Instead, they tried to face him down. He had launched his protest in October 1517 with a short set of “theses”: bullet-point statements summarizing his views. It was a standard way of starting an academic debate, and Luther had done it many times before on different subjects. In this case, there were ninety-five theses, and the subject was the sale of indulgences: documents in which the Church promised to bestow God’s grace in recognition of a charitable gift. A great many thoughtful Christians reckoned that the indulgence trade stank, so much so that sales were dropping and the indulgence sellers were forced to redouble their efforts and coarsen their rhetoric. Luther had been preaching against indulgences since the start of the year. His October theses might or might not, as legend has it, have been nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.6 More to the point, he sent a copy to Archbishop Albrecht, the sponsor and one of the chief beneficiaries of the current indulgence campaign.
It was a challenge that could not be ignored, and because Luther refused to back down, the argument steadily escalated. A series of set-piece debates between Luther and increasingly formidable theological opponents took place during 1518 and 1519. They settled nothing. Luther, in fact, found them intensely frustrating. He wanted to talk about God’s grace, true repentance, and how nitpicking legalism was rendered meaningless by Christ’s astonishing gift of salvation. But his opponents would not let him. From the beginning, they accused him of questioning superiors to whom he ought instead to submit. There were crude financial considerations at work; by attacking indulgences, Luther was threatening a major income stream. There were also institutional rivalries: the Dominican friars, watchdogs of orthodoxy, distrusted Luther’s modish Augustinian order. After the first debate, in 1518, Luther was summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy. He did not go. After the second, the pope required Luther, as a matter of obedience, to accept the official line on indulgences. Again Luther refused, insisting that the pope needed to produce arguments, not commands. The establishment had decided that this was a matter for lawyers, not theologians. But if there was one thing Luther’s theology opposed, it was law.7
Most of us, in Luther’s place, would have crumbled. Perhaps from prudence: a charge of heresy is not a game. Or from conscience: when the Church, Christ’s representative on earth, commands us to be silent, who are we to disagree? But Luther rejoiced in rejecting prudence, and his conscience was marching to a different beat. During 1518 and 1519, he discovered in himself an epochal, adamantine stubbornness. The more he was assaulted, the more firmly he took root.
At the third debate, a full-scale scholarly disputation at Leipzig in 1519, he faced the ablest theological opponent of his life, Johann Eck of Ingolstadt. Eck, who had no real hope that Luther would concede, aimed to unmask him as a heretic. He pursued the apparent points of agreement between Luther and the Czech theologian Jan Hus, who had been executed for heresy in 1415. Eventually, he forced Luther to concede and indeed to trumpet that he, too, held the beliefs for which Hus had been condemned.
Still Luther did not budge. If what he believed was incompatible with what the Church had decreed, then, he insisted, the Church must be wrong. To his opponents, this was almost comically grotesque. Luther was choosing his own frail opinion over the collective weight of the whole Church, guided through the ages by the Holy Spirit. It was a textbook example of heresy: wilful disobedience. But to Luther, it was a liberation. If the Church’s most authoritative decrees could be wrong, there was no longer anything that could separate him from the love of God. Only now did he realize how far he must go. Eck had succeeded in pushing Luther out of the Church, but the result was not quite what he had intended. If 1517 was the beginning of the Luther scandal, 1519 was the real birth of Protestantism.
Luther, now outed as a plain heretic, should have been arrested and dealt with. He was saved by politics. Rome had more pressing concerns than this squabble between German friars. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, had been dying for years and doing so unconscionably slowly. Since 1514, he had taken a coffin with him everywhere he travelled. Long before he finally died in January 1519, plans were being laid for the contest to follow. For the imperial title was not hereditary; it was elected, chosen by seven senior German princes and bishops. Since 1440, the electors had chosen members of Austria’s Habsburg dynasty, but there was nothing to stop them from choosing someone else, and this time there was a good reason to do so: the Habsburg candidate, the eighteen-year-old Charles, was also king of Spain and of the Netherlands. The prospect of one man’s controlling such a vast set of territories was alarming, not least to the pope. The king of France was a realistic rival. Even Henry VIII of England was considered. The looming election overshadowed everything.
It just so happened that one of the seven electors was Frederick of Saxony, Luther’s local prince and the founder of the University of Wittenberg. Frederick’s relationship with Luther was an odd one. The two men never met in person, and Frederick, who was an avid collector of holy relics, never quite saw the point of Luther’s theological preoccupations. Yet he was determined to defend the celebrity professor from his prized university. The celebrity was certainly part of it. Luther had put Wittenberg on the map in a very pleasing way, was beginning to attract star academics and distinguished students, and had vaulted the town’s printing industry into the first rank. In this sense, Frederick’s protection was a side effect of Luther’s mass-market appeal. But Frederick also wanted to defy outside interference as a matter of principle. And in 1518–19, Frederick’s wishes mattered. In the impending imperial election, he was seen as a crucial swing vote. He was even considered an imperial candidate himself. If, at this moment, he wanted to shelter a suspected heretic, no one was going to force the issue.
In the end, on June 28, 1519, Charles was unanimously elected emperor, and became Charles V. But the damage was already done. The crucial Leipzig disputation was unfolding when the election was held. Frederick had bought Luther enough time to turn his personal crisis of conscience into a mass movement threatening the Church’s entire structure of authority.
During 1520, Luther wrote a series of tracts laying out the core of his ideas. His legions of readers snapped them up like episodes of a serial drama. The Freedom of a Christian described his understanding of God’s free grace in rapturous terms. Other books reviled the Church’s hierarchy and the corruption he thought it had spawned. Luther declared that the Church’s ceremonies and sacraments were an elaborate confidence trick, fleecing Christians before abandoning them to hell. All Christians, he insisted, had both the right and the responsibility to reform the Church, and they should act on that right whatever the priests say. In fact, the distinction between priests and laypeople was meaningless. All Christians are priests. At the end of the year, he defiantly burned the papal bull that had condemned him as a heretic.
By then, his enemies were finally assembling. The new emperor formally assumed his imperial title in October 1520. Luther had had a magnificent run, but justice was closing in on him. An imperial Diet, the empire’s highest legislative body, was planned at the southwestern German city of Worms. Luther was summoned to attend and, undoubtedly, to be condemned. He was promised safe-conduct from Wittenberg to Worms and back, but promises made to convicted heretics were not necessarily binding. Jan Hus, whom Luther had praised in Leipzig, had been burned despite just such a safe-conduct promise. Luther fully expected the same fate, and friends urged him not to go. His correspondence as the Diet approached shows a man torn. Naturally, he was frightened and agitated. He prayed urgently for safety and doubted his prayers would be granted. Yet in another mood, he relished the Diet as an apocalyptic confrontation, at which he would at last testify to his doctrines, seal them with his blood, and win a martyr’s crown. And so he went to Worms as Christ went to Jerusalem, a three-hundred-mile journey, pausing to preach on the way. When warned of the dangers ahead, he replied that if there were as many devils in Worms as there were tiles on the roofs, he would still go. He arrived on 17 April 1521, to find the rooftops crowded, not with devils, but with supporters and spectators. The streets were so thronged as to be impassable. He was borne through to the Diet and brought before the estates of the empire.8
Luther