Events During Martin Luther's Lifetime

I would like to acknowledge Pastor David Hansen's contributions to this post and I encourage him to continue adding or filling in the blanks as I go along. Thank You Pastor David and please visit his blogs at Lutheranism 101 and Postings from Prairie Hill as well, as I have found it to be enlightening along my journey.

Major events in Martin Luther's Lifetime
During the 63 years of Marty's life (I like to think he would have liked being called Marty,) the world under went major change as this was a period of transition from Medieval period and feudalism to the Renaissance Period. This was a time of Art's and Science, da Vinci, invented the horizontal water wheel in 1510, Peter Henlein invented the pocket watch in the same year. Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel from 1508 to 1512. Rumor has it that the flush toilet was also invented during this time (which leads to why civilization began to flourish). I digress, Christopher Columbus discovered...well the Caribbean which also led to the 1st outbreak of smallpox there also. In addition, the Plague was running rampant across Europe (thanks Pastor David) a pandemic that killed upwards of 75 million people and an estimated 20 million in Europe alone. There was also the invention of the moving type printing press in about 1450 which by 1517 was the renaissance version of the Internet.

The Power of the Press
Which brings me to something I was planning to save for later and I may actually get into further detail another time, but the Printing Press may have been Martin Luther's biggest Allie during the reformation and Catholicism's Achilles heel. For had it not been for the power of the press Martin Luther might very well have met his fate at the stake. The printing press and some good marketing people gave Martin Luther the ability to publish his thoughts and disseminate them to a much broader audience. Not only were kings, popes and princes reading Martin Luther but so was the meagerly educated peasant population of the land. And the press enabled Martin Luther's works to be distributed faster and gave the catholic church less time to respond to his writing. The pope was unable, or unwilling, to embrace this technology in a way that would allow the church to sway Martin Luther's popularity against him. By the time Martin Luther came out of hiding (or escaped from his kidnappers) enough of his writings had been circulated to the populace that the Church would have a very hard time arresting him or even executing him for heresy. Had the church made a move to arrest him at this point they likely would have had a large and very bloody revolt among the German people. In a sense you could say Martin Luther was like a Rock Star or at the very least the renaissance version of Billy Graham.

I promise tomorrow we will cover what I like to call "Ad Fontes!"