The Rest Is History - 436. Luther: Showdown with the Emperor (Part 4)

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

"I cannot and will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.…Here I stand, I can do no other” The Diet of Worms in April 1521 was one of history’s most dramatic confrontations, a clash of the old world and the new. It saw the celebrity professor Martin Luther summoned to the imperial free city of Worms by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, to defend his radical beliefs. And though his life was guaranteed by the Emperor, Luther had never been in greater danger. He arrived in the city to huge, ecstatic crowds, like Jesus returning to Jerusalem from the desert. But would his rhetorical brilliance and passionate defence save him and the future of protestantism, or would he doom himself to a fiery fate? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss one of the most groundbreaking moments of western history: Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521, and the extraordinary twist of fate which saw the most famous man in Europe inexplicably vanish from the face of the earth. Defenestrated dogs, malevolent poltergeists and scatological furores abound...  *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I had already concluded my letter when I gathered from various reports, as well as the hasty running of the people, that the great master of heretics was making his entrance. I sent one of my people out, and he told me that about a hundred mounted soldiers had escorted him to the gate of the city. Sitting in a coach with three comrades, he entered the city at ten in the morning,

surrounded by some eight horsemen, and found lodgings near his Saxon prince. When he left the coach, a priest embraced him and touched his habit three times and shouted with joy, as if he had the relic of the greatest saint in his hands. I suspect he will soon be said to work miracles. This Luther, as he climbed from the coach, looked around in the circle with his demonic eyes, and he said, God will be with me. Then he stepped into an inn, where he was visited by many men, ten or twelve of which he ate with, and after the meal all the world ran there to see him. So Tom, that was Hieronymus Alexander, the papal legate, and he was reporting on Martin Luther's arrival in the city of Worms, which was the city on the banks of the Rhine, on the 16th of April, 1521.

The funny thing about that passage, I mean, when you read it, it's very kind of a Pharisee describes the coming of Jesus, isn't it? I mean, the 12 people eating with him. It's remarkable that Hieronymus Alexander did not notice the parallel hanging there in the air, or maybe he did? Well, as we'll find out, Luther gets given excellent accommodation in verbs, and Alexander doesn't. And it may be that he's a bit cross about the discrepancy in accommodation that's going on.

But this is one of the great scenes in European history, isn't it? And as you said yesterday, to English english speakers it's always been a cause of amusement the diet of worms so a diet is a kind of it's an assembly of the various leaders from across the empire who get summoned by the emperor himself but obviously the idea of eating worms i mean we in our chocolate episode we talked about how in the 17th century it was recommended that you should add worms to chocolate. Gaul of eel. Gaul of eel. Yeah.

But worms particularly. And more recently, the gravel-voiced manager of Everton Football Club, Sean Dyche. He called a press conference, didn't he? For the record, I definitely don't eat worms. He did. Our producer, Tony, told us that... Great anecdote about him. Well, because he was the manager of Burnley at the time when he made this.

Yeah, and Tony is a Burnley fan. He said that Sean Dyche, a superstition, a ritual of his, that after every match, he stops at McDonald's for a coffee. Tony thought this was an absolutely extraordinary detail, but we didn't greet it with the rapture and excitement that he was hoping for. Yeah, because if he'd stopped for coffee and a lot of worms, please, that would have been interesting. But anyway, listen, let's not get sidetracked.

So, Tom, let's just put this into context, because last week we talked about the rise of Martin Luther from obscurity to European celebrity, so European fame. This monk born in 1483, who either does or does not nail his attack on indulgences to the door of the church in Wittenberg. There's then a series of confrontations and debates with representatives of Catholic orthodoxy, if that's not a contradiction to that, where he's going further and further and becoming more and more radical in his attack on the establishment. He has gone through, we talked last time, he's gone through this almost kind of conversion experience, the experience of being born again, his reformation moment, as it is called, where he becomes convinced that only through the experience of the Bible and through faith alone can you achieve salvation.

And now we are heading for one of history's titanic confrontations, a great showdown. So it's two years, as you say in your notes here, so it's two years after another showdown we talked about, which was that between Hernan Cortes and the Aztec emperor Montezuma outside Tenochtitlan on the causeway. This is two years later, but arguably this is, I mean, it's less dramatic, but it's, would you argue it's more important or as important maybe? The meeting of Cortés and Montezuma is symbolically important for what it portends. But I think the meeting here, I mean, it really

matters what the result of it is. And the meeting of the old world and the new is obviously off the scale in terms of the strangeness of it. But there is a strangeness here as well, because Luther, as well as being a condemned heretic, I mean, he is also a very humble stock. He is from a humble mining village. His ancestors are peasants. And the emperor, Charles V, is a Habsburg, and he is the ruler of probably the largest empire the world, certainly the European world, has seen. Because he's got all these vast European possessions. He's the Holy Roman Emperor. He's got Spain. He's got the Netherlands. He's got all kinds of stuff. But he's also getting this empire in the New World. Yeah.

