By 1520, the gap between Luther and the church had become too wide to be bridged, and in 1521 he was duly excommunicated. Support from German princes, however, enabled him to continue his reformation, which was soon mingled with political interests and immersed in waves of social unrest and other movements of a not strictly religious nature. It marked the beginning of a long and disturbing period that was to break Europe up into an assembly of religiously and politically separate territories.
Luther’s view of a more individual faith and the nonessential role of the priesthood offered the biggest challenge to the church. In the heat of the debate around 1520, however, some positions that derived from these basic tenets seemed more threatening. One of them was Luther’s position on the papacy. The logical deduction from his view that the priesthood is not essential was, of course, that the papacy is not essential either, and that its supposed plenitude of power is therefore simply not relevant. Yet the papacy was fully responsible, according to Luther, for misleading the congregation of the faithful and allowing the many abuses in the church to endure. In 1520, at the height of his dispute with the church and shortly before his excommunication, he published a pamphlet on The Papacy at Rome, in which he carefully discussed the question “whether the papacy at Rome, possessing the actual power over all Christendom (as they say), is of divine or of human origin, and this being decided, whether it is possible for Christians to say that all other Christians in the world are heretics and apostates, even if they all agree with us in holding to the same baptism, Sacrament, Gospel, and all the articles of faith, but merely do not have their priests and bishops confirmed by Rome, or, as it is now, buy such confirmation with money.” One part of this pamphlet contains a critical discussion of the key passage in the Gospel of Matthew (16:17–19), which the Catholic Church had traditionally interpreted as stating that Saint Peter’s authority is divinely instituted, that it is plenary and not subordinated to any earthly superior. To this interpretation, Luther responded,
the same Matthew has barred such erroneous interpretation in the xviii. chapter, where Christ says to all in common, “Verily, I say unto you, whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven.” It is clear that Christ here interprets His own words, and in this xviii. chapter explains the former xvi.; namely, that the keys are given to Saint Peter in the stead of the whole Church, and not for his own person. Thus also John, in the last chapter [i.e., 20:22–23], “He breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.” To maintain the sole authority of St. Peter, where there are two texts against one, many men have labored in vain. But the Gospel is too clear, and they have had to admit until now that in the first passage nothing special was given to St. Peter for his own person.
After this refutation, Luther continued with pointing out the disastrous consequences of the Catholic interpretation of the key passage in Matthew:
Now the greater part of the Roman communion, and even some of the popes themselves, have forsaken the faith wantonly and without struggle, and live under the power of Satan, as is plainly to be seen, and thus the papacy often has been under the dominion of the gates of hell. And should I speak quite openly, this same Roman authority, ever since the time it has presumed to soar over all Christendom, not only has never attained its purpose, but has become the cause of nearly all the apostasy, heresy, discord, sects, unbelief and misery in Christendom, and has never freed itself from the gates of hell.26
With these and similar arguments, Luther attacked the theological foundations of the papacy. At the same time, others were challenging its historical basis as well. In 1519, the German Ulrich von Hutten published a collection of writings by various authors who all attacked the position of the pope.27 One, the Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), presented strong philological and historical arguments that the so-called Donation of Constantine was a forgery.28 For centuries this document had been considered the authentic declaration that Emperor Constantine the Great had issued around the year 325, when he transferred the capital of his empire to Constantinople and ceded “the city of Rome and all the places, cities and provinces of Italy and the west” to the papacy in the person of Sylvester I. Thus, it had been a major historical support to justify the pope’s claim of supremacy over the emperor in western Europe. Valla’s treatise had caused some stir in the fifteenth century, but this had quieted down when the author found employment in the papal court in 1448. Yet this time bomb kept ticking, and the destructive explosion came with its rerelease in the charged atmosphere around 1520. Lorenzo Valla’s words sliced through the dense mass of papal claims and pretensions:
I know that for a long time people have been waiting to hear the accusation I would bring against the Roman pontiffs: a massive accusation assuredly, of either supine ignorance or monstrous avarice, which is enslavement to idols, or pride of rule, which is always accompanied by cruelty. Already for several centuries they either did not realize that Constantine’s Donation was a lie and a fabrication, or else they invented it themselves. Their descendants, following the deceitful path of earlier generations, defended as true what they knew to be false—dishonoring the majesty of the pontificate, dishonoring the memory of the pontiffs of old, dishonoring the Christian religion, and confounding everything with slaughter, collapse, and crime. They say that the city of Rome is his, that the kingdom of Sicily and Naples is his, that the whole of Italy is his, the peoples of Gaul, Spain, Germany, and Britain,—in short that the West is his: they say that all these are encompassed in that document of donation. Is all this yours because of that, supreme pontiff? Do you intend to recover all of it? Is it your idea to despoil of their cities all the kings and princes of the West and to force them to pay you annual tribute? I, on the contrary, think that the princes have a better right to despoil you of the entire empire you hold. For, as I shall show, that Donation, from which the supreme pontiffs want to derive their legal right, was unknown to [Pope] Sylvester and Constantine alike.29
The impact of critical writings such as those of Luther and Valla—and many others in their wake—is apparent in The History of Italy, which Francesco Guicciardini wrote in Florence in the 1530s but which was only posthumously published in 1561. A digression on the history of the papacy, based on facts and critical observations and not on religious tenets, was omitted from all Italian editions up to 1621. A section of it may explain why and, at the same time, give an impression of the critical mood concerning the papacy in the sixteenth century:
Raised to secular power, little by little forgetting about the salvation of souls and divine precepts, and turning all their thoughts to worldly greatness, and no longer using their spiritual authority except as an instrument and minister of temporal power, [the popes] began to appear rather more like secular princes than popes. Their concern and endeavors began to be no longer the sanctity of life or the propagation of religion, no longer zeal and charity toward their neighbors, but armies and wars against Christians, managing their sacrifices with bloody hands and thoughts; they began to accumulate treasures, to make new laws, to invent new tricks, new cunning devices in order to gather money from every side; for this purpose, to use their spiritual arms without respect; for this end, to shamelessly sell sacred and profane things. The great wealth spreading amongst them and throughout their court was followed by pomp, luxury, dishonest customs, lust and abominable pleasures: no concern about their successors, no thought of the perpetual majesty of the pontificate, but instead, an ambitious and pestiferous desire to exalt their children, nephews and kindred, not only to immoderate riches but to principalities, to kingdoms; no longer distributing dignities and emoluments among deserving and virtuous men, but almost always either selling them for the highest price or wasting them on persons opportunistically moved by ambition, avarice, or shameful love of pleasure.
And for all these misdeeds, reverence for the papacy has been utterly lost in the hearts of men.30
Guicciardini’s critical judgment reveals the difficult position of the papacy. A century’s stay in Avignon had seriously eroded the solid papal bulwark. The councils of Pisa and Constance had seemed to signal the beginning of a badly needed renovation, but it was ultimately only a patchwork.