85
Woodblock print, from Leipzig, Germany
AD 1617
You can hardly turn on the radio or open a newspaper these days without being bombarded by yet another anniversary – a hundred years since this, two hundred years since that. Our popular history seems to be written increasingly in centenaries, all generating books and exhibitions, T-shirts and special souvenir issues, in a frenzy of commemoration. Where did this habit of anniversary festivities begin? The answer takes us to the great struggle for religious freedoms played out across northern Europe in the seventeenth century. The first of all these modern centenary celebrations seems to have been organized in Germany, in Saxony in 1617; the event it was commemorating had taken place a hundred years earlier. In 1517, the story goes, Martin Luther picked up a hammer and nailed what was effectively his religious manifesto – his ninety-five theses – to a church door; in doing so he triggered the religious turmoil that would become the Protestant Reformation. The object in this chapter is a souvenir poster showing Luther’s famous act, on a large single sheet of paper called a broadsheet, made for the centenary. And it isn’t just a celebration, it’s about getting ready for war.
In 1617, when this broadsheet was made, European Protestants were facing an uncertain and dangerous future. The New Year had opened with public prayers by the Pope in Rome calling for the reunion of Christendom and the eradication of heresy. He was effectively calling the Catholic Church to arms against the Reformation. It was clear to many that a terrible religious war was about to break out. In response the Protestants tried to find a way of rallying their supporters for the fight, but unlike the Catholic Church they had no central authority to issue directions to the faithful. Protestants had to find other ways of insisting that the Reformation had been part of God’s plan for the world, that individuals had no need of priests to gain access to God’s mercy, that the Roman church was corrupt, and that Luther’s Reformation was essential to the salvation of every living soul. Above all, they needed a view of their past that would give all Protestants strength to face the terrifying future.
Before this point, no particular day or moment had been identified as the beginning of the Reformation. But leading Protestants in Saxony realized that it was now a hundred years since the heroic moment when, on 31 October 1517, Luther had first publicly challenged the authority of the Pope, so it was said, by nailing his ninety-five theses on to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg in Saxony. So, with a masterly sense of media management, they launched the first centenary celebration in the modern sense. All the familiar razzmatazz was there: ceremonies and processions, souvenirs, medals, paintings, printed sermons, and the broadsheet – a woodblock print which illustrates the critical day that Protestants now saw as the beginning of the first step on their radical religious journey.
The broadsheet is a crowded composition, but the message is quite clear: in a dream, God is revealing to the elector of Saxony the historic role of Martin Luther. We see the elector asleep. Below him, Luther reads the Bible in a great shaft of light coming down from heaven, where the Trinity is blessing him. As Luther looks up, light pours down on to the page in front of him: here, scripture is the word of God, and to read the scripture is to encounter God – and this is not happening inside a church. You could not have a simpler statement that for Protestants, Bible-reading is the foundation of faith, a foundation which, thanks to the new technology of printing, was now available to all believers in their own homes.
This broadsheet was produced in Leipzig, which in 1617 was a centre of the European printing trade. As the religious historian Karen Armstrong describes, by then the whole pattern of religion in northern Europe had been changed by this new emphasis on reading the word of God:
It is very noticeable in this picture, the emphasis on the written word. Up until this point religion had been precisely about listening for what lay beyond language. People had thought not so much in terms of words or concepts or arguments but in terms of images, of icons, in terms of music, of action. Now, because of the invention of printing, which helped Luther disseminate his ideas, everything is going to become much more wordy. That has been rather the plague of Western religion ever since, because we are endlessly now stuck in words. Printing enabled people for the first time to own their own Bibles, and this meant that they read them in an entirely different way.
Without printing, the Reformation might well not have survived, and the broadsheet’s combination of text and illustration shows that along with words the image was still very much alive. Seventeenth-century Europe was still largely illiterate – even in the cities no more than a third of people could read – so prints with images and just a few key words were the most effective means of mass communication. Even today we all know a well-crafted cartoon can be lethal in public debate.
The front of the print shows Luther writing on the church door, with the world’s biggest quill pen, the words Vom Ablass – ‘About Indulgence’ – the title of his virulent attack on the Catholic sale of indulgences, the system by which souls spent less time in purgatory in return for cash paid to the church during their lifetime. The selling of indulgences had fuelled anti-papal feeling in Germany. Luther’s quill stretches half way across the print – to a walled city, helpfully labelled Rome, and straight through the head of a lion labelled Pope Leo X, who squats on top of it. As if that wasn’t enough, the quill then knocks the papal crown off the head of the Pope shown in human form. Never was a pen mightier than this one. The message is coarse but clear – Luther, inspired by reading the scriptures, has destroyed papal authority by the power of his pen.
Woodblocks like this were the first mass medium – with print runs in the tens of thousands, allowing each single copy to cost just a few pfennigs – the price of a pair of sausages or a couple of pints of ale. Satirical prints were pinned up in inns and market places and then widely discussed. This is in every sense popular art, the equivalent of the tabloid press or a satirical magazine, like Private Eye. We asked Private Eye’s editor, Ian Hislop, to comment:
The editor of this broadsheet has done exactly what you’d expect. He’s cracked his hero up, he’s demonized the enemy, turned him into an animal, and then into a ludicrous figure, a sort of blank-looking rather stupid person, who has his hat knocked off. All around the pen there are bits of it fallen off, so that everyone else has got a pen as well – this is about writing, about the word and, even more, about printing, because now the Bible can be printed, and we see that we’re up in heaven here and the word of God comes down from heaven straight on to the page.
So no priests in the way, no Pope, no nothing, to get between you and the word of God. The thing I love about it is that it’s like reading a magazine, there are big pictures with obviously cartoony jokes, and then there are captions everywhere to make sure that you don’t miss anything. My German isn’t really good enough to get a lot of the jokes, but looking at it, I just put my own in. I imagine someone here saying, ‘Abandon Pope all ye who enter here,’ or Luther with the pen is saying ‘It’s the quill of God,’ or a lot of very strict Catholics saying, ‘Yes, but your interpretation is much Luther.’ In fact I hope the jokes are better than that, but it’s pretty clear what’s going on in this picture, and I think it’s terrific.
The broadsheet was obviously aimed at a very wide public, but it has one particular viewer in mind: the elector of Saxony. If religious differences were going to come to open warfare, Protestantism would survive only if its princely champions fought to defend it. The elector of Saxony in 1617 would have to be just as resolute as his predecessor in 1517 and so would all the other Protestant rulers in Germany.
War came the very next year, 1618, and for thirty years devastated central Europe. By 1648 the two exhausted sides recognized that this was not a winnable contest. The bloodshed of the Thirty Years War forced the reluctant combatants to recognize that the only basis for lasting peace would be pragmatic tolerance and legal equality between Catholic and Protestant states.
In this part of the book, I have been looking at how very different societies across the seventeenth-century world addressed the political consequences of religious diversity – Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shi’a, Hindu and Muslim. Safavid Iran and Mughal India contrived more-or-less peaceful accommodations. Christian Europe foundered in war. But in the 1680s the English philosopher John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, held out the possibility of an ultimate happy outcome even in Europe:
The toleration of those who hold different opinions on matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel and to reason, that it seems monstrous for men to be blind in so clear a light.
This conviction, dearly and bloodily bought, that there are many ways to truth, changed the intellectual and political life of Europe, so that in 1717, when the bicentenary of Luther nailing his theses to the church door came round and new broadsheets were produced, the whole continent was well on the way to a revolution just as profound as the Reformation and, in many ways, a consequence of it – the Enlightenment.