14. Erasmus and His Readers

The rival images of the Rotterdam humanist which have governed the history of interpretation down to the present century^[1] can all be traced to his own era. One might be tempted to measure these various readings of Erasmus against the reformist-Catholic interpretation of his works that he himself provided, especially in his later years, consigning seemingly wayward views to some dustbin of historical errors. But a thoughtful scholar has questioned the maxim that the author is the best interpreter of his own work. Sylvana Seidel-Menchi acknowledges that Erasmus himself would surely have argued that his writings were distorted when religious dissenters in Italy read him “selectively,” isolating certain phrases from their context and making them yet more radical. In her view, however, “the selective reader offers a legitimate interpretation of the humanist’s religious writings” because “the radicalization effected by [the reader] was the result of the inevitable metamorphosis that thought undergoes when it descends into reality and becomes a principle of action.” ^[2] I take a more traditional approach, predicated on my belief that it is possible to reconstruct the assumptions in terms of which what an author says would make sense, and thus determine which interpretations are better than others. Yet there is no denying that a text once published to the world has a historical reality of its own, quite apart from how the author might have wished it to be read,^[3] and the truth of this wider, more diffuse reality must be all the more important for a writer like Erasmus, whose habit of “dissimulation” was not always transparent even to those who knew him best. Hence I propose to reverse the usual procedure by measuring the authorized reading Erasmus proposed for his own works against the ways in which he was understood by his contemporaries and near contemporaries. I will present an overview of sixteenth-century interpretations and then take a closer look at a typical but (for English-language readers) little known case of Erasmus’s influence among local elites, the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania.^[4]

Erasmus as Read by His Contemporaries

In Catholic Europe there were many “circles or settings” where Erasmus’s memory was cherished as he might have wished it to be cherished: “among the reforming bishops, in the Habsburg entourage, especially among the court humanists of the dynasty’s east European lands…and of the Netherlands.” Friedrich Nausea, a reforming bishop of Vienna (d. 1552) who was to argue at the Council of Trent in behalf of clerical marriage and Communion in both kinds for the laity, insisted that Erasmus’s only enemies had been ignorant monks and theologians whose god was their belly, for through Erasmus’s writings one could see and hear Christ as the disciples did; indeed, for Nausea, sanctus enim erat Erasmus (“Erasmus was a holy man”).^[5] At Leuven the Collegium Trilingue, incorporating Erasmus’s scholarly ideals, continued to promote study of the biblical languages, even if scholarship was increasingly subservient to the needs of an embattled Catholic orthodoxy and thus lacked the boldness and independence of the master’s work. Meanwhile, patristic and Scripture studies made headway even among the theologians. The Augustinian school of thought for which Leuven would become famous (Cornelis Janssen, for whom the Jansenist movement was named, had been a professor of theology here) developed from the combined influence of Erasmian humanism and the Collegium Trilingue and the practical need to use Augustine in combating Protestant foes with their own weapons.^[6]

Meanwhile, a very different Catholic view was taking hold in Italy. Girolamo Aleandro’s charges that Erasmus was secretly abetting Luther were echoed in no less than ten tracts published by Italian scholars between 1524 and 1534.^[7] Many of the authors were members or associates of the Roman Academy whose criticisms of his un-Ciceronian Latin Erasmus had scornfully rejected in a long letter of 1524 (published in 1529)^[8] as well as in the Ciceronianus of 1528. Like Aleandro in his dispatches from Germany and the Low Countries (1520–1521), Italian critics saw Erasmus as providing “kindling” for Luther, especially in works like the Colloquia, widely used in Italian schools, because of the way that his mockery of purely external religious observances undermined people’s faith in specific Catholic practices like abstinence laws and monastic vows. In fact, Italians called before the Inquisition on heresy charges between 1540 and 1550 were more likely to be accused of heterodox views on matters like abstinence laws or the veneration of saints than on justifying faith or the bondage of the will. In the 1560s, when the leader of a Calvinist circle in northern Italy sought to convert a local schoolmaster, he first gave him Erasmus’s Adagia to read, hoping to induce a critical attitude toward church authority.^[9] In the Rome of Clement VII (1523–1534) the policy was to treat Erasmus with respect, lest he be provoked into joining the camp of the reformers—an attitude that nicely mirrors Erasmus’s suspicions of Pope Clement and his entourage.^[10] But what Sylvana Seidel-Menchi calls the “Erasmus-is-a-Lutheran operation” had rapid success outside the Curia. Already in 1529 the Florentine humanist Francesco Vettori wrote a friend that he had stopped reading Erasmus, lest he be thought a Lutheran. Once Erasmus himself had passed from the scene, there was no reason for the Curia to withhold its support from the rising tide of condemnation. Pope Paul III (1534–1549) had offered Erasmus a cardinal’s hat in 1535,^[11] but the imperious Paul IV (1555–1559) personally supervised preparation of the first Index of Forbidden Books (1555), in which all of Erasmus’s works were completely forbidden. Following protests of this decision from the Habsburg courts in Brussels and Vienna, the 1559 Index, approved by the Council of Trent in 1562, banned only certain of his works, including the Colloquia and the Praise of Folly, and stipulated that the rest should remain forbidden until the theologians of Paris or Leuven had drawn up a list of passages to be expurgated, as was done in the Antwerp Index Expurgatorius of 1570. These decisions could not fail to undermine what Bruce Mansfield calls the moderate Catholic interpretation of Erasmus, especially in Italy, where after 1559 “not a single voice was raised from within the Catholic Church to vindicate the orthodoxy of Erasmus.” ^[12]

