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and incapable of understanding the protest that had been developing for the century and a half since Wycliffe had repudiated priesthood as necessary to salvation, as well as the sacraments and the Papacy itself. Leo hardly noticed the fracas in Germany except as a heresy to be suppressed like any other. His response was a Bull in November 1518 providing excommunication for all who failed to preach and believe that the Pope has the right to grant indulgences. It proved as effective as Canute’s admonition to the waves. Leo, however, was soon to be more distressed by the shock of Raphael’s death than by the challenge of Luther.

Once the protest became overt, revolt against Rome followed in a rush. When the Diet of Augsburg in 1518 was asked to vote a special tax for crusade against the Turks, it replied that the real enemy of Christendom was “the hell-hound in Rome.” At his hearings in Leipzig in 1519, Luther now repudiated the authority of both the Papacy and a General Council, and subsequently published in 1520 his definitive statement of the Protestant position, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Claiming that baptism consecrated every man a priest with direct access to salvation, it denounced popes and hierarchy for all their sins and unrighteousness and called for national churches independent of Rome. Taken up by other Church rebels and reformers, his doctrine swept in a torrent of illustrated sheets and pamphlets and tracts to eager readers in towns and cities from Bremen to Nuremberg. In the Swiss city of Zurich, a fellow protester, Ulrich Zwingli, already preaching the same theses as Luther, extended the protest which was soon to fall into doctrinal disputes that were to fragment the movement forever after.

Informed by papal envoys of the spreading dissent, the Papacy saw itself dealing with “a wild boar which has invaded the Lord’s vineyard,” so described in a new Bull, Exsurge Domine, in 1520. Upon examination, the Bull condemned 41 of Luther’s theses as heretical or dangerous and ordered him to recant. When he refused, he was excommunicated and his punishment as a declared heretic was asked from the civil arm. The new Emperor, Charles V, young but sage and not anxious to draw popular anger upon himself, handed the hot coal to the Diet at Worms, where Luther in 1521 again refused to recant. As a devout Catholic, Charles V was forced to denounce him, perhaps less from orthodoxy than in return for a political pact with the Pope to join in ejecting the French from Milan. The Edict of Worms obediently put Luther and his followers under the ban of the Empire, promptly rendered null by his friends, who removed him to safety.

The Imperial forces triumphed over the French at Milan in 1521, enabling their papal allies to regain the northern jewels of the patrimony, Parma and Piacenza. Characteristically celebrating the victory by one of his favorite all-night banquets in December, Leo caught a chill, developed a fever and died. In seven years he had spent, as estimated by his financial controller, Cardinal Armellini, five million ducats, and left debts of more than 800,000. Between his death and burial, the customary plunder on the death of a pontiff was so thorough that the only candles that could be found to light his coffin were half-used ones from the recent funeral of a Cardinal. His hectic extravagance, lacking even Julius’ justification of political purpose, was the compulsive spending of a spoiled son of wealth and the acquisitiveness of a collector and connoisseur. Unlike Chigi’s gold plate, it had no waiting net in the river. It nourished immortal works of art, but however much these have graced the world, the proper business of the Church was something else.

Leo left the Papacy and the Church in the “lowest possible repute,” wrote the contemporary historian Francesco Vettori, “because of the continued advance of the Lutheran sect.” A lampoon suggested that if the Pope had lived longer, he would have sold Rome too, and then Christ, and then himself. People in the street hissed the cardinals going