Giovanni de’ Medici was the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ruler of Florence. He received the tonsure at seven and the red hat at thirteen. When the conclave of March 1513 elected him pope he was thirty-seven years old and had not yet been ordained a priest; the ordination was performed in the days before his coronation.

He was a cultivated and generous man, a patron of Raphael, and by temperament a peacemaker rather than a fighter. He was also ruinously expensive. The rebuilding of St. Peter’s had been begun under Julius II and required money on a scale no ordinary revenue could supply. Leo’s solution was to authorize a plenary indulgence for the basilica, preached across Germany, with the proceeds divided between Rome and the Fugger bank — which had financed Albert of Brandenburg’s purchase of the archbishopric of Mainz.

Out of that arrangement came Johann Tetzel, and out of Tetzel came the Ninety-Five Theses of October 1517. Leo’s first response was to treat the matter as a squabble among monks and leave it to the Augustinian order. By 1518 it was serious enough for Cardinal Cajetan to examine Luther at Augsburg; by 1519 serious enough for Johann Eck to debate him at Leipzig.

On 15 June 1520 Leo issued the bull Exsurge Domine, condemning forty-one propositions drawn from Luther’s writings and giving him sixty days to recant.¹ It opens with the sentence that gave it its name:

Arise, O Lord, and judge Your own cause. … Foxes have arisen seeking to destroy the vineyard whose winepress You alone have trod.² Leo XExsurge Domine, 15 June 1520

Luther burned the bull outside the Elster Gate at Wittenberg on 10 December 1520, and on 3 January 1521 Leo excommunicated him by the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.³ Three months later Luther stood before the emperor at Worms.

Leo died in December 1521 at forty-five, leaving the papal treasury empty and the German church in revolt. He had been pope for eight years and had, by any reckoning, failed to understand what was happening in Saxony.

A note for preachers: Leo is often quoted as having said, “Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us.” The remark appears only in later and hostile sources, long after his death, and no contemporary record supports it. It makes a good sermon line and a poor historical claim; it is better left alone.

Roman Catholicism   Indulgences   The Ninety-Five Theses

Sources

1. Leo X, bull Exsurge Domine (15 June 1520), condemning forty-one propositions of Martin Luther. ↩
2. Exsurge Domine, opening lines. ↩
3. Leo X, bull Decet Romanum Pontificem (3 January 1521), the sentence of excommunication. See Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), § 48. ↩