In the kingdom of Castile, as in Italy, the fortunes of Erasmus were intimately connected with local trajectories of thought. Here his foes were led by Diego Lopez de Zuñiga, a scholar of biblical languages associated with the University of Alcala and its Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1522)^[13] who was the first critic to argue that Erasmus’s works were radically heretical, not just on the externals of religion but on fundamental points like the divinity of Christ.^[14] But Spain in these years had a home-grown movement of spiritual reform whose learned partisans were eager to connect their ideas with a figure of European stature like Erasmus, especially after about 1523. The allumbrados, or enlightened ones, who believed that prayer was a matter of turning the mind and heart to God, not of mumbling words, applauded in Erasmus not only his doctrina of a spiritual piety but also his disapproval of that dwelling in lugubrious detail on Christ’s Passion which was a staple of late medieval religious devotion. Hence in 1523 Erasmus Schets, the Antwerp banker, was informed by a correspondent in Valladolid that the leading men at court felt themselves “illumined by the Spirit of God” in reading Erasmus’s works.^[15]

The stage was set for a protracted struggle. Despite the influence of Zuñiga, Alcala, a new university where the new biblical philology was treated with respect, weighed in for Erasmus, while Salamanca, the traditional intellectual center of Old Castile and a bastion of scholastic theology, marshaled its legions against him. At a gathering of theologians convened in Valladolid to pronounce judgment on Erasmus’s works (1527), the Dominicans and Franciscans (with the men of Salamanca) attacked him, while the Benedictines and other orders (with Alcala’s theologians) were more favorable. The inconclusive result of the assembly was good news for Erasmus’s supporters, led by a trio of court humanists whom historian Marcel Bataillon describes as the “headquarters staff”: Juan Vergara, secretary to Juan de Fonseca, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain; Alonso Valdes, Charles V’s Latin secretary; and the Benedictine Alonso Ruiz de Virues, who at some time prior to 1531 was named court preacher for the emperor. These men published their own ideas on reform even as Erasmus’s works were translated into Spanish at a rate that in Bataillon’s view finds no parallel in other European languages.^[16] But Valdes and Chancellor Mercurino Gattinara, an admirer of Erasmus, both died shortly after Charles V left Spain in 1530 for Italy and Germany, and Erasmus’s friends missed an opportunity when the Latin secretaryship did not go to the Fleming Cornelis de Schepper, another devoted admirer (de Schepper lacked the political clout of his successful rival, the nephew of the man now all-powerful in the emperor’s entourage, Francisco de los Cobos). Meanwhile, the Toledo chamber of the Inquisition brought formal charges against Vergara after a friar had identified him as a “Lutheran” because he said that St. Augustine had misunderstood the Bible because of his ignorance of Greek. Vergara stipulated that none of his judges should be monks or friars, and his mistrust of the regular clergy was borne out when Alonso Virues, Benedictine and erstwhile Erasmian (though initially mistrusted by Erasmus), came forward as a witness for the prosecution. Vergara was forced to make a public abjuration of his errors in December 1535. By now Charles V had returned to Spain (April 1533) with no Erasmians in his entourage. The new climate of opinion may be seen in the change of heart by Juan Maldonado, a priest-humanist of Burgos. This former correspondent of Erasmus now published On the Reading of Erasmus (1534), urging that the Colloquies and even the Paraphrases had best not be read, pending a judgment by the church.^[17]

Protestant Europe was more evenly divided. Pier Paolo Vergerio, an Italian bishop who defected to Protestant Switzerland, regarded Erasmus as “a very important source [fonte]” for the different “streams” of Reformation doctrine. Thomas Cromwell (d. 1540), architect of the English Reformation under Henry VIII, sponsored translation of Erasmus’s writings into English in order to sow disrespect for the privileges of the old clergy and provide for lay devotion. Even under the more thorough-going Protestantism of Edward VI (1547–1553) an “Erasmian tradition” persisted in devotional literature.^[18] Other proponents of the Reformation paid Erasmus the backhanded compliment of putting their own (or Luther’s) ideas forward under cover of Erasmus’s authority. Louis de Berquin (or an unknown editor) included snippets from Luther in a translation of Erasmus; works by Luther and his disciple Nikolaus van Amsdorf were published in Venice under Erasmus’s name; and in Alcala Juan de Valdes, Alonso’s younger brother, praised Erasmus in his Dialogo de Doctrina (1529) and had it printed by the publisher of Spanish translations of Erasmus, but only to disguise the fact that the book was in good part a pastiche of citations from Luther and Oecolampadius.^[19] One assumes that in their own minds the authors of such stratagems were not so much foisting a deception on the public as closing the gap between Erasmus’s published statements and what the man who wrote as he did must surely have believed in private. In Italy an individual could be cited before the Inquisition for expressing doubt about the church’s fast and abstinence laws, and on the matter of “ceremonies” there was in fact little difference between Erasmus and Luther, as Melanchthon had written in a letter that Erasmus later published.^[20] Melanchthon, who alone among the reformers remained close to Erasmus through his correspondence, later delivered the Oratio de Erasmo Roterodamo (1557) praising God for the work of this great scholar and describing him at the end of his life as wishing to be a member of the Protestant church of Basel.^[21]

Yet the predominant opinion among Lutherans was quite different. Following the publication of Hyperaspistes II (1527), Luther himself was relieved of all doubt that Erasmus was irreligious through and through: “All religions serve him as an occasion for ridicule, he writes not a single word in earnest”; or “He is as certain that there is no eternal life as I am that I have two eyes.” Even a seemingly pious work like Erasmus’s Explanation of the Creed was rejected out of hand by Luther, who thought it would have been better for even his educational writings “to be blown out of our schools”; Luther simply refused to believe reports from Capito and Bucer that Erasmus had died calling on the name of God. Amid the bitter struggles among German Lutherans that followed Luther’s death (1546) and Charles V’s victory in the First Schmalkaldic War (1547), Melanchthon and his party were more and more discredited.^[22] The future thus belonged to loyal followers of Luther like Johann Mathesius, an ardent foe of the “Philippists” (followers of Melanchthon), who in one of his sermons recounted a story about Erasmus’s staunch Catholic patron, Duke George of Saxony:

