Evening in the Palace of Reason. James Gaines

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      THIS BRINGS US, roughly, to the reign of Frederick the Wise and the Hohenzollern cardinal Albert of Mainz, whose enthusiastic salesman Johann Tetzel did so much to color Martin Luther’s already jaundiced view of indulgences. We enter as well into some of the same historical territory passed through by the ancestors of Sebastian Bach, but to Albert and his descendant Hohenzollerns, the history of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly during the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, looked very different from the way it looked to the senior Bachs, rather like the difference in perspective between warden and prisoner.

      The Hohenzollern Cardinal of Mainz was a ravenously ambitious and entirely secular figure who had bought two important bishoprics at the ridiculous age of twenty-three. At twenty-five he set out to buy the archbishopric of Mainz, which would make him primate of all Germany. Fine, said the pope’s man, that will be twelve thousand ducats for the Twelve Apostles. Albert said he thought maybe seven thousand ducats for the Seven Deadly Sins would be more appropriate. Thanks to the Ten Commandments, Albert got his red hat, but having already laid out cash for his other two bishoprics, he had to borrow the money.

      To help him pay off the loan and to help with expenses for St. Peter’s in Rome (like Michelangelo’s fee), for which he would take half the receipts, the pope gave Albert a ten-year license to sell indulgences of unprecedented potency. These indulgences could actually work on future sins, so that, having paid the right price for a particular sin, you were preemptively absolved and presumably could feel at ease sinning likewise for the rest of your life. The pope authorized Albert to promise, seriously, that even violating the Mother of God Herself could be forgiven by these indulgences. It was the prospective-absolution feature of these indulgences, a patent encouragement to sin, that made Luther especially furious.

      Albert clearly had chosen the right man for the job. When Tetzel came into a city he arrived in procession, holding a huge red cross, fronted by flags and drums and a herald proclaiming, “The Grace of God and of the Holy Father is at the gates!” Making straight for the cathedral, he would plant his cross by the high altar and set his strongbox up beside it. Taking the pulpit, he gave his pitch: “At the very instant that the money rattles at the bottom of the chest, the soul escapes from purgatory and flies liberated to heaven … I declare to you, though you have but a single coat, you ought to strip it off and sell it.” Then he would stand by the strongbox, examining each supplicant in turn to determine the amount due. Kings and princes were good for twenty-five ducats, barons ten, etc. The various sins had prices too. Witchcraft was forgiven for two ducats, polygamy for six, murder for eight, and the sin of all sins, stealing money from the church, cost nine. (It is hard to believe that this one could be forgiven indefinitely, however expensive the indulgence.)

      Just as Albert and Tetzel had got started with their new indulgences, on the eve of All Saints’ Day 1517, when Frederick the Wise would have put out his relics and indulgence fever would be at a pitch, Luther pinned to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg his “95 Theses,” which took off directly from the promises in Tetzel’s latest spiel. For example:

      27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].

      28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone …

      46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons …

      75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God—this is madness! …

      Drawing to a close, he posed a series of statements from which he diplomatically distanced himself by characterizing them as “shrewd questions from the laity”:

      84. “… What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul’s own need, free it for pure love’s sake?”

      86. Again: — “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”

      The rest, as they say, is history, one of whose most wonderful ironies is that we have a Hohenzollern to thank, if only indirectly, for the Protestant Reformation.