The Vatican as a World Power/Chapter 9
SACK OF ROME
The fortunes of the Papacy, the deeds and misdeeds of the men who occupied the Roman See during the time of the Renaissance, the German Religious Revolution and the Counter-Reform undertaken by the Catholic Church, bring to mind a saying by that great humanist, -^Eneas Silvio: 'The apostolic ship often founders but it never sinks; it is often shaken, but it is never broken up." On the other hand Saint Martin, a mystic, later on termed the Church the strength of the Papacy; and in this sentence he came far nearer the truth than he did in the antithetical statement that the Papacy is the weakness of the Church. For we must remember that the vigorous protests of the Church against weak and wicked Popes were normally also a silent apotheosis of the Papal Sec,
No one has ever questioned the significance of this institution for the Eternal City, but many have debated about its connection with the imperium Romanum of antiquity. On this subject opinions differ widely in all ages. Edmund Gibbon, looking back upon Gregory the Great, was of the opinion that Rome had always contained within itself the law that governs its life. Hippolyte Taine believed that the Papacy had retained too much of the spirit of the Roman Empire and of Latin culture. Nietzsche, on the other hand, reproached Christen- dom with having corrupted Rome; and Goethe, wandering over the Seven Hills, refused to judge the past in accordance with his own ideas and sought to understand the greatness which confronted his gaze. One thing is surely true: antique Rome lived on in Christian Rome, and this even in times oblivious of Christ has constituted the political backbone of religious life in Europe. This it certainly was until the Rome of the Renaissance placed God beneath the gods. It lost the inner world of the first and the seventh Gregorys and with that the right to exercise power for the sake of faith.
The triumph of humanism did not come about unexpectedly. Men recalled to mind the Greek influence on early Christian thinkers and teachers. Cassiadorc had abandoned politics for the study of the ancient writers, and on these the cultural life of the courts of Charlemagne and Otto was fed. Cicero, Ovid, Terence and Seneca
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were read in the monasteries. Plato and soon after him Aristotle (though he was sharply attacked) nurtured Scholasticism. The Averroists in the secular schools of Paris soon found themselves pat- ently separating reason from faith. Dante still lived and wrote out of the feeling that these were one; and throughout a lifelong struggle Petrarch clung to that unity. After they were dead a change took place in Naples, Florence and other cities a change which led to a partly philosophical, partly aesthetic coolness to the spiritual world of the Middle Ages. In these cities and in the Rome of the Renaissance Popes, there were made manifest about 1500 things that had long since been in preparation in the dolce stil nuovo, in Scholasticism, and also in mysticism. The number of men who were estranged from the older conception of the supernatural increased. The arts of the Renaissance, if one excludes a few of its products, were no longer in- spired by the power of religion to give expression to its convictions, but grew out of the states of mind in which self-reliant man may find himself. To these artists religion became merely the subject-matter, the object, and the complex of symbols by which they gave expression to human points of view arising from within themselves. Some- times also it was no more than a storehouse of conventional fancies that could be put to aesthetic use. For already there were many who could not live without art many who differed radically in this respect from Bernard of Clairvaux who banished art lest it obscure the splen- dour of the inner life that had been vouchsafed to him. Art and inr tellectual activity were not to replace what had been lost. In this, as in many other periods during which they have flourished, they became symptoms of a defeatist pessimism face to face with existence. The magnificent human figures of the time wrestle with an inner spiritual chaos. Only a few artists confessed, as did MichaeUngelo, that in painting and sculpture alone is there no peace.
Hardly one among the ten Popes who reigned during this period of flourishing Roman culture can be recognized as a religious figure. It may be said in mitigation of the blame that rests upon most of them that there was a kind of natural barrier between these Romans and the innermost meaning of Christ's message. Characteristic of virtually all of them was readiness to take a role in th- . irama which He who
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was thrice tempted by the Devil once enacted as an example for those who were to be His viceroys on earth. Everyone knows the Renais- sance Popes and knows the worst ones best. What they did for Rome abides as a service to humanity; what they left undone and what they did ignobly (perhaps these things are not separable from the service, for saints do not function as warlords, builders, and fosterers of the arts) the Church must pay for in the coinage of historical satire to which there is no reply save the answer of her Master that He had given Satan power also over His own.
The political events which took place on the European scene during this period were dominated by the rise of the Spanish Habsburg power and by the efforts of the other great powers, among which were the territorial sovereigns of the two central states of the old Empire, Ger- many and Italy, to oppose that rise. But though they were divided among themselves, the nations continued to develop an autonomous cultural life. France became the most determined rival of the Span- ish Habsburg House. After it had concluded the war with England, it effected the collapse of the hostile state of Burgundy and strength- ened its own power through the King's successful resistance to the nobles. It was again in a position to assume leadership in the trend toward absolute monarchy which was so marked a characteristic of the first half of the sixteenth century, and to foster its imperialistic plans in Italy. The governing idea was to gain control of the states of the eastern Mediterranean area. After a successful expedition enabled Charles VIII (1494) for a time to subject Italy to French influence, the fortunes of the peninsula were bound up with the outcome of the great contest between Spain and France. The prelude to this contest had been the struggle between the Houses of Aragon and Anjou for control of Southern Italy, Then the Spanish kingdom and Germany (France's ancient rivals) were united in the one empire of Charles V; and Francis I found himself in danger of being overwhelmed by the universal monarchy.
Since Germany was meanwhile split into two camps by the Refor- mation, the religious question also became a political factor in this struggle between Charles and Francis. The dissolution of the spiritual unity of Europe, long since preceded by a political centrifugalism,
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was made permanent by the opposition of France and Spain. The "most Christian King" had the greatest interest in keeping the Ger- man upheaval from subsiding. He supported Protestant princes be- cause they were opponents of the Emperor, and was thus logically compelled to accord a certain toleration to a new faith which was soon to endanger the French national monarchy when it produced the re- publican movement of the Hugenots. Meanwhile Charles V, though obliged to cherish the Catholic unity which held the many peoples under his dominion together in an Empire which had no other bond, came into conflict both with the nationalism of the new teaching and also with the universalism of the Papacy, then as always the natural antagonist of his universal Empire. Therefore he had to outlaw Lu- ther and yet to take arms against the Curia, which used France against him in order to protect its own territorial power. The paradoxical spectacle of troops of a Catholic Empire inimical to heretics burning and plundering the city of the Pope (the sack of Rome) re-emphasized more impressively than ever had been done in the Middle Ages the irreconcilability of a real Empire with a politically powerful Papacy. This irreconcilability was and remained the source of misfortune in the Church regardless of whether the ancient rights of the patrimonium Petri were defended or whether the nationalistic ideal of Italy and its cultural hegemony were served. Once the temporal possessions of the Papacy had had a great significance and mission; but for a long rime this had not been the case. The Popes were harassed by con- cern over their power, and therewith lost the superior claim to uni- versal respect which alone could have unified the great powers against the threat of Tartar and Mohammedan invasions. The idea of the Crusades had still been alive in the fourteenth century. For the central powers it was part and parcel of any plan for world dominion. Intel- lectual leaders like Dante, Petrarch and subsequent humanists sum- moned all to battle against the "Egyptian hound" Islam, in the name of that great spiritual affiliation between Christian peoples which they wished to conserve as the legacy of the Middle Ages. But it con- stantly proved less possible to throw back the Turkish heirs of the Byzantine Empire as decisively as Spain had done. Francis I even negotiated with the Sultan in order to curb the power of Charles V.