So it is an amazing moment. But it's also, it really matters in the history of the Reformation because Luther, by this point, is the most famous man in Germany. He is the star professor at the University of Wittenberg. And the question now is what is going to be done with him. He's been condemned, but it seems that the mass of German opinion is on his side. And more germainly, a key figure in the politics of the empire is on his side. And that is Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony. And he is the man who has founded Wittenberg University,

and he doesn't want to see his star professor literally go up in smoke. And so he is the one who negotiates to have Luther's case heard not in Rome, where he would undoubtedly be condemned and burned, but in Germany, and to have it heard not by the representatives of the church itself, but by the emperor. And listeners may be wondering, well, how is he able to force this through? And the answer is that Frederick is in a very strong position. So we talked about how he is one of the seven electors. And Charles, he was elected in the summer of 1519 and was elected unanimously. And that really, really mattered. And Frederick had held his cards close to his chest. He hadn't revealed until the last moment who he was going to vote for. And so,

you know, Charles feels in his debt. And the evidence of this is that money starts to flow into Frederick's coffers. I mean, whether it's a bribe or not, I mean, maybe not, maybe it's kind of cast as a repayment or whatever, but definitely relations are, you know, have been couched in monetary terms, but they've also been couched in matrimonial terms. So Frederick's nephew has been engaged to Charles's sister. And although they never actually marry, the fact that they are kind of in-laws for this period, I mean, that also matters. And then of course, on top of that, there is the geopolitical context, which is that the Turks are at the gates and it's Charles's responsibility as emperor to construct a united front. And Saxony is very rich because of its silver mines.

And there is that reason as well, why Charles doesn't want to alienate Frederick. So just on Charles and the election, because I think it's nice to have a little bit of context, his main opponents in that election, so his rivals, everyone thinks he's probably going to get it because his grandfather Maximilian had been the emperor and it's kind of been a little bit of a Habsburg bauble

for the last couple of generations. But his rivals are François I of France, but also our own Henry VIII, Tom. How different history might have been. Now, as you said, Charles wins a unanimous victory. Interestingly, though, we talked last time about kind of proto-nationalism. This is an age often thought of as being before nationalism, but national sentiments do exist.

Charles wins in the election, partly because he says, I'm the most German candidate. Well, he speaks German to his horse, doesn't he? Right. So Charles is a genuinely really, really interesting figure. He's not as well known in Britain or the English speaking world as he is in continental Europe, where he's a massive transcendent kind of historical figure. He's not as well known in Britain or the English speaking world as he is in continental Europe, where he's a massive, transcendent kind of historical figure. So he became, what is he? He's 20 when he meets Luther. Yeah. So he's born in 1500. Born in 1500 in Ghent, which is now in Belgium, which was then part of his kind of Netherlands possessions. He's the son of Philip theip the fair of burgundy and joanna the

mad of castile crazy name crazy girl yes very good he's incredibly well educated he speaks lots of different languages so the famous saying is he speaks spanish to god italian to women french to men and german to his horse yeah and he has an enormous jaw famously the hapsburg jaw and he has an enormous jaw, famously the Habsburg jaw, and he's intelligent and thoughtful, but he's also very introverted, gloomy, suspicious, cautious, and he's obviously only just come in as Holy Roman Emperor and he has this massive disparate role. I know, nightmare situation. He's facing the Ottomans yeah but also to maintain

unity as king of spain as ruler of the netherlands and burgundy yeah as ruler of this mad patchwork of the holy room that's a tough tough job and he can see that the schism between people who back luther and people who are loyal to the established church, I mean, is really threatening. And so he wants to somehow try and resolve that while also keeping Frederick on board. And so this is why he agrees that he will summon Luther to hear him at Worms. And so the summons arrives from Charles in Wittenberg on the 26th of March, and Luther is instructed to answer with regard to your books and teachings. And he is given three weeks to comply. And he also, Dominic, receives a personal

assurance from the emperor of safe conduct. And listeners to earlier episodes will appreciate this may not be entirely reassuring to Luther because there is a salutary example of a professor accused of heresy being summoned by the imperial authorities to make a case and being given a safe conduct. And that is Jan Hus, who goes to Constance in 1414 and despite his safe conduct ends up being burnt. And that's the Bohemian reformer or would-be reformer who people saw as the sort of precursor to Luther. And Luther had said he'd been pushed into a corner by Johann Eck. And he had said, you know, I believe a lot of Hus' stuff. So that parallel must be hanging over him.

Absolutely. And as he's going there, he says to a companion, we are all Hussites and did not realize it. So he's now overtly identifying himself with Huss. And he'd been a monk. He'd been a very devout Catholic. So he would have seen Huss as a heretic. He's in a monastery where one of the figures who condemns Huss is buried by the altar. But now, essentially, he's totally reversing his understanding of history. He's seeing Huss as the goody, and he's seeing the papacy as the baddy. And I think that he is going to Worms thinking that he might well be burnt. I mean, he cannot help but have this lesson from history weighing him down. And it's incredibly brave of him to do it. It's not a given that he will get

away with this. So he leaves Wittenberg and he has his lawyer, who is the professor of law at Wittenberg, Hieronymus Scherf, who we've already mentioned. He's a guy who's always trying to slightly stop Luther from being quite as forthright as Luther tends to be. And they set out and they, obviously, they're very conspicuous on the road because Charles V has sent his herald, a guy called Kasper Sturm, and he leads this wagon with Luther and Scherf and various other people from Wittenberg. And the herald, he has the Imperial Eagle of Germany on his sleeves. And so every time they go on the road and they come into a town, huge excitement because Luther is, I mean, he's a massive, massive celebrity by this point. And great fun for Luther because he's going through places where he was educated.

