will be the Holy See and all Christendom, and will thank God for such a good, holy, and religious
Emperor."^389
The edict is not so long, but as turgid, bombastic, intolerant, fierce, and Cruel, as the Pope’s
bull of excommunication.^390 It gave legal force to the bull within the German Empire. It denounces
Luther as a devil in the dress of a monk, who had gathered a mass of old and new heresies into one
pool, and pronounces upon him the ban and re-ban.^391 It commands the burning, and forbids the
printing, publication, and sale, of his books, the sheltering and feeding of his person, and that of
his followers, and directs the magistrates to seize him wherever he may be found, and to hand him
over to the Emperor, to be dealt with according to the penal laws against heretics. At the same time
the whole press of the empire was put under strict surveillance.^392
This was the last occasion on which the mediaeval union of the secular empire with the
papacy was expressed in official form so as to make the German emperor the executor of the decrees
of the bishop of Rome. The gravamina of the nation were unheeded. Hutten wrote: "I am ashamed
of my fatherland."^393
Thus Luther was outlawed by Church and State, condemned by the Pope, the Emperor, the
universities, cast out of human society, and left exposed to a violent death.
But he had Providence and the future on his side. The verdict of the Diet was not the verdict
of the nation.
The departure of the Emperor through the Netherlands to Spain, where he subdued a
dangerous insurrection, his subsequent wars with Francis in Italy, the victorious advance of the
Turks in Hungary, the protection of Luther by the Elector Frederick, and the rapid spread of
Protestant doctrines, these circumstances, combined to reduce the imperial edict, as well as the
papal bull, to a dead letter in the greater part of Germany. The empire was not a centralized
monarchy, but a loose confederation of seven great electorates, a larger number of smaller
principalities, and free cities, each with an ecclesiastical establishment of its own. The love of
individual independence among the rival states and cities was stronger than the love of national
union; and hence it was difficult to enforce the decisions of the Diet against a dissenting minority
or even a single recalcitrant member. An attempt to execute the edict in electoral Saxony or the
free cities by military force would have kindled the flame of civil war which no wise and moderate
ruler would be willing to risk without imperative necessity. Charles was an earnest Roman Catholic,
but also a shrewd statesman who had to consult political interests. Even the Elector Albrecht of
Mainz prevented, as far as he could, the execution of the bull and ban in the dioceses of Mainz,
Magdeburg, and Halberstadt. He did not sign the edict as chancellor of the empire.^394 Capito, his
(^389) Dispatch of May 26. Brieger, I. 224. The edict appeared in print on the following Thursday, May 30, and on Friday the Emperor
left Worms.
(^390) Aleander himself calls it more terrible than any previous edict (cosi horribile quanto mai altro editto), June 27, 1521. Brieger, I.
- Ranke says (I. 343): "Es war so scharf, so entschieden wie möglich."
(^391) Die Acht und Aberacht. The Acht is the civil counterpart of the ecclesiastical excommunication and excludes the victim from all
protection of the law. The Aberacht or Oberacht follows if the Acht remains without effect. It is in the German definition die völlige
Fried- und Rechtslos- oder Vogelfrei-Erklärung. The imperial Acht is called the Reichsacht.
(^392) See the edict in full in Walch, XV. 2264-2280. It was published officially in Latin and German, and translated into the languages
of the Dutch and French dominions of Charles. Aleander himself, as he says, prepared the French translation.
(^393) Letter to Pirkheimer, May 1, 1521: "Me pudere incipit patriae."Opera II. 59.
(^394) Janssen, II. 208 sq.: "Albrecht musste sich beugen vor Luther, der Primus vor dem excommunicirten Mönch, welcher ihm mit
Enthuellungen drohte."