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Tommaso Parentucelli, the son o a Ligurian physician, continued the passionate humanistic studies of his early years after he had become Nicholas V (1447-1455) . He had served as a teacher in the Flor- entine families of the Strozzi and Albizzi and had been Cosimo de Medici's librarian at San Marco. He was from the beginning eager to spend whatever money he had for books and building. A tireless collector of manuscripts from all the world, he was the founder of the Vatican Library. His hope was that the Roman See might by foster- ing culture win the affection of the peoples; and so the court of this amiable scholar, who personally led the simplest of lives, became in all truth a Court of the Muses. Fra Angelico painted for him; Leo Battista Alberti spent his universalistic genius on countless plans drawn up for the Pope. And among the host of literati who swarmed about there were also such critical spirits as Laurentius Valla, who proved that the long disputed "Donation of Constantine" was a forgery and escaped the Inquisition thanks to the Pope and the King of Naples. Churches fallen into ruin were restored, and buildings serving practical or ornamental uses were erected. To be sure the price exacted was a wholesale destruction of the memorials of antiquity. The waters of the Fontana Treve sparkled anew as the symbol of a fresh and vig- orous Roman life. Bulwarks and castles arose throughout the city and the Papal States by order of a Pope who spent his days and nights reading parchments but did not fathom the runic handwriting on the wall of the future. A treaty with Germany, the Viennese Concordat of 1448, conferred many an advantage on the Roman See which a stronger Imperial power would not have conceded; but it also increased German resentment, which expressed itself with increased vigour in the Gravamina nationis Germanica against the methods of Roman ad- ministration. Legates of the Curia who journeyed throughout Eu- rope to proclaim the jubilee of 1450 and to introduce reforms were able to do little even though they possessed gifts of mind and character similar to those which Nicholas of Cusa, so creative a spirit in that time of intellectual change, manifested in Germany. Here, under the much too prolonged and far too inactive rule of Frederic III, on whom the Pope had in 1452 conferred the last Imperial crown that was to be bestowed in Rome, traditional bonds with the ecclesiastical centre had been loosened. The failure of such advocates of reform made a
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far deeper impression on Nicholas V than did a conspiracy, organized by Porcaro, a demagogue and a shadow of Rienzi, who paid for his Gesaristic dreams and his attempts on the lives of the Pope and the cardinals with death by hanging.
A troubled Conclave followed the death of Nicholas and chose as Pope a Spaniard who had proved his mettle as a diplomat. He took the name of Calixtus III (14551458). He was descended from the powerful and prominent family of the Borgia of Valencia, and had grown up hating Islam. The war against the Turks became his polit- ical program: he sent men and money to Hunyadi, Regent of Hun- gary; and among the men were the Cardinal Legate Carvajal, the Pope's countryman, and St. Juan Capistrano, a fiery preacher. A fleet was fitted out by the Holy See itself and placed under the leadership of the Cardinal. Hunyadi died victorious after the Battle of Belgrade, 1456, mourned by the Pope who then sent aid to Iscander Beg (Prince George of Albania) who almost single handed kept the field against the Turks. The princes into whose eyes the scimitar did not directly flash looked calmly on at a distance. The Germans muttered against the tithes that were levied for the wars against the Turks; and, their bishops, whom the Concordat of Vienna had not freed from the bur- den of Roman taxation, were lax preachers of the Crusade. For the sake of its eastern trade Venice sought to live on good terms with the conquerors of Byzantium. Only a few understood what had been lost when the ancient bridge between Orient and Occident collapsed, because the fall of the hated Greek Empire overshadowed all else in their minds.
The danger was grave when Cardinal yEneas Silvio Piccolomini re- ceived the tiara as the fitting conclusion of the colourful Odyssey of his life. This noble Siennese, who had known a childhood of poverty, called himself Pius II (1458-1464) , because "Pius" was the adjective coupled with -^Eneas in his beloved Virgil's epic. He was a broad- minded humanist who had manifested the brilliance and richness of a universal mind in writings and addresses. He was known as a charm- ingly libertine story-teller after the manner of Boccaccio, as a defender of the councilar idea, as secretary to an anti-Pope, as a geographer, as the historian of the Council of Basel, and as a diplomat in the Imperial chancellery. When he reached the age of fifty he stripped off a cer-
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tain frivolity and became devoted to serious thought. One is re- minded of Heniy V of England's parting from Falstaff in Shake- speare's play when one reads that the Pope in the famous Bull of 1463 told his contemporaries who bade "the new Pius to remember the old ^neas" to "forget ^neas but cling to Pius." He now upheld the Papal system without compromise. Appealing to a Council, no matter in whose name, he termed heresy and lese majeste. The first and last care of his government was to serve the idea of a unified lead- ership of the Christian West and to defend European culture against the attacks of Islam. Summoning all the Christian princes to a Coun- cil in Mantua, he urged them in a brilliant sermon to take up the Cross. He stubbornly insisted that each country pay its church rev- enue, cut off moneys due to humanists and artists, and used the vast sums which accrued to him from the newly discovered mines near Tolfa to arm and equip an army against the Crescent. When vir- tually all the Princes failed him, the Pope himself took command. He was already a dying man when he stood on the cliff of Ancona waiting for his fleet; and with his death the whole enterprise failed.
Paul II (14641471) was no energetic furtherer of his predecessor's policy. This splendour-loving Venetian dwelt within narrower ho- rizons. He was a generous and in spite of his dignity a jovial friend of the Romans, built the Venetian Palace of San Marco for himself, collected masterpieces of plastic art, and also aided the first German printers in Rome. Yet he was decidedly a churchman and this brought him into sharp conflict with the humanists. He discon- tinued the college of the seventy abbreviators who earned their keep in the Papal Chancellery by copying extracts from letters of petition and drawing up suggestions for Curial letters. Likewise he abolished the learned guild of the Roman Academy, wherein the cult of the ancient gods had become more than just a romantic game in the garb of an heroic past. The proceedings of this liberal lodge of cultivated men harboured also the passions of revolutionary demagogues. The sus- picion of having conspired against Paul rested even on Platina, who was made to serve a sentence in a cell at San Angelo. After he had begged his way out in the most self-abasing manner, he became the Plutarch of Papal history. Though his work as a whole is fair, he took revenge on the Pope who had punished him by describing him
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as a rude barbarian. Since even Platina could say nothing worse, this Pope who loved the world, doubtless also added something to the carnival joys of the Romans, but could not bring himself to go beyond imposing the ban on the Hussites, managed to earn a decent histori- cal reputation.
History has had to deal otherwise with his immediate successors. Even so all the ignominy which the Popes of the next fifty years were to heap upon the Papacy is not without its significance for the political historian; and to the chronicler of culture these are, of course, decades of splendour. Because these pontificates were alternately or simulta- neously concerned with fostering either the Papal States or nepotism, they prevented Rome from being swallowed up by France or the Spanish world empire.
Sixtus IV (14711484) , born of a poor family of fisherfolk named Rovere in the Genoese country, first a Friar Minor and then General of the Franciscan Order, appears in the Vatican fresco painted by Melozzo da Forli as a venerable, princely figure, earnest, restrained, who gazes meditatively into the distance through wise, beautiful eyes. Among the men grouped before the seated Pontiff is Platina, Prefect of the Library, who kneels and points to an inscription which glorified the Pope as a builder of churches, bridges and squares, and the donor of a foundling hospital. The rest are relatives, among them also Galliano della Rovere who was later to become Pope Julius II. This group-picture, which portrays the opening of the Vatican Library, is also known as "Sixtus IV and his Circle." The chronicler of the Papacy looks upon it differently than does the friend of the arts.
Hardly was Sixtus elected than he appointed his nephews Giuliano and the degenerate Pietro Riario bishops and cardinals. Pietro soon managed to have a yearly income of about 2,250,000 francs in present- day currency. This he did not long enjoy, for he soon died of the effects of his dissoluteness. The most beloved of Papal favourites was, however, Pietro's brother, Girolamo Riario, a layman. Origi- nally a pedlar of spices, he became the sovereign of an important principality. The fact that his uncle had been zealous in behalf of the Crusades proved of value also to him; for according to contempo- raries the real Turks were the Pope's nephews. The tithes and the
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moneys gained from indulgences did not suffice to attain the high objective, to reach which Sixtus waged wars and did even worse. His territorial policy clashed with the interests of the Medici in Florence. When he stripped Lorenzo of an advantage gained in the Apennines, this Lord of the Florentine Republic was compelled to make an alliance with Milan and Venice.
