That is all we can say with confidence definitely happened on October 31st, 1517. There is another story, that he hammered a copy of the same letter to the door of his local parish church. But while it makes for an excellent story, it cannot be proved.
The contents of the letter, sent to his bishop, were explosive, although no one at the time realised it. They tore apart just over a millennium of unity in Western Europe. In 1500, you could go from Norway to Italy, from Spain to Poland, and pretty much everyone would profess the same beliefs. They believed in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth... and so on.
The letter sent on Allhallowtide 1517 changed all that. The medieval Catholic Church, fairly popular and reflective of the beliefs of the people, was destroyed, emerging as the modern Roman Catholic Church. Arrayed against it was the bewildering array of Protestant denominations. In the process, millions of Europeans butchered each other in the name of Christ.
Our story begins hundreds of miles away from the sleepy little town in northern Germany, in Rome. Pope Julius II was out of money. Constant wars, and the rebuilding of St Peter's basilica, had finally caught up with him. Luckily, Julius had a plan to raise the cash he so desperately needed. He launched a sale of indulgences. These were essentially a 'Get out of jail free' card from Monopoly, only they weren't free. In exchange for a fee, the indulgence would shorten the time spent by the purchaser in purgatory, the gateway to heaven in Catholic teaching where sins are burnt away before entry to paradise.
In the Holy Roman Empire, the most mis-named state in all human history, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was not viewed kindly by many. For years, resentment at money being taken from Germany and ecclesiastical corruption had fuelled anti-clericalism. Julius' blatant use of the Church as a cash cow for his world ambitions provoked more ire. In Saxony, there was fury when an indulgence salesman showed up and began peddling his wares. These complaints were taken to an Augustinian monk, a professor at the University of Wittenberg. Martin Luther's challenge to the indulgence seller to defend his position would have massive implications.
Yet Luther was not the first person to raise his voice against these practices within the Church. In the 1300s, Oxford University lecturer John Wycliffe had said many of the same things. In the early 1400s, these writings came to the attention of Jan Hus, a Czech university lecturer. Neither man met a good end. In Wycliffe's case, English law protected him, and he died in his bed in his mid-60s. However, shortly after, a heresy law was introduced in England, and Wycliffe's remains were exhumed and burnt; his ashes were tipped into a local river.
Hus' fate was even more dramatic. He was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1415, to debate his ideas before a general council of the Catholic Church. He was promised safe conduct; however, on his arrival, he was imprisoned, put on trial, and burnt at the stake. In response, Bohemia rose in revolt against the Holy Roman Emperor, and the revolt took twenty years to be put down.
What Wycliffe, Hus, and the numerous heretics who had gone to their deaths in the centuries before Luther all lacked was the ability to communicate their ideas widely. But since the flames that had consumed Hus, an invention had arrived in Europe that would transform the world. The printing press reduced the time taken to complete a book. Already, some authors were being widely read- Erasmus, and Thomas More. But the exciting nature of Luther's ideas, his clear and plain prose, catapulted him onto the bestseller list. Erasmus grumbled that soon it was impossible to find a book that wasn't by Luther or about him. This ability to spread his message and get it heard was the making of Martin Luther.
Eventually, Luther would find himself excommunicated from the universal Church, condemned to suffer in hell for eternity. He would ramp up his attacks, from being merely anti-indulgence to anti-papal, and finally breaking with key elements of Catholic doctrine. Fanned by the printing press, political power grabs and popular anti-clericalism, Luther's message eventually spawned the European Reformation, destroying Christian unity in Western Europe and condemning countless numbers to die in the religious conflicts that wracked Europe for the rest of the early modern period. For Christianity, the split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism was made immeasurably more complicated, as the Protestant denominations split from the Western Catholic Church. These divisions still matter today, as one look at Ireland will make clear. They certainly provoked centuries of conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism.
But all that was in the future. As the sun set on Wittenberg on that autumn day in 1517, an obscure German monk could not have had any idea what he had just set in motion. Whether he really did hammer the 95 Theses to the church door, or simply sent them as a letter to his bishop, he had set in motion the biggest historical upheaval since the end of the Roman Empire.
"Yes Martin, just pose nicely" said the illustrators from the Ladybird books
