VI

PESTIS

Part II

Christendom in Crisis, c. 1250–1493

USURY

EARLY in 1317 in Marseilles, a certain Bondavid de Draguignan was charged in court for continuing to demand payment after the capital of his loan to one Laurentius Girardi had already been repaid. Bondavid was a Jew and a moneylender, and was suspected of breaking the laws against usury. Here was one well-documented incident amongst countless others which reinforced the medieval stereotype of the Jew as a heartless swindler. Bondavid was a real precursor of the fictional Shylock, whom Shakespeare immortalized two centuries later in The Merchant of Venice.1

Usury—the taking of interest, or of excessive interest, on money lent— was regarded in Christian Europe as both a sin and a crime. Churchmen pointed to Christ’s teaching: ‘But love your enemies, and do good, and lend nothing hoping for nothing again … Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful’ (Luke 6:35–6). Repeated attempts were made to ban interest or, later, to limit it to 10 per cent per annum.

Jewish practice, in contrast, whilst forbidding usury between Jews, permitted a Jew to charge interest to a non-Jew: ‘unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend on interest’ (Deut. 23: 20). This distinction supposedly gave Jews an edge in the medieval money-markets, and loan business. It also gave rise to one of the sharpest points of antagonism between Christians and Jews, captured in Shylock’s provocative aside about his rival, Antonio:

I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice….
He hates our sacred nation; and he rails
Even there where merchants do most congregate,
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift
Which he calls interest. Cursed be my tribe
If I forgive him.

                     (The Merchant of Venice, 1. iii. 37–47)

In reality, the laws on usury were observed in the breach. Christian bankers could conceal high interest rates by not recording the sums borrowed, only the sums repaid.2 Jewish moneylenders probably drew the greatest opprobrium because they concentrated on petty loans with the populace at large. Hypocrisy, and a measure of animosity, were perhaps inevitable, and one of the essential techniques of capitalism was inhibited for centuries. Even so, the prominent role of Jews in European credit and banking is a fact of history.

The Peasants’ Revolt in England cannot be attributed to the desperate rage of paupers. The chronicler Froissart said that the common people who led it were living in ‘ease and riches’. Their demands for an end to servitude were made amidst improving material conditions. They harboured special grievances about a third poll-tax in four years; and they expressed a strong sense of moral protest, as befitted the era of the Lollards. Their fury was directed against the clergy as well as the gentry. Popular preachers, like the rebel priest John Ball, had been spreading egalitarian ideas: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?’

For a few days in June 1381, therefore, it looked as though the entire social hierarchy was under attack. Wat Tyler and his men poured into London from Kent. Jack Straw marched in from Essex. They burned the home of John of Gaunt at Savoy House. They burned Highbury Manor, and a Flemish brothel by London Bridge. They strung up the Archbishop, and beheaded a number of citizens. At Smithfield they came face to face with the young King and his entourage; and in a scuffle Wat Tyler was killed. After that, they turned into a rabble. The ringleaders were seized and executed. The rest dispersed, to be pursued at assizes through the shires. No one cared to boast of their achievements. Chaucer, who had been present, never raised the subject; nor did Shakespeare in his play Richard II. Not till the nineteenth century did the Revolt receive sympathetic consideration.22 [TABARD]

The Papal Schism, which lasted from 1378 to 1417, followed hard on the popes’ return from Avignon. There had been anti-popes before, of course; but the spectacle of two men, both elected by the same College of Cardinals and each preaching war and anathema against his rival, proved a grave scandal. The two original claimants, Urban VI and Clement VII, could hardly be described as holy men. The former turned out to be a deranged sadist who read his breviary in the Vatican garden whilst supervising the torture of his cardinals. The latter, Robert of Geneva, had once ordered the appalling bloodbath at Cesena. In 1409, when both the Urbanite and the Clementine parties declined to attend a council designed to reconcile them, the College elected a third. The Schism was not ended until the Council of Constance dismissed all three existing pontiffs and unanimously acclaimed Cardinal Odo Colonna as Martin V (1417–31) in their place.

The Council of Constance (1414–17) saw the culmination of the conciliar movement. Professors of the University of Paris had been calling for such an assembly for half a century. It was summoned by the German King, Sigismund of Luxemburg, and invitations were sent to all cardinals, bishops, abbots, princes, friars, teachers. Eighteen thousand clerics, fired with a mission of unity, converged on the tiny lakeside town. Among other things, they were supposed to limit papal power. They ended the Schism by confirming the election of Martin V as sole Pope. But they burned Jan Hus, on the grounds that an imperial safe conduct was not valid in the hands of a manifest heretic; and they did nothing to reform their own abuses. A further conciliar meeting, envisaged at Constance, finally met at Basle under the protection of the Duke of Savoy in 1431, and dragged on for years. But it fell into conflict with Pope Eugene IV, and ended by confirming the Duke himself as anti-pope. Ironically enough, the final outcome of the conciliar movement was to reinforce the conviction that the Church needed a strong Papacy.

TABARD

A STATUTE of Richard II in 1393 made it compulsory for every inn in England to display a sign. The result is a great open-air gallery of picturesque names and signboards.1

Medieval inns were often connected with pilgrimages. Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims started from the TABARD in Southwark. The TRYPPE TO JERUSALEM, which took its present name in 1189, is still extant in Nottingham. London’s inns were decimated by the Great Fire of 1666. The thirteenth-century HOOP AND GRAPES in Aldgate claims to be the oldest survivor.

Very many inn names denote the heraldic arms of their patron. Richard II’s arms bore the WHITE HART. The RISING SUN recalls Edward III; the BLUE BOAR, the House of York: the GREEN DRAGON, the Earl of Pembroke; the GREYHOUND, Henry VII. Many others were founded by crafts or guilds, hence the BLACKSMITHS’ ARMS or the WEAVERS’ ARMS. The BEETLE AND WEDGE or the MAN AND SCYTHE recall craftsmen’s tools. Connections with transport were legion. The PACK HORSE, the COACH AND HORSES, and the RAILWAY TAVERN reflect improving means of travel. The BLUE POSTSin St James’s, London SW1, marks an eighteenth-century system of litter stops. Sporting connections are also numerous. Some, like the HARE AND HOUNDS or the FALCON, refer to hunting, others, like the DOG AND DUCK, the FIGHTING COCKS, or the BULL, to cruel sports long since banned.

More modern inns have often been dedicated to popular heroes and to literary figures. These include everyone from LILY LANGTRY and LADY HAMILTON (WC2) to the ARTFUL DODGER, ELIZA DOOUTTLE, and, in Bromley, the BUNTER. Historical battles, such as TRAFALGAR, gave frequent inspiration, as did the ROYAL OAK, which hid Charles II in 1651. Less dramatic events find an echo in THE CARDINAL’S ERROR (the suppression of Tonbridge Priory in 1540), THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN (the discovery of Australia in 1683), or THE TORCH in Wembley (the Olympic Games of 1948).

Corrupted names abound. The CAT ‘N’ FIDDLE is reputedly a corruption of ‘Caton Ie Fidèle’, a knight who once held Calais for England, BAG O’NAILS comes from the Latin ‘Bacchanales’ or ‘drinkers’, the GOAT AND COMPASSES from a Puritan slogan, ‘God Encompasses Us’. Patriotic references were popular—hence the ALBION, the ANCIENT BRITON, the BRITANNIA, and the VICTORIA. The ANTIGALLICAN (SE1) was the name of a famous man-of-war of Napoleonic vintage.

But foreign countries are not neglected. The KING OF DENMARK (N1) recalls the visit of Christian IV in 1606. The HERO OF SWITZERLAND commemorates William Tell; the ANGERSTEIN honours the Baltic German who refounded Lloyd’s; and the INDEPENDENT (N1) the Hungarian leader Kossuth. The SPANISH PATRIOT in Lambeth was founded by veterans of the International Brigades of the 1930s, [ADELANTE]

None the less, an undecipherable residue remains. It is anybody’s guess what to make of the MAGPIE AND STUMP (Old Bailey), the WIG AND FIDGET in Boxted, or the GOAT IN BOOTS (NW1).

Italy evaded all foreign tutelage. In the fifteenth century Italy boiled with great prosperity, great turbulence, and immense cultural energy. It saw the zenith of the city-states, the city despots, the condottieri, and the early Renaissance (see Chapter VII). Unending municipal conflicts destroyed the oligarchic communes, giving the opening for local tyrants. Milan under twelve Viscontis (from 1277 to 1447) and five Sforzas (from 1450 to 1535) or Florence under Cosimo and Lorenzo dei Medici (from 1434 to 1494) saw no incompatibility between low politics and high art. Venice rose to the peak of its power and wealth, winning extensive possessions on the mainland, including Padua. Naples was cast into the outer darkness of civil strife. But Rome, in the hands of ambitious and cultured popes such as the Florentine Nicholas V (1447–55), re-emerged into the sunlight. Italy was free to enjoy its own strife and splendours until the reappearance of the French in 1494.

The ‘Hundred Years War’, whose conventional dates run from 1337 to 1453, was not a formal or continuous war between France and England. It is a historians’ label, first used in 1823, for a long period of troubles, ‘le temps des malheurs’, which were constantly used by the English as an occasion for raids, jaunts, and military expeditions. (It is sometimes called the Second Hundred Years War—in succession to the earlier Anglo-French conflict of 1152–1259.) It was, above all, an orgy of what later generations were to judge most despicable about ‘medievalism’—endless killings, witless superstition, faithless chivalry, and countless particular interests pursued without regard to the common weal. The scene is strewn with colourful figures. There were great knights such as the Breton Bertrand Duguesclin (c.1320–80), Constable of France, or his adversary Edward of Woodstock (1330–76), Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, ‘the Black Prince’. There were treacherous barons such as Charles le Mauvais of Navarre, rowdy adventurers such as Sir John Fastolf, and any number of unscrupulous prelates like Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who would formulate a theological justification of murder or an ecclesiastical show trial to order. Few emerge with much credit. Fittingly enough, the most influential personage of the war was Bishop Cauchon’s chief victim Jeanne d’Arc, a blameless peasant girl who had heard mystical voices, who rode to battle in full armour, and who was burned at the stake on false charges of heresy and witchcraft. By that time, in 1430, every memory of the origins of the troubles had been lost. Well might Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465), princely poet and 35 years an English prisoner, lament for his native land:

Paix est tresor qu’on ne peut trop loer
Je hé guerre, point ne la doy prisier;
Destourbe m’a long temps, soit tort ou droit,
De voir France que mon cœur amer doit.

(Peace is a treasure which cannot be praised too much. /I hate war: one should not hold it in high regard. /I have long been troubled, whether rightly or wrongly, / To see France, that my heart should love.)

France’s troubles were rooted partly in the dynastic problems of the House of Valois, partly in the waywardness of the great fiefs—notably Flanders, Brittany, Guyenne (Aquitaine), and Burgundy—and partly in the volatility of Paris. England’s interest lay in the Plantagenets’ continuing claims to the French throne; in their territorial possessions—notably in Guyenne; in commercial links with Flanders; and, above all, in the conviction of four or five generations of Englishmen that fame and fortune awaited them across the Channel. Potentially, France was always the stronger contestant; but English dominance at sea kept the island safe from all but France’s Scots allies; whilst the technical superiority of the English armies repeatedly postponed a clear decision. As a result, virtually all the fighting took place on French soil; and the English were free to keep on trying their luck and their manhood. Even in the 1450s, after a century of adventuring, it is doubtful whether the English would have stayed away if they had not been caught by a great civil war of their own.

Given the vast panorama, one should stress that six major royal expeditions from England, which start with Edward III’s landing at Antwerp in July 1338, and end with the death of Henry V at Vincennes in August 1422, are somehow less typical than the smaller but more frequent provincial campaigns, and the rovings of independent war parties. The glorious English victories in the set battles at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), or Agincourt (1415), though sensational, were less illustrative of the whole than the interminable skirmishes and castle-storming of the lesser actions. And they must be set against the shameful massacre of the citizens of Limoges by the Black Prince in 1370, or the wanton chevauchée from Calais to Bordeaux by his brother John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in 1373. They were certainly less decisive than the naval battle off L’Écluse (Sluys), where 20,000 Frenchmen perished in 1340. The short-lived royal armies probably caused less devastation than the freelance war parties, the Grandes Compagnies of the nobles, or the murderous banditry of the routiers and écorcheurs. The major diplomatic events, such as the Peace of Brétigny (1360) or the Congress of Arras (1435), were no more productive than the innumerable minor pacts and broken truces.

The miseries of France form an essential backdrop to the main military and diplomatic events. The plague of 1347–9, which forced the third truce, was an important factor. So, too, were the jacquerie of 1358; the exploits of Étienne Marcel, draper of Paris, who took control of the Estates-General; the revolt in 1382 of the maillotins, who literally hammered the king’s tax-collectors to death; the butchers’ mob of Jean Caboche, or the warring factions of the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. Ferocious murders were commonplace: Marcel, who had murdered the royal marshals in their master’s presence in the Louvre, was himself murdered. Louis d’Orléans, founder of the Armagnacs, was murdered in 1407, as was the Constable of Armagnac and their chief rival, the ex-crusader Jean Sans Peur of Burgundy, on the bridge at Montereau. The unhappy house of Valois sat uneasily on the throne. With the exception of Charles V le Sage (r. 1364–80), a capable despot, they knew little repose. Jean le Bon (r. 1350–64), captured at Poitiers, died in English captivity. Charles VI (r. 1380–1422) passed thirty years in insanity. Charles VII (r. 1422–61), after years as Dauphin and as the hapless ‘King of Bourges’, survived decades in the shadow of Armagnacs and Burgundians before emerging as ‘the Well-Served’ at the head of France’s resurgent administration, [CHASSE]

The crux of the conflict was reached in the 1420s, a decade which started with the English rampant and ended with the French resurgent. After Agincourt, the young Henry V was busy organizing a new Anglo-French kingdom. By the Treaty of Troyes (1420) he controlled virtually all of France north of the Loire; and as son-in-law of the French King he was formally recognized as heir apparent to the Valois. After his sudden death at Vincennes his infant son, Henry VI, was proclaimed King under the regency of John, Duke of Bedford. Paris remained in Anglo-Burgundian hands from 1418 to 1436, with an English garrison in the Bastille. In 1428 Bedford laid siege to Orléans, the last royal-Armagnac stronghold in the north, and Valois fortunes were depressed to the point of despair. Yet no one had reckoned with that peasant girl, Jeanne d’Arc, la Pucelle, the maiden cavalier, who shamed the hesitant Dauphin into action. On 8 May 1429 she charged across the bridge and broke the Siege of Orléans. She then led her reluctant monarch across Anglo-Burgundian territory to his coronation at Reims. By the time of her death in 1431, tied to an English stake in the market square at Rouen, the English tide was ebbing fast, [RENTES]

Thereafter, the tempo of the conflict gradually declined. Once the Congress of Arras in 1435 had weaned Burgundy from the English alliance, it was unlikely that England’s fortunes would revive. The Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie of 1439 at last gave the French kingdom a powerful standing army of cavalry and archers. The suppression of the Praguerie revolt ended Armagnac and aristocratic resistance. The last actions took place in 1449–53. When the Earl of Shrewsbury was defeated by artillery fire at Castillon in July 1453, and the gates of Bordeaux thrown open to French rule, Calais alone remained in English hands. In 1475, in a sort of coda, an English army landed in France expecting the support of the Burgundians; but it was bought off for a pension of 50,000 crowns per annum, 75,000 crowns down payment, and the promise of the Dauphin’s marriage to Edward IV’s daughter.

CHASSE

LE LIVRE DE LA CHASSE (The Book of Hunting) by Gaston Phœbus, or, to give its full title, Les Deduits de la chasse des bestes sauvages et des oiseaulx de proye (1381), is a remarkable social document, which inspired some of the finest illuminated manuscripts ever produced. It is best known in the version of MS 616 Français in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Its author, Gaston III, called Phébus, Count of Foix and Seigneur of Béarn (1331–91), was a colourful adventurer from Gascony, who had fought for the French at Crécy and for the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, and who had frequently entertained the chronicler Froissart in his Pyrenean castle at Orthez. It surveys all the species of game and the methods of hunting them: wolf, stag, bear, boar, and badger; bloodhound, greyhound, mastiff, and spaniel: stalking, coursing, trapping, netting, shooting, snaring, even poaching; every step from the scent to the mort is expertly described and illustrated.1 (See Plate 30.)

