Transcript

It is the last day of October 1517 a gaunt figure, an Augustine monk identifiable by his almost entirely black habit, emaciated from decades of ascetic exercises marched along the one paved road of the town of Wittenberg (population 2,000). His body may still be broken, but his mind was on the mend. His existential terror of a stern, wrathful God who condemns the unrighteous sinner to eternal agony had receded. He might not yet have fully developed his views of how one can find a way into God’s grace. But his doubts had been mounting over the way the established church was guiding its flock towards salvation.

As he walked, he carried sheets of paper, about the size of a modern A3 containing 95 theses in tight rows, summarizing his emerging view of what it meant to be a Christian. Being an academic he was keen to test his ideas with his peers. Hence this document – composed in Latin, the universal language of learning,  opened with quote: “Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and ordinary lecturer therein at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore, he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter.” 

Historians keep debating whether, on this fateful autumn day, the future reformer headed up to the castle church of Wittenberg to nail, or to glue a copy of his theses to its door, to be seen by the thousands of pilgrims expected on All Saints Day; or whether he only went to the coaching inn to send this text to his ecclesiastical superiors, the archbishop of Mainz and the bishop of Brandenburg, fellow academics at other universities, humanists in Nürnberg and elsewhere, or in fact to the printers.

What we do know is that within 2 months these theses, written by an obscure young professor at a second tier university in a European backwater had spread not just across the Holy Roman empire but all across europe, being read and debated by men like Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More. Translated into German and later into French, Spanish and English they were pondered over by burghers, artisans and even simple laborers. Soon they and many more of Luther’s writings would spread all the way to the peasants in the villages.

Martin Luther was not the first passionate monk to slate the clergy; he wasn’t the first to demand a return to scripture and he was not the first to believe that God’s mercy was the only way to salvation.  The list of Luther’s precursors goes back well beyond Savanarola and Jan Hus to St. Francis, to Bernhard of Clairvaux, Peter Waldens, all the way to the early heretics and hermits of the fourth and fifth century. Opposition to the established church and disputes over the meaning of scripture are as old as the Christian religion itself.

But why did the Christian Church in the West that had more or less held together since the Great Schism of 1054, fall apart in the early 16^th century. What were the conditions and personalities that made that happen, and that were not present before?

That is what we will be discussing in this season. So once again, welcome to the History of the Germans – Season 12: The Reformation!

I know I have been away for an ungodly amount of time, and I am extremely grateful that you allowed me to indulge in my other pursuits. I had a great time, in particular on the History of the Germans Tour and then on my sailing trip to Spain; up to the point when we were so rudely interrupted by Iberian Orcas. Nobody got hurt and the boat can be repaired – no harm done.

Being away did not mean I forgot about the podcast. Rather the opposite. I spent a lot of time considering changes to the structure and style of the show. I listened to other history shows, some more successful than mine, to see what I could learn. I considered getting a co-host, do more interviews, don’t do interviews at all, be more profane, be less profane, be funnier, be more serious….

Bottom line is, not much will change. I cannot see how any of these structural changes could fit with the premise of the show, which is still to tell the story of the German people from 919 to 1990, warts and all.

But two things I will at least try to do.

One is to be more concise. Episode length has crept up from on average 30 minutes in 2021 to now 40 minutes and still rising.  And that is not a good thing. As Blaise Pascal, or Goethe or Mark Twain or Churchill or actually all of them said, “if I had had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter”.

Hence, I will aim to make the episodes once again shorter and crisper and maybe funnier. Which is something that takes time, in particular the funny bits. So, they will no longer appear weekly, but only every two weeks. It is either that or another four months break next summer – and nobody wants that – not even I.

The other change is one that will materialize naturally anyway. The show had so far focused on the lives of the kings and emperors with some excursions into economics, law, culture etc.. The problem is that neither of these are very relatable, unless you are a king, queen or economist.

Going forward I will try to bring more life stories of individuals, many of whom will not be kings or emperors, but people from all sorts of backgrounds.  And I am in luck because the 16^th century is when individuals truly take center stage, where we learn about not just their deeds but their inner lives, their dreams, hopes, convictions, doubts and fears. And there will be some fascinating characters here, not just the great reformers, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin but also radicals like Karlstadt. Müntzer and Matthys, Intellectuals like Erasmus of Rotterdam and Willibald Pirckheimer, princely politicians like Frederick the Wise and Philipp of Hesse, knightly rebels like Franz von Sickingen, Florian Geyer and Ulrich von Hutten, the innkeepers and veteran Landsknechte who led the peasants in the largest popular uprising before the French Revolution. And we will not forget the opponents of the Reformation and the leaders of the counterreformation, Albrecht von Brandenburg, Johannes Eck, Ignacius of Loyola, Cardinal Contarini, Ferdinand I, Charles V and of course the great Renaissance popes.

