A World Lit Only by Fire

by William Manchester

after a year in office he died, unmourned, having been, wrote Vettori, “a little and despised pope.”

It was actually dangerous; the Church didn’t want—didn’t permit—wide readership of the New Testament. Studying it was a privilege they had reserved for the hierarchy, which could then interpret passages to support the sophistry, and often the secular politics, of the Holy See.

After Jane Seymour’s death in childbirth, Parliament, bowing to Henry’s will, recognized all three of his children, conceived in various wombs, thus establishing the final order of Tudor succession: first Edward, son of Jane; then Mary, daughter of Catherine; and finally, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne. Crowned in 1558 at the age of twenty-five, Elizabeth I restored Protestantism, revived her father’s Act of Supremacy, and reigned over England for forty-five glorious years. In light of the tragic consequences of her parents’ sexual excesses, which had typified European nobility in their time—the promiscuity, the proliferation of bastards, the hasty coupling in palace antechambers—she was perhaps wise to live out her long life unaccompanied by a connubial consort, and to be remembered in history as the Virgin Queen.

The patterns of Magellan’s age are now clear. Its clarifying event was the shattering of the medieval world—medium aevum, as Renaissance humanists called it. That historic collapse was the legacy of countless events and influences, which combined to create the greatest European upheaval since the barbarians’ conquest of Rome. The religious revolution—which destroyed the Renaissance—was merely the most conspicuous thread in a very long rope. Others were the fall of Constantinople to Muhammad II in 1453, the humanists’ discovery of wisdom in the values of classical civilization, thereby dooming Scholasticism, a medieval attempt to fuse pagan learning and Christianity. As the Church relinquished its monopoly of education, renascent Europe became aware of a widening, unbridgeable gulf between reason and faith. The masses remained pious; the learned found serenity in rational thought.

Meantime the growth of commerce, particularly the prosperity of England and Germany, expanded the middle and merchant classes. These, growing in power and influence, became exasperated with the arrogant prelates even as the supernational authority of Roman pontiffs was being challenged by rising nation-states and strengthened monarchies. Secularism spread, fueled by the invention of printing, the growth of literacy, and the wider knowledge of the Scriptures in vernacular versions. All these forces raised doubts, discredited custom, bred skepticism, loosened standards, undermined the comfort and support of tradition, and, as Christendom decayed as a distinctive civilization, led to the emergence of modern Europe.

All this meant change, and was therefore resented by the medieval mind. It is perhaps significant that the science which showed the least progress in these years was geology. Because of its divine authorshi...

Finally, 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. The discoveries also undermined pontifical dogma on the character of the globe, introducing yet another threat to papal prestige. 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

During the long medieval night, Hellenic and Egyptian learning was preserved by Muslim scholars in the Middle East, where it was discovered by early Renaissance humanists.

Until the Tatar Peace of the mid-thirteenth century, no European had traveled east of Baghdad. The crusades and pilgrimages had provided some grasp of Palestine and Syria, but the Orient—“Cathay”—was considered magical, fantastic, and endowed with incredible wealth.

Rutters were copied by hand and translated under supervision, but those opening new trade routes never reached the hands of printers. They were too precious. Some were sold. Others were declared to be state secrets; divulging their contents was punishable by death, for a rival captain with a rutter in his cabin could exploit another’s dearly bought knowledge. Once a way had been found, dangers were minimal, but the perils of the original explorers can scarcely be exaggerated.

It is a remarkable fact that virtually all of them came from one corner of Europe. Portugal and Spain had contributed little to Western civilization before then. In the five centuries since then they have produced several brilliant artists; apart from that, their achievements have been less than awesome. But this, incontestably, was Iberia’s hour. Within thirty years—a single generation—a few hundred small ships weighing anchor in Lisbon, Palos, and Sanlúcar discovered more of the world than had all mankind in all the millennia since the beginning of time.

Because Arab traders had passed along fragments of Asian geography, Europeans had a general idea of the continent’s chief coastal features:

In his idle hours, spent on the docks, he talked to Asian pilots and navigators from as far away as Okinawa, asking about tides, winds, magnetic compass readings—the kind of information which, if they had kept records, would have been in their rutters. Through this method he became as well informed about the Indonesian archipelago as any European seaman.

Magellan encountered no rogues then—they would come later—but Seville was certainly chaotic, especially within the Casa de Contratación, the royal house of trade. It was there that merchants who were prepared to finance expeditions met captains eager to lead them, there that the two bargained under supervision of the king’s magistrates, and there that the Portuguese explorer headed. The hall was surrounded by taverns swarming with adventurers, pilots, and seasoned mariners, some of them men who had sailed with Columbus, Côrte-Real, or John and Sebastian Cabot, and all of them bearing maps and plans guaranteed to enrich their King Carlos, their sponsors, and, not incidentally, themselves.

As a Portuguese of noble blood with service in Africa, Asia, and the islands beyond, he had had access to Lisbon’s celebrated Tesouraria (Treasury). There, before defecting to Spain, he had pored over the rutters, logs, and sailing directions of fellow countrymen who had explored the Americas. Their accumulated knowledge was now his.

The fear of hell was probably a more effective check to savagery than the prospect of salvation. The point is moot; the certainty of one or the other possessed men from childhood, when they reached the age of awareness, sheathing them in a holy discipline.

Johannes Kepler was one of the great Renaissance astronomers. The discoverer of the three principles of planetary motion, he provided the bridge from the ancient view of the skies to modern astronomy. His first publication after his appointment (in 1601) as imperial mathematician to the Holy Roman emperor’s court in Prague was De fundamentis astrologiae certioribus (The More Certain Basics of Astrology), in which he rejected the established view that the lives of men are determined celestially. Yet his astrological forecasts were regarded with awe. He cast the personal horoscopes of Emperor Rudolf II. Even so, in a world ruled by superstition, men of science were always suspect. In his late forties, when he was at the peak of his powers, Kepler learned that his mother had been indicted as a witch. He hurried to her side, not sparing his horses, inspired partly by filial duty, no doubt, but also to save his own skin. Indictment was usually followed by torture and the stake. Had his skillful intervention not saved her, he himself would have been a candidate for disgrace, the loss of office, and possibly even a trial before the Inquisition.

The power of the medieval mind had been irrevocably broken. Its dogmatism, its infallibility, its absolute lack of ambiguity, were lost. It had already been deeply troubled. The Renaissance, nationalism, humanism, rising literacy, and the new horizons of trade—all these had challenged blind, ritualistic allegiance to the assumptions of a thousand years. But Europe was no longer the world, and the world was no longer the center of the universe. Since the earth was revolving daily, heaven and hell could not be located where they had been thought to be, and in rational minds there was a growing skepticism that either of them existed. Satan without hell was implausible. God without heaven was inconceivable, at least the medieval God was, but here reason ended. Christendom found the prospect of a godless world intolerable. Because faith in a higher power was needed, it would be necessary to find, or even to fabricate, another Creator, a new King of Kings and Lord of Lords—“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer” (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”), Voltaire would write in 1770.