In the fourteenth century, hunting was still an integral part of the European economy. Game provided an essential supplement to the diet, especially in winter. The weapons of hunting—bow, sword, and pike—the horsemanship, and the psychology of the chase and the kill together formed an essential element of military accomplishment. Forest reserves, protected by fierce laws, provided an important item in royal and noble privilege.

In the East, where both the forests and game were larger, and agriculture more precarious, the art of hunting was still more important. The historian, Marcin Kromer, writing in 1577, described a bison hunt in Podolia on the Dniester in terms very reminiscent of a Spanish corrida:

Meanwhile, one of the hunters, assisted by powerful hounds, approaches, and draws the bison round and round the tree, playing it and teasing it until it drops from its wounds or just from sheer exhaustion. Should the hunter … be threatened by danger, his colleagues distract the bison by waving large red capes, since red is a colour which drives it to a fury. Thus tormented, the bison releases the first man, and attacks the next one who is then able to finish it off.2

The development of firearms, and of agricultural production, gradually transformed the techniques and the social role of hunting. In England, for example, where the last wolf was killed in the eighteenth century, hunting had to centre on the fox, the arch-enemy of farmers. The ancient ritual, with the ‘hunting pink’, the horns, and the howls of ‘Tally-ho’, were preserved. But the original utility was lost. In 1893 Oscar Wilde could gaily portray the English country gentleman galloping after a fox as ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’.3 Hunting and shooting had been reduced to a form of recreation. In the eyes of anti-blood sport fundamentalists, even angling would be added to the list of cruel barbaric survivals.4 [KONOPIŠTE]

In Eastern Europe, hunting retained its social cachet somewhat longer. It was adopted as a status symbol by the top communist dignitaries. For them, as for Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering in the 1930s, shooting bison was the ultimate prize, the ultimate parody of feudal aristocracy.

For France, the Hundred Years War was a sobering experience. The population had fallen by perhaps 50 per cent. National regeneration began from the lowest possible point. Under Louis XI (r. 1461–83), the ‘universal spider’ and master of diplomacy, it proceeded apace, notably by his removal of the Burgundian menace.

For England, the era of the Hundred Years War was crucial in the formation of a national community. At the outset, Plantagenet England was a dynastic realm which in cultural as well as political terms was little more than an outpost of French civilization. By the end, shorn of its Continental possessions, Lancastrian England was an island kingdom, secure in its separateness, confident in its newfound Englishness. The Anglo-Norman establishment had been thoroughly anglicized. With Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340–1400) English literature began its long career. Under Richard II (r. 1377–99) and the three Lancastrians—Henry IV (r. 1399–1413), Henry V (r. 1413–22), and Henry VI (r. 1422–61)—the wars in France provided a safety valve for energies left over from the violent struggles of monarchy and barons. Richard II was forced to abdicate, and later murdered at Pontefract. Henry IV, the usurper son of John of Gaunt, seized the throne with the aid of a false genealogy. Henry V was cut short in his endeavour to conquer France. Henry VI, another infant king, was eventually deposed. But underneath the blood-soaked surface of the political stage a firm sense of patriotism and national pride was building. No doubt it was anachronistic for William Shakespeare, writing 200 years later, to put England’s finest patriotic eulogy into the mouth of John of Gaunt, who spent so much time and energy fighting over the spoils of France. But he was expressing a sentiment that grew from the conflicts of that earlier age:

This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,

RENTES

CLIOMETRICS—the science of quantitative history—came into its own through computers. Previously, historians were often deterred by the immensity of surviving data and by the inadequate means for exploring them. Statistical samples were small; time-runs were short; and conclusions were tentative. The arrival of historical number-crunching removed many such inhibitions.

The ‘Section Six’ of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, founded in 1947, was among the pioneers. One of their projects sought to establish the growth of Parisian ground-rents from the late Middle Ages to the Revolution.1 The first stage, using 23,000 sets of institutional and private records, was to calculate average annual rents in livres tournois. The second stage, to compensate for currency deflation, was to convert the monetary figures into a series representing real purchasing power. This was done by relating the rents to mean, three-year cycles of wheat prices, expressed in setiers or ‘hectolitres’ of wheat. The third stage was to plot the deflated ‘rent-curve’ against sample soundings from a second, independent source—in this case, from the records of the Minutier Central or ‘Main Notaries’ Register’, which was available from 1550. The resultant concordance was close (see Appendix III, p. 1263):

	A verage rents by calculation			Rents from the Minutier Central
		Livres	Setiers		Livres	Setiers
	1549–51	64.24	16.77	1550	63.72	16.64
	1603–5	168.39	17.81	1604	229.00	24.23
	1696–8	481.96	23.41	1697	531.00	25.79
	1732–4	835.55	55.70	1734	818.35	54.55
	1786–8	1281.04	58.63	1788	1697.65	77.69

The Paris ‘rent-curve’ reflects both political events and economic trends. The low points, when rents were depressed, occurred, predictably enough, during the ‘Joan of Arc Depression’ of 1420–3, the ‘St Bartélémy Basin’ of 1564–75, the ‘Slump of the Siege’ in 1591–3, and the ‘Vale of the Fronde’ in 1650–6. The periods of recovery tended to be much longer—in the ‘Renaissance’ of 1445–1500, in the decades of the Price Revolution after 1500, when the rise in ‘real rents’ lagged far behind the whirlwind ascent of nominal rents, in the era of Louis XIV’s stability up to 1690, and on the steady upward slope of the mid-eighteenth century. According to the computer calculations, the highest peaks were reached in 1759–61 (69.78 setiers) and in 1777–82 (65.26 setiers). According to the Minutier, they were reached in 1788 (77.69 setiers).

The ultimate value of this data is open to question. The rent curve offers no insight into many key factors which affected the Paris housing market, let alone the French economy in general. It says nothing about the pressure of population, the size and quality of tenements, or the construction of new dwellings. Yet for the pre-modern age, where historians can only dream of a full range of statistics about prices, wages, costs, and incomes, it provides one modest index against which different sources of information can be gauged. Above all, it illustrates the hopes of economic structuralists, who put their faith in establishing the conjoncture, the overall pattern of underlying trends. In their view, the conjoncture is the foundation on to which all other historical facts are to be fitted.

This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
… This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.24

It was in France that the English performed those exploits which cemented the spirit of their common patriotism. Where but before Harfleur, on the eve of Agincourt, could Shakespeare have set the speech which ever since has called on the ‘noblest English’ to hold the breach?

Within England’s island kingdom, the Welsh formed the only community which could not be fully assimilated. In 1400–14, at the height of the French Wars, they staged a promising rebellion with links to the King’s other enemies in Northumbria, Ireland, Scotland, and France. Under Owain ap Gruffydd, Lord of Glyndyvrdwy (c.1359–1416), who was known to the English as ‘Owen Glendower’, they revived the vision of a liberated Wales, and briefly reconstituted an independent principality. In 1404–5 a sovereign Welsh parliament was summoned to Machynlleth. Within a decade, however, the enterprise was crumbling. Its fate was sealed by the English victory at Agincourt. After that, the royal castles in Wales were gradually recovered, and Glendower’s son was forced to submit. Henceforth, though culturally and linguistically impervious, Wales was to form an integral part of the English realm.

From 1450 onwards England was laid low by a fratricidal war reminiscent of that between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. An insane king and a disputed succession set the Lancastrians and the Yorkists at each other’s throats. The Wars of the Roses did not leave England free to benefit from its growing prosperity until the rivalries of the three contenders—Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII—had been buried by the victorious Tudors.

Again, it was out of place for Shakespeare to describe how ‘The Blood of England shall manure the ground … the field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls’. In reality, if recent research is to be believed, the fighting was rather gende-manly.25 Except at Tewkesbury in 1471, prisoners were not generally slaughtered. Much of the action took place on the Celtic fringe: at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, and in Wales—at Denbigh, Harlech, Carreg Cennen, and at Pembroke, the birthplace of Henry Tudor, who eventually triumphed. The scene at Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485—with the despairing hunchback, Richard III, crying ‘My kingdom for a horse’, as his discarded crown hung on a thorn bush—has become a cliché. But it gave a fitting end to English medieval history.

One of the by-products of the Hundred Years War was the rise of Burgundy as a quasi-independent state of great brilliance. The eclipse both of France and of the Empire created the opening for a ‘middle kingdom’, which played a powerful role in European politics but which, lacking in cohesion, was extinguished as rapidly as it had flared. Though royal status evaded the four great Valois dukes of Burgundy—Philippe le Hardi (1342–1404), Jean sans Peur (1371–1419), Philippe le Bon (1396–1467), and Charles le Téméraire (1433–77)—their wealth and prestige exceeded that of many kings. Their initial holding, the ancient Duchy of Burgundy round Dijon, was granted to Philippe le Hardi by his royal French father in 1361. From then on, it was steadily expanded by the acquisition of numerous territories on either side of the Franco-imperial border (see Appendix III, p. 1281). Philippe remained essentially one of the French ‘princes of the lilies’, together with his brothers, the Duke of Berry and the Duke of Anjou. But thanks to their English alliance his son and grandson were able to free themselves from their family ties. Philippe’s great-grandson, Charles the Rash, overstretched himself in a bid to outsmart his neighbours. Their wealth derived largely from the flourishing northern cities—Bruges, Arras, Ypres, Ghent, and Antwerp. Their court was still itinerant, but apart from the Hôtel d’Artois in Paris and the ducal palace in Dijon, they maintained important residences at Lille, at the Prinsenhof in Bruges, at the Coudenberg in Brussels, and at the castle of Hesdin in Artois (see Appendix III, p. 1260).

The Burgundian court was the focus of an extravagant cult of chivalry, manifest in the ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Fleece and the enthusiastic sponsorship of crusading. Tournaments, jousting, banquets, spectacles, processions of all sorts were the rage. The dukes were lavish patrons of the arts—of sculptors such as Claus Sluter, of artists such as Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, of poets, musicians, romanciers, and of the famous tapissiers. They bedecked themselves and their courtiers in cloth-of-gold, ermine, jewels—all designed to impress and astonish. They were masters of diplomacy and, above all, of diplomatic marriage. Philippe le Bon once offered refuge to his cousin, the future Louis XI, only to watch the one-time refugee turn bitter adversary. Duke Charles was gradually caught up in Louis’s political web, defeated by Louis’s Swiss allies at Morat, and killed fighting the Lorrainers at Nancy. The Burgunderbeute or ‘Booty of Burgundy’ fills Swiss museums to the present day.26 [CODPIECE]

Charles’s death in 1477 precipitated Burgundy’s downfall and partition. Louis XI recovered the original duchy; but the lion’s share fell to Mary, Charles’s daughter, and thence to her husband, Maximilian von Habsburg. Their part of the Burgundian legacy—Flanders, Brabant, Zeeland, Holland, and Guelders—formed the basis of the future Netherlands, and the fortune of their grandson, Charles V, ‘the last of the Burgundians’. Nothing remained of the Burgundian state; not even the magnificent ducal mausoleum at the charterhouse of Champmol, near Dijon, has survived.27

CODPIECE

AFTER their victory at Morat in 1476, the Swiss soldiery plundered the Burgundian camp, captured large chests of elegant clothes, cut them to pieces, and held a mock parade in the tattered garments of their foe. This incident has been taken not only to explain the source of the fashionable ‘slashed doublet’ of the sixteenth century, but to illustrate the military origins of medieval male fashion in general.1

At that time two other items of male garb were in evidence, both with explicitly erotic overtones. The poulaine or cornadu, the ‘horned shoe’, was literally on its last legs. Invented to facilitate standing in stirrups, its upturned point was later thought to demonstrate the prowess of members other than toes. The braguette or ‘codpiece’ was on its way in. Invented, according to Rabelais, to protect the genitals in battle, it was more likely devised to facilitate the armoured knight’s call to nature. It has also been said to have protected the wearer’s clothes from staining by greasy, anti-syphilitic ointments. None of which explains why it had to be flaunted in so exhibitionist a fashion for more than a hundred years. In As You Like It, Shakespeare wrote of Hercules, whose codpiece was ‘as massive as his club’.

Until recently many intimate garments, especially of underwear, were classed as ‘unmentionables’. Polite historians ignored them. Nowadays they are the subject of learned dissertations and of lurid exhibitions.2

Many years later, a monk showed the skull of Jean sans Peur to Francis I, King of France, and reportedly said, ‘There is the hole through which the English made their way into France.’ One could equally point to the brainless ambitions of Charles the Rash: there was the gap that brought the Habsburgs into western Europe.

For the time being, however, the Habsburgs were still on the make. Though they held the imperial title in Germany without interruption from 1438—Frederick III von Habsburg (1440–93) being the last emperor crowned in Rome—they still had not outgrown their rivals. Indeed, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was nothing to set them above the other mighty dynasties of the region. In the end, it was only by accident that the Habsburgs succeeded where the Jagiellons failed.

For two centuries the rumbustious nobles of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, who held the right of confirming the royal succession in their kingdoms, danced an elaborate gavotte with the representatives of four great central European dynasties. They resembled nothing so much as the shareholders of old-established companies who seek an association with one or more of the stronger multinational conglomerates. In this, whilst assuring a measure of continuing control over their own affairs, they supposedly obtained both experienced management and effective protection from takeovers and mergers. In all three countries, the opening was created by the extinction of the native ruling house. The Árpád line died out in Hungary in 1301, the Přemyslids in Bohemia in 1306, and the Polish Piasts in 1370. (See Appendix III, p. 1261.)

As a result, east-central Europe passed into a long period of shifting dynastic consortia involving the Habsburgs, the Luxemburgers, the Angevins, and the Jagiellons. At first it seemed that the Luxemburgers would get the upper hand. They held the Empire in 1308–13 and 1347–1437, Bohemia 1310–1437, and Hungary 1387–1437. In the mid-fifteenth century the Habsburgs amassed a similar conglomeration, only to see both Bohemia and Hungary pass back to native rulers. By 1490 the Jagiellons controlled Poland-Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary, but not the Empire. Imperial or national histories of the period, written without reference to these wider connections, lack an essential ingredient.

Bohemia was a special prize after its kings became hereditary Electors of the Empire. In their final phase, the Přemyslids had taken hold of Austria-Styria-Carinthia, only to lose them to the Habsburgs at the batde of Dürnkrut in 1278. Later, Vaclav II (r. 1278–1305) obtained the crowns of both Poland and Hungary. After the Přemyslids’ demise, Bohemia saw periods of Luxemburg, Habsburg, and Jagiellonian rule. In the fifteenth century, the Bohemian crown was embroiled in extended wars both with the nobles and with the Hussites. The last native King, Jiří z Poděbrad (George of Podiebrady, r. 1458–71), gave his country two decades of fragile independence.

The Hussites, who founded a national Czech Church, survived repeated attempts to suppress them. They appeared at a juncture when the Papal Schism was at its height and when Bohemia was rent by conflicts between Czechs and Germans, between kings and nobles, between the clergy and the Pope, between the University and the Archbishop of Prague. Their demands soon exceeded the theological and political propositions advanced by Hus. They were so infuriated by the news of his death, and by the excommunications hurled at the whole Czech people by the Council of Constance, that they launched what in effect was a national rising and ‘the first Reformation’. They were divided into two main groups: the Utraquists, who took over the established Church from its largely German, Catholic hierarchy, and the radical Taborites, who founded separate evangelical communities centred on their fortified camp or ‘Tábor’.

Matters came to a head in Prague on 30 July 1419. A Hussite procession was stoned in the New Town, and the German burgomaster was thrown to the crowd from the window of his Rathaus. The Pope responded by announcing a general crusade against the heretics. Thereupon the Utraquists, who held that the bread and wine of the Communion should be dispensed sub utraque specie, ‘in both kinds’, promptly formalized their doctrine in the Articles of Prague (1420), whilst the Taborites took to the field under their marvellous one-eyed captain, Jan Žižka z Torncova (1376–1424). Year after year, huge invading armies of German crusaders were heavily defeated. The Hussites, who carried the struggle into Saxony, into Silesia, and into Hungary, suffered most from their own internal divisions. In 1434 a crushing Utraquist victory over the Taborites at Lipany enabled the victors to make their peace with the Catholic Church. Through the Compacts of Basle, they were able to keep an Utraquist church order in Bohemia until 1620. In the subsequent political settlement the Czech nobles attempted to run their own affairs by choosing a Habsburg infant to succeed the Luxemburgers and, twenty years later, by choosing the forceful Utraquist general, Jiří z Poděbrad. After Jiří’s death, the Diet settled for Vladislav Jagiellon (r. 1471–90) to save them from the Hungarians and the Habsburgs.

