A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

‘heresies’. To Eck’s delight, Luther replied that he was not so sure they were heresies. The debate
continued for several days, until the duke said he needed the hall for a ball. But Eck had got what
he wanted - admissions that amounted to heresy. Meanwhile Luther, now a national hero, was
cheered by crowds along his route back home.
Pope Leo sent Luther an ultimatum: recant, or be excommunicated. The stubborn German was now
too angry to care. He replied with a pamphlet, written in German - so that everybody could read ii
criticising the Church and proposing reforms. Leo replied with a hull of excommunication. In
German cities, Luther’s pamphlets were burned publicly on the orders of the bishops. In
Wittenberg, defiant students burnt the pamphlets that denounced Luther.
The emperor of Germany - and of Spain, the Netherlands and many other places - was Charles V,
the man who had financed Magellan’s voyage round the world and would later finance Pizarro’s
conquest of Peru. He certainly had the power to suppress Luther, and the inclination as well. But he
was also in continual need of money. And if the German princes - many of whom were
‘protestants’ - withdrew their support, his position would be seriously weakened. So when the pope
appealed to him to suppress Luther, he could only reply, unhappily, that it would be done
eventually, but that for the moment they must proceed with caution. It was decided that Luther
should appear in front of the German parliament - the Diet - when it met at Worms in April 1521.
Luther was accompanied by a cheering crowd of two thousand when he came to Worms. But in
front of the Diet, he was obviously nervous. When asked whether he stood by all he had written, he
asked for time to think it over and was given an extra day. But when he returned the next day, he
replied firmly that he would be glad to recant if he could be shown his error. Then he left the Diet
to decide whether he was a heretic. Under the gaze of Charles V, they decided that he was. But by
that time, Luther had disappeared, apparently kidnapped by bandits. In fact, Frederick the Wise had
ordered him to be taken to the Wartburg Castle for his own safety.
Luther spent a year in the half-empty castle, and whiled away the time by translating the Bible into
German. Meanwhile, his revolt spread. Monks and nuns left their monasteries and married. Priests
began to recite the mass in German. Reformers began smashing sacred statues in churches (which,
after all, was nothing new - the early Christian Church had also had its iconoclasts). Finally, public
disorder in Wittenberg grew so dangerous that the townspeople asked Luther to return. Ignoring
Frederick’s order to stay in the castle, he went back in March 1522. The disorders subsided. Luther
was allowed to continue with his work unmolested.
And, without any further effort from Luther, the new ‘protestant’ movement snowballed. This was
not entirely a compliment to its spiritual conviction; the German princes soon realised that, if they
became Lutherans, they could lay their hands on the wealth of the Church - particularly of rich
monasteries. In a few years time, Henry VIII would make the same discovery. Then there was a
general social dissatisfaction, of the kind that had caused Wat Tyler’s revolt in England. Religious
revolt tended to develop into primitive communism - as it had in Bohemia after the death of Hus.
So the name of Luther was used to justify two diametrically opposite revolutions.
Things came to a head in south Germany in 1525, when the peasants revolted, plundering castles
and cloisters. They wanted their share of the immense wealth they imagined to be in the hands of
the Church and the aristocracy. Contemporary pictures show them guzzling wine and eating the
monastery’s trout and chickens. An evangelist named Thomas Muntzer, who believed himself to be
the new Daniel, led one group from Mulhausen. Nearly six thousand of them were surrounded by a
professional army and massacred. The peasants had appealed to Luther, but he was horrified to hear