18

Luther, Leo, and the Aftermath

“Now that God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.” Julius’s successor, Leo X, never said those words. They miss the mark of the man, but there is just enough truth in them to have made them stick to him like glue. Leo was intelligent, devout, attentive to his duties as pope (as he saw them) and, in contrast to his recent predecessors, free of amorous liaisons. But he had about him an aristocratic languor that Raphael captured in his famous portrait. He gathered around himself a coterie of poets and musicians, in whose company he seemed to feel more comfortable than in any other. While pope he employed 683 servants, including a keeper of the papal elephant.

He was a Medici, second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the man who escaped assassination in the Pazzi Conspiracy. Emotionally detached though he might be from other pressing concerns, he certainly was not detached from the fate of Florence or his family. There was therefore no way he could or wanted to stay aloof from the vicious and ever shifting politics of Italy. Paolo Sarpi, the sharp-tongued historian of the seventeenth century, said of Leo, “He would have been an ideal pope if he had had the slightest interest in religion.” Sarpi’s assessment is as unfair as the enjoying-the-papacy attribution, but it hits the bull’s eye if interpreted to suggest that Leo’s core value was not the good of the church but the good of his native city and the Medici.

Giovanni de’ Medici, made a cardinal at age thirteen, received a superb education in Florence in the household of his father. Driven out of Florence with the rest of his family in 1498, he two years later took up residence in Rome until the family was reestablished in their city in 1512. The next year he was elected pope—without money exchanging hands. Julius II’s severe legislation against bribery had had its effect. He was only thirty-seven. His placid personality looked like an attractive change from the stormy and bellicose Julius.

Leo’s first three years as pope were relatively uneventful. He had to bestir himself, however, in 1516 after the new French king, Francis I, won a crushing victory at Marignano and thereby was able not only to vindicate French claims to the Duchy of Milan but with his army posed a threat to Florence and the Papal States. Leo brokered with Francis the Concordat of Bologna, 1516. In it Francis agreed to rescind the royal decree of 1438, the Pragmatic Sanction, which, in support of the Council of Basel, asserted the authority of council over pope and suppressed papal annates throughout the kingdom. He also agreed, after Leo granted him Parma and Piacenza in the Papal States, not to move further into Italy. On the papal side, the Concordat dealt a serious blow to the idea that the pope’s powers could be limited by a council, and it ensured the flow of revenues from France. But for these concessions Leo paid a terribly high price. Besides sacrificing Parma and Piacenza he granted the king the right of nomination of all the higher clergy in France.

The pope retained the right of veto of any candidate he deemed unworthy, and Leo’s successors sometimes exercised that right. But the Concordat marked in France the definitive end of the elective principle for which the Gregorian reformers of the eleventh century had fought so passionately. It was the nuptial contract that legitimated the “marriage of throne and altar” that characterized the ancien régime in France. This aspect of the Concordat was congruent with the authority the popes were in this same era granting the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs in their overseas possessions, the patronato and the padroado. In France from this time forward the king could use church offices to reward his friends among the powerful aristocracy. The control the king now had over the French church made the Reformation not merely unattractive to Francis and his sons but a serious threat to their power.

The same year as the Concordat Leo undertook a war against the Duchy of Urbino in order to install a nephew there. The war was a financial and political disaster and was the spark that ignited an assassination plot against him among the cardinals. When Leo discovered it, he had the leader executed, other cardinals imprisoned, and then packed the college of cardinals with thirty-one new members, an unprecedented maneuver that raised membership from a traditional limit of twenty or twenty-five to more than double. Although a few of the new cardinals were men of genuine talent and piety, such as the Dominican theologian Tommaso De Vio (known as Cajetan) and the Augustinian Giles of Viterbo, most were political appointments.

Leo inherited from Julius the Fifth Lateran Council. Like all the cardinals, he vowed before his election that as pope he would continue it. The council wrestled with the problem of church reform, which had been a shrill cry in the church at large at least since the Council of Constance, and it did so more seriously than historians have given it credit for. Leo in principle backed the council’s reform decrees, but he lacked the will to carry them forward.

From him the artists and architects patronized so intelligently and lavishly by Julius had every right to expect great things, given Leo’s education and family tradition. They were disappointed. Leo loved Raphael, continued to sponsor his painting of the papal apartments, but failed to elicit from him the same genius that Julius had. Even in this area he behaved as the abstracted connoisseur who was more interested in sponsoring concerts and theatrical shows than big undertakings. His plans to continue the financing of the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s through the issue of an indulgence backfired badly—much more badly than Leo ever seems to have realized.

Despite being a Medici, Leo X would probably rank among the more forgettable popes except for that indulgence, which led Luther to throw on him the spotlight of inglorious fame. The story is familiar. Luther, terrified by thoughts of what he believed God’s justice demanded of him, found inner freedom and peace in the doctrine that we are saved not by our own efforts but by the grace (or favor or love) of God. We are not justified by our “works” (good deeds), as if we could force God to love us or save us simply by behaving properly. The idea that by contributing money toward the building of Saint Peter’s, which was by definition a good deed, we could win God’s grace or have an effect on souls in purgatory was utterly repugnant to him.

