10
Tying the Knot

Luther wasn’t exaggerating when he claimed that at any moment he could be hunted down, captured, and burned at the stake. Branded a heretic and known across the land as a dissenter, execution was a very real threat and had been the unfortunate fate of many reformers before him.

Yet one wonders if this was truly the reason behind Luther’s reluctance to marry. Perhaps, after forty-two years as a bachelor, he was simply accustomed to and comfortable with living alone. Maybe he considered how marriage might compromise his authority or even distract him from his primary work. Luther was used to being on his own and answering only to himself, and while sixteenth-century marriages certainly were not equitable by modern-day standards, at the very least, as a married man, Luther would have to consider another’s opinions, thoughts, and will in addition to his own. Part of him might also have secretly seen himself—or at least wanted to see himself—as one of those unique men who could transcend the carnal, a man in whom God had bestowed the rare gift of true chastity. Or perhaps Katharina von Bora herself was the real stumbling stone. After all, Luther had already tried to marry her off to two other men, first to Hieronymus Baumgartner, who had jilted her, and most recently to Kaspar Glatz, whom Katharina had emphatically refused. Clearly his preference was for Katharina to marry someone else.

It Pleased God

A number of factors ultimately impacted Luther’s decision to marry Katharina, the first of which was his desire to please his father. Luther had carried his father’s disappointment with him for years. Offering Hans a grandchild was a way to make amends. During a visit to Mansfeld in the spring of 1525, Luther confided his thoughts about marriage to his father, and Hans urged his son to marry so that he could eventually provide him with a grandchild.1

A second factor was Luther’s regret over the Peasants’ War, for which he felt at least partially responsible. Sparked by Luther’s reforms, more than 100,000 of the 300,000 peasant insurgents involved in the revolt were killed during the spring and summer of 1525, right around the time Luther was considering marriage.2 In a letter to John Rühel, a councilor to Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, on May 4, 1525, Luther declared that he would marry Katharina when he returned home to “spite the devil,” whom he blamed for provoking the peasants to revolt.3 Later Luther claimed his marriage would “please his father, rile the pope, cause the angels to laugh and the devils to weep.”4

Politics were a factor in his decision as well. In a June 1525 letter Luther encouraged the archbishop, Albrecht von Mainz, to marry and later declared, “If my marrying will strengthen him, I am ready. I believe in marriage.”5 Luther knew his reforms would take hold much more quickly if church officials like von Mainz married. He was willing to serve as an example to others in order that they might be encouraged to follow in his radical footsteps.

“[I did this] to silence the evil mouths which are so used to complaining about me. For I still hope to live for a little while,” Luther wrote in a letter to von Amsdorf, inviting him to the wedding banquet. “In addition, I also did not want to reject this unique [opportunity to obey] my father’s wish for progeny, which he so often expressed.”6 At the same time, he added, he wanted to make a statement, to practice what he preached and to serve as an example to others who might feel intimidated or afraid to take such a bold step, despite the fact that God willed it.7 In the same letter Luther admitted that he was neither romantically nor physically attracted to Katharina, though he cared about her. “For I feel neither passionate love nor burning for my spouse,” he confessed, “but I cherish her.”8 His reasoning sounds rational and his explanation makes sense, yet at the same time one senses a deeper reason behind his decision to marry Katharina—a reason Luther himself may not have realized until much later.

A Dutiful Servant

Perhaps the most telling explanation for marrying Katharina was the one Luther offered years later to the friends and students gathered around his dining room table, when he admitted that he’d initially had his eye on another of the escaped nuns, one of Katharina’s closest friends. “If I had wanted to get married thirteen years ago, I would have chosen Eva Schonfeld,” he said. “I didn’t love my Kathe at the time, for I regarded her with mistrust as someone proud and arrogant. But it pleased God, who wanted me to take pity on her.”9 It seems the real reason Luther married Katharina was not for love, politics, or theology, but out of obedience to Christ. Luther’s decision to marry sprang directly from his new vision of the redeemed Christian’s relationship to God.

