Soon after breaking out in Germany, the Protestant Reformation began to spill over into Switzerland. With its independent and fiercely individualistic cantons (aka states), a track record of small-scale religious reform movements, and a growing tide of national sentiment, Switzerland enjoyed some of the same key conditions which had helped the Reformation take hold in Germany. Just as Germanic Protestantism operated largely under the leadership of Martin Luther, many Swiss Protestants found their ideal teacher in Ulrich Zwingli, a highly educated devotee of the humanist theologian Erasmus. Zwingli was just as intense, uncompromising, and outspoken as his Germanic counterpart and his devotees followed his example. Before too long, many of the Swiss cantons declared their Protestant allegiance, but the region unfortunately was not able to institute lasting compromises between its new Protestant and established Catholic populations. Before too long, these tensions would boil over into two bloody civil wars – first in 1529 and again in 1531. It was during this last conflict that Zwingli was killed in battle.

Luther himself created a vernacular translation of scripture. He was against sacerdotalism and encouraged all to communicate directly with God. The other practices listed are emblematic of the corruption he sought to purge from the Catholic Church. In order to answer this question, you could have either known of Luther's vernacular translation, or known about his points of contention with the church.

Matteo Ricci is famous for his missionary work in China, on behalf of the Catholic Church, in the late sixteenth century. Ricci is responsible for many of the early in-roads made by Christianity in east Asia and is also one of the first Europeans to be able to read, write, and speak traditional Chinese.

In the years from the thirteenth into the fifteenth centuries, Western Europe saw the localized and/or regional rise of many lay religious movements. These developments were entirely conceived, implemented, and managed by secular individuals and were especially common in urban areas, where access to multiple sources of information (helped along by the printing press and expanding trade routes) encouraged free-thinking and experimentation. Several of these groups amassed rather substantially-sized followings – the Hussites, Waldensians, Beguines, and Lollards, for example. While of course these groups were all quite different, it is true that a definite majority shared a common central goal – they desired to return to what they saw as the simple religious practices put in place by Jesus and his original apostles. These individuals regarded the Catholic Church as a far too doctrinally and practically complex realm, one in which ritual outweighed belief. To solve this problem, many believed that the only true solution was a return to a more individualized, ascetic religious experience, one devoid of all the material trappings of Catholicism. Especially enshrined by such movements was the notion of equal and reciprocal exchange amongst religious leaders and the lay population, so that each church member, regardless of their official clerical or social status, was able to have their say and direct their own religious practices.

The opening years of the Renaissance coincided with a period in which the Catholic Church progressively fell from the position of near-absolute dominance which it had long exercised over much of Western Europe. This trend first emerged as a result of several events that occurred in the late Middle Ages – as the memory of the Black Death’s devastation receded, and was replaced with the horrific ravages of Europe’s many wars (especially the destruction wrought by the Hundred Years’ War), many individuals began to see the Church as less of a mainstay. Rather, the growing influence of national armies and international and/or inter-regional conflict promoted the birth of nationalist sentiment among the population. Increasingly, citizens from all societal classes came to view national loyalty and pride as a quite natural and important expression of allegiance, which in turn caused loyalty to the Church to correspondingly decline. After all, the Church taken sides throughout many of these wars as well, which many individuals regarded as unnecessary clerical meddling at best or even unwarranted papal posturing at worst. The deep transformations wrought by the Renaissance furthered this trend, as humanist scholars guided their students away from Church teachings in favor of more secularized and widely varied courses of study. These humanist students and scholars helped engender an entirely new breed of intellectuals, who began to serve as government administrators and officials, increasingly replacing the members of the clergy who once had filled these posts.

The Protestant Reformation began in the sixteenth century and spread most quickly and effectively in Northern Europe - Germany, the Netherlands, the British isles. It threatened to remove the influence of Catholicism from Europe, but never really took effect in Southern Europe. The Catholic Church enacted the Counter Reformation at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and fought back against the forces of Protestantism. The Protestant Reformation had a massive impact on European, and subsequently American, society.

Henry VIII was a devoted Catholic king before his break from Rome, even earning the title "Defender of the Faith" after he published literature attacking Martin Luther. However, his desire to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon overcame his love of the Church, and the English Reformation began as an attempt to circumvent Church laws and legitimize Henry's new marriage to Anne Boleyn. Henry would later argue that his decision was based on English laws that had long been ignored, although Parliament did not officially make Henry the head of the English church until the schism was already well under way. Henry's argument that the Church had no authority in England had already been used to get rid of his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, who had failed to secure Henry's divorce and was branded as a traitor.

The Kongolese Kingdom was founded in the fourteenth century and existed, as either an independent state or as a Portuguese vassal-state, until the early twentieth century. After the arrival of Portuguese missionaries the Kongolese Kingdom converted to Christianity in the sixteenth century.

The Edict of Nantes was issued by King Henry IV of France in 1598. It was primarily concerned with religious tolerance in France. It extended freedom of worship to French Calvinists (known as Huguenots) in what was, at the time, an officially and exclusively Catholic nation.

The Aztec religion included elements of human sacrifice. The Aztecs waged many brutal wars of conquest in Central America before the arrival of the Europeans. The people they conquered would be assimilated into the empire and some of their citizens would be sacrificed to appease the Aztec gods.