Читать книгу Reformation - Harry Reid - Страница 21

CHAPTER 4

Luther the Man

MARTIN LUTHER (1483–1546) was a colossus, a life-force, at once the perfect revolutionary and the imperfect man. They say that more books have been written about him than about anyone other than Christ. For nearly 500 years, he has invited huge claim and angry counter-claim. He must inevitably and justly dominate any book about the Reformation. The moving and tempestuous story of his life, with its fear, its darkness, its constant travails, its heroism, its hope, its brilliance, its extraordinary vitality, and at times its sheer badness, is a story of quintessential human struggle.

For some, such as the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, Luther was the ultimate hero; for others, even those you would expect to approve of him, he produces responses of disdain or worse. I know of one leading figure in the Church of Scotland who shudders with distaste every time his name is mentioned. There was always something vulgar about Martin Luther – a coarseness, a boorishness. He once concluded a letter to his wife: ‘I got drunk like a German. God be praised.’ He attacked his many enemies and critics with abuse and, at times, hysterical exaggeration. Luther was proud of the fact that he was German. While both the Christian Church and the new vogue for humanism were essentially transnational, Luther was very much a German nationalist.

If we contrast him with Desiderius Erasmus, the most fastidious intellectual of his time, we can understand at least something of Luther’s essence. Erasmus, like Luther, was an especially clever man who, despite his cleverness, thought that theology, and indeed Christianity itself, should not be too complex. Both men believed that religion should be kept simple and that Jesus Christ was both human and humane. Both men were concerned about the corruption of the Church. But there were crucial differences between them. Above all, Erasmus was an eminently reasonable man; Luther was often anything but reasonable.

At first, Erasmus gave Luther cautious support, though he detested violence and force. In his own words, he was ‘averse to any action which might lead to commotion and uproar’, whereas commotion and uproar were Luther’s constant companions. If you wanted a quiet life, you stayed well away from Martin Luther. Erasmus was a cool and detached man – yet when the break came, it was bitter. ‘I shall not oppose it if they roast or boil him’, wrote Erasmus, with uncharacteristic vehemence, in 1521. Three years later, the break was complete. Erasmus was appalled by Luther’s brutish, wicked response to the German peasants’ revolt. He desired moderate, steady change; he certainly did not want to see the Church smashed to bits. He called Luther, in a gentler and more typical phrase, ‘a harsh and severe doctor’.

Erasmus died in Basle in 1536, a rather lonely man. He was rejected by many Catholics for helping to foment the Reformation, and rejected by many of the new Protestants for not joining it. By contrast, when Luther died, he was surrounded by adoring friends and colleagues and, above all, by his wife Catherine, who had come to love him so much that, even two months after his death, she still could not eat or sleep. His great friend and disciple, Philip Melanchthon, said that the world had lost not just a prophet but its father. ‘We are entirely poor, wretched, forsaken orphans who have lost our dear noble man as our father’, he said at Luther’s funeral.

The prophetic man, the most significant figure in the extended birth of the modern world, was dead – but the debates raged on. They still do. Has any man been so many-sided? Paradoxes abound. The man who could write with vicious venom was venerated for his kindness. The man who single-handedly unleashed an era of giddy change was deeply conservative. The man with the refined, clear intelligence could behave like the most egregious boor. His spirituality did not signify solace. He was sometimes, in his own words, ‘angry with God’.

Luther’s last recorded words were: ‘We are all beggars.’ Neither a king nor an emperor, neither a warlord nor a politician, but a rumbustious, earthy, flawed human being and above all a prophet, he had had an impact on humanity that was, and remains to this day, gargantuan. Despite his frequent crassness, he always had his sensitive, introverted side, and at the close he was humble and spiritually alone as he prepared to meet his Maker. But then this was the man who had said: ‘They threaten us with death; they would do better to threaten us with life.’

Though he came from German peasant stock, Luther’s background was quite comfortable. Unlike many Europeans of his time, he did not grow up amid grinding poverty. Indeed, the part of Germany where he was brought up and where he became a noted scholar and teacher was one of the more prosperous parts of early sixteenth-century Europe. Germany as a whole was comparatively affluent and confident.

