A World Lit Only by Fire

by William Manchester

Despite Charles’s military successes, which would culminate in his great victory over the French at Bicocca, Leo’s only spoils were two provinces in northern Italy, hardly worth the loss of Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia to Protestantism.

In his first speech to the cardinals he bluntly told them that corruption in the Church was so rife that “those steeped in sin” could “no longer perceive the stench of their own iniquities.” Under his predecessor, he said, “sacred things have been misused, the commandments have been transgressed and in everything there has been a turn for the worse.” They eyed him stonily. He moved decisively to end the sale of indulgences, outlaw simony, cut the papal budget, and assure that only qualified candidates for the priesthood were ordained, but his orders always miscarried. Unable to bridge the cultural barrier with the Italians around him—only two of his aides were Dutch—he was thwarted at every turn by the entrenched Curia, and after a year in office he died, unmourned, having been, wrote Vettori, “a little and despised pope.”

THE ITALIAN CARDINALS, grateful for the chance to rectify their mistake so soon, now turned to one of their own: Giulio de’ Medici, a cousin of Leo X, who became Pope Clement VII (r. 1523–1534).

On May 6, 1527, they burst into Rome. One of the first victims of the assault was the Constable de Bourbon, killed by a sniper on the Roman walls. Any hope of disciplining the mutineers died with him. They pillaged house to house, murdering anyone who protested. Buildings were put to the torch. Then the dying began. Clement, most of the sacred college, and many Curia officials found sanctuary in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo, though they barely made it—one cardinal was hauled to safety in a basket after the portcullis had been dropped. But the rest of the population was helpless.

Women of all ages were raped in the streets, nuns rounded up and herded into bordellos, priests sodomized, civilians massacred. After the first, week-long orgy of destruction, more than 2,000 bodies were floating in the Tiber, some 9,800 others awaited burial, and countless thousands of corpses lay sprawled in the city’s ruins, their bloated, stinking remains eviscerated by rats and hungry dogs.

The soldiers had come for money, and they got it—between 3 million and 4 million ducats in ransoms alone. The rich were scourged, and the lucky, who could pay, freed. Those who produced no ransom were tortured to death. But the plunder did not stop there. No source of loot was overlooked. Tombs were broken open for treasure, relics stripped of their jeweled covers, monasteries, palaces, and churches rifled f...

All this continued, off and on, for eight months, until the food ran out and plague appeared. Only then did the mutineers withdraw, having transformed the glory that was Rome into a reeking slaughterhouse.

BUT MOST MEMBERS of the Catholic hierarchy saw it differently. Now, they believed, they had seen the faces of the Protestant heresy—the fact that half the looting troops had been Spanish Catholics was ignored—and now they would move with just as much vigor, intolerance, and brutality as those rebelling against their God.

henceforth every action by the insurgent Christians would provoke an equal and opposite reaction in Rome.

In that age the world was still lit only by fire. At times it seemed that the true saints of Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike, had become blackened martyrs enveloped in flames.

Instead the Vatican committed its prestige to reaction, repression, and military and political action against rulers who had left the Church. As always, when scapegoating has become public policy, the Jews were blamed.

The Spanish Inquisition is notorious, but the Roman Inquisition, reinstituted in 1542 as a pontifical response to the Reformation, became an even crueler reign of terror. All deviation from the Catholic faith was rigorously suppressed by its governing commission of six cardinals, with intellectuals marked for close scrutiny.

Afonso de Albuquerque took office as governor of Portuguese India in 1509. His duties were more military than civil; fighting Hindus and Muslims, he captured and fortified both Goa and, on the Arabian coast, Aden; then he landed on Ceylon and moved on to seize Malacca on the Malayan Peninsula, the center of the East Indian spice trade. From Malacca alone he sent home $25 million in loot. His Excelência roamed all over the underbelly of Asia.

Half a world away, Columbus had continued to make one landing after another in the New World, sending back reports on his increasing knowledge of the Orient. However, there was a growing suspicion among the mariners who had followed in his wake that they were not in Asia at all. By the late 1490s landings had been made in Honduras, Venezuela, Newfoundland, and on the North American mainland.

With the discovery of Panama, Colombia, and the mouth of the Amazon, a very long coastline had begun to take shape.

By the second decade of the new century—the 1510s—Europe’s developing image of the Americas resembled an enormous jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were rapidly falling into place.

On April 2, 1513, Juan Ponce de León, pursuing the medieval dream of eternal youth, landed four hundred miles to the south. Naming his discovery Florida (from Pascua Florida, Easter), he declared it to be Spanish territory. Other Spaniards claimed Argentina and explored the Gulf of Mexico, planting their flag in the Yucatán Peninsula. Toward the end of the decade, Montezuma II made the capital error of cordially welcoming Hernando Cortés, thereby sealing his fate as Mexico’s last Aztec emperor.

