A few years before he was to change the face of Christian Europe forever, a German Augustinian friar crossed the continent to plead with the Pope for his order’s independence from Rome. Half a millennium later, Nigel Willmott retraced his journey I  was there at all because of one line in a book. Inspired to further reading by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s epic history of the Reformation, I found a history of Martin Luther where it recounted, almost in passing, that in 1510 Luther was sent on a mission from Erfurt, in central Germany, to Rome. And in the early sixteenth century, that meant walking halfway across the continent.That was enough to give me what I was looking for – another route for a long-distance walk. I came to walking rather late in life. But in 2003 I deci