Luther’s grandfather was a modest farmer, a sort of senior peasant; his father Hans became a copper miner and then founded his own small business, a foundry. Martin was born on 10 November 1483. His upbringing was tough. Both his parents beat him; this was normal in those times. Life, despite the comparative prosperity, remained violent and chancy. Death was always near; the plague was a constant threat.

Martin was the eldest child. Hans soon realised that he was very clever. Rather than apprentice him, Hans decided to ensure that he had a good education. First locally in Mansfeld, then at Magdeburg forty miles to the north, then at Eisenach, Martin went to school. And then, in May 1501, he went on to university in the large Saxon town of Erfurt (population 20,000).

Although very bright, Martin took some time to flourish academically. He struggled to gain his first degree. As he studied for his second, the MA, he gradually began to fulfil his early promise. He came second out of seventeen students. At the same time, he suffered from persistent depression. One of his consolations was music, which he adored; he was to become one of the greatest hymn-writers of all time.

The next academic stage was to prepare for the law. One day, in the summer of 1505, when he was walking back to Erfurt from Mansfeld – he had been allowed home for a few days to celebrate the feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin – he approached the gates of the university town with thunder booming around him. Then lightning suddenly flashed, and a bolt struck the ground beside him. He fell over, terrified and shouted: ‘Beloved St Anne – I will become a monk.’ (Anne was the patron saint of miners, and he had often heard his parents praying to her.)

Within a fortnight, he had cancelled his law course and joined the Augustinian friary in Erfurt. Hans Luther was furious, but to no avail. Martin had signed up for a life of chastity, prayer and – above all – obedience. By 1506, he was ready for full profession. He promised ‘to live unto death without worldly possessions and in chastity’. He was to break both promises.

The friars kept a hard and rigorous house. In his theological and spiritual education, Martin saw little evidence of the degradation and corruption which were supposedly among the root causes of the Reformation. He moved on to the small town of Wittenberg, with its equally small university, which had been founded only a few years earlier by the Elector of Saxony. Wittenberg was an unsophisticated place compared with Erfurt. But Luther was to flourish there. He became a lecturer, popular with his students, and then in 1512 he became professor of Holy Scripture, succeeding a notably sensitive and supportive scholar called Johannes von Staupitz.

In the years between 1506 and 1512, Luther was undergoing a protracted personal crisis. He was excessively self-absorbed. He was introspective – and, despite his ability to relate to those whom he taught, he felt himself utterly alone. He could not find God. Indeed, he felt God had rejected him. He was in danger of slipping into a mire of self-loathing.

He was an original; he was trying to work out his own theology – but, although he was a clever man, his mind lacked the logic of his great successor Calvin. There was an imaginative imprecision about him. Indeed, as his hymns and some of his prose writings show, he had a lot of the poet in him. He thought and studied hard, but his conscience kept challenging his thought processes. He remained an earnest and scrupulous friar. Yet his mind was in constant torment.

Staupitz, who was vicar-general of the Augustinian friars in Saxony, did his best to help. He had been Luther’s confessor; sometimes Luther’s confessions took several hours, and even the well-disposed Staupitz became impatient. It was Staupitz who steered Luther towards St Paul.

As Luther turned more and more to the writings of Paul, and in particular the Epistle to the Romans, he slowly began to emphasise faith above all else. It was through faith that the grace of God flowed down; this simple insight at last gave him peace of mind. As he was able, with growing confidence, to work out his own theology, the torments eased and arrogance began to appear. In 1517, he wrote to a friend saying that his, Luther’s, theology was becoming dominant in the university. On the other hand, the great Aristotle was going downhill! Perhaps the Greek would ‘go all the way to hell’.

For some time, Luther had been vexed by a commonplace Church scam, the cynical sale of indulgences. It affronted him that ordinary decent people thought they could avoid penitence simply because they had purchased an indulgence. Pope Leo X had authorised a massive sale of indulgences across Germany, a fruitful country for this kind of fund-raising. The chief salesman was a Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, whose pitch was crude and effective. Indeed, he was a spiritual snake-oil salesman of the worst kind. Like many high-profile salesmen, he was very well paid, with a substantial salary, generous expenses and – if he sold sufficient indulgences – huge bonuses. People listened to Tetzel. They enjoyed being frightened by him. After all, if they bought an indulgence, they would have escaped the fires of hell – or so they believed.