Sixtus saw that the Roman See was at stake. He undermined the Medici bank by withdrawing the moneys of the Apostolic Camera which were deposited there; and Florence for its part withstood Rome whenever there was question of appointments to ecclesiastical positions. Still further clashes deepened the conflict. Driven by his passionate devotion to his kindred, by a lust for power, and by theocratic concep- tions of the Church-State, the Pope could not resist affiliating himself with the most prominent foes of the Medici government. Riario befriended himself with the House of Pacci in Florence, which was harbouring plans of rebellion. The Pope was made a confidant. He said he wished the state to be overthrown, but wanted no one killed: "Though Lorenzo is a wicked man, still I do not wish his death. To give our assent to assassination whoever the man might be would not be befitting our office. But in so far as rebellion is concerned, yes, I want it ... Go and do what you think best, but see to it that no murder is done." But the conspirators to whom he addressed these words had already made it clear to him that they were plotting murder. He allowed them to proceed and perpetrate a deed which he could have prevented but did not wish to prevent. During Solemn High Mass on Easter Sunday, 1478, Giuliano Medici was murdered, but Lorenzo escaped slightly wounded into the sacristy. The indig- nant people took a dreadful revenge on the Pacci and other conspira- tors, who were thus also victims of the Papal policy. Florence was placed under the interdict, and the Papal States had to bear the mili- tary consequences of the unsuccessful uprising. On the immortal splendour of the Sixtine Chapel there falls the irremovable shadow of treason to the highest dignity on earth. During the same year -the Pope also said the word which decided that the Inquisition in Spain was to be given a new lease of life. His endorsement was necessary because in essence the Inquisition was no less a Church than a State institution. The alien, principally Jewish elements which under-
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mined the structure of the state compelled their Catholic Majesties Isabella and Ferdinand to adopt measures of defense in which political ends and spiritual means, political means and spiritual ends, were in- extricably interwoven. The great historical success achieved by this blunder was the temple-like structure of a state which was so firm that it had no appeal and so strong that it virtually turned to stone. From out of this Spain, which knew how to maintain its national independ- ence when it signed a Concordat with Sixtus in 1482, there would go out later on an impulse salutary to the whole tottering Church.
A meaning of comparable depth is not to be discerned in the other European scandal of this period of intellectual renaissance. The de- plorable figure of Innocent VIII (14841492), a Genoese who owed his tiara to Julius Rovere who dominated him, began his reign by is- suing the fateful bull against witchcraft. The great prelates of the Carolingian Empire, and even the Church laws of the "dark" tenth century, had condemned as heretical the belief in witchcraft and magic which was a legacy from old Nordic and other Germanic peoples. One ruling had declared that whosoever believed these things to be true had lost his faith that he was doubtless an unbeliever, and even more degraded than a heathen. The experience that if faith is shown out the door superstition comes in through the window, was also borne out by the sunlight of the Renaissance. Everyone knows how the old German mania of witchcraft, encouraged by Luther, soon spread anew through the Protestant countries. Against the opposi- tion of those who fought against the rabid scare the noble Jesuit Count Spe and Thomasius, the rationalist Lutheran theologians thundered, and said that now atheism was bursting in upon evangeli- cal Zion. During the century which gave birth to Galileo and Lieb- nitz, countless women's bodies shrivelled up at the stake in all parts of Northern Europe. Not even the hatred entertained by the Lutheran camp for the Pope and all things Catholic, a hatred which was even to repudiate Gregory Ill's reform of the calendar on the ground that it emanated from Rome, could overcome a passionate dedication to the spirit of the "Witchhammer." This Dominican catechism of the particular madness of the time said, in opposition to the early Middle Ages and also to Gregory VII who had suppressed the persecution of witches in Denmark, that it was a great heresy not to believe in
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witches and witchcraft. The German inquisitors who composed this treatise had previously succeeded in eliciting the Papal Bull, and with it solemn recognition of the sanity of their madness. Canonists, in- quisitors and executioners joined in receiving the blessing of Inno- cent VIII. These horrors ran their course while the Pope was helping his children to make brilliant marriages. He wedded his son Frances- chetto to a daughter of his new ally Lorenzo di Medici, and as part payment for this favour made a thirteen-year-old son of the Medici House (the future Pope Leo X) a Cardinal. The marriage of his daughter Teodorina in Aragon sealed the dearly bought peace with the Ferranti of Naples. Both marriages took place in the Papal pal- ace. Prince Dschem, a Vatican prisoner, furnished the sums which the Pope needed for himself and his family. This unfortunate pre- tender to the Turkish throne was kept under arrest; and in return for the service thus rendered, his brother and rival Sultan Bajazet paid a large annual tribute to Innocent.
The Conclave of 1492 was the unhappiest in Papal history. When Lorenzo Medici died the situation in Italy became chaotic. Inside the College of Cardinals the Milanese party under Ascanio Sforza opposed the Neapolitan party under Giuliano della Rovere. The leaders of both factions considered themselves still too young to wear the tiara and therefore pushed instruments of their policy into the fore- ground for the time being. It was masterly intrigue and shameless vote-buying which brought the victory to the richest of all the Cardi- nals, Rodrigo Borgia, who was the candidate of the Milanese camp. Elected unanimously, this sixty-year-old Pontiff called himself Alex- ander VI (14921503). Out of his adulterous union with a Roman noblewoman, Vannozza dei Catani, whom he loved better than any other woman who had bestowed her favours upon him, four children Cesare, Juan, Jofre and Lucrezia were born. His policy was based on nepotism; and after Cesare, who had been appointed a cardi- nal in 1493, resigned from the sacred College in 1498, the Pope de- voted himself completely to the task of building up a central Italian kingdom under the Borgia dynasty. Unstable, chaotic, he made and then dissolved amateurish alliances which brought both himself and Italy to the brink of despair. By making common cause with Milan,
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France's ally against Naples, he opened a route through Italy for Charles VIII, the French king whose diplomats had won him over to their side while he was still a cardinal. Negotiations between the Pope and Naples met with temporary success. Charles recognized the legitimacy of the Pope's election, the dubiousness of which had been a trump card in the hands of the Rovere, broke the Cardinal (Giuliano) and his party, and as a result induced Alexander to sever that tie with the Aragon prince of Naples which Cesare Borgia had just previously sealed by effecting the coronation of Alfonso II. There- with the French were free to attack Naples. When a league was formed to drive the conquering Charles out of the country, the Pope reversed his policy and joined it. He now also broke off his alliance with the house of Milan and brought about the divorce of his daughter Lucrezia, whom he had married at the age of thirteen to a Sforza. This year, 1497, in which the tragedy of Savonarola, the great casri- gator of Florence, neared its end and during which the Pope's son Juan was slain, possibly by Cesare, amidst a chaos of family scandals, was followed (1498) by a sharp change in the Borgia policy. Cesare himself now took control and proved firm, lucid and merciless. Every- one knows the unrelenting methods by means of which this ruthless man during a full five years carried out his will to power in a way that delighted Machiavelli. He dominated the Pope, his family, the Curia, the Sacred College, and the Roman nobility, and nowhere met resistance.
