from Anneliese Glau,
Rose and Sword (1967)
Relations between Friedrich and the Electorate of Saxony’s most important subject had never recovered after the execution of Andreas Karlstadt. It is easy, of course, to attribute this to the resentment of the duke toward Luther for his perceived role in Karlsadt’s death. But in truth, that’s but half the story. Luther, in later letters and conversations, was as frank as he could afford to be that though he had been forced to argue for Karlstadt’s execution, he had not done so attributing blame for the tragic circumstances to Karlstadt himself. Instead, Luther lay responsibility for the disaster, which rendered Karlstadt’s children orphans to whom he would extend support for the rest of his life, at the flightiness and imprudence of the duke. Thus, it would seem from that point the dislike was mutual.
And there was no question the antipathy affected, if not poisoned outright, the relationship between the two most important men in Electoral Saxony. From the time of the Marburg Colloquy, in which Philip of Hesse called together reformist theologians from across the empire to craft a common body of belief, Friedrich held Luther’s intransigence on the eucharist in contempt. First, there is every reason to believe Friedrich’s own position on the substance of the controversy was in agreement with Zwingli’s. Second, perhaps because he dared not air directly his difference on the matter with Luther, Friedrich subjected Luther to scathing criticism over the practical effect of the breach between he and Zwingli, which was to prevent the German Protestants from becoming a unified community of believers.
On one level, of course, this tension is grounded not in the men’s personalities or their difficult personal histories but the institutional struggle of what would over time evolve into the Imperium and the General Consistory (or, as it’s more commonly known, “Luther’s Vatican”). However we choose to frame this contest, it would not be the last between the prince’s role in providing external protection to a physical community of believers, and the theologian’s, who is at least supposed to do his or her work without recourse to low matters of expediency.
The friction between the two men came to a head in May 1536, when German Protestants met in Wittenberg to negotiate, finally, mutually acceptable compromise language describing the eucharist. Luther began by an intemperate attack on the Swiss and South German attendees on the matter of what happens when a non-believer ingests the host. Friedrich, who had servants monitoring the discussion, was informed of the tone of Luther’s remarks, and responded by walking briskly down the street from the castle to the Leucorea. Barging in, he reproved Luther with strong words before the assembly. This public embarrassment, stopping just short of a public endorsement of the opposing view, helped pave the way for the Wittenberg Concord between the German reformed churches.
The slowly ratcheting tension between Luther and the elector next vented in their momentous debate over the Jews. In 1537 Luther led a call for the expulsion of Jews from Electoral Saxony. By temperament, Friedrich was much more inclined to take the position assumed by Philip of Hesse in 1532, which would permit them to stay. In the ensuing disputation, Friedrich received the famous Josel of Rosheim at Wittenberg. Josel offered letters of recommendation from Alsatian reformers with whom Friedrich had maintained cordial relations. However, for once, on Luther’s side stood the formidable Electress Dowager Elizabeth of England, who observed the English prejudice, and for whom the presence of the Jews in Germany had always represented a horrifying affront.
The colloquy was recorded, stored in the electoral archives, and subsequently published in 1722, at which point it became a sensation, and a cherished text in European legal history. For his part, Luther delivered a performance that was both a tour de force and deeply counterproductive. The core of his argument, peppered with his usual rhetorical excess, was that temporal mercy to the Jews was an evil in that it frustrated their salvation, by keeping them outside the Christian faith.
Friedrich’s response was icy, condescending, and brilliant: “So old friar, you would advise me as to the Jews as [Pope] Paul does Charles [V] as to me, for the same reason, the healing kindness of flame? And you would have me offer them an inferior quality of mercy than the one I beg him for? If Charles listens to Paul as you would have me incline my ear to you, what would then should become of you? Old friar, the paper you set your name to can easily kindle the flame that would burn your children.”
Not expecting a direct rebuttal from the magistrate to whom his argument was directed, Luther’s response to these words were uncharacteristically tame. But Friedrich relished the moment, and rebutted him further: “Brother Martin, you are famed as the greatest preacher in all the world, and yet you cannot convert a Jew. And here you are, on account of that defect of your craft, pestering the laws of Saxony to give you tools to do what you are telling me your preaching cannot: fire, iron and hunger. Why should I trouble myself with these low tools? If the Jews will not be converted, what is needed are better preachers.”
Though this exchange seems like it was as satisfying for Friedrich as it was bracing for Luther (addressing him as “Old Friar” and “Brother Martin” by this point in his life, while putatively a diminutive of affection, seemed to convey the exact opposite sense), the question was not so easily settled. For one thing, much of the argument for the permissive position lay in following the example of Hesse. But at the same time as the matter was being disputed in Wittenberg, Philip was expressing his own uncertainty on the wisdom of his previous decisions on the matter, even undertaking a partial reversal of his own policy of tolerance, restricting the Jews to only certain professions and urging them to cease resistance to their conversion.
This in turn led to a long extension in Friedrich’s deliberations on the matter. Many in fact believed he might render no decision at all, and let his silence on the question of the Jews stand as an implicit resolution of the question. Finally in 1538 he made his decision: the Jews of Saxony would not be expelled, nor would they be pressed for conversion by material need in the way of having professions closed to them that Christians could practice. Even military service and the tilling of land would be open to Jews, at least in theory. However, neither could they engage in trades or practices barred to Christians. In short, there would be a regime of legal equality, with Jews operating enterprises parallel to Christians and living in the same communities with the protection of the same laws. Of course, there was no affirmative requirement they be given tenancies, or admitted to guilds, so there were practical limitations on these rules.
