Hungary had valiantly defended itself against the Turks ten years
before, without aid from the German empire. It looked now as if Belgrade
might be left to its fate. The brave John Hunyades and his faithful
Hungarians were the only bulwarks of Europe against the foe, for the
people seemed incapable of seeing a danger a thousand miles away. The
pope and his legate John Capistrano, general of the Capuchins, were the
only aids to the valiant Hunyades in his vigorous defence. They preached
a crusade, but with little success. Capistrano traversed Germany,
eloquently calling the people to arms against the barbarians. The result
was similar to that on previous occasions, the real offenders were
neglected, the innocent suffered. The people, instead of arming against
the Turks, turned against the Jews, and murdered them by thousands.
Whatever happened in Europe,--a plague, an invasion, a famine, a
financial strait,--that unhappy people were in some way held
responsible, and mediæval Europe seemed to think it could, at any time,
check the frightful career of a comet or ward off pestilence by
slaughtering a few thousands of Jews. It cannot be said that it worked
well on this occasion; the Jews died, but the Turks surrounded Belgrade
still.
Capistrano found no military ardor in Germany, in princes or people. The
princes contented themselves with ordering prayers and ringing the
Turkish bells, as they were called. The people were as supine as their
princes. He did, however, succeed, by the aid of his earnest eloquence,
in gathering a force of a few thousands of peasants, priests, scholars,
and the like; a motley host who were chiefly armed with iron flails and
pitchforks, but who followed him with an enthusiasm equal to his own.
With this shadow of an army he joined Hunyades, and the combined force
made its way in boats down the Danube into the heart of Hungary, and
approached the frontier fortress which Mahomet II. was besieging with a
host of one hundred and sixty thousand men, and which its defender, the
brother-in-law of John Hunyades, had nearly given up for lost.
On came the flotilla,--the peasants with their flails and forks and
Hunyades with his trained soldiers,--and attacked the Turkish fleet with
such furious energy that it was defeated and dispersed, and the allied
forces made their way into the beleaguered city. Capistrano and his
followers were full of enthusiasm. He was a second Peter the Hermit,
his peasant horde were crusaders, fierce against the infidels,
disdaining death in God's cause; neither leader nor followers had a
grain of military knowledge or experience, but they had, what is
sometimes better, courage and enthusiasm.
John Hunyades _had_ military experience, and looked with cold disfavor
on the burning and blind zeal of his new recruits. He was willing that
they should aid him in repelling the furious attacks of the Turks, but
to his trained eyes an attack on the well-intrenched camp of the enemy
would have been simple madness, and he sternly forbade any such suicidal
course, even threatening death to whoever should attempt it.
In truth, his caution seemed reasonable. An immense host surrounded the
city on the land side, and had done so on the water side, also, until
the Christian flotilla had sunk, captured, and dispersed its boats. Far
as the eye could see, the gorgeously-embellished tents of the Turkish
army, with their gilded crescents glittering in the sun, filled the
field of view. Cannon-mounted earthworks threatened the walls from every
quarter. Squadrons of steel-clad horsemen swept the field. The crowding
thousands of besiegers pressed the city day and night. Even defence
seemed useless. Assault on such a host appeared madness to experienced
eyes. Hunyades seemed wise in his stern disapproval of such an idea.
Yet military knowledge has its limitations, when it fails to take into
account the power of enthusiasm. Blind zeal is a force whose
possibilities a general does not always estimate. It is capable of
performing miracles, as Hunyades was to learn. His orders, his threats
of death, had no restraining effect on the minds of the crusaders. They
had come to save Europe from the Turks, and they were not to be stayed
by orders or threats. What though the enemy greatly outnumbered them,
and had cannons and scimitars against their pikes and flails, had they
not God on their side, and should God's army pause to consider numbers
and cannon-balls? They were not to be restrained; attack they would, and
attack they did.
The siege had made great progress. The reinforcement had come barely in
time. The walls were crumbling under the incessant bombardment.
