A World Lit Only by Fire

by William Manchester

1400 First stirrings of Renaissance 1414 Jan Hus betrayed 1433 Prince Henry the Navigator flourishes 1453 Constantinople falls 1458 Gutenberg’s Bible 1475 Birth of Cesare, Cardinal Borgia’s son 1477 Canterbury Tales 1478 Pope Sixtus IV conspires to slay Medicis during High Mass in Florence Cathedral 1480 Birth of Lucrezia, Cesare’s sister 1486 Dias rounds the tip of Africa 1484 Pied Piper murders 130 German children 1485 Le morte d’Arthur 1487 Torquemada named Grand Inquisitor Star Chamber in England 1488 King James III of Scotland murdered 1490 Savonarola’s first Bonfire of the Vanities 1492 Cardinal Borgia buys the papacy, becomes Pope Alexander VI Columbus discovers the Bahamas 1495 Vatican revels with naked prostitutes First syphilis outbreak ravages Naples 1497? Amerigo Vespucci in the New World 1497 Lucrezia Borgia’s triple incest The pope’s eldest son, Juan, is murdered 1498 Manutius’s five-volume Aristotle published Rise of humanism Savonarola burned at the stake Lucrezia gives birth to the Infans Romanus 1500 Michelangelo: Madonna and Child 1501 Over 1,000 printing shops now in Europe Pope acknowledges paternity of his daughter’s child 1502 All books challenging papal authority ordered burned 1503 Julius II: the Warrior Pope New universities include Wittenberg and Frankfurt an der Oder Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa 1505 Death of Russia’s Ivan the Great 1506 First stone of St. Peter’s Basilica laid 1507 Violent death of Cesare Borgia Waldseemuller christens “America...

A.D. 400 and A.D. 1000—are still widely known as the Dark Ages.

incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.

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. Although homicides were twice as frequent as deaths by accident, English coroners’ records show that only one of every hundred murderers was ever brought to justice. Moreover, abduction for ransom was an acceptable means of livelihood for skilled but landless knights. One consequence of medieval peril was that people huddled closely together in communal homes. They married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away.

Medieval Christians, knowing the other cheek would be bloodied, did not turn it.

Charlemagne was a just and enlightened ruler—for the times. His loyalty to the Church was absolute, though he sometimes chose peculiar ways to demonstrate it. Conquering Saxon rebels, he gave them a choice between baptism and immediate execution; when they demurred, he had forty-five hundred of them beheaded in one morning.

In A.D. 330 Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to recognize Jesus as his savior, made Constantinople the empire’s second capital. Within a few years, a great many people who shared his faith began to die there for their interpretation of it. The emperor’s first Council of Nicaea failed to resolve a doctrinal dispute between Arius of Alexandria and the dominant faction of theologians. Arius rejected the Nicene Creed, taking the unitarian position that although Christ was the son of God, he was not divine. Attempts at compromise foundered; Arius died, condemned as a heresiarch; his Arians rioted and were put to the sword. Over three thousand Christians thus died at the hands of fellow Christians—more than all the victims in three centuries of Roman persecutions.

But medieval Christianity had more in common with paganism than its worshipers would acknowledge. The apostles Paul and John had been profoundly influenced by Neoplatonism. Of the seven cardinal virtues named by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century, only three were Christian—faith, hope, and charity—while the other four—wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance—were adopted from the pagans Plato and Pythagoras.

Even so, the followers of Jesus were widely blamed for bringing about Rome’s fall; men charged that the ancient gods, offended by the empire’s formal adoption of the new faith, had withdrawn their protection from the Eternal City.

De civitate Dei (The City of God), the first great work to shape and define the medieval mind. Augustine (354–430) began by declaring that Rome was being punished, not for her new faith, but for her old, continuing sins: lascivious acts by the populace and corruption among politicians.

But, he wrote, the original sin, and he now declared that there was such a thing, had been committed by Adam when he yielded to Eve’s temptations. As children of Adam, he held, all mankind shared Adam’s guilt.

The chief distinction between the old faiths and the new were in the sexual arena. Pagans had accepted prostitution as a relief from monogamy. Worshipers of Jesus vehemently rejected it, demanding instead purity, chastity, and absolute fidelity in husbands and wives.

subtler registers to Augustine’s mind. In his most complex metaphor, he divided all creation into civitas Dei and civitas terrena. Everyone had to embrace one of them, and a man’s choice would determine where he spent eternity.

