While Pope Leo works with the artist Raphael toward the preservation of Roman antiquities and tries to steer Italy between the deadly rocks of France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, a little problem crops up to demand his attention. And that little problem had a name: Martin Luther.
Transcript
So with that, let’s go back to the year 1505, on a July afternoon…
A university student was returning home after visiting his parents. He found himself caught in the middle of a sudden thunderstorm. Lightning struck the ground near him. On the spot, Luther prayed to Saint Anne, vowing he would give up his studies in law and become a monk if he survived the thunderstorm. The young student did indeed survive and joined an Augustinian monastery. And that university student was Martin Luther.
I don’t see much of a point in arguing Great Man or Great Person Theory, because honestly I think it’s fairly obvious that history is made by both general trends and certain individuals and groups who are definitely of their times but manage to transcend or shape the society around them in some way. Instead, I’m much more interested in hingepoints. For example, there’s the failure of the ancient Marib Dam, which might have caused a famine that single-handedly brought about the downfall of the Jewish Himyarite kingdom in modern-day Yemen, creating a political vacuum in the Arabian peninsula that would be filled with the rise of Islam. Or the fact that Archduke Ferdinand actually survived an attempt to bomb the car he was in. It was Ferdinand’s decision to visit an officer wounded in the bombing and the fact that his driver took a wrong turn on the way to the hospital that brought Ferdinand and his wife Sophie into the crosshairs of the assassin Gabriel Princip. And here we have a day trip and a lightning storm sparking the whole Protestant Reformation.
Well, we shouldn’t get hung up on counterfactuals, but maybe the Protestant Reformation or something like it would have happened even if Martin Luther instead died in obscurity as a provincial German lawyer. It just really brings home how strange and even frightening the workings of history are. No one, not Pope Leo and not even Martin Luther himself, could have known how far-reaching the drama they unwittingly found themselves cast in would be.
As for Pope Leo, when writing these words I’m saying now, I found it hard to avoid letting Martin Luther just take over the whole narrative by sheer force of gravity. Traditionally, if Leo is not just a background character or minor villain in the story of Martin Luther, he is often depicted as the living embodiment of an extravagant and parasitic institution. But of course, Leo was no foil for Luther. He had his own point of view and his own concerns, like the recent deaths that had devastated his family.
Leo’s mind was instead focused on the future of his family, Aside from his cousin the mercenary captain Giovanni, all Leo had left of his immediate family were his sisters Lucrezia and Maddalena; a great-niece in her infancy, Catarina; an illegitimate cousin, Cardinal Giulio; and a nephew and a great-nephew who would also be considered illegitimate and in any case were too young to claim public roles. If Leo ever considered that his family was being punished harshly by God, he never gave a sign. Instead, he made sure that at least his family would leave behind a monument that would be admired for all time. In 1516, Leo commissioned no one less than Michelangelo to design a tomb in the New Sacristy of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. Right away, it was meant to house the remains of Leo’s brother Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo. The two would rest under allegorical figures representing Night and Day and Dusk and Dawn respectively. At the same time, the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus Christ kept watch over the mausoleum. Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano were supposed to join them, but Michelangelo never finished the project. When it was finally completed in 1555, Michelangelo’s plans to add tombs for Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother and install more statues were abandoned. Time had moved on. But at least it was a fitting monument to the two unexpected deaths that completely upended Leo’s glorious plans for the dynasty.
The other thing that consumed Leo’s mind in those years was, of course, politics. It was bad enough that Leo had to keep playing nice with King Francois of France, plus having to constantly dangle papal recognition as the rightful King of Naples to try to keep him in line. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian von Hapsburg had decided that his grandson Charles would not only inherit the archduchy of Austria, in addition to his titles in Spain, Burgundy, and the Netherlands, but he should also be elected Holy Roman Emperor. To that end, Maximilian was already putting pressure on the imperial electors to elect his grandson after his death. Such an election would make Charles the first monarch to rule that much of Europe since the days of the Carolingians. And on top of all that, the prospect of an Ottoman invasion of Italy was still looming overhead, at least as long as the Ottoman Empire’s manic sultan Selim I was still alive. Instead of having a balance of power he could manipulate to his own advantage like past Popes did, Leo X was stuck in a death trap where three walls were moving to crush him to death. One wall was labeled France, one was labeled the Hapsburgs, and the last one was the Ottoman Empire.
