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eventually a scofflaw ruler would defy him. But the line was only beginning to blur. No monarch had yet refused to hand over a heresiarch —and thousands of men had perished at the stake for offenses less flagrant than those already committed by Wittenberg’s seditious professor. To challenge papal supremacy was, by definition, heretical and a capital offense. In the memory of living men four Germans had been martyred for apostasy, and the similarity of their offenses and Luther’s was striking. Johan von Wesel of Erfurt, like Luther a professor, had rejected indulgences, telling his students: “I despise the pope, the Church, and the councils, and I worship only Christ.” Despite a later recantation, he had been sent to his death. Condemnation had also awaited the brothers John and Lewin of Augsburg, for pronouncing indulgences a hoax, and Wessel Gansfort, who had rejected indulgences, absolution, and purgatory, calling the Bible the sole source of faith and salvation.

Luther later said of Gansfort, “If I had read his works before, my enemies might have thought that Luther had borrowed everything from [him], so great is the agreement between our spirits.” That was also true of the others, and if they had been guilty of high crimes, so was he; he had defied the Vatican in print, on platforms, and from the pulpit. All that was lacking was a formal confession before an official ecclesiastical body, and on June 27, 1519, eight months after his flight from Augsburg, he unwittingly provided that in the great tapestried hall of Leipzig’s Pleissenburg Castle.

Actually he could, with dignity, have absented himself from the Leipzig debate. The principal figure, in effect representing Luther, was his senior colleague at Wittenberg, Andreas Bodenstein, universally known, from his birthplace, as Professor Karlstadt. Karlstadt had run afoul of the Catholic hierarchy when Obelisks, Johann Eck’s polemical reply to Luther’s theses, had appeared. At the time Luther himself had been packing for the Augustinian meeting in Heidelberg; his own comments had been confined to a few scribbled notes at the bottoms of pages. But Karlstadt, eager to join the struggle, had produced a manuscript listing 379 new theses, to which he had added another 26 before publication. And now, challenged by Eck, he found himself in the middle of the battle.

EVERY SEAT was taken. Most of the audience comprised theologians and nobles, but there was a large delegation of Wittenberg students armed with clubs, prepared to fight for their professors. The youths kept a wary eye on the presiding officer, Duke George of Albertine Saxony. Duke George was a cousin of Frederick the Wise, but, unlike the elector, he was also a fierce conservative and therefore hostile to Luther. The only motive for Luther’s presence in the hall was personal loyalty. He was a fighter and an able debater, and Karlstadt, though intellectually gifted, was neither. The great Eck was expected to destroy him. Luther knew Eck could do it, but meant to see to it that he left the hall bearing a few bruises of his own.

As it turned out, Eck carried the day, scoring a greater victory than anyone had anticipated. Afterward he boasted of a personal triumph. He was right; it was. When Luther intervened, supporting his colleague, Eck skillfully maneuvered him far afield, then to a quagmire, into which he sank. The catastrophe began innocently, with a dispute over obscure issues raised a century earlier at the ecumenical General Council of Constance, called to reform the Church, bring an end to the Great Schism (there were three rival popes at the time), and suppress heresy. Unaware of where they were headed, Luther allowed Eck to lead him into a candid discussion of a tragic victim of the council, the Bohemian martyr Jan Hus.

Hus, the first great Czech patriot, had wanted to see the establishment of a Bohemian national church. After his ordination he had dominated the ancient University of Prague as its rector and dean of the philosophy faculty. Delivering both lectures and sermons in Czech, he rode to a crest