Hungarian history followed a similar pattern to that of Bohemia. In this case, after a brief interval under the Bavarian Wittelsbachs, Hungary was taken over by the Angevins of Naples. Charles Robert or Carobert (r. 1310–42) and Louis (r. 1342–82), known as Lajos the Great, established a powerful supremacy, only to yield to the Luxemburgers and the Habsburgs. The last prominent native king, Matthias Corvinus, ruled from 1458 to 1490. The first Jagiellon to be invited to rule Hungary, Ladislas of Varna (r. 1440–4), was killed fighting the Turks. The third, Louis II (r. 1516–26), died in the same way at Mohács.

Poland was heading for a grander and more independent destiny. After 182 years of feudal fragmentation, it was reunited as a viable kingdom by Władysław Łokietek (r. 1320–33) who, having visited Rome for the Jubilee, obtained a papal crown. Łokietek’s son Casimir the Great (r. 1333–70), the last of the royal Piasts, established an efficient administration, a code of laws, and a coherent foreign policy. By resigning Poland’s western provinces, notably Silesia, to the Luxemburgs, he freed himself for expansion to the East. His acquisition of Galicia and the city of Lwów in 1349 was Poland’s first major step into the east Slav lands. His reception of Jewish refugees from Germany in that same year laid the foundation of Europe’s largest Jewish community. The reign of Louis of Anjou was marked by the Statute of Koýice (1374) which gave the Polish nobles similar rights to their brothers in Hungary. Henceforth the power of the Szlachta grew inexorably. Most momentous, however, was the marriage of Louis’s daughter Jadwiga, already accepted as rex in Poland, to Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, [SZLACHTA]

The union of Poland and Lithuania had wide international implications. By bringing together two large countries, both in a dynamic stage of development, it fuelled a powerful fusion, almost a new civilization. Its immediate rationale derived from the menace of the Teutonic Knights, whose activities were deplored no less in Cracow than in Vilnius. But much more was involved. Poland, which had recovered from the Mongol invasions and escaped the Black Death, was looking eagerly to the open spaces of the East. Lithuania, still ruled by a pagan élite and anxious about the rise of neighbouring Moscow, was looking for an entrée into the mainstream of Christendom. Both were looking for mutual support. Here was a marriage, therefore, that far transcended the two persons most directly involved. Jadwiga, a twelve-year-old fatherless girl, bowed to her duty. Jogaila, a forty-year-old warrior-bachelor, whom the Poles called Jagiełło, sensed a historic opportunity, which he could not refuse.

Lithuania’s baptism followed decades of vacillation between the Latin and the Orthodox options. Jogaila’s father, Grand Duke Algirdas (r. 1341–77), had pursued a policy of ‘dynamic balance’. Throughout his reign, he teased both Avignon and Constantinople with the prospects of a conversion. In the 1370s it looked as though he would take the Orthodox path in order to supplant Moscow as leader of the Orthodox Slavs. In 1375 he persuaded the Patriarch of Constantinople to create a separate metropolitan of ‘Kiev, Rus’ and Lithuania’, in opposition to the older metropolitanate of ‘Kiev and all Rus’’, now controlled by Moscow. Jogaila, too, had leaned towards the Eastern option. In 1382 he was pushed towards Moscow, when his disaffected brother began to consort with the Teutonic Knights. As late as 1384 a provisional treaty was concluded by Jogaila’s Christian mother, Juliana of Tver, whereby Jogaila was to be betrothed to a Muscovite princess and Lithuania to Orthodoxy. The plans were probably ruined by the Tartars, who razed Moscow and destroyed the value of a Muscovite alliance. So, when the die was cast in favour of union with Catholic Poland, it was cast very suddenly. Jogaila reached agreement with the Polish and Hungarian-Angevin envoys at Kreva in August 1385. On 15 February 1386 he was baptized in Cracow, receiving the Christian name of Władysław. Three days later he was married to Jadwiga. On 4 March he was crowned co-king of Poland.28 (See Appendix III, p. 1262.)

Oddly enough, when the sacred oaks were felled in Vilnius in 1387, it was not the last Christian conversion in Europe. At the time, the district of Samogitia or ‘Lower Lithuania’ was occupied by the Teutonic Knights, who did not care to take the same step. So the district did not receive its baptism until recovered by the Lithuanians in 1417.29 Eleven centuries after Constantine, the long career of pagan Europe reached its term.

The Jagiellons quickly established themselves as a major force. Their future was assured once the Teutonic Knights were routed at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410. With one branch of the family ruling in Vilnius and the other in Cracow, the Jagiellons ruled the largest realm in Christendom. Though Roman Catholicism was the dominant cultural force, and Polish increasingly the language of the ruling nobility, they presided over a multinational community where Polish, Ruthenian, and Jewish interests were all strongly represented. (Lithuanian culture receded into the peasant mass of the north-east.) Jogaila’s son Ladislas/Władysław IV (d. 1444) reigned in Hungary as well as Poland, dying on crusade at distant Varna. His grandson Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (r. 1445–92), who was married to a Habsburg, was known as the ‘grandfather of Europe’. Indeed, when Kazimierz died in 1492, his heirs looked set to inherit the earth. Fate intervened in the form of the Turk. When Louis Jagiellończyk, King of Bohemia and Hungary, perished heirless on the field of Mohacs in 1526, his possessions reverted to the Habsburgs. And it was the Habsburgs who inherited central Europe. Even so, the Jagiellons had given rise to a civilization that long outlasted their eclipse, [MICROBE]

MICROBE

CASIMIR Jagiellorńczyk, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, was buried in the Holy Cross Chapel of Wawel Cathedral in Cracow in July 1492. In May 1973, 481 years later, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyła, gave permission to a team of conservationists to reopen the tomb, together with that of Casimir’s queen, Elizabeth of Austria. The occasion was not unique: the tomb of Casimir the Great (d. 1370) had been reopened in 1869, and the reburial gave occasion for a great Polish patriotic demonstration. The tomb of St Jadwiga (d. 1399) had been reopened in 1949.

Yet the exhumation of 1973 was, in all senses, disturbing. Within a short period of time, no fewer than sixteen persons directly involved had died of uncertain causes. The world’s press remembered the ‘Curse of the Pharaohs’ and speculated about 500-year-old bacilli. A Cracow journalist wrote a best-selling book on Curses, Micobes and Scholars which, in the best medieval fashion, reverted its readers’ attention to the topic of human mortality.1

In late medieval Scandinavia, the three monarchies were overshadowed by the separate interests of a stormy nobility and by the commercial activities of the Hansa. The Viking communities had abandoned their sea-raiding by the thirteenth century, and had settled down to exploit the agriculture of the lowlands, the timber and iron mines, and the rich fishing grounds such as the famous herring-beds off Scania. The Hansa network based at Lübeck and at Visby linked Scandinavia both with Western Europe and with Russia.

In 1397 the remarkable Queen Margaret (1353–1412), who reigned in Denmark by inheritance, in Norway by marriage, and in Sweden by election, succeeded in forging a limited union of the three countries. But this Union of Kalmar was an agglomerate, not a compound; and it was due to disintegrate into its national components. In the favourite saying of Queen Margaret’s father, Waldemar IV Atterdag, ‘Tomorrow is another day.’

Medieval civilization is frequently called ‘theocratic’—that is, it was governed by the all-pervasive concept of the Christian God. God’s will was sufficient to explain all phenomena. The service of God was seen as the sole legitimate purpose of all human enterprise. The contemplation of God was the highest form of intellectual or creative endeavour.

It is important to realize, therefore, that much modern knowledge about the Middle Ages has been coloured by the religious perspective of the churchmen who provided the information and wrote the chronicles. To some degree, modern observers may well have been misled ‘into supposing that mediaeval civilisation was more intrinsically Christian than was probably the case’.30 Even so, the central position of Christian belief can hardly be denied. On this point the growing schism between Latin and Orthodox Christianity made little difference. If the West was largely theocratic in outlook, the East was almost completely so. Indeed, the Orthodox world avoided most of the new influences which, from the fourteenth century onwards, made some of the broad generalizations less tenable (see Chapter VII).

There is a distinction to be made, however, between the ‘high culture’ of the educated élite and the ‘low culture’ of ordinary people. Recent scholars have contrasted ‘clerical culture’ with the ‘folklore tradition’. Since the educated minority was made up either of clerics or of clerics’ pupils, the formal culture of literate circles could be expected to adhere fairly closely to conventional religious teaching. By the same token, since large sectors of the population were illiterate, including untutored women and the unlettered aristocracy, it would not be surprising to find pagan survivals, heretical opinions, or decidedly irreligious viewpoints among them. Traditional medieval scholarship was largely confined to the sphere of high culture. Popular culture is one of the subjects of the ‘new Middle Ages’, as presented by the latest generation of medievalists.

Imagining the Middle Ages is, indeed, the problem. Historians have to stress not just what the medieval scene contained but also what it lacked. In its physical surroundings, it lacked many of the sights, sounds, and smells that have since become commonplace. There were no factory chimneys, no background traffic noise, no artificial pollutants or deodorants. Tiny isolated settlements existed in an overpowering wilderness of forest and heath, in a stillness where a church bell or the lowing of a cow could carry for miles, amidst a collection of natural but pungent whiffs from the midden and the wood fire. People’s perception of those surroundings lacked any strong sense of discrimination between what later times would call the natural and the supernatural, between fact and fiction, between the present and the past. Men and women had few means of verifying the messages of their senses, so all sorts of sensations were given similar credence. Angels, devils, and sprites were as real as one’s neighbours. The heroes of yesteryear, or of the Bible, were just as present (or as distant) as the kings and queens of one’s own country. Nothing was more fitting, or more obvious, than Dante’s story of a living man who could walk through heaven and hell, and who could meet the shades of people from all ages—undecayed, undifferentiated, undivided.

The medieval awareness of time and space was radically different from our own. Time was measured by the irregular motions of day and night, of the seasons, of sowing and reaping. Fixed hours and calendars were in the sacred preserve of the Church. Men travelled so slowly that they possessed no means of testing conventional geographical wisdom. Jerusalem lay at the centre of the three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe, allocated respectively to the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Beyond the continents lay the encompassing ocean, and beyond the ocean the line where heaven and earth merged imperceptibly into one. [TEMPUS]

Medieval interest in the human body was as minimal as the understanding of it. The internal organs were not clearly differentiated, let alone the interdependent workings of the nervous, skeletal, circulatory, digestive, and reproductive systems. Instead, the body was thought to be composed of a marvellous combination of the four elements, the four humours, and the four complexions. Earth, fire, air, and water were matched with black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm, and permed against Man’s melancholic, choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic temperaments. Specialist knowledge grew very slowly. The early fourteenth century saw doctors practising post mortem dissection, and a corresponding improvement in textbooks, notably in the Anatomia of Mondini di Luzzi (1316) and of Guido da Vigevano (1345). Surgery benefited from new textbooks such as theChirurgica Magnaby Guy de Chauliac (1363). After the experience of the Black Death, quarantine against plague ships was instituted, first at Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in 1377, then at Marseilles in 1383.

Above all, it has been suggested that medieval people lived in a psychological environment of fear and insecurity that inhibited bold and independent thought. Exposure to the forces of nature, incessant warfare, widespread banditry, raids by Vikings, nomads, and infidels, plague, famine, and anarchy—all contributed to the conviction that man was feeble and God was great. Only in the asylum of a monastery could a forceful mind follow its own genius.

Medieval philosophy, therefore, remained essentially a branch of theology. The central task was to accommodate Aristotelian ideas with religious dogma, and more generally to reconcile reason with faith. The greatest of medieval philosophers, the Dominican St Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74), achieved this by saying that human reason was divinely appointed, that faith was rational, and that, properly interpreted, the two could not be contradictory. Related problems were elaborated by three Franciscans, all from Britain: Roger Bacon (1214–92), John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), and William of Ockham (c.1285–1349). Bacon, the doctor mirabilis, spent fourteen years in prison for his ‘suspect novelties’. Duns Scotus, after whom, somewhat quaintly, the English language obtained the word ‘Dunce’, dissented from Aquinas, arguing that reason could only be applied to the realm of what was immediately perceptible. He was champion of the Immaculate Conception. Ockham, the venerabilis inceptor, excommunicated for his pains, was the leader of the so-called Nominalists. His demolition of the reigning Platonic notion of universals—abstract essences that were thought to exist independently of particular objects—undermined the philosophical foundations of many inflexible medieval conventions, including the social orders. ‘Ockham’s Razor’—the principle that facts should be interpreted with a minimum of explanatory causes—proved a powerful instrument for logical thinking. His complete separation of reason from faith opened the way for scientific and secular investigations. His watchword was Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (entities should not be unnecessarily multiplied). When he was presented to the German Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, he was supposed to have said, ‘If you will defend me with the sword, Sire, I shall defend you with the pen.’

TEMPUS

GIOVANNI DA DONDI (1318–89), Professor of Astronomy at Padua, was by no means the first clockmaker. Dante mentions a clock in his Paradiso; and there are records of clocks in London’s St Paul’s in 1286 and in Milan in 1309. But Dondi’s treatise // Tractus Astarii (1364) provides the earliest detailed description of clockwork. It presented a seven-dialled astronomical clock, regulated by an escapement of the crown-wheel-and-verge type. (It has inspired several modern replicas, one of which is displayed in the Science Museum, Kensington, another in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington.) (See Appendix III, p. 1250.)

The original invention of clockwork is usually attributed to an eighth-century Chinese, Liang Lin-son. But practical applications were not made in Europe until the end of the thirteenth century. The first clocks simply struck an hour bell. A machine of this type, built in 1386, still operates in Salisbury cathedral. Later models had dials, showing not only the hours of the day but also phases of the moon, the passage of the planets, even the calendar of saints’ days and religious festivals. The finest examples were built at Milan (1335), Strasbourg (1354), Lund (1380), Rouen (1389), Wells (1392), and Prague (1462). Mechanical clocks gradually supplanted earlier types of timepiece such as shadow-clocks, sundials, hourglasses, and clepsydras. They were specially attractive for the northern countries, where sunshine was unreliable. They were constructed in all the great cathedrals, on city squares and gates, and above all in monasteries.

The twenty-four-hour clock, with hours of a fixed duration, revolutionized daily habits of time-keeping. Most people had lived by the variable rhythms of sunrise and sunset. Where systems of hours had been known and used, they varied in length from season to season, and from country to country. Daytime ‘temporal hours’ differed both from the ‘watches’ of the night and from the ‘canonical hours’ of the Church, divided into matins, laude, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline. Ordinary folk took the idea of a fixed daily routine, regulated by equalized hours, from the medieval monks. These provided the necessary prelude to the later norms of urban life, and to the artificial disciplines of industrialized society. The clock is a ‘totalitarian taskmaster’ with a powerful socializing influence. Newtonian physics sanctified the idea that the whole universe was one great ‘celestial clock’; and it has taken the greatest of modern minds, including Einstein and Proust, to show how unnatural the mechanistic perception of time really is.2 [COMBRAY] [e = mc2]

Landmarks in the evolution of clockwork included miniaturization, which gave rise to domestic clocks in the fifteenth century, and to personal watches in the sixteenth; the pendulum (1657), which greatly increased reliability; the marine chronometer (1761), which solved the long-standingproblem of measuring longitude at sea; and the keyless mechanism (1823), which led to popular pocket and wrist watches. The ultimate timepiece, an atomic clock accurate to one second in 3,000 years, was built at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory in 1955.

Over the centuries, clockmaking developed from a highly specialized craft to a mass production industry. The early centres were found at Nuremberg and Augsburg, and at Paris and Blois. Switzerland benefited by the influx of Huguenot craftsmen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England became predominant. France led the field with case design and ornamental clocks. The Black Forest specialized in wooden ‘cuckoo clocks’. In the nineteenth century Swiss industry, based at Geneva and at La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Jura, gained worldwide supremacy in high-quality machine-made watches.

