are circulated about me. Thank her in my name, and tell her I am in God’s hands, a creature whose heart he is able to change and change again, to kill and make alive every hour and moment. But so long as I am in my present mood I shall not marry. Not that I do not feel my sex, for my heart is neither wood nor stone; but my inclination is against marriage, for I am in daily expectation of death and of punishment suited to a heretic.23
Although little is known about Katharina during the years between 1523, when she escaped the convent, and 1525, when she married Luther, those years, however, were anything but blank. Part of this time was taken up with a roller-coaster ride of emotions. Many of us know what it’s like to wait for letters in the mail and then to be jilted by someone we love—perhaps even someone we know simply isn’t right for us. We can feel the raw betrayal, and we want to reach back in time and put our arms around her.
We wince when we imagine how difficult it was to be wearing cast-off gowns and worn-out shoes while living in the fancy Cranach household. Was the lady of the house haughty and critical, shameless in her costly brocade gowns? How we wish we had a journal entry in which Katharina poured out her heart. We want to know how she felt when she realized she was essentially being auctioned off as a bride, maybe to some schlep whose ministerial credentials did not make up for what was lacking in a potential husband. Did she cringe when she heard jokes and snide remarks at the expense of the alte Jungfer, an “old maid,” “on the shelf,” “spinster”? And then there is that notion that even before she escaped, she had her eye on marrying the great Reformer.
I’m reminded of my freshman year at a Bible college in the mid-1960s when most of the young women students were accused of enrolling for the purpose of earning their MRS degree. Sure we laughed, but I knew instinctively it was a pejorative term, derogatory of women. Now when I contemplate Katie, I occasionally come across that same MRS-degree mentality. “Personally,” writes Glenn Sunshine, “I suspect she was looking to marry Luther from before she left the convent.”24
Such speculation is condescending. Katie was a cloistered and protected nun whose midnight escape was focused on freedom—and safety. Her destination was a scary world of rapid change and revolution. Even today, the relocation of a nun from an insular convent to a life on the outside involves culture shock. How different daily life was in the sixteenth century when a nun escaping a convent was committing a serious crime. That she would have pined for Martin Luther, who was himself running from the law, does not square with what must have been going through her mind as she and the other nuns planned their getaway. They were not bent on graduating with an MRS degree.
Also denigrating is the repeated suggestion that Katie was not a pretty young woman, as Preserved Smith and others have emphasized. “The portrait of Katie,” writes Smith, “does not bear out the conjecture of Erasmus that the monk had been led astray by a wonderfully charming girl (mire venusta).”25 Smith, at a centuries-long distance, judged her to be homely:
She was of a type not uncommon among Germans, in whose features shrewdness, good sense, and kindliness often give a pleasant expression to homely persons—though even this can hardly be seen in Cranach’s picture. Her scant reddish hair is combed back over a high forehead; the brows over her dark blue eyes slant up from a rather flat nose; her ears and cheek-bones are prominent.26
Obviously, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I look at the same Cranach portrait and wonder about the artist himself. And of course his portrait of Martin does not exactly show the man to be a handsome stud. Enough about Katie’s looks. To his credit, Smith goes on to at least partially redeem himself—on a matter far more significant than looks: “Katie was sometimes reproached with pride and avarice. But that an orphan, without friends, money, or beauty should have any pride left is rather a subject for praise than blame.”27
Although Luther may have implied as late as 1525 that she had suitors, she did not. By any standard, she was spirited, energetic, competent, and a real catch, but her options were slim: Amsdorf or Luther. In the end, it was Luther who showed up at the Cranach home to arrange to take her as his wife and to get it over with as soon as possible. She was not so naive as to realize that his decision was not for love—and perhaps neither was hers.
If we were sitting at table with Luther’s colleagues three days after the marriage, we might turn to Philip Melanchthon. Why, we would ask him, did his close friend make this sudden decision? His thoughts are written in a letter to Joachim Camerarius:
On June 13, Luther unexpectedly and without informing in advance any of his friends of what he was doing, married Bora . . .
These things have occurred, I think, somewhat in this way: The man is certainly pliable; and the nuns have used their arts against him most successfully; thus probably society with the nuns have softened or even inflamed this noble and highspirited man. In this way he seems to have fallen into this untimely change of life. The rumor, however, that he had previously dishonored her is manifestly a lie . . . I have hopes that this state of life may sober him down, so that he will discard the low buffoonery which we have often censured.28
We sum up his remarks: Bora used her magical arts to inflame a noble man, snare him as husband, sober him up, and rid him of low buffoonery. Good enough reasons for the great Reformer to marry.
Luther’s upcoming marriage would rightly be hailed as a profound landmark in Reformation progress. But it was by no means the first. As the Lutheran theologian Justus Jonas observed, it was Bartholomäus Bernhardi’s public marriage in 1521, soon after the Diet of Worms, that led to “many thousand priests and monks deciding to marry.”29 Bernhardi was a fervent supporter of Luther, having been a student at Wittenberg. Not until 1523, however, did the matrimonial flood actually begin. By the end of that year, nearly one hundred priests, monks, and nuns had publicly tied the knot, most of them with no direct connection to Luther or to Wittenberg. Other clerics before this had married, but rarely in a public celebration.
Nevertheless, the significance of Martin Luther’s marriage would be difficult to exaggerate. On the same day that Melanchthon wrote his letter about Luther having “fallen into this untimely change of life,” Luther wrote to his friend Spalatin, “I have stopped the mouths of my calumniators with Catherine von Bora . . . I have made myself so cheap and despised by this marriage that I expect the angels laugh and the devils weep thereat.”30
Did Katie realize the profound significance of her marriage? There is no evidence she did. She had escaped the convent with no specific future plan, and two years later, she found herself to be the last nun standing. Luther was one of two she would accept, having been jilted by the man she truly loved.
A footnote to Katie’s two years of trial before she married relates to Jerome, the cad who did not even have the decency to officially break off their relationship. Martin had given him a pass because his first responsibility was to honor his parents. Their fierce opposition to their son marrying a destitute runaway nun apparently trumped any kindness he should have shown to her. In succeeding years, Martin had contact with his former student on other matters, and on one occasion he added to a letter a comment that he was sending friendly greetings from Katie, “his old flame.”31 Among her other positive qualities, Katharina von Bora had class.