Really, can you blame Leo for not caring less about a monk who kept getting into theological disputes and raising a stink about indulgences?
Alas, Leo was as much a prisoner of his present time as…well, we are prisoners of ours. And anyway even if we could warn him he probably wouldn’t have believed that one day the Church would have more to worry about from a random German monk named Martin Luther than from the Turks who just took over all of Egypt or the two most powerful monarchs in Europe. I like the quote where Leo X dismissed Martin Luther as just some drunken German who would change his tune once he got sober not because it represents arrogance or hubris, but because when Leo said it, it actually was a perfectly reasonable reaction, if a bit rude. History just likes to make fools of us all.
As for the drunken German, he came from a small mining town, Mansfeld, in what was then the duchy of Saxony. His mother Margarette came from a family of well-off burgers and sternly ruled over Luther and his siblings. His father Hans worked as a mining administrator who oversaw the copper-smelting process. An imposing man, Hans was said to have once broken up a bar fight by pouring ale over the two brawlers and hitting one of them with a jug until he bled. Although Luther’s family was comfortably middle-class, his brush with the mining industry may have influenced some of Luther’s views. As it is even today with modern technology, mining was hard, dangerous, and badly paying work. Stories of the suffering and hardships of miners and the selfish, exploitative practices of mine owners could very well have shaped Luther’s more bleak views of the human condition. Certainly, however much modern historians like to associate Luther and Protestantism with capitalism, it had an impact on his views about money. As a recent biographer of Luther, Lyndel Roper, points out, when the Duke of Saxony offered to make Luther a shareholder in some mines he owned, Luther flatly refused, even though it was a time in his life when he badly could have used the money. Because their health and their lives were so often in danger, miners were also popular targets of the sellers of indulgences, which were notes from the Church saying that in exchange for performing an act of penance a Christian would have their time in Purgatory reduced. As we will see, this cannot have been a coincidence given how Luther’s own career as a professional firebrand began with condemning such indulgences.
Luther’s father wanted him to become a lawyer, not just because it would have been steady work, but having a lawyer in the family would greatly help Hans Luther’s own business. And it was to study law that Luther was a student at the nearby University of Erfurt when he experienced that fateful thunderstorm that made him vow to become a monk in the name of St. Anne, who incidentally was a patron saint of miners. Given how strict tradition says Luther’s mother and father were, standing up to them to declare he will become a monk instead of a lawyer does explain a lot about Luther and his rebellious behavior. But as a monk, Luther proved to be terrified of displeasing God. While his own confessor took a more lax and forgiving attitude toward penance, Luther lived in constant fear of God’s wrath. So much so that it was said he once spent six hours at confession.
While some of Luther’s superiors seem to have found his excessive guilt annoying, he still managed to climb the Church’s hierarchy. He was assigned to teach theology at the newly founded University of Wittenberg, also in Saxony, which already had a reputation for two things: being in the same town as one of those newfangled printing presses and for having professors with humanistic leanings. Although Luther himself was no humanist, given that his pessimism about human nature went against the spirit of the whole thing, he taught much like one. He ignored all ancient and medieval commentaries on the Bible and encouraged students to make their own notes on the text he taught, going so far as printing off copies of whatever verses he was lecturing on with wide margins made for note taking.
When Luther started making a career as a university professor, the Church had already been under a great deal of pressure. I talked about some of this in my episode giving an overview of the history of the Catholic Church and its role in society, but it’s worth a refresher. On top of the political threats Leo X was facing, the Catholic Church’s legitimacy and moral authority never fully recovered from either the French monarchy’s domination over the papacy in the fourteenth century or the Great Schism. The Catholic Church’s role in people’s everyday life was likewise beginning to erode. The rising population across western and central Europe and an escalating crisis with inflation and income inequality, driven in no small part by all the gold and silver being imported from the Americas, strained the Church’s own capabilities and meant secular governments were beginning to step into the business of social welfare, a role once mostly left to the Church. At the same time, the Church was visibly wealthier than ever before, which set an unpleasant contrast to the fact that Europe’s poor were only getting poorer.