The craft of clockmakers grew out of the earlier guilds of locksmiths and jewellers. Famous names include Jacques de la Garde of Blois, maker of the first watch (1551); Christian Huygens (1629–95) of the Hague, inventor both of the pendulum and of the spiral-balance hairspring; John Arnold, Thomas Earnshaw, and John Harrison (1693–1776), masters of maritime chronometry; Julien Leroy (1686–1759), clockmaker to Versailles; Abraham-Louis Bréguet (1747–1823), inventor of the self-winding montre perpetuelle; and Edward John Dent (1790–1853), designer of Big Ben. Antoni Patek of Warsaw and Adrienne Philippe of Berne joined forces in 1832 to found Patek-Philippe, the leading Swiss firm of the day.

By that time clocks and watches were a universal feature of urbanized Western society. The peasants of Eastern Europe adapted more slowly. For millions of Soviet soldiers, the Red Army’s advance into Europe in 1944–5 provided the great chance to ‘liberate’ and to possess a watch.

Medieval science, too, was inextricably bound up with theology. There was no clear sense of the separation of physical and spiritual phenomena, so that exploring the ‘secrets of nature’ was frequently seen as immodest prying ‘into the womb of Mother Church’. The medieval German language, for example, made no distinction between ‘gas’ and ‘spirit’. Both were Geist, the modern equivalent of the English ‘ghost’. Scientific experiments often risked charges of sorcery. Alchemy long outpaced physics and chemistry, and astrology outpaced astronomy. The Oxford of Robert Grosseteste (c.1170–1253), Chancellor of the University and Bishop of Lincoln, is sometimes taken as the first home of the scientific tradition.

But most of the landmark achievements came from the work of scattered individuals. Roger Bacon’s, experiments with optics and machines formed part of his general attack on corruption and superstition. He was trying to verify knowledge, in the same way that his unfashionable insistence on Greek was an effort to verify the accuracy of the Latin Scriptures. Bacon’s master Pierre de Maricourt (Peter the Stranger) produced a fundamental treatise on magnetism, apparently as he whiled away the time during the Angevin siege of Lucera di Calabria in 1269. Witello, or Vitellon (1230–80), a Silesian, wrote a fundamental treatise on optics, the Perspectiva, which, by dividing the mechanical operations of the eye from the co-ordinating function of the mind, opened the way to modern psychology. Nicolas Oresme (c.1320–82), Bishop of Lisieux, produced an influential work on the economics of money, and another on astronomy, De Coelo et Mundo, which supported the theory of the rotation of the earth. He was an enthusiastic advocate of Reason, a man of the Enlightenment before his time, a denouncer of astrologers and miracle-mongers. ‘Everything contained in the Gospels’, he argued, ‘is rationabilissima.’ A century later, Cardinal Nicholas Cusanus (1401–64), from Kues on the Moselle, repeated the idea of the earth’s rotation, predicted calendar reform, and prophesied the end of the world in 1734. All these men had little difficulty distinguishing themirabilia of nature from the miracula of the Church.

Given the gradual accumulation of knowledge, a need was created for encyclopaedic compendia. Among the most widely distributed were the Speculum Maius (1264) of Vincent of Beauvais and the Opus Mains (1268) of Roger Bacon.

Religious belief, however, remained surrounded by every form of irrationality and superstition. In the later Middle Ages, Church dogma was still being formulated and systematized. The area of belief which people were ordered to accept unquestioningly was expanding. The Lateran Council of 1215 had made confession and penance obligatory. In 1439 the doctrine of the seven sacraments, from baptism to extreme unction, was regularized. The doctrine of transsubstantiation—the contention that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are miraculously transformed into the blood and body of Christ—was so refined that the priest alone was allowed to drink the wine of the chalice. Lay communicants could only partake of the bread. The separation of the people from the magical, priestly caste was emphasized. Masses were performed on every possible occasion. The cult of the Virgin Mary, the divine mediator with Christ, was officially adopted, the recitation of the Ave Maria, ‘Hail Mar’, being formally added to the order of the Mass after the Pater Noster. Every sort of organization, from guilds to chivalric orders, had its patron saint. The veneration of relics was ubiquitous. Pilgrimages were part of everyday life for everyone, not just for the devout. Belief in the supernatural was reinforced by official teaching about an elaborate hierarchy of good and evil angels, and by the universal fear of the Devil. Lucifer, the fallen archangel who once sat beside Gabriel in the empyrean of Heaven, now stalked the world in command of the forces of darkness. The horrors of Hell gave preachers their favourite theme and artists a popular subject.

The mystical tradition, which gave precedence to religious intuition over rational belief, had first found coherent expression in the twelfth century in the Augustinian monastery of St Victor in Paris. It later took deep root among the populace at large. Its leading exponents were headed by St Bonaventura (c.1217–74), sometime Master of the Franciscans and author of the influential Itinerarium Mentis in Deum; by ‘Meister’ Johann Eckhart (1260–1327) of Strasbourg, Vicar-General of Bohemia, who reputedly claimed that the world was created by his little finger; by the Fleming Jan van Ruysbroeck (1294–1381), ‘the Ecstatic Teacher’, author of De Septem Gradibus Amoris; by the Englishman Walter Hilton (d. 1396), author of a similar work in the vernacular, The Ladder of Perfection; above all by Thomas Hemerken from Kempen, near Cologne, known as Thomas à Kempis (c.1380–1471), author of the Imitatio Christi. The anonymous Englishman who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing was also representative of the genre. Many of the mystics were speculative philosophers; but they taught Christians to cultivate the inner life, and to shun the evil world which they could not control. Their writings helped to fan the embers which eventually fired the Reformation.

Witchcraft developed in parallel to Christian mysticism, and for some of the same reasons. Witches, black and white, were undoubtedly a hangover from the pagan animism of the pre-Christian countryside, as was the firm belief in pixies, elves, sprites, and hobgoblins. Yet the systematic practice of witchcraft seems to have been a product of the late medieval period. What is more, by openly entering into combat with witchcraft, the Church inadvertently fostered the climate of hysteria on which the alleged witches and sorcerers thrived. The crucial Bull Summis Desiderantes, which launched the Church’s official counter-offensive, was issued by Innocent VIII as late as 1484. The standard handbook for witchhunters, the Malleus Maleficarum, was published in i486 by the Dominicans. If previously there had been reticence about witches’ doings, now there could be none. Henceforth all Christendom knew that the legions of the Devil were led by evil women who anointed themselves with grease from the flesh of unbaptized children, who rode stark naked on flying broomsticks or on the backs of rams and goats, and who attended their nocturnal ‘sabbaths’ to work their spells and copulate with demons. Women were classified as weak, inferior beings, who could not resist temptation. Once the Church gave public credence to such things, the potency of witchcraft was greatly increased. Large sums of money could be obtained by people who undertook to ruin a neighbour’s crops or to cause an enemy’s wife to miscarry. The frontiers between fact and delusion, between charlatanry and hallucination, were hopelessly blurred.

‘It has lately come to our ears’, declared Innocent VIII, ‘that … many people of both sexes have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi et succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations and other accursed charms … have slain infants in their mother’s womb … have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees … These wretches, furthermore, blasphemously renounce the Faith, which is theirs by Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink … from perpetrating the … filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their souls.’

After that, for 300 years and more, witchcraft and witch-hunting were endemic to most parts of Europe, [HEXEN]

Medieval ethics, as expounded by the Church, were governed by hierarchical notions both of the social order and of the moral code. Everyone and everything that was inherently inferior should be subordinated to their superiors: serfs should be obedient to their masters; women should be ruled by men. Venial sins should be distinguished from the seven mortal sins. In those countries where the ancient practice of ‘head-money’ survived, the murder or rape of a noble person was judged more serious, and hence more costly, than that of ignoble victims. Penitential tariffs emphasized that minor transgressions should not be punished in the same way as major ones. Despite the repressive teaching of St Augustine on sexual matters, sexual peccadilloes were not judged severely. ‘Misdirected Love’, as Dante put it, could not be compared to sins driven by hatred or betrayal. Adulterers pined in the highest circle of Hell; traitors languished in the Pit. Betrayal of God was the ultimate evil. Blasphemy and heresy carried the greatest opprobrium. The Council of Constance of 1414–17, which burned Jan Hus at the stake, attracted an estimated 700 prostitutes,[PROSTIBULA]

Medieval law, too, was governed by a hierarchy of values. In theory at least, human laws were subject to divine law as defined by the Church; in practice, diversity was the norm. A welter of competing jurisdictions—canon law in the ecclesiastical courts, local custom in city or manor courts, royal decrees in the king’s courts—were matched by a profusion of legal sources, practices, and penalties. Roman law remained the principal source in southern Europe; Germanic and Slavonic tribal custom were the main source in northern and eastern Europe.

Customary law, however, should not be thought of as the mere survival of primitive practices. It was the product of a long process of detailed bargaining between princes and their subjects, and was often written down in elaborate codes. The Weistümer, for example, proliferated throughout Austria and parts of western Germany. In Austria they were known as Banntaidingen, in Switzerland as Öffnungen. Over 600 have survived from Alsace, where they were known as Dingofrodeln. Their existence greatly strengthened the concept of Gutherrschaft, as opposed to the prevailingGrundherrschaft east of the Elbe, whilst conserving the position of the peasant Gemeinde or communes in the countryside. They provide one of the basic explanations why western Germany escaped the tide of ‘neoserfdom’ which was to occur in the East (see pp. 583–4). In some parts of eastern Europe, such as Bohemia and Silesia, the influx of German settlers led to the merger of German and of local legal customs.

In the later centuries, the revival of classical studies helped Roman law to extend its sphere at the expense of customary law. In 1495, for example, it was admitted to the Reichskammergericht or Supreme Court of Justice of the German Empire. Its impact was to be profound. Given the growing fragmentation of sovereignty in the Empire, it encouraged all princes to regard themselves as the sole fount of legislation, and in due course to flood every aspect of life with regulations. The German Rechtsstaat or ‘state ordered by law’ would grow into a land which could produce the famous road sign in Baden: ‘It is permitted to travel on this road.’

England alone remained exclusively attached to its common law. In England, as in other countries west of the Rhine, it was assumed that where the law was silent, the citizen was free. France, apart from the growing power of the royal ordonnances and of the central Parlement, continued to be divided between the sphere of customary law in the north and the sphere of Roman law in the Midi.

Many countries undertook extensive codifications at an early date. In Castile, the Leyes de las Siete Partidas (1264–6), which formed the core of later Spanish law, served the same purpose as, for example, the Statutes (1364) of Casimir the Great and the Dygesta (1488) in Poland, or theSudiebnik of Casimir Jagiellon in Lithuania. In the absence of police forces, enforcement tended to be weak. Fugitives from justice were ubiquitous. Punishments for those apprehended, therefore, tended to be ferocious and exemplary: hanging was often accompanied by drawing and quartering; mutilation by branding or by amputation was designed to be a social deterrent. Imprisonment and fines, which developed with statute law, led to inhuman conditions for poor prisoners, since little or no provision was made for their upkeep.

Medieval education built on the foundations laid down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Primary learning, of letters and numbers, was largely left to the supervision of the family or the village priest. Secondary learning was supported by the cathedrals and increasingly by city councils. The content, though less so the clintele, was still geared to the training of clergy. The three disciplines of the Trivium—Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic—were the basic diet. Well-established foundations such as Winchester College (1382) or the Latin School at Deventer enjoyed a national, if not an international, reputation. Several of the large cities in Italy and Germany opened commercial schools. Fourteenth-century Florence possessed six such schools, with over 1,200 pupils. University foundations spread during the fifteenth century to all countries of Latin Christendom: such foundations included Leipzig (1409), St Andrews (1413), and Louvain (1425).

Medieval literature remained predominantly devotional in character, although the secular tradition promoted by the chansons de geste and the byliny continued to develop. Most books were written in Latin or Greek. Many of them remained within the milieu for which they were written. The fifteenth-century discovery of the works of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, for instance, a German nun who had written a series of Latin comedies five centuries earlier, suggests that a significant part of medieval literature may never have come into general circulation. An extensive popular literature, however, such as ballads and lives of the saints, was increasingly found in the vernacular, partly because formal education was not available for women. Popular theatre began with the miracle plays staged by the Church. New developments, though pregnant for the future, were confined to narrow circles (see Chapter VII).

Medieval historiography remained the realm of the chroniclers and the annalists—men, often monks, who sought to record the past but not to explain it. Divine Providence was accepted as sufficient causation. The corpus of medieval chronicles contains several hundred major items. Some, such as the early Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in England or Nestor’s eleventh-century Primary Chronicle from Kiev, were written in the vernacular. So too were the great series of French chronicles—Villehardouin (c.1150–1212), Joinville (c.1224–1317), Froissart (1337–1400), Commynes (1447–1511). Latin or Greek, however, predominated. The chroniclers’ bias fell heavily in favour of the Church’s view on events, or that of the ruling prince. ‘Qui Diex vielt aidier’, concluded Villehardouin, ‘nuls horn ne li puet nuire’ (he whom God wishes to help, no man can harm). Political thought centred on the perennial problem of defining the powers of Church and State. Carolingian thinking had approximated to the Caesaropapism of Byzantium. Feudalism stressed the concept of contract. The investiture dispute and its derivatives produced ardent apologists both for papal supremacy or, like Dante’s De Monarchia, for the imperial cause. Roman ideas on sovereign monarchy re-emerged with the study of Roman law, especially in France. But nothing was so revolutionary as the anti-papal treatise, Defensor Pacis, of Marsilio of Padua (1270–1342), sometime rector of the University in Paris, who dared to propose that supreme authority should be wielded by a sovereign people controlling a secular state.

International relations were governed by St Augustine’s idea of a just war. In theory, war could only be just if it satisfied certain conditions. According to Ramón di Peñafort, these were: the desire to redress injury, the exhaustion of alternative means, the use of professional soldiers, the good faith of the instigator, and the approval of the sovereign. In practice, warfare was endemic. Subservient clerics could always be found to confirm the justice of anyone’s cause, private or public. Outbreaks of temporary peace punctuated the normal predominance of fighting. And war involved the unbridled licence of the soldiery. Medieval military logistics and technology did not facilitate the rapid settlement of disputes. Armies were tiny, the theatres of operations vast. A defeated enemy could easily retire and recoup. Action was directed at local castles and strong-points. Sieges were more common than set battles. The spoils of war were more desired than mere victory. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries mercenary companies, first raised by the Italian cities, were used to supplement the unwieldy feudal hosts. Longbows, and crossbows, greatly improved since their appearance in the twelfth century, increased fire-power. Gunpowder, first used in the fourteenth century, led to artillery, which, in the hands of Hussites or Turks, became a decisive arm. But armoured cavalry remained the backbone of any major fighting force.

Medieval architecture was dominated by two classes of stone building— churches and castles. The late medieval church style, which the nineteenth century was to dub ‘Gothic’, is widely thought to be essentially aesthetic in inspiration—soaring, as it were, towards Heaven. As such, it is often contrasted with the military functionalism of the turrets, barbicans, and machicolations of the castles. In fact, all the main Gothic features, from the pointed arch to the flying buttress, are no less functional than aesthetic: they were devised for the purposes of efficient vaulting and of large window spaces. From the innovations of Abbot Suger at St Denis, the Gothic spread all over Latin Christendom. Gothic cathedrals were built from Seville to Dorpat, and at all points in between. The Orthodox world, in contrast, stayed loyal to the Romanesque-Byzantine tradition. East of the Catholic/Orthodox divide there are neither Gothic cathedrals nor private castles. New-found civic pride gave rise to magnificent belfries, city halls, and cloth halls. Fine examples were built at Brussels (1402), Arras, Ghent, Ypres (1302), and Cracow (1392). [GOTHIC]

Most medieval arts developed in the setting of church or cathedral. Painting was directed either to icons and altar-pieces or to the religious scenes of church murals. Book illumination was undertaken to adorn bibles and psalters. Sculpture in stone gloried in the statues and tableaux of cathedral fronts, and in the effigies of tombs and chantries. Sculpture in wood embellished choir stalls or choir screens. Stained glass filled the vast expanses of Gothic church windows. ‘All art was more or less applied art.’

