Western society seems obsessed with sex.
We never stop talking about it.
And I think all this sexual chatter is rooted in the religion
that slowly took over the West hundreds of years ago.
For nearly two thousand years, Christian thinkers
have worried away at sex,
trying to lay down the law on what's right and what's wrong.
And this endless debate has turned sex into a Western obsession.
In its first thousand years, Christianity transformed sex
from a subject Jesus Christ hardly discussed into a sin.
The Church taught that celibacy was the Christian ideal,
sex was shameful,
and women were sexual temptresses,
driven by uncontrollable desire.
But this was only the beginning.
Between the 11th and the 16th century,
there were two revolutions in Christian thinking.
The first saw the Church
take control of people's lives as never before.
It tried to take control of their bodies too.
500 years later, a second revolution - the Reformation -
rejected papal authority and split the Western Church in two.
Sexuality became a battleground between Catholics and Protestants.
Christianity's grip on Western sexual morality
would now be stronger than ever.
By the 11th century, Christianity had grown
from a small Jewish sect in the Middle East
into the dominant religion of the West.
Medieval monarchs put their thrones at risk
if they angered the Pope in Rome.
Now the Church sought to micromanage people's sex lives.
It started with marriage.
For the first thousand years of Christianity,
Christians did not go to church to get married.
Marriage was a civil contract between a man and a woman.
Some happy couples might ask their priest to bless the wedding,
but marriage was still valid with or without the Church's involvement.
A couple could get married wherever they wanted.
All it took was their verbal consent -
and sex, to seal the promise.
But in 1073, there was a new Pope, Gregory VII.
He had his own vision of strict Christian morality,
and sex and marriage were at the heart of it.
Now Pope Gregory decided that it was the Church's sacred duty
to take control of this central institution of Western society.
Gregory's papacy came at a time of huge social change across Europe.
Kings and noblemen realised that there was more profit to be made
from farming and trading than from plundering each other.
The result was greater security and stability,
a new respect for the law.
Landowners were able to make the most of their estates
and become rich.
The landowners quickly realised that the best way
of cascading their wealth down the generations
was to leave their estates exclusively to their eldest son.
But often there was more than one sprog
claiming to be the legitimate heir - by different mothers.
The answer to this problem of inheritance
was to call in the most reliable referee possible.
God.
The Church would declare marriages valid, and then noblemen would know
that the legitimacy of their heirs was beyond challenge.
The dynasty was safe.
It was a neat deal between clergy and nobility.
For the first time in the history of the West,
you had to be married by a priest.
But that wasn't all.
The Church built up its power by introducing laws
telling people precisely who they could and couldn't marry -
wonderfully illustrated by what happened here at Bamburgh Castle,
in the north-east of England.
Around 1085, the Lord of this castle
was a Norman newcomer, Robert de Mowbray.
William the Conqueror had made him Earl of Northumberland.
A contemporary chronicler called him
"powerful, bold, rich, and fierce in war.
"Of great stature, strong, swarthy and hairy."
Your average Norman nobleman, then.
King William gave Robert Bamburgh Castle
as a base for subduing the rebellious North.
Now Robert looked for a wife with the right connections
to strengthen his power and wealth.
He found one in Maud, daughter to another important Norman nobleman.
But Maud was Robert's distant cousin.
And under the new Church laws,
nobody could marry anybody within the seventh degree of consanguinity.
That means blood relations closer than your seventh cousin.
And the Church extended this ban to your godparents,
and their children - they were your spiritual relations.
For the Norman aristocracy,
that meant that almost everyone they knew was out of bounds.
But under the new laws,
only the Church could grant a dispensation to marry.
And the consequence was that the Church could approve or veto
virtually every marriage across the West.
As well as giving the Church power,
these dispensations also brought it great wealth.
For a hefty fee, the Pope granted
a special dispensation for Robert and Maud.
But the happy union was to be short-lived.
In 1087, William the Conqueror's son, William Rufus,
came to the throne.
Robert de Mowbray promptly rebelled against him.
The King laid siege to Bamburgh Castle.
Maud now found herself defending her husband's castle
only a few months into married life.
William captured Robert and paraded him in chains
before the castle wall.
