Turning Modern

Author: chad

  • How an Independence War Inspired a Ski Competition

    How an Independence War Inspired a Ski Competition

    A rebel leader and future king makes a dramatic escape across the Swedish countryside in the dead of December. This is the story of how this adventure inspired a famous competition centuries later.

    Sources

    Gustafsson, Harald. “A State That Failed?: On the Union of Kalmar, Especially Its Dissolution.” Scandinavian Journal of History 31:3-4 (2006): 205-220.

    “Gustav Vasa Couldn’t Ski?” Nordstjernan. Last accessed: 8/22/2026.

    Kent, Neil. A Concise History of Sweden (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

    Nordstrom, Byron J. The History of Sweden (Greenwood Press, 2002).

    “Pre-history.” Vasaloppet.se. vasaloppet.se/en/about-us/history/pre-history. Last accessed: 8/22/2026.

    Sundmark, Björn. “Snowy State: The Children’s History of Sweden” in Nordic Utopias and Dystopias: From Aniara to Allatta!, eds. Maria Ahlbäck, Jouni Teittinen, and Maria Lassén-Seger (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2022).

    Swart, Peder. Gustaf Is Krönika (G.E. Klemming, 1870).

    Transcript

    Every year on the first Sunday of March in Sweden, there is a national ski race, the Vasaloppet, that in recent years has drawn an average of 15,000 participants. The race starts in Sälen near the Norwegian border, a region famous for its ski resorts, and ends almost 60 miles to the east at the town of Mora. The race has taken place annually since 1922 except for the years between 1942 and 1945 for reasons that hopefully don’t need an explanation

    However, its origins reach even further back by a number of centuries. The course of the race is a reversal of a legendary trek undertaken by Sweden’s first king of the modern age, Gustav Vasa, who according to legend skied the distance from Mora to Sälen before he was king and when he was still just a fugitive fleeing from a foreign tyrant.

    This is far more than just a legend that’s inspired a legacy of athleticism. It’s a story wrapped up in Swedish nationalism and the origins of modern Sweden, specifically the country’s War of Liberation that aimed for independence from Danish rule.

    This is Turning Modern.

    *

    On June 17, 1397, at the city of Kalmar in southeast Sweden, Queen Margaret of Denmark signed a treaty that formally unified the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden under one crowned head. She was the hereditary queen of Denmark herself. Meanwhile her husband Haakon had been the king of Norway and Sweden. After the death of their only son and heir Olaf and then Haakon’s own death, Margaret was proclaimed queen of Sweden and Norway in her own right. Remembered by history as the Union of Kalmar, the treaty Margaret signed was a compromise of sorts. Technically, all the Scandinavian kingdoms would remain mostly independent. Each of the three kingdoms would retain their own representative assemblies and their own laws, but they would share one monarch, one trade policy, and one foreign policies.

    The Kalmar Union wasn’t just the product of a dynastic accident. It was the result of months of heated negotiations between representatives of the three kingdoms. It was also seen as a necessity. Much like how parts of eastern and central Europe united under the Hapsburgs in response to the threat of the Ottoman Empire, the kingdoms of Scandinavia also had a common foe, the Hanseatic League, a confederation of northern German towns. The Hanseatic League vied with Scandinavia for control over the lucrative trade network between the North and Baltic Seas. The rivalry reached a crescendo when Denmark suffered a crippling defeat after clashing with the Hanseatic League. By the time Queen Margaret made her bid to become queen of all three kingdoms, bitter memories of the Hanseatic League and how they forced Denmark and by extension all of Scandinavia to accept a policy of quote-unquote “free trade” were still very fresh.

    While the Kalmar Union wasn’t entirely an accident of births, deaths, and marriages, credit should also go to Queen Margaret, who was from all accounts a fierce negotiator and a brilliant administrator in her own right. Unfortunately, she was also the only one who could keep the Kalmar Union running smoothly. The union started showing cracks as soon as she died in 1412. Her son Olaf was the only one besides her who would have had any legitimacy in all three kingdoms, and he was long dead. She tried to solve the problem by setting up her great-nephew Erik of Pomerania as a co-monarch and adopting him as both her son and heir, even though her hand remained firmly on the wheel until her death. Unfortunately, as a king Erik was as appetizing as sour milk. It’s telling that he’d always be remembered in Scandiavian historiography as “Erik of Pomerania”, stressing the fact that he came from northern Germany and was not a proper Scandinavian. Major revolts broke out in both Sweden and Norway, and eventually Erik was deposed and fled back across the Baltic.

    The Kalmar Union never recovered, but it remained in place…more or less. Even though at least in theory the Kalmar Union was meant to be a federation of equals, Denmark kept asserting itself as the dom. And while the Kalmar Union stayed in place on paper, at times Norway and Sweden elected their own kings over the Union no matter what Denmark had to say, and war did break out between the three kingdoms although without formally and permanently overturning the Union. Still, starting in the second half of the fifteenth century, Sweden was ruled by a series of regents who were arguably all but kings in name and picked by the Swedish national council, even if they still paid lip service to Denmark.

    In hindsight, the Kalmar Union was on course to crash headfirst into an iceberg. But I think it is possible it might still have worked indefinitely in one form or another; after all, Norway and Denmark would remain unified under one monarchy until the 19th century. Instead, we get King Christian II of Denmark, whose reign ended up being the stake in the Union’s heart. Depending on what source you read, Christian II was either a bloodsoaked tyrant or a reformer ahead of his time. Unsurprisingly, the most likely truth is that he was both. On the reformer side of the equation, he promoted humanist education, was said to sympathize with commoners and hate the aristocracy, and reformed laws in a way that benefited peasants by demolishing most of the last remnants of feudalism, including the ability of landlords to trade serfs like livestock. As for the tyrant side…well, we’ll get to that.  

    No doubt Christian II was aware of how the great dynasties of the rest of Europe – the Hapsburgs, the Tudors, and the Valois – were all consolidating and expanding their territories. He even married Isabella, the sister of Emperor Charles V. As he sought to bring the three kingdoms closer together, Sweden stood out as a problem child. For decades, almost all levels of Swedish society were increasingly unhappy about the partnership with Denmark. Miners and merchants alike grumbled over how their businesses was impacted by Denmark’s trade policies while the nobility resented Christian II’s reforms and how Denmark made an alliance with the state that would soon become Russia, the Grand Principality of Moscow, which was already threatening Sweden’s eastern borders. It didn’t help that this was also the time of the Reformation. So the fact that Christian II’s most powerful supporter on the Swedish council, Gustav Trolle, happened to be an archbishop gave the tensions a religious dimension. Christian II scored a decisive victory against the separatists in 1520 with a battle that saw the rebellious regent of Sweden, Sten Sture, fatally wounded. Striking what looked like a conciliatory and merciful tone, Christian II invited the elites of Sweden for his coronation as king of Sweden in Stockholm.

    After the celebrations were over, though, Christian II did not sit down with them for negotiations as they expected. Instead, he had over a hundred noblemen, city council members, merchants, and even two bishops arrested. Archbishop Trolle declared that they were guilty of heresy, taking advantage of the spread of Lutheranism in Sweden at the time. However, veryone knew their real offenses were being involved in the separatist movement. One by one they were dragged out to the city square and beheaded, their bodies unceremoniously burned and the ashes scattered. He didn’t stop there; he had a number of influential women imprisoned as well and had the bodies of Sten Sture and his son torn out of their graves. A possibly accurate, possibly apocryphal account claims that Christian once said this to his correspondent, the scholar Erasmus: “Mild measures are of no use; the remedies that give the whole body a good shaking are the best and surest.” Clearly Christian had put his philosophy into practice.

    It was not only a clearcut atrocity, but for Christian II himself it was an unforced error. Ever accepting Christian as their ruler was now a total non-starter for the Swedish. There’s no debate that the Kalmar Union was also a casualty of what would become known as the Stockholm Massacre. It didn’t help that once Christian II became aware of the magnitude of the backlash he blamed Archbishop Trolle, which only further enraged the Pope who was already furious that Christian had laid his hands on two bishops. Then he shifted the blame to his own officers, which of course only caused the men whose swords he relied on to grumble mutinously.

    Three of the victims of the Stockholm Massacre were the father, uncle, and brother-in-law of a prestigious and well-liked nobleman named Gustav Vasa. All three had been prominent supporters of Sture. Luckily, Vasa had been outside of Stockholm at Gripsholm Castle. Since Gripsholm Castle was close enough to the city, Gustav fled westward toward Norway. It was of course still part of Christian II’s domains, but either it would have been easier to go underground than in his homeland or Gustav was hoping to catch a boat to England or Germany from there.

    Vasa’s westward flight became the backdrop of many Swedish legends, some more plausible than others. My own favorite out of these stories has Gustav hiding out dressed as a peasant in the home of a commoner named Sven when some Danish soldiers burst in and demanded to know the identity of Sven’s guest. Thinking quickly, Sven’s wife struck Gustav on the back with a spade while yelling at him for being a lazy farm laborer. The soldiers reasoned that the mysterious peasant couldn’t have been Gustav Vasa because no commoner would dare strike a nobleman no matter the circumstances. Needless to say, this is generally considered one of the more implausible accounts.

    But the most famous story from Gustav Vasa’s time as a fugitive is the very story that inspired the Vasaloppet. Since it was in the dead of December, Gustav traveled to Norway, trying to rally support wherever he went. When he attempted to get the townspeople of Mora to rebel against Christian II, they refused. The versions of the story I found claimed that the people of Mora didn’t want to become traitors and were tired of war from the last attempt to break away from Denmark, but I suspect if the story is true maybe they thought who cares if the king murdered a bunch of nobles and rich people in the big city. Whatever the reason, Gustav’s words met only blank stares. Since the Danes were closing in, he fled Mora not on horseback or snow shoes, but on skis. Not long after Gustav’s departure, the people of Mora heard rumors from other travelers who had been in the vicinity of Stockholm that Christian II wasn’t satisfied with all the blood he spilled and planned to carve a path of destruction across Sweden, rounding up anyone suspected of disloyalty and killing them on the spot. Either that or they had heard about the Stockholm Massacre for the first time; the accounts I could find diverge a bit on that part.

    Whatever changed their minds, the town council of Mora agreed to send two men, Engelbrekt Jonsson and Lars Jakobsson, to catch up with Gustav Vasa and tell him that they would join any rebellion against Danish rule. The two men skied the entire way and delivered the message to Gustav Vasa, convincing him to abandon his plan to hide out in Norway and instead return to Mora where he could help organize a rebellion. Returning on their skis back to Mora, there Gustav Vasa received oaths of loyalty from the leaders there and organized the people into a fighting force that more volunteers from around the region flocked to join. With their help, Gustav marched south, seizing some of the tax revenues collected and inspiring revolts in other parts of the country. The burgeoning rebellion also got support from Lübeck, the wealthy port city leading the Hanseatic League which had a vested interest in weakening Denmark and which had been annoyed by Christian II’s policy of raising tolls. The Swedish rebellion was even backed by Christian’s own uncle Frederick, who had been sharing with Christian power over the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein on the Danish-German border. By the summer of 1523, the Swedish Council elected Gustav Vasa as king of Sweden.

    As for Christian II, his luck just kept getting worse. At about the same time Gustav Vasa was declared king of Sweden, his own country also rebelled against him and he was replaced with his own disloyal uncle Frederick. Christian fled to the Netherlands, hoping his brother-in-law Charles V would intervene and put him back on his throne, but Christian only got empty promises. So by 1531, Christian took matters into his own hands and set sail for Oslo. Even before he became king of Norway, Christian had ruled over Norway as regent, and he had always been popular there, so he had high hopes of starting a revolt. However, the army he was hoping for didn’t materialize like it did for Gustav Vasa. Christian tried to return to the Netherlands and was granted safe conduct by his uncle, but it turned out Frederick was lying and at the first opportunity he had Christian imprisoned. In a sign that Christian’s reputation as a reformer wasn’t entirely fluff, there was a conspiracy to put him back on the throne after Frederick died, but ultimately Christian was sent back into his cushy imprisonment and instead Frederick’s son, confusingly also named Christian, became king of Denmark and Norway after defeating Christian II’s sympathizers. He was still in captivity when he died in 1559.

    So the million-dollar question is, did the first modern king of Sweden really ski across the Swedish countryside to escape the Danes? I wish I could give you something conclusive, but…I don’t know. The main early source for the story is Peder Svart’s chronicle of Gustav Vasa’s life, which was dictated by the king himself, but Gustav Vasa was very much aware of the power of public relations and wouldn’t have been above embellishing or flat-out making up stories. Also I found an article claiming that a genealogist local to Mora has found correspondence written by Gustav Vasa suggesting he didn’t know about the existence of skiing. I’m a little skeptical of this claim, since skiing has been a Scandinavian pastime and means of transportation since literally the Stone Age and we know there were ski divisions in Swedish armies even back in the Middle Ages. But, to be completely honest, I couldn’t even find much about this outside the article itself, which you can find referenced in the show notes, much less the actual correspondence. Even so, it’s not the only source I found that’s at least a little skeptical of the claim that Gustav Vasa skied himself.