Yet the secular element in medieval art, never completely absent, was growing. Princes, and then the rich bourgeois, began to commission their portraits or their statues. The art of illumination was applied to copies of the chansons de geste and to the fashion for books of hours, herbaries, and bestiaries. Late medieval dress entered a period of extravagant flamboyance where rich materials, fantastic styles, and brilliant colours were all designed for effect. Green represented love; blue, fidelity; yellow, enmity, white, innocence. Heraldry moved from its original military function into the realm of social ostentation.

Medieval music, too, saw a fruitful blending of the sacred and the profane. The dominant sounds still emerged from the churches; but secular patronage was increasing, notably in Burgundy and the Flemish cities. The ars nova style of the fourteenth century enjoyed the same international influence as Gothic architecture. John Dunstable (c.1390–1453), court musician to the Duke of Bedford in France, was innovative and influential, as was Guillaume Dufay (c.1400–74). Choral polyphony developed, as did instrumental music. The dulcimer has been noted in 1400, the clavichord in 1404, the organ keyboard in 1450, the sackbut or trombone in 1495.

The ‘medieval person’ is an abstraction, and as such is unhistorical. Individuals are by definition unique, and no one person can possibly reflect all the main social, intellectual, and artistic trends of an age. Yet some attempt must be made to overcome the anonymity which surrounds many medieval endeavours. Individualism was not in fashion. Artists such as Jan Van Eyck might occasionally sign their works—JVE FECIT—but as often as not leading figures remained anonymous. Hence the very great value of modern works which seek to reconstruct the detailed lives of ordinary people, [MERCANTE]

No one is more medieval, however, in the utter conviction of the mission of Christendom, and yet more open to all the rich currents of the age, than the famous Catalan doctor, philosopher, linguist, poet, prodigious traveller and martyr, Ramon Llull (c.1235–1315). Born in Palma, Majorca, shortly after the Ara-gonese conquest, he knew Arabic no less than Latin; and he was raised on the works of the Moorish and Jewish philosophers. He laboured for many years at the Franciscan monastery at Miramar on Mt Randa, before setting out on his endless tours to persuade popes and princes to adopt the teaching of oriental languages. He taught at various times at Montpellier, Paris, Padua, Genoa, Naples, and Messina, and journeyed as far afield as Georgia and Abyssinia. At the Council of Vienne in 1311 he witnessed the nominal acceptance of his cherished proposals. He made repeated missionary expeditions to Muslim North Africa, where he was tragically stoned to death for his pains. His Libro del Gentil (1272) (Book of the Gentile and the Three Sages), first published in Arabic, describes an inconclusive disputation between the three religions. His Ars Majorand Ars generalis contain a mass of speculative philosophy, which impressed thinkers as different as Giordano Bruno and Leibniz but which is largely disregarded. Llull had a vision of universal knowledge:

MERCANTE

IN 1348 or 1349 the young Messer Francesco Datini inherited a small plot of land in the town of Prato, near Florence. Both his parents had died in the Black Death. He sold the land, and used the proceeds to set up business in the papal city of Avignon. There he flourished, importing silk, spices, weapons, and armour from Italy. In due course he was able to transfer the business to Florence, opening branches in Pisa, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia, Majorca, and Ibiza. He was specially strong in the wool trade, buying fleeces direct from producers in England, Spain, and the Balearios. As he sat at his counter in Florence, he supervised the construction of a splendid palazzo in Prato, and the management of his country estate in the Apennine foothills. The palazzo, which still stands, was built round an arcaded courtyard and with a marble-panelled frontage. It was run by his wife, Monna Margharita, helped by his bastard daughter Ginevra, and by a large domestic staff, including slaves. It was enlivened by the constant flow of messengers and mule-trains. When Messer Francesco died heirless on 16 August 1410, of the gallstones, he bequeathed his estate, his papers and an enormous endowment of 70,000 gold florins, to the poor people of Prato. Over the door was inscribed:

Ceppo di Francescho di Marco

Mercante dei Poveri di Xto

del quale il Chomune di Prato

       è dispensatore

lasciato nell’anno MCCCCX.

(Almshouse of Francesco, son of Marco | Merchant of Christ’s Poor | Of which the Commune of Prato | is trustee | Bequeathed in the year 1410).

Francesco’s will also arranged for the manumission of his slaves, the cancellation of all debts, and payment of a sum for the restitution of profits from usury.1

The Datini Archive contains over 150,000 letters, 500 account ledgers, 400 insurance policies, and 300 deeds of partnership. It shows how Messer Francesco, by extraordinary attention to detail, kept the pulse of a multinational operation. It also gave historians an unparalleled picture of a medieval company and household.2 A typical bill of exchange reads:

In the name of God, 12th February 1399. Pay at usance3 by this first of exchange to Giovanni Asapardo £306. 13s. Ad. Barcelonesi, which are for 400 florins received here from Bartolomei Garzoni at 15s. Ad. per florin. Pay and charge to our account there and reply. God keep you. Francesco and Andrea, greetings from Barcelona. Accepted March 13. Set down in Red Book B, f 97.4

Such transactions moved money and credit round Europe effortlessly. But they did not cure Messer Francesco’s incurable anxiety: I dreamed last night of a house that had fallen to pieces … and it gives me much to ponder on. For there is no news of a galley that left Venice more than two months ago bound for Catalonia. I had insured her for 300 florins … But I am so vexed … The more I seek, the less I find. God knows what will happen.5

According to Braudel, the world of the Mercante a taglio or Fernhandler, the rich and powerful ‘long-distance merchants’, has to be extracted from the petty dealing and intense competition of small-scale, local market economies. The former were the true capitalist pioneers. Thanks to their superior sources of intelligence and their command of large sums of ready cash, they could escape the laws of market competition. By concentrating on single transactions of great promise, this ‘small group of large merchants’ stood to make exorbitant profits:

From the very beginning, [these men] went beyond national boundaries … [They] knew a thousand ways of rigging the odds in their favour: the manipulation of credit, and the profitable game of good money for bad … They grabbed up everything worth taking—land, real estate, rents.6

Generally speaking, the capitalists did not specialize, and they did not finance manufactures. They put their money promptly wherever the maximum opportunity lay. Money trading was the one area in which they did sometimes concentrate their interest. ‘But its success never lasted long, as if the economic edifice could not pump enough nourishment up to this high point of the economy.’ From the fourteenth century onwards, therefore, a cavalcade of inordinately wealthy capitalists creamed off the greatest profits of the European economy—the Bardi, the Medici, the Fuggers, the Neckers, and the Rothschilds.

Clearly, the successes and disasters of the capitalists rested on the general movements of the European economy. In the fifteenth century, ‘the “ground floor” of economic life recovered’, especially in the cities. In the sixteenth century, when Atlantic trade expanded, ‘the driving force operated at the level of the international fairs—Antwerp, Frankfurt, Lyons and Piacenza’. The seventeenth century, though often described as a period of stagnation, saw ‘the fantastic rise of Amsterdam’. In the ‘general economic acceleration’ of the eighteenth century, when London supplanted Amsterdam, the uncontrolled private market outperformed the regulated public market. Finally, ‘financial capitalism only succeeded … after the period 1830–60, when the banks grabbed both industry and merchandise, and when the general economy could support this edifice permanently’.7

About that time, in 1870, Messer Francesco’s ledgers were found in a pile of sacks under the stairs of his house in Prato. His motto was written inside each ledger ‘ln the Name of God and of Profit’.

It took the form of what can only be described as a computing engine, which linked up the basic principles or ‘ground-words’ of all knowledge by a mechanism consisting of concentric circles segmented by radii and of geometric symbols. It seems to have been what might be called a cybernetic machine, prepared to unravel every problem, every science, even faith itself…34

His Blanquerna (1283) is sometimes cited as the world’s first novel, or the first Utopian tract. His poetry, in El Desconort or Lo Cant de Ramon, is beautifully simple and sincere. Llull has been called ‘a great European’.

The fifteenth century is generally taken as the century of transition between the medieval and the modern periods. In certain spheres the quickening pace of change led to a decisive break with the medieval tradition. This was true in learning, in the arts, and, to some degree through the rise of national monarchies, in politics (see Chapter VII). In most other spheres, the old order held sway. Huge variations, of course, continued to persist. If life in some of the late medieval cities was precociously developed, especially in Italy and the Low Countries, life in the countryside remained largely unaffected. Old and new lived side by side, [PRESS] The gulf between Latin Christendom in the West and Orthodox Christendom in the East was steadily increasing.

For the fifteenth century saw a momentous shift in the strategic confrontation between Christendom and Islam. In 1400 the European Peninsula was still gripped in the Muslim pincers that had stayed in place for the previous 700 years. One arm of the pincers still held on, ever more precariously, to Granada. The other arm, ever more persistently was throttling Constantinople. Yet by 1500 the pincers had slipped, and the main axis of the confrontation had moved dramatically. Islam, which was finally defeated in the West, was victorious in the East. As the Moors finally faltered, the Ottoman Turks triumphed. At the very time that Western Europe broke free of the Muslim blockade, Eastern Europe was confronted with the Muslim challenge in intensified form. In 1400 the main weight of the Muslim world could be felt along the whole of the traditional southern front. By 1500, though the green flags of the Prophet still waved along the African coast, they were concentrated overwhelmingly in the East. Christians of the Latin West could rejoice; Christians of the Orthodox East could not. [MATRIMONIO]

PRESS

THE printing-press of Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg, which started work c.1450 in the Rhineland city of Mainz, did not initiate the art of printing. It was the successor to an ancient line of Chinese woodblocks, metal engraving plates, and stone lithographs. Even so, it launched a revolution in information technology. Like many inventions, it created an original process through the combination of several existing techniques, including those of the Roman wine-press, the goldsmith’s punch, and impressionable paper. Also, through the use of movable metal type cast in replica moulds, it saw the first application of ‘the theory of interchangeable parts’—one of the basic principles of a later machine age. It possessed the inestimable facility for the text of a book to be set up, edited, and corrected before being reproduced in thousands of identical copies.

Gutenberg is probably best remembered for his 43-line and 36-line Bibles. But in some ways his printing of the Catholicon or ‘Book of Universal Knowledge’ represents a more distinctive milestone. This encyclopedia had been compiled by the Genoese Giovanni Balbo in the thirteenth century. In Gutenberg’s printed edition, it marked the first item of secular literature in mass circulation. It contains a brief preface from the publisher:

With the help of the Most High, at whose will the tongues of infants become eloquent… this noble book has been printed and accomplished without the help of reed, stylus, or pen, but by the wondrous agreement, proportion, and harmony of punches and types, in the Year of the Lord’s Incarnation 1460, in the notable city of Mainz of the renowned German nation.1

Within the period of incunabula before 1500, when printing was in its swaddling clothes, the main roman, italic, and gothic type-styles emerged; and the presses spread quickly to Basle (1466), Rome (1467), Pilzno in Bohemia (1468), Paris (1470), Buda (1473), Cracow (1474), Westminster (1476), and Cetinje in Montenegro (1493). Printing reached Moscow in 1555.

The power of the printed word inevitably aroused the fears of the religious authorities. Hence Mainz, the cradle of the press, also became the cradle of censorship. In 1485, the local Archbishop-Elector asked the city council of nearby Frankfurt-am-Main to examine the books to be exhibited at the Lenten Fair, and to help in the suppression of dangerous publications. As a result, in the following year, Europe’s earliest censorship office was set up jointly by the electorate of Mainz and the city of Frankfurt. The first edict issued by the Frankfurt censor against printed books banned vernacular translations of the Bible.2 [INDEX]

In contrast to Christendom, the Islamic world exercised a total ban on printing until the nineteenth century. The consequences, both for Islam and for the spread of knowledge in general, can hardly be exaggerated.3

The strategic shift was signalled by two landmark events: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and the fall of Granada to the Spaniards in 1492. The consequences were immense. The shift gave rise in the religious sphere to the last vain attempt to reunite the two divided halves of Christendom; in the economic sphere to the search for new trade routes. In the realm of geopolitics, it ensured that the emergent kingdom of Spain was bathed in Catholic triumphal-ism, whilst the emergent principality of Moscow was immersed in the resentments of the Orthodox defeat. The liberated West, led by Spain, was preparing for the conquest of new worlds. The embattled Orthodox East, led by Moscow, dug in behind its mental stockade. Each in its own way was preparing a further round in the medieval quest for a Christian empire.

Given the Ottoman encirclement of Constantinople (see p. 386), Christian leaders were driven to reconsider the healing of the Schism between the Greek and Latin Churches. The result was the ill-starred Union of Florence of 1439, one of the most pathetic episodes in the scandalous annals of Christian disunity. The Greeks had been petitioning the Papacy for decades, and a Venetian Pope, Eugene IV (1431–47), finally recognized the emergency. Indeed, being pressured beyond endurance by the reforming Council of Basle, he saw that mending relations with the Orthodox might strengthen his own position. The negotiations which opened in Ferrara in January 1438 and continued in Florence were led by the Pope; by the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeologos (r. 1425–48) and his Patriarch; and by twenty-two bishops, who had deserted their colleagues in Basle to attend. Not surprisingly, the desperate Greeks gave way on all matters of substance, readily accepting the Roman doctrines of papal supremacy, purgatory, the Eucharist, and the Filioque. The way was cleared for reinstating the unity of the Church on papal terms. In the decree Laetantur coeliof 6 July 1439, the union was formally sealed. The text of the union was read from the pulpit of Santa Croce in Latin by Cardinal Julian and in Greek by Archbishop Bessarion of Nicaea; and the two churchmen symbolically embraced.

Unfortunately, none of the parties to the Union actually possessed the means for putting it into effect. The Pope was bitterly denounced by the rump of the Council of Basle, which moved swiftly to elect the last of the antipopes, Felix V (1439–49). The German bishops stayed aloof. The French bishops, elated by the recent enactment of the antipapal Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, leaned towards the Council. The attempt to end the Schism with Constantinople had provoked yet another schism within the Roman Church itself. The Orthodox Church was no more enthusiastic. In Constantinople, the clergy who had signed the Union were repudiated. ‘We need no Latins,’ the mob shouted. ‘God and the Madonna who have saved us from Persians and Arabs will save us now from Muhammad.’ In Alexandria, a synod convened by the eastern Patriarchs condemned the Union outright. In Moscow, the Metropolitan Isidore returned from Florence wearing a Latin cross and was promptly imprisoned. His bishops rebelled against the ‘treason of the Greeks’, and proceeded to elect a new Metropolitan without reference to the Patriarch of Constantinople. This was the start of separate Russian Orthodox tradition.

MATRIMONIO

SIGISMUND DE ZORZI and his wife, patricians of fifteenth-century Ragusa, had twelve children—six boys and six girls. In the order of their birth, c.1427–49, the children were Johannes, Franciscus, Vecchia, Junius, Margarita, Maria, Marinus, Antonius, Helisabeth, Aloisius, Artulina, and Clara.

Three boys and one of the girls did not marry. Even so, finding suitable marriage partners for the other eight must have kept their parents busy over at least two decades. Margarita (No. 5) was the first to be betrothed in 1453, closely followed by Maria (No. 6, 1455) and the eldest daughter, Vecchia (1455). The eldest son, Johannes, did not marry until 1459, when he must have been at least 32 years of age. He was followed the next year by his sister, Helizabeth (No. 9), who was about 16 years his junior. Franciscus (No. 2) waited until 1465, when he was about 36, whilst 1471 saw the betrothals both of Artulina (No. 11), aged about 24, and Junius (No. 4), aged about 38.

The pattern of marriages in this one family was not unusual. They match not only those of other patrician families in Ragusa but also studies from Renaissance Italy. It conforms to what historical demographers have called the Mediterranean Marriage Pattern (MMP), characterized by high levels of celibacy and by a gross discrepancy in the age at marriage of sons and daughters.1

Ragusa was a city-republic living from Adriatic shipping and the overland Balkan trade.2 (It gave its name to the English word ‘argosy’.) Its population of c.20,000 was dominated by a score of closely intermarried patrician clans who held all the municipal offices. Marriage in medieval Ragusa was a serious business. Detailed pacta matrimonialia were drawn up between the bride’s father and the prospective son-in-law. Dowries were fixed on average at 2,600 hyperi (866 gold ducats). The standard penalty for not proceeding within the agreed period from betrothal to wedding and consummation was 1,000 gold ducats. The average age at betrothal, usually two to three years before marriage, was 18 for girls, 33.2 for men. As the de Zorzi example shows, brothers usually had to wait until their sisters had been provided for.