When the slippery man had given an equivocal and twisted answer, blowing neither hot nor cold, the wise Duke said: Dear Erasmus, you wash without making clean, I prefer the men of Wittenberg, who are not mealy-mouthed but say freely and honestly what they think.^[23]

In German-speaking Protestant Switzerland such views were regarded as excessive; while Erasmus yet lived, Heinrich Bullinger, Ulrich Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, objected to Luther’s “calumnies” against “an old man who has deserved well of the church and of letters.” But in French-speaking Geneva the first preacher of the Reformation had been none other than Erasmus’s worst enemy among Protestants, Guillaume Farel. In Basel in 1557 Erasmus’s dear friend Bonifacius Amerbach, who had helped to make his now Protestant city a haven for religious refugees of all descriptions, had a bitter dispute about Erasmus with two Genevan travelers, Farel and Theodore de Bèze, who would succeed John Calvin on his death in 1564. In his Icones or Images of famous men, Bèze characterized Erasmus as one who preferred his own opinion to the authority of Scripture, who had been content to carp at superstition and refused to learn the truth.^[24] Spiritualist reformer Sebastian Franck (d. 1542/1543) launched a separate tradition of dissenter commentary on Erasmus with his Geschichtsbibel (Strasbourg, 1531), which presented as the sole teachers of religious truth all of those whom Catholic authorities had condemned as heretics. Erasmus was outraged to find himself in Franck’s catalog of counterheroes, all the more so because Franck attributed to him such radical ideas as the rejection of infant baptism. Antitrinitarian writers later took up a similar argument, finding in Erasmus’s critical review of biblical proof-texts used by the Fathers against Arianism a basis for repudiating the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. This appropriation of Erasmus by radical theologians naturally served only to confirm the orthodox, Protestant as well as Catholic, in their growing certitude that the Rotterdam humanist had been fundamentally unsound.^[25]

The image of “slippery” Erasmus that now took shape was thus a by-product of Europe’s steady movement in the second half of the sixteenth century toward the consolidation of religious orthodoxies, a process known to historians as “confessionalization.” ^[26] Conversely, his memory was honored among the loose-knit fraternity of those who resisted confessionalization in the name of “concord” among Christians.^[27] These men drafted proposals for theological compromise or participated in the ecumenical colloquies organized under the auspices of various rulers, as at Dresden in 1538 (promoted by Duke George of Saxony), Regensburg in 1541 (by Charles V), or Poissy in 1562 (by Catherine de Medici as regent for her son, Charles IX). Protestant irenicists looked to the example of Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer, parties to the most promising of these discussions, at Regensburg, where Catholic and Protestant theologians agreed on a formulation for the doctrine of justification. For many unity-minded Catholics Erasmus was the exemplar, not least because of his treatise De Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concordia (On Restoring the Concord of the Church, 1533).^[28] George Witzel (1501–1573), a lay Catholic theologian who had been both a priest and a Lutheran pastor, urged the aged Erasmus to play a leading role in working “for the peace of the church.” ^[29] François Bauduin, a humanist jurist who helped organize the Colloquy of Poissy, drew on Erasmus for some of his ideas, like the notion that the mystical body of Christ should find its visible expression in the respublica Christiana.^[30] In a letter written the same year that the Council of Trent decreed the expurgation of Erasmus’s works, Joris Cassander (1515–1566), a Flemish humanisttheologian and sometime collaborator of Witzel and Bauduin, could write of Erasmus that “because of his uncommon good sense in ecclesiastical matters he seems to me to have been almost a prophet.” ^[31]

Another focal point for continuing admiration of Erasmus was his native Low Countries. In works of the “images of illustrious writers” genre published in the southern Netherlands, Erasmus was criticized for speaking too freely of theological matters, but Catholic authors of this region still retained something of the older, favorable interpretation. Petrus Opmeer (1526–1595) was the scion of a patrician family and a pupil of one of Erasmus’s Amsterdam friends. His works include a history of fellow Catholics martyred by partisans of the triumphant Reformation in Holland and the Opus Chronographicum (written in 1572 but published after his death), which presented the most well-informed account of Erasmus’s life that had yet appeared; Opmeer passed over in silence his hero’s censure by the Council of Trent. Erasmus had perhaps even more admirers among Dutch Protestant writers, though not among adherents of the orthodox Calvinist party that had by 1618/1619 asserted its full control over the Dutch Reformed Church. Among dissident Remonstrants,^[32] many of whom were disciples of Jacobus Arminius (d. 1609), Erasmus was proof that yearning for reform in the church was not the exclusive property of any one faction in Europe’s theological battles. Martin Lydius, an Amsterdam divine and friend of Arminius, may have been the first churchman who read Erasmus to clarify his own position. His Apologia pro Erasmo Roterodamo, written to prove Erasmus’s agreement with Protestantism, appeared for the first time in the monumental Opera Omnia of Erasmus (Leiden, 1703–1706), published by the Huguenot refugee Jean Leclercq.^[33] Arminius himself was known to quote Erasmus in support of some of his views, and his circle included men like Dominicus Baudius, who wrote an essay exculpating Erasmus of the charge of Arianism, and Paulus Merula, who penned an important early life of Erasmus.^[34] When members of the Arminian or Remonstrant party were expelled from the Reformed Church and forced to create their own ecclesiastical structures, the memory of Erasmus was a source of historical legitimacy for the new church. Simon Episcopius, rector of the Arminian seminary in Amsterdam, defended the inclusion of Erasmus in the curriculum by asserting that all of his works “breathed nothing but counsels of peace, tolerance, and moderation, no less learned than salutary.” For Geeraert Brandt, the Remonstrant church historian, Erasmus had helped fortify civil magistrates in the Netherlands with a sense of their own dignity in struggles against an overbearing Dutch Reformed clergy; the dominees read Calvin, in Brandt’s view, but the magistrates read Erasmus.^[35]

