Reformation
The 16th-century split that shattered Western Christianity, spread by the printing press, and set off a century of religious war that reshaped Europe.
In 1517 an obscure German monk objected to a Church fundraising scheme, and within a lifetime Western Christianity had split in two, never to be made whole. The Protestant Reformation shattered the thousand-year unity of Latin Christendom, spawned the churches that still divide Europe and the Americas, and helped invent the modern world of competing states and mass media. It is remembered as a religious event, and it was. But its accelerant was a machine: the printing press turned one man's protest into the first viral movement in history.
The spark
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, a theology professor at Wittenberg, circulated ninety-five theses attacking the sale of indulgences, paper certificates the Church sold to shorten a soul's time in purgatory. His objection was narrow and academic, written in Latin for scholarly debate. Rome's answer was that the pope's authority was not to be questioned. Luther pushed further, arguing that salvation came through faith alone, that scripture, not the Church hierarchy, was the final authority, and eventually that the pope himself might be the problem. In 1521, hauled before the Diet of Worms, Luther refused to recant, reportedly saying he could do no other. He vanished into hiding, and weeks later Emperor Charles V's Edict of Worms declared him an outlaw.
The first mass medium
What made this schism different from earlier heresies was Gutenberg's press, roughly seventy years old and finally cheap enough to matter. Luther grasped its power instantly. He wrote in punchy German rather than Latin, so ordinary people could read him, and produced short pamphlets that could be printed in a day and sold for the price of a chicken. His tracts and his German Bible sold in the hundreds of thousands. Illustrated broadsheets carried the message to those who could not read at all. The theses were said to spread across Germany in two weeks and across Europe in two months, faster than Rome could respond. It was, in effect, the first time a communications technology outran the authorities trying to contain a message, and every propaganda war since has rhymed with it.
The churches multiply
The movement fractured as it grew. Luther's followers became Lutherans; in Switzerland, John Calvin built a sterner, more disciplined Protestantism that spread to France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and beyond; in England, Henry VIII broke with Rome for reasons of his own and founded the Church of England. There was no longer one Church but many, each certain it held the truth. Catholicism answered with its own Counter-Reformation, cleaning up abuses and going on the offensive.
The political earthquake
The Reformation was never only about theology, because it redistributed power. Princes who embraced it could seize monastery lands and Church revenue and slip free of papal authority. The result was decades of war. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 tried to buy calm with a principle, cuius regio, eius religio, whose realm, his religion: each German prince would set the faith of his own territory. It bought only a truce. The deeper struggle erupted again in the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648, one of the deadliest conflicts in European history, which ended only with the Peace of Westphalia and its landmark bargain that sovereign states, not popes, would decide their own affairs. The monk who wanted to reform his Church had, without meaning to, helped birth the modern state system.