    All that said, the fact that the story does give specific names of two men who would have been either still alive or known by people still alive in Mora does make me think the story was at least partially true. Maybe the messengers sent to him from Mora actually did make the round trip on skis but Gustav himself made the journey in a more conventional way. That might explain how the two skiers sent from Mora were able to catch up with him. So, if I had to guess, I would say Gustav Vasa didn’t make the trip in skis, but the two men who convinced him to return to Mora did. But I’ll leave it there, since I’m really brushing up against the limits of my research resources and I don’t want to get deluged with hundreds of emails and social media posts from Swedish people angry that I poked too hard at a beloved national legend. 

    Thank you for listening.

  • The Forgotten Woman Who Helped Shape The Protestant Reformation

    The Forgotten Woman Who Helped Shape The Protestant Reformation

    Someone sticks up for a university student accused of heresy. This starts the public career of one of the most assertive, formidable voices of the early Protestant Reformation, a voice that would probably be better remembered if not for the fact that they were a woman.

    Sources

    MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History (Viking, 2003).

    Mark, Joshua J. “Argula von Grumbach’s To the University of Ingolstadt.” World History Encyclopedia. 23 March 2022. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1971/argula-von-grumbachs-to-the-university-of-ingolsta/

    Stjerna, Kirsi. Women and the Reformation (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

    Transcript

    In the year 1523, an 18-year-old student at the University of Ingolstadt named Arsacius Seehofer was accused of having Lutheran views and harboring heretical pamphlets. Seehofer was expelled and imprisoned and was nearly condemned to be burned at the stake, if not for the intervention of his powerful father who pulled strings to get his case transferred to the secular courts. In tears, Seehofer made a public renunciation.

    However, Seehofer’s father wasn’t his only advocate. In September of 1523, a noblewoman, Argula von Stauff von Grumbach, wrote a letter demanding a meeting with the rector and governing council of the university. In the letter she declared rather imperiously, “How in God’s name can you and your university expect to prevail, when you deploy such foolish violence against the word of God… I am compelled as a Christian to write to you.” A genuine sympathy for Seehofer also comes through in the words:  “You have forgotten one thing: that he is only eighteen years old, and still a child. Others won’t forget.” She did not hesitate to take no aim at the faculty and administrators of the University of Ingolstadt themselves: “Are you not ashamed that Seehofer had to deny all the writings of Martin, who put the New Testament into German, simply following the text? That means that the holy Gospel and the Epistles and the story of the Apostles and so on are all dismissed by you as heresy. It seems there is no hope of a proper discussion with you.” Nor did she shy away from the fact she was writing to them as a woman: “What I have written you is no woman’s chit-chat, but the word of God; and I wrote as a member of the Christian Church, against which the gates of Hell cannot prevail.” Her letter was a tour de force of theological argument, drawing on 80 quotations from Scripture.  

    Her letter did not sway the authorities although eventually Seehoffer was released and continued his academic career, later becoming a professor himself. In another sense, though, Stauff’s letter was a success. She had a copy of it published and it appeared in the stalls of booksellers, becoming an instant bestseller that went through 14 editions in only two months. In her own time her name became as well-known as those of Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, or Jean Calvin. Yet, today she’s mostly known only to scholars and people with a vested interest in the history of Protestantism, at least in the anglophile world. Few of her prolific writings have been translated into English to this day. And  yet, she was a celebrated and decisive advocate for the Protestant Reformation from the beginning. The historian Kirsi Sjirnaasserts, “Had she been a man, the past centuries would have recognized her as one of the important personalities of the German Reformation.”

    This is Turning Modern.

    To use her full name, Argula von Stauff von Grumbach was born near the top of the pyramid. She was born into the Stauff aristocratic clan of Bavaria, who were prestigious in their own right but they also claimed to be related to the famous and infamous Hohenstauffen dynasty of medieval Holy Roman Emperors. Grumbach would sometimes sign her name in a way that would call  attention to her birth name rather than her marital surname of Grumbach. She was well aware of how much political and social capital her name got her, and she was going to use it.

    Most historians’ guesstimates hold that she was born sometime around 1492. Despite her family’s social weight, they represented the relatively poor branch of the family since her father Bernhardt lost much of his inheritance and lands in a legal dispute with his brother. At least, her father was entrusted with a governorship by the Duke of Bavaria which brought with it a generous income. Although Grumbach claimed she never learned Latin, her education was apparently up to par, and her father provided her with a German translation of some of the books of the Bible along with various theological tomes. Like many girls from prominent aristocratic households, she had to serve time as a lady-in-waiting for an even more prestigious family, in her case Kunigunde of Austria, sister of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and the Duke of Bavaria’s mother. At the Bavarian court, Grumbach happened to get to know Martin Luther’s former confessor, Johann von Staupitz. Although Staupitz remained a respectable Catholic until his death, it was probably through Staupitz that Grumbach became familiar with Luther and started becoming interested in his ideas.

    It’s tempting to speculate that tragedy sharpened the appeal of Lutheranism in Grumbach’s eyes. Her mother and father died within a little over a week of each other, victims of an outbreak of the plague. She was married off to a nobleman and administrator from northern Bavaria, Friedrich von Grumbach. We know very little about the marriage, but it was almost certainly not a happy one, since Friedrich was always a staunch Catholic and was poorly educated compared to his wife. A reference in a letter she wrote to a cousin gives the hint that she felt, in her own words, persecuted by her husband. Even so, Grumbach did her duty as a noblewoman and had four children. Nor was her husband able to stop her. She struck up correspondences with not only early supporters of Luther like Andreas Osiander, who was even allowed to tutor her children, but with Luther himself. From her contacts, Grumbach received recommendations for early Protestant writings. By 1523, she declared that she had read everything Luther had ever written in German.

    The Arsacius Seehofer scandal was her debut into the growing conflict between traditional Catholics and the reformers who would become known as Protestants. Her letter never received a response from its intended readers. Indeed, a faculty member at the University of Ingolstadt, Professor Hauer, gave a ser,on that were clearly aimed right at Grumbach, calling her an “arrogant fool”, “shameless whore”, and “heretical bitch.” The Ingolstadt faculty wrote to the Duke of Bavaria, urging him to outlaw any further publications of her letters and calling upon him to, in their words, “tame the hag.” Despite the ammunition her gender gave her enemies, though, her writings did strike a chord among sympathizers. Not only did published copies of her letter enter wide circulation around Germany, further letters she wrote urging tolerance of Lutherans to the Duke of Saxony and the Count Palatine of Simmern were somehow copied and published without her permission. Grumbach herself was very well aware of the particular rage her opponents had for her as a woman. In a letter she wrote to the city council of Ingolstadt, she remarked, “I hear that some are so angry with me that they do not know how best to speed my passage from life into death. But I know for sure that they cannot harm me unless the power to do so has been given them by God. He will keep me safe, for His name’s sake…I would dearly like to know what they have to gain if they were to murder me right now.”

    Despite the threats from her husband and the wider world, Grumbach continued to publicly identify with the Lutheran cause. While Luther did praise her bravery and happily asked her for advice on how to wean a baby—since he and his wife Katarina had their first child—he did not cite her writings in any of his endless theological disputes with his enemies. Stjernasuggests that Grumbach’s outspokenness on religious matters made even Luther uncomfortable.

    On the contrary, Grumbach did not think she was all that unique. Her writings mention a “school of women” that she thought held similar criticisms of the Church’s persecution of so-called heretics and how it pressured the German princes into allowing such oppression to take place. She knew the First Epistle to Timothy in the New Testament attributed to Saint Paul stated that women should be silent in church. Yet, Grumbach argued that Christian women had an obligation to speak up when men failed to do so, and that there was a “school of women” who will proclaim the truth with the full backing of Scripture. More radically, Grumbach’s letters constantly assumed or asserted her own right to read the Bible for herself and form her own interpretations and conclusions…not unlike the subject of another of our episodes, Marguerite of Navarre.

    In her own life, she went further and made her own views known. She made efforts to bring prominent reformers together to debate theological issues, lobbied reformers and princes to dedicate more effort to social problems like poverty, and urged the German princes and city councils to do more to protect reformers from persecution. She even personally attended the diets at the cities of Nuremberg and Regensburg in 1523 and 1524, where political matters related to the Lutherans and their persecution were hotly debated. However, she was disappointed by the experience, complaining in one letter that some of the reformers spent more time getting drunk than convincing the German princes to do more to back their cause.

    After the diets, by 1524 Grumbach for whatever reason started to step away from the public spotlight. Her last act was publishing a poem firing back at a satirical poem mocking her by, among other things, telling her to go back to weaving and suggesting she was sleeping with Luther. After that, Grumbach rarely made a public appearance until 1530 when she made an appearance at the Diet of Augsburg and met with Luther himself at the Bavarian city of Coburg. After that, she slipped back into obscurity, although a few accounts claim that she continued advocating for Protestantism, especially by funding the establishment of new churches and even preaching to crowds of people herself. Sometime in or around 1530, her husband died and she soon found a new husband, a Protestant man, Count Poppo von Schlick. This marriage does not seem to have been terribly happy either despite their shared religious values. The couple may have even informally separated not long after her marriage. In any case, he died only several years afterward. Throughout her life Grumbach was overshadowed by death; she had also outlived three of her four children.

    The year of her own death is not clear. She may have lived well into the 1560s. If a letter written by the Duke of Bavaria is any indication, she may have kept up as a Protestant agitator to the very end, distributing banned books and even officiating at funerals. If this woman being referenced is her, then she was imprisoned but quickly released due to her old age. One source vaguely suggests she ended up becoming a martyr, but there is no concrete evidence she was ever killed for her beliefs, and it’s quite possible she was only remembered as a martyr because she was a woman at the mercy of a Catholic husband.

    Her appearance in the drama of the Protestant Reformation was dramatic but short-lived.  This made it all the easier for her to be forgotten, in spite of her involving herself in one of the first public controversies of the Reformation, her letter to the University of Ingolstadt representing one of the first popular pieces of Protestant writing outside the works of Luther, and her advocacy for the German princes to defend the Reformation. Perhaps, though, as her reactions to the diets she attended suggest, in her own life Grumbach herself chose obscurity, disappointed by the men whose cause she tried to defend.   

  • The Peasant Revolt That Changed Eastern Europe

    The Peasant Revolt That Changed Eastern Europe

    A soldier named György Dózsa helps turn an army of peasant crusaders into a full-on revolution. His war on the nobles who ruined his country’s recent reforms is destined to have an impact, just not the one he wanted…

    Sources

    Albert-László. Barabási. Bursts: The Hidden Patters Behind Everything We Do From Your E-Mail to Bloody Crusades (Plume, 2011).

    Makkai, Laszlo. “Neo-serfdom: Its Origin and Nature in East Central Europe.” Slavic Review 34.2 (1975): 225-238.

    Molnár, Miklós. A Concise History of Hungary (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

    Pascu, Ștefan. A History of Transylvania, trans. D. Robert Ladd (Wayne University Press, 1982).

    Transcript

    If you ever lived or traveled in Hungary, you may have had in your hands at some point a piece of currency that bore the face of a man named György Dózsa – or, at least, what is imagined to be his face, since there are no surviving contemporary depictions of him. One of these pieces was the 20-forints bill, which was in circulation from about 1947 to 1992.  It shows this imagined yet once flesh and blood man looking sternly to his left. He wears the hat and coat of a burgher or perhaps a peasant of the time, with a close-cut beard. His face is marked with a distinct look of determination.

    György Dózsa is one of those figures who straddles historical fact and legend. Under Hungary’s post-World War II Communist government, György became a hero of class struggle. But even after the fall of Communism, György’s image persisted as an embodiment of Hungarian nationalism.

    And yet, famous as he is, György Dózsa likely died one of the most brutal deaths I’ve ever read about in history at the hands of his own country.

    This is Turning Modern.

    By the second half of the fifteenth century, Hungary was faced with a real existential crisis. The Ottoman Empire had taken Constantinople, the capital of the last direct vestige of the Roman Empire, and had steamrolled over Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia. Besides southern Italy, Hungary was now the obvious item on the Ottomans’ list of future conquests.

    Usually when people learn about this period of European history, they are usually exasperated by how those in power seemed to sit on their hands as the Ottomans took over Anatolia and then Greece and the rest of the Eastern Europe, especially when they learn about how much many Popes and monarchs of western and central Europe left the Byzantines trying to sail a sinking ship. This at least wasn’t always the case, however. Case in point: a historic royal election that took place in 1458.

