Episode 243 – Fame, Friends, Foes and a Fat Marmot

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Episode 243: Fame, Friends, Foes and a Fat Marmot

On August 23^rd, 1518 Pope Leo X wrote to the elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, the protector of Martin Luther: quote:

“Beloved son, the apostolic benediction be upon you. We recall that the chief ornament of your most noble family has been devotion to the faith of God and to the honor and dignity of the Holy See. Now we hear that a son of iniquity, Brother Martin Luther of the Augustinian eremites, hurling himself upon the Church of God, has your support. Even though we know it to be false, we must urge you to clear the reputation of your noble family from such calumny. Having been advised by the Master of the Sacred Palace that Luther’s teaching contains heresy, we have cited him to appear before Cardinal Cajetan. We call upon you to see that Luther is placed in the hands and under the jurisdiction of this Holy See lest future generations reproach you with having fostered the rise of a most pernicious heresy against the Church of God” end quote

A few weeks later the future reformer was on his way to meet said Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg, facing what may well have been the most dangerous moment of his life, much more dangerous than his journey to Worms two and a half years later. Cajetan was not just the papal legate to the empire with immense legal powers, he was also a man whose intellectual ability easily matched his and – unbeknownst to Luther – who carried with him an authorisation to arrest him and send him to Rome to be burned.

The story of how he got into this situation and how close he and his ideas came to being expunged and what all that has to do with a man the papacy called a Fat Marmot is what we are going to talk about today.

But before we start, I would like to thank you all for your understanding that the show has gone bi-weekly. I know that for many of you l0istening to the show had become part of your weekly routine, and now you need something else. Can I suggest my friends from the History of England, of Italy and of Venice? You will be in good hands there. On the plus side, my life has become immeasurably better. To be frank, the weekly schedule had been draining the joy out of making the podcast a little bit. But with two weeks between episodes, I can meander down rabbit holes and compare the secondary and primary sources once again, which is the real fun of doing this. I hope you do find this results in some quality improvement, and if not, my family still sends their regards…

And talking about gratitude, it is once again time to acknowledge the kindness of listeners who drop their hard-earned groschen into the collection box at historyofthegermans.com/support, kind souls like Uwe W., Emily C., Hannes E., MSG, Eirik, Craig L., Trevor O. L. PB and Jim L. Why don’t you join them and bask in the glow of your fellow listeners’ gratitude?

And with that, back to the show.

Fame

Last time we saw Luther rise from obscure professor of Bible studies at a brand-new university in the back of beyond to one of the best-known men in the empire. And what is remarkable is not just how fast that happened, but how many different groups of people saw in him what they wanted to see.

There were the imperial reformers, the men who had been drawing up the Gravamina, the grievances of the German nation, for the best part of a century. For them the 95 theses were the perfect expression of what they had always said: that Rome was fleecing the German sheep to pay for palaces, nephews and wars. Here was a man of unquestioned piety, an observant friar no less, saying the same thing, only better.

There were the humanists. Erasmus of Rotterdam had been poking fun at relic-mongers, pilgrimage-junkies and greedy prelates for years. He read the theses and sent them on to his friends, including Thomas More in England. In Nürnberg, Albrecht Dürer was so thrilled, he offered to send Luther one of his prints as a token of his appreciation and asked to paint him. For them, Luther was one of their own, a man going back to the sources, to the Bible and the church fathers, rather than wading through yet another scholastic commentary on a commentary on a commentary on Aristotle.

There were the friars and monks, in particular Luther’s own Augustinians, who had heard him in Heidelberg and found in his theology of the cross an answer to their own spiritual exhaustion. As we heard last time, he went out on foot and came back in a wagon.

And then there were the common people, who had bought the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace in their thousands, a six-page consumer advice booklet that told them in plain German not to waste their money on overhyped pieces of paper and to give it to the poor instead.

Four constituencies, four very different Luthers. The reformers’ Luther was a German patriot. The humanists’ Luther was an enlightened scholar. The friars’ Luther was a spiritual guide. And the people’s Luther was the plain-speaking man who told it like it was. Luther himself was probably none of these, or rather all of them and a fair bit more besides.