Patriotic pride had of course more than a little to do with such sentiments. During Erasmus’s lifetime the provincial parliament, or states, of Holland had voted the not inconsiderable sum of two hundred guilders for a jewel or fur hat for Erasmus, “by reason of our common fatherland.” ^[36] When the future King Philip II visited Rotterdam (1549), he found a wooden statue of Erasmus created for the occasion hard by the gate where he entered the city, with a man behind the statue speaking words of welcome in the name of Rotterdam’s most famous native son.^[37] Somewhat more than a hundred years later, when Rotterdam proposed to erect a stone statue of Erasmus to replace the wooden one torn down by Spanish troops during the revolt, even the Calvinist synod of South Holland approved of the gesture on the grounds that honoring Erasmus was a political and not a religious act.^[38] In later centuries the cult of Erasmus in the Netherlands led Johan Huizinga to suggest that the Rotterdam humanist had imprinted his own outlook on his countrymen, especially among the patrician elite of the wealthy and prosperous towns in his native province of Holland:

Thoroughly permeated by the Erasmian spirit, too, was that class of municipal magistrates who were soon to take the lead and to set the fashion in the established Republic…If in the Dutch patriciate of that time those aspirations lived and were translated into action, it was Erasmus’s spirit of social responsibility which inspired them. The history of Holland is far less bloody and cruel than any of the surrounding countries.^[39]

More recent Dutch scholarship has shown a healthy reaction against ascribing undue influence to Erasmus;^[40] rather than calling the Dutch Erasmian, it makes more sense to recognize that Erasmus was himself a product of the highly urbanized culture of the core provinces of the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries. Huizinga was not insensitive to this nuance, as his next sentence indicates: “Not for naught did Erasmus praise as truly Dutch those qualities which we might also call truly Erasmian: gentleness, kindliness, moderation, and a generally diffused moderate erudition.” ^[41]

Erasmus’s Polish Readers

Poland offers a particularly instructive example of the process by which Erasmus’s ideas became intertwined with local tradition. First, since Erasmus’s contact with Polish humanists effectively dated from the last twelve years of his life, when he was consciously endeavoring to correct what he saw as misunderstandings of his work, Poland is a good test of whether the Low Countries humanist could successfully propagate among readers the reformist-Catholic understanding he had of himself. Further, since most of Erasmus’s Polish correspondents—sixteen of twenty-one—had connections with the court of King Zygmunt I (reigned 1506–1548) in Cracow,^[42] we may assume that Polish scholars were in part using Erasmus as a sounding board for their own arguments about Poland’s place among the powers of Europe.

In these years the vast dual kingdom of Poland-Lithuania^[43] was beset by enemies all around, the grand duchy of Muscovy to the east, the Tartar khan of Crimea in the southeast, and in the north the military order of the Teutonic Knights, whose grand master was recognized as the ruler of a secularized and Protestant duchy of Prussia in 1525. Habsburg power loomed in the southwest, and to the south the feared might of the Ottoman Turks, though diverted from Poland’s frontiers by a series of truces for much of Zygmunt’s reign, was at its peak under the sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520–1560), whose armies at one point laid siege to Vienna (1529).^[44] Factions among magnates and gentry tended to crystallize around alliances with one foreign power at the expense of others. For example, Queen Bona Sforza, Zygmunt I’s second wife (married 1518), was initially commended to the king by her Habsburg connections but later became the center of a pro-French grouping once it became clear that her imperial in-laws were not willing to recognize the Sforza family’s claim to the duchy of Milan.^[45] Chancellor Krzysztof Szydlowiecki (d. 1531) and vice-chancellor Piotr Tomicki (d. 1535), the bishop of Cracow, were the acknowledged leaders of a faction that advocated close ties with the Habsburgs as a means of undercutting support for the Teutonic Knights among ethnic Germans within the Holy Roman Empire. They were the promoters both of Zygmunt’s marriage to Bona and of the earlier dual marriage (1515) that paired Charles V’s brother and sister, Ferdinand and Mary, with Zygmunt’s nice and nephew, Anne of Bohemia and Louis II Jagiello, the future king of both Bohemia and Hungary. When Louis II was overwhelmed and slain by a Turkish army on the Hungarian plain at Mohacs in 1526, these arrangements were put to the test. Archduke Ferdinand of Austria met no effective resistance to his claims to the crown in Bohemia, but in Hungary a majority of the nobles rallied behind Janos Zapolyai, voivode (governor) of Transylvania and leader of the anti-Habsburg party. Unable to match the army Ferdinand mustered, Zapolyai took refuge in Poland, where he found support from the anti-Habsburg party led by the archbishop of Gniezno and primate of Poland, Jan (I) Laski (d. 1531). Hieronim Laski (d. 1541) shared his uncle’s anti-Habsburg or perhaps anti-German sentiments. He journeyed to Istanbul on Zapolyai’s behalf, obtaining promises of help in return for his master’s acceptance of Turkish overlordship in Hungary and then went on to Denmark and north Germany to raise troops. Meanwhile, though Szydlowiecki and Tomicki had to welcome the refugee king as Zygmunt’s erstwhile brother-in-law,^[46] they were determined not to compromise Ferdinand’s interests. Thus when Hieronim Laski brought his recruits to Cracow (1529), Szydlowiecki and Tomicki, acting in the king’s absence, ordered the mercenaries to quit Polish soil at once. The chancellor and vicechancellor were also concerned to avoid any alignment of forces—such as a settlement in Zapolyai’s favor—that would foreclose a future united campaign of Christian powers against the Turks. As a modern historian has noted, Zygmunt could have arranged a conclusion to the continuing civil war in Hungary “only through an understanding with the Turk, a point to which neither the king nor Tomicki was receptive.” Yet Tomicki and Szydlowiecki, pillars of the pro-Habsburg party, were not always of the same mind. The latter was so closely tied to Ferdinand that one recent scholar describes him as “a paid agent for the Habsburgs,” but Tomicki could write in these years that many Poles were “disgusted by the Germans” and by “their desire to rule the whole world, and not be satisfied to remain within their boundaries.” ^[47]

