A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [80]
Pope Leo’s tolerance had seemed infinite, but this was too much. Protesting the abuse of indulgences had been heretical only in the eyes of precisians; Eck’s coup, after all, had been based on an antecedent in which the Church could scarcely take pride. Incitement of homicide, however, was beyond tolerance. To propose slaughtering the pontiff and his cardinals would have been a high crime had the offender been an ignorant member of the laity. Here he was an accomplished theologian, and disciplining his apostasy was overdue. Furthermore, that same June the vigilant Eck, now in hot pursuit of heresiarchs, arrived in Rome with a copy of a new, splenetic Luther sermon openly questioning the power of excommunication. Accompanying it were detailed reports of Lutheran converts spreading dissent in central Europe and Switzerland. Reconciled at last to the coming coronation of Charles as the new Holy Roman emperor, the pontiff finally acted. On June 15, 1520, announcing that the papacy was in mortal danger from “a wild boar which has invaded the Lord’s vineyard,” he issued Exsurge Domine, a bull condemning forty-one of Luther’s declarations, ordering the burning of his works, and appealing to him to recant and rejoin the faith. The German monk was given sixty days to appear in Rome and publicly renounce his heresies.
Sixty days passed, he remained in Wittenberg, and the Curia accordingly issued a bull of excommunication. It was not signed by the pope, and at his insistence it stopped short of the ultimate Decet Romanum pontificem, eternally damning the monk. Nevertheless Luther was named and condemned. All Christians were forbidden to listen to him, to speak to him, or even to look at him. In any community contaminated by his presence, religious services were to be suspended. He was declared a fugitive from the Church; kings, princes, and nobles were commanded to banish him from their lands or deliver him to Rome.
He responded with a series of caustic pamphlets. Then, told his books were being burned in Rome, he decided upon a dramatic act of defiance. At his suggestion, his faculty colleagues invited Wittenberg’s “pious and studious” undergraduates to gather outside the city’s Elster gate the next morning, December 10. A bonfire had been prepared. Cheering students emptied the university’s library shelves and ignited the pile. Finally Luther, with his own hands, cast a copy of the papal bull into the flames, murmuring: “Because you have corrupted God’s truth, may God destroy you in this fire.” The blaze continued until nightfall. The following day Luther assembled them again. This time he announced that any man who refused to renounce the authority of the Holy See would be denied salvation. “The monk,” Durant later wrote, “had excommunicated the pope.”
BURNING A PAPAL BULL was, of course, a capital offense, but Luther had broken no law, because this bull was illegal. In the turmoil at the Vatican the Curia had been betrayed from within. The sixty day countdown had begun June 15, the day of the Exsurge Domine, and damned Luther on August 14. But under their own laws, this period of grace did not start to run until he had been handed the bull. And there the saboteurs had been particularly effective.
He should have received it before the end of July. Summer had been dry; even a slow courier could have accomplished the journey from Rome to Wittenberg in less than seven weeks. Yet it did not reach him until Octorber 10. In itself the injustice was slight; Luther was burning bridges as well as decrees. The significance of the delay lies in the identity of the obstructionists. German archbishops, serving in Rome, had held up the bull for nearly four months. In so intervening, they were representing the will of their countrymen. Luther was to be saved, not by the justice of his cause, but because in his fatherland, as all over Europe, the political