    The nobles of Hungary elected their kings in a general assembly called the Diet. Actually, at least a hint of some old elective principle wasn’t that unusual among European monarchies, even if it was usually just basically a strange little detail in the background The Hungarian nobility was more openly assertive when it came to choosing their rulers than some others, but even then, every monarch since the founding of the kingdom in the eleventh century was connected to the royal bloodline at least distantly or through marriage. At least, that was the case until 1458. After the death of the last king, the Austrian Hapsburg Ladislaus V, the Diet of Hungary elected Mathias Hunyadi. His father Janos was a celebrated war hero, who had been among the few of the time to win decisive victories against the Ottomans. He also happened to be a nobleman who had more wealth and land than the monarchy itself. After Janos’ death, Mathias’ older brother, also named Ladislaus, became head of the family. Unfortunately, Ladislaus was in a feud with King Ladislaus V’s chief chancellor, Count Ulrich of Selje, and at Ladislaus’ order the count was assassinated. Enraged and no doubt fearing what his most powerful subject might do as an encore, Ladislaus V had both the Hunyadi brothers imprisoned. Soon enough, Ladislaus Hunyadi was unceremoniously put to death. Matthias may have followed him, especially since the rest of his family started leading a rebellion, but then Ladislaus V became ill and died without an heir. When Ladislaus V fled the rebels in Hungary for his homeland of Austria he dragged a still imprisoned Matthias with him. Matthias remained a prisoner until after Ladislaus V died.

    Just a couple of months later, the man who was a prisoner standing at the precipice of death was now king himself. He could claim no ancestry from a past monarch nor was he from a distinguished foreign dynasty. His historic election was made for various reasons, including the fact he was a compromise candidate preventing a civil war between rival claimants and factions, but he also owed his crown to his father’s reputation and his own personal popularity among the magnates. Most importantly, Matthias was hired to do the job of protecting Hungary from the Ottomans, and he did it superbly. Under the reign of Mathias Corvinus, as he became known, Hungary became the most well-oiled machine out of all the European states of the time. It had the famous Black Army, the largest standing army in Europe and an impressive array of fortifications at Belgrade. Nor was Mathias’ reforms all related to just the military. He put more control over Hungary’s judiciary and administration in the hands of professionals, rather than just the nobility. Determined to make Hungary a place that would attract the best scholars, artists, and engineers in Europe, he funded one of the largest libraries ever seen, the Bibliotheca Corvinica, and was arguably the first monarch outside Italy who embraced the Renaissance. All of this was just part of his own project of creating a nation that could stand up to the Ottomans.

    It was during the reformist reign of Mathias Corvinus that György Dózsa was born, sometime around the year 1470, in the village of Dalnók in Transylvania. He was a child of the Székely people, a community some accounts have claimed were descended from the Huns or the Turks but who were instead likely descended from Hungarians granted special privileges and liberties in exchange for them living in and patrolling the kingdom’s then uninhabited peripheries. By the time György was reaching adulthood, King Mathias had died. He had tried to set up his only son Janos as his successor. However, since Janos was the son of Matthias and his mistress, he had a serious disadvantage as a candidate. Besides, the top nobles of Hungary had reason to regret their choice. Mathias had done his job too well. His government demanded more taxes from them to fund the bureaucratic machine he turned Hungary into and if the nobles tried to start a rebellion he actually treated them brutally like traitors. If history has set laws one of them is that even in times of crisis the rich and powerful may admit a crisis is happening but they’ll reassess the minute actually dealing with the crisis becomes inconvenient. It didn’t help that the Ottoman threat to Hungary had receded, partially because of Mathias. So, they reasoned like so many other people in power throughout history, what was the problem in the first place?

    When Mathias died in the spring of 1490, for their next king the nobles went back to their old strategy of electing a prince from a neighboring country who had at least some kind of ancestral claim but wasn’t familiar with the ins and outs of Hungarian politics. Their choice was the already reigning king of Bohemia, Vladislaus, whose great-grandmother Mary of Anjou had been the Queen of Hungary in her own right. Crowned as Vladislaus II, the nobles soon gave the new king a nickname: “Yes, Alright”, so named because that is reportedly what he said every time a great magnate asked him for permission or for a favor. If they deliberately set out to find Mathias Corvinus’ exact opposite, they couldn’t have done better. The Black Army fell apart from a lack of funds and the massive bureaucracy Mathias Corvinus built either withered away or was coopted by the high nobility and the leaders of the Hungarian church. Even the low-ranking, “common” nobility was starting to feel the pressure from above. The tax burden that Mathias Corvinus tried to make at least somewhat more equitable by the standards of the era now shifted from the high nobility to low-ranking provincial nobles, the city burghers, and the landholding peasantry. To quote historian Miklós Molnár’s description of this period, “Social classes that had begun to rise found themselves sinking back, and the whole country sank with them.”

    György Dózsa would have lived through this change in regime. As a young man he may have already heard peasants complaining about the more corrupt and plutocratic regime of King Vladislaus II and pining for the good old days of the one they were already calling King Mathias the Just. Early accounts also claim that György was something of a young thug, who allegedly killed a government official and robbed merchants. In his book Bursts, the scientist Albert-László Barabási argues that these early stories of György were probably just distorted and biased accounts of him clashing with local officials who were infringing upon the ancient rights of the Székely people. In the years following King Matthias’ death, many royal privileges that protected certain local communities from tax assessments were weakened or abolished altogether, so it was certainly possible. All the same, a pattern of defying authority through violence had already been set in György’s life.

    The world in which György came of age was a tinderbox. On top of the tensions from tax rates and corruption, it was widely believed among the peasants and the rank-and-file clergy that the Ottoman Turks were heralds of the coming apocalypse. The peasants and low-tier clergy were also hearing from the Hussites of Bohemia, a religious movement that had many criticisms of the Church hierarchy similar to what the Protestants would argue in coming years and whose leader Jan Huss was notoriously betrayed and executed by officials despite a promise of safe passage. Much of the discontentment and outright rage people felt toward the Church that erupted in Hans Bohm’s would-be revolt was also simmering in Hungary.

    György became a mercenary, who might have fought against the Ottoman Turks at Belgrade in 1513. One legend claims he personally overcame and slew an infamous Turkish commander who was a skilled swordsman, for which King Vladislaus rewarded György with a noble title. It would have been around this time that György would have heard about a decree issued by Pope Leo X in 1513, calling on even the common people to participate in organizing a crusade to take Constantinople back from the Ottoman Empire.

    Unfortunately, the leading clergy in Hungary made one major mistake in entrusting recruitment for the crusade to the Franciscan monks of Hungary. For decades the Franciscan monasteries of Hungary had been hotbeds of revolutionary sentiment, perhaps because they recruited their numbers from young men who belonged to the segments of the peasantry that benefited from Mathias Corvinus’ reforms but were now floundering under the new regime. The monks and friars preached that the common people owed obedience only to the king and not the nobles, and that the Apocalypse where God will free the poor from oppression would happen within their lifetimes. One of these men was a friar and parish priest named Lőrinc Mészáros, who was one of the more successful organizers of the crusades.

    In fact, clergy like Lőrinc did their work too well. So many peasants were leaving their fields to take up arms with the growing armies around the city of Pest that local nobles and officials became alarmed that not enough people would be around to take in the harvest in the fall. Some nobles hired armed brigades to chain peasants and their families to carts and take them home. Already the nobility had been looking at this Peasants’ Crusade with undisguised contempt, refusing to offer any leadership or food and other provisions despite the Church’s urgings. As the army started to march across the Great Hungarian Plain for Ottoman territory, heated arguments and then violent brawls between peasants and the landowners started breaking out.

    The clerical leaders put in charge of the whole campaign just cancelled the whole thing, finally glimpsing the danger, but it was far too late. Many of the Crusade’s leaders ignored instructions to disarm and stop recruitment. Among them were György, who had befriended Lőrinc whose sermons had cemented his commitment to the cause. Preachers like Lőrinc not only rejected the orders to disperse, but a new theme entered their sermons. The king and the nobles wanted to stop the crusade precisely because they thought it would succeed. All along, the nobles and even King Vladislaus had been in league with the Ottomans. There was no chance that Constantinople could be taken back for Christendom until the threat at home was dealt with.

    What exactly the rebellious crusade now wanted has been made unclear by biased later accounts and by centuries of myth and legend. Some said that György sought to make himself the new lord of Hungary, although this sounds like the kind of thing that would be later invented by chroniclers hostile to the revolt. In any case, it does seem like they talked openly of abolishing the nobility, replacing the top clergy in Hungary with a single bishop who would be elected by the people, and redistributing the land held by the Church and the nobles. György, his brother Gergeley, and Lőrinc were chosen as leaders. From the city of Cegléd which occupied a strategic position in central Hungary, György drew in more recruits and conducted raids against noble manors and defiant towns. It was said György did show mercy toward people fleeing the raids, helping them escape from his own, more vengeful officers, but at the same time he was quite ruthless, having hundreds of nobles and landlords executed by crucifixion or impalement. The bishop of Cegléd himself was impaled and left to rot within view of the local citizens.

    The revolt became a true threat once it attracted the support of several towns and cities. Under György’s command even the untrained peasants at his command managed to capture several fortresses and supplies of artillery and get within striking distance of the capital of Buda. But they would not enjoy their success for long. In July of 1514, the crusaders suffered a staggering defeat at the hands of an army of hardened veterans led by Jonas Zapolya, a future king of Hungary, and by Stephen Bathory, who happened to be the grandfather of the notorious Elizabeth Bathory. (I’m saving her story for a special Halloween episode, by the way). Speaking of horror stories, we now get to the famous account of György’s execution.

    In my research I’ve seen suggestions made by people who weren’t writing as scholars that this story is a myth or at least embellished but at the same time the actual published scholarly sources I’m using for this episode don’t question its authenticity. I’m not saying that as a matter of personal judgment; it could be that there’s a source out there somewhere I’m not aware of that actually does debunk the story of his execution based on evidence. I just think it’s all worth bringing up, even at the cost of a messy narrative, so people can start to make up their own minds. In fact, I’ll fess up and say this was a difficult episode to research and write not just because there weren’t as many sources I could access as I usually have, but because so many details about György’s life, even the parts that are attested to in contemporary documents, are so muddled with legend and propaganda. I even nearly gave up on doing this episode at all close to the eleventh hour.

    With all that said, according to the account György was brought before a small crowd of notables. As a group of monks sang holy hymns, he was forced to set on a metal throne, which according to some versions of the story had been heated. Then a crown of red-hot iron was placed on his head. Nine prisoners were brought before the mock king. One of them was his brother Gergeley, whom György had been begging the authorities to spare. Gergeley had not even wanted to really join the crusade in the first place, until György convinced him. Instead of being given a pardon, Gergeley was cut down before him. The executions then took red-hot pincers and began ripping out parts of György’s flesh. The surviving prisoners were ordered to bite into his body; those who refused were killed on the spot. One account claims that grown men who watched this fainted at the site, others simply left. Another said that the moment György died one could see an apparition of the Virgin Mary herself, escorting György’s soul to Heaven. As for the execution itself, there was a sacred and symbolic logic there on top of the brutality. To quote Barabási, “The country is a body, organic and alive, as the king had often emphasized. György must die the way he disfigured his homeland—by biting into its live body.”

    The ones who agreed to cannibalize György so were spared from any further punishment and released. Apparently, the authorities were content with the punishment inflicted on him. In fact, a surprising number of the peasants involved in the crusades were given clemency. Someone needed to work the fields in time for the harvest, after all.

    The revolt did not quite end there. Several leaders including Lőrinc escaped or eluded capture and carried on the fight in parts of Transylvania. Fights and massacres erupted all over the country. In the end, though, order was restored.

    Still, György’s revolt unnerved those in power. That same year, by 1514 a proposed law code, the Tripartitum, was put together and presented to the Diet of Hungary. It would never be formally enacted, but nonetheless it would become a widely used source for Hungarian courts in the centuries to come. One source said the Tripartitum was “written in the blood of serfs.” To be fair, the Tripartitum codified a number of rights for both landholding and dependent peasants, but in other ways it also whittled away at their traditional rights. The rights of peasants to inherit and own land or to migrate were restricted. One day of service per week to the lords was now mandated and taxes and church tithes were set at fixed and high rates. To cap it all off, the Diet officially declared that the peasantry were now placed in a state of perpetual servitude in order to “remind you what a crime it is to rise up against your master.”

    Admittedly this didn’t happen entirely as a crackdown following the revolts. Some historians have argued that eastern Europe experienced a period of neo-feudalism or “Second Feudalism”, something I already touched on in my episode about Hans Bohm. But to go into more detail, from the late fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth century, Bohemia, Poland, Austria, Livonia, and parts of northeastern Germany enacted laws that also prevented peasants from moving freely and restricted their rights over their own lands, after feudalism had been in long decline in most of the rest of western and central Europe. Historians have proposed numerous explanations. One is the political threat of the Ottoman Empire, another points to the fact that Western Europe was more urbanized than the East. A more elaborate theory considers that the economies of western Europe were rapidly changing due mainly to the beginnings of colonial expansion into the Americas. The theory goes that colonization led to an infusion of wealth and raw materials into western Europe, which in turn fueled an explosion in manufacturing. This boosted trade between western and eastern Europe, with western Europe trading manufactured goods and eastern Europe trading agricultural produce in turn. With the growth in trade came a growth in demand, and landowners had the incentive to keep their peasants stuck on their farmlands as much as possible.

