Las Casas, whether on one side of the Atlantic, pleading his case at the royal court, or on the other, in straw-thatched colonial settlements, never doubted that his convictions derived from the mainstream of Christian teaching. Formulating his objections to Spanish imperialism, he drew on the work of Aquinas. ‘Jesus Christ, the king of kings, was sent to win the world, not with armies, but with holy preachers, as sheep among wolves.’20 Such was the judgement of Thomas Cajetan, an Italian friar whose commentary on Aquinas was the great labour of his life.* Appointed head of the Dominicans in 1508, and a cardinal in 1517, he spoke with a rare authority. News of the sufferings inflicted on the Indians filled him with a particular anger. ‘Do you doubt that your king is in hell?’21 he demanded of one Spanish visitor to Rome. Here, in his shock that a Christian ruler should think to justify conquest and savagery in the name of the crucified Christ, was the expression of a scholarly tradition that reached all the way back to Alcuin. Cajetan, in his efforts to provide the Indians with a legal recourse against their oppressors, never imagined that he was breaking new ground. The discovery of continents and peoples unimagined by Aquinas did not render the great Dominican any the less qualified to serve as a guide as to how they should be treated. The teachings of the Church were universal in their reach. That the kingdoms of the Indians were legitimate states; that Christianity should be imposed, not by force, but solely by means of persuasion; that neither kings, nor emperors, nor the Church itself had any right to ordain their conquest: here, in Cajetan’s opinion, were the principles fit to govern a globalised age.
There was, in this innovative programme of international law, a conscious attempt to lay the foundations of something enduring. Cajetan did not think that the discovery of a New World presaged the return of Christ. The days when popes imagined themselves living in the end times were gone. The concern now of the papacy and its servants was to invest in the long term. Evidence for this in Rome itself was to be found amid a great din of hammering and chiselling. On the opposite side of the Tiber from the Lateran, in the Vatican, the ancient quarter where Saint Peter lay buried, work had begun in 1506 on an immense new church, intended to be the largest in the world. In the Lateran, at a council held in 1513, a formal prohibition had been issued against preaching the imminence of Antichrist. In the spring of 1518, when Cajetan arrived in Augsburg on his first foreign mission, his aim was pre-eminently a diplomatic one: to form a united German front against the Turks. Rather than interpreting the Ottoman onslaught on Christendom as a fulfilment of prophecies in the Book of Revelation, he preferred to see it as something quite else: a military challenge best met by raising taxes.
Yet Cajetan, now that he was beyond the Alps, could not help but feel the swirl and tug of apocalyptic expectations all around him. Hilten had died at the turn of the century, confined to a cell in Eisenach, and writing at the end – so it was said – in his own blood; but prophecies of the kind that he had so forcefully articulated, of the ruin of the papacy and the coming of a great reformer, were still circulating widely. 1516, the year foretold by Hilten as the one in which the great reformer was destined to appear, had come and gone; but Cajetan could not afford to relax. Even as he pressed the German princes to invest in a crusade against the Turks, he knew that financial demands from the Church were generating widespread resentment. In 1517, a theological dispute about the methods employed by Dominicans to raise funds for the papal building programme had led to a particular stir in the Saxon fortress town of Wittenberg. There, a friar who served the recently founded university as its professor of biblical studies had issued a formal objection, in the form of ninety-five written theses. Various Dominicans, closing ranks against this display of impudence, had responded with indignant counter-blasts. Academic spats like this were nothing unusual, of course, and attempts to resolve it followed a process that would have been perfectly familiar to Abelard. The papacy, sent the ninety-five theses by the local archbishop, had pondered them for eight months before finally pronouncing, in August 1518, that they were indeed heretical. The author had been summoned to Rome. Yet this, far from settling the matter, had only stoked the flames. Already, in Wittenberg, writings by the local inquisitor had been burnt in the market square. Cajetan, tracking events from his residence in Augsburg, fretted that the bush-fires of controversy might spread out of control. As papal legate, it was his responsibility to stamp them out. The best and most Christian way of doing this, he decided, was to summon the troublesome author of the ninety-five theses to Augsburg, and persuade him in person to recant. Austere, learned and devout, Cajetan was a man whom even those normally suspicious of inquisitors knew that they could trust. His invitation was accepted. On 7 October 1518, Martin Luther arrived in Augsburg.
Perhaps, in greeting his troublesome guest, Cajetan reflected on how, almost four centuries before, Peter the Venerable had similarly welcomed a monk summoned to Rome on a charge of heresy and afforded him peace. Like Abelard, Luther was a theologian whose capacity for daring speculation was combined with a quite exceptional talent for self-publicity. It was typical of him that, travelling to Augsburg, he should have done so on foot. Intellectually brilliant, he knew as well how to present himself as a man of the people. As quick with a joke as he was with a Latin tag, as adept at speaking the language of taverns as he was at debating with scholars, he had followed up his ninety-five theses with an escalating volume of pamphlets. Indeed, such was public enthusiasm for what Luther had to say that Wittenberg, a town so poor and remote that it barely had an economy at all, was well on its way to becoming Europe’s most improbable centre of the publishing industry. In the space of barely a year, as Luther himself modestly observed, ‘it has pleased heaven that I should become the talk of the people’.22 To win such a man back from the brink of heresy would redound as gloriously to Cajetan’s order as the redemption of Abelard had redounded to Cluny’s. There was little, then, of the inquisitor about the Cardinal’s initial welcome. Fondly he spoke to the gaunt, spare man before him like a father to a son. Far from haranguing Luther, Cajetan aimed to persuade him in a gentle tone of his errors, and thereby spare him a trial in Rome. Recognisably, the cardinal spoke as the philosopher who had condemned the use of force against the Indians.