First, printers like Gutenberg provided the tools by which the papacy plunged itself headlong into a crisis of ethics and institutional corruption. Then, printers allowed dissent against the established order to spread across Europe at breakneck speed. The result was that, in the space of a few short decades, medieval Europe descended into religious and political turmoil, as a new movement—Protestantism—took root, providing the first serious challenge to Catholicism in one thousand years.