I hope this will be ok with you. Let me know if you are unhappy with these changes or if you think there are other things that need to be changed. Do not hold back – I am now relaxed and I can take it. Just don’t go hard at me in six months’ time when I am exhausted….

And with that, back to the show and the first of these uncommonly common people.

Luther the Pseudo Peasant

“I am the son of a peasant, my great grandfather, grandfather and my father were all true peasants” That is how Martin Luther described his background. But that is not really true. His father was a mining entrepreneur in the city of Mansfeld, and at least during Martin’s youth, a very successful one at that. It seems his paternal grandfather ran a smelter too, as did Luther’s grandfather on his mother’s side.

Which makes his statement even more fascinating. Why would anyone lower his status in the hierarchical society of the 16^th century, where access to city councils, knightly associations, religious fraternities even monasteries depended on how many of your ancestors had been nobles or patricians?

Was this an affectation that we know from modern day politicians who want to present themselves as men of the people despite their Oxbridge or Ivy League degrees and upper middle class upbringing? Or was he indeed a peasant at heart?

He definitely spoke and wrote like one. Martin Luther’s language is to say it politely, fruity. He had an  obsession with excrement and bodily fluids that renders much of his quotations not safe for work – unless you are a protestant theologians for whom this would be work.

But it goes well beyond that. Luther may have lived a more privileged life, but the world he lived in, the cluster of Saxon and Thuringian towns he barely ever left, was dominated not by the ideas of the Renaissance that was about to reach its peak in Italy and the Low Countries, but by popular piety, the faith of the common people of the Empire.

He may have been a professor proficient in Latin, but one of the reason his perspectives resonated with the average Joe, or more precisely, the common Michel was because he was a common Michel himself.

So, what were the lives and believes of these common people in the time just before the Reformation?

Life is Brutish and Short

Thomas Hobbes famously described life as “brutish and short”, though he coined the phrase as a description of life outside society, which is not the experience of most people in the 16^th century. Then the vast majority of people lived in close knit groups, in their villages and small towns. The anonymity of the big city is a modern invention.

People had good reason to stick together since things were not just tough but were also getting tougher.

Let’s start with the social structure. We usually describe unequal societies as pyramids, with a tiny minority at the top and a wide base of poor people at the bottom. Around 1500 there was no such pyramid structure. Society looked more like an onion.

There was a tiny minority at the top alright, but also only a comparatively small base of the truly poor at the bottom. Most people had a living standard above the level of the seriously poor. The reason for that is simple. There wasn’t much of a social safety net beyond the giving of alms. Meaning that if you did not have work you did not get to eat. And if you do not eat enough you die, of hunger or from diseases your withered body could not withstand. There were no poor because the poor did not make it. You had to be in the wide bulge of the onion just to survive.

And every time some natural or man-made catastrophe occurred, a bad harvest, a flood, wars or feuds, that whole wider bit of the onion dropped down an inch into the world of the truly poor – and people did what the poor did, they died.

This threat of death had been ever present throughout the Middle Ages. But by the later Middle Ages things had gotten worse. The climate changed and it became generally cooler. Many fields that had provided acceptable yields in 1200 had to be abandoned by 1400, floods became more and more common. If you were lucky enough to live under a powerful monarch like in France or England, you may have seen a reduction in violence that partially compensated for the climate effect. But not so in the empire. The Common Peace, the Allgemeine Landfrieden that was only passed in 1495 took decades to be widely enforced. And let’s not forget the imperial conflicts, the war against duke Ulrich of Württemberg and the Swiss war of 1500 that consisted less in pitched battles and more in destroying agricultural production.

The silver lining for the empire were the three industries where they dominated europe – Mining and metallurgy in Tyrol and Saxony, the Hanse trading network from the Baltic to the Low Countries and the long distance merchants and bankers of the upper German cities like Augsburg and Nürnberg. The only problem with these clusters was that they experienced a rapid consolidation of wealth and ostentation at the top, either with the princes or the bankers, making the common people feel their plight even more.

If the first three riders of the apocalypse, conquest, civil war and famine did not catch you, there was still the black rider who brought disease harvesting the fourth of the world that death was entitled to.

