Origins of the Reformation: the Church in crisis and Luther's challenge

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Indulgences (selling remission of sin), simony (buying/selling Church offices), and pluralism (holding multiple posts to collect multiple incomes).

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That the Church was riddled with corrupt bishops, ignorant monks and power-obsessed popes — a humanist satire designed to shame the Church into reform from within.

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A Dominican friar who sold indulgences in territories near Wittenberg to fund St Peter's Basilica. His aggressive campaign directly provoked Luther to write the Ninety-Five Theses.

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Sola fide (by faith alone, not works), sola scriptura (by Scripture alone, not Church tradition), and the priesthood of all believers (every Christian can read and interpret the Bible directly).

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(1) Address to the Nobility — German princes should reform the Church themselves; (2) Babylonian Captivity — reduced sacraments from seven to two; (3) Freedom of a Christian — salvation by faith alone.

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Johann Eck manoeuvred Luther into saying the Council of Constance had wrongly burned Jan Hus — meaning Luther now rejected both papal and conciliar authority, making reconciliation with Rome almost impossible.

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Luther's closest colleague at Wittenberg; he systematised Lutheran theology in Loci Communes (1521) and authored the Augsburg Confession (1530), the definitive statement of Lutheran belief.

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He arranged Luther's staged kidnapping and hid him at Wartburg Castle for nearly a year, where Luther survived and translated the New Testament into German while the imperial edict against him went unenforced.

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1526: princes were free to determine religion in their own territories — Lutheranism spread legally. 1529: Catholic majority tried to reverse this; six Lutheran princes and fourteen cities issued a formal 'Protest', giving Protestantism its name.

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Charles was perpetually distracted by wars with France (Italian Wars) and the Ottoman threat (Suleiman reached Vienna in 1529), and needed the German princes' military support — he could not afford to alienate them by enforcing the edict aggressively.

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Luther's principle that Scripture alone (not papal decree or Church tradition) is the supreme authority in Christianity. Radical because it stripped the pope and clergy of their monopoly on religious truth and invited every literate person to judge doctrine for themselves.

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Erasmus wanted reform from within — he stayed Catholic, used satire and scholarship to shame the Church, and never challenged papal authority directly. Luther broke with Rome entirely, denied papal and conciliar infallibility, and built an alternative Church structure.