EMPIRES: Martin Luther

• December 31, 2011

Monday, January 2 & 9 at 10 p.m.

Watch Martin Luther: Driven to Defiance on PBS. See more from Empires.

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Martin Luther’s attack on the all-powerful Catholic Church was a knife to the heart of an empire that had endured for more than a thousand years. Nailing his treatise to the doors of Wittenberg Cathedral, this previously obscure German monk changed the world forever, unleashing forces that plunged Europe into war and chaos. But Luther would do more than revolutionize the church; he offered the Christian world a new vision of man’s relationship with God and, in turn, redefined man’s relationship with authority in general. Filmed across Europe — from rustic rural Germany to the opulence of Vatican City — MARTIN LUTHER is the dramatic story of the collapse of the medieval world and the birth of the modern age. Liam Neeson narrates.