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Rh neatly, as if we were mere barbarians. Our nation, once so famous, is a slave now, who must pay tribute, and has lain in the dust these many years bemoaning her fate.” Aeneas Sylvius issued, immediately after his accession to the papacy as Pius II. the bull Execrabilis forbidding all appeals to a future council. This seemed to Germany to cut off its last hope. It found a spokesman in the vigorous. Gregory of Heimburg, who accused the pope of issuing the bull so that he and his cardinals might conveniently pillage Germany unhampered by the threat of a council. “By forbidding appeals to a council the pope treats us like slaves, and wishes to take for his own pleasures all that we and our ancestors have accumulated by honest labour. He calls me a chatterer, although he himself is more talkative than a magpie.” Heimburg’s denunciations of the pope were widely circulated, and in spite of the major excommunication he was taken into the service of the archbishop of Mainz and was his representative at the diet of Nuremberg in 1462. It is thus clear that motives which might ultimately lead to the withdrawal of a certain number of German princes from the' papal ecclesiastical state were accumulating and intensifying during the latter half of the 15th century.

It is impossible to review here the complicated political history of the opening years of the 16th century. The names of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. of France, of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. of England, of Maximilian the German king, of Popes Alexander VI., Julius II. and Leo X., stand for better organized civil governments, with growing powerful despotic heads; for a perfectly worldly papacy absorbed in the interests of an Italian principality, engaged in constant political negotiations with the European powers which are beginning to regard Italy as their chief field of rivalry, and are using its little states as convenient counters in their game of diplomacy and war. It was in Germany, however, seemingly the weakest and least aggressive of the European states, that the first permanent and successful revolts against the papal monarchy occurred. Nothing came of the lists of German gravamina, or of the demands for a council, so long as the incompetent Frederick III. continued to reign. His successor, Maximilian, who was elected emperor in 1493, was mainly preoccupied with his wars and attempts to reform the constitution of the empire; but the diet gave some attention to ecclesiastical reform. For instance, in 1501 it took measures to prevent money raised by the granting of a papal indulgence from leaving the country. After the disruption of the league of Cambray, Maximilian, like Louis XII., was thrown into a violent anti-curial reaction, and in 1510 he sent to the well-known humanist, Joseph Wimpheling, a copy of the French Pragmatic Sanction, asking his advice and stating that he had determined to free Germany from the yoke of the Curia and prevent the great sums of money from going to Rome. Wimpheling in his reply rehearsed the old grievances and complained that the contributions made to the pope by the archbishops on receiving the pallium was a great burden on the people. He stated that that of the archbishop of Mainz had been raised from ten to twenty-five thousand gulden, and that there had been seven vacancies within a generation, and consequently the subjects of the elector had been forced to pay that amount seven times. But Wimpheling had only some timid suggestions to make, and, since Maximilian was once more on happy terms with the pope, political considerations served to cool completely his momentary ardour for ecclesiastical reform. In 1514 the archbishopric of Mainz fell vacant again, and Albert of Brandenburg, already archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator “of Halberstadt, longing to add it to his possessions, was elected. After some scandalous negotiations with Leo X. it was arranged that Albert should pay 14,000 ducats for the papal confirmation and 10,000 as a “composition ” for permission to continue to hold, against the rules of the Church, his two former archbishoprics. Moreover, in order to permit him to pay the sums, he was to have half the proceeds in his provinces from an indulgence granted to forward the rebuilding of St Peter’s. A Dominican monk, Johann Tetzel, was selected to proclaim the indulgence (together with certain supplementary graces) in the three provinces of the elector. This suggestion came from the curia, not the elector, whose representatives could not suppress the fear that the plan would arouse opposition and perhaps worse. Tetzel’s preaching and the exaggerated claims that he was reported to be making for the indulgences attracted the attention of an Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, who had for some years been lecturing on theology at the university of Wittenberg. He found it impossible to reconcile Tetzel’s views of indulgences with his own fundamental theory of salvation. He accordingly hastily drafted ninety-five propositions relating to indulgences, and posted an invitation to those who wished to attend a disputation in Wittenberg on the matter, under his presidency. He points out the equivocal character of the word poenitentia, which meant both “penance” and “penitence”: he declared that “true contrition seeks punishment, while the ampleness of pardons relaxes it and causes men to hate it.” Christians ought to be taught that he who gives to a poor man or lends to the needy does better than if he bought pardons. He concludes with certain “keen questionings of the laity,” as, Why does not the pope empty purgatory forthwith for charity’s sake, instead of cautiously for money? Why does he not, since he is rich as Croesus, build St Peter’s with his own money instead of taking that of poor believers P It was probably these closing reflections which led to the translation of the theses from Latin into German, and their surprising circulation. It must not be assumed that Luther’s ninety-five theses produced any considerable direct results. They awakened the author himself to a consciousness that his doctrines were after all incompatible with some of the Church’s teachings, and led him to consider the nature of the papal power which issued the indulgence. Two or three years elapsed before Luther began to be generally known and to exercise a perceptible influence upon affairs.

In July 1518 a diet assembled in Augsburg to consider the new danger from the Turks, who were making rapid conquests under Sultan Selim I. The pope’s representative, Cardinal Cajetan, made it clear that the only safety Augsburg lay in the collection of a tenth from the clergy a twentieth from laymen; but the diet appointed a committee to consider the matter and explain why they proposed to refuse the pope’s demands. Protests urging the diet not to weaken came in from all sides. There was an especially bitter denunciation of the Curia by some unknown writer. He claims that “the pope bids his collectors go into the whole world, saying, ‘He that believeth, and payeth the tenths, shall be saved.’ But it is not necessary to stand in such fear of the thunder of Christ’s vicar, but rather to fear Christ Himself, for it is the Florentine’s business, not Christ’s, that is at issue.” The report of the committee of the diet was completed on the 27th of August 1518. It reviews all the abuses, declares that the German people are the victims of war, devastation and dearth, and that the common man is beginning to comment on the vast amount of wealth that is collected for expeditions against the Turk through indulgences or otherwise, and yet no expedition takes place. This is the first recognition in the official gravamina of the importance of the people. Shortly after the committee submitted its report the clergy of Liége presented a memorial which, as the ambassador from Frankfort observed, set forth in the best Latin all the various forms of rascality of which the curtizanen (i.e. curiales, officials of the curia) were guilty. From this time on three new streams begin to reinforce the rather feeble current of official efforts for reform. The common man, to whom the diet of Augsburg alludes, had long been raising his voice against the “parsons” (Pfaffen); the men of letters, Brand, Erasmus, Reuchlin, and above all Ulrich von Hutten, contributed, each in their way, to discredit the Roman Curia; and lastly, a new type of theology, represented chiefly by Martin Luther, threatened to sweep away the very foundations of the papal monarchy.