The plague had returned to Europe in 1347 and would not leave for centuries. Regular outbreaks continued well into the 17^th century with recent particularly severe ones in 1499 and 1502.

In 1494 another disease has been added to the long list of woes, Syphilis, which may have come from the Americas with Columbus’ sailors and had its first massive outbreak in Naples amongst the French army of Charles VIII. It was quickly recognised that it was a sexually transmitted disease, but given symptoms can sometimes be late, absent or minor, it still spread rapidly. Albrecht Durer produced a woodcut of a Syphilitic man in Nürnberg in 1496, barely two years after the first appearance down in Italy.

What made Syphilis so terrifying was that by its nature it affected younger people in the prime of life who could suffer horrific physical deformations and an excruciatingly painful death. If, like me, you have lived through the HIV epidemic, take that and multiply it by factor 10.

The end of the World according to Joachim of Fiore

With things being bad and getting worse, it is no surprise people turned to millennial prophecies, most prominent amongst them, our old friend Joachim of Fiore (roughly 1135-1202). His writings are – as the Encyclopedia Britannica so rightly points out – indigestible. But the potted version is that history mirrors the trinity. We had the age of Father, i.e., the time of the Old Testament, which was followed by the age of Son, i.e., the age of the New Testament, meaning that the next age will be the Age of the Holy Spirit – a thousand years of bliss and serenity that precedes the final judgement.

However, the transition from phase 2 to phase 3 was to be accompanied by violent disruption – bloody wars and natural disasters as described in the Apocalypse. Chaos will reign and the antichrist will become pope. The emperor will do battle with the antichrist pope and casts him back into hell at Golgotha, before he hangs up his crown in Jerusalem and everything will be fab fantastic thereafter.

These kinds of prophecies have been circulating for a while – we have encountered them already in the context of Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II. But in one way or another they kept coming back. In 1488 Johann Lichtenberger, the court astrologer of Friedrich III published his Prognostications that repeated much of what Joachim of Fiore had said but then equated contemporaries as the antichrist pope, the angelic pope and the good emperor – who was none other than his boss Friedrich III himself – with let’s say moderate predictive quality. He also produced a number of horoscopes, predicting rebellion, war and plague due to the alignment or not of Saturn and Jupiter. This book went through 14 editions in Latin, German and Italian between 1488 and 1499 and then another 9 editions in 1525 and remained popular until the late 17^th century.

This may all be hocus pocus, but one can understand why people who see their lives getting worse and worse are keen to buy into such prophecies. Fiore and Lichtenberger had an explanation for  their current predicament and offered hope of a better future. And don’t believe this kind of stuff has gone. The great philosopher and theologian Peter Thiel recently revived good old Joachim of Fiore and did a Lichtenberger on Popes Benedict and Francis and most bewilderingly, the recently deceased German theologian Hans Küng…..so maybe the thousand year Reich is just around the corner.

I digress.

The important point is that there was a widespread popular belief that the world was going to end, but that the end may be cataclysmic, but would be followed by some good times. Therefore anything that could shorten this transition period would be a good thing.

At which point the whole thing turns very, very dark. Our friend Lichtenberger had an explanation why this period of transition was seemingly endless. He argued that the world first had to become a unified community of true believers that pleased God before we can move on to the next stage. And unfortunately that wretched constellation of Saturn and Jupiter had brought out all the evil in the world. And these evils that blocked the road to thousand years of bliss were: the Jews, the Witches and the corruption of the church.

The Jews as Agents of Antichrist

The Jews had been in the crosshairs for a long time. England expelled them in 1290 and did not allow them to return before 1656. France took three attempts, in 1182, 1306 and finally succeeded in 1394.

In the Holy Roman Empire the process varied from place to place. Some princes or cities had been tolerant, even supportive of Jewish communities. But when the Black Death hit in 1346  Jewish prosecutions flared up all over the place. The emperor, formally protector of the Jews who were deemed his personal servants, rarely lifted a finger, often demanding his fair share of the property left behind by the fleeing Israelites. Most of then fled to Poland where they were welcomed to help rebuild the economy. The few Jewish communities left behind in the empire scraped by on small time lending, one of the few activities they were still allowed.

In the late fifteenth century however, the remaining Jewish communities in Europe came under renewed attack. The expulsion of the Jews and Muslims by Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain was one of the largest scale events of its kind and is one of the reasons for the slow economic decline of Spain in the subsequent centuries. Many left for the Ottoman empire, others found a home in trading cities, for instance in Venice, but also in Hamburg, Antwerp and Amsterdam, though they were confined to their own quarters, soon to be known as Ghettos after the one established in Venice in 1516.

