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 (31 page)

The breach with Lotter was hard for Luther but final. In his later table conversation he chose to remember not Melchior’s early transformation of the Wittenberg printing industry, but how much money Lotter had made from publishing his works, “a Godless and disagreeable profit.” Significantly Lotter is unfavorably compared in this reminiscence with Rhau-Grunenberg, who expressed conscientious scruples at the unprecedented profit to be made from printing Luther: “Dear Doctor, the yield is too great; I don’t like to have such books.”
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To focus on this, rather than Lotter’s enormous contribution to the Wittenberg industry, was graceless, but the dispute with Cranach and Döring, to whom Luther was very close, put the reformer in an invidious position. He conspicuously continued to support the younger brother’s enterprise after Melchior’s departure. Melanchthon seems also to have had some sympathy with Melchior’s predicament, and in an unusual demonstration of defiant independence continued to put work his way after the breach with Cranach.
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Printing was a rough, tough business, and it would be naive to think it could be any less so because the profits to be won came from editions of Scripture and Luther’s own work. The competition for Luther’s patronage was intense, and would be more so still when the success of the industry attracted other ambitious and capable practitioners to try their hand in Wittenberg. On the whole Luther handled the distribution of work among the competing houses well. It is sad that the most significant casualty should be a man who had made so fundamental a contribution to Wittenberg’s print revolution.

8.

T
HE
R
EFORMATION
IN
THE
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ITIES

T IS TIME TO
leave Wittenberg for a while, and to follow Luther (and his books) beyond the safe haven created by Elector Frederick in Electoral Saxony. This is where it would be tested how far Luther’s call for reform would fare in the wider world: the teeming, gossipy public arenas of Germany’s bustling cities; the political maelstrom of its patchwork of princely states. The first indications of interest, indeed enthusiasm for Luther, had been extremely promising. But it was one thing to shout “death to the Romanists” in the excitement of an Imperial Diet; quite another to follow Wittenberg into effective schism, and undertake a root-and-branch renovation of the familiar practice of religion.

In this respect 1521, and the promulgation of the Edict of Worms, was a critical juncture. Up until 1521 it had been relatively safe to show an interest in Luther. Most would agree that whereas they might not accept his wilder pronouncements, there was plenty in the reform agenda with which they might feel sympathy. But after the imperial edict was published the issue was very different. To express support for Luther was to give comfort to a condemned heretic and outlaw.

This was especially tricky for those who had previously shown the most interest in Luther’s criticisms of the established order, the urban patriciate of the imperial free cities. These were circles in which Luther’s challenge to the pope had been widely discussed. But to pursue this agenda any further might prove extremely perilous. The cities cherished their political independence, but equally their governments were conscious that this could not be guaranteed. They were well aware that their neighbors among the territorial princes were always anxious to extend their power. In some places questions of authority and the rights of competing jurisdictions were still partially unresolved. Traditionally the cities looked to the emperor to uphold their cause in any attempts to impugn their rights. But the emperor had now spoken out against Luther; to defy him in this was to risk a terrible retribution.

So the city fathers were inclined to tread carefully. The choices they faced were difficult and dangerous, the prospects for the future uncertain. They could see the strength of the agitation raised by Luther’s cause. They could sense it as they walked the streets of the city (for this was an era when the rulers were not physically separated from the ruled, who had many opportunities to signal their discontent on the city’s crowded thoroughfares). They reacted with extreme nervousness when the public excitements threatened to get out of hand. They could see the evidence of the Reformation’s success in attracting public interest in the pamphlets piled up on the booksellers’ stalls. But the dangers of precipitate action on their part often outweighed the dangers of public agitation. Did the public excitement really represent the developing view of the community, or just a noisy minority? And what of the political dangers? The emperor had made his opinion of Luther all too clear. Could they risk defiance?

So the city councils, often a self-contained oligarchy of powerful families, generally took a cautious approach, even if some of their members personally sympathized with the new teachings. Timid in the face of the emperor’s wrath, but also discerning in the evangelical agitation the potential for unwelcome disruption to the social order, they often
moved to stifle the first signs of enthusiasm for Luther’s movement, whether this was the local printing of evangelical pamphlets or a preacher speaking in Luther’s favor. They were particularly alert for any sign that sympathizers for Luther’s cause might be attempting to institute their own local Reformation. So it required some courage for those who did continue to speak out, particularly members of the clergy who used their own pulpits to proclaim their fealty to Luther’s movement.

Yet the Reformation could not have succeeded—would not indeed have survived—without men of this stamp. However eagerly Luther’s books were circulated and read, this in itself would not have been sufficient. It required the emergence of leaders, of trusted and respected local figures, prepared to commit themselves openly to the cause. This required great courage. Most knew there would be no protector like the Elector Frederick to ensure their safety. Many put their lives, and certainly their livelihoods, at risk by speaking up for Luther and the Gospel teaching. In the first years some would be hounded out of their pulpits and into an ignominious exile. It required the emergence of a genuine popular movement to ensure their return.

GOD’S WORD TRULY PREACHED

The early Reformation was in many respects profoundly anticlerical in tone. Luther led the way in his criticism of the church hierarchy, his denunciation of clerical greed, and his articulation of a new role for a theologically literate laity. Much of this found a resonance in the German cities. Many in the city governments were all too eager to cut the local church down to size: to challenge church immunities from local taxes, to repossess valuable urban property willed to church institutions, to wrest control over schools from the local cathedral chapter.
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So while bearing all this in mind, it is important to reflect that in the first years at least, the revolt against the church came largely from within the church. Most of Luther’s first and most influential supporters were, like him,
churchmen. The Reformation in the cities would be driven very largely by the clergy. These clerical supporters would play a crucial role in preaching Luther’s message to new audiences.