Foes

But fame comes with a price tag. And the bill was now being presented.

The first to push back had been the Dominicans. Johann Tetzel was a Dominican, the indulgence business was very much a Dominican business, and the Dominicans also happened to run the inquisition. We heard last time about Tetzel’s 106 counter-theses and the bonfire the Wittenberg students made of them. In Cologne the Dominican inquisitor Jakob van Hoogstraten was now sharpening his quill, and in Rome the Master of the Sacred Palace, aka the pope’s chief theologian, and also a Dominican, had condemned Luther as a heretic, not for his views on indulgences, but for standing up against the infallible pope. These men were not interested in debate. As far as they were concerned, the case was closed, and the only open question was the sort of firewood to use on the pyre.

The Dominicans, Luther could have predicted. What surprised him though was a second group, conservative German academics.

Top of that list was Johannes Eck, professor at Ingolstadt and the most feared debater in Germany. Eck had written a set of comments on the 95 theses and called them the Obelisci. An obelus was the little dagger sign medieval scribes used to mark spurious or corrupt passages in a text. In other words, Eck had marked up Luther’s homework and found it wanting. Luther answered with what he called his Asterisci – the little stars scribes used to highlight particularly valuable passages. Having read parts of it, I have to say even Asterix and Obelix at the Goths is funnier.

What hurt Luther even more was the reaction of his old teachers in Erfurt, the men who had taught him his philosophy and his Aristotle, and who now found their former student declaring that everything they had taught him was a waste of time at best and a sin at worst. When Luther stopped in Erfurt on his way back from Heidelberg and tried to talk them round, he got nowhere.

And finally there was the pope. The Curia had opened formal proceedings against Luther in the summer of 1518. The entire weight of the Roman Church was to fall on our gaunt little monk.

I have been doing this for five years now and for five years I have run again and again into the problem of explaining the power of the church. Because on the one side, the pope struggled to control his comparatively modest sized territory in central Italy, his college of cardinals was shot through with corruption and malice to the point of assassination attempts on his holiness. But on the other hand, the pope sat atop an organisation that spread its tentacles into every single little village of Western Europe, controlled by some estimates as much as a third of all the land and employed maybe 5 to 10% of its workforce. There has never been a larger, more powerful supranational organisation than the Roman Church. And the pope did not think that the church was the aberration, but that the monarchies and city states were the oddities. That the true order was one where they should all be in total obedience to him. Pope Julius II, the predecessor of Leo X had coins minted that presented him as Julius Pontifex and Caesar.

This organisation had made an emperor kneel in the snow outside the castle of Canossa and had wiped out the medieval empire of the Hohenstaufen down to the third degree. And it was now coming after Martin Luther.

If you ask me what I think the most fascinating aspect of the Reformation history is, it is that Luther survived the years 1518 and 1519.

Friends

What kept Luther alive through all this were his friends. And his circle of friends was changing.

His old mentor Johann von Staupitz, the vicar general of the Augustinians, was gradually receding into the background. Staupitz loved his difficult protégé, but he was a churchman of the old school who believed in reform through gentleness and personal piety, and he could see where Luther’s road was leading. He would stand by him one more time, as we will see shortly, but then they would part ways.

In his place came a new circle mostly from the University of Wittenberg. There was Andreas Karlstadt, the colleague who had awarded Luther his doctorate and who, having set out to refute him, had ended up converted – combative, learned and impatient. And there was the newest member of the faculty, Philipp Melanchthon, a 21-year-old Wunderkind who arrived in August 1518 to take the new chair in Greek and bowled everyone over with his inaugural lecture. He would very quickly become Luther’s closest and longest-suffering collaborator. Beyond Wittenberg there were friends in Nürnberg and elsewhere – Wenzeslaus Linck, Willibald Pirckheimer, Christoph Scheurl and Dürer among them.

