Commerce and the Decline of Social Morality
As the commercial spirit spread and charitable works were neglected, social morality declined. Now that a money economy had replaced the feudal order, innate human dishonesty appeared in new situations and in new forms. The newly rich, who held shares and bills of exchange instead of land and seldom met the people whose labor produced their profits, were no longer bound by the traditions of chivalry and generosity that had existed among wealthy landowners. Medieval trade and industry had accepted moral restraints in the form of guild, municipal and religious regulations, but the new capitalism threw them off and set men into such relentless competition that moral principles were pushed aside.
Commercial deceit took the place of religious deceit. The letters and diaries of the time are full of complaints about wholesale merchants passing off adulterated foods and counterfeit goods. Dietrich of Innsbruck complained in 1518 that importers "mix brick dust into ginger and unwholesome matter into pepper." Luther writes that sellers had learned to keep spices such as pepper, ginger and saffron for a while in damp cellars to add to their weight, and that there was hardly a commodity in which merchants did not cheat by weight, measure, count or artificial coloring: "There is no limit to such fraud." The Venetian senate even stamped a false seal of quality, weight and measure on the whole cargo of a ship carrying English woolen goods.
Charity Declines in the North
Charity still flourished in the Latin countries with the same cheerfulness as in the Middle Ages. Noble families gave a large share of their income to the poor in the name of God. Lyons had inherited from the fifteenth century an organized system of municipal charity to which its citizens always gave "with open hand and heart." In Germany and England the giving hand was far less open. Luther made a manly effort to revive the charitable institutions that princes' seizure of church property had left abandoned and empty, but he confessed that his efforts came to little. "In the time of the popes," he complained, "people were charitable and gave gladly, but now, in the age of the Gospel text, nobody gives, and everyone wants to fleece his neighbor. Nobody will give a penny."
Latimer reported the same in 1548: "London was never so wicked ... In former times when a rich man died, large sums of his estate were left to help the poor. Today the hand of charity has grown sticky." Cardinal Pole reminded Londoners that two Italian cities had given more in alms than the whole of England, and James Froude concluded: "With the spread of truth, charity and justice in England have declined." Protestantism probably had little to do with it; the commercial spirit and the weakening of faith more likely dried up the sense of charity.
Beggary as a Social Crisis
Begging spread and became a social crisis. Evicted tenants, idle craftsmen and soldiers back from the wars roamed the roads or made the slums of the cities their base for begging and theft. In Augsburg beggars made up a sixth of the population, in Hamburg a fifth and in London a quarter (figures reported by the book). The reformer Thomas Lever cried out: "O merciful God! How many poor, weak, lame, blind and sick people ... crawl and sleep in the mud of the streets!" Luther, who had a tender heart behind his rough tongue, was among the first to say that the state should take the care of the poor out of the hands of the church. In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) he proposed that every city should provide for its own poor.
While he was away at the Wartburg, his steadfast followers in Wittenberg set up a common fund to care for orphans, provide dowries for poor girls, pay school expenses for needy students and lend money to families in want. In 1523 Luther proposed a plan titled the Ordinance of a Common Fund, under which the inhabitants of each district, together with the clergy, would fix a contribution for each member and pay it into a joint fund from which interest-free loans were made to the needy and the disabled. Augsburg in 1522 appointed six "guardians of the poor" to supervise relief. Nuremberg followed, then Strasbourg and Breslau (1523), Regensburg and Magdeburg (1524).
Vives and Public Relief
Around the same time the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives presented the council of Bruges with a treatise, On Assistance to the Poor. In it he described how poverty was growing amid the rising wealth of society and warned that the sharp contrast between the two extremes might one day bring a ruinous revolution. "As it is shameful for a father of a family," he wrote, "who has the means of comfort, to let one of his household suffer nakedness or rags, so it is not fitting for the city authorities to close their eyes to the misery and hunger of the inhabitants and make no attempt to cure them."
Vives held that every person able to work should be given work and that nobody should be left free to make begging a habit. But since some are truly disabled or ill, they should be housed in almshouses, hospitals and free schools paid for by the municipality, so that their food, health and education would be provided; special arrangements should likewise be made for those mentally impaired. The city of Ypres combined Vives's ideas with the older German practice (1525) and created a common fund into which all gifts went as a single capital, with relief distributed under the direction of one official. Charles V asked for a copy of the Ypres plan and ordered it applied in all cities of his empire (1531), and Henry VIII issued a similar order to every parish in England (1536). In Catholic countries the church generally kept the administration of charity in its own hands.
