 Luther lived an interesting life in interesting times—where to a significant degree those times were made interesting by his life’s impact upon them. This impact began with the publication of his Ninety-Five Theses on 31 October 1517, in which as a young professor at Wittenberg he attacked the Church’s sale of indulgences; this was then followed by various further disputations and disputes as well as published works that defended his increasingly radical position, leading to his excommunication in 1521 and his famously defiant appearance at the Diet of Worms. Managing to escape capture under the protection of Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, and after a period of seclusion at Wartburg castle, Luther returned to Wittenberg, where he continued his teaching, writing and translating; married; and engaged with the complex and fraught swirl of forces unleashed by his work at various levels—in theology, in the Church, in politics, and in society at large. While he had fathered the Reformation, as it has become known, he did not set out to divide the Christian Church, and the movement quickly took on a momentum that he could not control, but which still in certain fundamental ways bears the stamp of his thought.