The only practical way their prerogatives were more limited after the 1538 Law was that because they could only pursue the same occupations as Christians, moneylending was now barred to them. This created an immediate problem for trade and industry, and there were immediate appeals for relief. Thus in 1539 the elector Friedrich established a state money-lending enterprise, which would charge fees, ostensibly to compensate for defaults and conveyance costs. Unofficially, it would be a profit-making business that would be able to ruthlessly exploit both its monopoly and the fact that its proceeds went to the same person in whom lay the power to make and enforce laws. Luther of course hated money-lending and commercial life even more than he did Judaism. He saw this descent into both religious permissiveness and the hated practice of usury as nothing short of satanic.
Realizing he had pushed Luther as far as he could without provoking an open breach, Friedrich began to take care to repair the relationship. Hence when Philip of Hesse requested Luther’s opinion as to the validity of marrying a second time with the first wife still alive, Friedrich forbade Luther from answering, when that was in fact excusing him from what would otherwise be a humiliating situation. Likewise, in 1542, when a dispute arose over tax revenues from the Wurzener lands between Friedrich and the new duke of Albertine Saxony, Moritz, Luther volunteered to intercede. However by now the storm clouds of conflict with the emperor seemed so dark and heavy Friedrich essentially demurred from the dispute, eager as he was to avoid any accusation of being a threat to the peace of the empire. Likewise, he declined to get drawn into a dispute with the Duke of Braunschweig over his interference with the reformation in the nearby imperial city of Goslar.
Gradually though, it became obvious all the caution in the world would not avert the impending war between emperor and elector. Luther began his own preparations, in 1545 planning to leave Wittenberg for an extended stay in his home town of Eisleben, in the lands held by the counts of Mansfield, ostensibly to mediate in local feuds affecting the business interests of his relatives. Though there may have been other ways Friedrich could have taken Luther's imminent departure, his actual attitude he recorded in a letter to Philip: “That this man, whom my lord uncle, and my lord father, and my self, all rendered ourselves his servants, would at the time of our impending trial depart like a thief, so that he may be safe while the rest of us may well perish on his account, is unbearable to me. I wish now I had taken the long-ago advice of my lady mother with respect to him, for it has been proven right.”
Enraged, Friedrich under the pretense of a concern for the old Luther’s safety in circumstances of imminent war declined giving him leave to go, when where he was trying to get was to safety, and detained him for his safety in the very place where he was in the greater danger, Wittenberg. Moreover, he demanded Luther write a pamphlet on the coming war. In several ways, this was anathema to Luther's stated beliefs. Though he had always been a rich font of advice in person, he had been reluctant in print to take sides in the affairs of states. Instead he had regularly enjoined his readers to loyalty to the prince, as he had in the Peasants’ War. Though the Jews represented an exception, he had most often argued against recourse to the sword, to the point of a fatalistic resistance to the idea of offering a defense against the conquests of the Ottomans. And finally, Luther had struggled almost obsessively to decline to play favorites among the Lutheran princes, in particular straining to maintain relations of at least equal warmth to Duke Moritz of the Albertines as he did the Elector Friedrich IV.
And of course this was not hard: after all, it was not Moritz who had made himself a friend to the hated Jews and taken the state into the business of usury.
But now what Friedrich demanded of Luther was a strident condemnation, not just of the Emperor Charles V, but all the princes, including the Lutherans, and especially Moritz, who stood next to him ready to make war against the League of Schmalkald. The legal justifications mustered by Charles and his allies were to be disregarded, and instead their resort to force against the League treated as an effort to extirpate the Lutheran faith, utterly. Moritz was to be denounced as a crypto-Catholic who would pretend to the Reformed faith until all its defenders were extinguished, at which point he would return his lands to obedience to Rome. In the apocalyptic vision Friedrich demanded, Charles and Moritz prepared a crusade that would see the German Bible committed to the flames, followed not too far behind by those innocents who resisted the reimposition of the authority of Rome. Finally, Luther would reiterate Friedrich’s earlier denunciation of Charles as a foreign king, imposing alien customs, reliant on outside armies and outside revenues, who had forfeited his imperial throne when he had broken his coronation oath by defending his tyranny with soldiers foreign to the nation. Four drafts Luther produced, each one more vituperative than the last, all of them rejected.
Catholic historicist painters from the Baroque era on reproduced the scene endlessly: the angry-eyed Friedrich IV, standing behind a bent, aged, fearful Luther, arm rigid and straight as a weather vane, pointing to places in the manuscript insufficient to purpose. Some of them even go so far as to picture Friedrich drawing his sword half-way out of the scabbard. To some extent this of course represents an exaggeration, and many witnesses to the exchanges of Friedrich and Luther in these days, including some who had little trouble making candid statements about the character of the elector, like Chancellor Brueck and Philip Melanchthon, assert the Elector brought Luther around to his opinion with respect to the ultimate goal of the impending war on the Protestant princes, and that the final work represents accurately Luther’s ultimate thought. But finally on November 26, 1545, Luther completed
Of the Antichrist and His Servants. Within two weeks after its completion, exhausted not just by the writing but by the ordeal that led to it, Luther was dead.
As to
Of the Antichrist itself, the best historical verdict of it remains Siskind’s, that “it was written at a time when the Elector Friedrich IV seemed powerless before Habsburg might. Well enough, for within that thin volume was the force of a kernelsplitter."
Below,
Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder