Religious Leader

It can be persuasively argued that no government or institution wielded as much power during the last millennium as the Roman Catholic Church and its leadership, the papacy. Despite the Great Schism of 1054 that split the Christian church into Western and Eastern branches, the Roman church retained an incredible amount of power and prestige. In the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, however, the church suffered a huge blow to its authority. One man was at the heart of that split: German theologian Martin Luther.

Luther, who was born in 1483 in the town of Eisleben, succeeded perhaps because he attacked the corruption of the medieval Catholic Church from the inside. An ordained priest, Luther began questioning some of Catholicism's main tenets after becoming a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg in 1508. Although many others had decried the corruption of the papacy and the church before, Luther focused his disputes directly on certain church doctrines.

Chief among these was his belief that only God, not the Catholic Church, could grant redemption from sin. This directly conflicted with the church's policy of selling indulgences. The indulgence was a monetary payment that promised the soul's release from punishment after death for sins committed during a person's lifetime. It was a popular and successful way for the church to raise money. In 1517 Luther publicly attacked this and other church practices that had become corrupted in his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly known as the Ninety-Five Theses. (In Encarta Deluxe see the Sidebar “Luther's Ninety-Five Theses.”)

Thanks to the new printing technology of the time, Luther's writings were widely distributed, discussed, and debated. Historians consider his revolutionary ideas the single most important contribution to the Reformation, a movement that ultimately shattered Catholicism's 1,200-year dominance in Europe and gave rise to Protestantism. Luther's defiance touched off more than a century of religious warfare and nurtured an emerging spirit of nationalism throughout the continent as governments rejected the authority of Rome and established their own national churches. In 1534, for example, England's King Henry VIII passed a law that created an independent Church of England, with himself as its head.

Luther was excommunicated in 1521, but he continued to agitate against the Roman Catholic Church for the rest of his life. He was also the principal figure behind translating the Bible from the ancient Hebrew and Greek into German; this translation was important in opening religious scholarship to those without training in the ancient languages. Luther died in 1546, but his influence lives on in the religious world. Protestantism stands beside Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy as one of the three main divisions of Christianity. Lutheranism, the religious denomination named after Luther, is just one of many Protestant denominations that exist today, denominations that by one estimate claim 316 million adherents.

Writer

The sheer volume of writing produced in the last 1,000 years is staggering. Especially with Gutenberg's invention, a world of words was created that has continued to grow exponentially. Accordingly, there is a galaxy of brilliant writers from which to select one writer as the most influential in the second millennium. In reality, however, there is only one person who has the literary resume to even apply for the job: William Shakespeare. Nearly 400 years after his death, the English playwright and poet remains the most influential writer who ever lived.

Shakespeare's central canon of 38 plays and a series of 154 sonnets is the standard against which all other writers are measured. His language, characters, plots, and wit are all consistently brilliant. Tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet (1595?), Hamlet (1601?), and King Lear (1605?) have survived the centuries with their beauty and power intact and remain some of the most popular and oft-produced plays. His comedies, including A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?) and Twelfth Night (1600?), still charm and entertain. As many critics have observed, the tragic flaws and comic conceits depicted in Shakespeare's plays are just as relevant at the end of the 20th century as they were when the plays were written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

The man who is sometimes known simply as the Bard also heavily influenced the English language, which has emerged as the dominant tongue of the Western world. He created and popularized many words that survive in the English language today, and his famed lines are arguably the best known in all of literature: “Get thee to a nunnery,” “The lady doth protest too much,” and “Et tu, Brute?” are just a few of the many Shakespearean lines still commonly quoted. Other languages have their beloved writers, but all languages and lands pay homage to Shakespeare.