He told Maud that if she did not surrender the castle,
he would burn out her husband's eyes.
Maud promptly gave in, but her husband was now a traitor.
He'd kept his eyes, but he was history.
Maud was in trouble.
Her marriage to Robert had proved to be a bad investment.
Maud appealed to the Pope in Rome.
The Christian Church didn't allow divorce,
but Maud successfully argued that since she and Robert were cousins,
their marriage was against Church law and must therefore be annulled.
Then Maud went on to marry another cousin, Nigel d'Aubigny.
But this new marriage produced no children.
Now it was Nigel who successfully argued
that the Church should annul it, and Maud who lost out.
Finally, Nigel took a new wife, who WAS able to bear him an heir.
The Church's control of marriage meant that this boy
could inherit the wealth of the de Mowbrays.
All this messing around with cousins might seem a bit ridiculous now,
but it shows how the Church's restrictions on marriage
became a key means for clergy to control society.
They could now have a say in every marriage, from paupers to royalty.
And it happened right across Europe.
For its first millennium,
Christianity began shaping the sexual attitudes of the West.
Now, its legal stranglehold on people's sexual behaviour
became a powerful new weapon.
By the end of the 12th century, the Church had revolutionised marriage.
It sealed this revolution
by declaring marriage to be one of the Christian sacraments.
Marriage now joined baptism and Holy Communion
as an unbreakable contract with God.
But the Church's attitude towards sex created a dilemma.
Ever since the 5th century, Christians had learned
from the writings of St Augustine that all sex was sinful.
Even within marriage.
Throughout Europe, the Church felt a tension
between approving of marriage as a Holy Sacrament
and yet still seeing marriage as tainted by sexual sin.
You can feel this tension
if you look at the marriage service used in the medieval West.
Now this is a real treat for me, I've not seen this before.
It's a manuscript of what's called the Sarum Rite,
which was created for a new cathedral built in the 13th century
in Wiltshire at Salisbury, or Sarum in Latin.
And what it is, is a user's guide to the round of the Church's year,
and it was the most popular liturgy
used in Scotland and England in the Middle Ages.
And if we get to the marriage service,
we find that it begins, "Ante ostium eccelestiae" -
"Before the entrance to the church".
That location for the wedding service is very revealing.
At Salisbury, what it meant was that the actual marriage took place
here, in the north porch.
Only after the couple had taken their vows, exchanged rings
and been blessed by the priest
did they get the chance to go inside the church itself.
There's a deep ambivalence here. On the one hand,
the Church wants to bless this event as it's a sacrament.
On the other, it can't quite bring itself
to do so inside the church building.
The Church's contradictory attitude towards marriage
raised obvious questions for laypeople.
If marriage is a sacrament of the Church,
why do we have to put up with getting married
outside the church door?
Is this the way to welcome newlyweds?
A sensible parish priest who loved his people
would have seen the point.
After all, there are practical things to think about.
Porches can be cold and draughty,
and not many of them are as big as Salisbury Cathedral's porch.
Take this porch, in the parish church of Avebury, in Wiltshire.
How would you cram all your relatives into this?
Increasingly, people voted with their feet and went indoors.
This was the happy couple's special day.
And it was also a holy day.
In a medieval church, the further you got inside,
the closer you were to God.
And the holiest place was the high altar, far from the porch.
So comfort and piety marched hand in hand.
This was the beginning of the church wedding as we know it.
Whatever the Sarum Rite said, by the end of the Middle Ages,
most of the service took place in church.
The couple would process up the aisle and were married
in front of the images of the Apostles on the rood screen.
The Church had finally adopted marriage.
This central institution of Western society
was now unmistakeably a Christian sacrament.
The new Church laws on marriage
changed the lives of the Christian faithful across Europe.
And not surprisingly,
the Church also intruded on the sex lives of the clergy.
We've now largely forgotten that up to the 11th century,
very many clergy were happily married, with families.
Monks and nuns represented the ideal of celibacy,
but there was no formal requirement
for other priests to follow their example.
No longer.
Pope Gregory wrote, in the last public letter of his career,
"My great concern has been that holy Church, the bride of Christ,
"our lady and mother, should return to her true glory
"and stand free, chaste and catholic."