Hieronim Laski and his younger brother Jan (II) were the first of a number of young Polish scholars who lodged for a time with Erasmus in May 1524. Jan returned the following spring for a six-month stay, during which he apparently paid Erasmus’s household expenses and also arranged to purchase the rights to the scholar’s library after his death.^[48] Other Polish visitors included Jan Antonin (July 1524), a physician who for a time served Bishop Tomicki (it was through him that Erasmus began correspondence with Tomicki), and Tomicki’s great-nephew, Andrzej Zebrzydowski (August–September 1528). Maria Cytowska has noticed that Erasmus’s letters to his erstwhile guests are friendlier in tone than those to court dignitaries, but few if any Polish correspondents made as much of an impression as Jan (II) Laski.^[49] It was Laski who encouraged Erasmus to write to Zygmunt I and (in P. S. Allen’s words) “no doubt supplied the information about his king’s achievements” which Erasmus worked into his missive of May 1527.^[50] In all these communications there is but a single hint of partisan divisions at the court in Cracow. When the younger Jan Laski suggested that Erasmus approach Szydlowiecki, through the dedication of his Lingua (The Tongue, 1525), a somewhat rambling essay on human garrulousness, he must also have suggested that the dedicatory letter include praise for his uncle (and Szydlowiecki’s enemy), the archbishop of Gniezno.^[51] As if to show that there were no partisan divisions among learned men, each of the two Laski brothers brought Erasmus a book by Tomicki’s nephew, the humanist poet and bishop of Ploc, Andrzej Krzycki, whom Erasmus wrote after the second gift.^[52] There are indications that Erasmus’s friends preferred to spare him the cutthroat details of court rivalries, and it seems his Polish admirers paid him the same courtesy.^[53]

Yet correspondence with Erasmus was not without a symbolic political importance, especially if the great man was willing to pronounce on certain issues. As in other parts of Europe,^[54] his admirers in Poland would have expected him to be a loyal partisan of the Habsburg dynasty; after all, he had boasted in print of his appointment as an honorary councillor to the young Charles V and he chose to spend his declining years in a town that owed allegiance to Ferdinand. As presented in these pages, however, Erasmus was more a man of the Low Countries than a Habsburg subject. He was deeply suspicious of Charles’s and Ferdinand’s plans for ending the religious division of Germany (see my chapter 12), and when he turned the same critical gaze on Habsburg policy in southeastern Europe he can only have warmed the hearts of Polish readers. The dominant consideration in all political calculations of these years was Ottoman power. The court in Cracow viewed a prudent truce with the Turks as the better part of valor, and even a Habsburg loyalist like Piotr Tomicki could wonder why Ferdinand would break off negotiations and risk open war with Zapolyai and his Turkish backers: “Many are surprised that Ferdinand provokes such a potent enemy, especially since there are rumors the King of France will attack his brother, the Emperor Charles, who will thus not able to offer him much help.” But Erasmus had made a similar point some years earlier in a letter to Johann Henckel, court chaplain of the widowed Mary of Hungary in Buda.^[55] To be sure, he recognized that Christendom must defend itself, and he now endorsed the kind of appeal for a crusade of which in earlier years he had been highly dubious.^[56] Yet he seems to have seen the struggle in southeastern Europe more as a battle for world domination than as a defense of Christendom. Luis de Carvajal, a Spanish theologian, attacked Erasmus in Charles’s behalf over a passage in the 1526 Colloquia referring to Charles as “ aiming for a new kind of monarchy over the whole world. ” For the next edition Erasmus changed the text to read “Caesar aims at extending his monarchy beyond its present limits,” ^[57] but he did not change his opinion. In 1529 he set the alleged cruelties of Ottoman occupation in a larger context: “The Turk holds the greater part of Hungary and spares no one, for he sees whither the power of Charles and Ferdinand is headed. Would that Christian princes did not fear them as well!” In 1531 he reported it was public knowledge that “the Turk will invade Germany with all his forces, in a contest for the greatest of prizes, to see whether Charles will be the monarch of the whole world, or the Turk. For the world can no longer bear two suns in the sky.” ^[58]

It seems likely that Erasmus’s thinking about Europe’s confrontation with the Turks was influenced by correspondence (only partly extant) with Jan Laski, whose brother Hieronim had regular contact with the Turks on behalf of Zapolyai and later on behalf of Ferdinand I. Erasmus did receive news, to be kept in the strictest confidence, about Hieronim’s service (in Zapolyai’s entourage) with the Turkish army against Ferdinand (1530). As to what the elder Laski brother’s views on the Turks may have been, Spanish archives preserve a report of his last mission to the Sublime Porte (1540) in which he was at pains to suggest that one need not go to war to gain the sultan’s attention—he was no less rational in calculating his interests than any Christian prince. Erasmus’s comment to Thomas More seems to reflect a broadly similar view, one he may have learned from Polish friends: “The Turk fears Caesar’s growing power, and thus prefers to have King John [Zapolyai] as his neighbor rather than Ferdinand.” ^[59]