Convinced that he had made a practicable breach, Mahomet, the sultan,
ordered an assault in force. The Turks advanced, full of barbarian
courage, climbed the crumbled walls, and broke, as they supposed, into
the town, only to find new walls frowning before them. The vigorous
garrison had built new defences behind the old ones, and the
disheartened assailants learned that they had done their work in vain.
This repulse greatly discouraged the sultan. He was still more
discouraged when the crusaders, irrepressible in their hot enthusiasm,
broke from the city and made a fierce attack upon his works. Capistrano,
seeing that they were not to be restrained, put himself at their head,
and with a stick in one hand and a crucifix in the other, led them to
the assault. It proved an irresistible one. The Turks could not sustain
themselves against these flail-swinging peasants. One intrenchment after
another fell into their hands, until three had been stormed and taken.
Their success inspired Hunyades. Filled with a new respect for his
peasant allies, and seeing that now or never was the time to strike, he
came to their aid with his cavalry, and fell so suddenly and violently
upon the Turkish rear that the invaders were put to rout.
Onward pushed the crusaders and their allies; backward went the Turks.
The remaining intrenchments were stubbornly defended, but that storm of
iron flails, those pikes and pitchforks, wielded by the zeal of
enthusiasts, were not to be resisted, and in the end all that remained
of the Turkish army broke into panic flight, the sultan himself being
wounded, and more than twenty thousand of his men left dead upon the
field.
It was a signal victory. Miraculous almost, when one considers the great
disproportion of numbers. The works of the invaders, mounted with three
hundred cannon, and their camp, which contained an immense booty, fell
into the hands of the Christians, and the power of Mahomet II. was so
crippled that years passed before he was in condition to attempt a
second invasion of Europe.
The victors were not long to survive their signal triumph. The valiant
Hunyades died shortly after the battle, from wounds received in the
action or from fatal disease. Capistrano died in the same year (1456).
Hunyades left two sons, and the King of Hungary repaid his services by
oppressing both, and beheading one of these sons. But the king himself
died during the next year, and Matthias Corvinus, the remaining son of
Hunyades, was placed by the Hungarians on their throne. They had given
their brave defender the only reward in their power.
If the victory of Hunyades and Capistrano--the nobleman and the
monk--had been followed up by the princes of Europe, the Turks might
have been driven from Constantinople, Europe saved from future peril at
their hands, and the tide of subsequent history gained a cleaner and
purer flow. But nothing was done; the princes were too deeply interested
in their petty squabbles to entertain large views, and the Turks were
suffered to hold the empire of the East, and quietly to recruit their
forces for later assaults.
_LUTHER AND THE INDULGENCES._
Late in the month of April, in the year 1521, an open wagon containing
two persons was driven along one of the roads of Germany, the horse
being kept at his best pace, while now and then one of the occupants
looked back as if in apprehension. This was the man who held the reins.
The other, a short but presentable person, with pale, drawn face, lit by
keen eyes, seemed too deeply buried in thought to be heedful of
surrounding affairs. When he did lift his eyes they were directed ahead,
where the road was seen to enter the great Thuringian forest. Dressed in
clerical garb, the peasants who passed probably regarded him as a monk
on some errand of mercy. The truth was that he was a fugitive, fleeing
for his life, for he was a man condemned, who might at any moment be
waylaid and seized.
On entering the forest the wagon was driven on until a shaded and lonely
dell was reached, seemingly a fitting place for deeds of violence.
Suddenly from the forest glades rode forth four armed and masked men,
who stopped the wagon, sternly bade the traveller to descend and mount a
spare horse they had with them, and rode off with him, a seeming
captive, through the thick woodland.
As if in fear of pursuit, the captors kept at a brisk pace, not drawing
rein until the walls of a large and strong castle loomed up near the
forest border. The gates flew open and the drawbridge fell at their
demand, and the small cavalcade rode into the powerful stronghold, the
entrance to which was immediately closed behind them. It was the castle
of Wartburg, near Eisenach, Saxony, within whose strong walls the man
thus mysteriously carried off was to remain hidden from the world for
the greater part of the year that followed.
The monk-like captive was just then the most talked of man in Germany.