And even before Luther there were already efforts to shake off the authority of Rome. I talked about heretical movements like the Lollards in England and the debate in France over whether or not the king should just take control of all offices of the Church within French borders. But the most successful such movement, and the one that really was a warning the Popes should have taken more seriously, was the early fifteenth century Hussite movement in Bohemia, roughly the modern-day Czech Republic. A university professor in philosophy, Jan Huss, found an eager audience for his anti-papal views and he even gained the backing of Bohemia’s king, Wenceslaus IV. Hus was scandalously arrested in the summer of 1415 after leaving a church council at the south German city of Konstanz despite being granted a pledge of safe conduct by the Holy Roman Emperor himself, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake. Despite this, the movement he inspired, the Hussites, fought on, and eventually the Church made a remarkable concession at the Council of Basel by basically acknowledging the legitimacy of priests who took moderate Hussite views. This wasn’t quite the end of the conflict, which would continue off and on until the eve of the Protestant Reformation, but it was still a major crack that formed at the foundation of the Church.
Another crack came with what was known as the Reuchlin controversy. Johannes Reuchlin was a German humanist scholar who sought to use the new technology of the printing press to promote the teaching of ancient Hebrew, while other, more reactionary members of the clergy thought texts in Hebrew should instead be completely banned. As you might remember, this was a controversy that Pope Leo himself dipped his toes into, with him coming out on the side of allowing books printed in Hebrew. But in Germany the debate took on a new weight. Some of Reuchlin’s most bitter enemies were members of the German clergy themselves, associated with the more conservative and anti-humanist University of Cologne. But the intervention of the papacy caused many to wonder why a bunch of bishops from Italy should have a say in what was taught at German universities. It didn’t help that one of the men who led the charge against Reuchlin was an Italian Dominican named Sylvester Mazzolini, a reactionary bigot in the timeless, purest sense, whose arguments against Reuchlin were ripped to shreds by his humanist rivals. We’ll be hearing more from Mazzolini soon. For the time being, Reuchlin and his party eventually won their case, not least because Reuchlin’s views aligned with those of Pope Leo himself, but the whole affair left a sour impression on many German clergy and university faculties.
This is the backdrop to the world Luther had placed himself in. There were tensions building up just underneath the surface, and while Luther taught and preached those tensions were about to boil over because of two agendas playing out on opposite sides of Europe. In the south, Pope Leo decided to take up an abandoned building project. In the middle of the 15th century, Pope Nicholas V had started to rebuild the crumbling St. Peter’s Basilica, which had been originally founded by Emperor Constantine I at the purported site where the apostle Peter was crucified. The project was forgotten about after Nicholas’ death. Pope Julius II tried to revive and expand the project, but didn’t get much further than demolishing the old basilica. Whether he intended to do so as part of his obsession with beautifying Rome or out of respect for his former mentor or just he could no longer bear such an important landmark being left unfinished, Pope Leo decided to complete the project. But to do that, he needed more money, and luckily there was someone willing to help.
Now we turn to northern Germany, to the electorate of Brandenburg which was ruled over by the House of Hohenzollern. The current elector’s brother was Albrecht, the Archbishop of Magdeburg. As the title implies, the elector of Brandenburg was one of the seven princes of the Holy Roman Empire who had a say in the election of the next emperor. One of those elector spots was the office of Archbishop of Mainz, which had recently been made vacant. Nabbing that title would make Albrecht an elector but it would also give him the office of imperial chancellor that came with it. The snag was that Albrecht was unwilling to give up his current prestigious title of Archbishop of Magdeburg. So Albrecht and Pope Leo came to an understanding with the help of the powerful, international bank of the Fuggers. Albrecht would promote the sale of indulgences in his territories in exchange for the Pope signing off on him holding two archbishoprics at once. In the end, the Hohenzollerns would get two votes in the next imperial election and a new St. Peter’s Basilica would finally be finished for the glory of Christianity, Rome, and Leo himself. Everybody wins.
