[wagglebee]

I don’t doubt for a moment that the printing press made the Reformation possible, but there were other things going on in the West, the very limited education of the population, the pyramidal, “top down” structure of medieval Western society, those sorts of things which simply weren’t the case in the East and may have contributed to making societal conditions ripe for change.

You are correct, political conditions in western Europe were VERY DIFFERENT from eastern Europe, and have largely remained so until the present.

What you say about the East with regards to education was certainly true in major cities like Constantinople, but it certainly wasn't the case in Russia and the Balkans which retained medieval serfdom for centuries after the West had abandoned it.

Another factor that cannot be discounted is the Black Death and the profound effect it had on society. For the first time it seemed as if God was punishing Christendom and nobody had any good answers. The massive scale of deaths had immediate effects on the economy and marked the beginning of a shift in western Europe from the farms to the cities.

I guess my overall contention is that conditions in western Europe were ripe for the Reformation. The same circumstances that prompted the Renaissance led to the Reformation.

[Kolokotronis]

"What you say about the East with regards to education was certainly true in major cities like Constantinople, but it certainly wasn't the case in Russia and the Balkans which retained medieval serfdom for centuries after the West had abandoned it."

It was true in Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria all of which retained their educational systems, run by The Church, into the 19th century. Serfdom was gone in Greece under the Empire, as was also true in Serbia and Bulgaria. The Turks brought back a sort of serfdom but not like in Russia or Poland or Rumania. I've never heard of anything like serfdom in Greece in the time since Christ but maybe at one point there was.

In Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria, during the Turkokratia, educating the people was forbidden so The Church ran what were called "hidden" or "secret" schools which the children went to at night, "by the light of the moon" to meet with the priest in a cave, or cleft in the rocks or the forest or in the church crypt where they learned to read and write and "of the things of God".

Here's a little poem every Greek Orthodox child, me included, has learned (in Greek of course) for well over 100 years:

Little moon, so bright and cool

Light me on my way to school

Where to study I am free

And God's Word is taught to me.

Here's a famous painting of one such Krifo scholio:

[redgolum]

It wasn’t just the printing press. If I had to place any event as the source of the Reformation it would be the fight between the Papacy and the HRE over who controlled the crowning of the Emperor.

That set the stage for a long drawn out fight between the Catholic Church and Empire, and resulted in the political situation where both sides saw Luther as more than just a monk asking questions. He became (and to an extent remains to this day) a focus of all the hopes and hates of the time (similar to the view the English had of the Pope post Henry VIII).

In reading Luther’s words, he was a bit surprised for all the fuss made after the 95 Theses. Now, he was a German and grabbed the ball and ran with it the direction he felt he had to, but a split was not his desire (and doesn’t remain a desire among most Confessional Lutherans).

The printing press expanded things, but remember the Cathar’s predated the press, yet it took a couple decades of war to stop them.