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Consider the book’s perfectly worded title. For centuries, since Eden or the Olduvai Gorge, humans had exactly three sources of illumination: sunlight, moonlight, and flame. When the sun set, nighttime ruled one half of history. Could anyone deny that midnight was a dim playground for spirits and demons, monsters, ghosts, witches, and even Satan himself?
But did the daylight make life all that much better? The “world” then—or, as it is now called, Europe—was a thick, unending forest so dense that a traveler could walk from Poland to the Pyrenees under a natural canopy that blocked the sun. The few roads from here to there had been laid by the Roman legions a thousand-plus years prior, not that there were many reasons to use them. Chances are you lived your entire life—say, forty years, if you were fortunate enough to neither starve nor work yourself to death—within a few miles from your birthplace. The world as you knew it was a small one,
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THE DENSEST of the medieval centuries—the six hundred years between, roughly, A.D. 400 and A.D. 1000—are still widely known as the Dark Ages. Modern historians have abandoned that phrase, one of them writes, “because of the unacceptable value judgment it implies.”
Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, which lasted some seven centuries after Charlemagne, literacy was scorned; when a cardinal corrected the Latin of the emperor Sigismund, Charlemagne’s forty-seventh successor, Sigismund rudely replied, “Ego sum rex Romanus et super grammatica”—as “king of Rome,” he was “above grammar.”
of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.
The defenders of the empire were responsible for a ten-thousand-mile frontier. Ever since the time of the soldier-historian Tacitus, in the first century A.D., the vital sector in the north—where the realm’s border rested on the Danube and Rhine—had been vulnerable. Above these great rivers the forests swarmed with barbaric Germanic tribes, some of them tamer than others but all envious of the empire’s prosperity.
Now they no longer were. They had panicked, stampeded by an even more fearsome enemy in their rear: feral packs of mounted Hsiung-nu, or Huns. Ignorant of agriculture but expert archers, bred to kill and trained from infancy to be pitiless, these dreaded warriors from the plains of Mongolia had turned war into an industry.
Defeated by the Chinese, they had turned westward, entered Russia about A.D. 355, and crossed the Volga seventeen years later. In 375 they fell upon the Ostrogoths (East Goths) in the Ukraine.
in A.D. 378, fought them, not with Roman legions, but using mercenaries recruited from other tribes. Caesar would have wept at the spectacle that followed. In battle the mercenaries were overconfident and slack; according to Ammianus Marcellinus, Tacitus’s Greek successor, the result was “the most disastrous defeat encountered by the Romans since Cannae”—six centuries earlier.
In 400 the Visigoth Alaric, a relatively enlightened chieftain and a zealous religieux, led forty thousand Goths, Huns, and freed Roman slaves across the Julian Alps.
In 410 Alaric’s triumphant warriors swept down to Rome itself, and on August 24 they entered it. Thus, for the first time in eight centuries, the Eternal City fell to an enemy army. After three days of pillage it was battered almost beyond recognition.
That was only the beginning; sixty-six years later another Germanic chieftain deposed the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, and proclaimed himself ruler of the empire.
It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent. Most others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European harbors until the eighth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries.
Surrounding them was the vast, menacing, and at places impassable, Hercynian Forest, infested by boars; by bears; by the hulking medieval wolves who lurk so fearsomely in fairy tales handed down from that time; by imaginary demons; and by very real outlaws, who flourished because they were seldom pursued.
As late as the year 1240, in a tourney near Düsseldorf, sixty knights were hacked to death.
was a paradox: the Church had replaced imperial Rome as the fixer of European frontiers, but missionaries found teaching pagans the lessons of Jesus to be an almost hopeless task.
early as A.D. 493 the Frankish chieftain Clovis accepted the divinity of Christ and was baptized, though a modern priest would have found his manner of championing the Church difficult to understand or even forgive.
Later in the thirteenth century Saint Thomas Aquinas celebrated the accord of reason and revelation, and in 1302 Unam
Rising gusts of wind, disregarded at the time, signaled the coming storm. The first gales affected the laity. Knighthood, a pivotal medieval institution, was dying. At a time when its ceremonies had finally reached their fullest development, chivalry was obsolescent and would soon be obsolete.