Although patriotic ardor burned in all these adventurers, their overarching goal had not changed. They were still looking for the mysterious East.

The pontiff therefore awarded the Portuguese all non-Christian lands east, and Spain all those west, of an imaginary north-south line drawn 100 leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. This had infuriated England’s Henry VII, who, refusing to recognize papal jurisdiction, vowed to build his own empire and designated Cabot as its first builder.

For various reasons Lisbon and Valladolid* had also been dissatisfied. War between them appeared imminent. Then they negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas, redrawing the line 270 leagues farther west.

The negotiators had overlooked the fact that the world was round. Eventually explorers from the two countries would meet.

DURING THESE YEARS of high excitement in the Americas, Magellan was a Portuguese soldier on the other side of the world, where Lisbon’s trade was flourishing and men-at-arms like him were fighting to expand King Manuel’s colonial territories. Beginning in 1505 he served there seven years, variously stationed in Africa, India, Malacca, and Mozambique.

From Labrador, at the sixtieth degree of north latitude, to at least lower Brazil, at the thirtieth degree of south latitude, the Americas presented a solid, intimidating front of earth and stone.

islands and inlets above what is now the Canadian mainland raised hopes for a northwest passage, and in some breasts these hopes endured for four centuries, until the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen threaded the countless straits between 1906 and 1909, only to find that the freezing of sea lanes and other arctic conditions made the route impractical. Most navigators had written off the north four centuries earlier, however.

That was more or less the situation on October 20, 1517, when the approximately forty-year-old Magellan, having renounced his Portuguese nationality, arrived in Seville accompanied by several pilots and his Malayan slave Enrique.

Magellan, in need of an ally, found one in Diego Barbosa, a fellow Portuguese expatriate well acquainted with the Magellan family. Diego had served the Spanish crown here for fourteen years. He took an instant liking to Magellan. So did his son Duarte, a mariner himself. Finally, Beatriz Barbosa, the daughter of the family, fell in love with Magellan, and, after a brief courtship, became his bride.

It was his certitude, however, which had impressed the Spanish court most. Other petitioners had speculated. Magellan said he knew, and his decisive manner confirmed him.

Faleiro’s globe was flawed. Due to compensating errors, his calculations of longitude were only four degrees off, but that was enough to discredit them. The islands were on Portugal’s side of the line, not Spain’s, and the more men learned about that part of the world the stronger Lisbon’s claim would become.

Antonio Pigafetta

The men, seeing that it was impossible to glimpse a far shore, cheered lustily; without exception, Pigafetta wrote, they believed this to be the mouth of the legendary strait. Their leader was sure of it, convinced that here, where Juan Díaz de Solís had died less than four years earlier, lay the inlet which would lead him to Balboa’s Mar del Sur and, six hundred leagues to the west, the coveted, disputed Spice Islands.

his Castilian captains knew the truth, they would clap him in irons, lock him up in the flagship’s brig, and return him to Spain, a defrocked Knight Commander of Santiago charged with fraud, imposture, and extortion of royal funds. Abandoning his search was therefore out of the question. Like Cortés at Veracruz, he had burned his boats.

Each day the weather grew more depressing. No European had ever been this close to the South Pole.* The days grew shorter, the nights longer, the winds fiercer, the seas grayer; the waves towered higher, and the southern winter lay ahead.

Rio de Janeiro, where they had first landed, is as far below the equator as Key West is above it. By the same reckoning the Río de la Plata is comparable to northern Florida, the Golfo San Matías to Boston, and Puerto San Julián, which they reached after thirty-seven days of struggling through shocking weather, to Nova Scotia. The sails of their five little ships were whitened by sleet and hail. Cyclones battered them twice a week or more. Both forecastles and after castles had been repeatedly blown away on every vessel and replaced by ship’s carpenters. Crews shrank as the corpses of men pried loose from frozen rigging slid to briny graves. Yet the paso remained as elusive as ever.

They had reached the forty-ninth parallel—the forty-ninth degree of south latitude. There, on Saturday, March 31, he told his royal captains that he meant to continue south until he had found the strait, even if it took them below seventy degrees. Some thought they heard him promise to turn back if their frustration continued as far down as seventy-five

Thus the lines of battle were drawn. In any fight Santiago—at seventy-five tons the smallest of the five—would be quickly sunk. The flagship could not continue round the world alone. The admiral seemed checkmated, but his dilemma over the paso—not to mention his temperament—meant that yielding was out of the question. Now, as so often, patience was his sheet anchor. He quietly awaited word from the rebels. When that word arrived—in the form of a letter from Quesada, speaking for the others—it revealed their pathetic weakness. Their noble birth was to be their undoing after all. The letter expressed no wrath, no piratical defiance; there was no ultimatum, nor even a list of demands. Instead the dons were submitting a suplica, a petition. On reflection they had decided to acknowledge his supreme authority, as conferred by their sovereign. In their subordinate role they merely asked for better treatment at his hands, a little respect for their high birth, and some information about his plans, particularly how he proposed to reach the Spice Islands. All this was set forth in the most florid, most oleaginous Spanish prose.

