The Story of an Unlikely Life
As night turned to early morning and it became clear the end was drawing near, a small group gathered in the bedroom, their shadows flickering across the walls in the dim candlelight. They hovered over the figure lying prone beneath the bedclothes, his breathing slow, rasping, labored. As Martin Luther drifted in and out of consciousness, his longtime friend, his three sons, and a local minister knelt by his side. They draped his body in warm towels and blankets, dabbed the pulse points on his wrists with herbal water, and smeared his chest with a healing poultice specially prepared by his wife. They held a cup of wine mixed with grated “horn of unicorn” (narwhal tooth) to his lips and offered him words of comfort and prayers for peace. Luther writhed, his face gray and pinched in the faint light. “Reverend father, are you ready to die trusting your Lord Jesus Christ and to confess the doctrine which you have taught by his name?”1 Luther’s friend whispered in his ear. “Yes,” Luther replied, his declaration cutting through the darkness with resolute clarity.
It was in many ways a typical deathbed scene, with one critical exception: Luther’s wife of nearly twenty-one years was not present at his bedside. Four days earlier Luther had penned what would be his last two letters, one to his wife, Katharina, the other to his longtime friend and fellow reformer Philip Melanchthon. Neither letter hinted at the dire turn of events to come. To Melanchthon, Luther mentioned the death and burial of Pope Paul III and other brief bits of political news and gossip. His letter to Katharina, on the other hand, exuded a discernible lightness and exuberance not evident in his correspondence to his friend. Luther told his wife he planned to return home later that week. His business in Eisleben was finished, his health was much improved, and he was sending ahead a gift of trout. “We have plenty to eat and drink and [live like] lords,” he said jokingly of him and his travel companions. “We are well cared for, even too well, so that we might easily forget about you people in Wittenberg.”2
Luther, however, would not return to Wittenberg and to his wife as planned. On the evening of February 17, 1546, the sixty-two-year-old reformer complained of a headache and chest pains during supper. Although he rallied for a few hours, by the middle of the night he was racked with pain and experiencing both tightness in his chest and shortness of breath. His friend Justus Jonas sent for the physicians and the castle preacher, and they, along with Luther’s three sons who had traveled with him, kept vigil at Luther’s bedside. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. You have redeemed me, faithful God,” Luther whispered, his last coherent words before slipping away between two and three o’clock in the early hours of February 18.3 As Martin Luther took his last breaths in his hometown of Eisleben, Germany, his forty-seven-year-old wife Katharina slept seventy miles away in Wittenberg, unaware.
Katharina had tried to convince Luther not to travel. He had been suffering from poor health for months, and that winter had been particularly hard on him. No longer strong enough to walk to the town church to preach, he was driven there each Sunday by wagon instead. He was often forced to cut his sermons short due to dizziness and shortness of breath. He suffered from kidney stones and gallstones, depression, difficulty breathing, digestive distress, ear infections, weakness, and exhaustion.
Katharina was filled with a sense of foreboding as Luther prepared to travel to Eisleben. She’d wanted him at home, where she could keep a close eye on him and nurse him back to health, but Luther, ever obstinate even in illness, would not be deterred. He insisted on traveling by carriage to his hometown to help mediate an ongoing dispute that had erupted and intensified between local political leaders in the area. Katharina couldn’t accompany Luther herself, so she did the next best thing: she insisted that three of their sons—Hans, Martin, and Paul—travel with him, and she prepared a package of healing herbs, poultices, and medicinal remedies to send along with them. Still, when she bid him farewell, Katharina couldn’t possibly have imagined her husband would never step across the threshold of their home again.