So he arrives in Erfurt where he'd been a student and huge party thrown for him. He gives a sermon and so many people crowd into the church that people are worried it's going to collapse. So it'd be like you, Dominic, turning up at Balliol and everyone holds a feast and they all come out to hear you. That probably would happen, Tom. I think that would happen. Do a live show of the rest of history or something. It would be great. But I think also, obviously, it's nerve wracking as well. So when he gets to Eisenbach, which is the Wartburg, that great castle, but it's where Luther had been at school,

he's so prostrated by panic attacks that he has to be bled. And Luther blames the devil for this. Luther is haunted by the sense that the devil is out to persecute him. Of course. But, you know, he's getting more and more nervous and he's just approaching firms when Frederick's secretary warns him not to enter the city because he is going to be condemned. So, very alarming.

So it's a bit like Navalny going back to Russia, but making a stand. He's making a stand, but he knows it'll probably end in disaster. I think Luther is more hopeful that he may get away with it than Navalny.

I think Navalny knew that he was doomed by going back. Luther doesn't think he's doomed, but of course, I mean, he has to be aware that death may be the result. But he kind of summons up his courage and he says, we shall enter in spite of the gates of hell and the powers of darkness. So he's doing what he always does, which is to cast himself as the agent of light and those who are opposing him as the agents of the devil. So we heard from the passage you read, the account by the papal legate that he arrives on the 16th of April. He's installed in very nice rooms near to the bishop's palace where his meeting with the emperor will take place. And he is summoned to meet Charles V the following afternoon, April the 17th. So just to paint a picture of Worms, Worms is on the western bank of the Rhine.

It's in the west of Germany. It's what's called an imperial free city. So it's self-governing under the emperor. There are stories that Luther is visited by representatives of the town's Jewish community because there's a big Jewish population in Worms. Right. And there are no Jews in Wittenberg. Right. So they have been expelled in the 14th century.

Also, its population has swelled to many times its normal size. I think there are something like 14,000 extra people there because the imperial diet, which is this regular assembly of the electors and other princes of the empire. Yeah. You know, these have been held since the 9th century when the empire was part of the Frankish kind of world. And you can imagine the streets full of hucksters, minstrels,

tourists, you know, big crowds and great excitement. Yeah. So all the accounts of Luther's appearance here emphasize the crowds. So they say that when he goes to the meeting on the afternoon of the 17th of April, that the crowds are so great that he has to be taken in by a sideway. So he gets led through a garden and in through a side door to the meeting. And people are climbing onto the rooftops to see. And you talked about how in the introduction,

the papal legate inadvertently is kind of conjuring up an image of Christ coming into Jerusalem. Luther's admirers are overtly saying that. They're overtly comparing these crowds to the crowds who come out to see Christ on Palm Sunday. Now, of course, that's not necessarily a reassurance. Yeah. Because Jesus still ends up being crucified.

And I think Luther is overwhelmed by it. I think he is really, really unsettled. So he walks into the chamber. The nobility of the empire are there. They're sumptuously arrayed in jewellery and robes and codpieces and everything. And Luther has just got his plain, simple cassock on. And even though lots of the nobles are shouting encouragement to him, it's a terrifying, overwhelming experience for him,

particularly because there at the end of the room, of course, is the emperor himself. And there is also a table that has a great pile of all his various publications. That's your nightmare, isn't it? You're called into a meeting of the biggest people in the world. Yeah, it is, isn't it? That you're called into a meeting of the biggest people in the world. Yeah, it is, isn't it? And there are all your books. They have to be dissected. Yeah.

Yeah. And they cut, you know, looking at them disapprovingly and say, have you written them? And this is asked both first in Latin and then in German. And Scherf, Luther's lawyer, says, let the titles of the books be read. So, Dominic, Seasons in the Sun. I'd love that. All that.

I'd actually love that, Tom. And the whole way through, Luther is supposed to only answer yes or no. So this interrogation has been structured so that he won't have an opportunity to grandstand because everyone is aware, his enemies, that he's very, very good at this. So the whole thing has been structured to ensure that he can't start freewheeling. And I think he's very upset by this and intimidated. So he adopts a delaying strategy. He's asked, will you recant and revoke your books? And he says to this, I don't know. I want to have time to think about it. And he says, this is the question of faith and the salvation of souls. And because it concerns the divine word, which we are all bound to reverence, for there is

nothing greater in heaven or on earth. And so he asked for an adjournment and this is granted. But Tom, this is unbelievable. He's gone all this way and there are huge crowds. And then he goes into this room. You know, it's like something from the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or something. People in their magnificent robes and just this one lone monk. And then he gets in and says, I'll come back tomorrow.

But it is a genius tactic. It's theater, right? It's absolute theater. He is brilliant at this PR. What chutzpah to say that to the emperor and to all of these electors and princes and counts and whatever they are. What extraordinary confidence. But also, Dominic, it's a kind of silence before the imperial power. And who else was silent before the imperial power?

When he goes out from the hall for his adjournment, the crowds out there are calling on him to be strong, to be brave, not to give in. And there are lots of them who are openly comparing him to Christ before Pilate. I think he's consciously making play with this, even as he is also playing for time. We've talked about this again and again and again. Luther's genius for the dramatic moment that people will remember and talk about and mythologize. And on that thing of comparing himself to Jesus, or at least role-playing as Jesus, as it were, this is somebody who not long ago was having six-hour therapy sessions with his confessor because he felt unworthy.