After the death of Charles VIII in 1498, Louis XII became King of France. In order to secure the Pope's assent to his divorce he offered him an alliance. Cesare accepted. He surrendered his spiritual ride, journeyed to France in order to induce Louis to take the field against Italy, and strengthened his position by marrying a French princess. The new allies moved on from victory to victory. Milan was oc- cupied, the seigniories of the Papal states and the Romagna were over- thrown, and all resistance in Rome was put down tyrannically during a speedy campaign in which the Pope himself took a part. Meanwhile Lucrezia conducted the business of the Curia. The power of the Colonna was broken, their fortresses were captured, and the heads of the family were slain. Suddenly Cesare appeared to be on the brink of danger his condottieri deserted him. But the horrible blood
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bath of Sinigaglia, where he drew the outwitted soldiers into a trap and ordered them strangled, cleared his path once more. The Orsini followed the Colonna down the path of destruction; the subjugation of Tuscany appeared to be only a question of time; the Spanish ma- jority in the College of Cardinals served as an instrument of the House of Borgia; and the Papal states were on the verge of becoming the sec- ular kingdom of their dynasty. Then everything was wrecked by an accident which seems like the closing act of a bad drama; and the splendour of the House of Borgia was destroyed.
Father and son had already done away with many a rich member of the Sacred College by resorting to poison. Cardinal Hadriaa Castellesi was also destined to meet the same fate. They agreed to come to dinner as his guests at his villa on the Janiculum. Poisoned wine, which they had provided, was destined for the lord of the house- hold; but the servants blundered and wine was drunk by all present. For two weeks the Pope fought for his strong life, but all efforts availed naught and he died on August 18, 1503.
Cesare hovered for a long rime between life and death, powerless to master the situation created by the decease of his father. After the pontificate of Pius III, an excellent Pope who unfortunately ruled only a meagre month, the energetic Giuliano Rovere became Pope. Now the head of the House of Borgia had to surrender his dominion over the Romagna. His life, which had known so many victories, came to an inglorious end in Spain during 1507. Lucrezia outlived him by twelve years; and in Ferrara she won for the name of Borgia some association with the milk of human kindness as the wife of the Duke, and as a mother and philanthropist.
Cesare and Lucrezia were personages one can understand, but it is otherwise with Pope Alexander, that formless son of chaos. Many contemporaries regarded him as a Marrane, but his habit of brooding over everything without proving able to reach a conclusion is an argu- ment against his having been of puie Jewish descent. On the other hand his superstitious nature, his intense sensuality and a certain heavy lack of intelligence make it impossible to look upon him as a repre- sentative of the pure Spanish character. But the riddle of his temper- ament is meaningless in comparison with the historical significance of his rule. Never before in the history of the Papacy was the tragedy
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of a sacred institution placed in desecrated hands enacted so powerfully as in the conflict between him and Savonarola, the great martyr of the Renaissance.
The sermons of Savonarola burst upon a Florence prostituted by power and prodigality, art and beauty, just as a storm might swoop down upon a fair. One cannot believe that this reddish blond son of Ferrara, whose soft eyes blended with the threatening daring of his face, was minus a trace of German blood. A whole generation prior to the religious catastrophe which was to overwhelm Germany, he sought to find a way between the Scylla of Rome and the Charybdis of anti-Rome. He was shipwrecked upon the rock that was sacred to him. He dwelt in the world of the prophets of the Old Testa- ment; and himself was of their tribe, a prophet to the marrow. In other words, he felt himself driven to proclaim to the whole world, in the presence also of the Roman throne placed above that world, the forgotten and betrayed "things of God." Regardless of what might come, he the mysteriously commissioned priest, gifted with mystical insight into the past and the future of historical development, was ready to meet and endure whatever might be exacted of him in behalf of those divine concerns which filled and stirred his soul.
To this day his enemies hurl at this fanatic (but fanwn means "holy ground") the rebuke that a monk should have meditated in his narrow cell at San Marco over learned parchments or knelt on a prie-dieu in Florence to worship God's councils and ordinances, instead of throwing himself headlong into the business of the great world. He had burned the vanities on the Place of the Seigniories, had inaugu- rated a sombre theocratic rule in Florence after France had overthrown the Medici, and had attacked the Pope for his vices as well as refused to obey him. Only poltroons or the corrupt will deny to a prophet the right to say what he must say. Nothing is more natural than that a religious man should take an interest in political trends which seek to bring about the death of religion* But just these did Savona- rola see in progress before his eyes. To him religion was not a mere magical business; but it was often just that to his contemporaries, even in the chambers of the Vatican. He demanded pure hearts and good deeds men able to stand in the presence of God. He lived and died for the sovereignty of the whole inviolate law of Christ the King.
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Prophetic consciousness spurred him on to renew the Church, in which from the beginning the gift of prophecy has always been (and will always be) made manifest. The fact that bold prophecies which he enunciated were verified strengthened his belief in his mission. Nev- ertheless he asked himself again, "Am I a prophet?" And he an- swered his question affirmatively he could not do otherwise. And then he preached unrestrainedly whatever his inner voice dictated, for it seemed as true to him as the Gospel itself. It was only as a cathe- dral preacher that he could fulfil his mission. "If I do not preach," he said, "I cannot live." The feeling of rhetorical power also carried him beyond the bounds he had set for himself. Yet even so impulse and effect, faith and utterance, survived in pure unison. Indeed loy- alty to his mission was the real cause of his tragedy. The hostile powers the Medici, Borgia, the Florence of the Arabbiati, his own Order, compelled him to act more and more wholeheartedly out of the necessity to "obey God." He was in no sense an innovator; but he did wish to renew what had become rotten in Florence, in Rome, and in the Church. His penitential sermons thundered and flashed like a great storm over the city of pleasure. Elegant humanists sniffed, irritated worldlings scoffed at him because of his ideals and his simplicity (simplicitas) . No doubt he shook the foundations of Florentine culture. But what constitutes the power of a prophet if not his fundamental repudiation of the message of comfort proclaimed by the children of this world lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, and pride? The real pessimism was that of Renaissance man who could not live without art, not that of the gentle Friar who sought nothing less than a victory over the world. A tendency to assent to the state kept him from making the secular power subservient to the priestly power or from subordinating the monarchy to the Papacy; and yet he held that the legitimately elected Pope is superior to a Council. A conservative friend of hierarchical order, neither was he intrinsically an iconoclast. He poured out the lava of his soul in verse. Even his bitter lamentations over the decadence of the Church were given strophic form; and the shadow of his spirit rested also upon the crea- tions of the artists who fell under the ban Fra Bartolomeo, Raphael and Michaelangelo.
Savonarola pitted his hopes on an alliance with the King of France.
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This belief in the great religious mission of Charles VIII he shared with others. The propaganda of the Anjous had aroused in many sec- tions of the people the hope that like a second Charlemagne the King would renew the Church of Italy and summon a Council to depose the unworthy Pope who was allied with the Turks, The Prior of San Marco could see no other help when he looked about him for some temporal power to ward off the destruction of Rome. Therefore he urged an alliance with France which was soon afterwards brought about by the Borgias themselves. Such a policy was, however, neces- sarily fatal to him as long as the Pope and his allies were pitted against France. Only Florence, under the spiritual compulsion of its prophet, clung to a union with the Valois monarch. But when Charles' cause was lost in Italy, the anger of the isolated city was directed at its spiritual leader. Alexander soon found friends enough on the Arno in order to bring about the fall of the "gossipy monk" whose peniten- tial preachments had long annoyed him. He summoned Savona- rola to Rome to give an account of himself, but the prophet did not go. He forbade him to preach; but Savonarola remained silent only a short while. He excommunicated him; but Savonarola paid no heed to this action, for the sentence seemed to him unjust and un- binding since the Pope was a simonist and an unbeliever meriting re- moval by a Council. Then Alexander threatened the city with the interdict, and the Florentines surrendered their prophet. They even tried him, though the Pope demanded that he be delivered unto him. Imprisoned, tortured, condemned to death, Savonarola remained what he had always been. On the 23d of May, 1498, he was hanged and burned. The monk entered the glory of martyrdom. A statute had destroyed the law, a letter had killed the spirit, and a criminal Pope had triumphed over a saint.
