Pope Adrian VI ,   1522-1523

Adrian Florensz was born from poor parents in Utrecht in 1459. He studied at the University of Louvain, where he later became professor of theology, chancellor and rector. The great humanist Erasmus was one of his pupils. In 1507 the emperor Maximilian I appointed Adrian tutor of his grandson Charles. As emperor, Charles entrusted him with numerous high offices in Spain. He was made cardinal in 1517, and when Charles left Spain in 1520, Adrian became governor.
When he was elected pope in 1522, Adrian took up the task of reforming the church with great earnestness in order to fight the Reformation, but he could accomplish little in the face of fierce opposition from the Italian Curia. Adrian was a charitable man, a scholar and ascete, who opposed corruption but also the arts. He was a hesitant mediator between Charles V and Francis I and therefore failed to bring about a unificaton of European powers against the Turks, who had occupied Rhodes in 1522.
The people in Rome hated him so much that they declared his physician a liberator when Adrian died after less than two years of governement in 1523. He was the last non-Italian pope until the election of John Paul II in 1978.

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam ,   *1466/9  †1536

Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist, was born at Rotterdam in 1466/9. Both parents died early, and he had to enter a monastery, but thanks to the bishop of Cambrai, he was given the opportunity to study in Paris and travel to England. During these years of study he developped an aversion against the traditional scholastics. His writings criticized and ridiculed ecclesiastical abuses and encouraged the growing urge for reform. He sympathized with the Reformation at first, but he refused to intervene either for or against Luther at the time of the Diet of Worms in 1521. He rejected Luther's self-proclaimed dogmatic mission as well as the papacy's claim to secular power, which made him suspicious to both parties. His supporters were rationalists, opposed to orthodoxy and praised his independent stance in an age of fierce confessional controversy. Erasmus wrote to pope Adrian VI, whom he had known at Louvain: he claimed there was still hope of reconciliation, if only the church would ease the burden of rules, for instance by permitting priests to marry.
    Erasmus and Luther engaged in a great debate about the place of human free choice in the process of salvation. In this controversy Erasmus was a fervent defender of free will (De libero arbitrio, 1524) and Hyperaspistes (1526-27). Luther wrote De servo arbitrio (1525), one of his most important theological works, in the course of this debate.
    Erasmus emphasised studies in classical and Christian antiquity and became the greatest European scholar of the 16th century. He used philological methods in his historical-critical studies of the past and edited the writings of most of the major Church Fathers in both Latin and Greek. In 1516 he published the original Greek text of the New Testament together with his own Latin translation. This work was intended to stimulate a renewal of authentic Christian faith.
    Erasmus was named honorary councillor to the 16-year-old archduke Charles, the future Charles V. For him he wrote "Education of a Christian Prince" in Latin.

Though he himself insisted that his best portrait was to be found in his books, Erasmus commissioned likenesses from some of the greatest artists of his day: Matsys, Dürer, and Holbein. Matsys had already painted Erasmus in 1517. Two years later he created this earliest medal of the famous humanist, who happened to pass through Antwerp that year.