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 (5 page)

Luther was now five minutes from his destination, the castle church, where much of the formal instruction of the university was held. Or perhaps he was heading for the university library, recently settled in the castle itself. The castle was another new building, only completed in 1509, a monument to the determination of Wittenberg’s ruler, Frederick, to build a residence appropriate to his status as a prince of the Empire.

F
REDERICK THE
W
ISE

Luther’s essential protector, though the two men may never actually have spoken to each other. Frederick’s tenacious loyalty to his turbulent professor was always something of a mystery, even to Luther.

Frederick’s passion for building can be traced back to a crisis in the ruling dynasty at the end of the fifteenth century. In 1485 the lands of
the Wettin Saxon dukes had been divided between two brothers, Ernest (Frederick’s father) and Albert. According to the strange Saxon custom, the elder brother, Ernest, decided how to divide the territories, and the younger, Albert, then chose which portion to take. Not surprisingly Albert chose the richest territories around Meissen, which also encompassed Saxony’s largest city, Leipzig. The inheritance of Ernest was more awkward, a long thin strip of territory with no natural center, and with Wittenberg the only town of any size. But it was Ernest who received the real prize: the electoral title that made him one of the seven hereditary electors whose privilege it was to select the Holy Roman Emperor.
When his son, Frederick, inherited these Ernestine lands in 1486, he determined to make something of this. Frederick was scrupulous in his attendance at every major meeting of the German assembly, the Diet. And he decided to make of Wittenberg a place fit for an electoral capital.

In 1486 the old residence was razed to the ground, and a new castle and church built in its place. This was a monumentally expensive project that would take twenty years to complete, for Frederick wanted a statement: a princely home built in the best Renaissance fashion, and a church to house his enormous and fast-growing collection of relics.

The church in which Luther now found himself would have been a cluttered place, home not only to the university but to a teeming array of altars and religious offices. Even before Frederick’s rebuilding, the All Saints foundation of the castle church possessed a precious distinction, a very rare indulgence that offered general remission from sins for all those who made an act of worship there on All Saints’ Day.
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Such indulgences, which offered the prospect of forgiveness in the hereafter for sins that might otherwise impede the progress of a soul to paradise, would in due course attract Luther’s ire, but in the centuries before, they were wildly popular, both as a means of raising funds for local churches and among those who bought them. When the new castle church was dedicated in 1503 by Cardinal Raymond Peraudi, the pope’s roving emissary, he graciously bestowed new indulgences on the church and its visitors. The pope obligingly played his part, urging Germany’s cathedrals and churches to offer some of their relics for Frederick’s increasingly impressive collection. Relics—fragments of the bones of saints and other holy memorabilia—were another pivotal aspect of medieval piety, and the pious pilgrim earned further indulgence by gazing upon them. It is one of the real curiosities of the Reformation that Frederick the Wise, at the same time that he stubbornly protected Luther from the consequences of his criticisms of medieval spirituality, also continued to add to his collection of relics. By 1520, when the latest inventory would be taken, it had reached 18,970 individual objects and was one of the largest in Germany. The most precious, rare items, such as a vial of the breast
milk of the Virgin Mary and a twig from the Burning Bush, would be preserved in beautiful gold or silver cases.
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When laid out for the benefit of pilgrims, the collection crammed eight aisles of the castle church. There would have been little teaching on All Saints’ Day, as pilgrims flocked to avail themselves of the 1.9 million days of indulgence that the assiduous visitor would gain from seeing them all. From 1509 there was a catalog, with 124 woodcut illustrations by Lucas Cranach, to guide them through the treasures.
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T
HE
C
ATALOG OF
F
REDERICK THE
W
ISE’S
R
ELICS, WITH
I
LLUSTRATIONS BY
L
UCAS
C
RANACH

The collection, already large when this catalog was published in 1509, would continue to grow massively even as Luther’s protest against indulgences and the cult of saints gathered pace.

Even when the relics were not on display, this would have been a busy place. In 1517, as the accounts show, nine thousand masses were said at the various altars; forty thousand candles were lit in honor of the dead.
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This was big business, and if Luther had stopped off in the town church on his way home, he would have found things much the same.
For the citizens of Wittenberg, however modest their houses and despite the sneering disregard of passing intellectuals, were not prepared to let the electors have everything their own way. Over the course of many years the town council had doggedly asserted its rights over the local countryside. Wittenberg had bargained and wheedled, taking advantage of the ebb and flow of ducal power to purchase important privileges: the right to mint coins, the power to exercise justice. Its trade guilds had poured money into their own institutions, not least the sacred societies that sponsored masses for the souls of dead members. So Wittenberg’s parish church was also full of altars and side chapels, employing a small horde of priests praying continuously for departed souls.

