It was, in fact, not so much the discriminating promotion of art and culture as a princely luxuriousness that absorbed Leo's funds. He was temperate at table. The cardinals and wealthier Romans continued to enjoy the senselessly rich banquets which they seem to have copied from the most decadent pages of Roman history. Cardinal Cornaro is noted as giving a dinner of sixty-five courses on silver dishes. Banker Chigi, a useful friend of Leo, had his valuable plate thrown into the river after one choice banquet; and on the occasion of his marriage with his mistress (whose finger was held by Leo to receive the ring) he brought luxuries, even live fish, from the ends of Europe. Banker Strozzi gave rival banquets, at which cardinals fraternized with courtesans. Leo approved, and sometimes attended, these banquets (at Chigi's palace), but was personally temperate. He had only one meal each day, and fasting fare on three days in each week, but he spent immense sums on musicians and trinket-makers, and many of his pleasures were in the grossest taste of the time. Men of prodigious appetite—one of them a Dominican friar—were brought to his table to amuse him and his guests by their incredible gluttony. The Pope bandied verses with half-drunken poetasters and patronized the coarsest buffoons as well as the keenest wits. When he went to his country house at Magliana for a few weeks' hunting—in which he displayed extraordinary vigour—he took a troop of his poets, buffoons, musicians, and other parasites. At Carnival time he entered into the wild gaiety of Rome; and comedies of the most licentious character were staged before him. Ariosto's Suppositi (in which Cardinal Cibò took a part), Machiavelli's Mandragola, and Bibbiena's Calandria alternated with Terence and Plautus. The Calandria, written by Cardinal Bibbiena, Leo's chief favourite, the frescoes of whose bathroom seem to have been like those on certain rooms in Pompeii today, is a comedy of thin wit and unrestrained license; the Pope had it presented in the Vatican for the entertainment of Isabella d'Este.
Such was the Pope who presided over the Lateran Council for the reform of the Church, and the historian will hardly be expected to enlarge at any length on its labours. Julius had initiated the council in order to checkmate France and the schismatical cardinals, and it continued its thinly attended sittings, at wide intervals, for four years. Some seventy or eighty Italian bishops attended, and they issued some admirable counsels to the clergy to improve their lives, condemned heretical writings, and voiced the sincere wish that some Christian prince would arrest the advance of the Turks. A committee of the council drew up a stringent and comprehensive scheme for the reform of Church-abuses, but this was lost amid the vehement wrangles of monks, bishops, and cardinals. In the end (1514) a very slender reform-bill was issued; nor were the clergy disposed to comply with this when they noticed that, in the following year, Leo himself bestowed a bishopric, and soon afterwards the cardinalate, upon the boy-son of Emmanuel of Portugal, and granted to the father a large share of the proceeds of the issue of indulgences. The council also forbade the printing of books without approbation, and encouraged the spread of banks or pawn-shops (Monti di Pietà) for the poor. On March 16, 1517, Leo, in spite of the murmurs of the reformers and the revolt in Germany, brought to a close his almost futile council. He had no desire whatever for reform, and even the measures which were passed were not enforced. The reforming prelates were deeply saddened by his levity, and, before the close of the council, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola drew up in their name an appalling indictment of the state of the Church and predicted that the refusal to remedy it would bring on them a heavy judgment.
The one work of the Council in which the Pope took a lively interest was the granting of a Concordat to France. The Gallican sentiments of the French prelates and doctors had been embodied in the Pragmatic Sanction (1438), and Rome had not ceased to protest against this cession to local councils of the powers it claimed. By the Concordat of 1516 the King and the Pope virtually divided these powers between them; the King had the right of nomination to bishoprics and abbeys, the Pope received the "first-fruits" (Annates). The Concordat was signed by Leo on September 16, 1516, but was not published until 1518, when it caused fierce indignation at the universities and among the clergy.
Leo had dismissed the reformers of the Lateran Council, and in the spring of 1517, the very year in which Martin Luther nailed his challenge on the door of the castle-church at Wittenberg, turned with relief to his corrupt court. There had, as we saw, long been an outcry in Germany against the corruption of a very large proportion of the clergy and against the Papal fiscal system, yet Leo had light-heartedly maintained the disorders. In 1514 he had, in order to secure the votes of two Electors, conferred the Archbishopric of Mayence upon a young and worldly noble, Albert of Brandenburg, and had (for a payment of 24,000 ducats) permitted him still to retain the sees of Magdeburg and Halberstadt. In order to recover the 24,000 ducats, which he had borrowed on the security of a share in the sale of indulgences, the unscrupulous prelate pressed the traffic eagerly, and some of the more enlightened German clergy protested. There were already princes, such as the Elector of Saxony, who refused to allow the Papal envoys in their dominions, and there were writers, like Ulrich von Hutten, who violently assailed their procedure. Leo, however, failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation and proposed to raise large sums, ostensibly for the building of St. Peter's, by granting indulgences.
I have already explained that, though John XXIII. undoubtedly sold absolution "from guilt and from penalty," as the Council of Constance established, the indulgence was, properly speaking, a remission of the punishment due to sins which had been duly confessed. In earlier Papal practice, the indulgence was the commutation into a money-payment of the penance for sin imposed by the Church, but, as the doctrine of Purgatory developed, the indulgence came to be regarded as a remission of the punishment due in Purgatory. Two questions had then arisen on which the schoolmen had exercised their ingenuity: on what ground could the Church claim to remit this punishment, and whether the indulgence could be extended to the dead who were actually suffering in Purgatory? The schoolmen found a satisfactory answer to both questions. Then Boniface IX. decreed that an indulgence might be earned by a payment of money to the Church (the price of a voyage to Rome), and the way was opened for the later abuse. In their commercial zeal the Papal envoys and preachers undoubtedly represented that souls were delivered from the fire of Purgatory when the coin rang in their collecting boxes.