Worse still, the mounted knight no longer dominated the battlefield; he could be outmaneuvered and unhorsed by English bowmen, Genoese crossbowmen, and pikemen led by lightly armed men-at-arms, or sergeants.
Europe’s new armies were composed of highly trained, well-armed professional infantrymen who could remain in the field, ready for battle, through an entire season of campaigning. Since only great nation-states could afford them, the future would belong to powerful absolute monarchs.
A kind of centripetal force, strengthened by emerging feelings of national identity among the masses, was reshaping Europe. And that was a threat to monolithic Christendom.
The papacy was vexed otherwise as the fifteenth century drew to a close. European cities were witnessing the emergence of educated classes inflamed by anticlericalism.
Denying the existence of universals, nominalists declared that the gulf between reason and revelation was unbridgeable—that to believe in virgin birth and the resurrection was completely unreasonable.
rediscovery of Aristotelian learning—in dialectic, logic, natural science, and metaphysics—had been readily synthesized with traditional Church doctrine. Now, as the full cultural heritage of Greece and Rome began to reappear, the problems of synthesis were escalating, and they defied solution. In Italy the movement was known as the Rinascimento. The French combined the verb renaître, “revive,” with the feminine noun naissance, “birth,” to form Renaissance—rebirth.
FIXING A DATE for the beginning of the Renaissance is impossible, but most scholars believe its stirrings had begun by the early 1400s.
Like all people at all times, they were confronted each day by the present, which always arrives in a promiscuous rush, with the significant, the trivial, the profound, and the fatuous all tangled together.
During the 1,436 years since the death of Saint Peter the Apostle, 211 popes had succeeded him, all chosen by God and all infallible. The Church was indivisible, the afterlife a certainty; all knowledge was already known. And nothing would ever change.
Shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition, they trudged into the sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon-toed gait of rickets victims, their vacant faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly toward the future they thought they knew—gullible, pitiful innocents who were about to be swept up in the most powerful, incomprehensible, irresistible vortex since Alaric had led his Visigoths and Huns across the Alps, fallen on Rome, and extinguished the lamps of learning a thousand years before.
All, however, would seem monstrous to those who cherished the status quo, and their names included Johannes Gutenberg, Cesare Borgia, Johann Tetzel, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Jakob Fugger, François Rabelais, Girolamo Savonarola, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Niccolò Machiavelli, William Tyndale, John Calvin, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Emperor Charles V, King Henry VIII, Tomás de Torquemada, Lucrezia Borgia, William Caxton, Gerardus Mercator, Girolamo Aleandro, Ulrich von Hutten, Martin Waldseemüller, Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and—most
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On his historic voyage he sailed under the colors of Castile and Aragon. Today Lisbon proudly acclaims him: “Êle é nosso!”—“He is ours!”—but that is chutzpah. In his lifetime his countrymen treated him as a renegade, calling him traidor and transfuga—turncoat.
Magellan’s vision may or may not have been cloudy, but clearly his real inspiration was nobler than profits. And in the end he proved that the world was round.
In so doing, he did much more. He provided a linchpin for the men of the Renaissance. Philosophers, scholars, and even learned men in the Church had begun to challenge stolid medieval assumptions, among them pontifical dogma on the shape of the earth, its size, and its position and movement in the universe.
Spices made valuable preservatives, but trafficking in them had other, sinister implications. They were also used, and used more often, to disguise the odors and the ugly taste of spoiled meat. The regimes that encouraged and supported the spice trade were, in effect, accomplices in the poisoning of their own people. Moreover, medieval Europeans were extremely vulnerable to disease. This was the down side of exploration. The discoverers and their crews had carried European germs to distant lands, infecting native populations. Then, when they returned, they bore exotic diseases which could
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Tomás de Torquemada, a Dominican monk, presided over the Spanish Inquisition—actually conceived by Isabella of Castile—which tortured accused heretics until they confessed.
in Germany the very mention of die verfüchte Jungfer—the dreaded old iron maid—inspired terror. The Jungfer embraced the condemned with metal arms, crushed him in a spiked hug, and then opened, letting him fall, a mass of gore, bleeding from a hundred stab wounds, all bones broken, to die slowly in an underground hole of revolving knives and sharp spears.