    Whatever the truth of the matter, and of course other historians have questioned the entire Second Feudalism thesis, the peasant crusade may have been fighting against forces that were already coalescing. At the very least, György’s revolution became an excuse to do what the powers that be wanted to do anyway.

    Then there’s the what-if questions the crusade leaves behind. King “Yes, Alright” died, but before his death he managed to get the nobility to accept as king his ten-year-old son, who was named King Lajos II. By this point the nobility had such a tight grip over royal finances that Lajos and his household had to pawn several of their personal possessions at several points to afford necessities. The army faired no better, with entire border fortresses left in need of repairs or understaffed. In 1526, Sultan Suleiman of the Ottoman Empire marched to go to war against Hungary, the type of scenario King Mathias had tried to prepare for. At the Battle of Mohács, most of Hungary’s high nobility, the very nobles who had been running the state for the past couple of decades, was cut down, and the then twenty-year-old King Lajos died when he fell off his horse and died in a stream because he couldn’t get up due to the weight of his armor. Hungary itself literally shattered: there was Royal Hungary, which was claimed by the Hapsburgs of Austria in the name of Lajos’ sister Anna who had married into the family; the Ottoman province of Hungary; and the Principality of Transylvania, whose leaders first claimed to be the rightful kings of Hungary and maintained a precarious independence by playing the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs off against each other.

    Would this have happened if Pope Leo had never tried rising a people’s crusade or if the clergy of Hungary had taken a different, better approach? Or if György’s revolt had been averted or if it had succeeded at least to the point that it provoked some beneficial reforms? Possibly; after all Hungary’s once formidable war machine had been breaking down from decades of neglect and underfunding while the Ottoman Empire was at what would prove in hindsight to be its peak. Still, it could very well have been decisive that the memories of the revolt were still so raw that peasants and burghers walked away from the call for recruits and some nobles and officials were extremely reluctant to try arming groups of peasants.

     If nothing else, I would say it’s a cautionary tale about how the powerful’s attempts to protect their self-interest at the expense of everyone else can, sooner or even much later, backfire spectacularly.

  • The Queen Who Became a Professional Writer

    The Queen Who Became a Professional Writer

    Marguerite de Navarre is the sister and wife of kings. While coping with being an agent of her brother and navigating the religious turmoil, she still found the time to become a bestselling author and perhaps the “first modern woman.”

    Sources

    Cholakian, Patricia F. and Rouben C. Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2006).

    Gristwood, Sarah. “I Wrote a Book About Renaissance Queens. Today’s Stories of Sex Assault Sound Like Something Out of the 16th Century.” History News Network. 3 December 2017. Last Accessed: 7/9/2026.

    Knecht, Robert J. Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

    Transcript

    Sometime in the year 1544 in England, a precocious eleven-year-old girl came up with a special gift for her stepmother Catherine. She translated a poem from French into English herself and bound it in a manuscript, titled The Miroir or Glass of the Sinful Soul. The girl may have also embroidered the book cover herself with silk threads in flower and Celtic knot patterns, although we don’t know for sure. The stepmother, who always treated the girl like the biological daughter she never had, cherished the gift. It was among her personal  possessions when she died, and it still rests today in the University of Oxford’s Bodlean Library.

    If any of you are Tudor history buffs, you probably already knew or at least guessed that the stepmother was King Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife Catherine Parr and the girl was the future Queen Elizabeth I of England. It’s a small moment, but it’s one that is in a way rare and profound. In this window of time, three generations of women were connected across time: Catherine Parr, Elizabeth Tudor, and the poem’s original author, Marguerite de Valois or to go by the title she held by the end of her life, Marguerite Queen of Navarre. They were all women born into the halls of power, yet they did experience hardships and were at various points at the mercy of men. Despite such obstacles, all three also left their own marks on history.

    Of course, none left as large a mark as the eleven-year-old Elizabeth would, even though at the time she was still the third in line for the English throne with an older brother no one had reason to assume wouldn’t live and one day have heirs of his own. Not only that, but many inside and outside of England believed she was technically born out of wedlock; long story. But even in the shadow of Elizabeth’s own unlikely and eventually perilous rise to the top, the other two women also made their own stands. Catherine Parr defended and sponsored church reformers and early Protestants, even though at one point it nearly got her sentenced to death by her own husband. Marguerite of Navarre was also a friend and protector of the church reform movement and even some of the early representatives of the Protestant Reformation. She constantly had to navigate between the demands of her king and brother and her own religious sympathies. Also she was not only a patron of the arts, but a writer herself, one of the first women who made her voice heard across Europe through the printing press. Finally while she was not the first, she was an early case of a woman who used her wealth and social position to host gatherings of intellectuals and writers, a particular French phenomenon known as the salon.

    This is a story of how one woman was a princess and a queen, but through her own efforts she also became something rather modern, a literary celebrity and a public intellectual.

    This is Turning Modern.

    Marguerite de Valois, future queen of Navarre, came from a poor, low-profile branch of her family. That family was the French royal family, so it wasn’t like she lived in squalor and obscurity, although the family was poor enough they chose not to hold celebrations over her birth, not least because she was just a daughter. Her prospects were thin or at least they would have been if not for France’s Salic Law, which had come into full force by her lifetime and which barred women and men descended from royal women from inheriting the French throne. The reigning king Louis XII was a distant cousin, but the Salic Law meant that Louis XII’s heir happened to be her younger brother, Francois.

    Theirs was a small and close-knit family. The marriage of Marguerite and Francois’ mother, Louise of Savoy, to their father Charles Count of Angoulême had been an arranged one, yet Louise and Charles genuinely loved each other…despite Charles having two mistresses. Forget it Jake, it’s France. Anyway, when Charles died in 1496, Louise was devastated and devoted her life to her only son Francois. Marguerite followed suit. Of course this is the sort of thing you would expect from a patriarchal society, but Francois did embody life-changing prospects for both his mother and his sister. It certainly helped that even as a teenager Francois struck the model of the ideal Renaissance prince – handsome (if a little big-nosed), well-built, charming, naturally chivalrous, and with a genuine passion for art, literature and fashion. He definitely cut a more attractive figure next to the elderly and miserly King Louis XII. Louise of Savoy affectionately called Francois “her Ceaser”, and for the most part Marguerite and Francois remained close for the rest of their lives, so much so that their relationship would inspire malicious rumors of incest.

    After the death of his wife Anne of Brittany, Louis XII acquired a new queen, Mary Tudor, the beautiful and vivacious young sister of the new king of England, Henry VIII. She was over three decades younger than her new husband. Louis XII died just a few months after the marriage, causing people to joke that sex with an attractive young bride was what  killed the old king. Students at the Sorbonne even put together a satirical play that showed the king being given a philly that carried him off to Hell.

    Marguerite herself was nearly married to the English prince who would become Henry VIII and even to Mary and Henry’s father, King Henry VII, when he was still alive. One account says that when Marguerite was approached by representatives of King Louis, she told  them off, saying, “When my brother becomes king, I will marry a man who is young, rich, and noble— without having to cross the [English] Channel!” Perhaps because her mother opposed the match as well, Louis XII actually dropped the plan.  

    Louise of Savoy had fretted that Mary Tudor would finally give Louis XII a male heir. Instead, her son Francois was now king. Marguerite ascended along with her brother. In fact, she rose far more than a French king’s sister should have, to the point you can see where the rumors of incest began. In the early years of Francois’ reign it was actually Marguerite who was for all intents and purposes the queen of France, and not Francois’ actual wife, the old king Louis XII’s daughter Claude. It was Marguerite who made the usual public appearances reserved for the queen of France, while Claude went to church, played cards with her ladies, and did the important work of being pregnant and giving birth. It was even Marguerite who went to Francois’ royal coronation while Claude stayed home, heavily pregnant.   Despite Marguerite’s defiant prophecy, she was already married to a man she would have almost certainly not chosen on her own: Duke Charles of Alencon, another distant relation of the royal family who stood in the line of succession. His family’s fiefdom happened to be a rich slice of territory, so the marriage was just a way of keeping a wealthy far-off relation close. He was sickly, not particularly intelligent, and while like many young prominent noblemen he was a commander in the armed forces he wasn’t a terribly competent soldier. Marguerite’s feelings about Charles would soften later in life, but in a poem she wrote after his death, The Prisons, she described him this way: “having neither read nor studied, / he would never have been taken for an orator.” For a girl who adored her athletic and intellectual brother, this husband must have been a disappointment, but this time she apparently had no say. Either she spent whatever leverage she had rejecting the betrothal to Henry VII or it was much easier for her to escape a marriage to an old foreign king than to a young man close to home.

    Complicating the matter is the chance that Marguerite was possibly attracted to a man who better matched her dreams, the dashing and witty Guillaume Gouffier, Lord of Bonnivet. We can only mostly reconstruct Marguerite’s history with Bonnivet from a trail of hints left across her writings, especially her short story collection The Heptameron. Perhaps in her mother and brother’s mind, Marguerite had to be married off precisely because she was an attractive girl with an extroverted personality who was already attracting men while being drawn to them. If some of the stories in The Heptameron had any basis in reality, one man went so far as to “accidentally” fall of his horse into some mud so he would have an excuse to be naked in Marguerite’s presence. As for Bonnivet himself, I have to admit this is speculation on my part. It is perhaps important context for the far darker turn their relationship would take.

    Marguerite of Navarre’s modern biographers, Patricia Francis and Rouben Cholakian, believe something traumatic happened to Marguerite, perhaps in 1520. While her husband was elsewhere, she and her brother were staying at the main estate of Bonnivet, who was a close confidant of the king. After Marguerite fell asleep, Bonnivet snuck into her room through a trap door and assaulted her. Marguerite tried to push him off and scratch him while screaming for help. Her attendants ran into the room and in the darkness Bonnivet was able to make his escape. Furious, Marguerite swore she would tell her brother and see Bonnivet put to death. However, an older woman among her attendants advised her to keep quiet despite herself. Marguerite had done nothing wrong, but people knew she had enjoyed Bonnivet’s company at one time or another. They might even say, she warned, that she had seduced Bonnivet and contrived his death. Marguerite was convinced. She got up the next day and joined her brother and Bonnivet for breakfast as if nothing had happened. Marguerite may have also been heeding the words of Anne de Beaujeu, another woman from the royal family who had been the regent of France for a time. Anne had written a sort of self-help book for aristocratic women, in which she wrote, ““Whatever your age, guard against being deceived . . . you can be blamed even for something very slight.” There is no man of worth, however noble he may be, who does not use treachery, nor to whom it does not seem good sport to deceive or trick women of rank.” Sadly the advice shared by Marguerite’s attendant and Anne de Beaujeu is still sadly a part of women’s experience even centuries later.

    Of course, we don’t know for sure that such a thing happened. However, the story I just described is in the short story collection Marguerite wrote, The Heptameron, only instead of Marguerite and Francois they are a nameless Flemish noblewoman, her brother, and a family friend. However, in his gossipy chronicles the abbot of Brantome declared that the story was true and that the assailant was Bonnivet. If anyone would have known it would have been Brantome, whose grandmother and mother would have been ladies-in-waiting to Marguerite at the time. And as the Cholakians point out, throughout the stories of The Heptameron, “rape and seduction are prominent themes.”

    While we may know of Marguerite’s traumatic past, we don’t know much about how she saw her marriage. They had no children, and Marguerite spent much of her time away in Paris at the royal court. At the same time, she turned more to religion, spending time in religious meditations and writing devout poetry. Her guide was Guillaume Brisonnet, bishop of Meaux, who was famous and in some circles notorious for being an advocate for church reform. In this time, Marguerite began to establish a reputation as a church reformer who in some eyes skirted around outright heresy. Yet, she never became a Protestant. Instead, she belonged to a group one might call moderate reformers, who agreed with Martin Luther and his crew that the Church was in need of drastic change but they still strongly accepted papal authority and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The hardline stance of the Council of Trent forced the moderate reformers to get in line or to abandon the Church and drew a sharper line between Catholics and Protestants, but that would not happen until after Marguerite’s death. For the time being, there was still a space in which one could be sympathetic to some Protestant ideas and still more or less be a good Catholic, although it was a difficult and even dangerous space to be in.

    At the Battle of Pavia in 1525, fought between France and the forces of Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, King Francois was taken prisoner. Bonnivet was killed in the fighting. Marguerite’s husband Alencon also survived. He was one of the few high-profile nobles at the battle who lived and escaped capture, but this was at best a mixed blessing. One account claimed he simply misjudged the situation and mistakenly ordered his regiment to retreat in the chaos; another said he deliberately left the scene of the battle when it seemed like the French cause was doomed. In any case, as Alencon returned home, a crowd would gather wherever he stopped to rest or spend the night and jeer at him as a coward and pelt him with insults and stones. Louise of Savoy blamed him for the imprisonment of her son and retaliated by keeping him and Marguerite apart. The stress of his humiliation worsened his already poor health, to the point that it became clear he was dying. Marguerite defied her own mother’s orders to stay with her husband in his final moments and he died in her arms.

