A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [101]
The fortress Castel Sant’ Angelo, Rome
There was also sacking for the sheer wicked joy of desecration. Archives and libraries went up in flames, with manuscript pages saved only to be used as bedding for horses. The Vatican was turned into a stable. Drunken Landsknechte strutted around in the red hats and vestments of cardinals, parodying holy rites, with one, wearing the pontiff’s vestments, riding an ass. All this continued, off and on, for eight months, until the food ran out and plague appeared. Only then did the mutineers withdraw, having transformed the glory that was Rome into a reeking slaughter-house.
As news of the sack spread across Europe, Protestants interpreted it as an act of divine retribution. And some Catholics agreed. A senior officer in Charles’s army, while deploring “these outrages on the Catholic religion and the Apostolic See,” commented, “In truth everyone is convinced that all this has happened as a judgment of God on the great tyranny and disorders of the papal court.” Cardinal Cajetan, who had met Luther in Augsburg nine years earlier, agreed. “We who should have been the salt of the earth,” he wrote with heavy heart, “have decayed until we are good for nothing beyond outward ceremonials.”
BUT MOST MEMBERS of the Catholic hierarchy saw it differently. Now, they believed, they had seen the faces of the Protestant heresy—the fact that half the looting troops had been Spanish Catholics was ignored—and now they would move with just as much vigor, intolerance, and brutality as those rebelling against their God. Sir Isaac Newton would not discover his Third Law until a generation later, but it was already in effect: henceforth every action by the insurgent Christians would provoke an equal and opposite reaction in Rome. And the Church’s reflexive responses to dissent matched those of the schismatics. The same doom, in the same guise, awaited those who had betrayed Rome: torture, drawing and quartering, the noose, the ax, and, most often, the stake. In that age the world was still lit only by fire. At times it seemed that the true saints of Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike, had become blackened martyrs enveloped in flames.
In vain enlightened Catholics urged internal disciplinary reforms, curing the blight which had driven good Christians from their ancestors’ faith—the corruption of the clergy, the luxurious lives led by prelates, the absence of bishops from their dioceses, and nepotism in the Holy See. At the very least, they argued, pontiffs should rededicate themselves to devotional lives, good works, and the reaffirmation of beliefs under attack by Protestants: for example, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the divinity of the Madonna, the sanctity of Peter.
Instead the Vatican committed its prestige to reaction, repression, and military and political action against rulers who had left the Church. As always, when scapegoating has become public policy, the Jews were blamed. In Rome they were confined to a ghetto and forced to wear the Star of David. Meantime, Catholic princes were persuaded to make war in the name of the savior, or
Lutheran satire on papal reform
even to send hired assassins into the courts and castles of the Protestant nobility. Every aspect of Protestantism—justification by faith alone, exaltation of the Lord’s Supper, the propriety of clerical marriage—was condemned in a stream of bulls. Nevertheless the rebel faiths continued to prosper. In 1530 Charles V, at the insistence of the Curia, signed a decree directing the Imperial Chamber of Justice (Reichskammergericht) to take legal action against princes who had appropriated ecclesiastical property. They were given six months’ grace to comply. None did.
The Spanish Inquisition is notorious, but the Roman Inquisition, reinstituted in 1542 as a pontifical response to the Reformation, became an even crueler reign