Ninety-five Theses

The Ninety-five Theses were a set of Latin propositions on indulgences drawn up in 1517 by Martin Luther, then a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony. Luther sent them to Archbishop Albert of Mainz on 31 October 1517, intending to provoke a scholarly debate. Instead they set off a controversy that is traditionally regarded as the start of the Protestant Reformation.

In the teaching of the medieval Church, a sinner who confessed was forgiven the eternal penalty of sin but could still owe temporal punishment, to be worked off in this life or in purgatory. An indulgence could reduce that punishment, and plenary indulgences were widely bought on behalf of the dead. Critics had long objected to the trade, summed up in the popular jingle that a soul springs from purgatory as soon as the coin rings in the coffer. In 1515 Pope Leo X authorised a plenary indulgence to pay for building St Peter's Basilica in Rome. In 1517 the preacher Johann Tetzel offered it in towns near Wittenberg, and many of Luther's parishioners travelled to buy it, since sales were banned in Saxony itself. Luther was alarmed when some of them claimed they no longer needed to repent.

The first thesis declared that when Christ called on people to repent, he meant the whole of a believer's life to be repentance, an inner change rather than an outward ritual. Luther argued that the pope could remit only penalties he himself had imposed, that no one could promise the release of souls from purgatory for payment, and that giving to the poor was far better than buying indulgences. He claimed that if the pope knew what was preached in his name, he would rather see St Peter's burn. Towards the end he listed awkward questions from lay people, such as why the pope did not simply empty purgatory out of charity.

What is certain is that Luther enclosed the theses with his letter to Albert of 31 October. The famous story that he nailed them to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg comes from Philip Melanchthon, writing later. Posting theses for a disputation was routine, but it is possible Luther did so only in mid-November, or not at all. Either way, the text spread fast: it was printed as a pamphlet in Basel and as posters in Leipzig and Nuremberg, several hundred copies circulated in Germany in 1517, and a German translation was made in Nuremberg that year.

Albert passed the matter to Rome. By February 1518 Pope Leo was pressing the head of Luther's Augustinian order to silence him. Tetzel answered with 106 counter-theses written by Konrad Wimpina, and Wittenberg students burned 800 printed copies of them. Luther's short German Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, aimed at lay readers, was reprinted twenty times. At Augsburg in October 1518 Cardinal Cajetan pointed out that thesis 58 contradicted a papal bull of 1343, but Luther refused to recant. His quarrel with the theologian Johann Eck led to the Leipzig Debate of 1519, and in 1521 Luther was excommunicated.

Luther later said he had still thought of himself as loyal to the pope when he wrote the theses, but the indulgence dispute launched the movement he went on to lead. As early as 1527 he and his friends marked 31 October as the anniversary, and in 1668 it became Reformation Day in Electoral Saxony. Its 500th anniversary in 2017 was a national public holiday throughout Germany.

Our 1500 and 1530 maps show Wittenberg within the Holy Roman Empire, on the eve of the Reformation and as it took hold.