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Martin Luther's mind was unshakably fixed as he sat in the great hall of the medieval castle in Marburg, Germany, on the morning of October 2, 1529.

He had come to Marburg grudgingly, at the request of the Protestant Landgrave of the German state, Philip of Hesse, who had summoned Luther and other leading German and Swiss reformers to a meeting ostensibly of great theological importance. But the real impetus for the gathering was strictly political. That underlying fact made the outcome of this "Marburg Colloquy" a foregone conclusion.

To Luther, theological truth could never be allowed to take a back seat to political expedience. Indeed, if Luther had not had matters of greater concern on his mind as more than 50 of the most influential Protestant reformers in Europe met for this first day of public discussion, he might have appreciated the irony of the setting Philip had chosen—the foundations of the gothic hilltop fortress, much like his own convictions, were firmly set in stone, and could not be moved.

Whether religious or political, the Marburg Colloquy undeniably represented a watershed in the course of the Reformation, and Europe's Protestant princes had good reason to fear that its failure could doom the movement. Religion and politics of the sixteenth century co-mingled to a greater degree than Luther wanted to admit, and not everyone shared his scruples against manipulating one in order to influence the other.

The most immediate example of this, and the direct cause for the colloquy, was the resolution drafted by the second diet of Speyer, which had convened in April 1529. The resolution aligned the Holy Roman Empire firmly behind the Catholic Church in opposition to the reformers, thereby threatening them with effective suppression.

Philip recognized the need for the disunited reformers in Hesse, Saxony, Strasbourg, Zurich, and Basel to form a common front based on a reformed theology on which all could agree. The chief obstacle, everyone knew, would be the divide over the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

Luther and Ulrich Zwingli stood far apart in their interpretations, and between them lay a great chasm, which neither, it seemed, could cross over.

Zwingli, the chief spokesman for the Swiss reformers, held firmly to the belief that the bread and wine offered through the Sacrament are symbolic of Christ's sacrifice and thus merely the outward signs by which the recipients acknowledge the grace that they have already received.

Luther vehemently insisted that Christ is literally present in the communion elements, which are the means by which grace is imparted to the faithful. The German reformer's position more closely resembled the Catholic doctrine than it did the Swiss, a point that earned him no little scorn from the more radical Protestants.

Philip had expended great energy just to persuade Luther to come to Marburg, and his presence in Marburg Castle must have been deemed a harbinger of good things to come.

But while for the next two days Luther and Zwingli drew close enough to look each other in the eye and launch invectives back and forth across a narrow table, the theological gulf between them remained unbridged.

Indeed, following a day of private consultations on October 1, Luther surely knew what the others only feared: as the public portion of the proceedings opened on October 2, the colloquy was not just beginning, it had for all practical purposes already ended. No compromise would emerge from this summit.

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