Political and Military Morality
Political morality stayed where Machiavelli had set it. Espionage was an everyday matter everywhere; Henry VIII's agents in Rome were expected to report the Vatican's most secret deliberations to the English court. Bribery was an old tradition, and after the rain of gold from America it flowed more richly. Governments competed in breaking treaties. Turkish and Christian ships rivaled one another in piracy. With the decline of the chivalric spirit, the moral rules of war sank to the level of a half-barbarous age: towns that could not hold out against besiegers and surrendered were plundered or burned, prisoners were slain or enslaved until ransomed.
The laws and customs of international courtesy that had existed shortly before, under which kings settled their disputes by the arbitration of popes, had vanished, and in their place came the anarchy of nationalist ambition and religious enmity. Christians observed no moral rules toward non-Christians, and the Turks repaid them in kind. The Portuguese captured and enslaved Africans, and the Spanish conquerors plundered, enslaved and killed the native peoples of America, with no lessening of their lofty claim to be Christianizing the New World. Life under Spanish rule was so bitter for the native Americans that, according to the book, thousands of them took their own lives in despair. Even in Christendom itself suicide increased strikingly in this period. Some humanists considered it excusable, while the church declared that it led the person directly to damnation.
The Reformers' Own Verdict
On the whole, although the Reformation in the end improved Europe's morals, it shook the foundations of public morality for a time. Willibald Pirckheimer and Hans Sachs, both supporters of Luther, lamented that with the decline of the church's authority moral principles had fallen into chaos and disrepute. Luther himself spoke with his usual candor: "The farther we go on our way, the worse the world becomes. ... It is now perfectly clear how much the number of greedy, hard-hearted, shameless and insolent men and evildoers has grown since the days of the popes. ... We Germans are now mocked and despised by all peoples, who call us a filthy swine. ... We steal and lie ... eat and drink to excess and abandon ourselves to every vice. ... The general complaint is that our young people have become wholly corrupt and undisciplined and no longer wish to learn anything."
The Lutheran preacher Andreas Musculus (1560) called his own age indescribably more wicked than the Germany of the fifteenth century, and many Protestant leaders agreed. Calvin groaned: "The future fills me with terror and I dare not think of it; if God does not come down from heaven to earth, there is no doubt that barbarism will swallow us up." The same lament was heard from Scotland and from England. Froude, an ardent defender of Henry VIII, concluded with fairness that the movement begun under Henry, judged by its results up to 1550, had made the country a plaything of adventurers: belief in one superstition, which at its height at least inspired respect and obedience, had been exchanged for belief in another that destroyed obedience and put quarrel in its place; under that harmful influence not only the highest self-sacrifice but the commonest moral duties and honesty vanished, and private life became so tainted that the license of the Catholic clergy looked like innocence beside it. Yet among the good who stayed clear of the corruption, he added, the best were still those who followed the Reformation.
Causes and Perspective
We cannot blame Luther for this moral decline on the grounds that he freed the sexual instinct from its chains or scorned "social charity," any more than we should make the personal appetites and hardness of Henry VIII the cause of corruption in England. By way of comparison, there was every kind of freedom in Catholic Italy under the Renaissance popes and in Catholic France under Francis I. The main cause of moral decay in western Europe was probably the growth of wealth. Another major cause was the loosening of faith, not only in Catholic doctrine but, more broadly, in the foundations of Christianity. Musculus lamented: "Nobody cares about hell or heaven, and nobody gives a thought to God and the devil."
In weighing such statements by religious leaders we should remember that, being generally disappointed at the ineffectiveness of their teaching on people's moral lives, they naturally tended to exaggerate. If we trusted the preachers, we should have to say that mankind was never much better in any earlier age and will never be much better in any later one. In other words, we can find all the sins of the sixteenth century in our own age, and the sins of our age in that century, in proportion to the means each had at hand.
Meanwhile both Catholicism and Protestantism founded and strengthened two centers of moral revival: one was improvement in the conduct of priests, with regard to the freedom to marry or to refrain from marriage; the other was an emphasis on the family as the last fortress of faith and chastity. In time the Reformation proved that it had indeed changed everything, even to excess; and a day came when men and women looked back with a wistful, hidden glance at that sixteenth century whose people were so wicked yet so free-spirited.