Leo X

The chain that ended in the Ninety Five Theses is administrative rather than theological at almost every link.

Albrecht of Brandenburg wanted the archbishopric of Mainz while already holding two other sees, which required a dispensation, and the fee was very large. He borrowed it from the Fugger bank. Leo, needing money for the rebuilding of St Peter's, granted both the dispensation and the right to preach the indulgence in Albrecht's territories, on terms under which the proceeds were split between Rome and the repayment of the loan. A banking agent travelled with the preachers to take the German half.

The Dominican Johann Tetzel then preached it in a way that made the transaction sound complete and mechanical, and his terms crossed into Saxony, where the elector had banned the indulgence but could not stop his subjects walking over the border.

Martin Luther's theses of 31 October 1517 attack the theology of indulgences, and they attack this arrangement specifically, asking why the pope, whose wealth exceeds that of the richest, does not build the basilica with his own money rather than with that of poor believers.

Leo's initial response was to treat it as a quarrel between religious orders. The examination by Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg in 1518 turned on authority rather than on the doctrine. The bull Exsurge Domine of June 1520 condemned forty one propositions and gave sixty days; Luther burned it publicly. Decet Romanum Pontificem excommunicated him in January 1521, and the Diet of Worms followed in April.

The Fifth Lateran Council had been sitting since 1512 and Leo closed it in March 1517, seven months before the theses. It had been called partly to answer a rival council convened against his predecessor and partly to address reform, and it issued decrees on preaching, on the conduct of clergy and on the reform of the curia. Almost none of it was enforced. A council on reform that adjourned without result, immediately before the reform crisis broke, is the single sharpest indictment of the pontificate.

The finances behind it are part of the same story. Leo spent on a scale that made his court the most brilliant in Europe: Raphael at work in the Vatican, the acquisition of antiquities, an Indian elephant kept as a gift from the king of Portugal, hunts, musicians and a very large household. Offices were created and sold in quantity to pay for it, and after the conspiracy of Cardinal Petrucci in 1517 he created thirty one new cardinals at once, which served both to secure his position and to raise money. He left the papacy heavily in debt.

One act of that pontificate is still visible on British coinage. In 1521 Henry VIII published a defence of the seven sacraments against Luther, and Leo rewarded him with the title Defender of the Faith. Henry broke with Rome thirteen years later and the title was withdrawn, whereupon the English Parliament conferred it again by statute. The abbreviation for it has appeared on English and British coins from the eighteenth century to the present.