Italy could dispense with Cesare Borgia when Giuliano Rovcic called himself Julius II, in memory of Julius Cscsar (15031513). In youth he had been a Franciscan brother, had then become a bishop and a cardinal, and was the father of a daughter. Worldly to the core, heroic minded, a man of energy who with good reason was termed *'/ tembilc, this raw son of Genoa saved, as has often been said, the honour of the Papacy. He was beginning to grow old, but dur- ing the decade of his rule this titanic man proved himself the most
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warlike of all the successors of Peter and the greatest benefactor of Rome. His belief was that the Popes must be lords and masters of world affairs,
Julius was the first politician on the Papal throne who devoted all his power to freeing Italy from alien dominion. The slogan "Italia fara da $e" was written on his banner long before it was ever uttered. The worldly possessions of his See were to him merely a lever with which he could make the Papacy strong and Italy free. Nepotism and concern for the power of his house did not place his great concep- tion in the bondage which before his time the Borgias, and after him the dynastically narrow policy of a Medici Pope, would make so injuri- ous to the whole nation. Once again he reconquered the Papal States in their entirety, and as a good player of political chess moved and exchanged the pieces to his advantage. He took Cesare's Duchy away from him, conquered the Perugia of the Baglioni, and wrested Bologna from the Bentivogli. Next it was the turn of Venice. In order to drive this power which as a result of the turmoil inaugu- rated by the Borgias had annexed cities and territories belonging to the Papal States and was planning to establish its power on the main- land between the Apennines and the Alps back to its lagoons, he formed the League of Cambrai in 1509 with Emperor Maximilian, France and Spain. Then he imposed the ban on the Venetians and followed this up by letting the cannon speak victoriously at Agnadello. The defeated republic was not (decided the Pope) to fall a prey to the allies of the Holy See. Least of all could it be permitted that the power of France and Northern Italy should become a threat to Rome and the whole country. Fitori i barbari! When the French vassals of Ferrara infringed upon the sovereign rights of the Pope, a causus belli was provided. Spain as well as Venice now came to his aid: it was the Holy League against France. Julius himself took the field as general, but the French troops defeated his army at Ravenna, in 1512, though their leader, Gaston de Foix, young and heroic nephew of the King, fell at the height of victory. It was fortunate for the Pope that France was at this moment compelled to face another swarm of hostile powers. The young King Henry VIII of England, whose friendship Julius had already courted by sending him the Golden Rose, went to war against France in the Netherlands, while Ferdinand of
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Spain attacked in the Pyrenees. The Swiss, under the leadership of Cardinal Schinner, who was allied with the Pope, joined with the Venetians and attacked the army of Louis XII in Northern Italy.
For the time being the French retreated. Agreement was reached in Mantua that Italy had been liberated and that the boundaries of the Papal States could now be firmly established. Milan came under the rule of the Sforza family, and in Florence the reign of the Medici was re-established. Machiavelli, comparing the fifteenth century with the beginning of the sixteenth century, correctly remarked that whereas formerly even the merest baron had despised the Papal power, now even the King of France respected it.
The Pope also kept the upper hand in warding off the spiritual attacks of his antagonists. The Florentine dictator, Soderini, had ceded Pisa to the French King as the site of a synod to be called in order to bring about a separation from Rome of the national Churches of France and Germany. The idea was that the new "Goliath" on the Papal throne, who upon election had forgotten his promise to summon a Council, was to be brought down by the slings of a few cardinals. Maximilian assented; indeed, when Julius was taken seriously ill during the summer of 1511, the Emperor, who was a widower, cherished the idea of becoming Pope as well. Julius saw the signs that pointed to the danger of a schism, perforce remembered his duty, and summoned a General Council to the Lateran in 1511. This lasted five years, discussed many things, arrived at a number of excellent conclusions, but made no very deep religious impression on the world or the Church.
Meanwhile Bramante, Michaelangelo and Raphael, though they also were at odds with the Pope during many an hour, completed their great works. The rebuilding of St. Peter's was begun, though one hundred and sixty years and twenty-two pontificates were to pass before this triumphal song in stone of the Universal Church would reach completion. The Vatican grew in breadth and height; the Stanzas and the Sixtine Chapel were rejuvenated with frescoes which gave witness to a new era as well as to the renascence of ancient cultural forces. Michaelangeio's monument to the Pope in San Pietro in Vincoli remained a torso, even as the political activities of this ruler of the Church found no conrinuer and perfecter. Among all the
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marble figures o this monument only one is worthy of Michaelangelo and the dead Pontiff. If, after losing oneself in reflection before this superhuman Moses, one tries to divine what the figure means, one may hover between disparate experiences of similar impressiveness. Does this figure signify by its exalted brooding aflame with divine fire, Papal awareness of God's commission to man and of His sacred wrath over the failure of mankind to respond to that commission? Or is the object of this majestic ire the scandal given by unworthy Popes?
Alexander, the Pope of Venus, had been followed by a Son of Mars; and now Pallas placed her favourite on the throne. That was about the meaning of an inscription on a triumphal arch as Leo X (1513- 1521) rode to the Vatican on a white horse, at the head of a solemn procession, to take possession of the Fisherman's See. This Medici prince was a cheerful epicurean, amiable and generous, a man of moderate endowments more devoted to the things that seem than to the things that are. He was a principe in Papal attire, and not much more. Before his rime many a Pontiff had fled from his electors be- cause the responsibility he was soon to assume seemed overwhelming. But we are told that Leo cheerfully accepted the burden. Dynastic interests took precedence in his mind over the idea of the Church as well as over the idea of the unity of Italy, which now looked upon the Popes as leaders and prime movers in the effort to foster a national policy. When France had reconquered Milan with a victory over the Swiss at Marignano, the Pope allied himself with the victor in order to insure the rule of the House of Medici in Florence. We must, he said, throw ourselves into the arms of the king and plead for mercy. His negotiations with Francis I, and the important Con- cordat of 1517 which the Lateran Council, still in session, had ratified, established the basis on which relations between the Curia and the French crown were to rest until the time of the Revolution. It is true that the half-schismatic clauses of the Pragmatic Sanction were removed in favour of a formal recognition of the Papal authority; but at bottom the fateful treaty established to a great degree the in- dependence of the Gallican Church from the Curia. Here the Pope was dominated by a desire to safeguard the dynastic interests of the Medici, and the same wish was also to involve him in disgraceful
MARTIN LUTHER 245
struggles over the Duchy of Urbino. This was to be taken from the hands of a member of Julius IFs family and given to a member of Leo's family. Enormous sums of Church money were required to effect this conquest. Angered and irritated cardinals conspired to bring about the murder of the Pope. The plot was discovered and its instigator, Cardinal Petrucci, was executed. The rest paid heavily for life and mercy. The rescued Pontiff enjoyed for a few years more the life of a grand seigneur. He did not permit the new "monkish quarrels" to dampen his ardour for hunting and music, theatrical enter- tainment and generous hospitality.