Unfortunately, very few of Katharina’s letters have survived, but we can infer a great deal about her personality, her state of mind, and her affection for her husband from Luther’s correspondence to her. We know, for example, she worried incessantly about him during his last trip and others. We also know from the number of his replies to her that she wrote him frequently during his three weeks in Eisleben. In his February 1, 1546, letter to Katharina, Luther admitted he had experienced vertigo and weakness en route, which he attributed to a frigid wind that blew so forcefully into the carriage it seemed it would “turn my brain to ice.”4 While he assured her he had recovered fully, Katharina clearly was not comforted, because six days later Luther wrote her a longer letter, insisting that she cease worrying.
“Free me from your worries,” he pleaded on February 7. Luther tempered his request with his trademark humor, addressing his letter lightheartedly: “To my dear mistress of the house, Catherine Ludher [the original spelling of Luther’s name was Luder, though Luther used several other variations during his lifetime, including Ludher; he also frequently called Katharina “Catherine,” among other nicknames], a doctor, the lady of the pig market at Wittenberg [a reference to the fact that she owned pigs]—placed into the hands of, and at the feet of, my gracious lady.”5 He urged Katharina to read the gospel of John and his own Small Catechism, and then joked, “For you prefer to worry about me instead of letting God worry, as if he were not almighty and could not create ten Doctor Martins, should the old one drown in the Saale, or burn in the oven, or perish in Wolfgang’s bird trap” (a reference to his servant Wolfgang Seberger’s hobby of trapping birds in the backyard).6 Turning more serious, Luther reminded Katharina that the situation was out of her control, as it should be. “I have a caretaker who is better than you and all the angels,” he consoled his wife, “he lies in the cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom, and yet, nevertheless, he sits at the right hand of God, the almighty Father. Therefore be at peace. Amen.”7
Luther was clearly distressed by his wife’s suffering and sought to ease her mind with both comforting words and playful teasing. Three days later he teasingly blamed the power of her worrying for the fact that he’d had several brushes with death, including a fire in the hallway that tried to devour him, a stone that just missed falling onto his head, “nearly squash[ing] [him] as in a mouse trap,”8 and mortar crumbling around him while he sat in his “secret chamber”9 (i.e., the toilet). “I worry that if you do not stop worrying the earth will finally swallow us up and all the elements will chase us,”10 he continued in jest. Although his tone was playful, his message was clear: Luther did not want his wife to worry about him. He could not stand by and allow her to fret, not only because such anxiety indicated a lack of faith and trust in God, but also because he cared too much about her to allow her to suffer, especially on his behalf.
Martin and Katharina Luther loved and cared deeply for one another. This is evident from both the tone and content of Luther’s final letters and the many others he wrote Katharina throughout their marriage, as well as from the bits and pieces of their conversations that were recorded by guests who sat with them around their table. Theirs was not simply a marriage of convenience, nor was it a marriage lived out in political or theological name only. Rather, Martin and Katharina Luther shared a mutual and abiding love. Theirs was a partnership founded and strengthened on shared joy and grief, triumph and travail.
Yet what an unlikely union it was, this marriage between a runaway nun and a renegade monk—she, unknown and destitute; he, one of the most famous and powerful men of the time. Their relationship could be written into the pages of a romance novel. But this love story, one of the most scandalous and intriguing in history, is not fiction but fact. How did this most unlikely, most radical union come to be? How did Martin Luther the monk and Katharina von Bora the nun come to wed in the first place? And even more importantly, how did such a union not only survive but thrive in the face of the most daunting odds?
This monumental moment in the history of marriage was born out of a dramatic set of circumstances. For a variety of reasons, Katharina von Bora and Martin Luther each determined that marriage—the most radical of options—was also the best one. Not only did that choice impact them personally as individuals, it also had a powerful and lasting effect on their own early Renaissance culture and society. Today, five hundred years later, the impact of their choice continues to reverberate in the lives and faith of Christians across the globe.
Yet behind the historical significance of their marriage is also the story of a man and a woman who met, married, and raised a family together. True, Martin and Katharina Luther were radical revolutionaries, but they were also simply two people who shared twenty-one years together, until death did them part.
This is the story of their unlikely life together as husband and wife.