A World Lit Only by Fire

by William Manchester

“Probably the basic cause in the moral loosening in Western Europe,” a modern historian argues, “was the growth of wealth.” Nevertheless, the religious revolution played a role.

During the early sixteenth century lust, and particularly noble lust, seethed throughout Europe. In France this was the age of Rabelais, and across the Channel the lords and ladies of Tudor England were establishing a tradition of aristocratic promiscuity which would continue in the centuries ahead. Yet Rome, the capital of Christendom, was the capital of sin, and the sinners included most of the Roman patriciate.

MEANTIME, as tumult and intrigue marked papacy after papacy, Italian arts flourished.

The most powerful men knew artistic genius when they saw it, and their unstinting support of it, despite their deplorable private lives and abuse of authority, is unparalleled.

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452–1519), the most versatile creative figure of that age—perhaps of any age—confronted traditional authority with a more awkward problem.

of all the great Renaissance artists, Da Vinci alone was destined to fall from papal grace.

Leonardo, sui generis, questioned everything. Rather than accept the world God had created, as Christians had always done, he probed endlessly into what human ingenuity could achieve by struggling against it.

Leonardo was left-handed; his notes, seven thousand pages of which have been preserved, were written in mirror script. Though quite legible, they can be read only by holding them up to a looking glass. In the sixteenth century that was enough to envelop him in suspicion.

“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”

(Italian) Abandon all hope, you who enter

Luckily, the French crown, not for the first time, came to the rescue of Italian genius. Francis I invited the great pariah to Paris as “first painter and engineer to the king.”

Gutenberg then borrowed money to buy a press and, in 1457–1458, published his superb Bible of 1,282 outsized, double-columned pages. It was one of the great moments in the history of Western civilization. He had introduced movable type.

Copies of the first type-printed book were studied all over Europe; Gutenberg had built a bonfire in Mainz, and printers throughout Christendom flocked to kindle their torches from it.

Some grasp of the vernacular was sought by everyone who wished to raise himself in the world, but in most of Europe Latin was still the language of the elite—the Church, scholars, scientists, governments, and the courts.

It was still the language of international communication; if you wanted to address the European public and be universally understood, you had to use it. In countries whose languages were rarely learned by foreigners—Flemish, German, and, yes, English—Latin was the language of choice.

Yet in the long run native languages were destined to triumph. The victory was not altogether glorious. It meant that the dream of a unified Christendom, with a single Latin tongue, was doomed.

As the presses disgorged new printed matter, the yearning for literacy spread like a fever;

“That a relatively large number of people knew how to read, write and count,” conclude the authors of The New Cambridge Modern History, “was due to the casual and ill-organized efforts of thousands of humble individuals. Such were the uncertain foundations not only of the popularity of vernacular literature but also of technical advance and the diffusion of general knowledge.”

Scholars—most of whom were theologians—continued to be fluent in classical tongues, but in the new intellectual climate that was inadequate. Publishers could no longer assume that their customers would be fluent in Latin.

provincialism had been succeeded by an awareness of Europe as a comity of nations, and readers were curious about the work of foreign writers—so much so that translations became profitable.

Aldus Manutius, the great Italian printer and inventor of italic type (for an edition of Virgil), had been toiling for twenty years on the Aldine Press to produce a series of Greek classics.

By the end of the decade following Manutius’s accomplishment, humanism had begun to replace the old curricula, dominating both the new universities and the refurbished old.

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.

Yet if news was electrifying, it could pass from village to village and even across the Channel, borne word-of-mouth. That is what happened after Luther affixed his theses to the church door. Before the first week in November had ended, spontaneous demonstrations supporting or condemning him had erupted throughout Germany. Luther had done the unthinkable—he had flouted the ruler of the universe.

History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects, and is affected by, everything else. This is never clear in the present. Only time can sort out events. It is then, in perspective, that patterns emerge.

the exploration of lands beyond Europe—of which Magellan’s voyage was to be the culmination—opened the entire world, thus introducing the modern age.

One of Rome’s oldest arguments was that the Church’s teachings must be true because everyone believed in the divinity of Christ. That had been plausible in the Middle Ages, but now, as reports poured in from navigators, travelers, conquistadores, and even missionaries, Europeans realized that other religions flourished in newly discovered lands, and those who worshiped alien gods there appeared to be none the worse for it.

profit, not curiosity, was to be the prime motive behind the age of exploration.