Peddling to pay the pope

In crafting and posting his 95 Theses, Martin Luther was ticked off in particular at a

Dominican friar called Tetzel, who traveled around peddling indulgences. (The word

friar meant “brother,” and it was used for men who were members of certain religious

orders, such as the Dominicans.)

Tetzel came into a village or city and gathered a crowd, much as a snake-oil salesman

would in a frontier American town three centuries later. Imagine Tetzel hawking

indulgences as if they were the latest things in patent medicines for your soul.

Why did he do it? Well, Tetzel was not an entrepreneur, as it may seem. He was a

deputy sent out by the newly appointed Archbishop of Mainz.

Another Church practice that bred widespread skepticism was that anyone appointed

to a high ecclesiastical office, such as archbishop, had to pay fees to the pope as a sort

of recompense for the appointment. If that sounds like a kickback, you’ve got the idea.

In 1514, when the Archbishop of Mainz got his job, Pope Leo X was spending a lot of

money in Rome — especially on the building of St. Peter’s Basilica. And so Leo set a

high fee.

The new Archbishop of Mainz lacked ready cash, so he borrowed from an Augsburg

family called Fugger. (No remarks, please.) Powerful banking families, another

Renaissance phenomenon that started in Italy, had risen in northern Europe by this

time. (The Welser family, also of Augsburg, was the other big banking force in

Germany.)

The archbishop needed to repay the Fuggers. To help, the pope gave him an easy way

to raise funds: He made the archbishop regional distributor for holy indulgences. Tetzel

was the archbishop’s sales rep