The date was October 31, 1517, and the setting was the Empire of Germany and the remote northeastern town of Wittenberg ruled by Frederick the Wise, Prince of Electoral Saxony. It was not business as usual in Wittenberg that day, for on the Catholic Church’s liturgical calendar, it was the annual festival of All Saints’ Eve. The following day, November 1, marked the special time of year when the church paid special honor to the dead who had achieved enough holiness to enter the gates of heaven and behold the Lord of glory. (All Souls’ Day on November 2 offered prayers and intercessions for those who were still being sanctified in the postmortem fires of purgatory.)
Not too far away, across the border of Electoral Saxony in Jüterborg, Brandenburg, the Dominican friar John Tetzel and his entourage were preaching the sale of indulgences with the blessing of Pope Leo X and Albrecht, the diocesan archbishop of Mainz. The traffic of indulgences did not actually make its way into Wittenberg, however, because Prince Frederick did not want them competing with the transactional benefits marketing his own prized collection of saints’ relics.
Indulgences had been available in the church since the Middle Ages. In exchange for the giving of alms towards a religious cause, penitent sinners could be remitted part or all of the acts of penance, or temporal discipline, required for their sins. The abundant merit of Jesus Christ and all the saints in heaven’s treasury was at the disposal of the clergy to withdraw and deposit in the spiritual accounts of needy sinners at their discretion. Now, following a papal bull promulgated in 1476, indulgences could even be purchased on behalf of loved ones suffering in purgatory—one of the many forms of late medieval religious devotion that historians have called “the cult of the living in service of the dead.”1 The archbishop of Mainz would receive a portion of the sales to pay off a bank loan funding the…
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