The Pope now wanted all clergy to renounce sex.
Throughout the continent,
bishops were responsible for enforcing this campaign.
In 1080, William de St-Calais became Bishop of Durham
and began building this cathedral.
As a monk, he was celibate.
But his cathedral clergy were not.
Everywhere he looked, there were priests' wives and children.
It must stop.
This 900-year-old manuscript written by Symeon of Durham
gives a vivid sense
of William de St-Calais' attitude to married clergy.
Here, Symeon tells the tale of a married priest
who was celebrating mass one day.
And as he lifted the chalice to his lips,
"He looked into the cup
"and saw that the consecrated bread and wine were hideously transformed,
"and had become pitch black."
The message was that God did not want married priests in his Church.
They polluted it.
Married clergy weren't just offensive to God.
They and their offspring
also threatened to empty the Church's coffers.
Married clergy had families, and had an inconvenient habit
of wanting to give their children an inheritance.
They were establishing dynasties, and were passing Church wealth
onto their heirs, rather than preserving it for the Church.
In 1139, a Council of Bishops in Rome
declared that clerical marriages
were universally unlawful and invalid.
It ordered clergy to embrace the highest Christian ideal - celibacy.
This had a permanent impact on Western society.
From now on, celibate clergy
saw themselves as superior to everyone else.
Their sexual restraint set them apart
from those who indulged in the sin of sex.
Even if not all clergy lived up to this high ideal,
the division was still established -
celibate clergy were superior to carnal laity.
Across Europe, clerics were set apart.
It was now easy for them to look down on ordinary people -
especially women.
Since St Augustine, the Church had viewed women as sexually unruly,
and not to be trusted.
Women were a danger to holy places.
At Durham, the Church found a drastic solution.
Durham Cathedral now became a Benedictine monastery.
This had astonishing consequences.
Women were simply not allowed in, beyond a few steps.
This is the line laid in marble into the church floor
at the entrance to the nave,
and marks the point beyond which women could not pass.
The cathedral's ban on women received unexpected support
from one of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon saints, St Cuthbert.
He'd been dead for 500 years
and was buried behind the high altar,
but a cathedral chronicler reported that the great man
made a surprise intervention from beyond the grave.
He recast the saint as a raging misogynist.
The chronicler tells us that one day the cathedral was visited by
a Scottish noblewoman, who decided to look round the great new church.
That night, the senior official charged with looking after
the cathedral had a vision - a visit from a very angry St Cuthbert,
who did not mince his words about this terrible pollution
of his beloved church.
"Get that bitch out of here!" he shouted.
When she heard of the saint's tantrum,
the poor Scots lady was so mortified that she went off to be a nun.
Near Bedford. Now there's penance for you.
The exclusion of women
wasn't just about keeping them out of holy places.
In the Middle Ages, most women had no public voice.
The only place where they were in charge was in nunneries.
For centuries, convents had been centres of learning across Europe,
and boasted their own great libraries.
Some abbesses were respected and celebrated scholars.
But from the 12th century onwards,
nuns were steadily excluded from the world of learning.
Because now, intellectual life had a new focus -
and it was for men only.
The university.
This manuscript dates from the 12th century,
which was when Oxford University was founded, one of the first in Europe.
It brought to England, for the first time
since the fall of the Roman empire, the philosophy of Aristotle,
which really was new learning for medieval Europe.
But not for girls.
Women were excluded from this intellectual feast
for the very simple reason that only men went to university,
to do exclusively male things,
like becoming clergy or doctors or lawyers.
From now on, nuns should stick to their embroidery.
Male Church leaders made no objections
as the nuns were silenced.
But all over Europe, many holy women now became renowned
for a different kind of knowledge, which didn't need book learning.
Christian women increasingly took to mysticism.
They claimed to have religious visions, many of them sensual.
Catherine of Siena claimed to have experienced
a mystical marriage to Christ.
Others spoke of their erotic visions of him.
One of my favourites is a lady from Vienna called Agnes Blannbekin.
In the early 1290s, she had more than 200 visions.
In some, she saw herself naked before God.
