Renaissance+Religion


 * Erasmus || Machiavelli || Martin Luther ||
 * [[image:toripmuseum/Erasmus.jpg width="236" height="274"]] || [[image:toripmuseum/Machiavelli.gif width="252" height="273"]] || [[image:toripmuseum/Martin_Luther.jpg width="230" height="252"]] ||
 * This picture is of Desidarius Erasmus, a very famous Christian humanist who believed that in order to reform yourself and society, you should study the ancient classics and the Bible. Since everyone could only rely on priests to tell what the bible said, Erasmus translated the Bible into Greek. By doing this, the Bible could be more closely read by Greeks too, therefore allowing Christianity to spread. One of Erasmus's close friends was Thomas Moore. They had similar ideas, but Moore was trying to spread Christianity to England. He sugested the idea of a "Utopia" or a perfect world. Then, King Henry VIII had Moore beheaded for opposing his religious policies and refusing to compromise his beliefs. Even when Moore was dead, his ideas continued to spread throughout the country || Niccolo Machiavelli, the man in the picture, wrote possibly one of the most read book of the Renaissance, The Prince. The Prince was a practical guide to how a leader should rule to maintain and gather political power. The book expressed Machiavelli's beliefs that a ruler had to be clever and ruthless and should be feared rather than loved. The Prince was read often by many leaders and influenced their way of ruling. The bookmade some rulers harsher and meaner in the way they ruled, thus causing people to fear and even hate them. This let the leader have better control beacuse he was feared, but also made him less liked. || This is the door that Martin Luther hung his 95 theses on. These theses or statements were writen by Luther after the church started selling indulgences, which Luther was strongly against. The 95 theses, in the end, caused a series of events that split the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church accused Luther of heresy when he fought indulgences, so the church excommunicated him. Following Luther, many priests broke from the Catholic Church as well. This caused divisions in the Catholic Church and so it lost power. The period that followed this was a time of bloody warfare. That caused less people to work, but the same ammount of people buying goods, which would bring the economy down. ||

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