295. LUTHER TO SPALATIN. Enders, ii. 477. Wittenberg, September 11, 1520.
Greeting. Dear Spalatin, I received your letter from Alten- burg yesterday, but the one you wrote later from Buttstadt^ I received earlier. Nothing was done about me at Eisleben,* except that Charles von Miltitz took counsel with the fathers and finally induced them to send the reverend Father Stau- pitz and the new Vicar Link to me, to beg me to write a private letter* to the Roman Pontiff witnessing that I had never tried to do anything against him personally. Miltitz hopes that this plan will turn out well.
Although this plan does not appeal to me, nor to the fathers, yet we will oblige Miltitz, who perhaps in asking it is grinding his own ax. I shall, therefore, write the exact fact that I never had the slightest cause to attack the person of the Pope. What could be easier to write or truer? I must take care in writing not to treat the apostolic see too ferociously, but I will be a bit caustic.
Hutten sent me a letter* boiling over with great indignation at the Pope, writing that now he is rushing on the priestly tyranny with pen and sword, because the Pope planned to assassinate him and commanded the Archbishop of Mayence to send him bound to Rome.** "Madness," he exclaims, "worthy of a blind* Pope." You will see a copy when I get it from Henry Stromer who asked to see it.
The worst of it is that the Archbishop of Mayence had a mandate issued from the pulpit, mentioning Hutten by name and forbidding his books to be read or bought under pain of excommunication, and adding that the same held good of simi- lar books, by which he meant a covert attack on mine. If he only mentions me by name, I will join with Hutten and excuse
- snyself in such a way as will not please the Archbishop of
'The elector was starting out to meet the new Emperor in the Netherlands, ^mith, p. 98.
^Supra, no. 289.
- Tliis letter became the introduction to Luther's tract On the Liberty of a
'hrisiian Man, cf. Smith, p. 91. ♦Lost
- The papal breve of Jtily la to Albert of Mayence says nothing of this, but
lere is other evidence to show that Hutten's story was at worst an exaggeration.
- Leo X. was very short-sighted.
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