Except that’s not quite how Martin Luther saw it. Now, speaking as someone who was educated in a primarily Protestant area, I think the issue of indulgences often gets misrepresented in traditionally Protestant areas. If you purchased an indulgence, you or the deceased loved one you were buying it for weren’t guaranteed forgiveness and less time in Purgatory. You still had a duty to go to confession, perform acts of charity, or spend time in fasting and prayer, depending on what was written on the document. Also, as rightfully cynical as the system sounds, free indulgences were often given to the poor. At this time in his life, Luther wasn’t opposed to indulgences in of themselves. What horrified him was how men of the church like the friar John Tetzel sold the indulgences using methods not dissimilar to telemarketers today. Infamously he was said to have come up with the pithy slogan, ““When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” Besides being a rather callous approach to matters involving the salvation of people’s souls, Luther feared such promotional campaigns misled the uneducated into believing that indulgences could guarantee an individual was forgiven of their sins. His concerns and Luther’s personal dislike of John Tetzel inspired him to write down what would become known to posterity as his 95 Theses, which argued against what he saw as the abuse of the indulgences system. Like the theses high school teachers and college professors tell their students to use, these were just statements made to kick off academic debate. This Luther was still not the Luther who would trigger the greatest split in the history of Christianity. He is careful to argue that Pope Leo would put a stop to the abuse of indulgences if he was aware and to blame the whole mess on corrupt theologians and self-serving low-ranking members of the clergy.
While the “95 Theses” is much dryer and restrained than the Luther we see after he fully breaks with the Church, there are still hints of a genuine disgust here and there. Thesis 8 for example reads: “Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.” Thesis 45: “Christians are to be taught that those who see a needy person and pass by, yet give their money for indulgences, do not buy papal indulgences but God’s wrath.” And Line 50: “Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence preachers, then he would prefer that St. Peter’s Basilica were burned to ashes than constructed with the flesh and bones of his sheep.”
And in Thesis 86, while Luther is careful not to insult Pope Leo, he does ask a very pointed question: “Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?”
According to legend, on the fateful day of October 31, 1517, Luther posted copies of his 95 Theses on the doors of the cathedral and other churches in Wittenberg. At least, Luther did send a copy of the Theses to Archbishop Albrecht himself, along with a letter in which Luther tells Albrecht he should be aware of the corrupt practices being done in his name. And while Protestants would make this a momentous event, even turning October 31 into Reformation Day, this act would not have been out of the norm for any member of the clergy or university faculty member seeking to start a debate. In fact, Luther wasn’t even the first to criticize how indulgences were sold. About half a century before Luther, Thomas Gascoigne, the vice chancellor of Oxford University, also wrote some pointed criticisms of the sale of indulgences and he hardly made much of a splash. What was so different about Luther? As Luther’s modern biographer Lyndal Roper summed up the situation, “Written by an unknown German professor in an intellectual backwater, the Ninety-five Theses nonetheless gained widespread attention with startling speed.”
