The History of Sex: Prague -- Premature Perestroika -- (Chapter X, Part 15)

And most of the government's reforms were very moderate indeed.

As a teenager, Jan Kaplan took advantage of the new freedom to travel to visit London.

He describes the Prague Spring as typically Czech, comparing it with the attempts by national hero Jan Hus to gradually change the Catholic Church from within a century before the Reformation—a statue of the martyred reformer is one of Prague's landmarks.

Student Jan Palach committed suicide by self-immolation in Wenceslaus Square
to protest the crushing of the Prague Spring.
This still is from Burning Bush, a Czech miniseries set in the era. 

'You can't live in central Europe and be landlocked and hope to change things except from within,' Kaplan says.

'The Czechs were developed, and the Russians were peasants, with an almost feudal form of control in the way that they implemented Socialism. The Czechs could have done it far more elegantly,' he adds wistfully.

That may be, but the Russians realized that their template for undermining democracy now threatened to break up the Communist bloc.

In August 1968, the Soviets decided to crush the 'premature perestroika,' and the Red Army that had once liberated Prague returned to shackle it.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'The German Vice' -- (Chapter IX, Part 6)

Like history, for instance.

Sooner or later, while slogging through your umpteenth tome on the erotic past, you realize that practically all modern sex histories share one unquestionable underlying assumption: namely, that Sex Is a Very Good Thing Indeed.

Tossing off any pretences of objectivity, even the driest academic works tend to portray 'sexual progress' as being synonymous with 'more sex,' while the only 'good' kind of sexual control is birth control.

As an outsider, it's probably no coincidence that I first noticed this bias while trawling through the literature on homosexuality: I think the book that finally clinched it for me was a university hardback entitled Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600.

By one Helmut Puff.

It was then that I realized: if history is written by the victors, you can practically hear Freddie Mercury caterwauling 'We Are the Champions' when you open your average 'queer studies' text. 

Oddly, though, the genre often overlooks one believe-it-or-not fact: contrary to what I would have guessed, the gay-rights movement didn't begin in New York or London—or even Paris or Amsterdam—but in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century.

As a matter of fact, it was a German émigré (Henry Gerber) who later founded America's first gay organization, naming the Society for Human Rights after the groups he'd been involved with in Berlin.

Some also credit Germany's gay-rights movement with pioneering the term 'activist'—amid a slew of other world firsts.

And not for nothing.

If spanking was le vice anglais, the French called homosexuality le vice allemand.

Homophobia and chauvinism aside, there were many reasons why the Continent's Germanic core became the home of gay emancipation in the nineteenth century.

Perhaps most importantly, Germany's activists had something concrete to kick against.

The History of Sex: Seville -- The Church of Me, Myself, and I -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 5)

The Holy Office of the Inquisition got its start in Seville in 1478 after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella—the self-styled 'Catholic Monarchs'—became convinced that their newly united kingdom needed to be saved from fake converts to Christianity: namely, closet Jews and Muslims.

Conveniently, the men who convinced them were Dominicans, members of the order that had been founded by a saintly Spaniard but later racked up loads of expertise on How to Persecute Your Opponents.

The so-called 'Dogs of God' had burned the Cathars into oblivion two centuries earlier, and armed with the same how-to manuals on terror and interrogation, they resolved to do the same to heretics in Spain.

What's more, as Protestantism spread throughout Europe—with its very own 'Rome' in Geneva!—Spain's 'Modern' Inquisition increasingly served as an inspiration for the Catholic fightback known as the Counter-Reformation.

Detail from The Inquisition Tribunal by Goya

To be fair, just as Luther and Calvin had good reasons for reforming the Church, Rome's backlash wasn't just about preserving its earthly perqs.

Devout Catholics must have divined that once you start attacking the foundations of any institution, there's a danger the whole edifice will come tumbling down.

In that sense, the crisis in England was a warning of things to come, with a cretin like Henry VIII—as debauched as any Borgia—personally denouncing Luther yet setting himself up as the pope of his very own breakaway 'Protestant' church and murdering his wives because he couldn't father a healthy son.

It was even more perverse that the English should celebrate him as a jolly rogue—or at worst, a sympathetic monster—rather than a woman-killing tyrant.

And if King Harry could break away, it was just a matter of time before every Tom-and-Dick Commoner would end up worshiping at their own Churches of Me, Myself and I.

