Quote:
Originally Posted by smurf
Now someone must have forget to tell Luther about the modern science of the printing press. A Gutenberg's printing press set to work printing the 95 Thesis and in 2 weeks it was all over Germany, in 2 months it was across Europe. Such speed of information dispersal must have came as shock to sum.
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He probably was aware of the printing press, but he probably didn't anticipate how politicized this would get, and how far this would spread. (I once heard a speech by the leader of the work group that invented the MP3 coding scheme, who said something similar...)
Religion should play a huge role in this era, since after the Reformation each ruler choose whether to stay Catholic or become Protestant - and this was often more a matter of political alliances than faith. And then his subjects usually had to join the same denomination by default.
If you look at a map of the distributions of Protestants and Catholics in Germany today, it will still map fairly closely to those old territorial boundaries, especially in rural areas...