Part of it certainly was that the Reuchlin controversy had made Germany ripe for some more anti-papal sentiment. But most historians agree that the real decisive factor was the presence of a fully functional printing press in town. To speak in modern terms, Luther’s 95 Theses just went viral. Originally written in Church Latin, editions of the 95 Theses translated into vernacular German also appeared. It was arguably the first time the printing press revealed the potential power of the public opinion, which couldn’t be controlled by either the church or the state. It was around this point that Leo first became aware of Luther when Archbishop Albrecht forwarded a copy of Luther’s letter and the 95 Theses to him. Every indication is that Leo just thought of Luther as another theological squabble between Germans, much like the Reuchlin controversy. At the urging of Luther’s critics, Leo agreed to ask an official theologian of the Church to answer Luther’s criticisms. Unfortunately, Leo chose the man who might have been the worst person for the job: Silvestro Mazzolini, the very man who had so badly bungled the Reuchlin controversy. When Luther heard that his opponent was to be Mazzolini, he quipped, “Our Lord God was merciful for that priest of Bacchus wrote such rubbish one could only laugh.” It took Luther only two days to write a full rebuttal to Mazzollini’s paper, and Luther even had his rebuttal published along with a full reprint of Mazzolini’s work. As he often would in the years to come, Luther went a bit too far mocking his critics. Leo was annoyed to see Luther’s lack of respect for a theologian he had appointed and chosen. A modern historian Charles Mee writes, “Mazzolini might be a dolt, but he was the Pope’s dolt, and the Pope would not have Luther toy with him.” Shortly thereafter, Luther received an official summons to appear in Rome within sixty days to answer charges of heresy.
Still, though, even an accusation of heresy wasn’t quite as dire as it might sound, and Luther was able to negotiate the summons down to a formal meeting with the local papal legate, Cardinal Tommaso Cajetan, in Augsburg. Unfortunately, the two men were debating from two completely separate realities. Luther was demanding an honest debate over theological matters, Cajetan just wanted an acknowledgment of papal authority out of Luther. In fact, Cajetan had also once written about indulgences and shared several of Luther’s conclusions, including arguing against that certain sellers of indulgences were encouraging the mistaken belief that the Pope could actually reduce the time a soul spent in Purgatory. Perhaps the two could have even found a common ground, but Luther had been put in a position where he could not submit to Leo’s authority without compromising his stance. Luther had several meetings with Cajetan, and all ended at best with a stalemate. Luckily for Luther, politics had stepped in. Leo had hopes that when the Emperor Maximilian finally died the imperial electors would choose a German prince as the next emperor, instead of his grandson Charles of Spain. And one of the most likely candidates was Luther’s sovereign and the sponsor of the University of Wittenberg, Elector Frederick III of Saxony. Frederick knew and cared little about Luther’s teachings, but he had no desire to see a lecturer at one of his universities arrested for heresy. In short, for the Elector Frederick Martin this was an academic freedom issue. Leo did not want to alienate the man he hoped would be the next Holy Roman Emperor. And at the exact same time Emperor Maximilian wanted to do everything possible to ensure his grandson’s election, and handing an increasingly popular German religious figure over to the tender mercies of Mother Church would not help. Even more cynically, Emperor Maximilian and Elector Frederick both glimpsed in Luther a potential weapon to use against the Pope if needs be.
But even when he was comparatively safe, the hostility Luther got from the members of the clergy he debated with embittered and radicalized him. Over the course of this time Luther was plagued by doubts and fears that he would end up being burned as a heretic. Touchingly, at one point during this time he confided to a friend that he often wondered, “What a disgrace to my parents.” But he also began questioning many things that were fundamental to mainstream Church authority. Most dramatically, he began to wonder if people actually can help affect their own salvation through charity and acts of penance, or if it was all up to God. And he questioned if a church hierarchy that had so harshly reacted to his own call for mild reforms might be rotten to the core after all.
Luther’s growing notoriety and fears among the clergy that he was another Jan Huss in the making became too much for Leo to ignore. Finally, Leo decided to take the nuclear option. On June 15, 1520, Leo signed a papal bull, “Exsurge, Domine” – in English, “Arise, O Lord” – that denounced Martin Luther as a heretic. Of course, this only spurred Luther to start writing and publishing the more radical ideas he was forming. One of the books he wrote that busy year, “The Freedom of a Christian”, was so named because it put forward the case that a Christian like himself might be freed from guilt and fear by relying entirely on God and not their own actions for their salvation. In it, Luther included a letter addressed to Pope Leo X himself. It was a last-ditch effort by Luther to reconcile himself with the Pope and the Church as a whole:
“For many years now, nothing else has overflowed from Rome into the world–as you are not ignorant–than the laying waste of goods, of bodies, and of souls, and the worst examples of all the worst things. These things are clearer than the light to all men; and the Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness. Meanwhile you, Leo, are sitting like a lamb , like Daniel in the midst of lions, and, with Ezekiel, you dwell among scorpions. What opposition can you alone make to these monstrous evils? Take to yourself three or four of the most learned and best of the cardinals. What are these among so many? You would all perish by poison before you could undertake to decide on a remedy. It is all over with the Court of Rome; the wrath of God has come upon her to the uttermost. She hates councils; she dreads to be reformed; she cannot restrain the madness of her impiety; she fills up the sentence passed on her mother, of whom it is said, “We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed; let us forsake her.” It had been your duty and that of your cardinals to apply a remedy to these evils, but this gout laughs at the physician’s hand, and the chariot does not obey the reins. Under the influence of these feelings, I have always grieved that you, most excellent Leo ,who were worthy of a better age, have been made pontiff in this. For the Roman Court is not worthy of you and those like you, but of Satan himself, who in truth is more the ruler in that Babylon than you are.”