In others, she saw nude monks and nuns dancing in heaven.
And Agnes had a favourite feast in the Church's year -
the Feast of the Circumcision of the Infant Jesus.
On some occasions at Mass on that day,
she felt a sweetness on her tongue,
and described herself as "swallowing the foreskin of Christ".
Today, this might just seem good for a cheap snigger,
but we need to remember
that sexually charged mysticism like this was one of the few outlets
for women's voices in the Middle Ages.
Otherwise, women remained silent behind their convent walls,
or kept silence before their husbands in marriage.
By the 13th century,
Church authorities had taken control of marriage,
enforced celibacy on clergy, and silenced Christian women.
They had boosted their power
by intruding into people's private lives
in unprecedented ways.
Now, they pushed open the bedroom door.
The Church had never been particularly happy
with sexual desire, even in marriage.
The 13th-century friar Vincent de Beauvais
wrote in one of the most respected encyclopaedias of his day,
"A man who loves his wife too eagerly is an adulterer.
"All love for another man's wife is indeed shameful,
"but so is excessive love for one's own wife."
Sexual desire, even for your wife, was a sin.
The Church disapproved of all sex, even within marriage.
But was anybody listening?
There's plenty of evidence in medieval literature
that ordinary people ignored
the extremes of these teachings about love and sex.
There was clearly a lot of sex,
and not just within marriage.
A torrent of poems and tales about courtly love
are full of joyful adultery.
In the legend of Tristan and Isolde,
the married queen says to her adulterous lover,
"Fold your arms around me close
"and strain me so that our hearts may break.
"Take me to that happy place."
It's often said that courtly love is a deeply spiritual sort of love.
Come off it. They would say that, wouldn't they?
The greatest story of courtly love is the story of Lancelot.
And this medieval picture shows it rather well -
the handsome Lancelot's adulterous passion
for King Arthur's queen Guinevere.
And his body language speaks volumes.
I think the gent in purple
tapping Lancelot politely on the shoulder is King Arthur,
but it does seem to me that his intervention
is too little, too late.
Medieval Christians were celebrating adultery
and turning it into great literature.
Even more startling
is that some of this literature revelled in same-sex love.
One scholar wrote to a male friend,
"Would I cover you with tightly pressed lips - not only your mouth,
"but also your every finger and your toes, not once but many times."
The Middle Ages were a golden era for gay poetry.
In one sense, Department of No Surprise.
This was a culture in which newly celibate male clergy
were doing most of the writing.
Take Baudri of Bourgueil, French abbot,
who addressed a lot of passionate poetry to his fellow monks.
In one of his efforts he addresses the monk Ralph as,
"My other self, or yourself, if two spirits can unite,
"and if two bodies can become united."
I don't think you can get away from the meaning of that.
Monks wrote a lot of homosexual love poetry.
Some inconsistency here?
The Church had always said
that homosexuality was one of the gravest sins.
Now clergy were openly glorying in sin.
Everywhere the Church looked, it found illicit sex -
sinners swimming in their own filth.
Church leaders decided that if they couldn't stop it,
they would have to take it over.
In the 13th century, they came up with an extraordinary solution.
One of the greatest theologians of the medieval world,
Thomas Aquinas, wrote, "Even the most splendid palace
"must have a sewer system to survive."
The Church decided to provide that sewage system for sexual sin.
It may seem surprising to us now,
but Church leaders all over Europe
started setting up and licensing brothels.
Here on the South Bank of the Thames, in Southwark,
are ruins of the great palace of the medieval Bishops of Winchester.
Right next door were brothels known as "the stews".
And they were managed by the Church.
Christian leaders could now exercise tight control over sexual traffic
in the brothels - and make money at the same time.
The Bishop imposed strict rules on the stews.
He banned prostitutes from living on site,
and there were precise opening hours.
Sex workers had to leave not just the brothel
but the entire area on holy days
between the hours of six and eleven in the morning
and one till six in the afternoon,
and when Parliament was sitting, at night-time too,
because the Bishop would be in residence here at the Palace
while he was attending the House of Lords.
Time, gentlemen, please.