Meanwhile, as Luther’s personal spiritual crisis eased, his career progressed. His main concern remained his academic work, but he was also in charge of the castle church in Wittenberg, where he preached every Sunday. He had a further responsibility: the running of various convents.

By 1517, Tetzel was conducting his hard sell not in Wittenberg itself, but nearby. The Elector, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, had banned Tetzel from his own territories, which included Wittenberg. But Luther became aware that some of his own congregation had crossed the River Elbe to places where they were free to purchase indulgences. He was appalled, but he was also measured. At this point, the 33-year-old Professor Luther was far from being some latter-day Savonarola, inciting the masses with his fiery preaching. He had become something of a Church careerist; the last thing he would have wanted was to tear his Church apart, though that was exactly what he was about to do.

Luther dealt with his concern about indulgences in a cautious, academic, restrained way. He was dealing with a specific abuse of the Church’s power. He was not drawing up a vast programme for reform, a masterplan to modernise the Church. In late October 1517, he drafted a series of theses in which he did not neglect to argue that the pope himself was being slandered by the preaching of men like Tetzel. He sent the theses to the Archbishop of Mainz (somewhat naïvely, because Mainz had subcontracted Tetzel) and to the Bishop of Brandenburg. He also distributed them to various friends and colleagues at the university.

It was on the final day of October that one of the most famous and momentous events in human history took place. Or did it? Luther announced that he was convening a debate on his theses at the university the next day. He then pinned the ninety-five theses on the main door of the castle church. So what? This was a routine way of making an announcement, of alerting people to a forthcoming event. Luther was not trying to instigate a rebellion, far less a revolution. The theses were written in Latin, not German, and they had been penned by a loyalist who was steadily making his way in the Church.

It is not known whether or not the debate at the university took place. Indeed, it is not certain that the theses were actually pinned by Brother Martin to the door of the church. The only person to claim that they were was Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s first biographer (the first of hundreds), who was not even in Wittenberg at the time. In Luther’s own copious writings, there was no reference to pinning the theses to the church door.

If the theses were publicly displayed, this might well have caused a local stir. But what really mattered was that they found their way into the hands of a printer and were translated into German. This undoubtedly happened. And it probably happened without Luther’s knowledge or approval. The printed theses were soon being distributed through Germany and beyond its border. Sir Thomas More was studying them in England early in 1518.

Even then, there was no great likelihood of anything other than an essentially academic controversy, albeit a bitter one. What first fired the great conflagration in the crucial year of 1518 was the sheer stupidity of two men: Tetzel himself, and then the man who was supposedly the foremost theologian in Germany (and a sometime friend of Luther’s). This academic, John Eck of the University of Ingolstadt, was guilty of particularly foolish over-reaction.

Tetzel – who commanded the attention of ordinary people – ferociously denounced Luther as a heretic. He bragged that Luther would be burned to death within weeks. This was quite in keeping with his character. But he also had intellectual pretensions, and he decided to write a long series of ‘counter-theses’. When they arrived in Wittenberg, Luther’s students got hold of them and burned them publicly. (It was very much an era of burning, of documents and books as well as people.) Eck, supposedly more refined and intellectual, was almost as outspoken as Tetzel, calling Luther among other things rebellious, impudent, simple-minded and – most dangerously – ‘a despiser of the pope’.

Luther had in fact been careful not to attack the pope directly. In any event, Leo X was not a cerebral man – he was basically a hedonist dilettante – and had no grasp of theological matters. More significantly, he had no political antennae. In December 1517, the Archbishop of Mainz forwarded Luther’s theses to Rome, indicating that Leo would no doubt know how to deal with ‘such error’. As it turned out, the pope had not the slightest notion of how to cope. An aged, obscure and pompous theologian – a man called Sylvester Prierias, the Commissioner of the Sacred Palace, and a Dominican – was asked to provide the public response to the insolent Augustinian. Prierias took precisely the wrong tack, blustering, abusing, threatening, ignoring the arguments in the theses and instead reiterating the claims of the infallible papacy.