With regard to the struggle in Hungary there is little doubt that Erasmus adopted a “Polish” standpoint. His letter to Zygmunt I (15 May 1527) praised the king for having renounced any claim he himself might have had to succeed Louis II in Bohemia and Hungary and for sending Szydlowiecki to mediate “once you learned it would come to a trial of arms between Ferdinand and John, the King of Hungary.” This letter was published soon after delivery in Cracow, evidently through Tomicki; Stanislaw Hozjusz (Hosius), a young humanist whom Tomicki had placed in charge of a school in his episcopal palace, dedicated the unauthorized edition of Erasmus’s missive to his patron.^[60] Jan Laski reported to Erasmus that “there is no one here [Cracow] who does not think highly of you, because of your letter to our prince.” But the reaction in Vienna was rather different, for Erasmus’s reference to Zapolyai as “king” caused him “no small amount of grief at Ferdinand’s court”—until he checked his own copy of the letter to Zygmunt, Erasmus suspected someone had inserted the offending word in the published version to get back at him, “for I am always condemning these wars and calling for peace.” ^[61] In subsequent letters to Poland Erasmus avoided calling Zapolyai king, and in a published letter he urged Jan Antonin, who had been invited to join Zapolyai as court physician, not to take sides in the conflict.^[62] But in letters he did not publish, as in one to Tomicki while Charles and Ferdinand were conducting a joint campaign into Turkish territory, Erasmus still took a view of Hungarian affairs that Vienna would not have approved:

These crusades have frequently turned out badly for us; and if this war is against the whole empire of the Turks, on behalf of the common Christian cause, then it should be undertaken by the common consent of all Christian kings. But they say this is not so. Conversely, if it is a struggle for the Helen [of Troy] that is Hungary, why does the pope mix himself in the business?^[63]

The correspondence of Charles V and Ferdinand^[64] is replete with references to “le bien de toute la chrétienté,” but it is not always clear the brothers are capable of distinguishing between “the good of all Christendom” and the interests of “our house of Austria.” Just this identification between the two was of course problematic for Christian foes of the dynasty and also for Erasmus: “There is hope of a truce with the Turks, which I think would be not only for the good of the commonwealth [respublica], but also more conducible to the propagation of the Christian religion.” ^[65] In other words, absent an agreement among all Christian princes, a crusade would be unlikely to damage the Ottoman Empire and would carry the risk of imposing a tyrannical monarchia on the lawful, pluriform order of the respublica Christiana. No one in Poland could have said things better.

If Erasmus’s Polish friends sought in various ways to enlighten him about the politics of southeastern Europe, he for his part seemed eager to make the avowal of his Catholicism that admirers in Poland expected. His earliest contact with Polish humanists came after he had committed himself to writing against Luther.^[66] As it happened, Hieronim Laski, the first Polish humanist to seek him out, was hoping to invoke Erasmus’s authority against the incipient Protestant movement in Poland, especially among the German-speaking burghers of cities like Cracow. After the two men discussed Luther without revealing their opinions, Laski picked up from Erasmus’s table “a letter which Luther had recently written to me.” Erasmus put the letter back but later noticed that his visitor again had the letter “secretly” in hand: “‘It looks to me,’ I said with a smile, ‘as though you had in mind to steal something.’” Laski admitted with a laugh that “many people have actually tried to persuade our king that you are in very close alliance with Luther, and this letter will prove them wrong.” Erasmus then offered to give him the autograph, once he had a copy made, “and with it two others in which [Luther] uses even more offensive language about me,” so that Laski might prove “that my relations with Luther are not as close as many people maintain.’” ^[67] Laski also brought with him a copy of Andrzej Krzycki’s Encomia Lutheri, a satire that notes Erasmus’s opposition to Luther, apparently hoping for an approving response.^[68] When another Polish scholar seemed to be wavering in his orthodoxy, he received some avuncular advice. In 1529 Erasmus responded as follows to a lost letter from Justus Decius, the close friend of a man whose Cracow home was in later years the meeting place for supporters of the new religious doctrines:

I see that your piety is heartfelt, so that you are more dear to me, and resemble your name [Justus, “the just”]. The things Luther charges against our side are truer than I would wish .…And the points that Luther presses home, if treated with moderation, come in my opinion rather close to the vigor of the Gospel. That he rages against images in a hateful way has little to do with piety, and much to do with sedition. Nor do I see why the mass should be altogether abolished, even if what Oecolampadius teaches were true. For neither the body nor the soul of Christ is adored with what is called worship [latria], but only his divinity, which is nowhere not present.

He goes on to say that despite some sympathy for Oecolampadius’s view, “I stay with what is handed down by the Church, the interpreter of Scripture,” and “that you do the same, I vehemently approve: you are acting in the interest of your salvation.” ^[69] Some years later Andrzej Krzycki, bishop of Ploc, wrote Erasmus that he had invited Philip Melanchthon to his diocese. Erasmus’s first reaction, in a letter to a Low Countries friend, was favorable: “Melanchthon declares clearly enough in his Commentary on Romans and in private letters to me that he grows weary of the people on his side.” But he evidently had second thoughts, as he wrote to Jan (II) Laski: “One of your bishops tells me he has invited Melanchthon to Poland, which surprises me; he does indeed write less violently, but he departs not even a hair’s breadth from Luther’s dogmas.” ^[70]

Andrzej Zebrzydowski’s career may serve as an example of the Catholic Erasmian tendency in Poland. Once back from his stay with Erasmus and a brief period of study in Padua, the young aristocrat “spent most of his time in pursuit of wealth,” according to a recent biographer, and added to his cumulation of benefices through “diplomatic skill as well as bribery.” The official correspondence which is all that survives from his pen dates from his time as bishop of Wloclawek in Kujavia (1546–1551) and the first two years of his tenure as bishop of Cracow (1551–1553). These years marked the high tide of Reformation influence in Poland; the Sjem (diet) was increasingly under the influence of an informal coalition between outspoken Protestants and the mass of nobility who were determined to prevent any incursions on their privileges by the crown. In this context the writings of Erasmus were mined for arguments against the Reformation and for a Catholic vision of reform. For example, in preparation for a synod of bishops which was to discuss reform of the church (1551), the cathedral chapter of Cracow recommended two of Erasmus’s works for use by the clergy, the Enchiridion (presumably the 1518 edition) and the Modus Orandi Deum of 1524.^[71]

