Albrecht von Brandenburg

To hold the archbishopric of Mainz alongside his other offices, Albrecht borrowed tens of thousands of gulden from the Fugger banking house. On 31 March 1515, a papal bull fixed how the resulting indulgence revenue would be split: half toward the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome, half toward repaying his debt. In January 1517, Tetzel was appointed his general agent for indulgences; that October, the instructions for the indulgence campaign reached Luther and directly triggered the Ninety-Five Theses.

The fuse of the Reformation storm was laid in Halle.

Across his 27 years at the Moritzburg, he elevated Halle's cathedral into the collegiate church of the Neues Stift (New Foundation) and had it lavishly refitted to house his “Halle relic collection.” The 1520 printed inventory, the Heiltumsbuch, records 42 complete relics of saints, 8,133 relic fragments, and 353 precious reliquaries — an indulgence value calculated down to the day, at 39,245,120 years and 220 days. Wittenberg's electoral relic collection, by comparison, was worth around 1.9 million years in the same period — Halle's was twenty times as large. The relics were put on public display only twice, in 1520 and 1521; at the end of 1521, Luther forced a written showdown with him over it, and the cardinal replied with a chastened letter of concession.

In fairness, he was also one of the greatest patrons of the German Renaissance: he commissioned Lucas Cranach the Elder to paint sixteen altarpieces and more than a hundred panels for Halle's cathedral — reputedly the largest single painting commission in German art history — and Dürer made engraved portraits of him twice. Halle's artistic golden age and its spiritual crisis were two sides of the same coin.

On 21 February 1541, he was driven out of Halle after 27 years there: the Neues Stift was forced to dissolve, and the relic collection and the Cranach paintings went with him into retreat at Aschaffenburg, never to return. Less than two months later, Jonas preached the first Protestant sermon at the Marktkirche, on Good Friday.

He had once calculated indulgence-years down to the last 220 days. What the city finally heard instead was another message — that grace cannot be bought, and cannot be counted.