Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town Into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--And Started the Protestant Reformation (4 page)

A miserable, poor, dirty village, in comparison to Prague, hardly worth three farthings: yes, in fact, it is not worthy to be called a town of Germany. It has an unhealthy, disagreeable climate; it is without vineyards, orchards or fruit bearing trees of any kind . . . dirty homes, unclean alleys; all roads, paths and streets are full of
filth. It has a barbarous people who make their living from breweries and saloons, and a body of merchants not worth three cents.
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George, Duke of Albertine Saxony, enemy and rival to Luther’s own patron, Frederick the Wise, put it more succinctly. “That a single monk, out of such a hole, could undertake a Reformation, is not to be tolerated.”
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Indeed, one of the reasons opponents so underestimated Luther at first was because they simply could not conceive anything of importance emerging from such a place.

NEW WEALTH AND NEW INVENTIONS

The comparative backwardness of Wittenberg in this era was all the more glaring because the German cities were regarded, with some justice, as among the greatest jewels of European civilization. In the fifteenth century Germany had become one of the powerhouses of the European economy. While the emerging nation-states of Spain, France, and England expended their gold in dynastic conflict, Germany enjoyed comparative peace. Germany had its emperor, a member of the Habsburg family, who certainly aspired to expand his authority; but the Habsburg lands were too dispersed, and crucially, the emperor’s own position depended not on heredity succession, but on election by a college comprised of the rulers of seven of Germany’s larger states. These were the elite among the three hundred rulers of Germany’s patchwork of small and tiny territories. Their borders were in constant flux. Saxony, where Wittenberg lay, could have been one of the largest but for a family tradition of partible inheritance that led to frequent divisions. Some of the grandest territories were held by bishops, true princes of the church such as the archbishop of Mainz, Albrecht of Brandenburg, a man who would play a large part in Luther’s story.

By the fifteenth century many of the largest cities had successfully
repudiated the authority of any neighboring prince: these were the imperial free cities. Nuremberg, the greatest of them all, had a considerable territory of its own; in southern Germany it coexisted in friendly rivalry with Augsburg, center of the German banking industry. Augsburg was also southern Germany’s major news hub, a crucial staging point on the imperial post road linking Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries.
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To the north lay Hamburg and Lübeck, leaders of the venerable Hanseatic League of Baltic trading towns; to the west Cologne, Strasbourg, and Basel were strategically located on the Rhine, the great communication and transport artery that linked the rich trading towns of Flanders with Italy to the south. It was the connection with Italy across the perilous Alpine passes that was the lifeblood of Germany, for Italy was the gateway to Asia and its precious cargoes of spice and silks. The greatest benefits of this international trade were confined to the imperial cities of the south and west; at the turn of the sixteenth century very little of this luxury trade would have found its way to the chilly northern plains of Thuringia and Saxony, where fish and grain dominated the local markets.

In the second half of the fifteenth century the sophisticated markets of Flanders, Italy, and southern Germany began to deal in a new branch of trade: the commerce in printed books. When in the mid-1440s a dogged Mainz entrepreneur called Johannes Gutenberg began to experiment with new ways to mass-produce books, it was by no means clear that this was an invention the world really needed. Europe already had a highly developed book trade, volumes lovingly hand-copied from manuscript to manuscript. Consumers and collectors would seek out their manuscripts from the best and most famous copy shops, or take their texts to the local scribe: this was a very flexible market. The trade in manuscripts would continue to flourish for many years after Gutenberg first exhibited pages of his printed Bible at the Frankfurt Fair in 1454.
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Gutenberg’s Bible certainly attracted a great deal of attention and quickly sold out. But it also bankrupted him. It was the last major project in which he would be involved.

Gutenberg’s story, one of technological fascination and financial failure, would be disturbingly characteristic of the first seventy years of printing.
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As news of his great achievement spread, princes, bishops, or town councils all wanted to have a press in their territory. Printing spread quickly through Germany, Italy, and France, and thence more haltingly to Europe’s periphery: Spain, England, and Scandinavia. But most of these ventures, unsuitably located in small cities away from the major centers of population, closed after publishing only a handful of titles. It took some time for the fatal flaw in the business model to become apparent. It was comparatively simple to print some three hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand copies of a printed text. But the manuscript book trade, essentially a retail business linking one text with one purchaser, gave no hint of how such quantities could be sold in a marketplace spread all over Europe.

The answer, painfully derived after thirty years of expenditure and failure, was to be guided by those who had this sort of experience: the wealthy merchants who dominated Europe’s transnational luxury trades. These were the men who knew what was necessary to make the new trade work: raising capital for the necessary investment and transporting books in bulk to major markets, where they could be traded, often by exchange, for other consignments of books. They knew how to arrange storage for many hundredweight of paper until an edition could be disposed of, and how to handle the complicated loans and exchange transactions necessary in any capital-intensive industry.

So the book trade contracted. Although books were at some point in the fifteenth century printed in more than two hundred places around Europe, two thirds of them were produced in only twelve cities. All of them were large commercial centers, strategically situated in Europe’s major trading places: six in Germany, four in Italy, and two in France.
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This iron geography of book production would prove remarkably enduring. Of the twelve great printing towns of fifteenth-century Europe, none was smaller than thirty thousand inhabitants. This was true also of
the two sixteenth-century latecomers to the printing elite, London and Antwerp.

It was a world that should have had no place for little Wittenberg. And initially this was exactly how it turned out. The experimental age of printing, the fifteenth century or incunabula age, passed Wittenberg by altogether. Such books as the inhabitants of the small city required, and these were not many, could have been purchased in nearby Erfurt and Leipzig, both of which had a lively early printing industry. The first printing press was not established in Wittenberg until 1502, as a service to the new university. Most university towns had a press of their own, but this was hardly a flourishing venture. It was probably only the determination of Wittenberg’s ruler, Frederick the Wise, that his capital should have the appropriate accoutrements of cultural sophistication that allowed it to stagger on.

