The Reformation

by Will Durant

Suleiman was doubtless the greatest and noblest of the Ottoman sultans, and equaled any ruler of his time in ability, wisdom, and character; but we shall find him, now and then, guilty of cruelty, jealousy, and revenge.

Suleiman may have been saved by Luther, as Lutheranism owed so much to Suleiman.

the pirate ships of the Knights preyed upon Moslem commerce16 in one end of the Mediterranean as the Moslem pirates of Algeria preyed upon Christian commerce in the other.

Occasionally a freethinker spoke too frankly, and, in rare instances, was condemned to death. Usually, however, the ulema allowed much liberty of thought, and there was no Inquisition in Turkish Islam.

An elite infantry was formed from captive or tributary Christian children, who were brought up to serve the sultan in his palace, in administration, and above all in the army, where they were called yeni cheri (new soldiers), which the West corrupted into Janissaries.

the means were too excellent merely to serve an end; the army became an end in itself; to be kept in condition and restraint it had to have wars; and after Suleiman the army—above all, the Janissaries—became the masters of the sultans.

even Hungary thought it fared better under Suleiman than under the Hapsburgs.

Suleiman’s seraglio contained some 300 concubines, all bought in the market or captured in war, and nearly all of Christian origin.

Some Christian saints had prided themselves on avoiding water; the Moslem was required to make his ablutions before entering the mosque or saying his prayers; in Islam cleanliness was really next to godliness.

Coffee came into use among the Moslems in the fourteenth century; we hear of it first in Abyssinia; thence it appears to have passed into Arabia. The Moslems, we are told, used it originally to keep themselves awake during religious services.38 We find no mention of it by a European writer till 1592.39

many cities captured by Turks fared better than Turkish cities captured by Christians. When Ibrahim Pasha took Tabriz and Baghdad (1534), he forbade his soldiers to pillage them or harm the inhabitants; when Suleiman again took Tabriz (1548) he too preserved it from plunder or massacre; but when Charles V took Tunis (1535), he could pay his army only by letting it loot.

“The Turks,” wrote Cardinal Pole, “do not compel others to adopt their belief. He who does not attack their religion may profess among them what religion he will; he is safe.”

In November 1561, while Scotland, England, and Lutheran Germany were making Catholicism a crime, and Italy and Spain were making Protestantism a crime, Suleiman ordered the release of a Christian prisoner, “not wishing to bring any man from his religion by force.”

Suleiman fought too many wars, killed half his progeny, had a creative vizier slain without warning or trial; he had the faults that go with unchecked power. But beyond question he was the greatest and ablest ruler of his age.

In the irritability of his senility Luther attacked the Jews as if he had never learned anything from them; no man is a hero to his debtor.

In one town in southern France the entire Jewish community was cast into the flames. All Jews in Savoy, all Jews around Lake Leman, all in Bern, Fribourg, Basel, Nuremberg, Brussels, were burned.

It would be hard to find, before our time, or in all the records of savagery, any deeds more barbarous than the collective murder of Jews in the Black Death.

because a tithe of agricultural produce was demanded by the Church, Jews more and more withdrew from cultivation of the soil; and finally they were forbidden to own land.75 Since they were not admitted to the guilds (which were formally Christian religious organizations), they could not rise in the manufacturing world, and their mercantile operations were hedged in with Christian monopolies.

Leo X encouraged the first printing of the Talmud (Venice, 1520); but Julius III signalized the passing of the Renaissance by ordering the Inquisition to burn all copies to be found in Italy (1553).

the impact of Aristotle on medieval theologies inaugurated their disintegration and the transition from the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason.

Gersonides derived the existence of God from what the atheist Holbach would call “the system of nature”: the law and order of the universe reveal a cosmic Mind.

He repudiated the attempts of Maimonides and Gerson to reconcile Judaism with Aristotle; who was this Greek that God had to agree with him?

Of every five children born, two died in infancy, another before maturity.

Civilization is a parasite on the man with the hoe.