    While Louise of Savoy during her son’s imprisonment became the ruler of France, Francois explicitly asked that Marguerite handle the negotiations for his release. Although negotiations stalled at first, she did succeed, although she also advised her brother to break the terms of the treaty she herself negotiated as soon as he crossed over France’s borders. Like her mother, Marguerite was pragmatic when she needed to be.

    Marguerite was too valuable a commodity in dynastic terms to be left unmarried. Her next marriage was politically useful, but she probably did have more of a choice this time. Her groom was King Henri II of Navarre, a small kingdom in the Pyrenees that had been made even smaller after the southern half of the kingdom was invaded by Spain but Henri had also inherited some lands in southwestern France. Henri was ten years younger than Marguerite and was many things Alencon was not: a valiant soldier, a natural speaker, and a wit with an interest in literature. Tellingly, Marguerite spent less time at Paris and more time at her husband’s estate at Nerac in southwest France. Henri did have his mistresses, but there are hints that he and Marguerite were attracted to each other. And they did have two children, a daughter named Jeanne, who would become the mother of the future King Henri IV of France, and Jean, a baby who died soon after birth. This loss devastated Marguerite, and afterward for the rest of her life she would dress in a widow’s black.

    At Nerac, Marguerite of Navarre truly came into her own. With the encouragement of a Protestant publisher, Simon du Bois, she published “The Mirror of the Sinful Soul”, the very poem that the future Queen Elizabeth of England would translate for her stepmother Catherine Parr. Almost certainly inspired by the death of her son, Marguerite wrote the poem about triumphing over her own weaknesses and even death itself through faith. The poem was, in sixteenth century terms, a bestseller. It was translated into Latin for international release and republished no less than eleven times in her lifetime.

    It was also at Nerac where Marguerite established her own salon, where writers, theologians, and artists who sought her patronage or protection would visit. She also patroned and commissioned works from her own favored stable of writers and scholars. One such man was the physician Francois Rabelais, the author of the satirical French prose epic Gargantua and Pantagruel. It was Marguerite who also commissioned the first translation of Boccaccio’s short story collection The Decameron into French and had it published. When the religious firebrand Jean Calvin was on the run from authorities, it was Nerac where he sought sanctuary until the heat died down. Marguerite did not hesitate to step in to protect other moderate reformers and even outright Protestants, even from her own brother.

    The day came when she had to back down, though. In 1534, pro-Protestant pamphlets were seen around Paris and its environs. On the so-called Day of the Placards, when pamphlets were found even in the king’s private apartments, he was terrified and enraged. The crackdown on the French Protestants or Huguenots truly began then. Marguerite tried to convince her brother that the pamphlets must have instead been distributed by the Huguenots’ enemies to discredit them, but this time she pushed too hard. She left Nerac for Navarre and for over two months neither she nor Francois wrote to each other, an unprecedented gap in their correspondence, suggesting either that one of them was giving the other the silent treatment or the letters were discreetly destroyed. Despite all that, few doubted that she was a good Catholic. It’s telling that both the Pope Paul III and the staunchly Protestant city council of the Swiss city of Berne both warmly wrote to her and asked her for favors.

    While she fulfilled her traditional role as the sister and wife of kings, dispensing favors and securing her own network of clients, she also embarked on a career as an author. She continued publishing her poetry. She may have also intended to publish her own short story collection The Heptameron, which was clearly inspired by The Decameron, but sadly it was unfinished by the time of her death.

    While she clearly took a personal pride in publishing her own writing, criticisms by the French clergy over “The Mirror of the Sinful Soul”, especially in the wake of the Day of the Placards, stung her enough that she rarely published anything after 1533. Over a decade later, she lost her beloved brother Francois. Their relationship had become somewhat strained, both by Francois reneging on his promise to work on restoring the stolen half of her husband’s kingdom and on the growing persecutions of the Huguenots and other so-called heretics that alarmed Marguerite. Still, when he died she wrote a poem lamenting his absence. It reads, “My life was filled with sugar and honey / when it was sustained by his, / but now it is nothing but absence and bitterness.” Perhaps it was the loss of the rest of her small family – Louise of Savoy had died in 1531 – that caused Marguerite to turn to the more mystical sides of Christianity. This alienated a few of her Protestant friends, including Jean Calvin, but Marguerite was never one to let others define her own understanding of God.

    One day in 1549, Marguerite may have watched as Haley’s Comet passed the Earth. If she did, she may have wondered if it was predicting her own death. Not long after she would have seen the comet, she did become sick with pneumonia so severe that she lost the ability to speak for several days. She died on December 1 that year at the age of 57.

    One of the women who knew her well was her lady-in-waiting, a young English noblewoman named Anne Boleyn. Anne would share both Marguerite’s reformist sympathies and her independent streak, although the latter played a role in getting her executed at the orders of her own husband, Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth would be very same future queen of England who would translate Marguerite’s own words as a present. Of course, such connections are easily explained by the frankly incestuous world of European high nobility and royalty. And yet, there is something in how closely connected these women were, like members of an intimate spiritual lineage.

    Marguerite seemed herself to stand astride both the old world and the new. Some of her religious sentiments like her fixation on arcane mysticism had a sense of the medieval, but she also showed an open-mindedness and a constant spiritual reevaluation and experimentation that made both Catholics and Protestants uncomfortable and revealed something of the modern. She served as a patron, a protector, and a political agent like any good queen since ancient times, but at the same time she had something of a career as a writer, whose works were so successful they set early sales records for the nascent print industry. I honestly think one can go so far as agree with the translator Samuel Putnam, who referred to Marguerite of Navarre as the “first modern woman.”

    Thank you for listening.

  • The Actual First Bible Translated into English (And The Man Who Died For It)

    The Actual First Bible Translated into English (And The Man Who Died For It)

    An Oxford grad and private tutor has a dream of making the first English Bible translated directly from Hebrew and Greek. Unfortunately, his ambition becomes a matter of life and death once his scholarly endeavors become just another front in the war to decide Europe’s religious future.

    Sources

    Daniell, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (Yale University Press, 2003).

    Foxe, John. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Selected Narratives, ed. John N. King (Oxford University Press, 2009).

    ___________.  William Tyndale: A Biography (Yale University Press, 1994).

    Moynahan, Brian. William Tyndale: If God Spare My Life (Abacus, 2002).

    Transcript

    The scholar from England prayed aloud as he was bound to the stake. The path of his destiny brought him from the halls of Oxford to London and finally to the old duchy of Burgundy, where his fate was discussed in the halls of power. Diplomats and ministers all either tried in vain to save him or signed off on his condemnation.  

    He had time to cry out to the watching crowd, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes!” before his very breath was cut off. The executioner strangled him with a rope before his body was to be burned as punishment for heresy. This was the only mercy that God or humanity granted him. But still, he must have thought, at least it was preferable to the flames.

    His body was burned, any bits of bone were smashed into powder, and the ashes were scattered, all to present anyone from claiming his remains as relics of martyrdom. It was too late though. Already his name had become a rallying cry, a watchword for resistance and defiance.

    What crime or revolutionary act did this man do? He translated a book.

    This is Turning Modern.

    One of the annoying things about us historians is that you can ask us a simple question and the odds aren’t bad that we’ll just answer, “Well, it depends on what you mean.” Case in point: what was the first English translation of the Bible? Well, it depends on what you mean by “English” and by “the Bible.” If you count Old English and any of the Books of the Bible, then it would be the monk Bede’s translation of the Gospel of John in the eighth century. According to legend, a century later King Alfred himself translated parts of Exodus and the Book of Psalms. There were other Old English translations of other parts of the Bible, including all four Gospels. There were also Middle English translations, but of just parts of the Old and New Testaments.

    Now if you mean the complete Bible in English, then that honor would go to the Bible translation made by John Wyclife in the fourteenth century. His translation was based on the version of the Bible used by the clergy of the Catholic Church for centuries, the Vulgate of St. Jerome, so named because it was written in the popularly spoken or vulgar version of the Latin.

    It wasn’t so much that the Catholic Church totally rejected all other versions of the Bible. They authorized translations for missionary purposes, like the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet in the ninth century to allow passages of the Bible to be written for Slavic readers. While that particular project had the backing of the Pope himself, though, there was still some opposition among the clergy, anxious that the Bible could be transmitted in a new and unfamiliar form.

    This fear grew more acute as Latin became a dead language – or more like an undead language that still shambled on as the language of the Church and diplomacy and scholarship, just not a language average people actually spoke – and vernacular languages becoming not just spoken but written as well. The thing is, the Catholic Church was right to be anxious over vernacular translations of the Bible. The first complete translation of the New Testament in a Western European vernacular language we know about was made in the twelfth century by the Waldensians, a heretical sect hounded by the Church. After all, translation is an art, not a science, and the act of interpretation itself can be inflammatory.

    Still, the Catholic Church itself never technically banned translations of the Bible. Like the punishment and execution of heretics, that was left to states, what the Church referred to as the “secular arm.” In the High Middle Ages, as literature written in vernacular languages became more common and as the Church reached the height of its power, laws against unauthorized biblical translations spread. In England, the so-called heretical movement sparked by John Wycliffe, the very same Wycliffe who produced the first English Bible translation, became the object of persecution. Wycliffe’s desire to make the Bible more accessible went hand in hand with his criticisms of the Catholic Church, especially papal authority. At the end of the fourteenth century, King Henry IV came to the throne by overthrowing his cousin Richard, so to secure his reign he felt obliged to get the Church on his side. Persecutions and executions for heresy in England had been rare until in 1400 Henry IV got the Parliament of England to pass a law cracking down on heretics, namely John Wycliffe’s followers, called the Lollards. The text of the law reads, “It is a dangerous thing, as witnesseth blessed St Jerome to translate the text of the holy Scripture out of one tongue into another, for in the translation the same sense is not always easily kept… We therefore decree and ordain, that no man, hereafter, by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue, by way of a book, libel or treatise; and that no man can read any such book, libel or treatise, now lately set forth in the time of John Wycliffe, or since, or hereafter to be set forth, in part or in whole, privily or apertly, upon pain of greater excommunication.”

    But even under the threat of being burned alive, the Lollards persisted, even if they did have to go underground. And it was perhaps inevitable, especially as the Middle English of John Wycliffe became increasingly incomprehensible to future generations, that someone else would take up the challenge of producing an English Bible. That man came from an unassuming gentry family in Gloucestershire in southwest England, William Tyndale. We don’t know much about his family and even the year of his birth, 1494, is just a guestimate. But his family must have been well-off as his brothers were a government official and a successful merchant based in London.    

    Tyndale doesn’t truly appear on the historical record until he became an undergraduate student at Oxford. He aspired to become a priest, but even at the university with England’s premier faculty of theology, according to his own writings Tyndale was quickly disillusioned at how the professors and his fellow students were much more interested in logical propositions derived from Aristotle’s philosophy than they were in the Bible itself. There were other reasons why Tyndale would have been disgruntled with the Catholic Church in general. He had to have known that the bishops of Worcester, who oversaw the pastoral care of Tyndale’s home community, were just absentee bishops. Three consecutive bishops of Worcester from 1512 on were Italians in Rome, who lived off the income that came from the office but never set foot on English soil, much less in their own diocese. Tyndale’s youth also coincided with the rise of the English church prelate Cardinal Wolsey, who essentially became the prime minister under the young King Henry VIII. Wolsey made so much money off the church and his worldly career he built a palace for himself more extravagant than any owned by the king. Later in life, Tyndale wrote scathingly about Wolsey, calling him “Wolfsee” and saying “this wily wolf, I say, and raging sea, and shipwreck of all England.”

    After Tyndale finished his Bachelors degree and spent the required year after graduation as a lecturer at Oxford, Tyndale chose not to continue his graduate studies there. Instead, he went to Cambridge, which at the time had a reputation as what we might call today Oxford’s safety school. For Tyndale, though, while Oxford was a stronghold for stale orthodoxy, Cambridge had a reputation for Lollard sympathies lurking just under the surface.

    It was an exciting but also frightening time for those like Tyndale who had serious doubts over the status quo. The Dutch humanist Erasmus, who had even taught at Cambridge for several years, published through the new printing press the first bilingual editions of the books of the New Testament, which had passages from St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate alongside the original Greek the New Testament was written in along with detailed scholarly annotations. Then a rebellious monk named Martin Luther made a stir with his highly publicized dispute with the Catholic Church itself. By 1522, Luther and his sympathizers translated the entire canonical Bible, also with annotations, into German from the original Hebrew and Greek. Tyndale had his inspiration.

    After completing his Masters at Cambridge, Tyndale took a job as a private tutor for a family of Welsh landowners back in Gloucestershire. His life was comfortable and he was well-liked, but the desire to become a preacher and possibly even more never left Tyndale. According to John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which is the only source for several details about Tyndale’s life, Tyndale cut his teeth on preaching at an open space in the nearby city of Bristol, a spot today called College Green.