So for followers of the old faith, heresy had to be stamped out.

Like its European, Portuguese, American, and even Goan imitators, the Spanish Inquisition was so complex that historians still can't agree on body counts or how universally its diktats were applied.

At best, it seems to have tolerated transgressions so long as you didn't brag about them.

At worst, it fostered a culture of spying and informing on your neighbours, torturing and murdering innocents, and then stealing their estates to feed the killing machine.

As one man put it, 'if the Inquisitors don't burn, they don't eat.'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- How Not to Pick Up a Booth Babe -- (Chap. V, Pt. 18)

Rather than force me to walk round and round to talk to them, the Skoda girls suggest I hop in the backseat, with Nikolina 'driving' and Jessica riding shotgun.

'You must get lots of guys hitting on you,' I venture.

'With guys hitting on us, it's easy, because we have security here, so they ask them kindly to go. But you get these—weird people.' Jessica wrinkles her nose.

'We had an experience with a man who was French, and he had some food left on the side of his mouth. And he was with his son and his friend. And he was talking to me so nicely. And his friend was trying to take a picture, and his boy was getting into the picture, and he was yelling at his son—'"Francois, get out of the picture!!!"'—she switches back into nice-guy mode, nodding attentively—"Yeah, yeah, I work in Bern, it's really nice"—"Francois, get out!!!" And when he turned his face to me—he was so—so friendly!'

She giggles.

'And he was also spitting.'

'A lot of guys say, "Where are you going tonight?"' Nikolina adds. 'And I always give answers like, "Somewhere you're not." Or "I don't speak French," "I don't speak English"—Whatever. I don't want to be rude. We smile, but it's not so easy all the time.'

'Do you ever get any corny pick-up lines?' I ask.

Jessica groans. 'The one everyone says is "Are you included with the car or do we have to pay extra?"'

'We usually say we'd be too expensive. You couldn't afford it.'

As the convention crowds continue to revolve around us, I mention that I've been surprised the atmosphere isn't more, um, glamorous. Without putting too fine a point on it, where have all the babes gone?

'You should've come the first two days, the press days, which aren't open to the public,' Jessica explains. 'Every car label has its models, it's only press here, and then there's really a bit of glamour. Then, when it starts to open to the public…' she shakes her head and smiles '…it stops.'

Tomorrow is the last day of the Motor Show, when thousands will forego church to spend their Sunday lusting after earthly goods in the erstwhile Protestant Rome.

As I step out of the revolving Skoda, I can't help but recall an oft-repeated phrase in Geneva: poor old Calvin must be spinning in his grave.

* * *

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Calvin and 'The Woman With Beautiful Breasts' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 12)

The latest attempt to breathe life into the Old Reformer is the $3.4 million International Museum of the Reformation that opened in 2005 in a neoclassical mansion right next to the cathedral.

Built on the spot where Geneva's leaders officially adopted Protestantism, the maison itself actually dates from the city's age of decadence—in fact, the merchant who built it was accused of flouting laws against extravagance.

Even more gallingly for Calvinists, the museum's first director is a Lutheran, though she's also the moderator of Geneva's Company of Pastors, the first woman in the post since Calvin himself created it nearly five centuries ago.

As if the 21st-century mandate of making history 'fun' weren't daunting enough, the Reformation Museum also has to overcome the modern ignorance of religion.

A PROTESTANT JUKEBOX

What's more, the early Protestants weren't big on the visual arts; their focus was always on the Word.

So the museum has done its best to make religious history comprehensible to the TV-minded: Calvin and Luther pop up in mirrors as talking heads, an imaginary dinner party ropes in the competing opinions of Jean and Jean-Jacques, and a jukebox cranks out Protestant hymns.

In trying to make Calvin's brand of Protestantism palatable, though, they've watered it down so that he comes across as being mainly about respect for the individual, a fundamental love of democracy and other smiley-faced concepts.

The museum shop peddles Calvin's grave image on everything from busts to umbrellas.

They even sell Calvin-branded beer, Reformation ashtrays and bonbons stamped with the ascetic's face, which is akin to putting Gandhi's mug on shotgun shells.

As of this writing, there are no Calvinator sex toys on sale, but I wouldn't rule it out.

The new musee won the Council of Europe's Museum Prize in 2007, causing some embarrassment: the statuette is an abstract by Miro with a terribly specific title: La femme aux beaux seins, or The Woman with Beautiful Breasts.