Rome was reacting in the worst possible way. In Germany, Luther was now receiving fervent support from his own students and guarded support elsewhere. He was emerging as an unlikely public hero. The turning point, when Luther received the personal endorsement he probably needed to pursue his case, came in April 1518 when his own order held a meeting at Heidelberg. While the theses themselves were not debated, Luther was acclaimed. A young friar called Martin Bucer was especially impressed. Bucer was to become a leading reformer.

Luther, who five years previously had been tormented with self-doubt, struggling with his faith, was rapidly growing in confidence. His mindset was changing. He was more assured and was relishing his burgeoning celebrity. He was beginning to realise what a superb, potent writer he was. Already a popular and confident lecturer, he discovered that he could write fast and well, in both Latin and German. He became a consummate communicator; he was an enormously effective journalist and propagandist. The new printing technology was a godsend for him. His papers, tracts and pamphlets were printed and distributed to large audiences all over Germany.

I wrote above that Luther was the perfect revolutionary. This might seem peculiar, given that he did not intend to start a revolution and had no idea of where to take it once it started. But his sheer mastery of communication, allied to his uncanny ability to act as a focus for all the resentment and frustration, both spiritual and nationalistic, that had been simmering in Germany – these, along with the unstoppable force of his personality, turned him into a one-man machine ready to turn the world, or a considerable part of it, upside down. Further, he was by now well prepared for the coming battle, when he knew his life would be in danger. The Church had neither shut him up nor squashed the dissidence. In the summer of 1518, Luther received an instruction from Leo X to journey to Rome and face his accusers. At the same time, the pope instructed the head of the Augustinian order in Saxony to have Luther arrested, manacled and imprisoned.

Luther knew that it would be folly to venture outside Germany. Anywhere in Germany outside Saxony might also be problematic, but within Saxony he was probably safe – so long as he had the protection of the elector. So, Luther made a specific plea for that protection. He understood that Frederick the Wise’s sympathy would be crucial; the secular ruler could, if he wished, safeguard both his life and his work.

Frederick was well disposed to Luther. Apart from anything else, Luther had put the little university of Wittenberg on the map. Frederick had founded the university, and he was gratified to find that it was now becoming famous. Furthermore, the elector was, obviously enough, a German – and German nationalism was nascent at this time. Frederick, although a good old-style Catholic (he was the proud possessor of a huge collection of relics), was by instinct unhappy with Italian clerics interfering in German affairs.

The specific political situation also favoured Luther. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, was in poor health. Everyone knew that his death was imminent. Frederick was a member of the six-man Electoral College that would shortly be choosing the next emperor. The pope was concerned that the next emperor should not be Charles (son of Philip of Burgundy and Joanna of Spain); he would have preferred just about anyone else, perhaps even Frederick himself. It would therefore not be in his interests to alienate Frederick. Luther, meanwhile, was determined that his ‘case’ should not be heard in Rome, where, whatever the merits of his arguments, he would be in acute danger. Pope Leo tentatively asked Frederick the Wise as ‘a good son of the Church’ to hand over Luther, ‘a son of perdition’. Frederick did nothing.

Now the great test was approaching. Luther’s first significant adversary was to be yet another Dominican – this time the general of the entire Dominican order, Tomasso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, who was also the papal legate in Germany. This was the man whom the pope chose to swat Luther into oblivion. Cajetan was decent and thoughtful, like Eck a distinguished theologian, but more personable. Cajetan had investigated the continuing cult of Savonarola. He was himself, in his own gentle, reasonable way, a reformer; he was a sincere enemy of corruption, and he wanted to restore moral rigour to the Church. But he had a tendency to snap under pressure, which was to prove fatal. In other circumstances, he might well have patched up what was still, just about, a little local difficulty.

