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 (11 page)

Indulgences were also frequently proclaimed to raise armies for crusading against the Turk; these continued long after the Holy Lands had passed definitively into the hands of the infidel in the thirteenth century. Indeed, with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the battle with Islam took on a new urgency, with repeated calls for funds to raise new armies to turn back the Ottoman advance in the eastern Mediterranean.

The crucial, perhaps fatal, development in the theology of indulgence was the papal declaration that indulgence could be purchased on behalf of another. This would normally be a dead relative, suffering in purgatory and thus beyond the reach of confession and absolution. The emergence of purgatory as a sort of holding station for those ultimately destined for paradise was a defining feature of late medieval Catholicism. The ultimate salvation of souls in purgatory was assured, but the time of uncomfortable waiting could be stretched out indefinitely. In 1476 Pope Sixtus IV allowed the application of indulgence to the relief of these suffering souls, opening the floodgates for a mass of penitential
acts and donations. It was such a devotion that Luther performed for the relief of his dead grandfather in Rome, and it was the fear of the sorrows of purgatory that ensured the fame of vast collections of relics such as those of Frederick the Wise.

In view of the later notoriety of indulgences it bears emphasis that in the overwhelming number of cases the pope did not benefit directly. Most grants were for the support of pious projects, the building or rebuilding of churches, or the performance of a stipulated pilgrimage.
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Those that did raise money for papal funds, campaigns against the Turk, and the notorious St. Peter’s indulgence of 1515, were rather the exception than the rule. Luther’s Augustinian community in Erfurt was granted indulgence in 1502, and again, to support the building of a library, in 1508. The reconsecration of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg in 1503 was accompanied by a further grant of indulgence.
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But it was the great international fund-raising campaigns that caught the eye, particularly, in the later fifteenth century, the repeated series of appeals for a new crusade against the Turk.
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The high point in this fund-raising effort came with the three great campaigns in Germany led by Cardinal Raymond Peraudi between 1486 and 1504.
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Peraudi was the great impresario of the indulgence trade, bringing to the economy of salvation both logistical brilliance and a real sense of theater. The campaigns were planned like the military operations they were ostensibly intended to fund. Towns that Peraudi proposed to visit on his preaching tour were contacted in advance, and detailed contracts agreed for the division of the sums raised (generally one third to the local church and two thirds to Peraudi and his team). Peraudi was also the first to devise a specific tariff for donations that linked the size of the expected gift to the financial resources of the donor—a sort of spiritual progressive taxation.
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In places that lay beyond Peraudi’s itinerary a delegate might be appointed: the Dutchman Antonius Mast led the campaign in Sweden, for instance, and Michael Poyaudi in Finland.
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The money gathered during these campaigns was very substantial. In 1491 Peraudi was able to loan Emperor Maximilian ten
thousand guilders of the money collected in Sweden. That same year he received a receipt for twenty thousand gold ducats collected in Scandinavia and dispatched to the Curia.
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It was Peraudi, too, who performed the reconsecration of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg, proclaiming a new indulgence for this already richly endowed church.

Peraudi died in 1505, but this brought no letup for the citizens of Germany. Between 1503 and 1510 a crusade indulgence for the German order in Livonia and its struggle against the Tatars was preached in almost every church province. Between 1513 and 1519 indulgences were proclaimed for major building projects in Constance, Augsburg, and Trier.
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This sustained fund-raising formed the essential backdrop for Pope Leo X’s momentous initiative: the appeal for support to rebuild the fountainhead of the Western Church, St. Peter’s in Rome.

A VIRTUOUS TRADE

“As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” This, according to Martin Luther, was the depths to which the trade in indulgences had by 1517 been reduced: a crude financial transaction making a mockery of the careful requirement of real repentance. This characterization, of course, is Luther’s, articulated in the twenty-seventh of his ninety-five theses.
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We have no direct evidence that such words were used by those hawking the indulgence for St. Peter’s in towns near Wittenberg, and the caricature is one that suited the reformers well. But there is no doubt that the whole process had by this point been thoroughly monetized. This was not all bad. The proceeds from indulgences enabled many churches to embark on rebuilding programs that would otherwise have been beyond them. The precious certificates brought comfort to many sincere Christians anxious for the fate of their own souls and those of their departed relatives. Among the greatest beneficiaries were those who supported this great industry with the necessary publications: Europe’s printers.

The great late medieval boom in indulgence preaching coincided neatly with the invention of printing. Europe’s printers were soon heavily involved in producing the various publications generated by the preaching of indulgences. Johannes Gutenberg, as we have seen, was happy to print indulgences; so, too, was William Caxton, the first printer of England.
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All the major indulgence campaigns generated a blizzard of print.
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For one relatively modest campaign, in aid of the collegiate church in the small Swabian town of Urach, we can count over two dozen printed documents spread over six years. It required six different printing houses to cope with the workload.
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Most precious of all was the contract to print the certificates of indulgence: the formal document attesting to the donation and the spiritual relief provided. On May 2, 1452, the papal legate of Germany, Nicholas of Cusa, authorized the prior of St. Jacob’s Church in Mainz to have two thousand indulgences ready for sale to the citizens of Frankfurt by the end of the month.
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If these were to be handwritten the copy shops of Mainz would have been very busy; two or three years later Gutenberg could have fulfilled this order in a few days. But an order of this size, enormous for a printed book, was quite modest for indulgences. We know of one contract for 130,000 indulgence certificates. Another, for the monastery of Monserrat in Catalonia, was for 200,000 copies.
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Orders of this size would no doubt have been divided among several printing shops, speeding completion and spreading the benefit around the trade.