And one friendship would turn into an immensely powerful weapon: that with Lucas Cranach, court painter to the elector of Saxony and one of the richest men in Wittenberg. His workshop churned out altarpieces, portraits and woodcuts by the hundred. There is a delicious irony here, since Cranach’s biggest commissions ever, was for Albrecht of Brandenburg, the man who was in charge of the St. Peter’s indulgences and arguably had caused all that kerfuffle. Cranach was in the business of advertising the old faith before he went into the business of advertising the new one. In 1520 he would give Luther a face, with the first portrait engraving. Luther’s words and Cranach’s images – that combination would prove almost unbeatable. But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

Another important friendship, however, was not at the university but at court. In fact, at court Luther did not have friends; he had exactly one friend. And that was Georg Spalatin, the elector’s secretary, chaplain, librarian and go-between with his university – a gentle, scholarly and exceedingly discreet man. Luther would write him hundreds of letters over the coming years, not just asking for political air cover, but sharing much of his theology, ideas, personal fears and hopes.

In August 1518 Luther might have great fame and a circle of smart and well connected friends, but neither of these could have stopped his impending extradition to Rome. The only one who could and did save Luther from certain death was an old man, a cautious man who had avoided war all his life, a man so overweight, a papal envoy described him as a fat marmot – Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, his prince.

The Fat Marmot

Even though it is recognised by all concerned that without Frederick the Wise, Luther would have been burned at the stake and the Reformation would have taken a very different turn, if any at all, the man himself is usually portrayed as a ponderous, superannuated, distant, hesitant operator whose intentions and convictions are rooted more in his pride than in his faith.

And that is not only not fair, but also not very helpful. Contrary to the general perception, Frederick had not always been old or even overweight. When he took over as Elector way back in 1486, he was 23 years old. Dürer painted him as a fashionable young prince, looking svelte in his tight fitting doublet with black and gold slashed sleeves and trimmed beard. Like his fellow aristocrats he loved hunting, going out almost every day. A Renaissance prince who built a number of palaces, not just in Wittenberg but also the magnificent castle Hartenfels in Torgau. He employed the greatest artists of his time; Lucas Cranach was his court painter, Hans Burgkmair, Peter Vischer and Albrecht Dürer executed his commissions. He was a humanist, fairly fluent in Latin and corresponded with Erasmus. 

So far, so normal. But in other respects he was not your run of the mill 15^th century German prince.

For one, in the 39 years he ruled his half of Saxony, he did not once fight a war. He came close a few times, but always found a compromise at the last minute. And that wasn’t because he kept out of politics – quite the opposite. He was one of the most astute political players in the empire, a loyal but independent ally of Maximilian and a driving force behind the imperial reforms of 1495 to 1500, the Perpetual Peace, the Reichskammergericht and the Reichsregiment, which we covered in episodes 223 to 225. and the interview with Professor Duncan Hardy).

His involvement in imperial politics was always guided by the idea that the weakness of the empire was largely down to the incessant feuding, which in turn was a consequence of weak or non-existent institutions. Whilst he swung back and forth in his allegiance to Maximilian, this desire for peace and stability was his consistent political objective.

This consistency brought him the reputation of an honest broker who could negotiate solutions the parties could live with. He was a listener who thought before he spoke. He controlled his emotions and had made sitting on the fence an art form. His seniority, political skill and position as one of the seven electors, made Frederick the most respected prince in the empire.

He was also one of the wealthiest. Though the House of Wettin had split its huge possessions in two after the Leipzig division of 1485, see episode 200, the part that Frederick ruled still produced 65,000 Gulden per year. That alone put him into the top level of imperial princes, but the reason he had a lot more than others was his sensible management. He did spend a lot of money on his castles, on good works and his appearances at imperial diets, but he never spent more than he had, hence never had to take out loans with the Augsburg bankers and never found himself squeezed dry like so many others. A wise man indeed.

Being sensible with money allowed him to fund his university in Wittenberg, amass his remarkable collection of relics and even spend the mindboggling sum of 200,000 Gulden, three years his gross income, on the church and monastery of All Saints in Wittenberg.

He was a man of profound piety. Piety in the late medieval sense. He was seeking salvation through good works. And such good works included not just his boundless striving for peace, but also a string of pilgrimages, almost every year. In 1493 he went on the biggest of them all, he travelled to Jerusalem where he was made a knight in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Such a journey was perilous in dozens of ways, fleecing Venetian shipmasters, pirates of every faith, disease, and the risk of being held for ransom if anyone realised who he was.” Still he went.