The Dominican monk Tetzel, who in 1517 was sent to preach the indulgence as Albert of Brandenburg's sub-commissary, was more zealous than scrupulous in his representations, and people of Wittenberg, who had crossed the frontier in order to profit by the indulgence, came home with unedifying reports of his sermons. Martin Luther, then a professor at the Wittenberg University, heard these reports with disdain. There was no defined doctrine of the Church on the subject, and more than one divine had felt, like Luther, that this apparent traffic was as enervating to real piety as it was in itself distasteful. A man of intense and stormy spiritual experience, he sternly combated all that seemed to encourage "sloth" in religious life; his was the more arduous religion of St. Paul and St. Augustine. Conscious, therefore, that the whole practice was based on comparatively recent speculations of the schoolmen, which he had a right to dispute, he challenged Tetzel to justify his "lying fables and empty promises." A war of pamphlets ensued, and, as his opponents naturally appealed to the language in which the Popes had announced indulgences, Luther was compelled to slight the words of the Popes and appeal to the declarations of Councils and the teaching of Scripture. He was still orthodox; the language he used had been heard in the Church for two centuries, and in that age one would as soon have thought of claiming impeccability as infallibility for the Popes.
At the beginning of 1518 it was reported to Rome that the agitation raised by the robust professor was seriously interfering with the indulgences, and Leo, encouraged by the angry Dominicans, directed his superiors to restrain him. When they failed, he summoned Luther to Rome. The monk, knowing how such trials ended at Rome, appealed to the Elector of Saxony and to Maximilian. The appeal to the Emperor, however, fell at a time when the Papal favour was sought for Charles, and Maximilian encouraged the Pope to take action. Leo ordered Luther to present himself at once before the Papal Legate and prepare for trial at Rome. On the other hand Frederic of Saxony insisted that Luther should be examined in Germany, and the Pope dreaded to irritate an Elector on the eve of an imperial election. Legate Cajetan was therefore empowered to see the rebel at Augsburg, and a series of futile conferences took place on October 12th-14th. Luther wished to argue and justify his thesis: Cajetan was instructed merely to demand his submission. Luther insisted that he should be tried by the learned doctors of Basle, Freiburg, Louvain, and Paris: the legate was charged to assert the Papal authority. On October 18th Luther departed in disgust for Wittenberg; and his temper was not improved by the discovery that Leo had, on August 23d, directed the legate, in case of obstinacy, to declare him heretical. He appealed to a General Council.
Luther was still within the limits of orthodox sentiment and practice, and the protection of the Elector embarrassed the Pope. A more diplomatic envoy, Karl von Militz, a Papal chamberlain, was sent to Germany, and some months were spent in amiable correspondence. Luther promised to be silent if his opponents would keep silence, and wrote a respectful letter to the Pope; to which Leo made a gracious reply. But the truce was little more than a diplomatic regard for Papal interests during the period of the imperial election, and the policy of silence soon proved impossible for both sides. Ulrich von Hutten and other critics encouraged Luther to assail the Papal authority, and the exaggerations of his opponents reacted on the growth of his mind. By the end of 1519 he seems to have concluded, with some firmness, that the Papal system was an unwarranted addition to primitive Christianity, and a formidable movement supported his ideas.
In January (1520) Luther's case was submitted to a commission of theologians at Rome, and the Elector was summoned to compel him to retract. Frederic refused, and in June Leo signed the Bull Exsurge Domine; Luther was to be excommunicated if he did not submit within sixty days, and the secular authorities would incur an interdict if they did not surrender him. It is not of material interest to quarrel with the Pope's procedure: to point out that the disappointed Cajetan was one of the heads of the commission of inquiry, and that Luther's vehement opponent Eck was one of the two legates entrusted with the publication of the Bull. Rome demanded submission; and, if Luther had submitted, some other German would before long have instituted the Reformation. Europe was ripe for schism, and it may be doubted whether even a reform of the Church would have long prevented the growth of a body of men holding the Reformers' view of the bases of Papal authority. On December 10th (1520) Luther publicly burned the Bull. Even this act was not without orthodox precedent, but Luther was constantly advancing. He was summoned before the Diet of Worms in April (1521), and he then stated that the word of neither Popes nor Councils would condemn him; he must be judged by reason and Scripture. But the political situation, which casts its shadow throughout on the development, was now modified. Charles obtained his wish of an alliance with the Papacy against France. This alliance was signed on May 8th: on the 12th the Diet issued the Edict of Worms. Luther was, in accordance with the Pope's second Bull,[300] declared a heretic. He retreated to the Wartburg under the protection of Frederic, and the gravest phase of the struggle opened.[301]
Leo died in December, as I have stated, leaving to his successor the terrible legacy of his frivolity in face of a grave calamity. In his last two years he apprehended, to some extent, the magnitude of the German trouble, but he plainly proposed to answer the just demand of reform only by the burning of a few heretics. His entirely dishonourable diplomacy and his costly indulgence of tastes which ill befitted a successor of Leo I. imposed the last unendurable burden on the patience of Europe. For him the Papacy was a principality, and the religious nature of its financial sources makes more contemptible the use to which he put his wealth. Even that artistic splendour which casts a glow over the Papacy before the breaking of the great storm owed to him comparatively little. The middle or secular phase of the development of the Papacy came to an end in the tawdry luxuries and unscrupulous measures of a Pope who has been treated with singular favour at the bar of Catholic history.