Those who associated themselves with Luther’s teaching in these first years came to his movement in one of three ways. They might be members of one of the existing intellectual circles of which Luther or one of his Wittenberg colleagues was part. They might have met Luther in person; here his three long journeys across Germany between 1518 and 1521 played a crucial role in gathering a following. Or they might have been drawn to the Reformation from reading his books, sometimes reinforced by correspondence with friends already turning toward reform.

The direct influence of Luther and his circle was most obvious in northern Germany, within the geographical orbit of Wittenberg. In Erfurt, the first to advocate the reform agenda were two close allies, Johann Lang, a longtime friend, and Justus Jonas. Both were preaching in the city churches from 1520. The Reformation in Erfurt found its strongest support from within the university community. The extraordinary demonstration of enthusiasm for Luther as he passed through on his way to Worms was critical to the development of a local Reformation movement, which from this point would progress in close communication with Wittenberg.
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Wittenberg’s influence also reverberated strongly in Leipzig (though here the Reformation would be held back by the determined hostility of Duke George) and in Nuremberg. The first to preach in Luther’s support in Nuremberg was Wenzeslaus Linck, a graduate of Wittenberg University and a former colleague of Luther on the teaching faculty. Linck made his first visit to Nuremberg in 1516, and became a popular preacher; he also became deeply embedded in the intellectual circle that gathered around Staupitz.
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Nuremberg had been deeply engaged in Luther’s cause since he had passed through the city on his way to his Augsburg meeting with Cajetan in 1518. Two members of the humanist group who greeted him warmly on this occasion would later be included, to the city’s
embarrassment, on the list of those who shared Luther’s excommunication in
Exsurge Domine
. In Nuremberg, more than anywhere, patrician intellectuals were drawn to Luther because they saw him as sharing their reform preoccupations; they were less sympathetic with the implicit radicalism of his developing theology or the explicit and violent repudiation of papal authority. Of his early Nuremberg admirers, a number, most prominently Pirckheimer and Scheurl, would eventually disassociate themselves from Luther. It was left to the preachers to push the matter forward: first Wenzeslaus Linck, and from 1521 Andreas Osiander. Osiander was well acquainted with all the leading players in Nuremberg politics, a member of the
Sodalitas Staupitziana,
a teacher of Hebrew, and a former Wittenberg student.
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So when Osiander began to preach more aggressively against papal authority, the council reacted with much less alarm than had the preacher been a lowborn incomer.

The Nuremberg Council’s management of the reform process during these years provides a vivid illustration of the conflicting pressures under which the imperial cities were forced to operate. The Edict of Worms was obediently posted at the town hall, and the city’s publishers, no doubt to their great frustration, were ordered not to publish Luther’s books. As a result, from 1521 Nuremberg contributed much less to the total volume of Luther imprints than one would expect. But the booksellers’ stalls were still crammed with Luther’s works, and eagerly purchased, as the papal nuncio Francesco Chieregati rather sourly noted.
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When a vacancy arose for a preaching position at the church of St. Sebald in 1521, the council invited Luther to advise on a suitable candidate and appointed the man he proposed. So in the same years when Luther’s initial enthusiasts among Nuremberg’s intellectual elite were beginning to have second thoughts, the Nuremberg Council was carefully, watchfully, moving toward a more decisive alignment of the city with the evangelical cause.

Wittenberg would continue to act as an important center for the diffusion of the Reformation in northern and eastern Germany for years to come. It was to Wittenberg in 1524 that the beleaguered evangelicals of Hamburg appealed for a preacher, one of many such requests.
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Wittenberg also functioned as a place of refuge for many among the first generation of evangelical preachers whose untimely adherence to the Reformation had put them in danger. The former Dominican Jacob Strauss first preached in the evangelical cause at Hall in the Austrian Tyrol. Expelled on the order of the local bishop in 1522, Strauss came to Wittenberg and enrolled as a student. In 1523 he was reassigned to the Church of St. George in Eisenach.
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Paul Speratus was one of the first to declare for the cause of reform, preaching at Würzburg in 1519. Summarily expelled, again on the order of the bishop, by 1522 he had come to Wittenberg, where he made himself useful translating some of Luther’s Latin works into German.
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In 1525 he was dispatched to Königsberg, to orchestrate reform in the Prussian lands of the Teutonic Knights. In this way Wittenberg contrived to place well trained and passionately committed agents of its reform in key centers across the region; this would be the stronghold of Lutheranism for centuries to come.

The situation was rather different in the larger, sophisticated urban centers of the German south and west, where direct connections with Wittenberg were far more attenuated. Even here though, a number of those who played a critical role in the preaching of the Gospel message could date their adherence to the Reformation to a personal meeting with Luther. The most famous example was that of Martin Bucer, who first encountered Luther as a Dominican interloper present to hear Luther defend his teachings at the meeting of the Augustinian chapter in Heidelberg. This experience in March 1518 made Bucer an instant disciple; he would go on to play a leading role in the Strasbourg Reformation and would become a significant figure in the European Reformation in his own right.
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Johann Brenz was another who heard Luther at Heidelberg. Then still a student, by 1522 he would be preaching the Gospel in Schwäbisch Hall, the beginning of a long and distinguished career at the heart of Lutheran churches in southern Germany.
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