His seemingly violent capture had been made by his friends, not by his
foes, its purpose being to protect him from his enemies, who were many
and threatening. Of this he was well aware, and welcomed the castle as a
place of refuge. He was, in fact, the celebrated Martin Luther, who had
just set in train a religious revolution of broad aspect in Germany, and
though for the time under the protection of a safe-conduct from the
emperor Charles V., had been deemed in imminent danger of falling into
an ambush of his foes instead of one of his friends.
That he might not be recognised by those who should see him at Wartburg,
his ecclesiastic robe was exchanged for the dress of a knight, he wore
helmet and sword instead of cassock and cross and let his beard grow
freely. Thus changed in appearance, he was known as Junker George
(Chevalier George) to those in the castle, and amused himself at times
by hunting with his knightly companions in the neighborhood. The
greater part of his time, however, was occupied in a difficult literary
task, that of translating the Bible into German. The work thus done by
him was destined to prove as important in a linguistic as in a
theological sense, since it fixed the status of the German language for
the later period to the same extent as the English translation of the
Bible in the time of James I. aided to fix that of English speech.
Leaving Luther, for the present, in his retreat at Wartburg Castle, we
must go back in his history and tell the occasion of the events just
narrated. No man, before or after his time, ever created so great a
disturbance in German thought, and the career of this fugitive monk is
one of great historical import.
A peasant by birth, the son of a slate-cutter named Hans Luther, he so
distinguished himself as a scholar that his father proposed to make him
a lawyer, but a dangerous illness, the death of a near friend, and the
exhortations of an eloquent preacher, so wrought upon his mind that he
resolved instead to become a monk, and after going through the necessary
course of study and mental discipline was ordained priest in May, 1507.
The next year he was appointed a professor in the university of
Wittenberg. There he remained for the next ten years of his life, when
an event occurred which was to turn the whole current of his career and
give him a prominence in theological history which few other men have
ever attained.
In 1517 Pope Leo X. authorized an unusually large issue of indulgences,
a term which signifies a remission of the temporal punishment due to
sin, either in this life or the life to come; the condition being that
the recipient shall have made a full confession of his sins and by his
penitence and purpose of amendment fitted himself to receive the pardon
of God, through the agency of the priest. He was also required to
perform some service in the aid of charity or religion, such as the
giving of alms.
At the time of the Crusades the popes had granted to all who took part
in them remission from church penalties. At a later date the same
indulgence was granted to penitents who aided the holy wars with money
instead of in person. At a still later date remission from the penalties
of sin might be obtained by pious work, such as building churches, etc.
When the Turks threatened Europe, those who fought against them obtained
indulgence. In the instance of the issue of indulgences by Leo X. the
pious work required was the giving of alms in aid of the completion of
the great cathedral of St. Peter's at Rome.
This purpose did not differ in character from others for which
indulgences had previously been granted, and there is nothing to show
that any disregard of the requisite conditions was authorized by the
pope; but there is reason to believe that some of the agents for the
disposal of these indulgences went much beyond the intention of the
decree. This was especially the case in the instance of a Dominican
monk named Tetzel, who is charged with openly asserting what few or no
other Catholics appear to have ever claimed, that the indulgences not
only released the purchasers from the necessity of penance, but absolved
them from all the consequences of sin in this world or the next.
We shall not go into the details of the venalities charged against
Tetzel, whose field of labor was in Saxony, but they seem to have been
sufficient to cause a strong feeling of dissatisfaction, which at length
found a voice in Martin Luther, who preached vigorously against Tetzel
and his methods and wrote to the princes and bishops begging them to
refuse this irreligious dealer in indulgences a passage through their
dominions.
The near approach of Tetzel to Wittenberg roused Luther to more decided
action. He now wrote out ninety-five propositions in which he set forth
in the strongest language his reasons for opposing and his view of the
pernicious effects of Tetzel's doctrine of indulgences. These he nailed
to the door of the Castle church of Wittenberg. The effect produced by
them was extraordinary. The news of the protest spread with the greatest
rapidity and within a fortnight copies of it had been distributed
throughout Germany. Within five or six weeks it was being read over a
great part of Europe. On all sides it aroused a deep public interest and
excitement and became the great sensation of the day.