    Eventually Tyndale left for London with just some savings, a letter of recommendation from his former employers, and a hope that he would find a patron who would help him fulfill his dream of writing an English translation of the entire Bible. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that a fair number of intellectuals at least tend to be not very skillful at dealing with people or politics. Tyndale was one such scholar. His first major contact in London was the bishop of London himself. He genuinely hoped that the bishop would sponsor him and use his authority to suspend the heresy law to allow the translation to be published. The bishop politely but firmly refused. Tyndale turned instead to a group of merchants who sympathized with Luther. They raised enough money for Tyndale to support himself and leave for Germany, where he could solicit support from the Lutherans themselves and work without fear of persecution. Either right away or eventually he set himself up in the city of Hamburg, where he began work on what you could call the first real English bible, since it was the first one translated into English directly from the original Hebrew and Greek. While he likely learned Greek from Cambridge, we don’t actually know where he learned Hebrew, which was still a difficult language to learn outside Europe’s Jewish communities. What we do know for sure is that Tyndale also taught himself German just so he could use Martin Luther’s German Bible as a resource along with Erasmus’ New Testament. What Tyndale did not use as a source was Wycliffe’s English translation. Tyndale wanted his work to be wholly original.

    Indeed it was. Perhaps only Shakespeare played a larger role in shaping modern English than Tyndale and his biblical translations. In fact, he created new words by combining existing ones and devised phrases still used today, so much so that some words and phrases are mistakenly attributed to him when they are older. It was Tyndale who combined two English words to come up with Passover as a name for the Jewish holiday of Pasech. In his bible Wycliffe had erroneously termed the holiday “Easter.”  He did the same to invent the word “scapegoat.” His translation also gave us the phrases “eat, drink, and be merry,” “the powers that be”, “sign of the times”, and “it came to pass”, among others.

    It was the originality of Tyndale’s translation that made it dangerous, so much so it vindicated the authorities’ concerns about new and unauthorized translations of scripture. The controversy was inflamed by Tyndale’s interpretations of two particular Greek words. He interpreted the Greek word ecclesia as “congregation” instead of “church.” This was a total rewriting of the verse Matthew 16:18, in which Jesus declared to the apostle Peter, “Upon this rock I will build my church.” The Catholic Church’s entire claim to special authority rested on this verse, since the Popes were held to be the successors of Peter. Take “church” out of the verse and arguably you take away the entire foundation stone for the papacy’s legitimacy.

    The other word was presbuteros. Traditionally it was seen as a Greek word for “priest.” Tyndale instead rendered it in English as “senior” or “elder.” This one simple word choice was also explosive. The implication was that the presbuteros referred to in the Bible was not meant to be a special elite but simply an experienced leader of their congregation. Of course, Tyndale’s translations were not made in a vacuum. His choices were informed by the Lollard and Lutheran ideas he harbored most of his life. Even so, through translation, he was making these choices historically and theologically defensible, presenting them as not just a difference of scholarly opinion but a much more authentic understanding of the original text.

    Tyndale started publishing his Bible as separate books, beginning with the New Testament in 1526 and then Genesis in 1530 with Tyndale also continuously producing revised editions. Like the Waldensian bibles, these were published in slim volumes that people could easily carry with them – and easily hide from hostile eyes if necessary. Of course, Tyndale couldn’t just have his volumes of the Bible printed in England. Instead, he went to the northern German city of Cologne, which had already become a major center for the burgeoning book industry. The city was ruled by an archbishop and any book published there needed his permission to be legally printed, but since it was a publication by a foreign author in a foreign language, it was not difficult to get around the law. Tyndale turned to other publishers, soon relocating to the city of Antwerp, He hoped to eventually provide a translation of the entire Bible, the first directly translated into English.

    His books were contraband and copies were publicly burned, with authorities having to rather awkwardly explain that they weren’t burning true copies of the books of the Bible, just deliberate heretical mistranslation. Already in 1526 when Tyndale’s New Testament just started appearing in England the bishop of London, the same one Tyndale tried approaching, issued a proclamation banning copies of Tyndale’s translation, declaring, “Many children of iniquity, maintainers of Luther’s sect, blinded through extreme wickedness and wandering from the way of truth and the catholic faith, craftily have translated the New Testament into our English tongue, intermeddling therewith many heretical articles and erroneous opinions …”

    Tyndale’s most ferocious enemy was Thomas More, who had taken the place of Cardinal Wolsey as King Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor after Wolsey fell spectacularly from grace when he failed to secure papal support for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to his queen Catherine of Aragon over her not producing a male heir. More had a personal revulsion for Lollards and Lutherans, and he used his position to escalate persecutions and executions of heretics. He singled out Tyndale and his bibles, snarkily declaring that finding errors in Tyndale’s translations was like finding water in the sea.

    However valid or biased More’s criticisms were, it wasn’t really Tyndale’s academic cred that was at issue. In his biography of Tyndale, Brian Moynahan explains the big deal this way: “The real horror of Tyndale’s Testament to the Church was not so much the words in themselves, however, but that they were English words. As heretical polemic moved out of Latin and into the vernacular, the whole of English society was open to the infection; and one book, passed from hand to hand, read out aloud by a literate to a company of illiterates, and spread by them in turn, could infect a multitude.” One conservative opponent of Tyndale put it this way, remarking on the impact Tyndale’s translations were already having: “Even silly little women want to pass judgment on the Bible as they might on their needle and thread.”

    Henry VIII was no friend of the reformers. He wanted the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to his mistress Anne Boleyn to be recognized in and outside of England. And, into the bargain, he wanted to be the sole head of the Church of England and break away from papal authority, but he still had no tolerance for the theological claims of men like Tyndale or Luther. So More’s efforts to have Tyndale brought back to England or persecuted on the continent had the king’s full support. Then there was Emperor Charles V, whose realms included Germany and the Netherlands. Charles V also wanted to root out Lutheranism and his aunt happened to be Henry VIII’s ex Catherine of Aragon. But still as an English national Tyndale had support among some of Henry VIII’s officials and among the English merchant community in Brussels, Tyndale was a huge diplomatic snafu in the making for Charles V.

    For the time being, though, Tyndale was safe. He hid out in the so-called English House in Antwerp, which city officials had given to the English merchant community. Essentially, the English House functioned as an embassy, and nobody wanted the legal and diplomatic headaches that would come from trying to force someone out. Unfortunately, for all his work with the Bible, Tyndale did not recognize a Judas when he saw one. This Judas went by the name of Henry Philipps. Like Tyndale himself, Henry Philipps was an Oxford graduate who came from a respectable and well-off family. His father was a landowner, a customs official, and a Member of Parliament prominent enough to have been invited to the wedding of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Unlike Tyndale, for whatever reason Philipps’ life fell apart after he graduated. He lived off any scraps he could beg off or steal from his relatives and friends. Then, suddenly, he came into some money from an unknown source. He arrived at Brussels and enrolled in the University of Louvain, which was known to be a hotbed of reactionary Catholic sentiment. Philipps himself was a devout Catholic, hostile toward Luther and Henry VIII as well. One day, Philipps convinced Tyndale to leave the English House to go to dinner at a restaurant. While they were walking down a narrow ally, Tyndale was ambushed and taken into custody.

    Obviously someone paid Henry Philipps, who disappears from the historical record after this point. But who? Brian Moynahan argues that it was likely Thomas More, but the evidence is circumstantial. If More was behind it, then ironically at almost the same time More himself was sitting in a jail cell, imprisoned for refusing to recognize King Henry VIII as the Head of the Church of England. He would be beheaded, becoming a martyr for Catholics just as Tyndale would become a martyr for Protestants.

    For over a year, Tyndale was kept in prison at the castile of Vilvoorde not far outside of Brussels. Henry VIII’s new right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell, make some effort to secure Tyndale’s release, but complicating matters was that Tyndale was not only a heretic, but was also critical of Henry VIII’s marriage annulment and marriage to Anne Boleyn. Charles V and his officials also dithered, afraid that the ever unpredictable Henry VIII would end up siding with Charles’ archenemy King Francois of France. In the end, though, Tyndale would die.

    Of course Tyndale himself would have probably preferred to live, but I suspect he would also be sorely disappointed to learn that he never got to finish the entire Bible and that the King James Bible would overtake his translation in fame. Still, a modern study found that the majority of words used in the King James Bible were still taken from Tyndale’s translations, with some major exceptions. For example, the King James Bible went back to translating ecclesia as “church”, since the new Church of England had its own legitimacy that had to be traced back to the Apostles of Jesus.

    At the very least, though, I think a language nerd like Tyndale was would be delighted to learn that it’s impossible to avoid his fingerprints in the language English-speakers talk today.

  • The Drop-Out Who Destroyed a Society

    The Drop-Out Who Destroyed a Society

    In 1519, Europeans made their first diplomatic contact with an urbanized empire in the Americas—and, within a few years, that empire will no longer exist, in no small part because of a failed law student from Spain.

    Sources

    Cortés, Hernán. Letters from Mexico, trans. A.R. Pagden  (Orion Books, 1971).

    Florentine Codex, vol. 9, trans. Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, rev. ed.  (School of American Research, 1973).

    Gómara, Francisco López de. Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (University of California Press, 1964),

    Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford University Press, 2003).

    Townsend, Richard F. The Aztecs, rev. ed.  (Thames & Hudson, 2000).

    Transcript

    Today the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe watches over the Plaza of the Americas in Mexico City. Countless pilgrims come there to see the centerpiece, an image of the Virgin Mary, as it has done since 1531. Although a newer building was constructed next to the old church in 1976 and claimed the Virgin Mary’s holy icon for itself, the older basilica not only still stands but remains open to visitors. However, the entire church hides something of a secret. It was built at the site a temple sacred to the goddess Tonantzin, the “Honored Grandmother” who presided over fertility. This is far from the only case of Christianity placing a thin veneer over older religious practice, but it is perhaps more appropriate than most. More than a place for Catholics to prove their devotion to the mother of Jesus Christ, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe remains a patriotic symbol for Mexico.

    The very name of the country of Mexico refers to the society that once worshipped Tonatzin, the Aztecs. The story of how the Aztecs’ empire ended was not a simple one of enemy armies swooping into their land. Instead it was the preposterous story of how circumstance and the decisions of one man, who was acting against the orders of his superiors the entire time, devastated an entire civilization.

    This is Turning Modern.

    Contrary to his reputation as a conqueror, Hernán Cortez was born a chronically ill child, who seemed destined to become a  clerk or a member of the church. In truth, he was too unmanageable to be made into a decent student, although he did learn quite a bit about law from the years he spent working as a notary. Cortez came back home as arguably the sixteenth-century Spanish equivalent of a college dropout. Yet while he wasn’t going to become a secretary for some prominent nobleman or a magistrate working for the monarchy, Cortez still had ambitions that were inflamed by the stories coming about a sailor named Christopher Columbus and lands unknown to both the Bible and the ancients.

    Using his family connections, Cortez seized on the first opportunity to go to the New World. Eventually he got a job as a notary and secretary for the governor of Cuba, Diego Velazquez. Cortez went far enough to secure his position in the new colony that he married Velazquez’s sister-in-law. However, being a man on the rise in a new colony was not enough for Cortez, although he may have also been motivated to leave Cuba because relations with Velasquez were starting to go south. In any case, Cortez worked hard to get appointed the commander of an expedition into Mexico, especially since he was interested in the rumors that there were vast hordes of gold and silver to be found there.

    The risks were incalculable. Just two years ago, members of one Spanish expedition into the Yucatan ended with the expedition’s members getting massacred. However, the possible rewards were enough that Cortez easily found a crew of around one hundred men. Along with religious missionaries, their ranks included professional mercenaries, younger sons of noblemen shouldered out of their inheritance by older brothers, and less distinguished men who were simply desperate or greedy for wealth and land.

    Velasquez signed off on the mission at first, but Cores had gone too far. Velasquez attempted to recall the expedition, but Cortez shrugged off the order, even though it made him guilty of mutiny. Instead, Cortez used his knowledge of the law to start building a case that he was acting directly under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V, and not a mere colonial governor.

    From this point on the true story is buried under layers of myth, legend, and outright propaganda. One persistent claim would have it that the natives that Cortez came across were overawed by the strange men from across the sea who seemed connected to blindingly fast beasts with four legs, so much so they thought the god Quetzalcoatl had returned to reclaim his kingdom. This is nonsense; the Aztecs could easily understand that the Spanish were simply a people they had never encountered before. Now it does seem to be true that the Aztecs were frightened by horses and were at a disadvantage because of the Aztecs’ steel armor and guns.

    Cortez had help, though. The first was the greatest ally of Cortez and all would-be conquerors of the Americas from Europe, the disease of smallpox, which preyed on the American populations that had no natural defense against it. Some modern estimates hold that smallpox claimed as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas. A possible eyewitness account of the outbreak of the plague from an Aztec perspective might have been preserved in the Florentine Codex, which was written by a Franciscan friar decades after Cortez arrived in the Americas but was drawing on the testimonies of indigenous converts to Christianity. It reads, “But before the Spaniards had risen against us, first there was prevalent a great sickness, a plague. […] No longer could they walk; they only lay in their abodes, in their beds. […] There was death from hunger; there was no one to take care of another; there was no one to attend to another.”