The underlying factors of Ragusa’s ‘marriage culture’ were economic, biological, mathematical, and customary. Men held back from matrimony until they could support a family and could expect a share of their father’s legacy to augment the wife’s dowry. Many waited so long that they never married at all. Women entered matrimony much earlier, but not just to maximize their child-bearing capacity. They had to compete for the pool of reluctant grooms. Families preferred their sons-in-law, who would normally become business partners, to be mature, and to take early responsibility for their daughters’ ‘honour’.

The ramifications of marriage strategy in history are so complex that macro-theorizing on the subject has proved less satisfactory than empirical local studies. The theory which divided the whole of Europe into two simple zones of a late-marrying ‘European [sic] Marriage Pattern’ and an early-marrying ‘East European Marriage Pattern’ carries much less conviction than the micro-analysis of matrimony in medieval Florence4 or Renaissance Ragusa. [ZADRUGA]

Ragusa retained its independence until 1805, when it was occupied by the French. After a century of Habsburg rule, it was joined in 1918, as Dubrovnik, to Yugoslavia, and to the Republic of Croatia in 1992. The medieval city in which the de Zorzi lived was twice devastated—by the earthquake of 1667 and by the Serbian naval bombardments of 1991–2. Among the many Renaissance buildings in the Stari Grad which took a direct hit was the Sponza Palace, home of the city archives and of the marriage registers.5

The Ottomans pressed on. At Varna on the Black Sea coast, in 1444, the Ottoman Sultan Murad II destroyed the last of the crusades which papal money could send against him. In 1448 he crushed the last of the Hungarian expeditions across the Danube. Only in Albania, under Skanderbeg, did resistance to the Sultan flourish. Feeble, friendless, but still defiant, Constantinople awaited its destiny, [VLAD]

The final siege of Constantinople began on 2 April 1453, Easter Monday, and lasted for eight weeks. The twenty-year-old Sultan, Mehmet II (r. 1451–81), handsome and secretive, was eager to attack, having been frustrated as a boy, when his plan for a campaign against the Walls had been rejected. The bachelor Emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologos (r. 1448–53), still optimistically searching for a bride, awaited him without illusions. Preparations had been thorough. The cities of Thrace and the Black Sea coast were ravaged to prevent assistance. A fleet of triremes and transport barges was assembled at Gallipoli. A castle was built at the narrowest point of the Bosporus at Rumeli Hisar. A 26-ft (7.9-m) bronze cannon, hurling stone shot of 12 hundredweight (609 kilos) each, had been specially cast by the Sultan’s Hungarian engineer, and was pulled from Adrianople by 60 oxen. Inside the city, weapons were collected and money raised to pay the troops. Outside the walls, the ditches were deepened and the moat by the Blachernae Gate flooded. Embassies were duly sent to Venice, to the Vatican, to France and Aragon. A company of 700 men arrived under Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a Genoese captain who was given command of the land walls. On the day that the first Turkish detachments came into view, a procession of migrating storks flew over the Straits. The city gates were closed. A great iron chain was stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn. Only 7,000 defenders stood to arms against the onslaught of 80,000.

VLAD

VLAD III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–76), otherwise known as ‘Dracula’ and ‘Vlad the Impaler’, quickly passed into legend as a byword for cruelty. In recent times, the sexual overtones of his perversion have attracted much notoriety. Yet he was an historical figure, whose birthplace at Sighişoara, and castles at Poenari and Bran, can be visited in present-day Romania. His principality of Wallachia lay on the left bank of the lower Danube, squeezed between the great Kingdom of Hungary, which regarded him as its vassal, and the growing empire of the Ottoman Turks, to whom he paid tribute. During the Crusade of Varna in 1443–4, when he was an adolescent boy, he was sent as a hostage to the court of the Ottoman Sultan, Murad II; and the buggery to which he was subjected can be considered the likely psychiatric source of his later obsessions.

The use of the pala or ‘pointed stake’ was well known to the Turks as a form of punishment. But in the hands of Vlad III it became an instrument of veritable mass terror. In the more refined variant, a needle-thin stake, specially sharpened and greased, was rammed in the victim’s rectum and out through the mouth in such a way that the death throes could last for days. Vlad III came to power in 1456, only three years after the Turkish Conquest of Constantinople, and saw himself as champion of the Christian princes confronting the Infidel. One expedition across the Danube reputedly brought him 23,883 prisoners for impaling, not counting those mercifully beheaded or burned alive. At home, his reign began with the mass killing of the Wallachian nobility, perhaps twenty thousand men, women, and children impaled on a forest of stakes beneath the castle window.1

Dracula’s arrest and imprisonment by Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, led in 1463 to the publication in Vienna of a German account of his misdeeds, Geschichte Dracole Wayde, which was the basis for all subsequent literature. A Russian version produced in 1488 was certainly known to Ivan the Terrible, who seems to have made use of it. Its pages serve to remind us of the strange connection between religious fanaticism and pathological cruelty which persisted in both East and West. The annals of the Spanish Inquisition, or of the Marian persecution in England as related in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), belong to the same sickening genre as the horrors of the Wallachian vampire-prince.2 [LUDI] [TORMENTA]

The progress of the siege at first gave encouragement to the defenders, though the impaling of Christian prisoners in view of the Walls was calculated to cause panic. On 12 April a naval attack on the boom failed. The great cannon, firing once every seven minutes from sunrise to sunset, day after day, reduced large sections of the outer wall to rubble. But the gaps were filled at night with wooden stockades. On 20 April an imperial transport flotilla fought its way into the harbour. Turkish mining operations were betrayed.

But then, in a masterstroke, the Sultan ordered his fleet of galleys to be dragged overland behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. The City lost its harbour. From then on, the defenders had only three options: victory, death, or conversion to Islam. On 27 April an ecumenical mass was celebrated in St Sophia, for Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholics. ‘At this moment, there was Union in the Church of Constantinople.’

The decisive assault was launched about half-past one in the morning of Tuesday, 29 May, the fifty-third day of the siege. First came the bashi-bazouk irregulars, then the Anatolians, then the Janissaries:

The Janissaries advanced at the double, not rushing in wildly… but keeping their ranks in perfect order, unbroken by the missiles of the enemy. The martial music that urged them on was so loud that the sound could be heard between the roar of the guns from right across the Bosphorus. Mehmet himself led them as far as the fosse, and stood there shouting encouragement… Wave after wave of these fresh, magnificent and stoutly armoured men rushed up to the stockade, to tear at the barrels of earth that surmounted it, to hack at the beams that supported it, to place their ladders against it… each wave making way without panic for its successor.36

Just before sunrise, Giustiniani took a culverin shot on his breastplate and retired, covered in blood. A giant janissary called Hasan was slain after mounting the stockade; but he showed it was possible. A small sally-port, the Kerkoporte, was left open by retreating Greeks, and the Turks swarmed in. The Emperor dismounted from his white Arabian mare, plunged into the fray, and disappeared.

Constantinople was sacked. Gross slaughter and rapine ensued. St Sophia was turned into a mosque:

The muezzin ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the ezan or public invitation … The imam preached; and Mohammed the Second performed the namaz of thanksgiving on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Caesars. From St Sophia, he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine… A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind, and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry. ‘The spider has woven his web in the Imperial Palace, and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab’.37

The Roman Empire had ceased to exist.

In the course of their conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman Turks gradually set the terms of trade in the region, controlling the routes which linked Europe with the Levant and India. In practice the Turks were tolerant to Christian traders, and the reluctance of Venice and Genoa to assist Constantinople can only be explained by the lucrative trade which they already operated in the Ottoman realms. But contemporaries further afield may have judged the situation differently; and the rise of the Ottomans is traditionally associated with the attempts by Christian leaders in the West, led by Portugal, to discover a new route to India. It may well be, of course, that the Portuguese were as unwelcome to the Venetians as to the Turks, or were pulled by the lure of African slaves and beautiful islands.

At all events, for forty years Prince Henry of Portugal (1394–1460), known as ‘the Navigator’, sent expedition after expedition down the western coast of Africa in the wake of earlier Arab voyagers. His ships found Porto Santo (1419), Madeira (1420), the Canaries (1421), later ceded to Castile, the Azores (1431), Cabo Blanco (1441), and Cape Verde (1446). The fate of the Canaries, where the native Guanche population was annihilated under Spanish rule, gave a foretaste of the instincts of later European colonization. In 1437 the Colonial and Naval Institute at Sagres was founded, the first of its kind. By 1471 the Portuguese were strong enough to wrest Tangier from the Moors. In 1486, sailing from Portuguese settlements on the Gold Coast, Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cabo Tormentoso, subsequently renamed the Cape of Good Hope. In 1497 Vasco da Gama completed an unbroken voyage from Lisbon to Calicut, thereby circumventing the Ottoman sphere. [GONCALVEZ]

In neighbouring Spain, that same era was crowned by a famous political union. The two rival kingdoms of Castile and Aragón had long tempered their rivalry with dynastic alliances and marriages. The marriage of Juan I of Trastámara, King of Castile (r. 1379–90), to Eleanora of Aragan produced the protoplasts of both the Castilian and the Aragonese houses of the following century. One son, Henry III (r. 1390–1406), reigned in Castile, whilst the second son, Ferdinand I, was unexpectedly chosen in 1412 for the throne of Aragón in Barcelona. The marriage between Henry Ill’s granddaughter Isabella, Princess of Castile (1451–1504), ‘La Católica’, and Ferdinand I’s grandson, Ferdinand, Prince of Aragon (1452–1516), ‘El Católico’, which was concluded in 1469 at Valladolid, was not without precedent; but its future implications were immense.

Both bride and groom were heirs to the desperately troubled families, and to viciously disputed kingdoms. They were cousins, and knew well what to expect if their relatives or their nobles were allowed to gain control. Isabella, upright and devout, had been touted for marriage in Portugal, England, and France throughout her childhood, and had only been saved from the altar by the death of an unwanted suitor on his way to the wedding. Her claim to Castile only arose through the unlawful exclusion of her niece; and her accession in 1474 sparked off both a civil and an international war with France and Portugal. Ferdinand, devious and devout, sought her hand as a means of escape from his own miserable circumstances. His childhood was passed amidst the horrors of a protracted Catalan revolt. His claim to Aragón only arose through the exclusion of his bastard cousin, Ferrante of Naples, and the poisoning of his half-brother, Charles of Viana, Prince of Navarre. Isabella’s brother, Henry IV (r. 1454–74), has been described as ‘a miserable, abnormal cipher’. Ferdinand’s father, John II (r. 1458–79), was the hated poisoner of a son and a daughter. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ferdinand and Isabella, ‘the Catholic monarchs’, were advocates of strong and orderly government.

GONCALVEZ

IN 1441 Antam Goncalvez sailed his tiny ship out of Lisbon, edged southwards along the Atlantic coast of Morocco, passed the Canary Islands, and rounded Cape Bojador. Since the prevailing winds blow northerly off that part of the African coast, it was only seven years earlier that a similar Portuguese ship had succeeded in passing the fearful Cape and in returning safely to Europe.

Goncalvez had set out to collect a cargo of blubber and sea-lion skins. But landing on the shore of the Rio de Oro, he was seized by the idea of taking a few of the local inhabitants as a prize for his master, Prince Henry. So the next evening a party of ten sailors marched inland. Returning empty-handed across the sand dunes at dawn, they spied a naked Berber walking behind a camel and carrying two spears. The man defended himself with spirit, but was soon wounded, overpowered, and captured. Together with a luckless black woman, probably a local slave girl, who also appeared on the scene, he was tied up and carried off. They were the first recorded victims of a European slave-raid south of the Sahara.1

Soon afterwards Goncalvez joined up with another ship commanded by Nuno Tristao. Their combined crews mounted a night attack on a native encampment. With wild cries of ‘Portugal’ and ‘Santiago’ they fell on the sleeping villagers, killing three and taking ten prisoner. In all, they returned to Lisbon with twelve captives. Their exploits were recorded by the chronicler Zurara, and Prince Henry sent an embassy to Rome to seek the Pope’s blessing for this new sort of crusade. The Pope granted ‘complete forgiveness of sins … to all engaged in the said war’.2

Slave-raiding and slave-trading were an immemorial feature of African life, but this was the moment when Europeans broke into operations that had hitherto been handled by African and Muslim traders. It happened some fifty years before Europe’s first contacts with the Americas, and it put European entrepreneurs into a good position for exploiting the new opportunities. In 1501 Spain issued a decree to limit the export of Christian girls to garrison brothels across the Atlantic. In 1515 Spain sent the first consignment of black slaves directly from Africa to America, whilst receiving the first shipment of slave-grown American sugar.

More than a century after Goncalvez, a fresh stage of the Atlantic slave trade was reached, when English sea captains broke into the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly. In October 1562 John Hawkins sailed from Plymouth for the coast of Guinea with three ships—the Salomon, theSwallow, and the Jonas. Variously described as a pirate and an admiral, Hawkins established the ‘Great Circuit’, with its threefold profits of English goods sold in Africa, African slaves sold in the Indies, and American products sold in England. On that first voyage he took a short cut by relieving a Portuguese slave ship of its human cargo at sea. On his second voyage, in 1564, he received financial backing from the Queen of England herself, who rewarded him with a knighthood and with a coat of arms bearing ‘a demi-Moor, chained’. On a third voyage, in 1567, he obtained 470 slaves as booty after lending his crewmen as mercenaries to the kings of Sierra Leone and of Castros, who were fighting a war against their enemies, Zacina and Zatecama.3 [USKOK]

In this way, European traders entered a lasting and lucrative partnership with their African suppliers. ‘The Root of the Evil’, writes one historian, lay in ‘a demand for slaves on one side, and on the other a monopolist interest among African chiefs in obtaining European consumer goods, especially firearms.’ Before the trade was stopped in the nineteenth century, some 15 million Africans had been seized for slavery in the Western hemisphere. Of those, perhaps 11 or 12 million were actually landed alive.5

For the time being, the union of Castile and Aragon remained a personal one. The two kingdoms retained their separate laws and governments. Isabella had little choice but to attack the nobility of Castile; Ferdinand had no choice but to work with the Cortes of Aragon. Even when he asked for a window to be closed in the debating chamber, he was wont to add: ‘if the fueros permit’. The sense of common purpose was achieved partly by the introduction of a common currency and the removal of commercial barriers and partly by the enforcement of ultra-Catholic ideology. In 1476 Isabella set up a sinister but efficient law-enforcement agency, initially aimed at the noble brigands of Castile—the Santa Hermandad or Holy Brotherhood. In 1483, both Castile and Aragón were required to play host to the first institution of united Spain, a reorganized royal version of the Holy Inquisition under its president, the Queen’s confessor, the Dominican Thomas Torquemada (1420–98). Henceforth, treason and heresy were virtually indistinguishable. Non-conformers, Jews, and dissidents were rigorously persecuted. The further existence of the emirate of Granada could not be tolerated, [DEVIATIO]

The final conquest of Granada began in 1481 and lasted for ten years. In wealth and population Granada was as superior among the provinces of Spain as Constantinople among the cities of the East. Seventy walled towns, supplied by the most fertile countryside, might have hoped to resist indefinitely. But the dissensions of the Moorish rulers gave entry to the united Spanish forces. When Granada itself was besieged, a wooden city called Santa Fe or ‘Holy Faith’ was built to house the besiegers. The capitulation came on 2 January 1492. In the eyes of Christian enthusiasts, Constantinople was avenged.