Does he now just feel kind of puffed up as maybe too harsh? No, the Lord is with him. He's born again. God loves him. Yeah, he's invigorated. He's loving this. And he does think reenacting the journey of Jesus, as it were, he thinks it's fine because I'm doing the Lord's work. Christ is with him. Christ is in his heart. That is his state of grace. Right. Okay. So he

goes back the following afternoon. So that's now we're now on the 18th of April. And so many people want to see this showdown that they've had to move it to a bigger hall. And even as it is, some of the princes who've come, they have to stand. So this is the measure of how this is by miles, the hottest ticket in town. And Luther goes in and by now it's getting dark. The torches are burning, the shadows are flickering. And he is asked the same question, will you recant and revote your books? And Luther replies, rather as he had done to Khadhatan, the cardinal who we talked about in the previous episode, that he will, if it can be shown from scripture, that they contain errors. But otherwise he won't.

And he says, you know, these books, the things I have to say, look at the stir they have created here in the city, across the empire. And I'm not going to apologize for this because basically the excitement that my books have created is proving the truth of what they say. And he says to see excitement and dissension arise because of the word of God is to me clearly the most joyful aspect of all in these matters. So he's turning on its head the charge of his enemies that he is creating public unrest and saying, well, yes, the public unrest is the proof of the value of what I'm doing. For this is the way, the opportunity and the result of the word of God, just as Christ said, I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. And whenever a Christian leader starts

saying that, it was slightly nerve wracking. But the thing with the inquisitor, sorry, the inquisitor says to him, Tom, doesn't he? Luther says, you know, basically to make me recant, you'd have to prove in the Bible. I mean, it's just the Bible or nothing for me. Yeah. But even at this point, the inquisitor, who's a guy slightly confusingly, he's called Johan X. So he has the same name as a previous Johan X. We had waves of X. But he's a different man.

And Johan X says, you know, all heretics go on about the Bible. I mean, he makes this point. He says, you're talking about scripture, but that's what all heretics do. That's why you need the church as the institution to explain what the Bible means, because otherwise it's too ambiguous and it's too unclear. And that issue, that conflict between the two, I mean, that runs through hundreds of years of not just Protestant versus Catholic, but kind of Western civilization, the individual conscience versus the institution. Yeah, absolutely. Because Luther is taking for granted that the Spirit is speaking through him, that his understanding of the Word is self-evidently the truth, and that if everyone

shares in his experience, they will understand the Word of God exactly as he does. And that is his position. And this is what gives him the strength to face down the Inquisitor. And when the Inquisitor accuses him of basically playing scholastic games, playing the kind of the university lecturer, trying to wriggle out of situations with fine sounding sophistry, Luther makes this ringing statement. around him, he says that he scorns all the pretensions of popes and councils and inquisitors because he is bound only by the understanding of scripture that has been revealed to him by the spirit. And he says, my conscience is captive to the word of God. So that word conscience again, which he keeps emphasizing, I cannot, and I will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. And according to the transcript of the interrogation, this is where he stops. This is his final statement. But according to the transcript that in due course

will be released by his supporters in Wittenberg, he then goes on to utter a ringing phrase that will probably be the most famous thing he ever says. I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand. Here stay ich. And this phrase will ring across the empire and indeed, Dominic, down the centuries. And so basically his enemies have handed Luther exactly what they didn't want to do, which is a chance to make his case in front of the emperor himself. The simple monk opposed by all the panoply and power of the emperor of the church. And it's an amazing moment. Tom, that moment, by the way, that phrase, here I stand, I can do no other, or however you translate it, Dietmar McCulloch in his book on the Reformation says that's the motto, not just of the Reformation, but of all modern Western

civilization. Yeah. Living my truth. Yeah. That's what it is, right? Exactly. Yeah. And that's why it reverberates. That's why it has the influence it does. And it means that Luther, rather than the emperor, is center stage in the way that people understand this confrontation. But two days after he's heard Luther make the statement, Charles V writes his reply. And he says that he is staying true to the example set by his predecessors as emperor. He will always be a defender of the Catholic faith, of its rituals and its decrees and

its ordinances and its customs and so on. And so he confirms Luther's excommunication. Nevertheless, he is a man of his word. He had given Luther safe passage, he is a man of his word. He had given Luther safe passage. And so he will hold to that. But Luther has three weeks. And after that, he will be arrested and liquidated.

And that is the word that he used. Right. I think that's fair, Tom. I think that reflects well on Charles V. And the Diet carries on. And on the 26th of May, so this is the day after the diet ends of sweeps like wildfire by luther's supporters saying that the inquisitors in worms had gathered up all luther's books and burnt them but on the top there was an image of luther and that this didn't burn oh that definitely happened that definitely happened and you'll remember in the passage you read the papal legate saying people

will be calling him a saint soon i mean the paradox is that all this kind of miraculous stuff of, you know, images not burning. I mean, this is very pre-Reformation, one might say. Yeah. But also, Dominic, just to say, and to reiterate a point that you made earlier about how really the question is, how does Luther know that what he's saying is right? Because what Charles V says in his response is that he doesn't pretend to deep theological knowledge. He's not a professor of theology and

the Bible as Luther is, but he doesn't understand how a single monk could be correct in an opinion, which, as Charles puts it, according to which all of Christianity will be and will always have been in error, both in the past thousand years and even more in the present. I mean, that's such a fair point, right? Because Charles V could reasonably say, listen, fellow, Christianity is what the Christian church says it is. End of story. Yeah, right. So if the whole Christian church says, this is Christianity, and you say, no, it isn't, it's something else, you're by definition wrong because the church decides. Yeah. And Dominic, what's interesting is that there is a humanist scholar called Johann Cocleus who is in Worms and he's come sympathetic to Luther. And he's