In medieval Europe it was almost impossible to escape
the Church's attempts to control how, where and when
you could have sex.
It had a monopoly on moral authority.
But in the 16th century,
a challenge came to the Church's huge power over sexual behaviour.
A second religious revolution was unleashed.
It split apart the Western Church, with long-term consequences
for sex and sexual attitudes right across Europe.
In 1517, the Western Church was blown apart by a revolution
here in Wittenberg, in eastern Germany.
It led to the birth of a new Christian movement - Protestantism.
Set in motion by a celibate monk called Martin Luther,
this Protestant Reformation would also inspire a sexual revolution.
It began when Luther rebelled against one of the Church's
fundamental teachings - that it was impossible to enter Heaven
unless you had accepted the Church's offer of confession,
penance and forgiveness.
Martin Luther would often kneel before this image of God
as Dreadful Judge. He was overcome by despair,
sure that God was angry with him
and that no amount of confessing would earn him forgiveness.
But then Luther came to a realisation which would have
profound consequences for the Church and for the West -
that God alone would decide whom God wished to forgive.
That meant that all the Church's ceremonies, its confessions,
its promises that good deeds would get you to Heaven, were pointless.
In fact, Luther decided that they were a sham - nothing but lies.
Luther made his doubts public at Wittenberg's Castle Church,
and openly challenged the Pope's authority.
On 31st October, 1517, Luther walked up to this church doorway,
which doubled as the university notice board.
To it, he fixed 95 theses.
They might have seemed like detailed points for academic debate,
but Luther was publicly arguing that in crucial aspects
of its theology, the all-powerful Church had got it wrong
on the most important question in 16th-century Europe -
how to be saved and get to Heaven.
Ordinary people were furious that the Church had lied to them.
Luther's words ignited rage right across the continent.
It was the start of the Protestant Reformation.
Having attacked the official Church's central belief,
Luther also started to question its teachings on sex.
For over 1,000 years,
Western Christianity had honoured the teachings of St Augustine.
All sex was sinful - even for procreation within marriage.
Now Luther turned this long-held belief on its head.
This altarpiece helps you understand
Luther's revolutionary teaching on marriage and sex.
It's a work by his follower, the great artist
Lucas Cranach the Younger.
Now on the back panel here, you see Eve giving Adam the apple.
St Augustine had said that this was the moment when sex became sinful.
He taught that sin was transmitted
from one generation to the next by the sexual act.
It's called "original sin".
Now on the front, we see Luther and his colleagues
watching the baptism of Christ himself.
Baptism washes away human sin, original sin.
Augustine maintained that sexual intercourse brought that sin back.
Luther disagreed with him.
But the revolutionary aspect of what he said
was that sex was a fundamental gift of God,
and it was there for all of us,
so long as we took up the gift of marriage.
And, crucially, Luther said that God had not intended sex
just for the biological process of creating children.
It could also be fun.
This WAS revolutionary.
Luther's ideas on marriage were just as radical.
Luther declared that marriage had never, in fact, been a sacrament.
He returned it to being a contract between a man and a woman
who loved each other. And since it was a contract,
it could be broken by either husband or wife.
So Protestant churches introduced divorce.
Over time, that has fundamentally altered
the way in which Western society regards marriage.
And Luther was to go even further.
Western Christianity had come to teach that priests must be celibate.
Celibacy had set them apart, and made them superior beings.
Luther rejected the Church's insistence on clerical celibacy.
In fact, he came to see celibate clergy
as a positive danger to society.
He preached that whenever men seek to resist sex,
"It nevertheless remains irresistible
"and takes its path through fornication,
"adultery, and secret sins."
He in fact decided that all clergy ought to get married.
Luther led by example.
In 1525, he married an ex-nun called Katharina von Bora.
He turned his former monastery into the family home.
Now he had a chance to find out the fun in marriage.
In the very first year of his marriage, Luther wrote a letter
to an old friend, apologising for not coming to HIS wedding.
He joked that he and Katharina would have a private celebration.
Here's a copy of the letter.
"On the evening that I calculate you will receive this letter,
"I assure that I'll make love to my wife in your honour,
"while you're making love to yours. It will be a joint operation."