Yet within the next fifty years Wittenberg would defy all the rules of the new print economics and become a center of the book world. This was almost entirely due to Martin Luther: his notoriety, his passionate following, and his uncommon talent as a writer.

This book tells the story of how a new revolutionary movement was incubated in a tiny, remote city and quickly took Germany by storm. It is not just a story about books. Luther and his friends used every instrument of communication known to medieval and Renaissance Europe: correspondence, song, word of mouth, painted and printed images.
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Many people adhered to the new movement when they first heard Luther speak; others were led to the evangelical message by those who emerged as leaders in the hundred or more German cities that adopted the Reformation. The Reformation took wing largely because its advocates grasped that the pulpit could be one of the most powerful organs of public information and persuasion available in sixteenth-century society. All that said, the Reformation could not have occurred as it did without print. Print propelled Martin Luther, a man who had published nothing in the first thirty years of his life, to instant celebrity. It was his
genius to grasp an opportunity that had scarcely existed before he invented a new way to converse through books. In the process he changed Western religion and European society forever.

He also changed Wittenberg. Wittenberg, a town that had no printing at all before 1500, would become a powerhouse of the new industry, trading exclusively on the fame of its celebrity professor. And Wittenberg was not an isolated case. In many medium-sized and small German towns, the Reformation galvanized an industry that had withered after the first flush of overexuberant experimentation.
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All this Germany owed to Luther, and in this respect Wittenberg was a microcosm of a larger transformation. But it was in Wittenberg that it began, and began rather slowly, for at first the sleepy little settlement found it difficult to grasp the enormity of what was unfolding in its church and university. Luther, whose intuitive understanding of the power of print was one of the most remarkable aspects of his extraordinary personality, would have to intervene personally to ensure that Wittenberg developed a print industry that could match the huge demand for his work.

But that is for the future. Let us first take a little time to become acquainted with the city that Luther made, and that made Martin Luther. The best way to do this is in Luther’s company, for he was a congenial soul, though perhaps more so as the paterfamilias of mature years than as the intense young professor we first find hurrying through the streets of Wittenberg in 1513.

WALKING WITH LUTHER

In 1513 Luther had been definitively settled in Wittenberg for two years. Our walk with him will take the same path of a more famous walk that occurred four years later, as Luther strode through the town to pin up on the castle church his ninety-five theses: the event that would ignite the Reformation.

Or so tradition would have it. Fifty years ago a mischievous Catholic theologian suggested that the posting of the ninety-five theses was, in fact, a myth, a fable that grew up only when Luther became famous.
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There were indeed no contemporary witnesses, or at least none that thought the event important enough to record.
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This unwelcome intervention, not surprisingly, set off a storm of controversy. In one recent poll of the German public, the posting of the theses was voted the third most important event in German history, so it would be disconcerting indeed to think it did not take place. Personally I am inclined to believe the posting of the theses did take place, and to settle the question I will introduce evidence that emerged some years after Erwin Iserloh lobbed his hand grenade into the calm waters of Luther studies.
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We will come to that in due course. In 1513 indulgences were far from Luther’s mind, and certainly he had no wish to challenge the church in which he was making a promising career.

Luther was just approaching his thirtieth birthday. The first contemporary images show a lean, earnest young man, dressed in the habit of the Augustinian order that he had joined eight years before. He lived in modest quarters on the third floor of the Augustinian monastery, at the very eastern end of the city. The community housed some thirty monks, many of whom studied or had teaching duties in the university.
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It was an intense, intellectual atmosphere, which no doubt suited Luther well, for he, too, was notably cerebral. In 1512 he had been promoted to professor, a distinction that earned him the important privilege of a heated room.

Luther’s destination this morning was the university, situated in the castle church at the farthest western end of Wittenberg. It is a walk of about half a mile from one end of Wittenberg to the other. This walk took in Wittenberg’s two main streets, which run parallel to the Elbe River on its northern shore and which then, as now, shaped the topography of the city. As he hurried to his duties, there would have been little to detain him. Luther was not at this point well-known to Wittenberg’s citizens; it was only in the following year, 1514, that he would begin
regularly to preach to the townsfolk in the parish church. Wittenberg’s one parish church lay a few yards behind the main street, where the city broadened out to the north. This was the dwelling place of Wittenberg’s artisans and craftsmen, modest enough men who nevertheless dominated the city’s town government. For unlike the great imperial cities of Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Strasbourg, Wittenberg had no patrician elite of international merchants. This was a small community serving a modest agricultural commerce. Its beating heart was the marketplace, through which Luther would now quickly pass. Here, as elsewhere, this was a crowded place of market stalls, a hubbub of bawling tradesmen, live animals, and impatient customers.

Opposite the marketplace, on a corner of the road leading to the castle, was a building site. Here, on a huge corner plot, stretching back to the gate to the river Elbe, the artist Lucas Cranach was building a residence fit for Wittenberg’s most distinguished inhabitant. Cranach was one of a number of major figures drawn to Wittenberg by commissions to decorate the city’s most striking new building projects: the castle and castle church. But unlike Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgmair, and others, Cranach had remained in Wittenberg as the elector’s court painter. This was only one of a number of ventures pursued by this enterprising and driven man, who in 1513 was well on the way to being Wittenberg’s major employer. At this point, he and the young professor striding past his new building would have had little connection. In the years to come, their partnership, built on a profound mutual respect and friendship, would shape the Reformation.