So, here we are, Frederick the Wise was an unusual man long before he decided to protect Martin Luther. A truly sensible prince who sought compromise rather than conflict, who was well versed in the complexities of imperial politics and also a religious man deeply embedded in the traditional patterns of Christian belief. And in that latter respect, a man very much like Martin Luther. They both started out seeking salvation along the established paths laid out by the Roman church, and as Luther moved precipitously ahead, Frederick followed, slowly, cautiously, considering every step carefully, as he had done all his life, following his motto – Tantum Quantum Possum – which does not involve more exotic fauna, but simply means “as much as I can”.

Let’s see what he could do.

The papal summons

We are now in early August 1518. Prierias had declared “Martin Luther’s presumptuous theses concerning the power of the pope” as heresy and Luther was ordered to present himself in Rome within 60 days from receipt of this letter to stand trial.

Unbeknownst to him, the emperor Maximilian himself had written to the pope and asked him to put an end to the seditious activities of this obstinate friar. Maximilian had stumbled across Luther’s view that excommunication and imperial ban had been overused and should be constrained. Given the ban was one of the few remaining tools in the emperor’s political arsenal, that was not on.

On August 23^rd Pope Leo X wrote the letter to Frederick we heard at the top of the episode urging Frederick the Wise to apprehend Luther and hand him over. Similar instructions went out to the head of the Augustinian order in Germany.

The noose around Luther’s neck was tightening.

Luther, upon receipt of his citation to Rome, wrote to Spalatin, his friend and go-between to Frederick the Wise, asking for help. He was prepared to defend his position, and if properly instructed was of course willing to recant. However, in Rome, that cesspit of devious Italians, no fair hearing could be obtained. He asked whether their prince, Frederick the Wise, could arrange for the hearing to take place on German soil and before German judges.

At that precise moment Spalatin and Frederick the Wise were at the imperial diet of Augsburg. That is where they received Luther’s letter, as well as the demand from Pope Leo X. It was to Augsburg that Frederick was to dispatch Luther, where the newly appointed papal legate to Germany, Thomas Cajetan was to take him over and send him to Rome.

Frederick the Wise was now in a difficult position. On the one hand, the pope had called Luther a son of iniquity, a notorious heretic. Pope Leo had threatened to reproach him “with having fostered the rise of a most pernicious heresy against the Church of God”. Basically, harbouring such a man could have very serious repercussions, all the way up to excommunication.

Frederick was also likely aware of the emperor’s wish to have Luther silenced, adding the risk of an imperial ban to the list. And if both of these came through, his cousin in Dresden would likely jump on the bandwagon, invade his home, throw him and his brother out into the street and reunite the Wettin lands once again. The existence of his whole state was in jeopardy. No sensible prince would risk that much for the benefit of just one meagre friar, and a very meagre one he was at the time.

But then, Frederick was not like the other girls.

Luther and his theses had gained a lot of traction even amongst the imperial princes. During that same diet here in Augsburg the bishop of Liège had taken the stage to complain about the constantly rising tariffs for papal approvals, investitures, signatures and other endless paperwork. He called Rome a place inhabited by the sons of Nimrod forever hunting for benefices. Day and night they thought about loopholes in canon law so as to make more gold fly south across the alps than even Atlas could carry. In the thundering applause the name of Luther was whispered from pew to pew. Frederick had been a champion of imperial reform, a man who had supported the gravamina of the German nation. What would people say if he dropped the new champion of the resistance to Rome? And what would the world say if his great prestige project, the new university in Wittenberg, had to close once its star professor went up in flames.

And then there was the fact that at no point in his 39 years as Elector had Frederick the Wise been more powerful than in the 12 months leading up to the election of Charles V on June 28^th 1519. The election campaign had just begun, again at this self-same diet of Augsburg. The emperor Maximilian was gravely ill, and as we know now, had barely five months left to live.