Martin Luther, the Augustinian, had been sent to Rome during the close of 1510 on business for his Order, When he saw the Eternal City he fell on his knees and cried out: "Hail, O Sacred Rome!** But Rome still suffered from the effects of the reign of Alexander VI. Luther had heard and seen, had stored up in his heart, many a scandal by the time he was ready to return to his monastery cell. He was a learned doctor of theology, a zealous vicar of the Order, a preacher to city congregations, and a professor who delved so deeply into the things of God and the eternal puzzles of existence that he hardly found time in the midst of all his work for his religious duties. "I need two secretaries, since almost always I can scarce do anything else except write letters. . . Rarely do I have enough time to say the breviary and to celebrate Mass. In addition I must wrestle with my own temptations against the world, the flesh and the Devil," he writes. Even letters dated in 1516 indicated that Brother Martin was loyal to his Order, despite the fact that the spiritual world roundabout him was so disorderly. Nevertheless between the lines of what he writes there is betrayed a never-ending struggle with sexual passion, which is finally frankly confessed. Concupiscence is insurmountable. By way of excuse he clings to Pauline dicta anent the wrestling between the spirit and the flesh, anent failing to do the good one seeks to do, and doing the evil one wishes to avoid. He doubts the freedom and the re- sponsibility of man, quoting a few dark passages in St. Augustine to support his opinion while doing violence to and so falsifying other less comforting passages. In all he follows the requirements of his own heart. His nature is like a storm which drives melancholic
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clouds before it, through which in moments of quiet there is revealed a gentle landscape where flowers grow and heartfelt, passionate song is heard. Even as a baccalaureate Luther had tormented himself with doubts as he lay abed seriously ill. How can I find God? How can I reconcile myself with Him since I am a servant guilty of sin and He is the heavenly Judge and Avenger? Then it seemed to him that in one's own blood there is more truth than has ever been written down. He does not govern himself in accordance with the counsel given in books, but forces the books to harmonize with himself. Where the letter opposes him with unbending legality, he flings all the wrath of his language at it. He is a man of will and of feeling who will suffer no hair-splitting to affect the God of a simple-minded human being. He bases his faith in the Lord of the world upon the universal need of the human heart. He derides and despises reason in the things of religion. With heroic self-sufficiency, he places his confidence in the voice that speaks from within. He thunders at the cunning of those who would seek God in thought, and understands Him through a faith possessing religious force as One who is exalted above all that is human. Study, brooding and the discipline have not quieted his inner torment; no measure of good works has sufficed to bring him peace; all the good will expended on service and obedience has not redeemed him from wondering whether God has been merciful to him, the repentant sinner; and so there remains only despair or else the conviction that God Himself has visited upon man everything that is native to him, including sin and that evil lust which renders him so despicable. Have I been elected to an eternal happiness which I cannot earn with my poor human power? Shall I ever be worthy to appear before the Eyes of God? Who can stand in the Presence of Him, the Holy One? With all his temperament Luther clings as firmly to God as his body does to the chains of concupiscence. Now that he has reached the years of maturity this uncontrollably sensual peasant son who has fettered himself with irrevocable vows, feels the power of the flesh strike like fire from within. He is terrified lest He who is Divine and Holy, knowing his wicked urges, will judge and punish them.
Among the books from which he had formerly sought help were some which had been written two hundred years earlier by men akin
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to him in nature Ockham, the Franciscan, who thundered against the Pope, and who in loosening more and more the bonds which tied him to the Church tended gradually to regard the Bible as the infallible foundation of God's kingdom on earth; and those German mystics, the gentle Tauler and the Frankfort author of the ^beologia Germanica, who had ranked the inner activity of the soul, the submission to God in all things, purity and nobility of motive, far above outward actions. Staupitz had placed these books in the choleric young Augusrinian brother's hands in order to quiet him; and Luther found in them what he wanted to find. Grace is not accorded through the Sacraments, but comes from the rightmindedness of the receiver. Good deeds do not suffice, and consequently faith alone does suffice. Out of books that were still Catholic he read what was no longer Catholic. His teaching concerning justification declares outright that since the Fall man no longer has free will. To carry on the struggle by oneself is useless. One can only cast oneself wholly and absolutely upon the mercy of God and the grace of Jesus Christ.
Great natures once grown chaotic carry their struggles out into the world. Not everything, God knows, was corrupted in Luther's time; but as always the good that was done took place in secret, and a later world would remember of this epoch of the late Middle Ages only that it was a kind of darkly clouded eve which cast only shadows upon Luther's brooding soul. Naturally the unruly spirit of a man at odds with himself could find enough worthless things to destroy to keep him busy for a long while. Impelled by his own inner tumult Luther rose up against much that was amiss in die Church he was soon in opposition to that Church itself.
His breach with Rome did not take place suddenly. It was not out o preconceived purpose that he broke up the ancient unity. It may be that moral considerations were the deeper and stronger causes of his apostasy, but the intellectual causes were not missing. His Biblical lectures of the years between 1513 and 1517 show us a man fed on Scholasticism according to the manner of Ockham who voices his doubts as to the divine right of the Roman Primacy. The scene at Antioch and the roles there played by Paul and Peter caused him to waver. There Paul had acted "straightforwardly" in accordance with the meaning and the truth of the Gospel, which Peter had denied.
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Erravit he was mistaken, and not merely weak. But the faith of Peter (and his profession of that faith) in the Son of Man, once having existed, cannot cease to be a common treasure of the Church, even though he himself may have sinned against it. The Church as a whole and not the Apostle in person has the power and the right over the keys which were given to the one man only as a representative of the community. This was no revolutionary *idea for Thomas Aquinas had also said that the "Rock" was not the person of Peter, but rather his profession of faith that Jesus was the Messiah. The conception of die Church in the old Christian times might also be adduced. Moreover Luther's attack on the potestas directa of the Pope as an authority valid even in worldly matters was quite justified, and cer- tainly not in the least out of harmony with the great theoreticians of the ancient Church. But Luther's criticism of Peter led him farther to the conviction that the Papacy and the hierarchical system are merely the work of men and that they are verily contrary to the spirit of the Gospel.
Rome, as it was, helped this beleaguered monk to draw all the con- sequences latent in his first doubt. All roads led away from Rome. The new Cathedral of St. Peter's was already ten years a-building; and for this grandiose symbol of Catholic universality and unity, enormous sums of money were needed. In exchange for the alms that came from all the world, heavy levies were made on the Church's treasuries of grace. Leo X had proclaimed an indulgence in 1514 and had promised to the appointed High Commissioner for the German north, Albrecht of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mayence, h,-,!f of tnc moneys received. To this Prince of the Church who loved splen- dour and was deeply in debt to the Fuggers, the great bankers of the time, for the reason (there were others) that he had perforce to send a tremendous sum to Rome in payment for his dignity, this shower of graces became a monetary transaction. In order to succeed, Tetzel, the Archbishop's fiery preacher of indulgences, warped the Catholic teaching concerning indulgences for the penalties due to sin obtainable through good works. He also came to the city where Luther lived and issued warnings against Luther's contention that free will is capa- ble only of evil. The Augustinian monk then nailed his theses to the Church door in order, as he said, iinaily "to make an end of the
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farce." <r Why does the Pope, who is richer than Croesus, not build St. Peter's with his own money rather than with the pennies of the Christian poor?'* This was the most harmless of his dicta. It went straight to the point in true German style and was timely; but other theses went much farther. They were protests against the ministry of the Church to souls, proclaimed in the name of the Gospel as Luther understood it. All this took place on the Eve of All Saints, which is the feast of the unity of the Church Triumphant. The most majestic conception of the primitive Church, to which Luther surely wished to lead his time back again, was therewith undermined; everything that occurred in addition tore asunder more and more irreparably the ancient Christian spirit of communion, the basic idea of die Church, Not even the most despicable of the Popes had rent asunder the soul of Christianity. Yet precisely this it was which the tirades of Rome's antagonist demolished.
As yet neither he nor his country understood what had happened. Within fourteen days the theses and the name of Luther were known throughout all Germany. The Princes showered praises upon him because he had dammed up the stream of German gold that was pour- ing over the Alps. The monasteries and religious foundations took his part because their own indulgence privileges were once more held in honour. The people sang his praises because he said it was far nobler to help a poor person than to erect costly temples. Learned young humanists and the revolutionary knights of the Empire were less delighted with his version of Christianity than with his attack on the "anti-Christ in Rome." This widespread acclaim enabled Luther for a short time to appease his heart, which was still tormented by scruples and anxieties. Fame was like a charming lullaby that spoke of approaching better times. But the battle with Rome had begun, the seed of disunity sprouted, and as days and years went by the sower saw ripening a terrible harvest he had not desired. In his person the whole Germanic spirit had revolted in its dual nature, which is compounded of childlike candour and barbaric savagery. A nature which was religious to the core drew a sword against the objective truth of religion, out of yearning for holiness and out of pious shudder- ing in the presence of a just God enthroned above an unjust world.