While drinking a Calvinus with a museum board-member and an official Friend of Calvin, I mention that their founder condoned death for adultery.

They look bewildered.

'I don't think they killed people who committed adultery,' the museum official blusters. 'Witches were burned, but that was everywhere at the time.'

So even modern Calvinists are a bit sketchy on Calvinism.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Kicking Apostate Posterior -- (Chap. V, Pt. 11)

Not even the secluded Old Town is spared the sensual onslaught.

A dive called Le Petit Palais offers mixed strip shows 'for him and her,' and behind St. Peter's Cathedral, a neon girlie bar competes for business with the Lutheran church just a couple of doors up; at the top of the same street stands the Palace of Justice and a police station—but who are they to judge?

The big story this week is a police sex scandal, including allegations that Geneva's cops have been, well, copping off at headquarters.

On the very street where the Reformer lived, the Rue de Calvin, an art shop displays nudes alongside prints from Pompeii.

O Calvin, where art thou?
Geovanne Preite, a Colombian contender
for the title of 'Miss Fetes de Geneve'

And throughout the elevated heart of the city, amid the winding stone streets, sculpted parks and tiered dwellings are stores tempting you with everything from antiques to scented candles, beautifully aged meat to chocolate that's as intoxicating as any drug.

A standard joke about Geneva's old Protestants is that they invite you home for tea and ask if you want 'une sucre ou pois?'—'one sugar or none?'—but you can hardly blame them for keeping a tight lid on largesse.

After a few days in this environment, you realize that you most definitely could get used to a life of Genevese luxury.

SAVED BY SHALT-NOTS

Before you know it, you, too, would be coveting that 140-franc (£60 or $90) rhinestone collar for your dog with matching bling-tastic togs for yourself.

In fact, with all the money in the world, and no Calvinist self-restraint, you wouldn't make it out of Geneva alive.

You'd end up ODing on fondue and chocolate on a yacht on Lake Geneva, with a stripper on each limb and a bouquet up your backside (or you might end up like this guy).

Ironically, it's partly old-fashioned Protestant values—all those shalt-nots about idols, wasting money and showing off—that have made Calvin virtually unknown in the city once created in his image.

Back in the nineteenth century, Genevans considered building a giant statue of him out on the lake as an anti-libertine Statue of Liberty, but that was deemed, well, a bit much, so eventually his supporters had to make due with a hundred-meter Reformation Wall below the Old Town.

Geneva's godly Gang of Four stand front and center, led by Calvin with his sleeves rolled up like he's raring to come down and kick some apostate posterior, starting with the skateboarders and students snogging shamelessly in front of him on the very university campus he founded.

And as much as Jean praised music's ability to inflame men's hearts, you wonder what he'd think about the rock concerts inflaming their loins during the annual Fetes de Genève in front of the Reformation Wall.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Calvin and the Age of Consent -- (Chap. V, Pt. 8)

What really made Reformation Geneva different, though, was that it had begun to punish men and women equally for sexual transgressions.

As the charge of incest against Cossonex shows, Protestant Geneva also cracked down on sex crimes against children.

Calvin opposed arranged marriages and believed that the marrying age for individuals should be decided on a case-by-case basis, depending on their maturity.

When this proved impractical, the Genevan authorities set the age of consent at eighteen for boys and fourteen for girls.

Adults who crossed this boundary were sentenced to death.

Although the defendants would often try to bribe and threaten their victims, one researcher into Deviance in Geneva (1535-1650) has noted that kids living under Calvin's laws apparently didn't feel intimidated in telling their parents that they'd been abused—or in testifying face-to-face against their abusers.

At their core, all of Calvin's laws stemmed from his harsh (and thoroughly depressing) conviction that if God was all powerful, He must have decided everyone's fate before the world was created: in other words, a Chosen Few were predestined to be saved, while most were born to die in the eternal fires of hell.

The catch was that you could never know in this life whether you were one of the Elect, so the best you could do was examine your soul constantly, confess your sins regularly—not to intermediaries but directly to God and your peers—and hope that you found yourself in Jehovah's Good Book on Judgement Day.

Until then, you could look forward to a lifetime of Protestant guilt (arguably worse than Catholic guilt because there's no penance).

