Pope Martin V

Even still, Martin V’s reign exemplified the Church’s worst excesses – yet modern histories of this era often eschew specific examples of his depravity for vague denunciations of his character. For instance, Martin was so enraged that John Wycliffe, an Oxford professor who had died five decades earlier, had translated the Bible into English that he ordered Wycliffe’s corpse exhumed, crushed, and tossed into a river.

Christian apologists frame the 15 & 16th centuries as ‘decadent’, but the flagrancy of the wickedness, the intentional defiling of monasteries and convents, the deliberate spread and encouragement of prostitution, the legitimization of ‘communal baths’, and the growth of political subterfuge often goes unmentioned. Dr. Ludwig Pastor says of this period that “the prevailing immorality in Church orders exceeded anything that has been witnessed since the tenth century [and that] wanton cruelty and vindictiveness went hand in hand with immorality” (A History of the Popes - click to read this book).