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Leo’s intrigues destabilized the Curia, the papal court. One of his first appointments as cardinal was his young lover, Alfonso Petrucci, who came to resent his patron bitterly, putting together a conspiracy in which Leo’s doctor would treat his anal fistula by injecting poison into his fundament. When the plot was revealed, Petrucci, under torture, implicated other cardinals, who were pardoned in return for their fortunes. But Leo had his ex-lover strangled with a scarlet ligature by a Moorish executioner. His new lover was the half-Ottoman singer Solimando.

To pay for St Peter’s, Leo needed more cash, raised from loans from Fugger the Rich, from payments for cardinals’ hats and from the sales of indulgences (whereby a sinner could be delivered from purgatory in return for payments to the Church). Indulgences were just the latest outrageous papal abuse of sanctity that particularly disgusted a German monk from Wittenberg in Saxony. His real name was Martin Luder but he changed it to Eleutherius – Freed – which he Germanized into Luther.

When he was almost struck by lightning, he experienced a Damascene revelation, gave up his legal studies and became a monk. But a visit to Rome horrified him. ‘That filthy stinking puddle full of the wickedest wretches in the world’ was, he wrote with typical ferocity, awash with ‘filthy nonsense. If there is a hell, Rome is built on it.’ Rome was indeed a modern Babylon in which, as Leo’s obscene poet Pietro Aretino put it, visitors ‘usually wanted to visit not only the antiquities but also the modernities, that is the ladies’.

Luther, that pungent firebrand, theatrical and righteous, was even more disgusted by Leo’s hucksterism: ‘Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?’ In October 1517, Luther wrote an attack on the pope, his Ninety-Five Theses, which he nailed alongside other notices on the door of Wittenberg’s Schlosskirche. But he didn’t depend on the church doors: he deployed the new medium of printing. Ultimately, 3.1 million copies were published. He had himself repeatedly painted by his friend Lucas Cranach, making his pugnacious mug one of the most famous in Germany.

A vicious and visceral polemicist, he was fixated on faeces and sex, later denouncing the pope as a transsexual sodomite, his orders ‘sealed with the Devil’s own faeces, written with the anus-pope farts’. He unleashed savage diatribes against the Jews: ‘We’re wrong if we don’t kill them’, those ‘devil’s people’, ‘poisonous worms’ full of the ‘devil’s faeces … which they wallow in like swine’, their synagogue ‘an incorrigible whore, an evil slut’.

Luther’s fury gave a voice not just to resentment of papal corruption but also to a dawning scepticism. Sanctity, he argued, was based not on the titles, payments and magical rituals of the Catholic Church but on the direct relationship between man and God (without priestly intermediaries), guided by the scriptures – sola scriptura – which would soon be translated from Latin into German and so could be read by anyone. All people needed to enter the kingdom of heaven was literacy, which Luther now promoted.

As his teachings spread, twenty-seven nuns in a nearby Cistercian monastery wanted to join his movement. Luther, now forty-one, arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels and, presumably once they had been cleaned of fishiness, found himself attracted to one of them, the twenty-six-year-old Katharina. He had never considered marriage – ‘not that I’m insensible to my flesh or sex (for I’m neither wood nor stone) but because I daily expect the death of a heretic’. Now ‘suddenly I was occupied with far different thoughts. The Lord has plunged me into marriage.’ He argued that ‘A woman has no control of herself. God has made her body to be with man, to bear children,’ so she was welcome to enjoy sex – and they were blessed with six children. But Luther must have been exhausting. ‘Dear husband, you’re too rude,’ Katharina said once. Yet the nun in the fish barrel was decisive: Luther decreed that Protestant priests could marry.