This, in 1513, was Luther’s world: a town of 384 dwellings, far away from the main centers of culture and sophisticated urban life in Germany, Flanders, and Italy. Its new university, founded in 1502, was scarcely one the brightest lights in Europe’s intellectual firmament, like the venerable medieval institutions at Paris and Bologna, Louvain and Cologne. This was actually the smallest place in which Luther had ever lived, and he never quite shed a sense of its essential provincialism. But both the town and the university, profiting from the patriotic pride of the elector, had a fierce sense of identity. This was not a city torn apart by the sort of tensions between patricians and urban craftsmen that would so complicate the urban Reformation in much of Germany. Though Luther might sometimes yearn for the greater sophistication of larger cities, Wittenberg, in fact, provided an extremely sympathetic environment for his years of intellectual inquiry. When his cause became notorious, both the town and its rulers would cleave to him with a dogged loyalty.

THE INDUSTRY OF EDUCATION

Luther could not have made a Reformation—indeed he could not have survived—without the support he received in Wittenberg: from his fiercely protective elector, Frederick the Wise; from his colleagues in the
university; from the citizens who from 1514 were the first to appreciate the extraordinary power of his preaching. Over the course of Luther’s life this loyalty would be richly rewarded. As Luther became the most famous man in Germany, so Wittenberg became a magnet for those throughout Germany and beyond who saw Luther as their spiritual leader and protector. Countless thousands bought his published writings. By the time of Luther’s death in 1546, Wittenberg was transformed.

We will appreciate the scale of this transformation if we accompany Luther on a second walk through the town that he had now, perhaps reluctantly, come to see as home. The year is 1543, and Luther still lives at the Augustinian house. But there are now no monks: they were cleared out within a few years of Luther’s repudiation of the pope, victims of a new theology that denied the existence of purgatory and thus cut the spiritual roots of the monastic life of prayer. The rulers of Germany’s cities and princely states laid greedy hands on the monastic property that had previously dominated the landscapes and townscapes of Europe; in Wittenberg, a grateful elector passed the entire Augustinian house over to its most famous inhabitant. Today it is still the Lutherhalle, home to the magnificent museum devoted to Luther’s life and movement.

For some years Luther lived there alone, but by 1543 the house was once again teeming with life. In 1525 Luther, no longer bound by his monastic vows, had taken a wife. This event, the marriage of a former monk to Katharina von Bora, a former nun, had scandalized Christendom, and confirmed all the worst fears of Luther’s growing band of critics. Had the unity of the Western Church been sacrificed to the lusts of one man? But this scandalous union brought Luther enormous personal happiness. Children followed, and Luther found contentment as well as new spiritual insights in his role as paterfamilias. Katharina also proved an astute manager, presiding over a household now filled with students and lodgers, the more privileged of whom would join Luther at table, drinking in his conversation.

Luther’s progress through the town on this occasion is unlikely to have been as rapid. The lean, purposeful monk of 1513 is a distant
memory; Luther’s figure is a testament to years of sedentary occupation and hearty food (Katharina ran a very successful market garden as well as her brewery). Besides, Wittenberg is now a crowded place, crammed with students and the professors who instruct them. It is unlikely Luther could have traveled far without someone stopping to greet him. A few yards along College Street is the home of his friend Philip Melanchthon. Luther ranked it among his greatest achievements to have lured Melanchthon to Wittenberg. For years he fretted that another university might tempt him away, and in the years after the storm first erupted over indulgences he reproached himself bitterly that his impetuosity might have allowed Leipzig, the despised local rival, to induce the temperamentally conflict-averse Melanchthon to move on. But Melanchthon was a loyal friend as well as a brilliant scholar. This partnership of opposite temperaments was the foundation stone on which the churches of the Reformation would be built.

At the end of College Street Luther would find himself once again back in the marketplace. Here the transformation wrought in Wittenberg is most visibly apparent. As Luther enters the square, on the southeastern corner, he would pass the Eagle, a substantial inn established in 1524 to house and refresh the host of merchants and distinguished visitors for whom Wittenberg was an essential part of their itinerary.
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At the southwest corner Lucas Cranach’s large factory dwelling was now complete, an immense complex of eighty-four rooms. Between, at Markt 4, lay another Cranach residence, the present day Cranach House, a magnificent structure on four floors in the new Renaissance style.

The Cranach House looked down on a scene of busy commerce. On the other side of the square lay the new town hall, the Rathaus. The old, rather modest building familiar from Luther’s first years had been demolished in 1521, and a new larger civic center constructed, as the town reinvested the first fruits of its new prosperity. In some respects the town elders acted too hastily, before the full extent of Wittenberg’s commercial renaissance had become clear. This new town hall lasted less than fifty years, and was replaced in 1573 by the more confident and
monumental structure that dominates Wittenberg’s central square today. Now this is an impressively open space; in 1543 it would have been filled with market stalls, including a row of semipermanent booths erected between the town hall and the parish church.

For by 1543 Wittenberg was packed; in fact, it was seriously overcrowded. The influx of tradesmen, merchants, and especially students was almost more than the city could bear; in some years students made up a third or even half the population.
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The result was a significant increase in the prices of food, clothing, and accommodation. Property owners remodeled their houses and built extra stories to meet the demand for additional rooms. The open spaces within the city walls were now largely built over, and wooden houses had been rebuilt in stone. Like most communities, Wittenberg was happy to flaunt its new wealth.