Of the intellectual side of these great struggles there is little trace in Zebrzydowski’s official correspondence. One finds instead a prince of the church striving in difficult times to uphold his dignity, not to mention his income. In what proved a losing battle, he challenged the city council of Lutheran and German Gdansk (Danzig) for control of rural cloisters and the right to appoint city preachers; former revenues of the bishopric of Kujavia were at stake as well as the honor of the church and the Polish nation, forced to defend itself against the insubordination of the king’s German subjects.^[72] Zebrzydowski had trouble paying his debts, combined with a nobleman’s sensitivity to any slights against a personal honor or “dignity” that required some degree of conspicuous consumption; on one occasion he wrote Queen Bona that since he could not bear to be “scorned [contemni],” he would not permit himself to attend the upcoming diet in Cracow unless an order clearing all outbuildings from the street behind his residence were rescinded, because without his usual supplementary kitchen he could not possibly entertain the great men who would come to call on matters of state.^[73] Like bishops across Europe he was involved in unseemly petty disputes with his cathedral chapter, over such issues as who had the right to promise future vacancies in diocesan offices to favored candidates and who should pay for the services of the chapter’s physician when he was in attendance on the bishop.^[74] Yet through it all Zebrzydowski maintained his self-respect, and both Zygmunt I in his declining years and the young Zygmunt II August (1548–1572) apparently came to rely on him for shrewd advice on sensitive matters, such as how to deal with fractious magnates and nobles at meetings of the Sjem or how to keep the duke of Prussia in line without making it necessary for the Habsburgs to rally to his cause.^[75] In 1548, for example, the king turned to him for advice on an urgent request from his sister Isabella for military aid in behalf of her son, Janos Zygmunt Zapolyai, and his claims to the Hungarian crown. Zebrzydowski recommended the utmost caution—Zygmunt II should first send an envoy to determine if there were any real prospect of the grand anti-Habsburg coalition promised by Isabella’s Italian adviser, Giorgio Madruzzi—and as often happens in such cases he himself was appointed to carry out his recommendation. His subsequent reports from Hungary helped to lay this ambitious scheme to rest.^[76]

Here and there in the discussion of these issues one finds a vocabulary that could have been formed by reading Erasmus. Zebrzydowski certainly had a strong consciousness of the ordo or rank of the church that he represented as a bishop. When he was prevented from entering a Prussian castle, it was “not so much an insult to me personally as to the name and ordo I share with others.” He told the archbishop of Gniezno, with whom he was not on good terms, that bishops could ill afford to quarrel among themselves, in light of the “disturbance” at a recent Sjem that was “directed especially against our dignity and ordo. ” In the closing oration for a synod of bishops held in the presence of Zygmunt the August in Cracow (1550), he warned the king that agitation against the church threatened his very throne: “If the ordo which anointed you king, and by that royal sacrament elevated you to the ranks of Christian kings, loses its authority, do not believe anything will be safe for you in Poland.” ^[77] His first reaction to Isabella and Madruzzi’s plan for Hungary was to urge the king to consider “the well-being of the Christian respublica. ” Rather like Erasmus in his doubts about Luther’s spiritus, full of rage, or in his condemnation of Farel’s wanton zeal, he warned correspondents against men whose character (ingenium) he found wanting in all sense of shame or moderation; this was his personal assessment of Madruzzi, and also his critique, in the just-mentioned oration, of Protestant magnates who so boldly argued their case at meetings of the Sjem. These possible borrowings from Erasmus’s vocabulary of social relations seem superficial, but it may be that Zebrzydowski had given more thought to Erasmus than his official correspondence indicates. Before he died (1560), he left instructions to have engraved on his tombstone the proud boast “Magni illius Erasmi Rotherodami discipulus et auditor” (“A follower and pupil of the great Erasmus of Rotterdam”).^[78]

The Erasmus whom Poles came to know was thus sensitive to Poland’s suspicions of the Habsburgs, and hence the more appealing to Polish readers, and an outspoken foe of the Reformation. Accordingly, we would expect the reading of his works in Poland to be friendly rather than critical and Catholic rather than Protestant. Yet even in Poland there were at least two Erasmuses. This point may be made by briefly considering the later career of Jan (II) Laski (d. 1560), organizer of the reformed church at Emden and founder of Poland’s Calvinist church. Even while staying with Erasmus in Basel, Laski made the acquaintance of Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich, whom he would later remember as having given him the first inkling of true doctrine. He also studied Greek and Hebrew with Konrad Pellikan, later to be Erasmus’s adversary; his description (1544) of their quarrel over the Eucharist makes Erasmus’s position seem rather less assertive.^[79] Because of suspicions attached to his Protestant contacts abroad, on his return (1526) the young Laski was made by his uncle, the archbishop of Gniezno, to swear an oath of orthodoxy in the presence of a family enemy, Piotr Tomicki. Jan (I) Laski hoped that his nephew might eventually succeed him as primate of Poland, but the higher levels of ecclesiastical preferment eluded him and he became involved instead in Janos Zapolyai’s diplomatic offensive against the Habsburgs. By the time Zygmunt I got round to offering him an important bishopric (1538), Laski had become in his own mind a religious seeker who no longer desired such a post. He traveled first to Frankfurt and spent some time in Leuven (where he married a woman associated with the local house of the Brethren of the Common Life); he then moved on (1540) to Emden in East Friesland, safely beyond the reach of the Habsburg authorities’ campaign against religious dissidents. Summoned home to the deathbed of his brother Hieronim (1541), he again swore in public that he had not broken with the Catholic church but then returned to Emden (1542), where he did exactly that. In 1543 Anne of Oldenburg, regent of East Friesland for her son Edzard II, named him superintendent of the church in her lands, and in that capacity he prepared (1544) but did not publish an Epitome Doctrinae Ecclesiarum Frisiae Orientalis (Summary of the Doctrine of the Churches of East Friesland). He also engaged in a protracted and remarkably courteous controversy with Anabaptist leaders David Joris and Menno Simons—one recent scholar describes him as “genuinely committed to debate as a means of persuasion.” He is perhaps best known for creating a framework for cohesion among the clergy and discipline among the laity that made the Emden church a model for the later Dutch Reformed Church. When Charles V imposed the Augsburg Interim (1548) on most Protestant territories of the empire, Laski embarked on a period of exile, mainly in England and (after the accession of Mary Tudor in 1553) in Frankfurt; in both cities he organized Low Countries refugee churches. From Frankfurt he returned to Poland (1556), where in the last years of his life he built a church along Calvinist lines in Little Poland (the district centered on Cracow) and promoted his vision of a Protestant community that would include Lutherans and Bohemian Brethren as well as the Reformed—an ideal that was actually achieved some years after his death in the Consensus of Sandomierz (1570).^[80]

