The Historian Channel: History of protestant reformation and Martin Luther, Full Documentary; History of protestant reformation and Martin Luther, History Documentary

The Historian Channel: History of protestant reformation and Martin Luther, Full Documentary; History of protestant reformation and Martin Luther, History Documentary

The Protestant Reformation, often referred to simply as the Reformation (from Latin reformatio, lit. "restoration, renewal"), was a schism from the Roman Catholic Church initiated by Martin Luther and continued by John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli and other early Protestant Reformers in the 16th century Europe.

Although there had been significant earlier attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church before Luther — such as those of Jan Hus, Peter Waldo, and John Wycliffe — Martin Luther is widely acknowledged to have started the Reformation with his 1517 work The Ninety-Five Theses. Luther began by criticizing the selling of indulgences, insisting that the Pope had no authority over purgatory and that the Catholic doctrine of the merits of the saints had no foundation in the gospel. The Protestant position, however, would come to incorporate doctrinal changes such as sola scriptura and sola fide. The core motivation behind these changes was theological, though many other factors played a part, including the rise of nationalism, the Western Schism which eroded people's faith in the Papacy, the perceived corruption of the Roman Curia, the impact of humanism and the new learning of the Renaissance which questioned much of the traditional thought.

The initial movement within Germany diversified almost right then and there, and other reform impulses arose independently of Luther. The spread of Gutenberg's printing press provided the means for the rapid dissemination of religious materials in the vernacular. The largest groups were the Lutherans and Calvinists. Lutheran churches were founded mostly in Germany, the Baltics and Scandinavia, while the Reformed ones were founded in Switzerland, Hungary, France, the Netherlands and Scotland. The new movement influenced the Church of England decisively after 1547 under Edward VI and Elizabeth I, although the national church had been made independent under Henry VIII in the early 1530s for political rather than religious reasons.

There were also reformation movements throughout continental Europe known as the Radical Reformation, which gave rise to the Anabaptist, Moravian, and other Pietistic movements. Radical Reformers, besides forming communities outside state sanction, often employed more extreme doctrinal change, such as the rejection of tenets of the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon.

The Roman Catholic Church responded with a Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent. Much work in battling Protestantism was done by the well-organized new order of the Jesuits. In general, Northern Europe, with the exception of most of Ireland, came under the influence of Protestantism. Southern Europe remained Roman Catholic, although Greece remained predominantly Eastern Orthodox, while Central Europe was a site of a fierce conflict, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, which left it massively devastated.
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Martin Luther, shown in a portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder, initiated the Protestant Reformation in 1517.