We covered the election not so long ago in episode 235, but just to recap. This was the make or break election. Two candidates were in play, Maximilian’s grandson Charles, the king of Spain and duke of Burgundy and Francis I, the glamorous king of France in the other. It was Habsburg versus France, a rivalry that went back to 1477 and would dominate the European system of alliances until 1756. It would also answer the question John of Salisbury had posed way back in 1160: quote “Who has constituted the Germans judges of the nations? Who has conferred authority on these brutal and impetuous men of electing at their will a prince over the sons of men?” end quote Many believed that if France walked away with the imperial crown now, it would never return to German hands. The pope wanted neither of these men on the imperial throne, as both were breathing down his neck in Italy.

With that much at stake, bribes were flowing like never before and never again. And if you had not yet clocked that Frederick was unusual for his time and his class, here is the final proof. Of the seven electors, he was the only one not to take a single penny in bribes, not one. Instead he insisted that he and the other electors should choose their leader on merit, that the vote should be free. Frederick could not be bribed! And that made him the  most respected and hence most powerful of all the electors.

And so Frederick used this position to push through another one of his famous compromises. He met the papal legate, Thomas Cajetan and offered the following deal. Yes, he would get Luther to come to Augsburg. Not in chains, but as a free man. And this would not be a trial or pre-trial, but a fatherly instruction to the wayward monk, should indeed the monk be wayward after all. There were many in the German universities who regarded Luther’s views as Christian, so a debate needed to be had to get to the bottom of this.

Cajetan took the deal, largely for two reasons. One was that he indeed did not want to upset Frederick right in the middle of the election campaign. And the other was, that he fully believed he could get Luther to recant.

So, who was Thomas Cajetan and why did he believe he could swing Luther’s mind?

Tommaso de Vio, called Cajetan after his hometown of Gaeta, was another Dominican, until recently master general of the entire order, and one of the foremost thinkers of his age. His commentary on Thomas Aquinas had rejuvenated the somewhat sclerotic scholastic theology. He was scrupulously honest by the standards of the Curia, had demanded reforms to the excesses of the Renaissance papacy and he was a first-class debater. This was not some blustering inquisitor or provincial academic of the kind Luther had faced up to so far. In many ways Cajetan was the best opponent Rome could have sent – and that was part of the problem. Cajetan had studied Luther’s writings carefully, and he had concluded that this was not about indulgences at all, but about the foundations of the church as an institution.

The Meeting with Cajetan

Luther set out from Wittenberg at the end of September 1518, on foot, as the Augustinian rule required. He travelled via Weimar and Nürnberg where his friend Wenzeslaus Linck joined him, and lent him a better cowl, because Luther’s own was too shabby to appear before a cardinal in. Whereas before he had been dimly aware of the risks he was taking, this had now become very, very real. Throughout the journey, only one thought kept going round his head: “Now I must die. And what a disgrace I shall be to my parents.” This endless doom loop was only interrupted by bouts of terrible intestinal pain and constipation, so painful he had to get on a cart for the last miles into the city of Augsburg.

Why did he go? He could have just stayed in Wittenberg and ignored the summons. But that is not what Luther cared about. He was convinced he could move the minds of the church leadership. If they would listen to his arguments, he might just bring about the reform the church so obviously needed, saving millions of souls in the process. Yes, it was a huge risk he was taking, he might burn on the pyre, but it was a risk worth taking. Cajetan had promised to hear him out, and he was a smart man, an intellectual and most importantly, an honest man.

Luther arrived on October 7^th and took up lodgings with the Carmelite friars at St. Anna, St. Anna being the church that housed the Fugger chapel, the architectural miracle we discussed in episode 194. Frederick himself had already left the city, a typical Frederick move. He had made the arrangements, but he could not risk standing next to a man accused of heresy.

Five days later, on October 12^th Luther went to see the legate, who was staying in the palatial houses of the Fugger family on the Weinmarkt. This building was then the largest and most lavish dwelling in the entire empire. Jakob Fugger was richer than any prince, richer even than the emperor. And it showed in the sequence of courtyards, the magnificent frescoes and sculptures, and the lavishly decorated state rooms.

Luther had been briefed on etiquette. He prostrated himself before the cardinal, then got to his  knees, and, at Cajetan’s bidding, rose to his feet. Cajetan was polite, even friendly. He addressed Luther as “my dear son”.