If the pogroms of the time are less infamous than the Holocaust, it is only because anti-Semites then lacked twentieth-century technology. Certainly they possessed the evil will. In
Later mythmakers invested the Middle Ages with a bogus aura of romance. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is an example. He was a real man, but there was nothing enchanting about him. Quite the opposite; he was horrible, a psychopath and pederast who, on June 20, 1484, spirited away 130 children in the Saxon village of Hammel and used them in unspeakable ways. Accounts of the aftermath vary. According to some, his victims were never seen again; others told of dismembered little bodies found scattered in the forest underbrush or festooning the branches of trees.
The most imaginative cluster of fables appeared in print the year after the Piper’s mass murders, when William Caxton published Sir Thomas Malory’s Le morte d’ Arthur.
Some of his characters may actually have existed. For over a thousand years villagers in remote parts of Wales have called an adulteress “a regular Guinevere.” But Launcelot du Lac is entirely fictitious, and given the colossal time sprawl of the Middle Ages, it is highly unlikely that Guinevere, if indeed she lived, even shared the same century with Arthur.
Typically, news of an imminent marriage spread when the pregnancy of the bride-elect began to show. If she had been particularly user-friendly, raising genuine doubts about the child’s paternity, those who had enjoyed her favors drew straws. “Virginity,” one historian of the period writes, “had to be protected by every device of custom, morals, law, religion, paternal authority, pedagogy, and ‘point of honor’; yet somehow it managed to get lost.”
Females could marry—legally, with or without parental consent—when they reached their twelfth birthday. The age for males was fourteen. Even before she had reached her teens, a girl knew that unless she married before she was twenty-one, society would consider her useless, fit only for the nunnery, or, in England, the spinning wheel (a “spinster”).
Harlotry not only paid well; it was frequently prestigious. Because prostitutes had to expose their entire bodies, they were the cleanest people in Europe. The competition was fierce, but it always had been, and once established, these women became what were now being called courtesans (from the Italian courtigiane), or female courtiers. Moves to suppress them were rare and unpopular; Luther lost many followers when, though affirming the normality of sexual desire, he proclaimed that the sale of sex was wrong and persuaded several German cities to outlaw it.
Witch-hunting being a popular sport of the age, from time to time suspicious nocturnal gatherings would be reported to the authorities.
a time when “love” was a synonym for casual sex, one young madame la vicomtesse asked her, “You mean to say, then, that all is lawful to those who love, provided no one knows?” The reply was, “Yes, in truth, it is only fools who are found out.”
French Renaissance, and was far too shrewd to risk weakening her influence. Besides, women who dropped names were not invited back to Nérac; they had
Belief in a life everlasting lay at the very center of Christianity. To true Christians, life on earth was almost irrelevant. During it they obeyed the precepts of Catholicism to safeguard their future in paradise, disciplined by the fear that if they didn’t, they might lose it. The thought of living for the sheer sake of living, celebrating mortal existence before God took them unto his own, was subversive of the entire structure.
The new scholars took their worldly scripture from the first surviving fragment of Plato’s Protagoran dialogue: “Man is the measure of all things.”
Abandoning the past’s preoccupation with eternity, humanists preached enrichment of life in the here and now. Their message, reversing ten centuries of solemnity, was hearty—an expression of confidence that men would learn to understand, and then master, natural forces, that they cou...
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Those who translate revolutionary concepts into action are never as acceptable, or even as respectable, as those who express themselves indirectly. Humanism, by its very character, implied a revolt against all religious authority. It still does; the evangelists who denounce “secular humanism” five centuries later recognize the true adversary of fundamentalism.