Alternatively, if you felt instinctively that you weren't one of the Elect, you were effectively damned if you did and damned if you didn't—so you might as well do everything (and everyone) you could in this life.

* * *

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Torture in the Protestant Rome -- (Chap. V, Pt. 7)

However, several other cases ended in death, including that of another Frenchwoman named Anne and her manservant.

Anne Le Moine must have been middle-aged when she took up with Antoine Cossonex, who was a particularly nasty piece of work: not only was he arrested for adultery, but also incest, for he'd allegedly molested her daughter at the same time.

With the teenager testifying against Antoine, and the alleged lovers stonewalling the court, the authorities resorted to torture to extract a confession, sanctioning the estrapade.

L'estrapade (aka strappado) is more commonly associated
with the Inquisitions of Rome than with the "Protestant Rome"

After tying his hands and feet behind his back, Antoine's interrogators would have winched him into the air with a rope and pulley, then let him drop just short of the floor, the successive jolts wrenching his joints and dislocating his shoulders.

Antoine quickly cracked and confessed that he'd been fornicating with Anne for eight months, sometimes twice in one day and 'even in the bed of the master.'

He also admitted far more than they needed to know: it turned out Anne had given him a love token—a gift-wrapped tuft of pubic hair.

Antoine repaid her devotion by trying to rape her daughter, admitting to his torturers that he'd groped the teen's breasts and genitals and rubbed his penis against her.

DAMNED WITH ALL THE DEVILS

Anne made matters even worse under torture.

Instead of simply confessing and pleading for mercy, she adopted the (plainly insane) tack of wild defiance, cursing her husband, the court and no doubt Calvin himself, while also adding blasphemy to her rap sheet.

One account says she screamed that 'she wanted to be damned with all the devils to the deepest depths of hell (and) that she hoped to spend eternity with them at the bottom of the abysmal lake.'

Alas, she didn't get her wish with Lake Geneva, but she did end up in the River Rhone.

The court was so appalled by both lovers that they were put to death the next day: Anne was drowned and Antoine beheaded, a gender distinction that seems to have been common in Europe, possibly because drowning was somehow thought to be a more humane form of execution for 'the weaker sex.'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- The Killjoy Capital of the World? -- (Chap. V, Pt. 6)

But if all this makes the Protestant Rome sound like the Killjoy Capital of the World, at the time it had the opposite image problem, thanks to exiles who slandered it 'as a cauldron of debauchery and lust,' according to one historian.

Besides all the frolicking among the defrocked, the Protestants' new marriage laws created the need for another innovation: divorce.

However, Calvin and Co. didn't sanction it as an easy way out.

Divorce was meant to free husbands and wives if their spouses were at fault, especially if they'd committed adultery—a crime punishable by death in Geneva.

Though that may seem a bit harsh (maybe it's just me), Calvin's draconian code was designed to defend the City of God's reputation abroad and quash sex scandals at home.

When it came to the latter, not even the Reformer was safe: Calvin himself helped prosecute his sister-in-law not once but twice for alleged hanky-panky under his very own roof.

Jean's brother, Antoine, and his wife, Anne, had lived for years in the Reformer's house in Geneva.

HUNCHBACK LOVE

In 1557, though, the Calvin brothers publicly accused Anne of having cheated on Antoine with a former employee who was also a hunchback—several witnesses had seen him pulling up his trousers after being alone with her.

What's more, Anne had previous: eight years earlier, the Calvins had hauled her up in court for consorting with a member of the bourgeoisie.

The young man admitted having tried to seduce her, but both he and Anne swore they hadn't had sex.

That trial had ended with Anne on her knees, begging forgiveness from the Calvins, who in turn accepted her apology.

When she brought them into disrepute again, though, they weren't so forgiving.

Anne's hunchbacked friend had fled, so she faced her interrogators alone.

Tortured at least twice with thumbscrews, she steadfastly denied adultery (and may well have been innocent), saving herself from the death penalty.

Instead, the judges banished her.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- 'Fornicating Renegade Priests' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 5)

By 1541, Calvin's allies had come to power in Geneva and begged him to return, effectively granting him carte blanche to turn the republic into a Protestant theocracy.

By the time of his death in 1564, Calvin had vanquished the old guard of Geneva who resented 'that Frenchman,' his fellow foreigners, and his 'fornicating renegade priests.'