It is always difficult to put yourself into the shoes of someone who lived 500 years ago, but let me try to convert Luther’s experience in Augsburg into a modern day scenario. Imagine you are the regional sales rep in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. You have put out a meme that basically says that one of your products is a bit shit and should be taken off the production line. Somehow that meme has gone viral from Alaska to Washington, even people in Japan and Korea are giggling at your antics. So you are summoned to headquarters in New York. It’s your first trip out of the Midwest, apart from that sales conference in Paris years ago, where society lived at odds with your mid-western values and the Eiffel Tower was a bit disappointing. Now you sit on the 5 hour flight to New York and one thought goes round your head, I will be fired, I will be fired, and what will my wife and the kids say. You have been to the bathroom six times and the stewardess is looking at you with a mixture of pity and suspicion. Next day you wake up in your cheap hotel room in Brooklyn and travel on the A train downtown. You notice that all the wool clad bankers stare at your polyester suit from Macy’s. When you arrive at headquarters you are sent up to the 108^th floor and you are sitting in a meeting room full of mildly menacing modern art and views that take in both the Statue of Liberty and Central Park. You feel once again the urge to go to the bathroom when the door opens and the global head of sales comes in and says, well, son….

What is going to happen now? Even if you are convinced you are right, you have some strong reasons why the product should be taken off and you are doing this to help the company  succeed, you are still so far on the back foot. There is no way you are going to win the argument. That is where Luther was in Augsburg in 1518. He had never met a cardinal before, he was on unfamiliar territory, he was super stressed out – and so stuff came out of his mouth he may have regretted afterwards…

I have read about six or seven accounts of the proceedings and they all differ. Luther published his account shortly after the event, trying to make himself look good, whilst Cajetan wrote letters back to Rome telling his superiors he had done everything he could. So we do not really know.

What is agreed though is that the meeting did not go well. The German Augustinian with a hatred of the scholastics and the Italian Dominican who revered Thomas Aquinas had no common ground. They debated the exact wording and meaning of the papal bull Unigenitus from 1343 that introduced the Treasury of Merit. That descended into what  can only be described as nitpicking over some wording. They then moved on to a discussion about whether sacraments were effective, even if there was an absence of faith. This had a bit more substance, but Cajetan refused to get too deep into the matter. He kept telling Luther to recant and be done with it. So, it ended up with shouting, according to Luther mainly coming from Cajetan and according to Cajetan, mainly coming from Luther.

Cajetan’s impression was one of surprise and relief. This babbling barbarian was the famous Martin Luther who had written all these toxic treatises and whose arch heresies were threatening the church? This did not compute.

Cajetan called an end to the meeting and suggested Luther come back in a few days when he had calmed down, fully expecting him to recant.

Luther did return, but not to recant. He arrived, fully lawyered up, with a notary, four imperial counsellors and Staupitz as his witnesses. He read out a prepared statement where he submitted to the judgement of the church, but only if the case was heard in Germany and adjudicated by the university of either Basel, Freiburg, Leuven or Paris. Cajetan sighed and said that there wasn’t really anything to debate and he should simply recant. If he did, he, Cajetan, would do everything in his power to reconcile him with the church.

With no conclusion reached, Luther was dismissed but given one more opportunity to respond in writing. Another, similar document, was produced, another meeting took place and once more the two sides failed to see eye to eye. Luther later complained that the cardinal had shouted at him ten times and not let him get a word in edgeways. Luther, it has to be said, was not a man known for keeping his voice down either. In the end, Cajetan threw him out and told him not come back unless you are ready to recant.

Sometime later, Cajetan is reported to have said that he would not talk to this beast anymore, quote: “for he has deep eyes and wonderful speculations in his head”.

Luther for his part said that the cardinal was about as fit to handle his case “as a donkey was to play the harp”. The tone of political debate had clearly taken a turn for the worse in the 16^th century.

Flight from Augsburg

Luther did not recant. Meanwhile the city of Augsburg was abuzz with rumours that Luther might be arrested and sent to Rome any day now. He had received a safe conduct, but many remembered Jan Hus who had been burned in Constance despite his safe conduct.