We do not know if Leo ever even read this letter. Whether he did or not, Luther still gave a clear answer to his excommunication by publicly burning a copy of the bull along with the books of one of his top enemies, the theologian Johann Eck, and collections of church law. His fans across Germany reacted in similar ways, a sign of the turmoil to come. A copy of the bull in the Saxon city of Liepzig was torn down and covered in dung. In Mainz, an executioner ordered to publicly burn some of Luther’s books refused to do so because a mob loudly objected.
By this point, Leo’s opinion of Luther, never that great to begin with, had deteriorated even further. The Pope would refer to Martin Luther as simply “that wolf.” Nor was Leo pleased when Luther caught the attention of another major player on the political scene. After Charles of Spain was elected Holy Roman Emperor despite Leo’s and King Francois of France’s best efforts, finally getting that name and number we know him best by, Charles V, the new emperor decided to address the Luther problem himself. Charles V declared soon after his election that there would be an assembly of the princes of the Holy Roman Empire at the Rhineland city of Worms where, among other topics, the Luther matter would be settled. After being shocked by this news, Leo bitterly remarked that Luther “would not be well received even in Hell.”
Resigning himself to the idea that he might be condemned to death by the new emperor, Luther appeared in early 1521 at the conference, the Diet of Worms. He was barely briefed and was ordered to give short answers to the questions in order to keep him from any speech-making. Luther later complained that, just like his meetings with Cardinal Catejan, he had expected a proper hearing where he could debate with at least one doctor of theology. But instead all that happened was a brief interrogation where Luther’s own words, it went like: “Are these your books? Yes. Do you want to renounce them or not? Then go away!” On April 18, after a wait of two days, he was conducted into a dark hall, lit only by torches, that was so crowded even some of the princes had to stand. The imperial representative asked Luther if he would recant. Seizing his chance, Luther gave a speech where he tried to explain his views. The imperial representative replied that Luther had not answered the question and demanded to know again if he recanted. Luther gave an answer that would echo in countless history books: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” In some accounts, he added the words, “I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me. Amen.” Luther was followed out of the hall by a group jeering him and shouting, “Burn him! Burn him!” Still, Luther felt vindicated. Now by conscience Luther did not mean freedom of thought, but rather his knowledge of the objective meaning of God’s Word. This was the same conscience that had burdened him as a monk. Needless to say, this was not what Charles V wanted to hear. Although Luther was convinced that he would end up just like Jan Huss, Charles respected the safe passage he had granted Luther. However, at the end Charles issued an edict that also condemned Luther as a heretic and ordered that no subject in the empire would be allowed to promote his views. After Luther left Worms, he found himself kidnapped by agents of Elector Frederick, who had him brought to safety at Wartburg Castle, an isolated fortress off in the Thuringian Forest, where Luther would have little to do but translate the New Testament from ancient Greek into German.