The one biographer who has written about Laski’s relations with Erasmus has commented on how difficult it is to pin down the question of his dependence on the Rotterdam humanist.^[81] Writing in 1544 to Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, Laski could introduce himself as a man whose letters might be found in the published correspondence of Erasmus, “who was my first instructor in true religion.” ^[82] The Epitome of the Teaching of the Churches of East Friesland offers a way of assessing Erasmus’s importance for Laski at this early stage of his career as a reformer—when his erstwhile mentor’s critique of the Reformation was presumably still fresh in his mind.^[83] Church authorities in Wittenberg withheld their endorsement from this first fruit of Laski’s theological reflection because Laski adopted a Zwinglian view of the Eucharist, while Zurich disapproved because Laski refused to exclude from the communion of the church partisans of the Anabaptist movement that had long been anathema to the church in Zurich.^[84] On the cardinal issues of sin and grace Laski stood squarely within a Protestant framework. Like Calvin, he asserts that “all Christian doctrina seems to revolve around two points, first concerning the knowledge of God, second concerning the true knowledge of ourselves,” for when the world is “convicted of sin” by the Holy Spirit, this judgment, to be learned only from Scripture, conveys what is essential in “the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” ^[85] Like Bullinger, if not Luther or Calvin, Laski insisted that God’s salvific will extended to all men and was not restricted to the elect only.^[86] Like Luther, he taught that even after grace the human will remained “servile [serva]” in the sense that “we are so unable not to sin that for the whole of our lives we do nothing but sin.” ^[87]

Yet Laski’s sharp distinction between different kinds of sin seems to breathe a different spirit. “Venial” or “involuntary” sin was “inborn” in human nature, while “voluntary” sin was so great an evil that not even the grace of God could overcome it. The former was to be described as “weakness [infirmitas],” the latter as “contempt [contemptus]” of God and his word or as an utter lack of the fear of God. Satan through his wiles had reduced Adam to “unbelief” but not to “contempt” of God. In consequence of Adam’s sin man was “liable [obnoxious]” to evil but not under its domination (subjectus), “for whatever God has created is pure and holy”; in fact, “to charge all men and even newborn babes with contempt and hatred of God is itself a sin.” There was a connection between the two, for “voluntary sin” or contempt of God arose from acquiescence or “excessive indulgence [nimia indulgentia]” in involuntary sin. But the essential distinction was that while “weakness” was curable by divine grace, “God’s mercy does not extend to those who contemn him, for as Scripture says, ‘the Lord’s mercy is on those who fear him.’” Contempt of God is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the unforgivable sin; indeed, “there are many who would say that the pains of hell were created just for this sin.” ^[88] This doctrine seems to echo Erasmus, particularly in the Hyperaspistes, his refutation of Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio.^[89] Here Erasmus had insisted that in consequence of Adam’s sin, man was afflicted by “weakness [infirmitas],” not by a “malicious aversion from God”; by “error” but not by “perversity,” for “perversity comes not from nature but from free choice”; by the “stain” of vice but not by “an impious disposition.” By an impious disposition he meant “extreme malice, to the point of having contempt [contumeliam] for God,” and “it is one thing to hate God, another to love God less than one ought.” For Erasmus too there was a link between the less and the greater forms of evil, in that “perversity” was “born from the habit of sinning,” and the will of those who “simply erred” was “more curable” than of those who had become “hardened in their vices by long practice.” ^[90] It would of course require a more detailed study to test the validity of the argument proposed here. Provisionally, one may say of Laski in 1544, as a recent scholar has said of an “Erasmian” among the radical reformers, that he looked to the major reformers for the “theological substance” of his doctrine and drew on Erasmus for the “structure” of his thinking on human nature.^[91]

In his defense of Catholicism Zebrzydowski was more typical of the young Poles who had corresponded with Erasmus, but the Protestant Laski knew him better than any Pole and thought he had an understanding of Erasmus’s mind that went beyond the written word. Thus despite the strongly Catholic flavor of Erasmus’s letters to Poles, the reading of his works in Poland corresponded to a more general pattern in which those who admired the Rotterdam humanist made claims on him for one side or another of Europe’s great religious divide.^[92] Perhaps especially in works like Moriae Encomium or the Colloquia, where he had used ridicule as a weapon against superstitious dimensions of specific Catholic practices like pilgrimages or abstinence from meat on Fridays, Erasmus’s comments “lent themselves to a Protestant reading.” ^[93] Try as he might, the Catholic Erasmus of the Basel and Freiburg years could not add enough glosses or clarifications to control the interpretation of words and works already in the public domain.

Notes