Because he had identified the Church with his civitas Dei, Augustine clearly implied the need for a theocracy, a state in which secular power, symbolizing civitas terrena, would be subordinate to spiritual powers derived from God. The Church, drawing the inference, thereafter used Augustine’s reasoning as an ideological tool and, ultimately, as a weapon in grappling with kings and emperors.

Nevertheless the entire medieval millennium took on the aspect of triumphant Christendom.

Pagan holidays still enjoyed wide popularity; therefore the Church expropriated them. Pentecost supplanted the Floralia, All Souls’ Day replaced a festival for the dead, the feast of the purification of Isis and the Roman Lupercalia were transformed into the Feast of the Nativity. The Saturnalia, when even slaves had enjoyed great liberty, became Christmas; the resurrection of Attis, Easter.

After the pagan sacrifice of humans was replaced by Christianity’s symbolic Mass, the ceremonial performance of the sacraments became of paramount importance.

designation of saints emerged during the second and third centuries after Christ, with the Roman persecution of Christians. The survivors of the catacombs believed those who had been martyred had been received directly into heaven and, being there, could intercede for the living.

However, as the number of saints grew, so did the medieval yearning to give them identity; worshipers wanted pictures of them, images of the Madonna, and replicas of Christ on the cross.

Incense was introduced in Christian church services around 500, followed by the burning of candles.

Leo III, the deeply pious Byzantine emperor, believed it his imperial duty to defend true Christianity against all who would desecrate it. To him the adoption of pagan ways was sacrilege, and he was particularly offended by the veneration of relics and religious pictures during the celebration of Mass. After citing Deuteronomy 4:16—which forbids worship of any “graven image” or “the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female”—he issued a draconian edict in 726. On his orders, soldiers were to remove all icons and representations of Jesus and Mary from churches. All murals, frescoes, and mosaics were to be plastered over. This made Leo history’s most celebrated iconoclast. It also enraged his subjects.

Royal treasury officials were so deficient in elementary skills that they were dependent upon arithmetic learned from the Arabs; the name exchequer emerged because they used a checkered cloth as a kind of abacus in doing sums.

In the early centuries distinction ended with the death of the man who had won it, but patrilineal descent became increasingly common, creating dynasties.

Hereditary monarchy, like hereditary nobility, was largely a medieval innovation.

Because the papacy opposed primogeniture, secular leaders tried to maintain the fiction that sovereigns were elected—during the Capetian dynasty court etiquette required that all references to the king of France mention that he had been chosen by his subjects, when in fact son succeeded father in unbroken descent for 329 years—but by the end of the Middle Ages, this pretense had been abandoned. In England, France, and Spain the succession rights of royal princes had become absolute.

The conspicuous sacerdotal role in the crowning of kings, who then claimed that they ruled by divine right, was characteristic of Christianity’s domination of medieval Europe. Proclamations from the Holy See—called bulls because of the bulla, a leaden seal which made them official—were recognized in royal courts.

However, the greatest wound to the prestige of the Vatican was self-inflicted. In 1305 Pope Clement V, alarmed by Italian disorders and a campaign to outlaw the Catholic Knights Templars, moved the papacy to Avignon, in what is now southeastern France. There it remained for seven pontificates, despite appeals from such figures as Petrarch and Saint Catherine of Siena.

Christendom was ruled by two Vicars of Christ, a pope in Rome and an antipope in Avignon. IN ANOTHER AGE, so shocking a split would have created a crisis among the faithful, but there was no room in the medieval mind for doubt; the possibility of skepticism simply did not exist.

Catholicism had thus found its greatest strength in total resistance to change.

One was the medieval man’s total lack of ego. Even those with creative powers had no sense of self.

Noblemen had surnames, but fewer than one percent of the souls in Christendom were wellborn. Typically, the rest—nearly 60 million Europeans—were known as Hans, Jacques, Sal, Carlos, Will, or Will’s wife, Will’s son, or Will’s daughter. If that was inadequate or confusing, a nickname would do. Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie), or the like. Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason. If war took a man even a short distance from a nameless hamlet, the chances of his returning to it were slight; he could not identify it, and finding his way back alone was virtually impossible. Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning.

In the medieval mind there was also no awareness of time, which is even more difficult to grasp.