    Fate also put essential allies on Cortez’ path. Cortez came across a friar named Geronimo de Aguilar. Stranded by a shipwreck, he was captured by some Mayans and escaped, but not before he learned the local Mayan language. Then a local Aztec leader gave Cortez twenty enslaved women. One of them as Malintzin, who became remembered with notoriety as La Malinche, who spoke both the Mayan Chontal language and the Aztec language of Nahuatl. With her help as a translator, Cortez was able to negotiate and strike deals with local leaders.

    This made Cortez especially dangerous. The Aztecs’ authority was built on the obedience, grudging or otherwise, of regional chieftains. Some were only kept in line by the threat of force. This was probably why the emperor of the Aztecs, Moctezuma II, made the move he did. In a decision still debated by historians, Moctezuma didn’t send an army to crush Cortez and his band, but instead a formal delegation to invite them to come to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. This was his way of containing the threat, especially as it was undeniable that the presence of the Spanish was already sending ripples through the Aztecs’ delicate system of alliances and vassals. His greed inflamed by the extravagant gifts offered by the delegates, Cortez agreed to go, leaving some of his men behind to guard the territory they occupied in modern-day Veracruz.

    In his letters back to Spain, Cortez expressed astonishment over Tenochtitlan, a vast, well-populated city built over a lake, its streets and buildings interlaced with canals and connected with countless bridges. He writers, “The city is so big and so remarkable that, although is much I could say of it which I shall omit, the little I will say is, I think, almost unbelievable, for the city is much larger than Granada and very much stronger, with as good buildings and many more people than Granada had when it was taken.”

    Less positive was their impression of the Aztec priests who staffed the temples. A memoir written by one of Cortez’ comrades, Bernal Diaz, writes this: “They wore black cloaks like cassocks and long gowns reaching to their feet. Some had hoods like those worn by canons, and others had smaller hoods like those of Dominicans, and they wore their hair very long, right down to their waist, and some had it even reaching down to the ankles. Their hair was covered with blood, and so matted together that it could not be separated, and their ears were cut to pieces by way of penance. They stank like sulfur and they had another bad smell like carrion.”

    There’s no doubt this account was biased, but it does raise an issue worth addressing given the way people have been, let’s say, using history in recent years: the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. I don’t want to argue the point, so let me just have an interlude with a hypothetical of sorts. Let’s say there’s a parallel world where the Aztecs colonized Europe or at least they colonized Portugal and Spain. In other words, it’s a world where the Sunset Conquest took place; people who are fans of Crusader Kings will know what I’m talking about. In their version of the 21st century, the descendants of the Aztecs gave up human sacrifice centuries ago, and their political commentators and scholars are having their own debates over how the Aztec colonization of Europe should be viewed. Some still hold the traditionalist view that the Aztecs brought civilization to Iberia. After all, their descendants may have sacrificed humans to the gods, but these Spanish and Portuguese, they had crowds watch while people were burned alive just because they were accused of secretly worshipping their god the wrong way or they loved people of the same sex.

    That’s just something to keep in perspective if one is tempted to think a society was better off experiencing a Hernán Cortez.

    Anyway, let’s get back to Cortez himself, who is about to have his first meeting with Moctezuma. The first meeting is recounted in Cortez’ letters: “And they were all dressed alike except that Moctezuma wore sandals whereas the others went barefoot; and they held his arm on either side. When we met I dismounted and stepped forward to embrace him, but the two lords who were with him stopped me with their hands so that I should not touch him; and they likewise all performed the ceremony of kissing the earth.”

    For two weeks Cortez through his interpreters negotiated with Moctezuma, trying to get him to acknowledge Charles V as his God-given sovereign. Matters came to a head when he heard reports of a violent clash between his men in Veracruz and some locals, which made him believe that Moctezuma was trying to cut Cortez off from the rest of his forces, or so he would later claim. Whatever the exact truth, Cortez tricked Moctezuma into giving him a private audience in his chambers, giving his men the opportunity to take Moctezuma hostage. After several tense days, Moctezuma gave in. He would allow Christian worship to take place in the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan and would acknowledge Charles V as his overlord. With a hint of genuine sympathy, Cortez’s secretary, Francisco Lopez da Gomara, described the speech Moctezuma gave to an assembly of the Aztec elite:

    “You will please me by giving yourselves to this captain as vassals of the Emperor and King of Spain, our sovereign lord, to whom I have already submitted as his servant and friend. And I implore you to obey him henceforth, as you have obeyed me, and give and render him the tributes, taxes, and services that you have rendered me, for you cannot give me greater pleasure.” Moctezuma could say no more, because of his tears and sobs, and all the people wept so bitterly that for a good while they could not even answer him. They sighed and groaned so heavily that they even moved the hearts of our men; but in the end they said they would do as he commanded.”

    Moments like this is why in some historical narratives Moctezuma is seen as a cowardly dupe, cowed and outmaneuvered at every turn by the Spanish. Rather, I think this was a deliberate move to get the Spanish to press their luck too far. He might have also been aware that Cortez had got disturbing news. Velasquez sent a small army to capture Cortez and bring him back to Cuba to be tried for insubordination and treason. Reluctantly, Cortez again split his forces, leading some of his men to confront Velasquez’s squad while leaving one of his lieutenants, Pedro de Alvarado, in charge in Tenochtitlan.

    For reasons lost in the chaos – either Alvarado had been acting out of fear and hatred or he had been tricked by one of the Aztecs’ native enemies – he ordered a massacre of the Aztec people during a religious festival. The Florentine Codex, again likely using the words of an Aztec eyewitness, says, “And the blood of the brave warriors ran like water; it was as if it lay slippery. [. . .] And the Spaniards went everywhere as they searched in the. . . [buildings]. Everywhere they went making thrusts as they searched, in case someone had taken refuge.”

    The manhandling of their monarch was bad enough; the massacre of most of the empire’s nobles in the middle of one of the holiest festivals on the calendar was too much. The inhabitants of Tenochtitlan came out in force, pelting any of the Spanish they saw with stones and darts. Cortez had beaten Velasquez’s squad, only to return to a city that had slipped into chaos. At his urging, Moctezuma stood above the mob on a palace parapet, wearing the turquoise crown, begging for calm from his people. His subjects responded with furious shouts and with stones, one of which dealt a fatal blow to his head. Falling back, Moctezuma’s Spanish jailers hurried him to his bed where he would linger in agony for three days. Cortez and his priests tried to convince him to convert to Christianity, but Moctezuma died a believer in the gods of his ancestors. In his imagining of Moctezuma’s final moments, the writer Arthur Miller, in his play The Golden Years, has Moctezuma turn on his deathbed to a remorseful Cortez who hopes to atone for his crimes by saving the emperor’s soul and quip, “Your god is bloodier than mine.”

    Not long after Moctezuma breathed his last, the Spanish were driven out of Tenochtitlan by its people. This might have marked the moment when destiny finally turned against Cortez, but unfortunately, he was saved by his most precious ally, smallpox. The potential leaders of the empire who were not slain in Alvarado’s massacre, including Moctezuma’s brother and successor, were mostly killed by the plague. Soon enough, Tenochtitlan and the entire Aztec Empire would be claimed and remade by the Spanish.

    Was all this inevitable? How much of a part did one man, a failed law student named Hernán Cortez, play in the downfall of not just an empire but a society? If you go by scholars who are of the persuasion that geography and environment shape history, it was indeed inevitable. Any meeting of the peoples of the Old World and the New would have ended in violence, which the Old World was geared by circumstance to win. I don’t agree. Not just because I find such understandings of history to be callous and simply wrong, but because I just don’t believe in inevitabilities in history. What if someone other than Cortez had made first contact with the Aztecs, leading not to conquest but to agreements, albeit rather unequal agreements, similar to those reached between the Congolese and the Portuguese? I could be wrong. Even before the discovery of the Americas, Charles V already had pretenses of becoming the world emperor worthy of biblical prophecy, and the brutality of the European colonization of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean had already set the tone for what was to come.

    But that’s the thing about counterfactuals. You can never be completely sure; don’t trust anyone who says history ran a predictable course. After all, who can say we actually do live in the best of all possible worlds?  

  • 5/30 Update

    5/30 Update

  • Primary Source Reading: I Modi

    Primary Source Reading: I Modi

    I Modi is the first published book to be censored by order of the Catholic Church. It wasn’t so much its sexual explicitness that drew the ire of the Pope, but the book’s joyful celebration of sex without procreation, among other things. Support the show on Patreon here to hear it.

    Source Read: Romano, Giulio; Raimondi, Marcantonio; Aretino, Pietro; and Waldeck, Count Jean-Frederic-Maximilien. I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance, trans. and ed. Lynne Lawner (Northwestern University Press, 1988).

    For The Episode: The Erotic Publication That Scandalized Renaissance Europe

  • Primary Source Reading: The Articles of the Peasants of Stühlingen

    Primary Source Reading: The Articles of the Peasants of Stühlingen

    In 1524, the peasants of Stühlingen came up with 62 written articles of complaint to be submitted to the imperial courts of the Holy Roman Empire. This articles represented, though, grievances peasants across Germany had with the clergy and the nobility, which would explode into the German Peasants’ War. Support the show on Patreon to hear it here.

    Source read: The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents, eds. Tom Scott and Bob Scribner (Humanities Press International, Inc., 1991).

    For the episode: The German Peasant Who Almost Started a Revolution

  • Martin Luther on Trial

    Martin Luther on Trial

    Martin Luther braves persecution by the Church to come to the city of Worms to have his case heard by Emperor Charles V. In this contest between a reviled monk who is the son of a mine owner and a monarch whose empire spans an ocean, the victor is perhaps not the person one would normally expect…

    Sources

    Gregory, Brad S. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard University Press, 2012).

    Luther, Martin. Works: Letters I, vol. 48, ed. and trans. Gottfried G. Krodel (Fortress Press, 1963).

    Parker, Geoffrey. Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press, 2019).

    Roper, Lyndal. Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (Penguin Random House, 2016).

    Transcript

    On a spring day in 1521, a crowd of over 2,000 clogged the streets of the German city of Worms. Many of them were locals, but some had travelled from other towns and regions, just to catch a glimpse of the man who would be arriving.

    A wagon slowly weaved around the hordes of people. Suddenly, it stopped. The man who stepped out of it before the curious and admiring gazes of dozens of people was no king or general or bishop, but a monk and professor of theology whose father owned some copper mines. Even so, people across Europe from peasants to nobles now knew his name: Martin Luther. Once Luther had left the carriage, another monk emerged from the mob and embraced him like an old friend. He also touched his robes three times, like a petitioner hoping for a blessing from a saint.

    Someone who may have glimpsed Martin Luther’s arrival without knowing who he was or why he was there might have guessed that it was a joyous occasion. Instead, Luther was there to be judged before the most powerful man in Europe, Emperor Charles V. If Luther felt any genuine terror in that moment, no one knew but him. As far as his confidents knew, Luther would dive into the lion’s den without hesitation. In fact, he was even prepared to become a martyr.

    This is Turning Modern.

    According to Martin Luther himself, it was a thunderstorm that put him on the path to becoming one of the chief architects of the modern world. When he was a law student and traveling home to visit his family, he was caught in a severe summer thunderstorm near the village of Stotternheim. Likely because his father Hans owned several copper mines, Luther cried out to Saint Anna, the patron saint of miners, and swore that he would become a monk if he survived the storm. And that is exactly what Martin Luther did. In a sign of the defiance he would show throughout his life, he became a monk against the wishes of his stern father, who wanted him to become a lawyer who could represent their family’s interests. It should be said, though, that Martin did everything he could to avoid seeing his father for months after he went to a monastery. As Martin Luther’s modern biographer Lyndal Roper remarks, Luther’s “first step was the rebellion against his father.”

    While his decision to become a monk was likely also motivated by Luther’s lifelong struggles with depression and the recent death of a close friend, there really isn’t much of a reason to doubt Luther’s sincerity here, especially because that part of Germany was known for its violent thunderstorms in the summer. As he settled into the monastic life and rose through the ranks to become a professor of theology, Luther continued to be haunted by depression and the sense that he was awash with sin, much to the chagrin of his confessor, who had to endure Martin Luther’s hours-long, guilt-soaked confessions.

    Eventually Luther’s critical eye turned away from himself and toward the church, especially because of the practice of selling documents promising the remission of sins, called indulgences. Historians now tend to agree that Luther didn’t actually nail his famous Ninety-Five Theses criticizing the Church to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg. Still, the Ninety-Five Theses were written with the purpose to start scholarly debates, and when they were disseminated through the newfangled technology of the printing press, they immediately provoked the ire of the Church. Luther himself seems to have genuinely had no idea how much controversy he was stirring up.