Clearly Luther was enjoying the new pleasures of married life!
Luther had originally married Katharina out of pity,
as she was vulnerable and alone.
But he quickly came to adore her.
Within eight years, they had six children.
Luther also admired Katharina's intellect.
He used to call her affectionately "Dr Luther".
Luther, the patriarchal figure, would gather his family and friends
in this room after a cheerful meal.
Here he would talk about anything and everything,
including his views on marriage.
Katharina would be among those reverently jotting down his words
for posterity in what became known as the "Table Talk".
On one occasion he said,
"Men have broad chests and narrow hips, hence they possess wisdom.
"Women have broad backsides and hips, so they should sit still."
Now that might sound outrageous to our ears,
but I wonder whether he said things like that
with one eye on his beloved, capable and spirited Katie,
to see whether he'd succeeded in annoying her just one more time.
In the 16th century,
Luther's family became a model for families all over Protestant Europe.
A strong marriage,
with a paternal husband and a fertile, caring wife.
Pious Lutherans snapped up prints of Luther and Katharina
to nail up on their walls, as an example for families to follow.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were often bought
and given as wedding presents.
For centuries, clerical celibacy had been the ideal.
Now, the clerical family became a model for the community.
These clergy families became one of the great strengths
of Protestant Europe.
I know them well - my father was a country parson in Suffolk.
A good clergy marriage could enrich parish life.
The pastor's wife was a useful go-between with parish women.
She could go places and hear and say things that a man might not.
The clergy wife held a much-valued place in Protestant society
which simply had no equivalent in Catholic Europe.
Within a decade,
the Protestant Reformation spread across northern Germany,
Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Protestants encouraged couples to enjoy sex within marriage
and even forced priests to marry.
Catholic Europe was appalled
and declared Protestantism to be the worst of heresies.
Catholics soon had their fears confirmed
when a few extreme Reformers in Switzerland began to indulge in
promiscuous sexual behaviour,
"For the greater glory of God," they said.
They were part of a radical movement which quickly spread throughout
northern Europe, especially to one unfortunate German city - Munster.
Their enemies called them Anabaptists, or rebaptisers.
That's because they believed that only adults should be baptised.
For them only grown-ups could make such a solemn decision. Fair enough.
At the time, it was a nightmare.
It overturned 1,000 years of assumptions about being European.
Western society was Christian -
everyone joined the church by being baptised as a baby,
in beautiful fonts like this.
So, in the 16th century,
to deny baptism to babies was to dynamite the foundations of Europe.
In February 1534, Anabaptists from all over north-west Europe
descended on Munster and seized control.
They attacked the city's great cathedral
as a symbol of Catholic tyranny.
They tore off its roof...
..desecrated the memorials to its priests...
..and defaced and smashed sacred statues.
Most shocking of all,
the Anabaptists introduced a new sexual revolution.
Here in the council chamber, Jan of Leyden,
a 25-year-old Dutch firebrand,
announced that he was the biblical King David, reborn.
Under his rule, Munster would become a new Jerusalem,
fit for the return of Christ to Earth.
And he decreed radical new marriage laws.
The Old Testament says that most of the founding fathers of Israel
had several wives.
So, Jan introduced polygamy.
His deputy said that a man who has only one wife for sex
is as helpless as a bear shackled at a bear-baiting.
Under the new rules of polygamy,
once a man's first wife became pregnant he could take another,
and continue taking wives indefinitely.
The Anabaptists declared all existing marriages void
and announced that the men of Munster
could wed as many women as they liked.
As befitted a king,
Jan of Leyden was not content with one or two wives - he had 16.
Now, this is a contemporary document,
which is a sort of Who's Who of his court,
and it lists them all.
We have got Divara,
she was a powerful Dutch lady from Haarlem,
she is the only one to be called Queen.
Underneath are the other 15,
and I see Maria Deckers, Anna Knipperdolling,
Klara Knipperdolling.
And then there is an interesting description of the particular way
in which he chose "wife of the night".
There was a little board hanging on the wall with their names on,
and beside each name there was a hole,
and beside the board there was a pin hanging.
So whichever wife he chose to favour,
the pin went in beside the name.