Although he had only been in Germany as legate for a few months, Cajetan was well aware of the country’s political and diplomatic complexities. When Frederick the Wise formally asked for Luther’s case to be heard not in Rome but in the imperial free city of Augsburg, Cajetan told the pope that he should accede. And so, the first great set-piece of Luther’s career, which was to transform him from obscure heretic into the most celebrated man in Europe, took place in Augsburg, a large, wealthy and sophisticated centre, full of bankers, artists, printers and immigrant workers.

Cajetan had no stomach for a major clash. He was a natural conciliator. His personal instinct was to admonish Luther for errors rather than to condemn him for heresies. Yet he soon found that he had a distaste for Luther. Indeed, at their three meetings, the two men discovered that, despite themselves, they seriously disliked each other. Cajetan was irked by Luther’s eyes, constantly flashing with anger, and by his persistent pedantry. Further, Luther – always a terrible interrupter – showed Cajetan zero respect.

Cajetan had been advised not to get into a detailed argument with Luther but rather to demand a simple, straightforward recantation. If this was not delivered, the heretic was to be sent to Rome in chains. Luther was pugnacious, argumentative, truculently confident of his ability to debate any point, big or small, and utterly determined to force the cardinal to explain to him in fine detail precisely where and how he had lapsed into heresy. This was a trap for Cajetan, but he allowed himself to be dragged into it, and – clever as he was – he soon found himself outgunned and outclassed by the disputatious Augustinian. At the third and fatal meeting, Cajetan lost control. He shouted at Luther to get out.

Cajetan did not obtain his recantation; he had instead an escalating crisis. For it was Cajetan, more than anyone, who forced the issue, who concentrated Luther’s mind on the crux. In the course of their three confrontations, it finally became clear to Luther that he had a simple choice. He had either to endorse the pope’s absolute, unconditional authority – or to follow his convictions and accept, and publicly declare, that the pope could be wrong and that the Church did not have the ultimate authority to teach Scripture.

Luther still instinctively wanted to believe that the pope was just misguided, ill-informed, poorly advised. But he now had to face up to a stark truth: he was going to have to reject papacy and all it stood for. Once Luther had followed the logic of his own position, he found himself liberated, although paradoxically he was also in imminent danger of losing his personal freedom. He now knew that he would die rather than recant. He was free in his own mind; he was free to prosecute his own simple, crystalline case. At the end of the day, the pope did not matter. Scripture alone had authority.

The implications were colossal. For the last 500 years or so, we have been dealing with them. All sorts of things are supposed to have grown from this basic insight – individualism, capitalism, the opening of people’s minds. But, for the moment, all we need to note is that Luther had been forced into a position where he had no option but to assert that the pope’s authority did not exist. Furthermore, the Church was effectively redundant. All that the people needed was access to the Bible. If they had that access, they did not need priests.

Luther reduced Christianity to its very essence. The rising churchman had now declared his own Church superfluous. Man needed no intermediary between himself and God, as long as he had the Bible. Scripture alone possessed infallibility. Of course, this was far too simple. It could never be a case of all or nothing. The Church was needed. Priests were needed. Church buildings were needed. That was why the Reformation, in its purest essence, finally failed.

Luther was to have a major clash three years later at the Diet of the Holy Roman Emperor in the town of Worms. This has gone down in history as the time when he reached the point of no return. It was when he allegedly said: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other’, though these were not quite his actual words. Yet, almost certainly, the crucial, pivotal change came during his three disputes with Cajetan. Had Cajetan handled the impetuous academic differently, the revolution might never have happened.

After the third and final session in Augsburg had ended in disorder as a result of Cardinal Cajetan losing his temper and control of the proceedings, Luther’s good friend and mentor, Staupitz, who had bravely come to offer his pupil and protégé support, slipped out of the city, fearing for his life. As for Cajetan, he knew that the pope would have wanted him to have Luther apprehended and hauled in humiliation and disgrace to Rome. But he was also well aware of Frederick the Wise’s role in protecting Luther. The elector had granted Luther a formal safe conduct. Because of the delicate political situation in Germany, Cajetan was anxious to avoid a major confrontation with the elector. So, he dithered, not knowing whom to defy: the pope or the elector.