This was ideal work for a printer. An indulgence was a single sheet of paper printed on one side only. So long as the printer could source the required paper, it was a straightforward job. Furthermore, this sort of work had the priceless advantage that here the printer was working for a single client. He simply had to fulfill the order and deliver the whole stock to the sponsoring church, bishop, or indulgence commissioner. There were none of the complex problems of distribution and sale connected with the retailing of books. Nor were there endless middlemen, carters, wholesalers, booksellers, and money brokers, who in
the normal course of the book trade would take their cut and erode the printer’s margins.

A
N
I
NDULGENCE
C
ERTIFICATE FROM 1504

The sale of indulgences was big business for the church, and provided steady work for printers. This was one of the simplest and most lucrative assignments a printer could take on, and the size of the order was often huge.

This was the most ephemeral of all print. Many indulgences are known today from a single copy. Others have clearly disappeared altogether, and we know of them only from surviving contracts with printers. But of the identified printed works published during the fifteenth century, the first age of print, around 2,500 (10 percent) are single-sheet items. Of these over a third are indulgence certificates.
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Given what we know of the very high print runs of these works, this must represent at least 2 million precious certificates: simple to produce, but each representing to the sponsoring church a substantial donation.

To assess their value to the print industry in Germany let us return to the towering figure of Raymond Peraudi. Moving swiftly from city to city, Peraudi ordered new stock as he went. So he provided work for most of the major print centers in Germany: Mainz and Cologne, Leipzig and Erfurt; Memmingen, Würzburg, and Ulm in the south; Nuremberg, Augsburg, Speyer, Basel, and Strasbourg.
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It was probably in Lübeck that Antonius Mast sourced the twenty-five thousand certificates with which he was supplied for the Scandinavia campaign.
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And in addition to the certificates, Peraudi also required a mass of other print: summaries of the papal bull authorizing his campaign; a printed handbook for confessors (that offered both instructions for preaching the indulgence and stipulated the prices to be charged); a copy of Peraudi’s own letter of appointment.
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In the years following Peraudi’s death none could quite match the cardinal for this systematic exploitation of the medium of print. For all that, the traffic in indulgences continued to provide good business for Germany’s printers. The campaign for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s in Rome from 1515 to 1517 was a case in point.
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Among those who produced the various printed artifacts accompanying this campaign were some of Germany’s most accomplished printers. They included Melchior Lotter in Leipzig, Silvan Otmar in Augsburg, Adam Petri in Basel, and Friedrich Peypus in Nuremberg. Within four years all of these men would be heavily involved in printing Luther; Adam Petri indeed would be one of the first to print Luther’s ninety-five theses against indulgences. There is little room for sentiment in commerce. The church had been an excellent client, until Luther became a better one.

POISONED CHALICE

The trade in indulgences was now big business, and brought profit to many. Not all, however, could witness the increasingly brash commercialism without misgivings. Even before Luther registered his own
reservations, a number of voices had been raised in criticism of the indulgence trade. Although by no means numerous, or even particularly influential, these critics did create an important context for the debate that followed Luther’s disputation theses. It meant that when Luther’s views first attracted attention, many were inclined to give him a hearing, even if they would not all ultimately follow him down the road that led to a complete break with the church hierarchy.

Critics of indulgences in the period before 1517 can be divided into three groups: intellectuals, many of them either senior churchmen or committed humanists; Germany’s rulers, worried at the money draining out of Germany; and discontented buyers. Of the three, it was the intellectuals who were initially most vociferous, and ultimately most deceived in their expectations of Luther.

Skepticism about the practice of indulgence was not new. The decisive intervention of the Lateran Council of 1215 was recognition that the unregulated development of such a practice would bring potentially undesirable consequences. Once firmly under papal direction, however, there were remarkably few voices raised against the principle of indulgence in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The range of church institutions that benefited from the practice, combined with its rampant popularity among the faithful, sufficed to still any dissent. In his second great campaign Peraudi was reputed to have disposed of fifty thousand letters of indulgence in one place, Vorau in the Austrian Steiermark.
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Only one brave voice, that of the Würzburg cleric Dr. Dietrich Morung, was raised in protest. Morung used his pulpit to question the pope’s power to offer relief to those in purgatory.
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This, as we have seen, was a very recent doctrine, but Peraudi reacted with crushing force. Morung was excommunicated and incarcerated for ten years. After this, others kept their counsel.