All Europe was outraged and afraid.
Catholics said, "I told you so!
"That's what you'd expect after Luther's rebellion."
Reluctantly, Protestants agreed that the sexual revolution
was out of control.
The Catholic Prince-Bishop of Munster
and German Protestant princes joined forces to destroy the Anabaptists.
They laid siege to the city for months.
Thousands died of starvation.
Women and children ate rats and straw,
while King Jan of Leyden's polygamous court
lived in ever more insane luxury.
At last, after 18 months, in June 1535,
the besieging army broke through the city gates.
The soldiers had orders to kill every Anabaptist they found.
All except Jan of Leyden and his two deputies.
They were tortured to death with red-hot pincers,
their bodies dragged up the tower stairs of the Lambertikirche
and displayed in these three cages.
The birds picked away their flesh quite quickly,
but the bones remained.
50 years later, a visiting merchant wrote that he could still see
the skulls and bones of Jan and his deputies in the cages -
a perpetual warning to anyone in Christian Europe
toying with the idea of marrying more than one wife at the same time.
In Rome, the Catholic Church's leadership eventually responded
to this sexual chaos by launching a Holy War on the Reformation.
The Pope called a special council,
which began meeting at Trent in northern Italy in 1545.
Bishops and theologians debated how to win back souls for their cause.
And how to strengthen the resolve of the Catholic faithful.
This was the Counter-Reformation.
And one of its aims was to put the sexual revolution back in its box.
As part of its fight back,
the Catholic Church now reinforced the notion
that celibate clergy were superior to fallen laity.
It even pronounced a solemn curse
on anyone who said marriage was better than celibacy.
From now on, the Catholic Church
would enforce celibacy on its clergy as never before.
The celibate priests of the Roman Catholic Church sought to seize
the moral advantage from the Protestant Reformation.
They returned to Christ's command to look after the poor and needy
and launched a massive new commitment
to what we would call social work.
Part of this new social activism was a big initiative
to extend schooling way beyond the ranks of those
who could afford to pay for it - to poor children.
But the combination of strict clerical celibacy
and the clergy's involvement in educating children
would have unforeseen and tragic consequences.
In 1600, a Spanish priest called Joseph Calasanz established
the first Church-run free school for poor boys of Rome.
It was called a pious school -
the priests who taught there became known as the Piarists.
It was a great success,
and within 20 years there were more than 40 pious schools
across Catholic Europe, all under Calasanz's guidance.
Today, the Piarists still use his headquarters here in Rome.
The Piarists started out as a deeply austere order, as Calasanz intended.
In one letter he wrote that his priests should,
"live like angels in the world,
"without sensuality in their senses,
"and with no carnal affections in their flesh."
Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out as he had planned.
Calasanz had always been aware of
the risks of mixing celibate priests and young boys.
In the school rules, he insisted that teachers were never to be
left alone with a single pupil.
But in 1629, reports began to arrive here in Rome
that the Piarists' largest school in Naples
was involved in a serious sexual scandal.
Accusations mounted that the young headmaster,
Father Stefano Cherubini,
was sexually abusing the boys in his care.
Fully aware of the damage the Order would suffer
if the scandal became public,
Calasanz ordered the whole thing be hushed up
and all incriminating documents burned.
And instead of removing Stefano from the Order,
he promoted him to be Visitor General of all pious schools,
removing the culprit from the scene of the crime.
Of course, it gave Stefano access to more boys.
It didn't end well.
Father Stefano conspired to disgrace Calasanz in the eyes of the Pope.
He managed to force the founder out of the Order,
before becoming head himself.
It took the Piarists half a century to recover.
What's significant about this case is that the Church leadership,
including the Pope, knew the rumours about Stefano's child abuse,
but did nothing about it.
This was an extraordinary failure of power and trust.
The very people dictating the moral agenda were openly betraying it.
And this is a pattern that we have seen repeated
in the Catholic Church in more recent years.
The abuse of children covered up, denied, excused.
The trust of millions of Catholics betrayed.
But in the late 16th century,
the Counter-Reformation went from strength to strength.
The religious battle between Catholics and Protestants
spread right across Europe.