worrying about this. He wants to know kind of what Luther thinks. So on the 24th of April, while Luther is still in Worms, He gets himself invited to dinner in Luther's rooms and he finds himself sitting between Luther and Frederick the Wise, the elector who's there as well. And he presses Luther on this point and Luther doesn't really give him convincing answers. And so Luther, after dinner, goes back to his quarters and Cocleus follows him. So it's exactly the kind of behaviour that you really don't want. It's exactly how I expect theologians to behave to be fair. But Luther allows Cucleus in. Cucleus pulls back his cloak and shows that he doesn't have a sword

or anything. And Cucleus keeps pressing him and saying, how do you know that your interpretation of scripture is right? Surely everyone will have different interpretations. And Luther's answer is that the meaning of God's word is plain. If the spirit illum you then you will you will know you'll get it right tom i'm sorry this is such obvious tosh okay well kakleas is with you he agrees and the argument between them becomes so intense that the two of them fall out irrevocably and kakleas from being an admirer of luther becomes one of his most inveterate enemies and the accounts that that he will write of Luther are so abusive and so popular with Luther's enemies that they will influence how Catholics see Luther for centuries and centuries to come. But I agree, he has kind of zoomed in on what, as events will show, is the big issue for Luther and indeed for the entire Reformation. And really, in a way,

this is the high point of the identification of Luther with a single Reformation. Up until this point, he has been like Elvis or someone. He is the dominant figure. I can't believe you're compared with Elvis. Right. So Elvis is the king. He dominates the world of rock and roll. And then, of course, he gets drafted and he vanishes from the scene. And something rather similar to that happens to Luther because he has this three-week period of grace before the agents of the emperor will arrest him. He's heading back to Wittenberg and he's leaving Worms. He's a hero and he's an outlaw, even more famous than he had been before the diet.

The star of countless pamphlets, spreading news of his great confrontation with the emperor across the whole of the German speaking world and beyond. And then comes this extraordinary twist. He's halfway back to Wittenberg, going through Thuringia, through a ravine, when suddenly he gets ambushed. A posse of horsemen confront him. They've got crossbows. They point them at Luther and his companions, and they abduct Luther and two of the people who are traveling with Luther, put them onto their horses, gallop away. The hoofbeats fade, nothing left but dust. And there is no clue as to who has taken Luther, where he has gone, what his fate is. And it is the case that the most famous man in Europe has vanished from the face of the earth.

What an unbelievable cliffhanger, Tom. Such exciting scenes. But the good news for the listeners is they just need to return after the break and they'll find out what has happened to Martin Luther. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip.

And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We ended the first half with an extraordinary cliffhanger. Tom, men with crossbows, riding off into the dust with Luther, kidnapped.

Who has taken him and why? Well, Dominic, he's been abducted by agents of Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, and they have taken him to a place that Luther knows very well. It's Eisenach, where he had been to school, and specifically to the Wartburg, the great castle that broods over the town. And he's taken there and he gets disguised as a knight. So he takes off his cassock. He even gets to wear a codpiece. an amazing transformation he grows his hair out so the tonsil goes grows a beard and he looks like a like a knight so he's called yunca georg yunca george knight george by his keepers and he he doesn't make a very convincing night he occasionally gets taken out hunting and he falls off his horse and he sobs over the hair there's occasion where he

picks up a hair and shelters it in his cloak and the dogs just reek up and kind of grab the hair and chew it to pieces. But he is allowed out. He's not just locked up completely. He is allowed out, but under very close supervision. Most of the time he's kept in the castle because obviously Frederick doesn't want the emperor to know that he is responsible for looking after a condemned heretic. So most of the time Luther is stuck in his room, which is very small, has a high ceiling, very plain furniture. And he's plunged into kind of gloomy introspection.

And we know... He loves that. You know, from his time as a monk, that he's a great man for gloominess. He needs a bit of better help, Dominic. Yeah, he does. That's really what he needs. He totally does. And so, as is always the case when he's unhappy,

what does he start obsessing about? Oh, Tom, amaze me. He starts obsessing about his bowels. Right. And so he does write letters to close friends and all he does is moan on about his constipation, saying I'm constipated for days on an end. And he has this very vivid description of how agonizing it is finally to get released that I'm sure all mothers listening to this will really enjoy. He says, now I sit in agony like a woman in childbirth, ripped up and bloody. God, that's pretty intense constipation, isn't it? Yeah. And he sees this obviously as being persecution by the devil.

And so he writes it almost every night when I wake up there he is itching to argue with me and this is the period that generates the famous story of Luther throwing an ink well an ink pot yeah at the devil and supposedly the ink is is available to be seen in the fuck book this is not true okay I mean certainly the devil wasn't there but he didn't throw an ink pot at it but there are other stories that Luther does substantiate later in life. And there is a story that the devil comes into his room disguised as a dog and Luther picks the dog up and hurls it out of the window. So Tom, I was really struck by this. This is the one thing that most interests me about Arthur and Luther because we have talked about other dog murderers and the rest is history.

Jeremy Thorpe, Tom, the cad bounder and erstwhile leader of the Liberal Party. Friend of the show, though, I think. Very much a friend of the show. And Jaco Macaco. Another friend of the show. The fighting monkey who defeated a dog at the Westminster pit. And actually, there are some interesting parallels there. So Jaco Macaco, as with Martin Luther, there's a lot of mystery. We don't know what kind of monkey he was. And with Luther, some of his spiritual crisis is obscure to us, isn't it? And Martin Luther, you talked very powerfully about him and technology and his use of pioneering

technology. And of course, Jeremy Thorpe was a great enthusiast for the hovercraft. For the hovercraft. Yes, the parallels are piling up. But Dominic, I would say one way in which certainly he's not similar to Jaco Macaco is that Luther is a great dog lover. And I think that this is actually what makes this story terribly sad. Really? Especially for the dog?

