A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [83]
Aleandro was calmer—then. But less than six months later he too was appalled, writing the Curia from Hesse: “All Germany is up in arms against Rome. … Papal bulls of excommunication are laughed at. Numbers of people have ceased to receive the sacraments of penance. … Martin is pictured with a halo above his head. The people kiss these pictures. Such a quantity have been sold that I am unable to obtain one. … I cannot go out in the streets but the Germans put their hands to their swords and gnash their teeth at me. I hope the Pope will give me a plenary indulgence and look after my brothers and sisters if anything happens to me.”
In Wittenberg Luther was content. On June 11, 1520—four days before the promulgation of Exsurge Domine in Rome—he had written Spalatin: “I have cast the die. I now despise the rage of the Romans as much as I do their favor. I will not reconcile myself to them for all eternity. … Let them condemn and burn all that belongs to me; in return I will do as much for them. … Now I no longer fear, and I am publishing a book in the German tongue about Christian reform, directed against the pope, in language as violent as if I were addressing Antichrist.”
I AM PUBLISHING a book in the German tongue. … Although Martin Luther was a riddle of quirks and eccentricities, many wildly contradictory and some less than admirable, he was never a fool. At the outset he had been taken for one, but throughout 1520 events moved his way, partly because of the pope’s dawdling but also because Luther possessed intuitive political skills. He not only grasped the powerful Herrenvolk spirit rising throughout the fatherland; he had conceived an ingenious way to exploit it.
As noted, the medieval elect, like imperial Rome, had kept the masses ignorant by a kind of linguistic elitism. Upper-class Romans had embraced Greek forms and grammatical laws, despite the fact that these clashed with the natural rhythms of the Latin language; as a consequence, serious texts had been unreadable to the vast majority of the empire’s inhabitants. Their successors had followed the same pattern, adopting Latin as the tongue of men in power.
As new worlds of common speech struggled to be born, the humanists, with their veneration for antiquity, had actually played the role of obstructionists, fiercely criticizing Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio for writing in vernacular Tuscan, or Italian. The tide was beginning to run against them; sixteenth-century Italian intellectuals like Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Castiglione published in both Tuscan and Latin. In some parts of Europe—France, Castile, Portugal, and to a lesser degree England — public documents were appearing in vernacular.
Elsewhere in Europe, however, those to whom Latin was gibberish—everyone, that is, except the higher clergy, the learned, and affluent noblemen—could not decipher a word of official pronouncements, laws, manifestos issued by their rulers; of the liturgies, hymns, and sacred rites of the Church; or, of course, of either Testament of the Bible. Contemporary books were equally unintelligible to them; so were political pamphlets. There were exceptions: the works of John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Langland in England, and, across the Channel, those of François Villon. Villon, however, was virtually unique. Other Frenchmen, believing that serious “literature