Soon this man of God saw himself involved in a universal revolt
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o all mean instincts. The Sesame of freedom opened gates through which the dammed-up corruption of society drained off. If one wishes to term the Lutheran movement a cloaca maxima, the remark is just if one bears in mind that the corruption was of long standing and that therefore he who set the foul current in motion was only partly to blame, Luther avenged the preachers of reform Peter Damien, Bernard, Catherine of Siena and many others whose words had not been heeded. Twenty years previous the Church had kindled the fire that smothered the sermons of the prophet of Florence. Now there came a man who placed the brand in her own building.
Small wonder that Leo X did not understand what was happening. The seriousness of the German monk kindled no echo in the smiling Medici prince. Luther himself, as he blundered on, did not see whither the road led. Magis raptus qttam tractus (hustled into rather than attracted to) he had entered the monastery ; and in quite the same way he now rushed onward under the lash of his daemon. There can be no doubt that he was in earnest when he wrote the Pope that he fell at his feet, surrendered himself together with all he was and had, recognized in him the voice of Christ, and was minded also not to fear death if he had deserved it. Soon thereafter he refused to obey the Roman legate's demand for a retraction and fled. His adaman- tine certainty that he sought the right was transformed by the applause of thousands who looked upon him as a religious and social emancipa- tor, into a prophetic belief that he and his teaching had been ordained by God Himself. A few months afterward, relying upon his feeling that surely he wanted only what was best for the Church, he once more assured the Pope of his loyalty; and yet a few weeks afterward he confessed that he did not know whether the Pope was anti-Christ himself, or merely anti-Christ's apostle. Like all powerful natures destined to become innovators, he wavered between flagrant contradic- tions; and he leapt now to this and now that beam of a scaffold which he himself had caused to topple. The letters and the treatises he wrote in the single year of 1520, which sealed his breach with Rome, mirror all the moods of a gruff assailant, a vengeful man, a tender for- giver of wrong, a vicious rebel, a gentle, quiet seeker after the peace of God, an iconoclast and a dreamer envisaging an ideal religious culture.
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Everyone knows what happened as a result. To Luther himself, burning the first Roman Bull was a trifle. The Pope himself ought to be burned, he said: and those who did not immolate him in their hearts could not be saved. In a letter to Leo he praised the Pope's personal excellence and regretted that he was a Pope, since the Devil would be better suited to the position. The second Roman Bull struck at the rebel with clubs, but it was in vain. Luther gambled on the profound antipathy of the nation to the Roman See. Disregarding for the moment all other causes of indignation, one must remember that Germany fostered a grudge against the Pope because he had de- cided in favour of the French monarch during the struggle between German and French rulers for the Imperial crown. Aflame with this feeling, Luther journeyed to the Reichstag at Worms, riding like a Roman victor on his chariot, and carried the people along with him as he preached. Drunk with success later he was to smile bitterly at this drunkenness he, still the pale monk, emaciated to the bone, stood before the Emperor at the Assembly and answered "Nay," when he was called upon to utter a curt *Tes" in retraction. "God help me, amen!"
What happened during the next years was not all he might have wished. The princes clutched at monastic property and covered their mean greed with pious sayings about the Gospel and freedom. Clerics tore asunder the chains of their state of life, and the monasteries were soon empty. The peasants revolted against the oppression of the great lords, counting on the new man of Wittenberg as the saviour of his people and resorting to axes and scythes when he impotendy counselled peace. At last the whole of Germany foamed and surged quite differently than he could ever have desired or imagined in his own mind. Soon it was as if he were standing alone on a rock by the sea, crying out at the flood of waters and being heard no longer. He was the powerless spectator of the consequences of his violent rebellion. The two natures which had been imposed upon him gaped more and more widely apart. He summoned himself to give answer in a stern examination of conscience, and therefore probably ako exaggerated the state of mind in which he found himself. He saw the Doctor plenus eating and drinking, forever snoring and slothful at prayer. The man of the spirit looked disconsolately at the havoc
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wrought, and tuned the lyre of his feeling to the music of wonder* ful song* The demon in Luther hated devilishly, slew about him raucously, and made grimaces; but the bright, pious, darling child in him praised the Lord as he had always done in hymns. Today he doubts the value of his achievement; tomorrow he is certain of it again. Pushed on by the trend of events, he must often permit and do things that his heart repudiates; but if the whole is successful, what difference has a huge lie made? For him more than for anyone else the end justifies the means.
In founding and building up the Church he had severed from Rome he made tremendous mistakes. He tied it to the same worldly power which he had fought as the mortal enemy of a spiritual power and had none the less buttressed with quotations from the Scripture. The old and the new epochs part company in this giant and do battle within his soul It is no wonder, then, that from his eye there looked heaven and also hell The new era that took its rise in him he did not under- stand or desire. Freedom of faith and liberty of conscience, which he is said to have created, were so alien to him that he much preferred contradicting himself to conceding that one who contradicted him was right. No Church was any longer necessary, for his religion of God and the Soul required no visible authority. But it was too nearly akin to chaos to permit the rebels to surrender all that was contained in the Church. This disappeared only partly in the stormy waters; on the wreck to which its apostles clung, there raged a dreadful battle concerning the word of God, the half crushed Host, and the dregs of spilled Wine a thousand years old.
The drama was enough to drown out the voice of many a friend of Luther during the song of exultation. One for example, was Erasmus of Rotterdam. The greatest scholar of Europe was also the embodiment of a long-established quandary in which minds were caught as they faced the Church which was the backbone of Europe, and the new life of culture which broke against the walls of that Church. It was likewise a puzzle of choosing between the rights of the institution and the rights of the personality. Erasmus had poured out buckets of sarcasm over the way things were going in the Church and the Papacy; he had despatched the most ruthless satire to Julius II
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in eternity his imaginary conversation between the Pope and St. Peter at the heavenly gates more devastating even than the blows despatched by Ulrich von Hutten and Heinrich Kettenbach. But as early as 1524 he left none in doubt that he wished the Catholic struc- ture to endure. His character wavered, but it wavered round a fixed centre of confidence in the calling and the power of reason to lead mankind along the right path. He was an antiquarian in whom the Hellenic art of a humanity resting within itself was joined with the irony of a disillusioned Christian who finds the world everywhere caught in a contradiction between what is and what ought to be. Like Grotius, Leibnitz and Herder, he belonged with the spirits who love no party, fear no party, are without ties to the power of possessions, and hover above the storms and the waves of their time. In that they want to be everything to all their contemporaries they are nothing real to any of them. To the world roundabout them they give the im- pression of being double-tongued, because in playing their roles as all- discerning critics they realize the absurdity of every extreme view, never utter a final opinion straight-forwardly, and play right and left and above and below against each other in a salutary and educational way. Thus it was that Erasmus, good friend of the Popes from Leo X to Paul III, came to seem the prototype of a Catholicism lame on one side who found his counterpart in a Luther lame on the other side.
Leo died in the prime of life, "even as the poppy withers away.** As a result of the difficult situation created by tie conflict between France and the Habsburgs (which divided the Conclave even as it did the world outside) a man who lived in Spain as Regent of Charles V became Pope. He was the son of a handicraft worker and took the name of Hadrian VI. Of German ancestry and born in the Nether- lands, he had previously been the Emperor's teacher. Strictly re- ligious in outlook and of a retiring disposition, he was no patron of the arts, but the friend of the beggars and cripples who confidently lined the road as he passed. The fact that he was upright and virtu- ous prevented him from pursuing a "strong" policy. The single year (15221523) of his reign was rich in earnest goodwill but poor in successes. In the name of this last German Pope, who was also
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the last non-Italian Pontiff, the Nuncius to Germany, Chieregari, ap- peared before the assembly of Imperial dignitaries and spoke with unprecedented plainness concerning corruption in the Church and the blame which rested on the Curia and the Pope for having brought about the great apostasy. What was dishonourable, he said, was sin and not the confession of sin. But Pope Hadrian merely pushed the stone of Sisyphus up the Alps therewith; and quite as futile was his summons to the powers to join against the Turks, who after having brought about the fall of Belgrade also captured Rhodes in 1522 from the heroic Knights of Malta. He likewise set to work in earnest re- forming the Curia, gained the ill-will of those who profited by routine, and nevertheless made no friends in Germany. For even a good Curia would no longer have been appealed to in any case. The Pope whom Luther hated was zealous for the purity of Catholic teaching; and revolutionary Germany desired the "correct, pure, unadulterated Gospel" when the Nurnberg Reichstag assembled. Hadrian died full of sorrow. His monument in the German Church in Rome bears as its inscription his own sigh, "Ah, how much difference it makes in what times the virtues of even the best man blossom!"
