Martin Luther entered the world in the small mining town of Eisleben, in the Holy Roman Empire. Raised in a strict household under his father Hans, a former miner turned smelter operator, Luther was pushed toward law before abandoning it for theology. Three decades later his objections to Church practice, especially the sale of indulgences, would ignite the Protestant Reformation and permanently divide European Christianity.
Hans Luther named his newborn son Martin because he was baptized the following day, November 11, on the feast of St. Martin of Tours. The family soon moved to Mansfeld, where Hans worked his way up from miner to leaseholder of several copper smelters, giving the family enough means to send young Martin to good schools and eventually the University of Erfurt.
Luther's path toward theology was famously accidental. Caught in a violent thunderstorm near Stotternheim in 1505, he vowed to become a monk if he survived, and made good on the promise days later by entering an Augustinian monastery, to his father's fury. His restless intellect and torment over the certainty of salvation eventually led him to Wittenberg, where in 1517 he nailed, or more likely mailed, his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door, denouncing indulgence sales.
The boy born in that Eisleben house on November 10 would go on to translate the Bible into German, be excommunicated and declared an outlaw, hide out in Wartburg Castle under a false name, and reshape the religious and political map of Europe for centuries. He died in the very town of his birth in 1546.