A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [68]
The Vatican was unmoved. Over the years it had increased its levies, and that continued. In 1476 Pope Sixtus IV had proclaimed that indulgences applied to souls suffering in purgatory. This celestial confidence trick was an immediate success; David S. Schiff has described how peasants starved their families and themselves to buy relief for departed relatives. Discontent was growing when the wasteful Pope Leo found himself broke—undone by his war against the Duchy of Urbino. Going to the well once too often, on March 15, 1517, the Holy Father announced a “special” sale of indulgences. The purpose of this “jubilee” bargain (feste dies), as he called it, was to rebuild St. Peter’s basilica. As an incentive donors would receive, not only “complete absolution and remission of all sins,” but also “preferential treatment for their future sins.”
There was, understandably, no mention of a secret agreement under which the Curia would split the jubilee’s profits with young Albrecht of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz, who was deeply in debt to Germany’s merchant family, the Fuggers. Albrecht had the pontiff’s sympathy, and he was entitled to it. Albrecht had been obliged to borrow 20,000 florins because that was the price the pope had exacted for his confirmation as prelate.
The new archbishop chose as his jubilee’s principal agent and hawker one Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar in his fifties. There were quaestiarii whose traffic in indulgences was scrupulous, but Tetzel was not among them. He was a sort of medieval P. T. Barnum who traveled from village to village with a brass-bound chest, a bag of printed receipts, and an enormous cross draped with the papal banner. Accompanying him were a Fugger accountant and another friar, an assistant carrying a velvet cushion bearing Leo’s bull of indulgence. Their entrance into a town square was heralded by the ringing of church bells. Jugglers performed and local throngs crowded around, waving candles, flags, and relics.
Setting up in the nave of the local church, Tetzel would begin his pitch by opening the bag and calling out, “I have here the passports … to lead the human soul to the celestial joys of Paradise.” The fees were dirt-cheap, he pointed out, if they considered the alternatives. Christians who had committed a mortal sin owed God seven years’ penance. “Who then,” he asked, “would hesitate for a quarter-florin to secure one of these letters of remission?” Anything could be forgiven, he assured them, anything. He gave an example. Suppose a youth had slipped into his mother’s bed
St. Peter’s Square in Rome at the time of the coronation of Pope Sixtus V, in 1585.
and spent his seed inside her. If that boy put the right coins in the pontiff’s bowl, “the Holy Father has the power in heaven and earth to forgive that sin, and if he forgives it, God must do so also.” Warming up, Tetzel even appealed to the survivors of men who had gone to their graves unshriven: “As soon as the coin rings in the bowl, the soul for whom it is paid will fly out of purgatory and straight to heaven.”
In Germany Tetzel exceeded his quota. He always did. This was his profession; he traveled from one diocese to another, raising funds as instructed by the Curia. Indulgences were popular among the peasantry, but less so among those who, in those days, formed the opinions of the laity. And this time he was in hostile territory. Northeastern Germany—Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and Mainz—had been chosen for this extortion because it was weak. France, Spain, and England were strong, and when they had asked that little be expected of them, pleading poverty, the pontiff had agreed. The decision was not without risk.