We cannot go into the details of what followed. Luther's propositions
were like a thunderbolt flung into the mind of Germany. Everywhere deep
thought was aroused and a host of those who had been displeased with
Tetzel's methods sustained him in his act. Other papers from his pen
followed in which his revolt from the Church of Rome grew wider and
deeper. His energetic assault aroused a number of opponents and an
active controversy ensued; ending in Luther's being cited to appear
before Cajetan, the pope's legate, at Augsburg. From this meeting no
definite result came. After a heated argument Cajetan ended the
controversy with the following words:
"I can dispute no longer with this beast; it has two wicked eyes and
marvellous thoughts in its head."
Luther's view of the matter was much less complimentary. He said of the
legate,--
"He knows no more about the Word than a donkey knows of harp-playing."
In the next year, 1519, a discussion took place at Leipzig, between
Luther on the one hand, aided by his friends Melanchthon and Carlstadt,
and a zealous and talented ecclesiastic, Dr. Eck, on the other. Eck was
a vigorous debater,--in person, in voice, and in opinion,--but as Luther
was not to be silenced by his argument, he ended by calling him "a
gentile and publican," and wending his way to Borne, where he expressed
his opinion of the new movement, demanded that the heretic should be
made to feel the heavy hand of church discipline.
Back he came soon to Germany, bearing a bull from the pope, in which
were extracts from Luther's writings stated to be heretical, and which
must be publicly retracted within sixty days under threat of
excommunication. This the ardent agent tried to distribute through
Germany, but to his surprise he found that Germany was in no humor to
receive it. Most of the magistrates forbade it to be made public. Where
it was posted upon the walls of any town, the people immediately tore it
down. In truth, Luther's heresy had with extraordinary rapidity become
the heresy of Germany, and he found himself with a nation at his back, a
nation that admired his courage and supported his opinions.
His most decisive step was taken on the 10th of December, 1520. On that
day the faculty and students of the University of Wittenberg, convoked
by him, met at the Elster gate of the town. Here a funeral pile was
built up by the students, one of the magistrates set fire to it, and
Luther, amid approving shouts from the multitude, flung into the flames
the pope's bull, and with it the canonical law and the writings of Dr.
Eck. In this act he decisively broke loose from and defied the Church of
Rome, sustained in his radical step of revolt apparently by all
Wittenberg, and by a large body of converts to his views throughout
Germany.
The bold reformer found friends not only among the lowly, but among the
powerful. The Elector of Saxony was on his side, and openly accused the
pope of acting the unjust judge, by listening to one side and not the
other, and of needlessly agitating the people by his bull. Ulrich von
Hutten, a favorite popular leader, was one of the zealous proselytes of
the new doctrines. Franz von Sickingen, a knight of celebrity, was
another who offered Luther shelter, if necessary, in his castles.
And now came a turning-point in Luther's career, the most dangerous
crisis he was to reach, and the one that needed the utmost courage and
most inflexible resolution to pass it in safety. It was that which has
become famous as the "Diet of Worms." Germany had gained a new emperor,
Charles V., under whose sceptre the empire of Charlemagne was in great
part restored, for his dominions included Germany, Spain, and the
Netherlands. This young monarch left Spain for Germany in 1521, and was
no sooner there than he called a great diet, to meet at Worms, that the
affairs of the empire might be regulated, and that in particular this
religious controversy, which was troubling the public mind, should be
settled.
Thither came the princes and potentates of the realm, thither great
dignitaries of the church, among them the pope's legate, Cardinal
Alexander, who was commissioned to demand that the emperor and the
princes should call Luther to a strict account, and employ against him
the temporal power. But to the cardinal's astonishment he found that the
people of Germany had largely seceded from the papal authority.
Everywhere he met with writings, songs, and pictures in which the holy
father was treated with contempt and mockery. Even himself, as the
pope's representative, was greeted with derision, and his life at times
was endangered, despite the fact that he came in the suite of the
emperor.