Luther took advantage of the cardinal’s indecision. He was smuggled out of Augsburg in literal fly-by-night circumstances. He then undertook the most perilous physical journey of his life, on an ill-tempered and unsaddled horse, to the relative safety of Monheim, about fifty miles away. The story goes that, when he reached the town, he fell from the horse, utterly exhausted, on to a heap of straw.

By the end of October, he was back in Wittenberg, where the whole rumpus had started exactly a year earlier. From then on, everything moved at a giddy pace. Up until this point, Luther had not been directing events. He had wanted to purify his Church, no more; he had no idea that he could lead a huge popular wave of protest. Now, as he was discovering his extraordinary talent as a writer and mass communicator, he took off. Pamphlets followed each other in a kind of furious spate. Then, in 1520, he wrote his three great ‘Reformation Treatises’. One of his themes was that the princes and magistrates of Germany should reform the Church. By now, he was blatantly bypassing the bishops and cardinals; he was trying to destroy the power of the pope himself. He wanted the princes to preside over a great moral cleansing: closing the brothels, controlling the usurers and so on.

1520 was altogether a momentous year. Across Germany, people would go up to strangers and ask: ‘Are you for Martin?’ It appeared as if the majority were uniting behind him. South of the Alps, few could comprehend what was happening. In the summer, the pope issued his bull Exsurge Domine, which started rather fancifully, saying that a wild boar had blundered into the vineyard. It condemned Luther as a heretic and ordered people to burn his books. And there was indeed to be burning, but not of Luther’s books. Mobs were soon on the rampage, not just burning copies of the bull but also demonstrating raucously.

Luther himself, never one to resist the temptation of rousing a rabble, presided over one such burning, just outside the walls of Wittenberg, near the River Elbe. When the mob had thrown copies of the bull into the flames, they marched back to Wittenberg, led by a brass band, and found copies of books by Eck and other anti-Luther theologians. These were taken back outside the walls, and a second bonfire consigned more printed material to ashes. Luther was no longer an obscure friar. He was the man of the moment; and he was enjoying it. It was not until the beginning of 1521 that Luther’s excommunication was made formal, by another bull which significantly stated that those who protected him would themselves become heretics. This had no effect on Frederick.

The new, young and inexperienced Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (born in 1500, elected in 1519), now had an immense problem before him. This was his great test, and he knew Pope Leo to be his enemy. He also knew that at least some of the Electoral College who had recently chosen him as emperor were sympathetic to Luther. On the other hand, he feared a huge popular uprising in Germany. There was perhaps still time to put Luther down. He was well aware that real power in Germany rested with the electors and the princes. His own base was in Spain, and to a lesser extent southern Italy.

So, Charles summoned Luther to the imperial diet, meeting in Worms. This in itself was regarded by the papacy as a provocative act. Since the Church had unequivocally denounced Luther as a heretic, all the secular authority had to do was to carry out the papal sentence. No more confrontations or hearings were necessary. Charles was having none of this. At the same time, he did not wish to deal with Luther personally. Luther’s reputation was by now such that nobody on earth would have been confident in confronting him; and the German princes were starting to realise that matters were getting out of control. They reckoned there might be uprisings if Luther did not receive a personal hearing. So, Charles compromised; Luther would have his hearing, but there was to be no disputation.

On 17 April 1521, Luther appeared before the emperor, the electors, the princes and all the senior functionaries of the empire. Faced with this considerable assemblage of the great and the good, the patriotic German’s confidence deserted him. Asked straightforward questions, he mumbled incoherently. He was treated with respect and given a day to recover. His prayers were answered – and, when he appeared the next day, he was a changed man, resolute and eloquent. Asked whether he was willing to recant, he replied with humility. His conscience was captive to the Word of God. He could not, he would not recant anything. ‘For it is neither safe nor right to act against one’s conscience. God help me.’

This was not what the emperor wanted. Luther was a man of eloquence; Charles himself now showed no mean eloquence when he reminded the people that he was descended from a long line of emperors of the noble German nation. They had been faithful, to the death, to the Church of Rome; he was resolved to follow them. A single friar who went against all the Christianity of 1,000 years and more had to be wrong. He was determined therefore to stake his life and his soul, so that the German nation was not disgraced.