    Further writings published by Luther added fuel to the fire, both by giving his enemies in the Church ammunition and by making him famous across Germany. As we saw in the previous episode about Hans Behem and the peasant revolt that almost was, Germany had long been simmering with widespread resentment against the Church. For centuries the Church had clashed with Germany’s rulers, the Holy Roman Emperors. Also Germans were well aware that the tithes they paid to the Church more often than not went to funding the papacy’s construction projects in Rome or wars between the Papal States and their Italian rivals. The fact members of the upper ranks of the clergy and independent monasteries were also secular princes, more so in Germany than anywhere else in Europe, made the clergy a particularly unwelcome and burdensome presence in many Germans’ lives, from the members of city councils to the peasantry. One might say that it wasn’t so shocking that Martin Luther became such an overnight sensation, but that a Martin Luther didn’t come along sooner even without help from the printing press.

    In any case, Luther’s story might have turned out very differently if he didn’t have a powerful protector, one of the leading princes of Germany, Elector Frederick III of Saxony. When Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther and Luther kept publishing works critical of the Church, it was Frederick III who kept Luther from being packed off to Rome. Frederick arranged to have Luther’s case put before not the Pope, but the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles V was the most powerful monarch the world had ever seen, at least on paper. Through lucky accidents of marriage and birth and political maneuvering, his family had gone from being upstarts on the brink of political extinction to one of the great powerplayers in Europe, claiming not just the office of Holy Roman Emperor but Austria, Naples, Sicily, the modern-day Netherlands and Belgium, Spain, and Spain’s colonies in South and Central America. Unfortunately, this meant Charles was stuck with the unenviable task of running a flimsy patchwork empire, comprised of peoples who all had their own languages, laws, and political institutions and traditions. Making it worse for him was the fact that Charles V was, in the words of Dirk Hoffman-Becking, host of the excellent History of the Germans podcast, “just an average man.”

    Even when the exact magnitude of what Luther would create was far from clear, the disgraced monk already posed a challenge to Charles V’s already overtaxed mind. The papal representative was already calling on Charles V to condemn Luther was a heretic, and alienating the papacy was dangerous since the Pope could side with Charles V’s most powerful rival, King Francois I of France. But on the other hand, the office of Holy Roman Emperor was an elective one, and to help ensure his own recent election Charles V had made a number of concessions to the German princes. One of these was promising that no subject of theirs would be put on trial before a foreign court, and that included the papal court in Rome. Besides that, Charles V was well-aware that Luther was already a celebrity in Germany. Having him killed risked a massive revolt, and since Charles V was already dealing with violent resistance in his dominions in Spain, he could ill-afford to fight rebellions on two separate fronts. Charles V’s advisors also saw in Luther a potential weapon that could be used to bring the Pope to heel, if need be.

    So, when Frederick III asked Charles V to allow Luther to be heard at a planned meeting of the German princes at Worms and to give him a safe conduct, Charles V agreed. It was a decision supported by most of his advisors, but the papal ambassador Girolamo Aleandro was, of course, outraged. During an argument with one of Charles V’s advisors, he prophetically warned, “You will soon see such a fire that all the water in your North Sea will not extinguish it.”

    When Luther heard that the emperor had granted him an opportunity to plead his case at Worms, he told his correspondents that he would not go if the emperor was just going to browbeat him into repenting. If ,on the other hand, he was going to be condemned and executed, he was willing to become a martyr. This was not a remote possibility. Everyone knew very well the case of Jan Hus, a Czech priest also accused of heresy by the Church and who was also promised a safe conduct so he could appear before the Holy Roman Emperor, only to be arrested and burned at the stake.

    Once Luther arrived for his hearing, he was brusquely told by the imperial marshal to answer as briefly as possible, an order that Luther would characteristically ignore. Then he was brought into a large, packed meeting hall. There were up to a thousand people present, not just foreign ambassadors, members of the clergy, German princes or their representatives, and members of the imperial family and court, but also locals from the city and average people who could afford to make the trip. Charles V himself sat on a raised dais, directly facing where Luther spoke. The theologian Johann Eck, who had been a friend of Martin Luther but in recent years had turned into one of his harshest critics, was there, representing the emperor. He pointed toward a pile of books on a bench, all written by Luther since the Church condemned the Ninety-Five Theses, and asked in Latin and then German if Luther had written these books. A theology professor who was acting as a defense attorney of sorts for Luther shouted that the titles of the books should be read for everyone assembled. With that, Eck read out the titles and a brief summary of each one. When he was done Luther cracked a joke: “You haven’t mentioned all my books!”

    Ignoring the jibe, Eck asked again in both Latin and German if he would admit to writing these books, and if he did write them, if he would recant of what they said. Observers remarked that Luther appeared anxious. He responded at first by swearing loyalty to the emperor. Then he admitted that he wrote the books, but as for the second question, he asked the emperor to grant him another day so he could consider his answer because “this is a question of faith and the salvation of souls, and because it concerns the divine Word, which we are all bound to reverence, for there is nothing greater in heaven or on earth.”  Charles withdrew from the court to consult with Eck and his advisors. Returning after some time, he granted Luther’s request.

    It was a delaying tactic. Luther had actually been informed beforehand what he would be asked. In fact, he was annoyed at the lack of a real debate. In one letter, Luther complained that he expected that an army of theologians would face him in a rhetorical battle. Instead, he was, in his own words, just asked, “Are these your books? Yes. Do you want to renounce them or not? No. Then go away!” Anxious and disgruntled as he was, at least Luther enjoyed accommodations near where the Diet was held that were worthy of a nobleman. In fact, it was the same building several distinguished knights were also staying in. Meanwhile the papal delegate Aleandro was stuck in a shabby, poorly heated room. It was a subtle but clear sign of where many people’s sympathies really laid.

    The next day, Luther was not called into the Diet until the late afternoon. When he arrived, he was brought to an even larger hall lit only by several torches and that was so crowded with spectators that even some of the German princes had to stand. Even then, he had to wait for two hours while delegates debated on the topic of administrative reforms. Finally, though, the audience got to see the main event. Luther was again asked if he wrote these books and if he recanted what he wrote. Speaking in Latin and then repeating himself in German, Luther began by apologizing to the emperor for being a man not used to the imperial court, but only life in a monastery. Then he moved on to his actual answer. He admitted he wrote the books, but he quickly added that the books were all written with different purposes in mind. Some he wrote just to explain God’s word in plain language, some to criticize what he saw as abuses in the Church and the papacy, and some he had written to argue against defenders of the papacy. He could not recant what he wrote in the first category of books since they were just reflecting biblical teachings, remarking “even my enemies themselves are compelled to admit that these are useful, harmless, and clearly worthy to be read by Christians.” As for his writings about papal tyranny, well, if he was compelled to recant of those writings, it would only vindicate his own criticisms of said papal tyranny. With his usual acidic wit, Luther added that he just did not want to “add strength” to allegations of papal tyranny, “especially if it should be reported that this evil deed had been done by me by virtue of the authority of your most serene majesty and of the whole Roman Empire”. When Luther declared that the “whole German Nation was vexed and oppressed in Rome”, Charles V, who had been silent up until now, became irritated and ordered Luther to move on.

    This time, Luther complied. As for the third kind of book, Luther could not repent of those either, because he hadn’t written anything in those that went against Scripture. Sure, he admitted that he might have been more vicious in his writing than was appropriate for a Christian, but, Luther added, “I do not set myself up as a saint.” If anyone there could prove that he had erred against the Word of God, Luther would be the first to throw his books into the flames. Otherwise, “he would not retract a single word he had written.” Then Luther addressed the emperor directly, pleading with him to allow his works to continue to be published.  

    It was now Eck’s turn to speak. He countered by saying “that everything that [Luther] admitted writing in his books. …was heresy that had long since been condemned by [church] councils” and ‘for that reason there was no point in discussing something that had already been discussed, declared to be evil, reproved and condemned by the Church, which had issued holy decrees and very good decisions on the matter:. Rather than just being defensible interpretations of Scripture, Luther’s writings instead claimed, according to Eck, that “we must believe that our predecessors for the past thousand years were heretics and were not saved; and it would be reckless and a great error to think that one man, with little authority, wanted to condemn so many good Christians.”  At this, Luther fired back with one of the most famous speeches in history: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” An account published by his supporters added these famous words that were not included in the original transcripts of the Diet of Worms: “I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me. Amen.’ Whatever Luther actually said in that moment, it caused the emperor to interrupt the proceedings again. Charles V had been raised in Burgundy with French as his main language and his German and Latin were both not up to par. Nonetheless, Charles V understood all he needed to. He stood up and declared, “That is enough: I do not wish to hear any more from someone who denied the authority of the councils!”

    Luther’s appeal to his conscience has often been seen as a pivotal moment in history, and rightfully so. Still, Lyndel Roper warns us that we shouldn’t interpret what Luther was talking about in a modern sense. Luther was not talking about a moral and strongly felt but still technically subjective stance, like what we might mean by “conscience.” He saw himself not as presenting a new interpretation of Christianity, but as fighting for the true understanding of the Christian Gospels.  This is what Roper means when she writes, “When Luther said his conscience was ‘captive to the Word of God’ he meant that it could not be moved or altered; he ‘knew’ with his whole being — mind and emotion — what God’s Word was, and could not deny it.” In his writings, Luther explicitly condemned the notion of an individual interpretation of Scripture. For him, there was only the truth of God’s Word and corruptions of it. I don’t doubt Luther would be horrified to learn about the present-day situation in my country of the United States, where even in a small-ish city you might find all within walking distance churches belonging to four or five different denominations, at least. Even so, in Luther’s own lifetime other would-be reformers were publishing their own challenges to his doctrine. If enough people claim that they know the truth but their truths all look different from one another, then the distinction between what’s truth and what’s individual opinion really just doesn’t matter anymore. Further, it’s a thin line between the kind of conscientious stand Luther made and one made for a secular cause, like democratic freedom or a particular understanding of human rights. Regardless of what Luther meant, it’s really not unreasonable to draw a straight line between Luther’s defiant declaration of conscience and modern ideas of the individual and subjectivity.

    The significance of what happened in that moment does not seem to have been lost on Luther and his supporters and enemies. The Elector Frederick later said that Luther “spoke well”, but added that “he is too bold for me.” After Charles V stormed out of the hall and the German princes began leaving the chamber themselves, the imperial court’s Spanish attendants tried blocking the doors, shouting, “Burn him! Burn him!” However, Luther’s German supporters swarmed around him and carried him out of the hall on their shoulders. As he was carried out of the building, Luther made to the crowds the same gesture German knights typically made when they won a joust. His allies also remarked that Luther’s anxieties and fears seem to have dissipated and he was unusually cheerful after the day’s events. Still, Luther didn’t press his luck. He quickly left Worms before there was any chance his safe conduct might expire or be revoked. In the middle of Luther’s travels, Frederick III had his agents kidnap Luther after a faked highway robbery. Luther was secretly set up in Wartburg Castle, isolated in the mountains of Thuringia. There Luther would remain for almost a year. Before then, Luther did write a letter addressed to Charles V, assuring him that he would have recanted if someone had just convinced him that his interpretation of Scripture was wrong. He concluded with a plea: “I beg Your Sacred Majesty once more for Christ’s sake not to allow me to be crushed by my enemies, to suffer violence and be condemned since I have so often made myself available, as is becoming to a Christian and obedient man.” Charles V never saw the letter because no one dared give it to him.

    Charles V himself was so disturbed by Luther’s defiance that he spent that night writing a response. In it, he argued that he had a sacred obligation to defend the Church because he was descended from several royal houses that were all famous for defending the true faith. He then wrote, “I am entirely determined to dedicate my kingdoms and lordships, my friends, my body, my blood, my life and my soul” to battling heresy. He continued that to permit “heresy or a diminution of the Christian religion to rest in the hearts of men through our own negligence would bring permanent dishonour on us and our successors. Having heard the perverse reply that Luther gave yesterday in the presence of all of us, I tell you now that I regret having delayed so long before proceeding against him and his false doctrine, and I have decided to hear no more from him.” After that, Charles V signed the Edict of Worms, which made Luther an outlaw, forbade anyone to give him a place to stay or to eat with him, and outlawed publications of his writings. By the time copies of the Edict were distributed, though, Luther was already safe in Wartburg Castle.  

    Both the Church and the emperor had now declared war on Luther, so his supporters were surprised that he remained cheerful in the following weeks. Perhaps Luther knew that he had already won, despite all the forces arrayed against him. If so, Luther wouldn’t have been the only one who glimpsed this. One of Charles’ Spanish secretaries, Ifonso de Valdes, said as much when he wrote after the issuing of the Edict of Worms, “Some imagine that this marks the end of the tragedy, but I believe it is not the end but the beginning. I see that the minds of the Germans are very agitated against the pope; and I also see that they do not attach much weight to the emperor’s edicts, because as soon as Luther’s books see the light of day, they are sold constantly and with impunity in every street and square. You can easily conjecture what will happen as soon as the emperor departs.”

    Thank you for listening.