[Illustration: STATUE OF LUTHER AT WORMS.]
The diet assembled, the cardinal, as instructed, demanded that severe
measures should be taken against the arch-heretic: the Elector of
Saxony, on the contrary, insisted that Luther should be heard in his own
defence; the emperor and the princes agreed with him, silencing the
cardinal's declaration that the diet had no right or power to question
the decision of the pope, and inviting Luther to appear before the
imperial assembly at Worms, the emperor granting him a safe-conduct.
Possibly Charles thought that the insignificant monk would fear to come
before that august body, and the matter thus die out. Luther's friends
strongly advised him not to go. They had the experience of John Huss to
offer as argument. But Luther was not the man to be stopped by dread of
dignitaries or fear of penalties. He immediately set out from Wittenberg
for Worms, saying to his protesting friends, "Though there were as many
devils in the city as there are tiles on the roofs, still I would go."
His journey was an ovation. The people flocked by thousands to greet and
applaud him. On his arrival at Worms two thousand people gathered and
accompanied him to his lodgings. When, on the next day, April 18, 1521,
the grand-marshal of the empire conducted him to the diet, he was
obliged to lead him across gardens and through by-ways to avoid the
throng that filled the streets of the town.
When entering the hall, he was clapped on the shoulder by a famous
knight and general of the empire, Georg von Frundsberg, who said, "Monk,
monk, thou art in a strait the like of which myself and many leaders, in
the most desperate battles, have never known. But if thy thoughts are
just, and thou art sure of thy cause, go on, in God's name; and be of
good cheer; He will not forsake thee."
Luther was not an imposing figure as he stood before the proud assembly
in the imperial hall. He had just recovered from a severe fever, and was
pale and emaciated. And standing there, unsupported by a single friend,
before that great assembly, his feelings were strongly excited. The
emperor remarked to his neighbor, "This man would never succeed in
making a heretic of _me_."
But though Luther's body was weak, his mind was strong. His air quickly
became calm and dignified. He was commanded to retract the charges he
had made against the church. In reply he acknowledged that the writings
produced were his own, and declared that he was not ready to retract
them, but said that "If they can convince me from the Holy Scriptures
that I am in error, I am ready with my own hands to cast the whole of my
writings into the flames."
The chancellor replied that what he demanded was retraction, not
dispute. This Luther refused to give. The emperor insisted on a simple
recantation, which Luther declared he could not make. For several days
the hearing continued, ending at length in the threatening declaration
of the emperor, that "he would no longer listen to Luther, but dismiss
him at once from his presence, and treat him as he would a heretic."
There was danger in this, the greatest danger. The emperor's word had
been given, it is true; but an emperor had broken his word with John
Huss, and his successor might with Martin Luther. Charles was, indeed,
importuned to do so, but replied that his imperial word was sacred, even
if given to a heretic, and that Luther should have an extension of the
safe-conduct for twenty-one days, during his return home.
Luther started home. It was a journey by no means free from danger. He
had powerful and unscrupulous enemies. He might be seized and carried
off by an ambush of his foes. How he was saved from peril of this sort
we have described. It was his friend and protector, Frederick, the
Elector of Saxony, who had placed the ambush of knights, his purpose
being to put Luther in a place of safety where he could lie concealed
until the feeling against him had subsided. Meanwhile, at Worms, when
the period of the safe-conduct had expired, Luther was declared out of
the ban of the empire, an outlaw whom no man was permitted to shelter,
his works were condemned to be burned wherever found, and he was
adjudged to be seized and held in durance subject to the will of the
emperor.
What had become of the fugitive no one knew. The story spread that he
had been murdered by his enemies. For ten months he remained in
concealment and when he again appeared it was to combat a horde of
fanatical enthusiasts who had carried his doctrines to excess and were
stirring up all Germany by their wild opinions. The outbreak drew Luther
back to Wittenberg, where for eight days he preached with great
eloquence against the fanatics and finally succeeded in quelling the
disturbance.