Yeah, but also for Luther. I mean, at least, you know, the dog is blah, blah, and then it's all over. But for Luther, the agony continues because he adores dogs. Oh, he's the real victim, is he? He's the real victim. So he says about dogs that, Our Lord God has made the best gifts the most common, which I think is adorable. And there's a very sweet thing that he sees a dog wagging its tail, and he says,

Be thou comforted, little dog. Thou too, in resurrection, shall have a little golden tail. That's guilt talking. That is guilt talking, Tom. No, it's not. No, it's not. He wouldn't say that. He wasn't a notorious Rinker-style dog murderer.

Oh, that I could only pray the way that my puppy stares at meat. No one who didn't love dogs would come out with that. Rubbish. That's sinister. Well, anyway, Dominic, it's the fault of the devil. It's not Luther's fault. It's the devil persecuting him. That's what Jeremy Thorpe said in court to Mr. Justice Cantley. No.

Also, Luther is the person who seems to have coined the word poltergeist. So an invisible ghost that throws things around. Really? Luther coins the word? Yes, I think so. Wow. That's what Roger Clark writes in his brilliant book, A Natural History of Ghosts. And I have no reason to doubt him. Yeah. But Luther coins the word because he doesn't actually believe in ghosts because ghosts supposedly come from purgatory. Luther doesn supposedly come from purgatory. Luther doesn't believe in purgatory. So actually, this poltergeist who's chucking nuts at him is clearly the devil again.

The poltergeist is throwing nuts at him. He's killing dogs and people are throwing nuts at him. Come on. Well, he's coming in disguised as a dog and he's throwing nuts. So it's not surprising that Luther is very unsettled by this. Yeah, he's a troubled man, I think it's fair to say. But he says he has a fail-safe method for getting rid of the devil

when prayer fails to get rid of the devil. And I quote Luther, I chase him away with a fart. Yeah. So the constipation isn't all bad. There's stuff going on in his mind, Tom, that we can't even begin to imagine. I mean, just to reiterate,

I mean, all this is kind of knockabout stuff, but the devil is intensely real for Luther. Yeah. And he is wrestling with the devil very profoundly. And ultimately his solution to this crisis, the fact that the devil is coming in as a dog and throwing nuts at him and all kinds of things, is the one that I think that we would all do in his situation, which is to translate the New Testament. Of course, that's the first thing I thought of. Wouldn't you do that? Yes, absolutely. If you can't get better help, translate the New Testament.

And it's not the first time that the New Testament has been translated into German. Since Gutenberg appeared on the scene, a German translation has been printed and has actually been reprinted 13 times. So it's definitely out there. But Luther is the first to translate it directly from Greek rather than from Latin, so from the original language. And it takes him 11 weeks and it is massively influential. I'm not in any way, not actually speaking German, really qualified to say this, but I gather that it has a heft in German similar to the King James Bible

in English. Oh, it's massive. But whereas the King James Bible is all very sonorous, it may not surprise listeners at this point to learn that apparently Luther's translation is much earthier. It is earthy. I looked it up, Tom. And Luther writes in very short, unusually for somebody writing in German. He writes very short sentences and using the shortest possible words. And designed to be accessible, right? Yeah. The very famous things that he wrote later on a hymn, Ein fester Burg ist ein Gott, a strong fortress is that God. And the very, very short words and very kind of easily comprehensible.

That's Luther's populism again, isn't it? Yeah. You can see why he became an important figure for kind of German nationalists, because he invents German, the language, to some degree, as Chaucer does with English. The vernacular. Yes. He shapes the vernacular. Yeah. And you see, I think one of the really, really underappreciated things about Luther, which

you've brought out really brilliantly, is that he's not just talking to theologians and bigwigs and stuff, but he's actually talking in terms that are comprehensible to the man and woman in the street. Right. I think inspiring people as well to write in that style. So even while he's in the Wartburg, he's not publishing anything, but people are putting out pamphlets that are articulating his ideas and doing it in ways that echo his mastery of kind of simple, plain German. But it's not just word that is being promulgated, but the image. To give a modern analogy, Luther is not just

on Twitter, he is also on Instagram. This is also hugely important in promulgating his message and his image while he is in isolation in the Wartburg is that illustrators are piling in as well. And the inspiration for this is Lucas Cranach, who is Frederick's court painter in Wittenberg, who has become a very good friend of Luther and who right from the beginning has played a key role in branding Luther. And there's a brilliant book called Brand Luther by Andrew Pettigree that explores this wonderfully. And Cranach is a master of everything visual. So even the pamphlets and books that Luther is putting out, it's Cranach who frames them. So he gives them a kind of distinctive binding so that they will stand out on the bookstore. And the font and the lettering

and everything is very clear and precise. So it's a bit like a Penguin classic or something, that you will immediately recognise a pamphlet by Luther if you see it. But he's also doing portraits of Luther. So that portrait of Luther that supposedly didn't burn, it's a famous image of Luther as a monk looking very pious, ascetic. He's got the spirit in the form of a dove over his head. I know what you mean. Yeah. And this promulgates the image of Luther as an accompaniment to his words. People know what Luther looks like. And of course, this would have been harder to do in an age before printing, wouldn't it? You wouldn't have been able to distribute so many images.

