A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [88]
Ecken, ready for this, replied: “Martin, your plea to be heard from Scripture is the one always made by heretics.” In reality, he added, the right to scriptural interpretations was reserved to ecumenical councils and the Holy See: “You have no right to call into question the most holy orthodox faith” which had been “defined by the Church … and which we are forbidden by the Pope and the Emperor to discuss, lest there be no end to debate.” Once more he asked: “Do you or do you not repudiate your books and the errors which they contain?”
Until now all exchanges had been in Latin. This time, however, Luther replied in German. He rejected the authority of popes and councils, which had contradicted one another so often. He recanted nothing. To do so would violate his conscience; it would not, he added cryptically, even be safe. He ended: “Hier stehe Ich, Ich kann nicht anders.” (“Here I stand. I can do no other.”) Then, turning, he departed alone.
It was, Thomas Carlyle would write, “the greatest moment in the modern history of man.” Certainly it was the most astonishing moment in young Charles’s life. To rebuke a Holy Roman emperor! To defy the glittering array of ecclesiastical authority! The next day he summoned his most powerful princes and read aloud a statement he had written in French, expressing regret that he had not acted against the heretical monk’s “false teaching” with greater alacrity. He told them that although Luther could return home under his sauf-conduit, he would be forbidden to preach or make any disturbance along the way. “I will proceed against him as a notorious heretic,” he said and added, gratuitously, he thought, “I assume you will do the same.”
To his further amazement, only four of his electors agreed; among those declining were Frederick the Wise and Ludwig of the Palatinate. That night placards bearing the image of a peasant’s shoe—the German symbol of revolution—appeared all over Worms, including the door of the Rathaus (town hall). Bishops, frightened for their safety, implored Luther to make peace with the diet, but he refused, and, after a week left on his trip home. Pope Leo had sent his personal guarantee of the imperial safe-conduct, but it would expire on the tenth day of Luther’s journey, and Frederick, taking no chances, disguised a troop of his soldiers as highwaymen and staged a false ambush on May 6. Luther was spirited away to Wartburg Castle, near Eisenach, in the Thuringian Forest, and hidden from the world under the alias Junker Georg.
In Worms his princely allies had already begun to slip away. On the day of his disappearance only a rump diet remained in session. Nevertheless Charles convened it to deliver a vitriolic denunciation of the rebel monk, drafted by the frustrated Aleandro. The diatribe charged, among other things, that Luther had “sullied marriage, disparaged confession, and denied the body and blood of Our Lord.” It continued: “He is a pagan in his denial of free will. The devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle and invented new ones. … His teaching makes for rebellion, division, war, murder, robbery, arson, and the collapse of Christendom. He lives the life of a beast.”
On the emperor’s instructions, pursuit of the monk and his accomplices was to begin immediately. His writings were to be “eradicated from the memory of man.” Aleandro ordered Luther’s books burned. Those members of the diet still in the city ratified the imperial decision, and three weeks later it was formally promulgated. Meantime Pope Leo, who had been closely following the preparations for war in France and Spain, switched his allegiance from Francis to Charles, encouraging a preemptive strike by Spain. That was all the emperor salvaged from the Diet of Worms.