A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [77]
He then alienated powerful men in the Church and grievously offended the king. In 1411, the antipope John XXIII had demanded a large Czech sale of indulgences to finance new wars. Wars, Hus argued, were temporal; using ecclesiastical power to finance them was intolerable. Wenceslas, who had been promised a share in the proceeds of the sale, turned against him. Hus went into hiding and wrote tracts supporting his position, shielded by admiring peasants. Then, in 1414, when the Council of Constance was meeting, he was invited to address it. The reigning Holy Roman emperor, Sigismund, offered him a safe-conduct, and he accepted it, a suicidal error, for Sigismund betrayed him into the hands of the schismatic pope. Sentenced by a panel of judges, all his enemies, Hus went to the stake as a heretic.
Had Luther approved the condemnation of Hus, or even evaded the issue, his movement would have collapsed and he would have been scorned, even by his students, as craven and dishonorable. Being neither, he replied that even ecumenical councils could err. Hus had been right, he said; his doctrines had been sound; those who had broken faith with him, and then damned him, had behaved shamefully and disgraced the Church.
It was a brave reply. It was also calamitous. His differences with Rome had begun with a minor dispute over indulgences. Now he had challenged pontifical authority over Christendom, revealing himself before all Europe as an unshriven, unrepentant apostate. He knew it, and as he left Pleissenburg Castle, surrounded by his vigilant students, he was a badly shaken man.
ON THE DAY FOLLOWING Luther’s humiliation, the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire met in Frankfurt am Main to choose a new emperor, Maximilian having died six months earlier. The identity of the successor to der gross Max was far more engrossing to Pope Leo than the incipient split in the Catholic Church—a demonstration of how hopelessly the pontiff’s priorities were askew. Historians agree that Luther could have been swiftly crushed had the pope moved decisively in his role as Vicar of Christ, the spiritual head of Christendom. Instead he dallied, vacillated, became engrossed in minor matters, and spent too many late evenings with his books. Leo X was no Borgia. In many ways he was more admirable than Martin Luther. Head of the Medici family, a poet and a man of honor, he was a leading patron of the Renaissance, a connoisseur of art, a scholar steeped in classical literature, and a pontiff tolerant enough to chuckle as he read the satires of Erasmus, appreciative that the humanist had observed the gentlemanly rule under which learned men of that time were free to write as they pleased, provided they confined themselves to Latin, leaving the unlettered masses undisturbed.
Those closest to the pope agreed that he was afflicted by three weaknesses: he was superficial, a spendthrift, and he lacked judgment. His poor judgment was to be his undoing, and it contributed heavily to the undoing of his Church. In the absence of decisive pontifical action, the Wittenberg abscess was spreading steadily. Oblivious to it, Leo waited nearly three years after the posting of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses before issuing an ultimatum to their author. Meantime the situation within Germany had changed radically.
A pope who took his responsibilities more seriously would have stifled the revolt before the end of 1517 by ordering Frederick III to silence the mutinous Augustinian, imprison him, or cremate him. But Leo, for purely secular reasons, was courting Frederick. It had been clear for some time that the reign of the great Max was nearing its end. Any European prince was eligible to succeed him. The three obvious candidates, all mighty kings, were Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, and young Carlos