The indulgence, whose German intermediary was the archbishop of Mainz, was preached by a Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, who seems to have preached it in crude terms. To counter Tetzel’s preaching Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses, a set of theological axioms, a few of which touched on papal authority or practice. Number 86, for instance, “Since the pope’s income today is larger than that of the wealthiest of wealthy men, why does he not build this Church of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of indigent believers?” It hit a sore point that had been festering throughout Europe at least since the days of John XXII in Avignon.

Luther was a member of the Augustinian order. His attack incensed the Dominicans, who interpreted it as an attack from a rival religious order on one of their own number, and for a while in Rome the affair was viewed as just another squabble between two religious orders. Luther was soon presented in Rome, however, not as a theologian speaking about sin and grace but as one “speaking against the authority of the Holy See.” The next year, prodded from several sources, Leo moved into action and ordered an investigation. Things moved quickly from bad to worse in a series of missteps and missed opportunities that led in 1520 to the drawing up of a bull of excommunication. Only at that point did Luther move into the role of a church reformer, and in his reform he took special aim at the papacy.

In 1520 he published his “Appeal to the German Nobility,” in which he called upon the emperor and the German nobles to undertake a thorough reform of the church, which the popes not only had not done but had impeded. The “Appeal” is a long document, which for the most part is a summary of medieval grievances but now more rhetorically powerful for being marshaled into one list and articulated in highly inflammatory language. It called for a council and provided the reform agenda for it. Number 2 of the agenda was: “What Christian purpose is served by ecclesiastics called cardinals? Italy is now devastated by financial exactions, so that cardinals can have their revenues. Now that Italy is drained dry, they are coming to Germany. They think the drunken Germans will not understand what the game is.” Another: “The pope has more than 3,000 secretaries alone. Who can count the staff of the pope and the cardinals? Even when the pope goes out riding, he is accompanied by 3,000 or 4,000 on mules much as any king or emperor. . . . Oh, my noble princes and lords, how long will you let these raving and ravaging wolves range over your land and people?” And another: “I urge that every prince and city should forbid their subjects to pay annates to Rome. The pope should exercise no authority over the emperor. No one should kiss the pope’s feet. Pilgrimages to Rome should be disallowed.”

Luther’s message in all its hyperbole fell on willing ears—and on willing eyes, as the printing press sent it speeding through Germany. He was promised a safe-conduct to stand trial in Rome, but he refused, citing what had happened to Jan Huss, who also had a safe-conduct and ended up at the stake. Other attempts at reconciliation failed, and therefore on January 1, 1521, Leo’s bull of excommunication, Exsurge Domine, took effect. That should have settled the matter. The new emperor, Charles V, was a devout Catholic, unfavorably impressed by what he heard about Luther. He considered Luther “a notorious heretic” and declared him an outlaw of the empire, but the political situation prevented him from seizing Luther and bringing him to justice.

In the ten years between 1509 and 1519 the politics of Europe, and therefore of the empire, had taken a decisive turn. In 1509 the young Henry VIII came to the throne of England, a country now recovered from the devastation and disruption of the War of the Roses and ready to take its rightful role in international intrigue. In France in 1515, the young Francis I ascended the throne of the most powerful monarchy and richest country in Europe, and that year he successfully invaded Italy to win Milan, traditionally claimed by the empire, as his prize and then, as mentioned, sign the Concordat of Bologna. In 1516 the young Charles of Habsburg inherited from his maternal grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, the thrones of Spain and all the Spanish possessions overseas. Three years later, he was elected emperor, defeating through bribery his chief rival, Francis I of France.

With the imperial election Charles, whose aunt was the queen of England, Catherine of Aragon, emerged as seemingly the strongest man in Europe, the first emperor since at least Frederick II in the thirteenth century to live up to the imperial claims of authority. But his very power was his weakness. His own German nobles, jealous of their independence, feared and resented him, and some of them saw in Luther a chance to reduce him to size. On his eastern frontier he faced a newly aggressive Turkish offensive by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 had opened the gates to Europe. The French king, sharing with Charles a claim to the rich Duchy of Milan, was surrounded by Habsburgs—Charles to his south in Spain, Charles all along his eastern borders, and Charles’s aunt across the channel in England. He would do anything in his power to weaken his rival, even if it meant giving aid and comfort to the Lutheran princes in Germany.

Politics and religion could not have been more intricately intertwined. Charles needed his nobles’ help against Francis and against Suleiman. As more and more of them took up Luther’s cause, he had to pay heed, for they threatened civil war. Within less than a decade the Lutheran nobles formed the Schmalkaldic League, a military junta with the dual purpose of limiting Charles and promoting Luther’s reform. Meanwhile they sought, sometimes with questionable sincerity, a peaceful solution to the religious situation by calling for a “free Christian council in German lands.” Charles, who early emerged as the unwavering standard bearer for the Catholic cause, would for the next twenty years do his utmost to see the council become a reality.