Of course, completely. Let alone so many texts. Yes, absolutely. Yes. And while Luther is in the Wartburg, Cranach teams up with Melanchthon, who is the very young professor of Greek, and they publish a strip cartoon. So it's 13 woodcuts that contrast the life of Christ with the lifestyle of the Pope, very much to the- To the detriment of the latter. To the detriment of the Pope. But even more than that, they really pile in with abusive cartoons. So Carlos Eyre, who's written a brilliant survey of this entire period called, tellingly, Reformations.

So the idea that there are multiple Reformations. I mean, he says the evangelicals, so the followers of Luther, invented the satirical cartoon and they use images as a medium of dissent and polemic on a scale that has never been paralleled in history and in these cartoons luther is the hero and his opponents are objects of ridicule right and unsurprisingly because luther is the inspiration for this there is a lot of excrement in these cartoons yeah they're incredibly scatological aren't they so there's one famous one where the devil is shitting out monks he's excreting monks thanks for that tom but there's another one that carlos air writes about which targets johann cocleas the humanist who had been chatting to luther at firms and. And I'll read as description of

it. One of the most obscenely outrageous of all reformation images, the very epitome of smear tactics, reduces the work of Johann Cocleus to fecal matter. In this image, the devil defecates into Cocleus' mouth and Cocleus in turn excretes books out of his rear end. As devils gleefully dance in celebration of this process, a monk and a prince pick up the books and a crowd of bystanders, some covering their noses, look on in disgust. Yeah, I'm looking at the image now. I mean, you've described it very fairly. I mean, this is literally what happens. A horrendous devil is opening his bowels into the mouth of this bloke and then he himself is, as you say, excreting books. Nothing is left to the imagination whatsoever.

And we are familiar with this, with our own social media, that abuse and abusive images become more and more abusive because there's a kind of tidal wave, I suppose, of excitement that people who feel themselves to be part of a movement get gathered up on. And if you have the means to propagate your opinions and your hot takes by means of tweets or images or whatever, then you take it. And of course, the consequence of that in turn is that maybe the people who've inspired it can be left behind. And this is particularly the case if, like Luther, you've been effectively the equivalent of being kicked off social media. Yeah, locked up with the devil, throwing nuts around.

Yes, exactly. And so the consequences of this, while Luther is in the Wartburg, are very visibly seen in his great base in Wittenberg. So in Wittenberg, while he is away, people are inspired by the image of him standing up to the emperor and to the pope. And the monks and nuns in Wittenberg start to leave their cloisters and abandon their vows. And some of them even get married. And there's this sense that monasticism in Wittenberg and beyond is starting to implode. And students, and again, this is something that we are familiar with as well, that they get caught up in the excitement

of it all. And they start targeting masses, they start smashing images in churches, and they start targeting veneration of the Virgin and the saints. And it really starts kicking off in December 1521, so in the build-up to Christmas. And the guy who takes the lead is Luther's friend and admirer, Andreas Karlstadt, who is the guy who is the chancellor, who had accompanied Luther to the great debate with Johann Eck in Leipzig and had always been a kind of restrained and sober scholar, but he now emerges as a kind of firebrand. And again, it's kind of like the highly respected scholar who suddenly goes berserk on Twitter, abusing people left, right and centre. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking.

So I was thinking the comparison is obviously with the great sort of upsurge of kind of capital E enthusiasm in the last five to 10 years and activism and sort of the talk of social justice and stuff. And you would have people who previously would be very boring academics who suddenly find their voice. And then, of course, they're playing to the gallery, aren't they? So they self-radicalize. Yeah. And they get the likes and they want more likes. And the more likes you get, the more radical you become. And I think Kulchnat is the first example of this happening, really. He's the primal example of the angry academic getting cross about Brexit on Twitter.

So in December, he preaches a whole series of fiery sermons and he whips the students in Wittenberg up who go on the rampage, destroying images and pulling down altars and overtly menacing priests who are celebrating mass in the traditional way. And on Christmas Eve, there's a kind of enormous riot across Wittenberg, breaking into churches, destroying images. And on Christmas day, rather than apologizing for this, Karlstead doubles down. So he holds this festive celebration and he is making a whole series of points. So he does it not in the traditional vestments, but in a kind of plain cloak. He is not turning away from the congregation towards the awesome mystery that is at the heart of the Mass, but facing the congregation. He is speaking the word of in their mouth because this whole idea that the laity are not qualified to approach it let alone touch it i mean this is a shocking shocking blasphemy yeah and he gives them wine which is a very hussite thing to do it's a very overtly heretical thing to do karlstadt is going straight in. He's doing the whole thing. And just for good measure,

in the new year, he marries, and the person he marries is a 15-year-old girl. Well, he's all in. He's all in. He's all in. And the Wittenberg magistracy, they back him. So on the 24th of January, 1522, they basically say that the illegal service that Karlstadt had celebrated on Christmas, that this is brilliant, that this should be the model, that all private masses should be banned, that all religious images should be removed from Wittenberg's churches. And they give a date in February, 1522, when all of this has to be done. And a mob duly goes on the rampage through Wittenberg and they haul out every remaining image, icon, whatever. They burn icons that are made of wood. The stone ones, they have stone images of Christ, stone images of the Virgin.

They smash off the heads and break off the arms and celebrate. And it's all great fun. So, Tom, a couple of things strike me about that. One is obviously the thing that will have struck loads of listeners, which we don't want to labor too much, which is the impulse to destroy images, to tear down statues and stuff is something we're obviously very familiar with. And it's remarkable how enduring it is in human history. Just a question about destruction and removal of religious images and statues.

