Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (32 page)

And finally, speaking of races, let us not forget the most famous statement in our literature about the salutary humility—even the resulting freedom—we might obtain by admitting that the universe does not respect our preferences, and often operates on random pathways with regard to our hopes and intentions. The death of the dodo really doesn’t make sense in moral terms,
and didn’t have to occur. If we own this contingency of actual events, we might even learn to prevent the recurrence of undesired results. For the Preacher of Ecclesiastes wrote: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong . . . but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

THE DIET OF WORMS AND THE DEFENESTRATION OF PRAGUE

I
ONCE ATE AN ANT (CHOCOLATE COVERED) ON A DARE.
I
HAVE NO AWFUL
memories of the experience, but I harbor no burning desire for a repeat performance. I therefore feel poor Martin Luther’s pain when, at the crux of his career, in April 1521, he devoted ten days to the Diet of Worms (washed down with a good deal of wine, or so I read).

I am
a collector by nature, and mental drawers have more room for phrases and facts than physical cabinets maintain for specimens. I therefore reserve one cranial shelf for the best funny or euphonious phrases of history. “The Diet of Worms” remains my prize specimen, but I award second place to another D-phrase of European history: “the Defenestration of Prague” in 1618—the “official” trigger of the
Thirty Years War, one of the most extended, horrendous, and senseless conflicts in Western culture.

I do not believe in vicarious experience and will go to great, even absurd, lengths to stand on the true spot, or place a hand on the very wall. I could have written
Wonderful Life
without a visit to the Burgess Shale, but what a sacrilege! Walcott’s fossil quarry is holy ground, and only a four-mile
trek from the main road.

I therefore accepted a recent invitation for a lecture in Heidelberg on the stipulation that my hosts drive me to nearby Worms, site of the Diet. (I had, three years earlier, stood on the square in Prague where those bodies once landed after ejection from an upper-story window.) Now, with pilgrimages completed to the sources of both phrases that most caught my fancy in
Mrs. Ponti’s fifth-grade European history class, I can muse more formally upon the sadly common theme behind the two
D
’s—our cursed tribal tendency to factionalize, fight, and then, so often in our righteous certainty, to define our opponents as vermin and try to expunge either their doctrines (by censorship and fire) or their very being (by genocide). The Diet of Worms and the Defenestration
of Prague mark two cardinal events in the sad chronology of hatred and bloodshed surrounding a central theme of Western history, one filled with aspects of grandeur as well—the schism of “universal” Christianity into Catholic and Protestant portions.

The Diet, or governing body, of the Holy Roman Empire met at the great medieval Rhineland city of Worms in 1521, partly to demand the recantation
of Martin Luther. (German sources call the Diet a
Reichstag.
Moreover, German fishbait is spelled with a “u,” not an “o” as in English. Thus, the
Reichstag zu Worms
packs no culinary punch in the original vernacular.)

In school, I learned the heroic version of Luther before the Diet of Worms. This account (so far as I know, and have just affirmed by reading several recent biographies) reports
factual material in an accurate manner—and is therefore “true” in one crucial sense, yet frightfully partial and therefore misleadingly incomplete in other equally important ways. Luther, excommunicated by Pope Leo X in January 1521, arrived in Worms under an imperial guarantee of safe conduct to justify or recant his apostasies before the militantly Catholic and newly elected Holy Roman Emperor,
Charles V, heir to the Hapsburg dynasty of central Europe and Spain, and twenty-one-year-old grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, monarchs of Spain, and patrons of Christopher Columbus.

Luther, with substantial support from local people of all classes, including his most powerful protector, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, appeared before Charles and the Imperial Diet on April 17. Asked
if he would retract the contents of his books, Luther begged some time for consideration (and, no doubt, for preparation of a rip-roaring speech). The emperor granted a one-day recess, and Luther returned on April 18 to make his most famous statement.

Speaking first in German and then in Latin, Luther argued that he could not disavow his work unless he could be proved wrong either by the Scriptures
or by logic. He may or may not have ended his speech (reports vary) with one of the most famous statements in Western history:
Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders; Gott helfe mir; Amen
—Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me; Amen.

Faced with Luther’s intransigence, the Emperor and a rump session of the Diet issued the Edict of Worms on May 8. But that document, banning Luther’s work
and enjoining his detention, could not be enforced, given the strength of Luther’s local support. Instead, under Frederick’s protection, Luther “escaped” to the castle of Wartburg, where he translated the New Testament into German.

A stirring story, invoking some of the finest themes in Western liberal and intellectual traditions: freedom of thought, personal bravery against authority, the power
of one man with a grand idea before the crumbling weight of centuries. But dig just a little deeper, below the overt level of hagiography and school-day moralisms, and you enter a quagmire of intolerance and mayhem on all sides. Scratch the surface of soaring notions like “justification by faith,” and you encounter a world where any major idea becomes a political instrument in a quest for social
order, or a tool in the struggle for power between distant popes and local princes. Consider the operative paragraph of the Edict of Worms, complete with a closing metaphor about diets in the modern culinary sense:

These words may be chilling enough when confined to the destruction of documents. But annihilation often extended to the inventors of unorthodoxies, and to the genocide of followers. Of the early heretics mentioned above, Priscillian, bishop
of Avila in Spain, was convicted of sorcery and immorality, and executed by the Roman emperor Maximus in 385. The later Albigensians fared far worse. These ascetic communitarians of southern France frightened papal and other authorities with their views on the corruption of clergy and secular rulers. In 1209, Pope Innocent III urged a crusade against them—just one among so many examples of Christians
annihilating other Christians—and the resulting war effectively destroyed the Provençal civilization of southern France. The Inquisition mopped up during the next several decades, thus completing the extirpation of an unpopular view by genocide. Grisly, but effective. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
simply states: “It is exceedingly difficult to form any very precise idea of the Albigensian doctrines
because present knowledge of them is derived from their opponents.”

