The religious history of the period is a dramatic one. Christianity, which for more than a thousand years had been represented throughout all of Western Europe by one church, the Roman Catholic Church, experienced a tremendous upheaval during the 16th century. The first overt action of revolt came in 1517 when Luther defied the authority of Rome. That marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, the consequences of which were that Europe was divided into numerous divergent sects and into warring camps. Actually, all of that turmoil occurred after More wrote his Utopia, but the causes of the Reformation were of long standing and had been a source of concern to conscientious Christians for at least two centuries. Among the principal evils alleged in the attacks against the church were arbitrary exercise of papal authority, greed of the clergy as revealed in the selling of pardons and of church offices, and the traffic in holy relics. Intelligent people were indignant over the propagation of superstitions to anesthetize the common people, and social critics were bitter over the enormous opulence of the church amid the poverty and squalor of the majority of Christians.
In the decades immediately preceding Luther's break from the church of Rome, many devout Catholics were vocal in their criticism of practices authorized by the church as well as by the shameful conduct among the clergy. Eventually the critics broke into two groups. Luther and the other leaders of the Reformation, despairing of remodeling the established church with its ingrained fallacies, severed their connections with Rome and declared a new authority. Another party of critics strove for reform within the established church toward which they maintained an absolute loyalty despite its manifest faults. Among them, one of the most articulate and effective writers was Erasmus, More's close friend; and in the same camp, though not expressing his views so vociferously, was More also, whose aspirations toward a more truly Christian way of life are revealed through his plan of Utopia.
