neatly, as if we were mere barbarians. Our nation, once so
famous, is a slave now, who must pay tribute, and has lain in the
dust these many years bemoaning her fate.” Aeneas Sylvius
issued, immediately after his accession to the papacy as Pius II.
the bull Execrabilis forbidding all appeals to a future council.
This seemed to Germany to cut off its last hope. It found a
spokesman in the vigorous. Gregory of Heimburg, who accused
the pope of issuing the bull so that he and his cardinals might
conveniently pillage Germany unhampered by the threat of
a council. “By forbidding appeals to a council the pope
treats us like slaves, and wishes to take for his own pleasures
all that we and our ancestors have accumulated by honest
labour. He calls me a chatterer, although he himself is more
talkative than a magpie.” Heimburg’s denunciations of the
pope were widely circulated, and in spite of the major excommunication
he was taken into the service of the archbishop of
Mainz and was his representative at the diet of Nuremberg in
1462. It is thus clear that motives which might ultimately
lead to the withdrawal of a certain number of German
princes from the' papal ecclesiastical state were accumulating
and intensifying during the latter half of the 15th
century.
It is impossible to review here the complicated political
history of the opening years of the 16th century. The
names of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. of France, of
Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, of Henry VII. and
Henry VIII. of England, of Maximilian the GermanConditions in Germany at the opening
of the 16th century.
king, of Popes Alexander VI., Julius II. and Leo X.,
stand for better organized civil governments, with
growing powerful despotic heads; for a perfectly
worldly papacy absorbed in the interests of an Italian principality,
engaged in constant political negotiations with the
European powers which are beginning to regard Italy as their
chief field of rivalry, and are using its little states as convenient
counters in their game of diplomacy and war. It was in Germany,
however, seemingly the weakest and least aggressive of the
European states, that the first permanent and successful revolts
against the papal monarchy occurred. Nothing came of the lists
of German gravamina, or of the demands for a council, so long
as the incompetent Frederick III. continued to reign. His
successor, Maximilian, who was elected emperor in 1493, was
mainly preoccupied with his wars and attempts to reform the
constitution of the empire; but the diet gave some attention
to ecclesiastical reform. For instance, in 1501 it took measures
to prevent money raised by the granting of a papal indulgence
from leaving the country. After the disruption of the league of
Cambray, Maximilian, like Louis XII., was thrown into a violent
anti-curial reaction, and in 1510 he sent to the well-known
humanist, Joseph Wimpheling, a copy of the French Pragmatic
Sanction, asking his advice and stating that he had determined
to free Germany from the yoke of the Curia and prevent the
great sums of money from going to Rome. Wimpheling in his
reply rehearsed the old grievances and complained that the
contributions made to the pope by the archbishops on receiving
the pallium was a great burden on the people. He stated that
that of the archbishop of Mainz had been raised from ten to
twenty-five thousand gulden, and that there had been seven
vacancies within a generation, and consequently the subjects
of the elector had been forced to pay that amount seven times.
But Wimpheling had only some timid suggestions to make, and,
since Maximilian was once more on happy terms with the pope,
political considerations served to cool completely his momentary
ardour for ecclesiastical reform. In 1514 the archbishopric
of Mainz fell vacant again, and Albert of Brandenburg, already
archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator “of Halberstadt,
longing to add it to his possessions, was elected. After some
scandalous negotiations with Leo X. it was arranged that
Albert should pay 14,000 ducats for the papal confirmation and
10,000 as a “composition ” for permission to continue to hold,
against the rules of the Church, his two former archbishoprics.
Moreover, in order to permit him to pay the sums, he was to
have half the proceeds in his provinces from an indulgence
granted to forward the rebuilding of St Peter’s. A Dominican
monk, Johann Tetzel, was selected to proclaim the indulgence
(together with certain supplementary graces) in the three
provinces of the elector. This suggestion came from the curia,
not the elector, whose representatives could not suppress the
fear that the plan would arouse opposition and perhaps worse.
Tetzel’s preaching and the exaggerated claims that he was reported
to be making for the indulgences attracted the attention
of an Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, who had for some
years been lecturing on theology at the university of Wittenberg.
He found it impossible to reconcile Tetzel’s views of indulgences
with his own fundamental theory of salvation. He accordingly
hastily drafted ninety-five propositions relating to indulgences,
and posted an invitation to those who wished to attend a
disputation in Wittenberg on the matter, under his presidency.
He points out the equivocal character of the word poenitentia,
which meant both “penance” and “penitence”: he declared
that “true contrition seeks punishment, while the ampleness
of pardons relaxes it and causes men to hate it.” Christians
ought to be taught that he who gives to a poor man or lends to
the needy does better than if he bought pardons. He concludes
with certain “keen questionings of the laity,” as, Why does
not the pope empty purgatory forthwith for charity’s sake,
instead of cautiously for money? Why does he not, since he
is rich as Croesus, build St Peter’s with his own money instead
of taking that of poor believers P It was probably these closing
reflections which led to the translation of the theses from Latin
into German, and their surprising circulation. It must not be
assumed that Luther’s ninety-five theses produced any considerable
direct results. They awakened the author himself
to a consciousness that his doctrines were after all incompatible
with some of the Church’s teachings, and led him to consider
the nature of the papal power which issued the indulgence.
Two or three years elapsed before Luther began to be
generally known and to exercise a perceptible influence upon
affairs.
In July 1518 a diet assembled in Augsburg to consider the
new danger from the Turks, who were making rapid conquests
under Sultan Selim I. The pope’s representative,
Cardinal Cajetan, made it clear that the only safety Augsburg
lay in the collection of a tenth from the clergyThe diet of Augsburg
of 1518.
a twentieth from laymen; but the diet appointed a
committee to consider the matter and explain why they proposed
to refuse the pope’s demands. Protests urging the diet
not to weaken came in from all sides. There was an especially
bitter denunciation of the Curia by some unknown writer. He
claims that “the pope bids his collectors go into the whole
world, saying, ‘He that believeth, and payeth the tenths, shall
be saved.’ But it is not necessary to stand in such fear of the
thunder of Christ’s vicar, but rather to fear Christ Himself,
for it is the Florentine’s business, not Christ’s, that is at issue.”
The report of the committee of the diet was completed on the
27th of August 1518. It reviews all the abuses, declares that
the German people are the victims of war, devastation and
dearth, and that the common man is beginning to comment
on the vast amount of wealth that is collected for expeditions
against the Turk through indulgences or otherwise, and yet no
expedition takes place. This is the first recognition in the
official gravamina of the importance of the people. Shortly
after the committee submitted its report the clergy of Liége
presented a memorial which, as the ambassador from Frankfort
observed, set forth in the best Latin all the various forms of
rascality of which the curtizanen (i.e. curiales, officials of the
curia) were guilty. From this time on three new streams begin
to reinforce the rather feeble current of official efforts for reform.
The common man, to whom the diet of Augsburg alludes, had
long been raising his voice against the “parsons” (Pfaffen);
the men of letters, Brand, Erasmus, Reuchlin, and above all
Ulrich von Hutten, contributed, each in their way, to discredit
the Roman Curia; and lastly, a new type of theology, represented
chiefly by Martin Luther, threatened to sweep away
the very foundations of the papal monarchy.