DEVIATIO

NO medieval institution has attracted greater opprobrium from later ages than the Holy Inquisition. To many modern commentators, the ferocity aroused during the pursuit of heretics, Jews, or witches [HEXEN] is often incomprehensible. The inquisitors were simply deranged. Yet a little reflection suggests that the phenomenon is not exclusively medieval. The definition of ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ is always subjective. People whose unconventional conduct threatens entrenched interests can easily be denounced as ‘mad’ or ‘dangerous’. Comparisons have been made between the Inquisition and the contemporary medical establishment’s opposition to the Mental Health Movement.1 They can also be made with the treatment of dissidents to the Soviet regime, who in the 1980s were still regularly consigned to psychiatric clinics, diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’, and forcibly disabled with drugs.2

The conquest of Granada was accompanied by an appalling breach of good faith. Promises of religious toleration were not kept. When Queen Isabella hesitated, the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, is said to have held out a cross with the words: ‘Judas sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. How many will you take for this cross?’ The Jews were then faced with a decree enforcing conversion or banishment.38 Perhaps 20,000 Sephardic families chose exile—many, ironically, in Smyrna and Istanbul, whence the Sultan sent ships to collect them.39 The class of conversos, many still secretly loyal to Judaism, was greatly enlarged. By a decree of 1502 the Muslims were given the same choice. Many migrated to North Africa; the remainder were left to form a second group of dubious converts, the moriscos. Only in Aragon did the Cortes prevent the King from compelling the Muslim serfs, the mudejares, to change religion. In a climate of religious hatred and suspicion, the Inquisitors could barely cope. The fires of the autos-da-fé, the ‘acts of faith’, burned all over Spain. Spaniards became obsessed with the limpieza de sangre, the ‘purity of blood’.

By coincidence, the fall of Granada in 1492 was witnessed by a Genoese sailor who had come to the camp at Santa Fe to seek the Catholic monarchs’ patronage. Cristoforo Colombo (c.1446–1506), known as Cristóbal Colón, had long been seeking their support for his scheme to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in search of Asia. There, after the fall of Granada, he struck the deal. On 3 August, as ‘Admiral of the Ocean’, he set sail from the port of Palos in three tiny ships—the Santa María, the Pinta, and the Niña. Ten weeks later, at two in the morning on 12 (21) October, a crewman sighted land. Columbus landed at daybreak, kissed the ground, named it San Salvador, and laid claim to it for Castile and Leon. He returned to Palos, via the Azores and Lisbon, on 15 March 1493, convinced that he had discovered a route to the (East) ‘Indies’.40

That same year, after vigorous petitioning by Spain and Portugal, Pope Alexander VI agreed to set a boundary between their respective spheres of overseas interest. All land discovered to the west of a line lying 100 leagues beyond the Azores was to belong to Spain; everything to the east was to be Portugal’s. The world was neatly divided in two on the sole authority of a pope. In 1494, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, the line was moved 250 leagues further west. The event was nicely medieval. Yet it could hardly have taken place, still less been exploited, if the Iberian kingdoms had not been freed from their preoccupations with Islam. After all, Ferdinand and Isabella had stubbornly refused to negotiate with Columbus until the fall of Granada was accomplished, [STATE]

Three thousand miles to the east, at the other extremity of Christendom, the shift of the Christian–Moslem frontier was having equally unsettling effects. By 1452, almost the whole of the Orthodox Christian world was subject to foreign rule. The Orthodox of the Greek Rite, with the exception of the tiny Byzantine Empire and its dependencies, had fallen under Ottoman rule. The Orthodox of the Slavonic Rite, with minor exceptions, had all fallen under Tartar, Polish-Lithuanian, or Hungarian rule. So, when Constantinople surrendered, it looked as if the Orthodox of Europe were set to endure the same unending captivity that the Orthodox of Asia and Africa had endured since the seventh century. In one place alone, in the city of Moscow, there were thoughts of a different destiny.

Moscow in the mid-fifteenth century, though nominally subject to the Tartar khan, enjoyed a wide measure of autonomy. It was ruled by the Grand Prince Vassily II (r. 1425–62), who, having lost his sight, relied heavily on his son and heir. Ivan III (r. 1462–1505), therefore, was already an experienced politician when he mounted the throne. The once powerful Tartar Horde was greatly weakened, and Moscow had avoided payment of the annual tribute since 1452. As a result, Ivan had hopes of escaping ‘the Tartar yoke’ for good. In this, it was obvious that he should stress his role as the champion of the Orthodox Christians against the Muslims of the south and the Catholics of Poland-Lithuania to the west. If only he could gain recognition of his sovereignty, he would then become the one and only independent and Orthodox prince on earth.

Oddly enough, Ivan’s ambition was greatly assisted by the schemes of the Roman Pope. After the disaster of 1453 the Papacy had accepted the wardship of Zoe Palaeologos (b. 1445), niece of the last Byzantine Emperor. Zoe, daughter of Thomas, Despot of Morea, had been born in Greece, but had been well educated by tutors in Rome. In 1469 she was a bright young woman of 24, eager to escape her guardians. Pope Paul II, a Venetian, thought that he could revive the union of Florence and forge a Muscovite alliance against the Turks. So, when he heard that Ivan III was recently widowed, he produced the ideal candidate. Papal emissaries appeared in Moscow, and the match was made. Zoe travelled after them via the Baltic port of Reval. She was readmitted to the Orthodox faith, and married to Ivan on 12 November 1472. The prestige which attended Ivan’s marriage to a Byzantine princess is hard to exaggerate. Up to then, Moscow had been the most peripheral province of the most downtrodden branch of Christendom. Its princes were barely on the map. But now they were touching the mantle of the Caesars. They were only one step removed from adopting the imperial mantle for themselves.

STATE

IN 1493, the year in which Columbus returned to the Kingdom of Castile, the map of Europe from Portugal to the Khanate of Astrakhan contained at least thirty sovereign states. Five hundred years later, if one discounts Andorra and Monaco, the Union of Kalmar and the Swiss Federation, whose independence had been little more than de facto, no single one of those thirty states had maintained its separate sovereign existence. Of the sovereign states on the map of Europe in 1993, four had been formed in the sixteenth century, four in the seventeenth, two in the eighteenth, seven in the nineteenth, and no fewer than thirty-six in the twentieth. The rise and fall of states represents one of the most important phenomena of modern Europe (see Appendix III, p. 1268).

State-formation in Europe has been analysed in many ways. The traditional approach was based on constitutional and international law. The aim was to describe the legal framework within which empires, monarchies, and republics organize their government, control their dependencies, and gain recognition. More recently, greater emphasis has fallen on long-term considerations—on statistical calculations of the longevity of states,1 for example. Norbert Elias viewed state-formation as part of a civilizational process operating since the period of feudal fragmentation through the steady accretion of princely power.2

Others have looked more at the interplay of internal structures and external relations. In one view, three types of state have prevailed— tribute-raising empires, systems of fragmented sovereignty, and national states. Their internal life-force has been dominated either by the concentration of capital, as in Venice or the United Provinces, or by the concentration of coercion, as in Russia, or by varying concentrations of the two—as in Britain, France, or Prussia. Money and violence were the prime movers. The performance of states in the international arena depended on their participation in the elaborate multilateral power combinations that have constantly coalesced and recoalesced during more than 100 major wars in Europe since the Renaissance. The key questions were: ‘How did states make war?’ and ‘How did wars make states?’ Many of the issues resemble those examined in a more empirical fashion by Paul Kennedy.4

The supposedly ultimate destination, the nation-state, has been achieved many times. But the paths leading to that destination have been extremely varied. In the last resort, everything turned on power. ‘Qui a la force’, wrote Richelieu, ‘a souvent la raison en matière d’État.’ In short, ‘might is right’. Which only makes one wonder whether the nation-state should really be the ultimate destination.

In 1477–8 Ivan moved against Novgorod the Great, whose five provinces far exceeded the territory of Moscow. Novgorod had recently conceded the secular overlordship of Lithuania and the ecclesiastical authority of the Metropolitan of Kiev. Ivan saw this as a personal affront, and his army soon forced the poorly defended city to capitulate and to switch allegiance. A second visitation was made to suppress sedition, and was followed by mass executions and deportations. Pskov and Vyatka received the same treatment. In the summer of 1480 Ahmad, Khan of the Golden Horde, launched the third of his expeditions to enforce payment of Moscow’s tribute. He had counted on the aid of Poland-Lithuania, but it did not materialize. When Ivan held firm, and Ahmad retired empty handed, Moscow’s dependence on the Horde was taken to have finally lapsed. Moscow was free. By that time Ivan had started to refer to himself as ‘Tsar’ and ‘Samodyerzhets’—Russian equivalents of Caesar and Autokrator. Like Charlemagne almost 700 years before, a semi-barbarian prince was building his image not as the founder of a modern state, but rather as the reincarnator of the old, dead, and barely lamented empire of the Romans.

The Feast of Epiphany, 6 January 1493, the Kremlin, Moscow. The celebration of the holy day was proceeding amidst the splendours of the Grand Duke’s private chapel in the Blagoveshchensky Sobor, the Cathedral of the Annunciation. It was the twelfth day of Christmas, the final stage of the season of the Nativity, a remembrance of the time when Christ made himself manifest to the Three Kings. Sonorous voices intoned the Byzantine Rite in words of Old Church Slavonic, which echoed round every corner of the cathedral’s domes and frescoed walls. The icon screen, which cut off the inner sanctuary, was far older than the church. It was covered by rows of icons painted by Moscow’s greatest medieval artists— Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, Prokhor of Gorodets. Black-robed and bearded priests moved round the chancel, performing the preliminary ceremonies of vesting, censing, and veiling of the gifts.

This being Epiphany, the alternate liturgy of St Basil the Great took the place of the more usual liturgy of St John Chrysostom.41 In its Slavonic version, it was essentially the same as that which was used by the Orthodox of the Balkans. Though familiar, it was no more intelligible to the Russian congregation standing patiently before the screen than Latin was to Italians or Spaniards. The public service, the Synaxis or Assembly, began as the celebrants entered the nave, and a deacon recited the Litany of Peace: ‘For peace from on high, and for the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the Lord. For the peace of the whole world …’ There followed hymns, ferial anthems, psalms, the Beatitudes, lessons from the Apostles and from the Gospel, prayers, further litanies, and the Cherubic Hymn of the Thrice-Holy. The Gospel reading, introduced by the usual Preface, was taken from the first verses of Matthew 2:

Map 15. The Growth of Muscovy

The priest, bowing as he takes up the Book, and coming out of the holy doors preceded by tapers, turns to the west and saith:
‘Wisdom, be steadfast, let us hear the holy Gospel. Peace be with you all.’
Choir. ‘And with thy spirit.’
Deacom ‘The Lesson of the holy Gospel according to St Matthew.’
Choir. ‘Glory be to Thee, O Lord.’
Priest: ‘Let us give heed.’
The deacon then reads the Lesson:

(Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the Tsar, behold there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying: Where is he that is born Tsar of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him… )

The second part of the service, the Anaphora or offering of the gifts, began with the Great Entrance, when priests and deacons processed round the nave with prayers, censers, and candles. There followed the recital of the Creed, the preparation of the bread and the wine, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Communion. During Communion, the choir sang ‘Receive ye the body of Christ, Taste ye of the fountain of immortal life’. The priest, in the Orthodox tradition, mentioned every communicant by name. ‘The servant of God, Ivan, partaketh of the holy precious body and blood of… Our Saviour Jesus Christ, unto remission of his sins and unto everlasting life.’ After the thanksgiving, the priest distributed the blessed bread, held up the Cross for the people to kiss, then re-entered the chancel before the gates were shut behind him. The closing words of the Dismissal—’Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace’—were accompanied by hymns ending with the Contakion of the Sixth Tone:

Unshakeable foundation of the Church hast Thou shewn Thyself,
Unto all mankind bequeathing an assured mastery
Sealed by Thy ordinances,
Basil by heaven proven most holy,
Both now, and for ever and world without end. Amen.

Far away, unbeknown to the people of Moscow, the Admiral of the Ocean was battling at that very time against midwinter gales on the final stage of his return voyage to Spain. He would land at Palos within the week.

That year, the Christmas celebrations in Moscow were coloured by very special emotions. Learned monks had been predicting for some time that no one would live to see the year completed. According to Orthodox calculations, August 1492—the month when Columbus had set sail on his outward voyage—marked the end of the seventh millennium since the Creation; and it had been widely foretold to be the End of the World. Indeed, no steps had been taken to calculate the Church calendar for the following years. Although the Orthodox used the same Julian calendar that was current in the Latin Church, they had a different system for counting the anni mundi, the years of creation. Also, as in Byzantium, it was their custom to start the ecclesiastical year on 1 September. So, given their belief that the ‘seven days’ of creation were a metaphor for seven millennia, and their dating of the Creation to 5509 BC, AD 1492 was reckoned equivalent to 7000 AM, and the likeliest date for Judgement Day. 31 August was the critical date. Failing that, the crack of doom might be delayed until 31 December, the last day of the secular year—and the midpoint of the season of Nativity. When Epiphany was reached without incident, Moscow breathed a sigh of relief.43

Moscow, in fact, stood on the brink of a new career. Its Grand Duke, Ivan III, had not been counting on the Day of Judgement. He was nearing completion of grandiose plans to remodel the Kreml or ‘fortified city’ of his capital. By symbolic and ideological means, he was preparing to launch the powerful Russian myth which was to be a fitting partner for Moscow’s growing political might.

Most of the cities of Rus’ had their kremlins. But the Kremlin of Moscow, as redesigned by Ivan III, outshone anything that existed elsewhere. In January 1493 the vast enclosure of its red-brick walls and tall round towers had been completed only a few months earlier. It covered an irregular triangle round a perimeter of 2.5 km, enough to envelop half the City of London. At its heart was the airy expanse of an open square, round which were ranged four cathedrals and the grand ducal residence. The Cathedral of the Annunciation was in pristine state, having received its finishing touches only three years earlier. Its neighbour, the Uspensky Sobor, the Cathedral of the Dormition, the seat of the Metropolitan, was now thirteen years old. It had been built by the Bolognese architect Aristotle Firavanti, whose brief was to adapt the ancient Vladimir style to modern uses. It became a standard for Muscovite church architecture. Its interior provided a large open space, without galleries, under matching domed and vaulted compartments. Its frescos were still being painted in the inimitable bright colours and elongated figures of Dionysius the Greek. On the other side the Church of the Razpolozhenie, ‘of the Deposition of the Robe’, was seven years old. The Archangelsky Sobor, with its Renaissance façade, was still on the drawing board. The Granovitaya Palata or ‘Palace of the Facets’ by Marco Rulto and Pietro Solano—so called from the diamond-cut stones of its facade—had just been occupied by Ivan’s household. They moved in after several years sharing the house of his favourite minister. It replaced the former wooden hall which had served Ivan’s predecessors for centuries. Few capitals in Christendom short of Rome or Constantinople could compare with such splendour.

Within the Palace of Facets, Ivan’s household was riven by the rivalry of two powerful women—Zoe Palaeologos, his second wife, and Elena Stepanovna, his daughter-in-law. Zoe, the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, had married Ivan after the death of his first wife, Maria of Tver. Her preoccupation was to protect the interests of her seven children, headed by the thirteen-year-old Vasily. Elena was the daughter of Stephen IV, Hospodar of Moldavia, and widow of Ivan’s first heir and successor, Ivan the Younger, who had recently died. Her concern was to preserve the interests of her nine-year-old son, Dmitri. In 1493 Ivan III had not yet decided whether he should name his son Vasily or his grandson Dmitri to succeed him: he was to favour each by turns. The tension beneath the surface in the Kremlin must have been electric.44

Ivan III is popularly remembered in Russia as the Tsar who threw off the Tartar yoke. He might be better considered as an exponent of Tartar financial, military, and political methods, who used the shifting alliances of khans and princes to replace the Tartar yoke with a Muscovite one. In his struggle with the Golden Horde, whose hegemony he definitively rejected after 1480, his closest ally was the Khan of the Crimea, who helped him to attack the autonomy of his fellow Christian principalities to a degree that the Tartars had never attempted. From the Muscovite point of view, which later enjoyed a monopoly, ‘Ivan the Great’ was the restorer of ‘Russian’ hegemony. From the viewpoint of the Novgorodians or the Pskovians he was the Antichrist, the destroyer of Russia’s best traditions. When he came to write his will, he described himself, as his father had done, as ‘the much-sinning slave of God’.45

Ivan III had first called himself Tsar or ‘Caesar’ twenty years before. He did so in a treaty with the republic of Pskov, presumably to laud his superiority over other local princes; and he repeated the exercise on several occasions in the 1480s. But Tsar, though a cut above Grand Duke, was not the equivalent of the Byzantine title of Basileus. It could not be construed as a full imperial dignity unless accompanied by all the other trappings of Empire. Caesar, after all, was the term that had been used to designate the co-emperors and deputy emperors of the supreme Augustus.

