Nature's Evil

Success in mining promised career progress or even the prospect of starting your own business. The father of Martin Luther was a Saxon miner who became a furnace foreman and, towards the end of his life, the owner of a copper mine. 10 Martin grew up in the little town of Mansfeld, among mines, furnaces, chopped-down forests and smoke-blackened fields. Since the thirteenth century silver had been mined there, but by the time of Luther’s father it was a copper-smelting town, responsible for up to a quarter of all European production. The bankers of the southern princely states invested in Mansfeld, and Fugger also took an interest. There were about a hundred smelting furnaces in the town, and they were run by masters – this was a respected and well-paid job. Hans Luther ran seven furnaces with 200 workers. The miners were mostly migrants and foreigners, many of them from Bohemia. They were able to stand up for their own interests and wrote collective petitions that are still in the archives. In 1511 the Mansfeld miners formed a professional fraternity.

Copper gave excellent rents to the local landowners; during Luther’s time, three of them built castles round Mansfeld. But they were always in conflict: subterranean property rights were difficult to demarcate. After work the miners drank; alcohol relaxed tension and the town was full of taverns and brothels. Many miners had serious diseases of the lungs, stomach and skin. But Martin Luther preserved a fondness for Mansfeld and a sympathy for its problems. Thanks to his father’s income, he was able to study at university and become first a lawyer and then a monk. Giving his blessing to the investors and even the money-lenders, Luther wrote pamphlets against Fugger, the monopolist who had got rich at the expense of the miners’ toil. The miners, Luther’s local admirers, went on strike and occupied the mines. But Fugger was a harsh manager, and it was thought that his men killed some of the protesters. He insisted on having Luther arrested and handed over to the ecclesiastical court. Fugger’s money was behind the imperial Diet of Worms, which found Luther guilty of heresy. After this event, the emperor Charles V handed over control of all book printing in the empire to Fugger. By the end of his life Martin Luther’s father was in debt and had sold his business. His sons inherited land and houses but the creditors kept the mines. The number of working mines and furnaces decreased in Mansfeld; people were leaving the town, and new conflicts broke out among the mine-owners. In January 1546, Luther set off to settle a dispute between the five dukes of Mansfeld; discontented with their falling income, they had personally taken up the management of the mines. Luther persuaded Count Albrecht, one of his supporters, to make peace with his brothers so that they would hand over the management of the mines to an expert. Albrecht failed, and Luther decided that he must take on the task himself. He travelled to the neighbouring city of Eisleben, met the dukes and the miners, and listened to their grievances; it was while occupied with these matters that he died. Martin Luther shook the world with the Reformation but he died while mediating in a mining conflict.

By the 1560s the industry of Mansfeld had come to a complete stop. The silver and copper it produced could not compete with the metals brought from the New World. Neither Luther nor the dukes nor the miners could have imagined such an outcome; the boom and bust that they lived through were unthinkable in a feudal, essentially peasant culture. Complicated and tragic, life needed a new interpretation. It was precisely these conditions that gave rise to the religious doctrine which would change the life of Christians. Luther didn’t believe in portents or prejudices. But the idea of an omnipotent God whose will must be obeyed, even though it couldn’t be understood, dominated his refined imagination as much as it directed his fellow countrymen who descended into the mines every day. Acknowledging evil and believing in the power of good deeds were central parts of this faith.