Storm clouds gathered round the European horizon. The German war of religion was succeeded by social wars between groups of citizens. The Scandinavian countries began to sever the bonds between them- selves and Rome. Spain and France were warring for the north o Italy; and in the East the Crescent was moving onward. The Papacy, as a spiritual and temporal power, was involved in all the movements of the intellect and in all the passages at arms. The earthly strength of a giant and the heavenly strength of an angel would both have been needed in Rome to keep the Church as it was intact, for it was now an empire of compromise between Christ and Belial. Clement VII (15231534) , another Medici Pope and a son of the Renaissance as well as its destroyer, hoped to serve both masters. He lost in every engagement. Against his will he fostered religious rebellion; and equally against his will he settled alien dominion upon Italy for centu- ries. This intelligent, serious minded, but always hesitant, wavering Pope, spun a political fabric that was all too fine and artistic. The result was that it tore asunder at every thread.
Under his predecessors Popes Alexander, Julius and Leo the
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Spanish power had been extended farther and farther northward from Southern Italy. Being himself a friend of the Emperor, he had favoured Spain when he was Leo's Secretary of State. But the pres- sure of alien rule on a country which sought a political expression of unity and freedom to conform with the spiritual world power it already possessed proved constantly more and more unendurable. National hatred was stored up against the arrogant, booty-loving "semi-bar- barians." The Pope's dynastic interest in Florence likewise induced him to covet the friendship of France, It was not long, however, before Francis I was compelled, after the Battle of Pavia in 1525, to surrender his sword to the Imperial ruler of Milan and let himself be led off a prisoner to Madrid. The frightened Pope humbled himself before the Emperor in order to retain Florence. But the Peace of Madrid, which was signed at the beginning of 1526, subordinated France so completely to the Habsburg power that all Charles' op- ponents, including Italy and the Pope, banded together at Cognac to form a Holy League. During the same year the German Protestants obtained the status of a legal party at the Reichstag of Speyer; and now the Emperor had to reckon with them as a political factor quite in the same way as he had to deal with the Pope as a political antagonist. In the League England, Venice, Milan and Florence were joined with Clement. France was included, too, for its king no longer considered himself bound by the oath he had sworn in Madrid to renounce all claims on Italy. Charles* army, in which many Lutherans also fought, opened the campaign without money. It was to pay its own way by looting. The objective was Rome and its Pope. Frunds- bcrg showed his troops the rope with which the Pope was to be hanged, and by forced marches the army drew nearer and nearer to the Eternal City. It sacked Rome in 1527 like another mob of Vandals. It is unnecessary to relate again the well remembered story: churches were devastated, tabernacles were broken open. In front of the altar in St. Peter's there lay in a heap the corpses of those attached to the Papal court. Soldiers dressed in red led donkeys on which cardinals were seated, through the city. A German arrayed in the Papal robes directed the shafts of his wit at the Pope who was a prisoner in St. Angelo, and a mock conclave declared Luther elected Pope. A Swabian Lutheran thus described his role in the afiair: "In San AngeJo
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we found the Pope Clement with twelve cardinals in one narrow stall. We made them prisoners, and the Pope had to sign the articles which the secretary read to him. There was great sadness among them and they wept a great deal; but we all became rich."
The Pope sought safety by adopting a policy exactly the opposite of that he had sponsored hitherto. Florence had in the meantime cast off the rule of the Medicis; and the French army of Northern Italy was crushed by the Emperors Spanish troops. In order to save Tuscany for his family, Clement curried friendship with his van- quisher. When the land had once again been brought under Medici rule by the grace of Charles, a marriage sealed the reconciliation Allesandro, a Papal dependent and future lord of the Florentine re- public, took for his wife a natural daughter of the Emperor. Charles now also found himself obliged to be more considerate of the Pope if he hoped to avoid being labelled a Protestant, or finally arousing against himself the indignation of his Catholic Spaniards. Pope and Em- peror met in Bologna during 1530. There, in the great hall of San Petronio, Charles received tfce crown it was the last coronation of a German Emperor by a Pope. When he also signed a treaty with Clement, upon whom all Italian patriots had set their hopes, he was the master of the land. From this hour forward Italy beheld in the Germans its mortal enemies. The Guelph idea of freedom lost the powerful protection of the Papacy; and Italy began to serve as the football of Spanish despotism, of Bourbon greed for territory, and of Austrian absolutism.
Charles made it difficult for the Pope to keep the peace. Not as a Catholic but so much more as an administrator of Imperial power, he sought to make the professors of both the new and the old faiths contented subjects of his government. Therefore he found it ex- pedient to keep up the appearance of being one who stood above the parties, and so joined in the general demand for a Council. The Pope, however, had reason to fear that the Emperor s policy was ad- vantageous to Protestant interests, and once more tended to join France. While the redoubtable Julius II had been as frightened of a Council as a schoolboy is of the rod, the weaker Medici Pope was afraid lest he would confront an ecclesiastical parliament forcibly subordinate to the
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Habsburg power. He created a counterweight by forming a new alliance with Francis I. He met the King in Marseilles, gave him his niece Catherine de Medici for a daughter-in-law, and won the King over to voting against the idea of a Council. It is true that Francis persecuted the Calvinists in France but in Germany he supported the Protestants and was on the best of terms with Philip of Hesse, the Em- peror's enemy. It seemed that with a little pressure the Pope, who wanted to root out heresy with fire and sword, might himself have attempted to gain the support of the Lutheran princes.
Meanwhile letters heavy with fate had been exchanged between England and Rome. The desire of the English Church for inde- pendence had been in sharp antagonism to Roman claims since many a century. There the Gailican liberties had originated. Neverthe- less the Tudor who now wore the crown did not at the beginning seem destined to complete the breach with Rome. Yet this came closer now with rapidly increasing speed. Henry VIII had written a theological tract against Luther's heresy and had been given the Pope's approval as a reward. Soon, however, he looked upon the heresy with favour; for he quarrelled with Rome over a marriage deal involving Catherine of Aragon, his wife and the Emperor's aunt, and the lady-in-waiting whom he loved. The bloody, unhappy romance of his life occupied the centre of the European stage then and long thereafter. The Pope opposed the divorce which the King demanded. As things were after they had been expounded, twisted and turned by a host of theologians, scholars and politicians, the Pope could have blessed the King's passion, though of course it would only have been the first of many indulged by this insatiable cockerel. Campeggio, the Papal legate, had as a matter of fact crossed the Canal with powers, the latitude of which left nothing to be desired, in his pocket. But the issue was deter- mined by fear of the Imperial master of Italy. Clement declared that Henry's marriage with Catherine, the widow of Charles' brother, was valid and indissoluble. Schism was the King's answer. By the Act of Supremacy (1534) which the Pope did not live to hear of, Henry decreed that the King was the sole and highest head of the Church of Englahd and that the rights of the Pope were transferred in essence; and that whoever did not submit to the new order of tilings would be
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punished with death as being guilty of high treason. The first victims of this Qesaro-Popism included Thomas More, the Chancellor and the friend o Erasmus and of the younger Holbein, but nevertheless a martyr to the Roman idea, in the puzzling deeps of which the Cross and antique civilization have been bound together for all time.
INTAKE