Fine words – but the emperor remained in a quandary. He knew that at least some members of the Electoral College, including Frederick the Wise, were unhappy with the outcome. So, he changed tack. He convened a private meeting, which lasted several days, during which Luther was examined by a group of German theologians. They were reasonable and non-confrontational in their approach. But Luther stood firm.

Eventually, he was allowed to leave Worms with a safe conduct. Shortly afterwards, Charles issued the Edict of Worms. No-one was to assist or even communicate with Luther. If they did, they would be arrested and they would lose all their property. Luther’s writings were to be burned. Luther himself was an outlaw, under sentence of death.

All this was far too late. Luther had not been, and would not be, silenced. Nor would he be killed. His steadfast protector, the Elector of Saxony, arranged for him to be ‘abducted’ by five horsemen in a forest near Morha as he progressed northwards with his safe conduct, though that of course was now of doubtful value. Frederick’s men accomplished this phony kidnapping swiftly and competently. Luther, still clutching some books, was disguised and spirited off to the safety of Wartburg Castle, near Eisenach. This was derring-do, but the reality was that Germany was behind Luther. He might now be effectively imprisoned in a castle. But he was alive, and he was writing. The great communicator was just beginning.

Luther, usually on an emotional switchback, now became depressed. The confidence, the relish in his own celebrity, the truculence – all these evaporated into the Wartburg mist. He did not like living in what was virtual imprisonment. He fretted with his disguise. He suffered from constipation and insomnia. Ravens and magpies, flying round the battlements, disturbed him. He found himself, once again, battling with Satan. For a time, he discovered the Devil everywhere: he heard him on the roof, he heard him on the stairs; the Devil appeared as a black dog on Luther’s bed.

The warden of the castle, seriously concerned for Luther’s mental health, took him hunting. But Luther could see no point in pursuing a harmless little creature like a rabbit. Then, one day, a hunted hare, seeing Luther as a friend, sought sanctuary in the reformer’s cloak; but the hounds appeared and bit through to their prey. Had God deserted him again? Luther missed his friends and supporters, the adulation of his students at Wittenberg. He fell into the slough.

And yet, despite all these travails, which were real enough, this amazing man did not sulk or succumb. Instead, he rallied and literally wrote himself out of depression. His productivity was awesome. During his period of detention at Wartburg, which lasted less than a year, he wrote no fewer than twelve books, as well as translating the New Testament into German. This last was a masterpiece – a true and honest translation, but presented in vibrant, demotic German prose. It was at last a book for the common people. More than 200,000 copies were to be sold over the next decade.

Luther’s revolution was supremely a revolution of words. Between 1518 and 1523, the number of books published in the German language increased tenfold. This was almost entirely down to Luther. Printing presses were established all over Germany. And Luther’s ideas spread not just through the printed word but also through word of mouth. People were not now simply asking strangers if they were ‘for Martin’. They talked about his ideas and discussed his simple, straightforward version of Christianity.

Above all, he gave the people their Bible. At last, the Bible was becoming what it should always have been, the bedrock of Christianity.

In 1522, Frederick, by now the crucial secular figure in Luther’s life, judged that it was safe to let Martin return to Wittenberg. Why was Frederick (who owned one of the largest collections of relics in Christendom) so consistently supportive of Luther? He never became a Lutheran himself, but he liked and admired the first and most influential Lutheran. His secretary and chaplain, George Spalatin, who was always sympathetic to Luther, had considerable influence over him.

Furthermore, Frederick was grateful for the fame and prestige that Luther had single-handedly gained for his little university. And maybe his ‘wisdom’ persuaded him that, deep down, Luther was less radical than he seemed. If so, Frederick was correct.

As soon as the returning hero was back in Wittenberg, he showed the conservative side of his nature. Luther began to take issue with the more extreme reformers. He was never a Wycliffe or a Savonarola. He had relied on the protection of Frederick; increasingly, he saw his Reformation as being linked to secular power and authority.