The foundation for both Luther’s theology and his personal faith was found in Romans 1:17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” In other words, Luther believed God’s grace, rather than his own merit, was the key to salvation, and he came to realize that, seen through the lens of God’s mercy, righteousness meant the justification that a merciful God bestowed through faith.10 “The theological consequences of this turn were immense,” says historian Martin Brecht, “for it undermined the traditional medieval piety based on good works.”11

Yet Luther didn’t entirely disregard the purpose of good works in faith either. As was mentioned earlier, he believed good works were still an integral part of faith, and were, in fact, a result of one’s faith. In his famous treatise The Freedom of a Christian, Luther wrote that in order to truly comprehend the freedom Christ won for us, we must first wrap our minds around a paradox: “A Christian is free and independent in every respect, a bondservant to none. A Christian is a dutiful servant in every respect, owing a duty to everyone.”12 Christians, Luther wrote, are bound by love. They want to obey Christ and perform good works because of their deep and abiding love for Christ, and they love Christ because he loved them first from the cross. Good works, Luther argued, were a natural outgrowth of Christ’s love for us.

For Luther, faith was, at its essence, a matter of the heart. Human beings have the gift of faith because God gives them that gift through Christ. And because of the gift of Christ and the presence of Christ in the Christian’s heart, Luther expected the Christian to have the same selfless attitude of love, discipline, and service toward the world that Christ possessed.13 And he expected it most of himself.

“To my neighbor, I will be, as a Christian, what Christ has become to me, and do just what I see is needful, helpful, or acceptable to him, for I have enough of all things in Christ through my faith,” Luther wrote. “Lo, that is how love and joy in God flow out of faith. For just as our neighbor is needy, and requires our excess, so we were needy in God’s eyes, and required His grace.”14 It’s tempting to romanticize Luther and Katharina’s relationship, but the truth is, romantic love wasn’t part of the picture, at least at the outset. Katharina married Luther because he was the most promising out of a very limited number of options. Luther married Katharina out of his love for Christ, a love that flowed naturally out of his faith toward the person in his midst who was most in need of compassion. Katharina was Luther’s “good work.” Marrying her was an act of Luther’s discipline, love, and service born in the name of Christ. What he couldn’t possibly see at the time, however, was that his obedience would produce fruit beyond his wildest expectations.

To Bed, to Church, to Feast

Once Luther made up his mind, wedding plans quickly fell into place. He proposed, presumably at the Cranach residence, where Katharina was living at the time, and she, not surprisingly, accepted. Unlike Luther, Katharina had much less freedom in her decision of whether to marry or not. For her, marriage was an issue of survival. She was still single, living under the Cranachs’ roof, and unwelcome in her childhood home. When Hans von Bora placed his daughter in the convent, he certainly hadn’t expected her to flee eighteen years later. He had relinquished responsibility for Katharina in 1505. Though he was still alive when she left Marienthron, Hans von Bora was as good as dead to Katharina, and she to him.

We don’t know for sure how Katharina felt about Luther at the time of their engagement and wedding. It’s obvious from both his letters and his later statements around the table that Luther didn’t marry Katharina for romantic love, and we can safely assume the same was true for her. Katharina undoubtedly crossed paths with Luther when he visited Lucas Cranach, but the two likely spent very little time together. However, we also know from her refusal to marry Kaspar Glatz that Katharina was not willing to marry just any man. Clearly, the frequent threats on his life, his unstable income, his reputation as a radical reformer, and the fact that he was not a member of the nobility (as she was) were not enough to dissuade Katharina from tying the knot with Martin Luther.

What might very well be considered the most famous wedding in Christian history took place on an ordinary Tuesday in Wittenberg. It was a modest affair, as far as sixteenth-century weddings go. On the evening of June 13, 1525, a small bridal party—just five guests, plus the bride and groom—walked briskly down Wittenberg’s main lane in their wedding finery and made their way to the door of Luther’s home, the Black Cloister, on the southeast edge of town.