In the Mediterranean a ship of the early sixteenth century could make ten miles an hour in fair weather, but the heavier vessels designed for the Atlantic were lucky to make 125 miles a day.

the landowning aristocracy found itself squeezed between kings and business-controlled cities; it declined in political power, and had to content itself with pedigrees.

the economic changes of the sixteenth century left the working classes relatively poorer, and politically weaker, than before.

Among populations mostly fated to poverty here and damnation hereafter, crime was natural. Murder was plentiful in all classes. Every man of caliber dangled a dagger, and only the weakling relied on the law to redress his wrongs.

Execution might be by relatively painless beheading, but this was usually a privilege of ladies and gentlemen; lesser fry were hanged; heretics and husband-killers were burned; outstanding murderers were drawn and quartered; and a law of Henry VIII (1531) punished poisoners by boiling them alive,

It was some consolation that enforcement was rarely as severe as the law. Escape was easy; a kindly, bribed, or intimidated judge or jury let many a rascal go lightly punished or scot free. (“Scot” originally meant an assessment or fine.)

How did the people of Latin Christendom behave? We must not be misled by their religious professions; these were more often expressions of pugnacity than of piety.

Erasmus, sensitive to the charms of woman but not of matrimony, advised youngsters to marry as the oldsters wished, and trust to love to grow with association37 rather than wither with satiation; and Rabelais agreed with him.

People then, as now, were judged more by their manners than by their morals; the world forgave more readily the sins that were committed with the least vulgarity and the greatest grace.

Conversation was more polished in France than in Germany; the Germans crushed a man with humor, the French punctured him with wit.

Houses were big because families were large. Women bore almost annually, often in vain, for infantile mortality was high. John Colet was the eldest of twenty-two children; by the time he was thirty-two all the others were dead. Anton Koberger, the Nuremberg printer, had twenty-five children, and survived twelve of them. Dürer was one of eighteen children, of whom only three seem to have reached maturity.

Beer and wine were the staple drinks at all meals, even breakfast; one of Thomas More’s claims to fame was that he drank water.

In 1512 the household of the Duke of Northumberland allowed a quart of ale per person per meal, even to boys eight years old; the average consumption of ale in sixteenth-century Coventry was a quart per day for every man, woman, and child.

Holland boasted of several ladies who could be courted in Latin, and who could probably conjugate better than they could decline.

when he was asked on his deathbed where he expected to go, he answered, Je vais chercher un grand peut-être—“I go to seek a great perhaps.”

Fais ce que vous vouldras—“Do what you wish.”

He was tolerant of everything but intolerance. Like nearly all the humanists, when driven to choose, he preferred Catholicism with its legends, intolerance, and art to Protestantism with its predestination, intolerance, and purity.

He apparently accepted the immortality of the soul (II, viii; IV, xxvii), but in general he preferred scatology to eschatology.

like other humanists, he was confident that a good education and a good environment would make men good.

this pretended Lord of Dipsophily put into the mouth of Gargantua a sentence that in ten words phrases the challenge of our own time: “Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul”

think of him not as a great poet, but as a sane and cheerful voice in a century of hate.

ART had to suffer from the Reformation, if only because Protestantism believed in the Ten Commandments. Had not the Lord God said, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,

The Church, greatest patron of all, had employed the arts to form the letterless in the dogmas and legends of the faith. To the ecclesiastical statesman who felt that myths were vital to morality, this use of art seemed reasonable.

Day by day a secularizing, paganizing Renaissance asserted its classical predilections over the sacred traditions of medieval faith and form.

Viewing the Louvre today from the left bank of the Seine, or standing in its majestic courts, or wandering day after day through this treasure house of the world, the spirit shrinks with awe at the immensity of the monument. If, in some universal devastation, only one building might be spared, we should choose this.

today the spreading edifice is the congealed essence of 350 years of a civilization that ground the toil of the people into the splendors of art. Would the Louvre have been possible if the aristocracy had been just?