Background
Tetzel was the son of Hans Tetzel, a goldsmith of Leipzig, was born in 1465 at Pirna.
Tetzel was the son of Hans Tetzel, a goldsmith of Leipzig, was born in 1465 at Pirna.
He matriculated at the university in 1482, graduated B. A. in 1487, and in 1489 entered the Dominican convent at Leipzig.
He began in 1502 in the service of the Cardinal-legate Raymond Peraudi; and in the next few years he visited Freiberg (where he extracted 2000 gulden in two days), Dresden, Pirna, Leipzig, Zwickau and Gorlitz.
Later on he was at Nuremberg, Ulm and Innsbruck, where he is said to have been condemned to imprisonment for adultery, but released at the intercession of the elector of Saxony.
This charge is denied by his apologists; and though his methods were attacked by good Catholics like Johann Hass, he was elected prior of the Dominicans in Glogau in 1505.
Fresh scope was given to his activity in 1517 by archbishop Albrecht of Mainz.
Albrecht had been elected at the age of twenty-four to a see already impoverished by frequent successions and payments of annates to Rome.
He had agreed with Pope Leo X to pay his first-fruits in cash, on condition that he were allowed to recoup himself by the sale of indulgences.
Half the proceeds in his province were to go to him, half to Leo X for building the basilica of St Peter's at Rome.
Luther was thus roused to publish his momentous ninety-five theses on the subject of indulgences on October 31, 1517.
In 1517 his promotion of the indulgence for the erection of St. Peter's Church aroused the indignation of Martin Luther, whose theses were in part promoted by Tetzel's preaching.
Tetzel has been greatly overrated in importance.
He had no thought of personal gain from his preaching of the indulgence.
His teaching on indulgences was not in accord with the doctrine of the church; the sine qua non in gaining an indulgence is to feel contrition for all sins, but Tetzel did not require that for indulgences gained on behalf of the dead, only for those gained for oneself.
Even Albrecht was shamed by Luther's attack, but he could not afford to relinquish his profits already pledged for the repayment of his debts; and Tetzel was encouraged to defend himself and indulgences.
But the storm overwhelmed him: sober Catholics felt that his vulgar extravagances had prejudiced Catholic doctrine, and Miltitz, who was sent from Rome to deal with the situation, administered to him a severe castigation.
He hid himself in the Dominican convent at Leipzig in fear of popular violence, and died there on the 4th of July 1519, just as Luther was beginning his famous disputation with Eck. Many lives of Tetzel have been published on the Protestant and on the Catholic side.
Tetzel's efforts irretrievably damaged the complicated and abstruse Catholic doctrine on the subject of indulgences; as soon as the coin clinks in the chest, he cried, the soul is freed from purgatory.
He hid himself in the Dominican convent at Leipzig in fear of popular violence, and died there on the 4th of July 1519, just as Luther was beginning his famous disputation with Eck. Many lives of Tetzel have been published on the Protestant and on the Catholic side.
