The Church and the Reformation in the Later Middle Ages

Patrick Wyman: On the eve of Martin Luther's bombshell in 1517, the church was really a collection of regional and national churches. More and more tax revenues went to kings and their increasingly voracious state machinery rather than flowing to Rome. To make up the deficit, the papacy became more and more rooted in Rome and the papal states of central Italy. The pope was basically an Italian Renaissance prince who squabbled with his neighbors over territory.