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to the masses, telling them what they wanted to hear, motivated solely by the base desire to make money. The impact of his successes on Christendom’s establishment may be judged by an edict from the Holy Roman emperor. Any teacher found using the Colloquia in a classroom, he ordered, was to be executed on the spot. Martin Luther agreed. “On my deathbed I shall forbid my sons to read Erasmus’ ‘Colloquies.’ ” But Luther was then still professor of biblical exegesis at Wittenberg, an eminent member of the Catholic establishment. Within three years he would change his mind and, with it, the history of Western civilization. And Erasmus, though he denied it on his own deathbed, had sounded the claxon of religious revolution.

OF COURSE, “the great apostasy,” as it came to be called in the Vatican, was no more the work of humanist scholars than it was an achievement of those godless descendants of Goths who had amused themselves by forging obscene propositions from the Blessed Virgin. The forces which fractured the unity of Christendom were enormously complex, and humanism, though a prime mover, was merely one current in the mighty wave which had just begun to form far out in the deep. One of its contributions was the revelation that art and learning had flourished before the birth of Jesus, when, it had been thought, such accomplishments were impossible. But men also wondered why God had allowed the triumph of the Muslims and the fall of Constantinople. And explorers returning from Asia and the Western Hemisphere reported thriving cultures which had either rejected Christ or never heard of him, thus discrediting those European Christian leaders who had held that belief in the savior was universal. It was an omen that Marguerite of Angoulême, the lovely Perle des Valois, sister of the king of France and herself queen of Navarre, became a skeptic. Once a woman of ardent faith, she now became a lapsed Catholic. In Le miroir de I’âme pécheresse, she acknowledged that she despised the religious orders, approved of attacks on the pope, thought God cruel, and doubted the Scriptures. Marguerite was accused of heresy before the Sorbonne, and a monk told his flock she should be sewn in a sack and flung into the Seine. As the sister of the French king she was never in peril, however; he adored her, and her championing of sexual freedom had enhanced her popularity in France.

The Vatican, with its population of bastards, was in no position to censure an advocate of infidelity. Marguerite’s only real threat to Catholicism was her subsequent role as an accomplice of its enemies; she later provided sanctuary for fugitives from heresimach posses. One of them was John Calvin. It is instructive to note that Calvin was an ingrate. He rebuked his protectress for including, as guests of her court, Bonaventure Desperiers and Étienne Dolet, skeptics who mocked Catholics and Protestants alike. The dismal truth is that the new Christians would turn out to be at least as bigoted as the old.

However, their clergy were to prove neither corrupt nor depraved, and this, in that age, was refreshing. At a time when homicide, thievery, rape, and assassination reached shocking heights, loyal Catholics were most deeply distressed by the abuses of their own clergymen. Many of the clergy agreed. Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim condemned his own monks: “The whole day is spent in filthy talk; their whole time is given to play and gluttony. … They neither fear nor love God; they have no thought of the life to come, preferring their fleshly lusts to the needs of the soul. … They scorn the vow of poverty, know not that of chastity, revile that of obedience. … The smoke of their filth ascends all around.” Another monk noted that “many convents … differ little from public brothels.” According to Durant, Guy Jouenneaux, a papal emissary sent to inspect the Benedictine monasteries of France in 1503, described the monks as foulmouthed gamblers and lechers who “live the life of Bacchanals” and “are more worldly than the mere worldling. … Were I minded to relate all