A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [98]
To show that Calvinists were merciful, first offenders were let off with reprimands and two-time losers with fines. After that, those who flouted the law were in real trouble. The Consistory made no allowances for probation, suspended sentences, or rehabilitation programs, and Calvin assumed that everyone enjoyed community service without being sentenced to it. Excommunication and banishment from the community were considered dire, though those living in a more permissive age might find them less appalling. In any event, there were plenty of other penalties, some of them as odd as the offenses they punished. A father who stubbornly insisted upon calling his newborn son Claude spent four days in the canton jail; so did a woman convicted of wearing her hair at an “immoral” height. A child who struck his parents was summarily beheaded. Abortion was not a political issue because any single woman discovered with child was drowned. (So, if he could be identified, was her impregnator.) Violating the seventh commandment was also a capital offense. Calvin’s stepson was found in bed with another woman; his daughter-in-law, behind a haystack with another man. All four miscreants were executed.
Of course, it proved impossible to legislate virtue. Some of Calvin’s devoted followers insisted that it was possible, that the Consistory’s moral straitjacket worked; Bernardino Ochino, an ex-Catholic who had found asylum in the city-state, wrote that “Unchastity, adultery, and impure living, such as prevail in many places where I have lived, are here unknown.” In fact they were widely known there; the proof lies in the council’s records. A remarkable number of unmarried young woman who worshiped with Ochino managed to carry their pregnancies to term unde-
John Calvin (1509–1564)
tected. Some abandoned their issue on church steps or alongside forest trails; some named their male co-conspirator, who then married them at sword’s point; some lived as single parents, for not even Calvinists could orphan an innocent infant.
On other issues they were adamant, however. The ultimate crime, of course, was heresy. It was even blacker than witchcraft, though sorcerers could not be expected to appreciate the distinction; after a devastating outbreak of plague, fourteen Geneva women, found guilty of persuading Satan to afflict the community, were burned alive. But because the soul was more precious than the flesh, the life expectancy of the apostate was even shorter. Anyone whose church attendance became infrequent was destined for the stake. Holding religious beliefs at odds with those of the majority was no excuse in Geneva or, for that matter, in other Protestant theocracies. It was a consummate irony of the Reformation that the movement against Rome, which had begun with an affirmation of individual judgment, now repudiated it entirely. Apostasy was regarded as an offense to God and treason to the state. As such it was punished with swift, agonizing death. One historian wrote, “Catholicism, which had preached this view of heresy, became heresy in its turn.”
THE POPE, AFTER ALL, was a Catholic, if not a very good one, and because his Church hadn’t changed its view of heresy, one might have expected him to have met the Protestant revolt with a terrible swift response. The dimensions of the threat were staggering. But Leo failed to perceive this; he had learned nothing since Worms. To him the great split in his realm was still “a squabble among monks,” and he assumed that all pious men were governed by Augustine Triumphus’s Summa de ecclesiastica potestate (1326), promulgated two centuries earlier by Pope John XXII, which had decreed that as God’s vice-regent on earth, a pontiff must be obeyed, even when he is a great sinner.
Leo wasn’t a great sinner, but religion ranked rather low in his priorities, below learning, living well, serving as head of the Medici family, and making war. He was one of history’s great