Tag Archives: Charles V

Shark Attacks in Human History

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 17 May 2026

Watson and the Shark
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The Nazis Who Fled to South America: Where, Who, and Why?

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 31 October 2025

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Salem Witch Trials, Part One: Massachusetts on the Eve of the Panic

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 25 January 2025

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Murder, Martyrs, and Mystery: The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 31 August 2023

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The Incas and the Fall of Native America

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 30 December 2022

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The Munster Millenarians: Anabaptism and the Radical Reformation

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 February 2021

Execution of Jan Beuckelszoon // Illustration in a book by Lambertus Hortensius

In 1534, shortly after the onset of the Protestant Reformation, a radical sect from this new movement, the Anabaptists, seized the city of Munster in Germany and governed it for sixteen months as a millenarian cult in a manner so alarming it managed to bring together Catholic and Lutheran forces to put it down. The experience had a profound influence not only on the development of Anabaptism thereafter, but on the manner in which the Reformation more generally unfolded. Continue reading →

The Confrontation that Began the Protestant Reformation

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 January 2021

“Luther at the Diet at Worms”, by Anton von Werner, 1877

The Diet of Worms convened 500 years ago today.[1] Four years earlier, Martin Luther had sent his Ninety-five Theses as part of a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, Albert of Brandenburg. The date on which Luther sent this letter, 31 October 1517, is now celebrated as “Reformation Day”, but the Reformation in a serious sense did not begin until after Luther was summoned before the 1521 Diet of Worms. Continue reading →