In 1489 Ivan III had considered another proposition. In his dealings with the Habsburgs, he was told that a royal crown could be procured for him from the Pope. His standing in the West would certainly have been enhanced by regal status. But the title of rex or koro had connotations that offended Muscovite pride. [KRAL] To accept would be to repeat the alleged treason to the True Faith which the Greeks had committed at Florence. So Ivan refused. ‘My ancestors’, he explained, ‘were friendly with the Emperors who had once given Rome to the Pope.’ What he did do, though, was to borrow the Habsburgs’ imperial emblem. As from the 1490s, the double-headed eagle began to appear as the symbol of state in Moscow as in Vienna, as indeed in Constantinople, [AQUILA]

Apart from its fears about the end of the world, the Muscovite Church was enduring a period of great uncertainty. It had broken with the Patriarch of Constantinople (see pp. 446–7) without yet finding a fully independent role. Unlike the Metropolitan of Kiev, who was a resident of Lithuania, the Moscow Metropolitan was elected by his bishops, and headed an ecclesiastical organization which admitted no superior. For forty years it had been impossible to reconcile this state of affairs with the absence of an emperor, and hence with the Byzantine tradition that Church and State were indivisible. Just as there could be no emperor without the true faith, there could be no true faith without an Emperor. Some had pinned their hopes on the reconquest of Constantinople for an Orthodox Christian emperor—the so-called ‘Great Idea’. Others hoped that some arrangement might be reached with the German Emperor of the Latins. But that was rejected. The one remaining alternative was for Moscow to do what both Serbia and Bulgaria had done in the past—to find an Emperor of their own.

The immediate problem, however, was to draw up a new paschal canon, with its calculations of the Easters for the eighth millennium. This is the task to which Metropolitan Zosimus had been putting his mind in the autumn of 1492. ‘We await the Advent of our Lord,’ he wrote in the Preface, ‘but the hour of his coming cannot be established.’ He then appended a brief historical summary. Constantine had founded the New Rome, and St Vladimir had baptized Rus’. Now Ivan III was to be ‘the new Emperor Constantine of the new Constantinople—Moscow’.47 This was the first indirect mention of the pedigree with which Moscow would now be clothed.

Also in 1492, and also for the first time, the ‘new Constantinople—Moscow’ may have been given its more familiar label of ‘the Third Rome’. In that year Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod supposedly received a translation of the Roman Legend of the White Klobuck, and with it a preface explaining how a manuscript of the legend had been found in Rome. Scholars disagree about the age of this text, parts of which may have been interpolated at a later date. But it is not irrelevant that the Preface contains a clear reference to Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’. The author of the Preface is sometimes equated with a known translator who was working on the Apocalypse of Ezra. This work was part of Archbishop Gennadius’ project to endow the Muscovite Church with a complete version of the Bible equivalent to the Latin Vulgate.48

Once the Russian principalities were brought to heel, Moscow’s imperial ambitions would obviously be directed against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania— Muscovy’s western neighbour. Lithuania had benefited from the Mongol invasions, using its base on the northern periphery to expand its annexations among the fragments of the former Rus’, just as Moscow had done. By the end of the fifteenth century Lithuania, like Muscovy, controlled a huge swathe of territory— essentially the Dnieper basin—which stretched from the shore of the Baltic to the confines of the Black Sea.

Unlike Muscovy, however, Lithuania was open to Western influences. For more than a century the Grand Duchy had flourished under the personal union with Poland (see pp. 429–30). By the 1490s the Lithuanian court at Wilno and the Catholic ruling élite were to a large extent polonized in language and political culture. The Lithuanian dynasty was in possession not only of Poland and Lithuania but of Bohemia and Hungary as well. Unlike Muscovy, Lithuania permitted a wide measure of religious diversity. The Roman Catholic establishment did not impede either the numerical predominance of Orthodox Christianity or the steady influx of a strong Jewish element. Unlike Muscovy, the Orthodox Church in Lithuania had not broken with Constantinople nor with its ancient Byzantine loyalties. The Metropolitan of Kiev had every reason to resist Moscow’s separatist line, which was dividing Slavic Orthodoxy and moving inexorably towards the formation of a breakaway Russian Orthodox Church.

In January 1493 Moscow’s relations with Lithuania were about to take a new turn. Six months earlier Casimir Jagiellonczyk, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, had died, dividing his realm between his second and third sons. The Polish kingdom passed to Jan Olbracht, Lithuania to the unmarried Alexander. (The eldest son was already King of Bohemia and Hungary.) Ivan III had seen the possibilities. On the one hand, he was preparing an embassy which would travel to Wilno, and would launch negotiations leading to a political marriage between Grand Duke Alexander and Ivan’s daughter Elena. At the same time, he was setting conditions which would undermine the previous modus vivendi of the two states. For the first time in Moscow’s history, he armed his ambassador with instructions demanding recognition of the hitherto unknown title ofgosudar’ vseya Rust—‘lord of all-Rus'’.49 It was a classic diplomatic double hold—one part apparently friendly, the other potentially hostile. Ivan was deliberately pulling Lithuania into an engagement that called into question the future of all the eastern Slavs.

To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan’s envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.50 As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania’s political future.

The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.

By 1493, therefore, all the main elements of the ideology of the ‘Third Rome’ were in existence. There was an autonomous branch of the Orthodox Church looking for an emperor; there was a prince, related to the last Byzantine Emperor, who had already called himself Tsar; and there was a claim to the lordship of all-Rus'. All that was lacking was a suitably ingenious ideologue, who could weld these elements into the sort of mystical theory that was demanded by an intensely theocratic state. Such a man was at hand.

Philotheus of Pskov (c. 1450–1525) was a learned monk of Pskov’s Eleazar monastery. He was familiar with the biblical prophecies of Ezra and Daniel, with historical precedents from Serbia and the second Bulgarian Empire, with the Pseudo-Methodius and the Chronicle of Manasses, and with the Legend of the White Klobuck. Such knowledge was not unique. Philotheus was unusual only in his willingness to use these things for the benefit of the Muscovite princes. Pskov, like Novgorod, lived in fear and trembling of Moscow. Most of its monks were fiercely anti-Muscovite. When they made references in their Chronicle to Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, or to the four beasts of Daniel’s Vision, they were apt to do so in a manner that identified Nebuchadnezzar with Moscow. For whatever reason, Philotheus was prepared to turn the material round to Moscow’s advantage. In 1493, in his early forties, he held no office of authority in the monastery where he would later rule as hegumen or abbot; and he had not yet written any of the public Epistles which were to make him famous. But the ferment in the Church which was to shape his views, was already in progress. In due course he was to be the advocate of the total submission of all Christians to the Tsar, and of total opposition to the Latin Church. In his Epistle to Ivan’s successor, he enjoins the new Tsar to rule justly, because the world was now entering the terminal phase of history:

And now I say unto Thee, take care and take heed, pious Tsar: all the empires of Christendom are united in thine. For two Romes have fallen, and the Third exists; and there will not be a fourth. Thy Christian Empire, according to the great theologian, will not pass away. And, for the Church, the word of the blessed David will be fulfilled: ‘she is my place of eternal rest’…51

Later, in his Epistle to Munexin, Philotheus would fulminate ‘Against the Astrologers and the Latins’:

And now, alone, the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the East shines more brightly than the sun in the universe; and only the great Orthodox Tsar of Rome, like Noah saved from the flood in the ark, directs the Church …52

Here, twenty years after Ivan Ill’s death, but clearly inspired by his policies, was the definitive formulation of an ideology of Church and State that left no inch for compromise.

Later Russian tradition was to hold that Moscow had simply inherited the Byzantine mantie. In reality, whilst Byzantine forms were retained, the essence of the Byzantine ethos was lost. Muscovite ideologues had little interest in the universal and ecumenical ideals of East Roman Christianity. The most distinguished historian of these matters has described the ideology of‘Third Rome’ as ‘a meretricious substitute’. ‘The Christian universalism of Byzantium was being transformed and distorted within the more narrow framework of Muscovite nationalism.’

Muscovite theology was disturbed in Ivan Ill’s later years by a couple of related controversies that would both be settled in favour of the most uncompromising elements. One controversy centred on the views of a sect or tendency known as the zhidovstvuyushchie or ‘Judaizers’. The other centred on the supposed scandal of Christian monasteries growing rich through the possession of land. Joseph, Abbot of Volokhamsk, was the organizer both of the ‘anti-Judaizers’ and of ‘the possessors’.

Landed property was inseparable from the power of the Muscovite Church. But it was opposed by a company of puritanical monks led by the ‘Elders beyond the Volga’ who cherished Orthodox monasticism’s older, eremitical tradition. Ivan III seems to have prepared a scheme for secularizing monastic wealth, but was persuaded to desist. Matters only came to a head after his death, when his former favourite Patrikeev, now turned monk, published a new edition of the Nomocanon the Orthodox manual of canon law. One of Patrikeev’s associates, Maxim the Greek, who offered a ‘non-possessorial’ interpretation of the Church’s landed property, was lucky to escape with his life.

The Judaizers provoked still greater passions. They had emerged in the 1470s in Novgorod, where they were said to have formed an anti-Muscovite faction. Their views were allegedly inspired by Jews from Poland and Lithuania, and their members were said to be clandestine adherents of Judaism. Their activities do not seem to have worried the Tsar, who appointed a suspect Novgorodian to be archpriest of the Uspensky Cathedral; and they may have enjoyed the support of Elena Stepanovna. Despite a Council convened in 1490 to examine charges of anti-trinitarianism and iconoclasm, they continued to circulate in the highest circles. But Abbot Joseph did not give up. In 1497, in his Prosvetitel' or ‘Enlightener’, he named none other than Metropolitan Zosima as the chief ‘Judaizer and Sodomizer’, ‘a foul evil wolf’.54 Abbot Joseph and his partner, Archbishop Gennadius, were both admirers of the Spanish Inquisition, and their zeal was eventually rewarded by a grand auto-da-fé. They had succeeded in persuading their compatriots to believe what would prove a recurrent theme in Russian history—that evil came from the West. In their day, the West meant in the first instance Novgorod, and beyond Novgorod, Poland-Lithuania.

Ivan Ill’s diplomacy was taking the same direction.55 Diplomacy in those days moved extremely slowly. Muscovite embassies took anything between six months and four years to return and report from foreign countries; and ambassadors often found on arrival that the situation no longer matched their instructions. Even so, it was clear by the 1490s that the encirclement of Lithuania was becoming Moscow’s top priority. Ivan’s father had kept the peace with Lithuania for decades; and on his death Ivan and his mother had been entrusted to the care of ‘my Brother, the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, Casimir’.56 All this was being revised.

By 1493, Ivan III was coming to the end of twenty years of intensive diplomatic activity. The common thread was to check and to encircle the Jagiellons. His treaty with Stephen IV, Hospodar of Moldavia, sealed by the marriage of his son, had tried in vain to prevent Moldavia paying homage to the Polish king. His scheme for an anti-Jagiellonian pact with Hungary was ruined by the sudden death of Matthias Corvinus, and by the subsequent election of Władysław Jagiellon as King of Hungary. He even made contact with the independent dukes of Mazovia. As from 1486, Ivan III repeatedly exchanged embassies with the Habsburgs, who until then had wrongly thought that Muscovy was a fief of Lithuania. In 1491 an Austrian envoy, Jörg von Thurn, outlined plans for a grand anti-Jagiellonian coalition made up of the Empire, the Teutonic Knights, Moldavia, and the Tartars. In January 1493 Ivan’s envoy, Yuri Trakhaniot, tracked Maximilian down to Colmar only to find that the Emperor had already made his peace with the Jagiellons and was now more interested in a Crusade. Ivan Ill’s relations with the Crimea included an important anti-Lithuanian component. His main use for them was as allies against the Golden Horde; and in June 1491 he sent three armies to help disperse the camp which the Golden Horde had established at the mouth of the Dnieper. At the same time, he could not fail to notice that the Tartars, when sweetened by Moscow, spent most of their energies raiding Poland and Lithuania.

In the winter of 1492–3 Muscovy was engaged in a desultory frontier war with Lithuania. Several of the border princelings had changed sides. The Prince of Ryazan’ was preparing to challenge a punitive incursion mounted by the Lithuanian Voivode of Smolensk. The Muscovite army, which had orders to capture the city of Vyazma on the headwaters of the Dnieper, moved off within a few days of the Muscovite peace mission to Wilno. Whether peace or war was uppermost in Ivan’s mind was anyone’s guess.

In this age of discovery, therefore, Moscow, though remote, was not totally isolated. Each of the Muscovite embassies returned with foreign engineers, architects, and gunners in tow; and German and Polish merchants came every year to buy large stocks of furs. It is true that there was no direct contact with Tudor England, with Valois France, or with the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Baltic trade with the Netherlands stopped in Livonia, and the route round the North Cape had not yet been opened. Even so, Moscow had well-established lines of communication with the rest of Europe. In the north, the ‘German Road’ led through Novgorod to Reval or to Riga, and thence by sea to Lübeck. Overland, the forest trails stretched westwards to the frontier before Smolensk, and thence to Wilno and Warsaw. Ivan III had inaugurated a system of posts and post-horses, whose upkeep he commended in his will.57 To the south, the ancient rivers carried travellers rapidly to the Caspian or the Black Sea, and thence by ship to all points of the Mediterranean. Despite the Ottoman advance, Moscow was still in close touch with the old Byzantine world—that is, with the Balkans, with Greece, especially Athos, and via Greece with Italy.

Moscow, in any case, was making discoveries of its own. In 1466–72 a merchant of Tver, Afanasii Nikitin (d. 1472), made a six-year journey to Persia and India. He travelled out via Baku and Hormuz, and returned via Trebizond and Caifa. His adventures were written down in an early travel book, Khozenie za tri moria (A Journey Beyond the Three Seas). Ten years later the military expedition of Saltyk and Kurbskii crossed the Urals and reached the headwaters of the Irtysk and the Ob (a feat equivalent in scale to that of Lewis and Clark in America 300 years later). In 1491 two Hungarian prospectors had penetrated the Arctic tributaries of the Pechora, where silver and copper had been discovered. This discovery probably explains the arrival in Moscow in January 1493 of an Austrian prospector called Snups, who carried letters from the Emperor Maximilian asking him to be allowed to explore the Ob. Since Ivan’s link with the Habsburgs was no longer convenient, Snups was refused.

As for the Admiral of the Ocean, news of his exploits were brought to Moscow with a quarter of a century’s delay in the company of Maxim the Greek. Maxim Grek (Michael Trivolis, c.1470–1560) belonged to the dying Byzantine world whose parts still formed one cultural region. He was born at Arta in Epirus under Ottoman rule, whence his family moved to Venetian Corfu. In 1493 he was in Florence, studying with the Platonists and listening with approval to Savonarola’s sermons. After further studies at Venice and at Mirandola, where he specialized in the exegesis of Greek texts, he took the vows of the Dominican order in Savonarola’s own monastery of San Marco. Later, as the monk Maximos, he worked for a decade as a translator in the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos, in a pan-Orthodox and graeco-Slav environment, where the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic traditions did not apply. He was then invited to Moscow to organize the Tsar’s collection of Greek and Byzantine manuscripts, which Muscovite scholars were no longer trained to decipher. He soon fell foul of the hard-line faction of the Muscovite Church, which accused him of sorcery, espionage, and respect for the Patriarch of Constantinople. Yet he survived his lengthy imprisonment, met Ivan IV in person, and enjoyed his patronage. He was ‘one of the last of his kind’.

Maxim’s writings, which appeared in the 1550s, make mention of‘a large island called Cuba’.59 There is no doubt that by then he had a firm knowledge of Columbus’s landings in the Caribbean. But the chronology of his career is important. Since Maxim spent three decades incarcerated in a Muscovite gaol, it is reasonable to suppose that he brought the information with him when he first travelled to Moscow in 1518, twenty-five years after Columbus’s first voyage.

It is one of the wonderful coincidences of history that modern ‘Russia’ and modern ‘America’ both took flight in the same year of AD 1493. Europeans learned of the ‘New World’, as they saw it, at the self-same moment that Muscovites learned that their ‘Old World’ was not yet coming to an end.

* The arrangement stayed intact until 1623, when the Palatinate was replaced by Bavaria. In 1648 the Palatinate was reinstated alongside Bavaria, and in 1708 Hanover was raised to the ninth Electorate. Napoleon’s extensive amendments were never put into practice.