And this was the moment Johann von Staupitz released Luther from his vow of obedience to the Augustinian order. As long as Luther was under obedience, his superiors could be ordered to hand him over, as the general of the Augustinians had already been ordered to. Now, Luther was on his own. Nobody could order him to go to Rome, and nobody in the order could be held responsible for not delivering him there. Staupitz is said to have told him, quote: “Remember, brother, that you started this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. And then Staupitz and Linck quietly left Augsburg.

Staupitz might have meant it as a favour to his protégé, but that is not how it was received. At that crucial juncture Luther felt suddenly entirely alone and abandoned. He had lived in the close knit monastic community of the Augustinians for 15 years. It was his home and Staupitz was his ersatz father. He would later say that he was “excommunicated three times, first by Staupitz, then by the pope and finally by the emperor”.

Luther waited a few more days.

He wrote a conciliatory letter to Cajetan, apologising for his intemperate tone. No reply. He drew up a formal appeal “from the pope badly informed to the pope to be better informed”, a time-honoured legal device that basically said the pope had been misled by his advisers and would surely decide differently once he knew all the facts.

And then, on the night of October 20^th, his friends in the city got him out. A sympathetic city councillor had arranged for a small gate in the city wall to be opened. Luther was put on a horse – not something an Augustinian friar was used to – with no breeches, no boots, no spurs and no weapon, and rode off into the night with a guide. He rode so hard that when he finally reached the inn at Monheim, some 50 kilometres north, he could not stand up and collapsed in the straw of the stable.

Two days after he had gone, his appeal was nailed to the door of Augsburg cathedral.

He madehis way to Nürnberg, to his friends there. And it was in Nürnberg that he got to see the papal brief Cajetan had received from Rome to guide their conversation. He read that he had been declared a notorious heretic, a reprobate Augustinian, a pest infecting the minds of the simple, all without a hearing, and only a fortnight after he had received his 60 day citation. If he failed to recant in Augsburg he and all his adherents and followers were to be anathematized, excommunicated and cursed and any prince, city, corporation or magistrate that gave him shelter was to be placed under interdict.

In other words, the debate with Cajetan had been a farce from beginning to end. There had never been a fair hearing. The huge risk he took in going to Augsburg had always been for nought.

He was so outraged that he could not believe the letter was genuine. It had to be a forgery cooked up by his enemies. But it was genuine. And for Luther that was a revelation. Up to that point he had always assumed that the pope was badly informed, that if only he could get his case heard, the truth would win out. But that had never been on the cards. Cajetan’s fatherly demeanour had been but a trap to lure him to Augsburg. And if Rome was prepared to run its procedures like that, what else could it be trusted with?

As for Cajetan, he too did take something away from this altercation with Luther. He realised that indeed indulgences had no firm dogmatic foundations. He wrote up a more formal justification of the concept of the treasury of merit and the way the church, specifically the pope could dispose of it. This was a fairly conservative reading of the dogma, but it did contain a number of Luther’s ideas, specifically about curbing the excesses of the indulgence sellers. This document was turned into the Bull “Cum Postquam”. After that the debate on indulgences calmed down a lot, also in part because the indulgence sales had shrunk to a mere trickle.

But it was too little, too late. Even if this shut down the indulgences discussions, the debate had moved on. It was now all about the power of the papacy. Prierias had opened up this can of worms , and after the shock of finding out the pope had condemned him without even hearing him out, Luther was not going to let that one go without a fight.

Life on the Knife’s Edge

Luther arrived back in Wittenberg on October 31^st, 1518, exactly one year to the day after he had sent his 95 theses to Albrecht of Mainz. What a year.

Cajetan, meanwhile, had written to Frederick on October 25^th. He was furious. He had kept his side of the bargain, given the friar a fatherly hearing, and the friar had refused to recant and then run away in the night. He demanded that Frederick either send Luther to Rome or at the very least banish him from his lands. And he added a not very veiled warning that the elector should not stain the glory of his house for the sake of one little friar.

Now Frederick was in serious trouble. As for the Augsburg debate he could always say that he had been asked to deliver Luther to Augsburg and that is what he had done. It could not have been his fault the friar escaped. He was not there at the time and it was Cajetan who had let him slip through his fingers.

