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Had Charles remained in Germany to enforce his edict, he would have been unchallenged. His spies could have quickly found their man in Wartburg. After all, several bands of Lutheran admirers did. But lawmen would have been unnecessary anyway. Luther’s temperament wouldn’t permit him to hole up indefinitely, bored in the woods. Within a few months he left his lair to deliver a series of eight sermons in Wittenberg. Yet the emperor was already gone. Preoccupied by his conflict with the French, he absented himself from central Europe for ten years. By the time he returned, it was too late. Europe had changed. Somewhere in the continent a kind of universal joint—one of those suspicious devices whose design could be found among Leonardo’s papers—had shifted. German princes, the king of France—even the pope—were loath to give Charles the powers he needed to suppress Luther. Moreover, the monk and the movement he had launched had grown too powerful to be suppressed. The emperor tried mightily, but it would be his dying effort, and medieval Christendom would die with him.

COAXED BACK into hiding by his frantic protector, Junker Georg reluctantly grew a beard and wore knightly attire as a disguise. He slept poorly, ate too much, grew fat, and suffered familiar hallucinations—he told his bodyguards that an apparition of the devil had appeared, stinking up the place, but he had replied in kind, routing the demon “mit einem Furz” (“with a fart”). To Spalatin he sent a treatise on monastic vows, repudiating celibacy as a trap of Lucifer’s and declaring sexual desire to be irrepressible. (Spalatin, embarrassed, hid the tract.) Finally Luther settled down on a stump, surrounded himself with foolscap, and began compounding his crimes by translating the New Testament into German. But he remained restless. “I had rather burn on live coals,” he wrote, “than rot here. … I want to be in the fray.”

Actually no one was thicker in it. Luther’s movement was sweeping northern Europe: first the free cities, led by Nuremberg; then Saxony, Brandenburg, Prussia, Württemberg, Hesse, Brunswick, and Anhalt; then half Switzerland; then Scandinavia. Italy and Spain never threatened to defect. Nor, after England turned, did Ireland; whatever the English were for, the Irish were against. But for a time Catholicism seemed a lost cause in Bohemia, Transylvania, Austria, and even Poland. Converts could be found in the unlikeliest places. Maximilian’s granddaughter Isabella—sister of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor—was converted to Lutheranism. And the king of France tolerated Lutheran propaganda, decided purgatory did not exist, and turned against the pope, though he never became a closet Protestant. *

Early Protestant strength sprang from tradesmen; from anticlericals; from the educated middle classes, whose humanistic studies had convinced them that Catholicism was rooted in superstition; and, in Germany, from the nobility, whose first acts, upon renouncing allegiance to Rome, were to appropriate all Church wealth within their domains, including land and monasteries. This was a powerful incentive to break with Rome; overnight a prince’s tax revenues increased enormously, and as he appointed magistrates to fill the void left by ousted papal and episcopal appointees, his prestige among his people rose. They, however, had nothing to say about all this. The decision was completely his. His subjects adopted whatever faith he chose; the various diets and councils which met throughout the century to discuss tolerance—and eventually granted it, accepting the historic schism—were discussing the rights of rulers, not the ruled. Religious freedom for the individual lay centuries away. It did not even exist as an abstraction.

Had men been offered choices, the result would have been chaotic. Protestantism was already confusing enough as it was. All converts agreed on certain principles: renunciation of papal rule; replacing Latin with common tongues; the abandonment of celibacy, pilgrimages, adoration of the Virgin and the saints; and, of course, condemnation of