A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [96]
Lefèvre was one of Marguerite’s successes. She also had her failures, notably Bonaventure Desperiers and Étienne Dolet. Both were given her best efforts; nevertheless both died violently in Lyons. Desperiers had been guilty only of bad timing; had he published his Cymbalum mundi before Luther challenged Rome, the Curia would have ignored it. Written in Latin and addressed to fellow humanists, it noted the flagrant contradictions in the Bible, deplored the persecution of heretics, and mocked miracles. There was nothing new here. The satires of Erasmus and the German heretics, making the same points, had been more caustic. But in the new age of intolerance, Cymbalum was denounced by both sides—the Catholic witchhunters in the Sorbonne and the Protestant Calvin. Then it was publicly burned by the official hangman of Paris. Desperiers became too hot even for Marguerite; she was forced to banish him from Nérac. She sent him money, but the pressure was too much for him. On the run, threatened and hounded, he died, reportedly by his own hand. Dolet, on the other hand, courted death. A printer as well as a Ciceronian scholar, he clandestinely published books on the Index Expurgatorius until he was summoned before the Inquisition, found guilty, and, despite Marguerite’s attempts to intervene, burned alive.
Some humanists were victims; some became leaders of the revolt. All, when captured, met hideous deaths. Those who had led became martyrs, but the deaths of leaders and led seem equally senseless. In his Christianismi restitutio (The Restitution of Christianity) the Spanish-born theologian and physician Michael Servetus dismissed predestination as blasphemy; God, he wrote, condemns only those who condemn themselves. Servetus was naive enough to send a copy to a preacher who believed in predestination as the revealed word and who, knowing which church Servetus would attend and when, had him ambushed at prayer. A Protestant council sentenced him to death by slow fire. Now terrified, aware of his blunder, the condemned author begged for mercy—not for his life; he knew better than that; he merely wanted to be beheaded. He was denied it. Instead he was burned alive. It took him half an hour to die.
The Catholics who quartered the body of the Swiss Huldrych Zwingli and burned it on a pyre of dried exrement were equally merciless; so was Martin Luther, who had regarded Zwingli as a rival and called his ghastly death “a triumph for us.” In the darkness enveloping Christendom no one recalled that as a young priest the slain Swiss had taught himself Greek to read the New Testament in the original and possessed a profound knowledge of Tacitus, Pliny, Homer, Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, and Caesar. All they remembered was that he had said he would prefer “the eternal lot of a Socrates or a Seneca than of a pope.”
Perhaps the most poignant figure in the strife—and certainly one of the most tragic—was Ulrich von Hutten. Once he had distinguished himself as a humanist, a Franconian knight, a brilliant satirist, and one of the first scholars in central Europe to cherish the vision of a unified Germany. Like Luther, he had abandoned Latin to help shape the German language as it is spoken today; his Gesprächbüchlein, published the year after Worms, was a greater contribution to linguistics than to theology. But Hutten was one of the committed humanists, and like most Reformation zealots he displayed more enthusiasm than judgment. Unwisely, he had cast his lot with Von Sickingen, whose defeat transformed him into a penniless fugitive robbing farms for food as he fled toward Switzerland. Reaching it, he headed straight for Basel, and Erasmus. He expected his fellow humanist to support him, but that was asking too much. Not only had his vehement rhetoric offended the man who preached moderation and tolerance; Hutten had denounced Erasmus as craven for not supporting