A wedding portrait of Luther and Katharina does not exist, so we don’t know for sure what the bride and groom wore on their special day. It’s likely Katharina’s hair, now grown long in the two years since she’d fled the convent, was worn loose and flowing to her shoulders. She also probably wore a wreath of woven fresh flowers on her head. In late medieval German wedding ceremonies, the bride often presented the groom with this wreath, which symbolized an offering of her virginity. Likewise, at the wedding festivities that followed, the bride’s young maiden friends often distributed similar wreaths to the guests.15 As historian Lyndal Roper points out, “It’s hard to determine whether the wreath had always symbolized the offering of the bride’s virginity to the groom, or whether this was a later development as the Church, continuing its pre-Reformation campaigns, tried to prevent the couple from celebrating their sexual union until after the wedding.”16

As far as we know, a wedding portrait of Katharina and Luther does not exist. Lucas Cranach the Elder painted these portraits of Luther and Katharina in 1526, a year after they were married. [Lucas Cranach the Elder [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

Katharina, Luther, and their guests—Lucas and Barbara Cranach, friend Justus Jonas, jurist Johann Apel, and local pastor Johannes Bugenhagen—gathered in the living room of the Black Cloister. The couple recited their simple vows, slipped ruby and diamond rings upon one another’s fingers, and were pronounced husband and wife by Bugenhagen.17

In late medieval unions the bride typically brought her own bed—often handed down from mother to daughter—to the marriage, along with feather quilts, pillows, and embroidered linens as part of her trousseau, but Katharina owned nothing of her own and thus came to her marriage virtually empty-handed. Instead, she and Luther retired to his bed, which, Luther later admitted, was basically a pile of dirty straw that hadn’t been changed out in a year.18 That said, rancid straw was probably the least of Katharina’s concerns that night. Although Protestant reforms had altered the format of weddings, consummation was still considered an important and required part of the matrimonial ritual. And so, as was the German tradition of the time, the newlyweds consummated their marriage while Justus Jonas witnessed the event from the doorway of the bedchamber.19

One can only imagine the awkwardness of this first intimate encounter between the former nun and monk, she aged twenty-six, he aged forty-two, a witness lurking in the background to keep a watchful eye. Nonetheless, Katharina and Luther managed to survive this most uncomfortable of wedding rituals. “Yesterday I was present and saw the bridegroom on the bridal bed—I could not suppress my tears at the sight,” wrote Justus Jonas. “Now that it has happened and God has desired it, I implore God to grant the excellent honest man all the happiness.”20

Biographer Heiko Oberman suggests Jonas’s tears were prompted by disappointment over Luther’s marriage to Katharina (Jonas and Melanchthon were not in favor of Luther’s marriage and were concerned it would distract him from his reform work).21 Ernst Kroker, on the other hand, implies Jonas’s reaction to the consummation were tears of joy and affection for the couple.22 Regardless of his personal feelings, Jonas confirmed that Luther and Katharina could officially claim the distinction of husband and wife.

The wedding festivities didn’t end with the witnessed consummation. In accordance with Protestant reforms, two weeks later Luther and Katharina publicly celebrated their marriage with the kirchgang ceremony. On Tuesday, June 27, 1525—Tuesday was considered a lucky day for weddings—church bells rang out over Wittenberg as the bridal party followed a pair of pipers from the Black Cloister to the city church. Crowds lined the street along the way and packed around the entrance of the church as Bugenhagen performed the public consecration of marriage. Then, with all the requirements of an official marriage met, Luther and Katharina and their guests returned to the old monastery for a traditional wedding feast.

After the banquet, the bride and groom, their guests, and the musicians walked to the town hall, where the sounds of dancing, drinking, and revelry echoed throughout Wittenberg until the party was shut down by order of the magistrate an hour before midnight.23 Luther’s parents attended the festivities, as did dozens of his friends and professional colleagues. Noticeably absent at the celebration were any members of Katharina’s family. Though she kept in sporadic touch with one of her brothers, Katharina’s father, who historians surmise was still living at the time of her wedding, had essentially disowned his firstborn daughter.