Both used sex and sexuality as a battleground.
Protestants sought to outdo Catholics in sexual virtue
and sexual control.
All over Europe, adulterers, fornicators
and homosexuals were punished, brothels were closed.
But both Protestants and Catholics sensed a far greater evil
in their midst - witches, most of whom were women.
Europeans didn't suddenly start believing in witches
during the Reformation, they always had.
But now they saw witches as instruments of sexual disorder,
who fornicated with the Devil.
Protestants and Catholics alike cast themselves in the role
of St Michael in this statue, stabbing and destroying Satan.
For over 1,000 years, Christians had seen women as sexual temptresses.
Now this misogyny was given full and violent rein.
The victims were mostly widowed or single women -
easy victims of mass hysteria, as they had no husbands to defend them.
Across Europe, women were accused of witchcraft.
Nowhere did the accusations fly more freely than in Wurzburg,
a prosperous Catholic state in southern Germany,
right on the frontier of the religious war
that divided the continent.
In 1573, a new ruler took up office as Prince-Bishop, Julius Echter,
a zealous, thoroughgoing warrior for the Counter-Reformation.
His mini-state would now find out what that meant.
The weather didn't help.
In the 1580s, a particularly nasty phase
of what historians call the Little Ice Age struck Europe.
It brought freezing winters and short, dark summers.
Harvests failed and famine struck Wurzburg.
Surely it must be the work of the Devil.
The people of the town called on Prince-Bishop Julius,
high up in his castle, to root out the Devil's agents.
He appointed interrogators to seek them out.
The suspects were brought here to the Town Hall
where they were held in the cellars.
Most of them were women.
In cells like these, men would search the women for signs of
the Devil's Mark, a part of the body in which there was no feeling.
They pricked them all over with pins until they found a numb spot.
Then the women were shown
the instruments of the torture that awaited them
if they did not confess to being agents of the Devil,
or even to having had sex with the Devil.
Unsurprisingly, most of those accused gave way
and confessed to having been Satan's lovers.
Many of them also accused other women.
The sad thing is that their fear and pain may often have combined
with their own personal fantasies and frustrations.
Easily done, when you're being tortured.
In 1590, a public trial was held here on the town's old bridge.
The interrogators were able to pin the bad weather
on a number of witches.
One of the accused was Barbara Hohenberger,
a widow who'd been hoping to marry a neighbour called Michael Thresher.
She confessed to bringing disaster to the surrounding countryside.
This is a copy of Barbara's confession,
which was publicly read out at her trial.
She says here she helped cause bad weather, fog and thick frost.
And she ruined the trees so that the leaves fell off.
And she caused so much rain that they couldn't bring in the harvest.
And then Barbara gives a vivid account of being seduced by
the Devil who appeared to her in the form of her future husband,
Michael Thresher.
So he slipped under the bedclothes and had his way with her.
But he was so cold all over that she was badly frightened
and knew that something was wrong.
Well, the Devil had sex with her three times and before he flew away,
he let out a fart which smelt so bad that she thought she would die.
The town's archives don't say what happened to Barbara Hohenberger,
but with a confession like that,
it's unlikely she escaped being burned to death at the stake.
In 1590, in this small town, 100 people - 80 of them women -
suffered that horrible death.
But remember that it wasn't just Catholics.
Protestants were equally enthusiastic for persecuting witches
and they trotted out the same cliches about women
and their supposedly uncontrollable sexuality.
Across the continent it's fairly certain that 200,000 people
were put on trial for witchcraft.
And over 60,000 were executed for being witches, most of them women.
Such was western Christianity's mania to control sexuality
that both Protestants and Catholics were murdering innocent people.
Protestants had started out by attacking celibacy
and freeing marital sex from the taint of sin.
But Protestants agreed with Catholics
that sexual transgressions, like adultery, fornication
and homosexuality,
threatened the very fabric of Western society.
Both sides policed people's sex lives with increasing fervour.
In the West, the battle to control
and punish sexual behaviour had become more ferocious than ever.
In the next episode, guidebooks to London's best prostitutes...
Gay sex comes out of the shadows...
Women fight back...
And Christianity finally loses its grip on sex in the West.