The Fifth Lateran Council had been sitting since 1512 and Leo closed it in March 1517, seven months before the theses. It had been called partly to answer a rival council convened against his predecessor and partly to address reform, and it issued decrees on preaching, on the conduct of clergy and on the reform of the curia. Almost none of it was enforced. A council on reform that adjourned without result, immediately before the reform crisis broke, is the single sharpest indictment of the pontificate.
The finances behind it are part of the same story. Leo spent on a scale that made his court the most brilliant in Europe: Raphael at work in the Vatican, the acquisition of antiquities, an Indian elephant kept as a gift from the king of Portugal, hunts, musicians and a very large household. Offices were created and sold in quantity to pay for it, and after the conspiracy of Cardinal Petrucci in 1517 he created thirty one new cardinals at once, which served both to secure his position and to raise money. He left the papacy heavily in debt.
One act of that pontificate is still visible on British coinage. In 1521 Henry VIII published a defence of the seven sacraments against Luther, and Leo rewarded him with the title Defender of the Faith. Henry broke with Rome thirteen years later and the title was withdrawn, whereupon the English Parliament conferred it again by statute. The abbreviation for it has appeared on English and British coins from the eighteenth century to the present.