Mutineers may command, but they cannot beg.

His desolation was ironic, for during those eight fearful, brooding weeks, from August 26 to October 18, he was only 150 miles—two sailing days—from immortality.

known to history as the Strait of Magellan. Off his starboard prow, although he did not know it, was the southernmost tip of what is now known as South America; to port, a large island and a maze of smaller islands beneath which lay Cape Horn, some 350 miles above the Antarctic Peninsula. So cold was the island maze that the shivering Indians who lived there warmed themselves over perpetual fires. The flames, visible to Magellan, prompted him to call the southern shore Tierra del Fuego—Land of Fire.

In this they were singularly lucky; subsequent navigators found that foul weather was usually prevalent throughout the strait. Indeed, that became a major reason for their failure to get through it.

After a month in the seaway no one doubted that they had found the legendary paso. Three hundred miles of it lay behind them, and now unfamiliar birds flew overhead, a sure sign of another ocean ahead.

Stores were not the only consideration, he said; the ships were badly in need of refitting. Furthermore, no one knew the distance between them and the islands. If it was far, the entire fleet might perish on the merciless ocean, victims of thirst and starvation, their fate forever unknown. It was good advice. Magellan chose to ignore

Magellan had to face the hard fact that his biggest ship, with the bulk of his stores, was headed homeward. He was now down to three bottoms, and the supply situation, bad as it had been, was now worse.

His resolution was strengthened when another pinnace, sent ahead, reappeared on the third day with the electrifying news that Balboa’s Mar del Sur had been found. Hurrying there, the admiral looked out on the prize Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, and Pinzón had sought in vain: the mightiest of oceans, stretching to all horizons, deep and blue and vast with promise.

THE LITTLE armada’s 12,600-mile crossing of the Pacific, the greatest physical unit on earth, is one of history’s imperishable tales of the sea, and like so many

was as though all his sources of information—the cartographers, astronomers, and cosmographers of the time—had conspired to betray him. Schöner’s globe, then thought reliable, put Japan only a few hundred leagues west of Mexico. Indeed, everything Magellan had read or heard had encouraged him to believe that after a short cruise he would raise Dai Nippon. Instead he was lost on the earth’s greatest ocean, a trackless seascape so enormous that if all the earth’s landmasses were dumped into it, thousands of miles of water would still

The expedition had left Sanlúcar with 420 casks of wine. All were drained. One by one the other staples vanished—cheese, dried fish, salt pork, beans, peas, anchovies, cereals, onions, raisins, and lentils—until they were left with kegs of brackish, foul-smelling water and biscuits which, having first crumbled into a gray powder, were now slimy with rat droppings and alive with maggots. These, mixed with sawdust, formed a vile muck men could get down only by holding their noses. Rats, which could be roasted, were so prized that they sold for half a ducat each. The capitán-general had warned them that they might have to eat leather, and it came to that.

The serenity of the Pacific maddened the crews. Yet, as Don Antonio realized, it also saved them: “But for the grace of God and the Blessed Virgin in sending us such magnificent weather, we should all have perished in this gigantic ocean.” Some died anyhow; nineteen succumbed to starvation and were heaved overboard. Those left were emaciated, hollow-cheeked wraiths, their flesh covered with ulcers and bellies distended by edema. Scurvy swelled their gums, teeth fell out, sores formed inside their mouths; swallowing became almost impossible, and then, for the doomed, completely impossible.

Finally, on March 6, 1521, when the life expectancy of the hardiest of them could have been measured in days, they made a genuine landfall. It was Guam in the Marianas, then a nameless isle which, they found, was inhabited by hostile Micronesians—natives who were alienated, perhaps, by the stench emanating from the very bowels of the three wretched ships. Nevertheless Guam provided them with a reprieve. After a warrior party had paddled out to the fleet and stolen a skiff, Magellan sent forty armed men ashore to recover it. They returned with the skiff, and, far more important, fresh water, fish, fruit, poultry, and meat.

Pressing on after three days of convalescence, Trinidad, Concepción, and Victoria sighted the large Philippine island of Samar on March 16, and then, south of it, tiny Suluan and its neighbor, Homonhon, in the entrance to what is now Leyte Gulf.

According to Pigafetta, the capitán-general believed that he had found the Moluccas, but that is highly improbable; Magellan was too skillful a navigator, and knew Oceania too well, to have confused north and south latitude. The Spice Islands were over a thousand miles away. The likeliest explanation for Don Antonio’s confusion is that the admiral, realizing there was no hope of wrenching the Moluccas away from Portugal, had decided to make amends by staking another claim in the name of the Spanish king. And that is precisely what he did, declarin...