While he had been at Wartburg Castle, the students at Wittenberg had become over-excited. They had destroyed an altar in the Franciscan church. They had rioted during a Christmas Eve service. Luther now made it clear that he would have no truck with such behaviour – despite the fact that he had come close to inciting riots himself just a year or so earlier. Luther always detested social disorder.

In late 1523, a series of frenzied peasant risings swept across southern Germany. The peasants were relatively poor people in a wealthy country. But they had been enjoying a new-found prosperity. Their self-confidence was also growing. At least part of their new aggression could be attributed to Luther’s Reformation. The peasants were inflamed not just by the acts of unjust and oppressive landlords but also by a virulent anticlericalism. They were joined by craftsmen and tradesmen; indeed, actual peasants became a minority in the revolt.

Amid the ferment was the extremist Thomas Müntzer, a wild, radical preacher much given to bloodthirsty incitement. Müntzer would have been a dangerous man in any context; in those times, he was in his element. We have noted that Luther was not as reasonable a man as Erasmus; compared to Müntzer, Luther was the very model of reasonableness.

Müntzer was a well-educated, intelligent priest who had imbibed the ideas of Hus but had gone on a wild cerebral journey which led him to believe in the necessity of revolution. He wanted the people to be free and God alone to rule over them. He was not afraid of violence; indeed, he revelled in it. He claimed that God was ‘sharpening his scythe’ within him, though he called himself not ‘the scythe’ but ‘the hammer’. His sign combined a red cross with a sword. He was given to saying: ‘Let not the sword of the saint get cold.’ In truth, he was a maniac. He was also an outspoken enemy of Luther. Erasmus had called Luther a harsh and severe doctor; Müntzer called him ‘Dr Liar’. Further, Luther was accused of being ‘soft-living and spiritless’.

It is difficult to assess whether Müntzer was a marginal figure in the peasants’ revolt or whether his hellfire ranting played a significant part in whipping up the discontent. What is important is his clash with Luther, for Martin now began to worry about what he had unleashed. He had no direct responsibility for the uprising; indeed, he was concerned to put it down. But the climate he had created undoubtedly encouraged the subversive, the rebellious and the fanatical. Müntzer was just the most prominent exemplar of this last category. There were many others.

The actual revolt was uncoordinated. It took the form of a series of sporadic uprisings. These were often sullied by an unusual cruelty, on a scale that became horrific, even for those violent times. Castles and monasteries alike were attacked; nuns were raped. Feral gangs of men, drunk on beer and wine they had looted, roamed around the country lanes. When the princes and magistrates regained control, the repression was brutal. About 100,000 died, leaving behind many more widows and children.

Luther, always brave, had travelled into what were combat zones, preaching against the uprisings and denouncing the deranged zealot Müntzer. Once again, his life was in danger, but now from different enemies and for different reasons. He could not control his pen. He could not stop himself writing with savagery. In 1525, he wrote a lamentable and deplorable tract, Against the Murdering Thieving Hordes of Peasants. His language was vile. He incited not the peasants but the princes ‘to brandish their swords, to smite and slay the wicked’. This was bad enough, indeed it was unforgivable – but Luther sometimes dashed off crude polemics without much reflection. However, did there lie underneath his furious words a sinister, calculating motivation? Was Luther now fully aware that his Reformation depended on the civil authorities – that it was really a revolution not of the people but of the masters?

In any event, Luther could now be fairly branded as a counter-revolutionary, a man who wrote that you could not deal reasonably with a rebel; rather, you had to ‘punch him in the face until he has a bloody nose’. So, Luther became wholly identified with the ruling class, with the princes, with the rich, the powerful and the strong. Many of the innocent survivors of the revolt did not forget. They had been taught hard lessons. Luther’s Reformation was no longer for them. Some turned back to the old Church; some turned to the growing number of radical sects that the Reformation had spawned.

In those violent times, many of the new Lutheran ministers found themselves martyred when they had barely begun their ministry. In many parts of Germany, the Roman Catholic Church recovered its authority, and it was not slow in exacting reprisals. Whoever was now in control of the Reformation, it was not its begetter.

Luther himself was not to be martyred. Revolutions often devour those who start them. But Luther was to prove a great survivor. And, for some, he was also to prove a great betrayer.