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In 1510 the young Augustinian hermit monk Martin Luther was sent on mission and pilgrimage to papal Rome. Sick, he spent some time in the exceptionally scientific hospital of rich Florenz, the banking-rich center of the Christian world for creativity and art, starring Michelangelo (then in Rome), Raffael, Botticelli who set new standards for aesthetics as men like Da Vinci for empirical science. They introduced a focus on the individual, humanism, in a medieval world obsessed with the afterlife, where heretics were burnt at the stake. Rome was wrecked and being rebuilt gloriously by the warrior renaissance pope Julius II who financed the stunning new St. Peter's basilica from the massively commercialized sale of dispensations from purgatory or hell to sinners, splitting profits with local prelates like Luther's, the corrupt and profane aristocratic profit-obsessed elector-archbishop of giant church province Mainz (Mayence). Back home in Saxony, Luther would challenge church and colonies-mega-rich Habsburg Holy Roman emperor Charles V. Kaiser. His theological call for a return to the root, trusting only in divine grace, would undermine church and law, hence was banned by pope Leo X as well, but became part of a huge political chess game, in which his prince, a Saxon duke, staged his 'kidnapping' to hide him in his castle Wittenberg, from where Luther kept writing, more radical as the conflict dragged only, benefiting from the recent invention of book (and pamphlet) printing.

The Lutheran Reformation was greatly linked to the economics and social relations during the Renaissance. Immense wealth was concentrated, sometimes in new rich families, like the Fuggers whose financier empire, with great political influence such as financing the Habsburg bribes for electors to be Holy Roman Emperors, thanks to their monopoly on the Tyrolian silver mine of Schwaz, which constituted the majority of Europe's production. The fate of the peasant majority grew ever worse, with famine and rising levies from noble and ecclesiastical land owners, sparking circa 1525 German peasant revolts and plunder, mostly of fat monasteries, whose degeneration the fallen monk condemned while entering into marriage with still numerous-growing offspring. Although his press-divulged ideas, pleading personal responsibility and conscience rather then ecclesiastical formalism and its abusive excesses, were read as encouragement by the lower classes, Luther sided with legalistic obedience to the worldly order, blessing even the princes' bloody repression -notavly near Luther's natal countship near In Frankenhausen- by armies of the revolution preached by ex-Lutheran social reformer Thomas Müntzer.

Luther's criticism of the church, the ideological pillar of medieval society, brought the whole house of cards to collapse, a recipe for disorder, revolution and (civil) war. Various other preachers launched their own ideas to fill the vacuum claimed by disowning the Catholic hierarchy. In Munster (Westphalia), the Anabaptist sect declared its theocratic "News Jerusalem" which persecuted anyone else like "16th century Taliban". German ruling princes and the English kingdom abused Luther's teaching to usurp great wealth and power from the church and shed imperial/papal authority. While Luther remained a revered authority, a pragmatic sex scandal -'dispensing' bigamy t accommodate Landgrave Philipp of Hessen, a vital general, contributed to the movement getting out of control, his writings -sometimes contradicted later, often in conservative sense- were wielded with an authority of their own. Plagued by ill health and superstition too, Luther grew ever more bitter, fat and cruel, as turning against the previously protected Jewry. The Reformation became, rather despite Luther, a motor of (often misled) emancipation and changed history forever, even the New World.

During the war in Syria, the ancient city of Palmyra was looted and partly destroyed by the Islamic State. Researchers are now assessing the extent of the destruction.