But Leo X would live to see none of this. On December 1, 1521, the same year as the bull Exsurge, he died unexpectedly of malaria at the young age of forty-six. He had just a few months earlier bestowed on Henry VIII the title Defender of the Faith for his book on the sacraments against Luther. Even aside from the religious situation already exploding in Germany, this affable but ineffectual man left behind a heritage of bitterness and disappointed hopes. He also left behind an empty treasury.

A fifty-day, deeply divided conclave finally compromised by electing a cardinal absent in Spain, Hadrian Florensz who, contrary to what was by now a long-standing custom, kept as pope his baptismal name. Hadrian VI, an austere and dour Dutchman, had been professor and rector at the University of Louvain and tutor to the young Charles of Habsburg. His was a short pontificate of slightly more than a year.

Well intentioned, honest, and upright but rigid and gauche, “the German barbarian,” as he was known in Rome, probably would not have accomplished much had he lived longer. His frugality and the autocratic manner in which he imposed it on Rome and the court alienated even many sympathetic to his aims. Through his legate at the Diet of Nuremberg in December 1522, he frankly admitted to the scandal of the curia, but he seems not to have grasped the complexity of the situation in Germany. The story goes that when Hadrian died, the Romans showed their gratitude to his attending physician for failing to keep Hadrian alive by posting on his door a placard, “Savior of the Roman people.” Hadrian was the last non-Italian pope until the election of John Paul II in 1978.

After a conclave of almost two months, the cardinals on November 19, 1523, elected Giulio de’ Medici, a first cousin of Leo X and the illegitimate son of Giuliano de’ Medici, the young man assassinated in the Pazzi conspiracy. He took the name Clement VII (not to be confused with the Avignon Clement VII, Robert of Geneva). Handsome and intelligent, he was raised by his uncle Lorenzo the Magnificent as if he were his own child. One of Leo’s first acts as pope had been to brush aside the canonical impediment of Giulio’s illegitimacy to make his cousin and close friend a cardinal and archbishop of Florence. Despite Giulio’s involvement in family politics, he was highly regarded by contemporaries, who greeted his election with approval. He turned out, however, to be the wrong man at the wrong time.

Disappointment with him set in almost immediately. He had a knack for siding with the losing party each time in the back-and-forth fortunes of the wars between Francis I and Charles V. Although Charles had promoted him as his candidate in the conclave that elected him, Clement made the huge mistake of supporting Francis when Charles invaded Italy. Francis was badly defeated by Charles at Pavia in 1525 and taken prisoner. Charles’s forces now had a free hand in Italy. They captured Florence, and then marched south to Rome.

On May 6, 1527, they broke into the city and subjected it to a terrible sack. Clement himself barely escaped capture when the invaders moved swiftly through the city and broke into the Vatican. He fled the few hundred yards from the papal palace to the stronghold of Castel Sant’Angelo, where he was safe but for eight days had to watch the burning and sacking of the city. After the sack came a devastating plague. Thousands of Romans died or were killed, and many more thousands fled the city. The population dropped precipitously from about ninety thousand to about thirty thousand in just a few months.

Clement eventually was able to make peace with the emperor, who was not personally responsible for the sack but in the courts of Europe was severely criticized for it. Only after a decade would the city return more or less to normal. In 1530 Clement crowned Charles, up to that point officially just emperor-elect, in the cathedral in Bologna, the last imperial crowning ever performed by a pope. Meanwhile Henry VIII’s marital situation in England had reached a crisis point. Clement had characteristically evaded the problem, afraid of offending Henry whose aid he needed in his political maneuvering and afraid of offending Charles, whose aunt’s honor was at stake. Finally his hand was forced by Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn performed by the archbishop of Canterbury. He excommunicated Henry on July 11, 1533, and declared his divorce and his new marriage null and void.

Clement died a year later, a pontificate that was an almost unmitigated disaster. Besides everything else that went wrong, his precarious relationship with Charles meant that he never gave the emperor the support he desperately needed to halt the Ottoman advance into central Europe. The threat was dire. In 1529 the Turks were at the gates of Vienna. They were repulsed but would be back again.

Besides the Turks, by 1529 Charles faced the religious and military problem of the Lutherans at home. He sincerely believed that the only hope to resolve it was a council, and to that end he pressed Clement hard for one. Clement resisted, fearful the council would turn against him and even try to depose him. The councils of Constance and Basel had made popes wary of an institution they had earlier promoted.

But also, like practically all rulers in Europe except Charles, Clement feared Charles’s might should he be able to solve his problems with the Turks, with the Lutherans, and with Francis I. With a victorious Charles Europe might at last have a master. A successful council would help Charles ascend to that pinnacle. Whatever his reasons, Clement remained evasive to the end. How different would the religious history of Europe be if early, 1525, for instance, or 1527, Clement had convoked a council? It is impossible to say.