Erasmus became the most celebrated scholar of his age, producing a Greek edition of the New Testament, the satirical 'Praise of Folly,' and a vast correspondence connecting Europe's intellectual elite. Though he criticized Church corruption, he refused to join Martin Luther's Reformation, insisting on reform from within, a stance that made him a target of both Catholics and Protestants.
Illegitimate, orphaned young, and educated in a monastery he came to despise, Erasmus clawed his way into the highest circles of European learning through sheer literary brilliance and an unmatched command of Latin prose. He traveled constantly, corresponded with kings and popes, and became something like Europe's first public intellectual, a man whose opinion was sought on every controversy of the age even though he held no formal position of power.
His 1509 satire 'The Praise of Folly,' written in a matter of days while staying with Thomas More in England, mocked theologians, monks, and princes alike with a lightness that made its barbs land harder. Yet when Luther's Reformation exploded across Germany, Erasmus refused to pick a side decisively, arguing for reasoned reform rather than schism, which left him reviled by reformers as a coward and by Catholics as secretly sympathetic to heresy.
His exact birth date is debated by scholars, since Erasmus himself gave inconsistent accounts of his own age, but October 28, 1466 remains the most widely cited birth date, commemorated at Rotterdam's Erasmus University and on the old Dutch guilder banknote.
Key people: Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Thomas More