A World Lit Only by Fire

by William Manchester

Eine Kugel kam geflogen: Gilt es mir oder gilt es dir? Ihn hat es weggerissen; Er liegt mir vor den Füssen Als wärs ein Stück von mir.

(German) A bullet came flying Is it for me or is it for you? It tore him away Like it's a piece of me

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

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.

Medieval Christians, knowing the other cheek would be bloodied, did not turn it. Death was the prescribed penalty for hundreds of offenses, particularly those against property.

Every flourishing religion has been intermittently watered by the blood of its own faithful, but none has seen more spectacular internecine butchery than Christianity.

medieval Christianity had more in common with paganism than its worshipers would acknowledge.

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.

THE HOLY SEE’S struggle with Europe’s increasingly powerful crowned heads became one of the most protracted in history.

Imperial Rome having yielded to barbarians, and then barbarism to Christianity, Christianity was in turn infiltrated, and to a considerable extent subverted, by the paganism it was supposed to destroy.

Thus the allegiance of converts was divided.

Christian churches were built on the foundations of pagan temples, and the names of biblical saints were given to groves which had been considered sacred centuries before the birth of Jesus. Pagan holidays still enjoyed wide popularity; therefore the Church expropriated them.

Neither Jesus nor this disciples had mentioned sainthood. The designation of saints emerged during the second and third centuries after Christ, with the Roman persecution of Christians.

WAS THE MEDIEVAL WORLD a civilization, comparable to Rome before it or to the modern era which followed? If by civilization one means a society which has reached a relatively high level of cultural and technological development, the answer is no.

Nevertheless it possessed its own structure and peculiar institutions, which evolved almost imperceptibly over the centuries.

Europe was ruled by a new aristocracy: the noble, and, ultimately, the regal.

Because this was a time of incessant warfare, however, most noblemen had risen by distinguishing themselves in battle. In the early centuries distinction ended with the death of the man who had won it, but patrilineal descent became increasingly common, creating dynasties.

ROYALTY WAS invested with glory, swathed in mystique, and clothed with magical powers.

Because the first medieval rulers had been barbarians, most of what followed derived from their customs.

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

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.

Strong sovereigns continued to seek freedom from the Vatican, with varying success;

However, the greatest wound to the prestige of the Vatican was self-inflicted.

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.

In A.D. 340 Saint Cyril of Jerusalem had reasoned that what all men believe must be true, and ever since then the purity of the faith had derived from its wholeness,

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

Overstating this absolutism is impossible.

THE MOST BAFFLING, elusive, yet in many ways the most significant dimensions of the medieval mind were invisible and silent. One was the medieval man’s total lack of ego.

The folk (Leute, popolo, pueblo, gens, gente) were baptized, shriven, attended mass, received the host at communion, married, and received the last rites never dreaming that they should be informed about great events, let alone have any voice in them. Their anonymity approached the absolute. So did their mute acceptance of it.

Among the implications of this lack of selfhood was an almost total indifference to privacy. In summertime peasants went about naked.

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

pontiffs were explicitly permitted to exert authority not only in theological matters, but also in all vital political issues which might arise.

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.

By A.D. 1500 most of these sovereign dynasties were in place,

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.

European cities were witnessing the emergence of educated classes inflamed by anticlericalism. Their feelings were understandable, if, in papal eyes, unpardonable.

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.

When we look back across five centuries, the implications of the Renaissance appear to be obvious. It seems astonishing that no one saw where it was leading, anticipating what lay round the next bend in the road and then over the horizon. But they lacked our perspective; they could not hold a mirror up to the future.

Magellan gave men a realistic perception of the globe’s dimensions, of its enormous seas, of how its landmasses were distributed. Others had raised questions. He provided answers, which now, inevitably, would lead to further questions—to challenges which continue on the eve of the twenty-first century.

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 spread across the continent unchecked.

the late 1400s and early 1500s were haunted by dark reigns of pestilence, that life became very cheap, and that this wretched situation can scarcely have discouraged explorers eager to investigate what lay over the horizon.

In some ways the period seems to have been the worst of times—an age of treachery, abduction, fratricide, depravity, barbarism, and sadism.

Torquemada’s methods reveal much about one of the age’s most unpleasant characteristics: man’s inhumanity to man.

Blacks and Jews suffered most, but any minority was considered fair game for tyrants.

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:

Sixteenth-century men did not believe that criminal characters could be reformed or corrected, and so there were no reformatories or correctional institutions. Indeed, prisons as we know them did not exist. Maiming and the lash were common punishments; for convicted felons the rope was commoner still.

Subtly but inexorably the bourgeois would replace the clergy in the continental power structure.

THE TOWN, HOWEVER, was not typical of Europe. In the early 1500s one could hike through the woods for days without encountering a settlement of any size.

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

Although they called themselves Christians, medieval Europeans were ignorant of the Gospels. The Bible existed only in a language they could not read. The mumbled incantations at Mass were meaningless to them. They believed in sorcery, witchcraft, hobgoblins, werewolves, amulets, and black magic, and were thus indistinguishable from pagans.