But now the situation was different. If he kept Luther under his protection in Wittenberg, there was no plausible deniability. It was decision time. A nuncio, Karl von Miltitz was on his way, bringing carrot and stick. The carrot was the golden rose, the highest honour the pope could bestow on a layman, a sort of medieval Nobel Peace Prize; the stick was the threat of excommunication which would have been followed by imperial ban. And that was serious. Just ask duke Ulrich of Wurttemberg who had been banned at Augsburg and who was preparing for an invasion by the Swabian League at that precise moment.

Frederick, through Spalatin, told Luther to keep a low profile for now. Maybe all this would wash over if only the monk stayed stumm.

Luther’s response was – ah, sure, only there was a small problem. He had already written up his side of the debate at Augsburg and that had not only gone to the printers, the printers had already sent out some copies. In other words, this document was already in the public domain. And this document, the Acta Augustana, was another masterstroke. Unsurprisingly Luther painted himself as the better debater with not just the stronger arguments, but even superior mastery of Latin than the great Thomist Cajetan. But what struck a real chord with his German audience was first to include the papal instruction to excommunicate Luther and everyone associated with him without a hearing followed by his description of Cajetan as a haughty Italian who used crafty snares to lure an honest and straightforward German into heresy whilst his coterie of Roman hangers on sniggered at the provincial manners and clothing of the friar from the back of beyond. Once again he played the whole gamut of German prejudices and insecurities.

And still not to be shut up, he demanded a general council to discuss the ills of the church and adjudicate his case. Not even Luther could have been naïve enough to believe the papacy after decades of suppressing the conciliar movement would yield to his request.

So, what was all this about? Well, as much as he professed he wanted to keep his lord out of his troubles, these publications were meant to achieve exactly that. The more publicity his case got and the more it became a story of honest German versus perfidious Italians, the more Frederick the Wise was compelled to side with him.

But would it be enough for Frederick to risk his land and life on his behalf? Not likely.

Luther packed his things. He said his goodbyes. And on December 1^st, 1518, he invited his friends to a farewell dinner in Wittenberg.

Saved in the Final Hour

It must have been a strange evening. Here was a man who, a little over a year earlier, had been an obscure professor in a small town on the Elbe. Now he was the most talked-about man in Germany, and he was about to leave everything behind – his friary, his university, his students, his pulpit – to go into exile, with no idea where he could go. Paris had been mentioned, but who knew whether the king of France would protect him or whether the pope’s agents would catch up with him on the road.

During the meal, a letter arrived from Spalatin. The elector, it said, was wondering why Doctor Martin had not yet left.

Everyone around the table fell silent. That was it. Frederick had made his decision. The protection was withdrawn. Luther later said he was deeply saddened, but in a sense also relieved. At least now he knew where he stood. He’d put himself in God’s hands and go.

And then, before the evening was over, a second letter arrived, again from Spalatin. If Doctor Martin had not yet gone, he was to stay.

What had happened in those few hours at the court? We don’t know. Perhaps Frederick had been testing the waters. Perhaps news had come in from Rome or from the imperial court. Perhaps the slow, cautious, endlessly deliberating elector had simply, finally, made up his mind. Whatever it was, Luther was not going to Paris. He was staying in Wittenberg, under the protection of his prince.

It is hard to overstate what this moment meant. Had Luther left Saxony in December 1518, he would have been a fugitive friar, released from his order, condemned by the pope, with no prince, no university and no printing presses behind him. He might have survived in Paris. He might not. But there would have been no Leipzig, no Worms, no Wartburg, no German Bible.

The Reformation as we know it was saved by a letter of two lines, written by a secretary on behalf of a man who never once sat down and talked to the person whose life he was saving, a man who the next papal nuncio Girolamo Aleandro called a fat marmot with the eyes of a dog, never looking straight at his questioners. That quote stuck and in the German imagination he has remained forever the most cautious, most tentative of its consequential rulers.

Why Frederick did it, how he explained himself to an increasingly impatient Rome, and what Luther did with the reprieve he had been given is what we will discuss next time.

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