In all Christendom there was no such thing as a watch, a clock, or, apart from a copy of the Easter tables in the nearest church or monastery, anything resembling a calendar.* Generations succeeded one another in a meaningless, timeless blur. In the whole of Europe, which was the world as they knew it, very little happened. Popes, emperors, and kings died and were succeeded by new popes, emperors, and kings; wars were fought, spoils divided; communities suffered, then recovered from, natural disasters. But the impact on the masses was negligible. This lockstep continued for a period of time roughly corresponding in length to the time between the Norman conquest of England, in 1066, and the end of the twentieth century.

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.

At the same time, a subtle but powerful new spirit was rising in Europe. It was virulently subversive of all medieval society, especially the Church, though no one recognized it as such, partly because its greatest figures were devout Catholics. During the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) the 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.

the man who would destroy the very world the cartographers had drawn—Ferdinand Magellan.

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.

AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT the most dangerous enemy in Europe was the reigning pope. It seems odd to think of Holy Fathers in that light, but the five Vicars of Christ who ruled the Holy See during Magellan’s lifetime were the least Christian of men: the least devout, least scrupulous, least compassionate, and among the least chaste—lechers, almost without exception. Ruthless in their pursuit of political power and personal gain, they were medieval despots who used their holy office for blackmail and extortion.

Under Innocent VIII (r. 1484–1492) simony was institutionalized; a board was set up for the marketing of favors, absolution, forged papal bulls—even the office of Vatican librarian, previously reserved for the eminent—with 150 ducats (about $3,750)* from each transaction going to the pontiff. Selling pardons for murderers raised some eyebrows, but a powerful cardinal explained that “the Lord desireth not the death of a sinner but rather that he live and pay.” The fact is that everything in the Holy See was up for auction, including the papacy itself.

Ancient German custom offered convicted criminals a choice; they could be punished or, if they were wealthy, pay fines (Wehrgeld). Buying salvation was new to the Church. It was also sacrilegious. Early Christians had atoned for their sins by confession, absolution, and penance. Now it became possible to erase transgressions by buying indulgences.

The precept that men of God should sleep alone, established by the Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139 after nine hundred years of hemming and hawing, had begun to fray well before the dawn of the sixteenth century. Now it was a thing of shreds and patches. The last pontiff to take it seriously had died in 1471, and even he, during his youthful days as a bishop of Trieste, had slept with a succession of mistresses. A generation later the occupants of Saint Peter’s chair were openly acknowledging their bantlings, endowing their sons with titles and their daughters with dowries.

Allying himself with the Pazzi family, who were challenging the Florentine power of Lorenzo de’ Medici—Lorenzo the Magnificent—Pope Sixtus IV conspired with them to murder Lorenzo and his handsome brother Giuliano. He chose their most defenseless moment, when they were observing High Mass in the Florentine cathedral. The signal for the killers was the bell marking the elevation of the host. Giuliano fell at the altar, mortally wounded, but Lorenzo was not called magnificent for nothing. Drawing his long sword, he escaped into the sacristy and barricaded himself there until help arrived.

The donjon was the last line of defense, but it was the wall, the first line of defense, which determined the propinquity inside it. The smaller its circumference, the safer (and cheaper) the wall was. Therefore the land within was invaluable, and not an inch of it could be wasted. The twisting streets were as narrow as the breadth of a man’s shoulders, and pedestrians bore bruises from collisions with one another.

Sunlight rarely reached ground level, because the second story of each building always jutted out over the first, the third over the second, and the fourth and fifth stories over those lower.

The everyday dinner of a man of rank ran from fifteen to twenty dishes; England’s earl of Warwick, who fed as many as five hundred guests at a sitting, used six oxen a day at the evening meal.

The hearth excepted, the home of a prosperous peasant lacked these amenities. Lying at the end of a narrow, muddy lane, his rambling edifice of thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood was almost obscured by a towering dung heap in what, without it, would have been the front yard. The building was large, for it was more than a dwelling. Beneath its sagging roof were a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family’s apartment, actually a single room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot.

“Small beer” was the traditional drink, though since the crusaders’ return from the East many preferred “spiced beer,” seasoned with cinnamon, resin, gentian, and juniper. Under Henry VII and Henry VIII the per capita allowance was a gallon of beer a day—even for nuns and eight-year-old children.

Life expectancy was brief; half the people in Europe died, usually from disease, before reaching their thirtieth birthday.

Styles had changed since Greece and Rome shimmered in their glory; then garments had been wrapped on; now all classes put them on and fastened them.

Every knight wore a signet ring, and wearing fur was as much a sign of knighthood as wearing a sword or carrying a falcon. Indeed, in some European states it was illegal for anyone not nobly born to adorn himself with fur.