That’s where we will leave Luther before we risk letting this turn into the Reformation Podcast. In the meantime, during these fateful years that closed out the decade of the 1510s, Leo still kept up with his two main concerns: art and antiquities, and international politics. The artist Raphael whom Leo had patroned many times also wrote a famous letter to the Pope, pleading with him to do more to protect the ruins of ancient Rome which were still being scavenged for marble and stone. “Holy Father, let it not be the lowest of Your Holiness’s priorities to ensure that—out of respect to those divine spirits, the remembrance of whom encourages and incites to virtue the intellects among us today—what little remains of this ancient mother of the glory and renown of Italy is not to be completely destroyed and ruined by the wicked and the ignorant.” Besides Leo sending scholars to find and copy down ancient Roman inscriptions, Leo helped commission Raphael and other artists to draw up a map of ancient Rome based on the location of ruins and made Raphael the first commissioner in charge of the protection of ancient monuments. With Leo’s support, Raphael and a team of artists also began to make drawings of monuments across Italy. Sadly, however, Raphael would only be able to begin this undertaking. By April of 1520, he died from an unknown illness at only the age of 37. At his funeral, the Pope himself kissed his hand.
At around the same time, Leo did have happier news on the politics front. Although Leo’s plans for a crusade faltered, in September of 1520 Sultan Selim of the Ottoman Empire suddenly died, possibly from the plague, while in the middle of planning a westward campaign, rendering the immediate need for a new crusade moot. Meanwhile, eager to appease the Pope and weaken his biggest rival King Francois, Charles V signed an alliance with Leo and King Henry VIII of England against France. By November of 1521, the French were driven out of Milan, and a member of the Sforza family was back in charge as Duke Francesco II. Francois was also forced to surrender the cities of Parma and Piacenza to the papacy. By the time Leo heard the good news of the French defeat, however, he was already sick with pneumonia. Less than a month later, on December 1, the Pope was dead. On his deathbed, he was haunted by memories of his futile efforts to stop the massacre at Prato, the macabre event that inaugurated the restoration of the Medici. At another point, he woke up and looked around the room in a delirium, saying, “Pray for me. I want to make you all happy.”
So what can we say about Pope Leo X, the man overshadowed by his enemy Martin Luther. I think it’s safe to say his record was mixed. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest, most influential patrons of the Renaissance, rivaling if not surpassing even his own father, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Leo managed to not only leave his mark in the worlds of art and classical studies, but he had a pivotal role in the histories of the Jewish religion in Europe and Roman archaeological and cultural preservation. When it came to politics, Leo did make what a sports commentator might call an unforced error in trying to install his incompetent nephew Lorenzo the Younger as the Duke of Urbino, especially since Lorenzo refused to take up the responsibility and was soon to die anyway. This move needlessly cost Leo the friendship of the Della Rovere clan and damaged the Medici’s popularity in Florence. But other than that Leo did usually make the most out of a bad situation, managing to string along King Francois of France until the right time to cut the cord and free Milan from French rule. Even the fearsome Julius II would have been proud. It’s just that while Leo was an excellent patron and at least a decent monarch of the Papal States the role Leo performed the worst was that of the bishop of Rome. In Leo’s defense no one could have possibly known just how much damage Martin Luther would do to the unity of Christendom, even by the time of the Diet of Worms. However, with the Hussite rebellion and the Reuchlin controversy both in the not so distant past, Martin Luther’s falling out with church authorities should have been handled with more care. Perhaps there was nothing Leo himself could have done until it was already too late and maybe Martin Luther’s own combustive personality made any kind of compromise ultimately impossible, but the combination of apathy and bullishness shown by the upper echelons of the Church toward Luther only made everything worse. Still, in Leo’s defense it’s worth saying that by his time the Popes were saddled with an impossible job. They were the leaders of an international institution that had definitely seen better days while simultaneously ruling a vulnerable, minor power at a time when a few of the nations in the neighborhood were stronger than at any point since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Even a brilliant administrator and theologian would have been overwhelmed.
But now Pope Leo, Giovanni de’ Medici, was gone. There were no more legitimate patrilineal male descendants of Cosimo de’ Medici left alive. This left as the head of the family Leo’s illegitimate cousin, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, to lead what was left of the Medici line into an extremely cloudy future.
The Medici Podcast 