These free-spirited natives styled themselves the Children of Geneva, but Calvin denounced them as Libertines—giving us the modern meaning of the term—and ran their leaders out of town on pain of torture or execution.

Ironically, Catholic propagandists had invented a story that Calvin
had been branded as a sodomite before fleeing to Geneva

At the same time, he made Geneva an international safe haven for religious refugees.

These immigrants turned the 'Protestant Rome' into a center of artisanry and banking, with no fewer than forty printers cranking out Master Calvin's works as well as one of the first English translations of the Bible, compiled in part by the Scottish refugee John Knox.

The 'Geneva Bible' became the version read by Shakespeare and the one the Pilgrim Fathers took to America on the Mayflower, along with the founding principles of Calvinism.

Like its Catholic counterpart, though, the Protestant Rome had its excesses.

Calvin effectively ran Geneva as a religious dictatorship. As in much of Europe, torture was commonplace, though in Geneva's case it's ironic given the city's modern association with human rights.

It also doesn't seem much of a defense to argue that the self-styled City of God was as bad as everywhere else.

Geneva had already started cracking down before Calvin arrived, but the Reformer took the crusade against sin to Biblical extremes, outlawing prostitution (natch), but also premarital sex, dancing, immodesty, swearing, make-up and drinking in taverns.

In keeping with the rest of the Continent, heresy was a capital offence, but in Geneva that could take the form of simply disagreeing with Calvin.

The guy who complained about the Frenchman's 'fornicating renegade priests'—and was stupid enough to hang a placard on the pulpit where he preached—was tortured for a month and finally beheaded.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- John Calvin's Old-Fashioned Remedy For Lust -- (Chap. V, Pt. 4)

Born the year before Luther's pilgrimage to Rome, Calvin is usually depicted as thin and sickly, with a long, drawn face, a needle nose and a pointy beard, as if he's half dead already but sticking it out just to make life miserable for the rest of us.

Notably, the first book in his extremely prolific career was a commentary on that old Stoic, Seneca (the one who warned against rushing 'headlong into copulation').

Having been run out of Paris because of his Protestant ties, Calvin found himself kicking around the Continent in 1536 when he made a fateful detour to Geneva, then an independent city-state divided by political and religious squabbling.

The city council had officially plumped for Protestantism, but it initially resisted Calvin's radicalism and soon expelled him. 

Calvin then migrated to Strasbourg, where he surprised some of his friends by falling in love—or as close to it as he could.

Having been schooled in Renaissance humanism, Calvin preached that beauty was a gift from God; consequently, it wasn't inherently 'wrong for men to regard beauty in their choice of wives;' equally, it wasn't 'wrong for women to look at men.'

But he also added a common-sense caveat: 'Those who excel in beauty are exposed to many dangers, for it is very difficult for others to restrain themselves from lustful desires.'

Calvin promoted marriage among his followers as a 'remedy' for lust—'Satan dazzles us… to imagine that we are polluted by intercourse'—while also telling husbands and wives that they should not 'withhold sex from each other.'

Personally, though, Calvin seems to have been inclined toward celibacy, having married mainly to practice what he preached.

'The only beauty that seduces me is of one who is chaste, not too fastidious, modest, thrifty, patient, and hopefully she will be attentive to my health,' Jean wrote to a friend.

After a few false starts (including a young woman with a large dowry—Calvin thought it would be 'crazy' to marry her just because of her wealth; she didn't even speak French), he settled on a widow who had two children of her own.

Not only did Idelette tick all the Calvinist boxes (pious, frugal, etc.), Jean's friends were surprised to find that she was 'actually pretty.'

Idelette de Bure, Calvin's wife,
on a Belgian stamp

The plague cut short their honeymoon, and all their children were stillborn or died young, but they seem to have genuinely loved each other.

When Idelette passed away, Calvin never remarried.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Martin Luther and the Clergy Pimps -- (Chap. V, Pt. 3)

One of the most fundamental shifts in male-female relations stemmed from the new Protestant view of the Virgin Mary.

Luther and other Reformers accepted that Jesus' mother had been a virgin because the Bible said so.

However, they condemned any Catholic traditions that weren't backed up by the Scriptures.

So they rejected the doctrine that Mary had been a lifelong Virgin—noting that the Bible mentions her having other children.

By nixing the Veneration of Mary, Protestants effectively knocked the Mother of God off her pedestal and chipped away at the old saint/whore dichotomy of Mary vs. Mary Magdalene.

