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By Root 357 0

their unpleasant tour of Germany, posting bulls damning him and watching them be torn down, he published a manifesto in Latin and German charging that the Church founded by Jesus Christ had suffered a thousand years of imprisonment under the papacy, shackled and corrupted in morals and faith. He denied that marriage was a sacrament and said any wife married to an impotent man should sleep around until she conceived a child, which she could pass off as her husband’s. If he objected, she could divorce him, though Luther thought bigamy more sensible than divorce. At the end he repeated his defiance: “I hear a rumor of new bulls and papal maledictions sent out against me, in which I am urged to recant. … If that is true, I desire this book to be part of that recantation.”

After reading this, Von Miltitz, astonishingly, still believed in the possibility of a reconciliation between the apostate monk in Wittenberg and the pontiff in Rome. On October 11, 1520, the young Saxon priest, now a spokesman for the pope, appeared in Wittenberg with a proposition: he would try to have the bull withdrawn if Luther would write the pope, denying malice in his assaults and presenting a reasonable case for reforms. Luther agreed, and in his letter he did, in fact, ask Leo to take none of his polemics personally (“Thy blameless life [is] too well known and too high to be assailed”). This, however, followed:

But thy See, which is called the Roman Curia, and of which neither thou nor any man can deny that it is more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom ever was, and which is, as far as I can see, characterized by a totally depraved, hopeless, and notorious wickedness—that See I have truly despised. … The Roman Church has become the most licentious den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the kingdom of sin, death, and hell. … They err who ascribe to thee the right of interpreting Scripture, for under cover of thy name they seek to set up their own wickedness in the Church, and, alas, through them Satan has already made much headway under thy predecessors. In short, believe none who exalt thee, believe those who humble thee.

Luther was now beyond redemption. This was the language of a fanatic, and deep in the bowels of the Curia papal clerks and chamberlains began, in their timeless way, to prepare his Decet Romanum pontificem—his absolute excommunication. Whether saboteurs were still entrenched there is unknown, but the bull was not ready for the pontiff’s signature until late January 1521, and four months later, when Luther and the Holy Church finally parted, no copies of it had reached Germany.

In reality it would be only a technicality; the first bull had branded him an outlaw, banishing him from Christendom, and by both law and custom he should have been a runaway, the quarry of every European ruler. The fact that all were looking the other way—or that Rome wasn’t prodding them—was no excuse in Aleandro’s eyes. Seething over the injustice of it, he decided to corner the chief scofflaw, Frederick III the Wise, elector of Saxony. He found him in Cologne on October 23, 1520. The elector was in a foul mood. He had expected to be in Aachen, where Charles V, only twenty years old, was receiving the sacraments as Holy Roman emperor—the last of the line, as it would develop, with any genuine hope of achieving the medieval dream: a unified empire embracing all Christendom. Frederick shared the dream, had voted for Charles (without being bribed), and had been looking forward to the coronation all year. But he was nearly sixty, a great age then, and had always been an enthusiastic gourmand. Now he was paying the price. Immobilized by gout, he lay sprawled in an inn on the outskirts of the University of Cologne, attended by a professor of medicine, glaring at his swollen foot and groaning.

He received Aleandro ceremoniously; his respect for papal nuncios was great, and after ruling Saxony for thirty-four years he had learned to rally when called upon for decision. But he was not called the Wise for nothing. He knew how to distribute responsibility.