Let me quote here from Koenigsberger, Moss and Bowler’s very readable book entitled “Europe in the 16^th century” quote: “The belief in the Jew as Antichrist was combined with the equally deeply held belief that his conversion was a necessity in order that the Joachimite ‘age of the spirit’ might begin. The depth of their evil contrasted with the anticipated glory of their conversion. The book of the Apocalypse provided the evidence. The harvest must be reaped before the book of the seven seals would reveal its mystery. Luther shared this belief fully. If this was the true reformation of Christianity, the harbinger of the new age, then the jews would be converted. They refused, and he now advocated eradicating them from the surface of europe, burning their synagogues and forbidding their religion.” End quote.

The Prosecution of Witches and Sorcerers

The second group to be singled out as impediments to the transformation of the world, were the witches. We may have to do a whole episode on the witch craze. For now I just give you the key elements of the chronology.

In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis Desiderantes which recognised the existence of Witches and Wizards as consorts of the devil – who kill infants in the womb, spoil or destroy cattle, render men impotent and women infertile etc, etc. The inquisition was authorised to seek them out and, if unrepentant, prosecute them. This bull was issued upon request by a certain Heinrich Kramer an Alsatian Dominican friar and inquisitor for Tyrol, Salzburg, Bohemia and Moravia. 

Kramer roped in a colleague, Jacob Sprenger and in 1488 published the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of the Witches, a kind of handbook on how to identify and convict witches and sorcerers, mostly by the liberal administration of torture and intimidation. This handbook went through 30 editions over the next 200 years and was used in catholic and protestant lands alongside other witchfinder manuals.

Most of the victims were women driven at least partly by a dramatic though unexplained increase in the share of single women from about 5% of the population to 15-20%, specifically in northern europe. Women who lived outside society were particularly affected but also midwives and those involved with medicine and care.

Witch trials rarely ended with just one victim, but tended to snowball across whole communities as the accused were pushed under torture to name others, who in turn named others again; not only killing innocents but also destroying the cohesion of society for generations to come.

The Corruption of the Church

The third roadblock that – according to popular belief – held back the arrival of the Joachimite promised Third Age held a little bit more water. The corruption of the institutions of the church might as well have infuriated God and compelled him to leave humanity to toil in abject misery for just that little bit longer.

Criticism of the worldliness of the church has been a constant topic over the last 238 episodes. The problem – as perceived – was not only that the church extracted vast amounts of money from people who already lived quite precarious lives and then spent it on luxuries. The even bigger issue was that this worldliness, the simony, aka the sale of church offices, the laxness in performing the sacraments, the loose morals of many priests and bishops jeopardised the mission of the church.

With death omnipresent, concerns about the fate of one’s soul in the afterlife was also omnipresent. What if you die in the state of sin, in particular if it happens by mistake, say because the incompetent priest had given wrong instructions about what was and what wasn’t sinful, or the priest’s misdemeanours were so great, his sacraments were null and void in the eyes of God.

One way the church had tried to address these concerns had been the occasional attempts at reform. Some, like the reform papacy in the 11^th century under Leo IX and Gregory VII had been successful, but since then most efforts had fallen short. The most recent one, the Councils of Constance and Basel had petered out into a farcical mini schism. That does not mean that there weren’t abbots and bishops out there who took their role seriously, just that as an institution, the church struggled to improve.

No wonder everybody who was not a clergyman, and even some clergy, believed an external force was needed to clean out the stables. The only authorities able to force a reform on the church were the monarchs, particularly the emperor. Though the Salians and Hohenstaufens were already three feet under for centuries, the hope that the emperor Friedrich would rise again from the Kyffhauser and set things to rights, was very much alive. Similarly in France they yearned for a new Charlemagne and the Spanish monarchs would later pick up the mantle of the reformers.

Much hope had been placed in our old friend from last season, Friedrich III who had the right name, but turned quickly into a massive disappointment. His son Maximilian could not even achieve a proper papal coronation, let alone coerce a Julius II or Leo X to give up their palaces and their nepotism.

The church, aware that reform was elusive, tried to soften the blow. The first was the constant repetition of the dogma that even an unworthy priest performs valid sacraments. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.

Then there was a re-interpretation of the final judgement. There are two descriptions of the final judgement in the bible, Revelations 20:11-15 and in Matthew 25:31-46. Though very different in tone and style, they both describe a one-time judgement where the dead are brought before the heavenly throne and separated by their deeds as recorded in the book of life. The righteous go to the heavenly Jerusalem and the unrighteous are tossed into the lake of fire.

