Basel's printing houses drew Erasmus, and in 1516 the press of Johann Froben produced his edition of the New Testament in Greek with a fresh Latin translation beside it and annotations underneath. It was the first Greek New Testament to be published, assembled in haste from a handful of late manuscripts, and its faults are well known, including a passage in Revelation that Erasmus retranslated back into Greek from Latin because his manuscript lacked the final leaves. It was also the book Luther translated from, and the text type behind it dominated European Bibles for three centuries.
Erasmus wanted reform without rupture, and when Luther forced the issue he wrote in 1524 in defence of free will. Luther's reply, on the bondage of the will, was the more powerful book and ended any prospect of the two working together.
When Basel adopted the Reformation in 1529 under Oecolampadius, Erasmus left for Freiburg rather than take sides. He came back in 1535 and died in the city the following year, and he is buried in the cathedral of a church he never joined.
Three centuries later Basel became a missionary capital. The Basel Mission, founded in 1815, trained and sent workers to Ghana, Cameroon, India and China, where alongside preaching they set up printing presses, schools and trading companies, and produced grammars and dictionaries that fixed the written form of several languages.