Erasmus

Born around 1466 in Rotterdam, Erasmus became a Catholic priest who mastered Latin and Greek at a time when few could do both. His pioneering editions of the New Testament and the Church Fathers, dense with annotations, gave reformers the textual tools to challenge Rome - while his satirical *The Praise of Folly* and his treatises on education and style made him the most widely read scholar of the Northern Renaissance. He wanted the church reformed from within, not split, and when the Reformation came he tried to hold a middle ground: he wrote *On Free Will* directly against Luther's determinism, advocating for human agency in salvation. That position satisfied no one. Partisans on both sides turned on him, some Catholics questioned his loyalty, and he spent his later years moving between cities, still writing, still corresponding with kings and popes, still insisting on tolerance. He died in Basel in 1536, having shaped both sides of a war he'd tried to prevent.