There seemed to be no appeals process, no mitigating factors, no way to atone for your sins before the judgement. An utterly terrifying prospect to a people who firmly believed the devil and his hell existed. Depictions of the devil and his demonic assistants have been a staple of medieval art all across Europe. You see him in sculptures, in paintings, he is talked about in books and pamphlets.

The seminal literary work of the 14^th century was Dante’s description of the Inferno in all its gory detail. Talking about gory, the rapidly spreading technique of painting in oil allowed colours to become more vivid, details of wounds and sores and fangs and other horrors to be ever more detailed. Just take a look at the works of Hieronymus Bosch or Matthias Grunewald.

It was as if you had watched Nightmare on Elm Street every Sunday since childhood and would then find that every news outlet, every social media post, every mentor and coach told you that Freddie Kruger is real and that he had tortured someone just the other day in this or that place, never far. 

Could you ever be certain that you would not end up in hell? And all depended on whether one was free of sin at that one point in time, the last judgement.

By around 1200 church doctrine had developed a workaround intent on easing the terror. This workaround was called Purgatory. Purgatory sounds like a horrible place, but it was meant to be reassuring. Purgatory was where sinners who were redeemable could be cleansed through fire. Not pleasant, but better than eternal hellfire. Once they had atoned enough through this ordeal, they would be washed clean of their sins and could join the righteous. In other words, there was a way out – not a pleasant one, but a way out.

The only problem with Purgatory was that the time needed to clean off all these sins could be very long, like very, very, very long, like thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years.

So the church had to soften the blow once again and allowed for ways how the time in purgatory could be shortened. And one of these was celebrating mass.

Mass was a central element of pre-Reformation Christianity where bread and wine are actually transformed into the body and blood of Christ. This doctrine of Transubstantiation was formally defined at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

Transubstantiation was a moment of such holiness, that every time it is performed, there is an increase in the world’s treasure of merit. And that treasure of merit could be used to ease the journey through purgatory. And not only one’s own, but also that of the dead.

All this was well meant, but it led the church down a slippery slope. Wealthy or well-connected people found ways to compel others to pray for them. They gave donations to churches employing priests to say mass for them. They may donate funds to build a bridge and asked passing folk for prayers in lieu of toll. Churches now needed more and more chapels to accommodate all these individual masses and prayers. Just look at a Carolingian or Ottonian church from before 1200 – very few side chapels. Take a look at a high gothic cathedral and there are literally dozens of chapels in the choir and along the outer naves. There were stand-alone chapels, chantries, built solely for the purpose of saying mass on behalf of some dead rich guy or girl.

Churches did not have pews. The congregation was standing, only the bishops and the canons had seats in the choir. In many churches the choir was separated from the nave by a rood screen, an often elaborately decorated partition wall that separated laity from clergy. Therefore most people only ever saw the elevation of the host and the taking of communion through the gaps in the rood screen. What I find most bewildering, but also most telling, is that though mass was performed almost continuously in at least one of the chapels, common people received communion only very rarely, once or twice a year. Communion was a remote, mystic and exclusive event of such spiritual charge, it would blow simple lay people apart if administered too often.

Since every little mass helped, churches became regular prayer factories. Luther noticed that in Rome monks would say six or seven masses in record time and, as he saw it, sloppily. These prayer factories needed a huge amount of personnel. Statistics suggest that by 1500 almost 10% of the inhabitants of the towns and cities in the empire were members of the clergy, perennially praying or saying mass.

Alongside mass, another way to shorten time in purgatory of oneself and one’s loved ones were pilgrimages to see famous relics. You may remember Johannes Gutenberg’s business venture making mirrors for the pilgrimage to Aachen. He had planned a production run of 50,000 catering for the one hundred thousand pilgrims expected to come to the city. Relics were incredibly powerful. The church in Wittenberg – the one that Martin Luther may or may not have nailed his 95 theses on – housed the 17,443 relics that made up the astounding collection of his prince, Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony. These relics, if properly venerated could reduce a person’s stay in purgatory by a 1,902,202 years. Pilgrims came in their tens of thousands, filling the princely coffers, which in turn funded the university where Martin Luther taught.

Which gets us full circle to the beginning. The town of Wittenberg, its brand new university, its castle church and its soon to be world famous professor of bible studies.

More about him and the most egregious ways to reduce time in purgatory in two weeks’ time. I hope you will join us again. And as I said, any feedback is welcome, as long as it is honest and well-meaning.