Is that something new? Because obviously there have been lots of examples of it going back to Byzantine iconoclasm. Or is this an enduring anxiety? No, I don't think it is an enduring anxiety. I think it is taken for granted in Latin Christendom. You're right that there were debates in the Orthodox world, but they were centuries and centuries earlier.

Centuries before. So both in Byzantium and in Latin Christendom, the assumption that images are guides and helps maybe to the unlettered, it brings them closer to an understanding of their faith, is deeply, deeply entrenched. Yes. And so this is seen as utterly shocking and blasphemous. And of course, the blasphemy of it is, I think, part of the fun and excitement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. You know, blasphemy in itself, they don't see it as blasphemous. And of course, the blasphemy of it is, I think, part of the fun and excitement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. You know, blasphemy in itself, they don't see it as blasphemous, of course.

They see it as entirely justified. They see the presence of these images as malign in exactly the way that people toppling the statues of Confederate generals or Bristol slavers do. But clearly, there is a kind of excitement in it as well. Of course. And it would be foolish to deny that. and i've got another question so my other question is so the wittenberg authorities have given a date right and they have allowed this to happen doesn't this speak to the point that the reformation happens at a particular moment in time but it also happens at a particular moment in time, but it also happens at a particular place in Europe. Because isn't there an argument that only in the Holy Roman Empire, where authority is so decentralized and where local institutions have so much power, could this have happened? It's

much harder to imagine it happening, let's say, in England. Well, unless the central authority decides that they want to do it. Exactly. Which is, of course, what will happen there. But of course, what will happen, but it can only happen in this bottom-up way, in the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland. So Geneva. Which is the other great place in the Reformation,

which are the two most decentralized, localized polities in Europe. Yeah. So it can obviously happen in independent cities and Geneva, where Calvin will establish his regime is the obvious example of that. But as we will see in the next episode, there are places within the Holy Roman Empire where these regimes, these kind of iconoclastic regimes will seize control. But of course, Dominic, the magistracy in Wittenberg is not the ultimate arbiter of what should be done. The ultimate arbiter is Frederick the Wise. Right, the Elector of Saxony. Who has been backing the Reformation up to this point.

But he's still got his relics. Yeah. And he's not very happy about this. And so he basically says to Luther, I think, you know, it's going too far. You should come out and sort this out. And Luther, who initially had given his backing to Karlstadt, he now also feels that this has gone too far. So Karlstadt is moving towards a position that Christ is not present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Luther always

thinks that Christ is present. And Luther is not opposed to churches being beautiful and having images in them in the way that Karlstadt has. And so Luther writes to the elector and he says, Satan has come among the children of God. They've gone too far, that they have misunderstood the purposes of God, that they are being seduced by the devil and they are breeding anarchy. On the 6th of March, he reappears in Wittenberg. He's bearded, he's still dressed as a knight. It's clear that the old monkish Luther has gone for good. But in every other way, he is turning back the clock. All the old way of doing things that Karlstadt had abolished, Luther now reinstates.

And although obviously the ruined images can't be replaced, those icons that do remain are protected from vandalism. And Luther does what he can basically to completely unpick the reformation that Karlstadt has introduced. And he turns on Karlstadt with the fury and venom that is so Lutheran. And basically, Karlstadt is forced out in disgrace. And it seems that Luther has taken back control of the reformation. But of course, he hasn't. Tom, is that Luther swinging or is he being consistent? In other words, is he swinging because he's lost control of the revolution and also his political patron is in danger of

deserting him? Or is he consistent? Am I being unfair and too cynical? I think he is swinging back. I think he's very, very anxious not to lose Frederick's patronage, not just for selfish reasons that Frederick is protecting him, but also because he feels that Frederick has been appointed by God as the guardian of the Reformation and that its future would be threatened were Frederick to turn on it. But I think there's also a strong element of pique. It is a bit like Elvis coming back from the draft and discovering that things have moved on and that new types of music are being developed. So likewise, Luther is resentful that Karlstadt, who he's always seen as his number two, his deputy, has taken the lead. So I think that's

absolutely a part of it. But the thing is that Luther cannot now impose himself on the Reformation in the way that he had done before he'd vanished into the Wartburg. So that word that Carlos Eyre uses, reformations, I mean, we are now starting to look at multiple different ways of, the Reformation is becoming a debating ground of opinions as well as of beliefs. The consequence of this is that there are people who are going well beyond Luther. This man who has been the great revolutionary up to this point, he is revealing himself now to be a reactionary right and essentially for the rest of his life luther will be with the sides of reaction rather than with the sides of reform trying to keep a lid on what he has created trying to slow down the revolution yeah that he has inaugurated and

of course tom in the next episode we will be seeing how this plays out with unbelievably bloody and violent consequences, won't we? We will. A massive political convulsion that rips through the map of Europe. The German Peasants' War, one of the most exciting moments, Tom, in European history. And perhaps Luther's most fascinating and charismatic opponent, Thomas Munzer. Oh, yeah. Who pushes the Reformation to a very, very radical endpoint. Fantastic.

So if you're a member of the Restist History Club, or even better, one of our beloved Athelstan members, one of our elect, then you can listen to that episode right away. If you're just back there and made the congregation, I'm afraid you'll just have to wait till Thursday. But one way or another, we will see you next time for the high drama

of the German Peasants' War. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

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