Albert of Mainz

Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg was Archbishop of Mainz and of Magdeburg, an elector of the Holy Roman Empire, and the man whose debts provoked the Reformation. He was a younger son of the Hohenzollern elector of Brandenburg and rose through the church at a speed that only money could buy. He became Archbishop of Magdeburg at twenty-three and Archbishop of Mainz the following year. Holding several sees at once required a papal dispensation, and Leo X charged an enormous sum for it. Albert borrowed the money from the Fugger banking house of Augsburg. To repay them, he was permitted to preach a jubilee indulgence in his territories and to keep half the proceeds, the other half going to the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome. The Dominican Johann Tetzel ran the campaign, promising release from purgatory in terms that embarrassed even sympathetic churchmen. In October 1517 an Augustinian friar in Wittenberg sent Albert a letter of protest with a list of ninety-five theses attached. Albert forwarded them to Rome and asked for a ruling. What he received instead was the Reformation. He spent the rest of his career opposing it, as a founder of the Catholic League of Dessau and a firm ally of the Habsburgs, while much of his own territory turned Lutheran around him. He was also a considerable patron of the arts who employed Grünewald and Cranach, and he eventually sold his enormous relic collection at Halle when the Reformation destroyed the market for it. Luther attacked him directly in 1521 over the relic display, in a tract his own printers were afraid to publish. He died at Mainz in 1545, the year before Luther.

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