If Luther and other reformers had promoted their new versions of Christianity in the name of love, toleration, and respect, then I might accept the heroic version of history as progress inspired by rare individuals of broader vision. But Luther could be just as dogmatic, just as unforgiving, and just as bloodthirsty as his opponents—and
when his folks took the reins of power, the old tactics of banning, book burning, and doctrinal murder continued. For example, Luther had originally held little animus toward Jews, for he hoped that his reforms, by eliminating papal abuses, might lead to their conversion. But when his hopes withered, Luther turned on his vitriol and, in a 1543 pamphlet titled
On the Jews and Their Lies
, recommended
either forced deportation to Palestine, or the burning of all synagogues and Jewish books (including the Bible), and the restriction of Jews to agrarian pursuits.

In his most horrific recommendation (and on the eve of supposed personal happiness in his marriage to Katherine von Bora), Luther advocated the wholesale slaughter of German peasants, whose rebellion had recently been so brutally suppressed.
Luther had his reasons and frustrations, to be sure. He had never supported uprising against secular authority, although some of the more moderate peasant groups had used his teachings as justifications. Moreover, the militant faction of peasants had been led by his bitter theological enemy, Thomas Muntzer. Political conservatives like Luther always take a dim view (if only to save their
own skins) of insurrections by large and poorly disciplined groups of disenfranchised people, but Luther’s recommendations for virtual genocide, as presented in his tract of 1525
Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants
, makes my skin crawl, especially as a recommendation (however secular) from a supposed man of God:

The victorious nobility followed Luther’s recommendations, and estimates of the death toll (mostly inflicted upon rebels who had already surrendered and therefore posed no immediate threat) range to 100,000 people.

Sad tales of mass murder perpetrated by differing factions of a supposedly united cause haunt human history. I don’t think that Christians
are worse than other folks in this regard; we just know these stories better as defining incidents of a culture shared by most readers of this book. I am not speaking of isolated executions, but of wholesale slaughters, however unknown to us today for two eerie reasons. First, Hitlers of the past didn’t possess the technology (though they probably had the will) to kill six million in a few
years, so their depredations, though thorough, were more local. Second, obliterated cultures of bygone times featured fewer people, living in limited areas, and publishing little or no documentation. An older style of genocide could therefore be devastatingly complete and effective, truly wiping out all memory of a vibrant people.

I have already mentioned the Albigensian crusade. In 1204, the
Fourth Crusade, having failed to reach Palestine through Egypt to conquer the Holy Land, sacked the Byzantine Christian capital of Constantinople instead, imposing more mayhem upon people and art than the “infidel” Ottomans exacted when the city finally fell from Christian rule in 1453. The rupture of Europe into Protestant and Catholic parts provided more opportunity for such divisive destruction—and
Luther’s legacy surely includes as much darkness as light. Which brings me to the Thirty Years War and the Defenestration of Prague.

Throwing people out of windows has a long legacy in this beautiful city—a true Scandal in Bohemia, so to speak. In each major incident but the last, rebelling Protestants (or proto-Protestants) tossed entrenched Catholics out of their strongholds. The “official”
Defenestration (with a capital
D
) occurred in 1618. Local Protestants, justifiably enraged when the very Catholic King Ferdinand II reneged on promises of religious freedom, stormed Hrad
č
any Castle and threw three Catholic councilors out of the window and into the moat. (Legend states that they walked away, embarrassed but unharmed, thanks either to good fortune or to the good aim of their adversaries—for
they landed in a large and soft dunghill.)

The rebels of 1618 had consciously reenacted a past incident that they wished to claim as part of a proud and continuous history. (A Latin window, by the way, is a
fenestra
—so
defenestration
is just a fancy word for throwing something out such an opening.) The memory of Bohemian religious reformer Jan Hus, burned for heresy in 1415 and claimed by later
Protestants as a precursor, inspired the initial defenestration of Prague in 1419. A Hussite army (if you like them) or a rabble (if you don’t) stormed the New Town Hall and threw three Catholic consuls and seven citizens out the window (some to their death, for no cushioning dunghill broke these falls), and Bohemia did pass to Hussite rule for a time. Yet another, but lesser known, defenestration
occurred in 1483 King Vladislav had restored Catholic dominion, so another dissident band of Hussites threw the Catholic mayor out the window.

The tragic epilogue to this sequence will be remembered by readers just a few years older than me. Jan Masaryk, son of Thomas Masaryk, the founder of the Czech Republic, continued to serve as the only noncommunist minister of the postwar puppet government.
On March 10, 1948, his body was found in the courtyard of Czernin Palace. He had fallen to his death from a window forty-five feet above. Had he jumped as a suicide (with ironic consciousness of his nation’s history), or had he been pushed in a murder? The case has never been solved.

The Protestant triumph after the official defenestration lasted only two years and ended in yet another splurge
of murder and destruction. With powerful Hapsburg support, Catholics regrouped, and decisively defeated the Protestants in the Battle of the White Mountain on November 8, 1620. Weeks of plunder and pillage followed in Prague. A few months later, twenty-seven nobles and other citizens were tortured and executed in the Old Town Square. The victors hung twelve heads, impaled on iron hooks, from the
Bridge Tower as a warning.