For the Reformers, it was more important for a bride (or groom) to be spiritually pure than a physical virgin—Zwingli himself had married a widow—and Luther argued that the Church's impossible standards regarding virginity and marriage turned the clergy into pimps:

'What is it they sell? Vulvas and genitals,' he declared.

Instead, fully human marriages became the new relationship role models for the godly, while education for women was encouraged, if only so they could read the Bible for themselves.

Though Martin and Katie were by no means equal in the (probably impossible) sense that we use the term—he referred to her affectionately as his 'rib'—the Luthers represented a Protestant template for what marriage should be: an 'equally yoked' man and woman pulling together toward a common goal.

SEX OBSESSED?

Having sex and companionship as selling points didn't hurt when it came to attracting young priests and nuns to the Protestant cause.

To try and stop the exodus, Rome denounced Luther and Zwingli as sex-obsessed devils.

They were certainly more highly sexed than their successor, who turned out to be arguably the most influential leader of the Reformation.

If Luther was an archetypal German (for better or very much the worse), then Jean Calvin ranks as possibly the Worst Frenchman Ever.

Hardworking, honest and not overly fond of wine or women, in retrospect, the archetypal French Protestant seems a hard man to like.

Even worse, he was a lawyer.

Nevertheless, subsequent generations revered Calvin, and his legalistic interpretations of the Bible were studied almost as religiously as the Good Book itself in both the Old and New Worlds.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Marriage: The Healthy Alternative? -- (Chap. V, Pt. 2)

Luther and his fellow Reformers railed against Rome's corruption and preached marriage as a healthy alternative to celibacy.

Within five years, Luther's Swiss counterpart, Zwingli, openly committed heresy by marrying, breaking five centuries of tradition within the Catholic Church.

And in 1525, Luther himself went one better by tying the knot with a former nun he'd helped smuggle out of a convent.

The excommunicated Augustinian broke with the teachings of St. Augustine when it came to marrying his twenty-six-year-old bride.

By all accounts, Luther was still a virgin at the age of forty-two and, rather than 'descending with a certain sadness' into their matrimonial bed, he and Katharina seem to have gladly hopped to it.

They had six children, raised four orphans and had a very happy marriage—even though Luther could be a bit of a boor.

Martin and Katharina Luther, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder
(Martin liked to call her 'My lord, Katie')

A student recalled him teasing 'Katie' at the table, announcing: 'The time will come when a man will take more than one wife. A woman can bear a child only once a year while a husband can beget many.'

'Let the devil believe that!' she replied, quoting the Bible to him: 'Paul said that each man should have his own wife.' 

But the theologian kept on kidding her, noting that Paul had written 'his own wife;' not his 'only wife.'

'Before I put up with that,' Katie shot back, 'I'd rather go back to the convent.'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Protesting Too Much?: From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 1)

Chapter Five

PROTESTING TOO MUCH?

From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' in Geneva 

'Twice a week is the woman's due.
Makes in a year twice fifty-two.' 

--ex-monk Martin Luther, the 'Father of the Reformation,' advising husbands on how to keep their wives happy, c1530 

At the same time that Renaissance men were turning Venice into the world's porn capital, a greater threat to Rome was gathering force on the far side of the Alps.

Whether it was Martin Luther getting hitched to a nun or Henry VIII getting rid of his wives, sex played a crucial role in the world-changing split between Catholics and Protestants.

Though mainly a spiritual movement, this other cultural 'Re-Birth' also focused on matters of the flesh: particularly the age-old debate about celibacy.

By establishing a rival 'City of God' on earth, the Reformation ended up revolutionizing sexual mores around the world, paving the way for gender equality and creating laws on marriage, divorce and sex crimes that survive to this day.

In 1510, a provincial German monk hiked 850 miles across the Alps during winter to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.

Martin Luther soon returned disillusioned, not least because of the sexual hypocrisy he'd seen in the home of his Mother Church.

St. Peter's was on the verge of being rebuilt in the glorious incarnation we know today, financed partly by the proceeds from prostitution.

Sixtus IV, the man who commissioned the Sistine Chapel (hence its name), had also been the first Pope to tax prostitutes (and sanction the Spanish Inquisition).

And when that still wasn't enough, the Vatican stepped up its sale of indulgences, effectively doubling its money on whoremongers.