Weddings were as significant in sixteenth-century Germany as they are today and were considered a statement of a couple’s social prestige. Among the nobility and even the merchant class, weddings were the most expensive celebrations an individual was likely to host, usually far exceeding the amounts spent on burials or even for the festivities honoring the births and baptisms of children.24 A proper wedding offered an overabundance of food—enough for leftovers to be sent to those who had been unable to attend, and even to offer as charity for poor people in need.25 The more lavish and festive the wedding, the more powerful and prestigious the couple. “Such visible consumption of wealth was of course in pointed contradiction to the civic authority’s policy of careful housekeeping and preventing the wastage of city and individual resources,” observes Lyndal Roper.26

As a result, German cities often regulated weddings, limiting the number of guests and restricting festivities so as to control social order and create a more somber atmosphere. City council members interviewed wedding guests to ensure that a reasonable sum had been spent on gifts, that guest limits had not been exceeded, and no extra parties had been hosted. City ordinances even dictated how much money a groom could spend on wedding rings for his bride, as well as the order in which people walked to the church and were seated at the dinner table. “Weddings [became] pageants of the town’s social structure, where each individual might read off his or her place in that society,” says Roper.27

In comparison, Luther and Katharina’s wedding feast was fairly modest, primarily because Luther, though famous, was poor. Despite the fact that he had written hundreds of pages of published material, preached far and wide, and still taught at the university, he had little steady income. And Katharina, of course, came to the marriage penniless. When Luther sent out his wedding invitations prior to the June 27 celebration, he requested that several of his guests bring venison and barrels of beer to be served at the banquet. Their guests rose to the challenge and supplied Luther and Katharina with ample provisions for the wedding feast, as well as a number of generous monetary gifts to help establish their household as husband and wife. Elector Johann of Saxony (brother of the late Frederick the Wise, Luther’s protector, who had died in May), Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, and the city of Wittenberg gave the couple sizable cash gifts, while other guests brought valuable coins and silver cups (many of which the Luthers would later sell to make ends meet).

Snared with the Yoke of Marriage

Along with the request for wedding banquet provisions, Luther’s invitations also alluded to the fact that even a week or more into marriage, he was still reeling from the shock. “Doubtless the outcry has reached your ears that I have actually ventured to enter the married state,” Luther wrote to Electoral Chancellor Johann von Doltzig on June 21, 1525, eight days after his wedding ceremony at the Black Cloister. “Although my change in condition seems very strange to myself, being as yet scarcely able to believe it, still the fact is attested by so many honoured witnesses that I must believe it to be true.”28 The tone of the letter, though lighthearted, clearly indicates that Luther was hardly able to wrap his mind around the fact that he was now married.

To another friend, Luther wrote, “Suddenly, unexpectedly, and while my mind was on other matters, the Lord snared me with the yoke of marriage.”29 One of Luther’s closest friends, Philip Melanchthon, sought to reassure his friend, as Luther clearly seemed “somewhat troubled and perplexed over this change in his life.”30 Later Luther himself admitted that marriage required significant adjustments: “I was alone, and now there’s someone else here. In bed, you wake up in the morning and see a couple of pigtails on the pillow.”31 One can only imagine Katharina’s thoughts. Considering the fact that Luther hadn’t freshened his bed straw in a year (the sixteenth-century equivalent of not laundering the sheets), the transition to life as a wife couldn’t have been easy for her either.

The truth was, the odds were against Luther and Katharina living happily ever after. For starters, marriage between a twenty-six-year-old former nun and a forty-two-year-old former monk, each of them independent, stubborn, and accustomed to living a quiet, cloistered life, would have been challenging even under the best circumstances. Moreover, their precarious financial situation, Luther’s reluctance to marry in general and his hesitance to marry Katharina in particular, and the daily threats against his life inevitably added to the instability of the match. And finally, aside from his parents and a few close friends, much of the world, from the Holy Roman Emperor to the peasants in the fields, opposed their union. According to canon law, the Luthers’ marriage was a capital offense—a scandal, a blasphemy, and the work of the devil. According to Protestant reformers, the union would be nothing but a distraction, with the potential to derail the entire movement.

The deck was stacked against them. As husband and wife, Martin and Katharina Luther faced a long road ahead, with myriad obstacles along the way.