VII

RENATIO

Renaissances and Reformations, c. 1450–1670

THERE is a strong sense of unreality about the Renaissance. The mode of thinking which is supposed to distinguish modern European civilization both from medieval Christendom and from other non-European civilizations such as Islam had no clear beginning and no end. For a very long time it remained the preserve of a small intellectual élite, and had to compete with rival trends of thought, old and new. In the so-called ‘Age of the Renaissance and Reformation’ which conventionally begins c.1450, it can only be described as a minority interest. There were large sectors of European society, and huge areas of European territory, where as yet it wielded no influence whatsoever. It somehow contrived to be the most remarkable feature of the age and yet to be divorced from the main aspects of everyday political, social, and cultural life. It was untypical and unrepresentative, yet immensely significant. Like the wonderful figures of Sandro Botticelli, which are among its most powerful manifestations, whether the exquisite Primavera (1478) or the ethereal Venus Rising from the Waves (c.1485), its feet somehow did not touch the ground. It floated over the surface of the world from which it arose, a disembodied abstraction, a new energizing spirit.

Faced with the problem, many historians of the period have abandoned their earlier concerns. It is no longer the fashion to write so much about those minority interests. Humanist thought, reformation theology, scientific discovery, and overseas exploration have had to give way to studies of material conditions, of the medieval continuities, and of popular belief (and unbelief) as opposed to high culture. The professionals now like to spotlight magic, vagrancy, disease, or the decimation of colonial populations. This may be a very proper corrective; but it is as odd to forget Leonardo or Luther as it once was to ignore a Nostradamus or the Miller of Friuli. No one who wishes to know why Europe was so different in the mid-seventeenth century from what it had been in the fifteenth can afford to bypass the traditional subjects.

Even so, the incautious reader needs to be reminded. The world of Renaissance and Reformation was also the world of divination, astrology, miracles, conjuration, witchcraft, necromancy, folk cures, ghosts, omens, and fairies. Magic continued to compete, and to interact with religion and science. Indeed, the dominion of magic among the common people held sway through a long period of cohabitation with the new ideas over two centuries or more.1 One implication is that this ‘Early Modern Period’ may not be quite so modern after all. Despite the fresh seeds that were sown, it could well have had more in common with the medievalism that preceded it than with the Enlightenment which followed.

Map 16. Europe, 1519

The Renaissance, therefore, cannot be easily defined. It is easiest to say what it was not. ‘Ever since the Renaissance invented itself some six hundred years ago,’ complained one American historian, ‘there has been no agreement as to what it is.’ The Renaissance, for example, did not merely refer to the burgeoning interest in classical art and learning, for such a revival had been gathering pace ever since the twelfth century. Nor did it involve either a total rejection of medieval values or a sudden return to the world-view of Greece and Rome. Least of all did it involve the conscious abandonment of Christian belief. The term renatio or ‘rebirth’ was a Latin caique for a Greek theological term, palingenesis, used in the sense of’spiritual rebirth’ or ‘resurrection from the dead’. The essence of the Renaissance lay not in any sudden rediscovery of classical civilization but rather in the use which was made of classical models to test the authority underlying conventional taste and wisdom. It is incomprehensible without reference to the depths of disrepute into which the medieval Church, the previous fount of all authority, had fallen. In this the Renaissance was part and parcel of the same movement which resulted in religious reforms. In the longer term, it was the first stage in the evolution which led via the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment. It was the spiritual force which cracked the mould of medieval civilization, setting in motion the long process of disintegration which gradually gave birth to ‘modern Europe’, [BALLETTO]

In that process, the Christian religion was not abandoned. But the power of the Church was gradually corralled within the religious sphere: the influence of religion increasingly limited to the realm of private conscience. As a result the speculations of theologians, scientists, and philosophers, the work of artists and writers, and the policies of princes were freed from the control of a Church with monopoly powers and ‘totalitarian’ pretensions. The prime quality of the Renaissance has been defined as ‘independence of mind’. Its ideal was a person who, by mastering all branches of art and thought, need depend on no outside authority for the formation of knowledge, tastes, and beliefs. Such a person was l‘uomo universale, the ‘complete man’.3

The principal product of the new thinking lay in a growing conviction that humanity was capable of mastering the world in which it lived. The great Renaissance figures were filled with self-confidence. They felt that God-given ingenuity could, and should, be used to unravel the secrets of God’s universe; and that, by extension, man’s fate on earth could be controlled and improved. Here was the decisive break with the mentality of the Middle Ages, whose religiosity and mysticism were reinforced by exactly the opposite conviction—that men and women were the helpless pawns of Providence, overwhelmed by the incomprehensible workings of their environment and of their own nature. Medieval attitudes were dominated by a paralysing anxiety about human inadequacy, ignorance, impotence—in short, by the concept of universal sin. Renaissance attitudes, in contrast, were bred by a sense of liberation and refreshment, deriving from the growing awareness of human potential. Speculation, initiative, experiment, and exploration could surely be rewarded with success. Intellectual historians examine the Renaissance in terms of new ideas and new forms; psychologists would look more to the conquests of fears and inhibitions which had prevented the new ideas from flourishing for so long (see Appendix III, p. 1269).

BALLETTO

DANCE, having played a central role in pagan religious rites, was largely ignored during the Middle Ages, except for rustic entertainment. It is generally agreed that the secular dance spectacle performed by Bergonzio di Botta at the Duke of Milan’s wedding, at Tortona in 1489, is the earliest example of the modern genre on record. From Italy, the baletto was exported in the time of Catherine de’ Medici to the French court, where, under Louis XIV, it became a major art form. Lully’s Triomphe de I’Amour (1681) fixed the long-lasting genre of opera-ballet.

The modern theory and practice of ballet were largely developed in mid-eighteenth-century Paris, especially by the royal ballet master Jean Georges Noverre (1727–1810). Leading dancers such as Marie Camargo or Gaetano Vestris, who modestly called himself le dieu de la danse, based their training and performances on the grammar of the five classical positions. At a later stage, the combination of classical technique with Romantic music, such as the Coppélia (1870) of Léo Delibes or the Roy Douglas fantasia on Chopin tunes, LesSylphides (1909), proved immensely attractive.

Russia first imported French and Italian ballet under Peter the Great, but in the nineteenth century moved rapidly from imitation to creative excellence. Tchaikovsky’s music for Swan Lake (1876), Sleeping Beauty (1890), and The Nutcracker (1892) laid the foundations for Russia’s supremacy. In the last years of peace, the Ballets Russes launched by Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) enjoyed a series of unsurpassed triumphs. The choreography of Fokine, the dancing of Nizinski and Karsavina, and, above all, the scores of Stravinsky, brought ballet to its zenith with The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). After the Revolutions of 1917, the Ballets Russes stayed abroad, whilst the Soviet Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets combined stunning technical mastery with rigid artistic conservatism.

Modern dance, as opposed to ballet, is older than might be supposed. Its basic principles, of translating musical rhythm into corresponding bodily movements, were put forward by the music teacher Francois Delsarte (1811–71). Delsarte inspired the two principal practitioners of the art, the Swiss Jacques Dalcroze (1865–1950), the pioneer of rhythmic gymnastics, and the Hungarian Rodolf Laban (1879–1958). After modern dance in central Europe felHoul of the Nazis, the centre of gravity moved to North

No simple chronological framework can be imposed on the Renaissance. Literary historians look for its origins in the fourteenth-century songs and sonnets of Petrarch, who observed human emotions for their own sake (see Chapter VI). Art historians look back to the painters Giotto and Masaccio (1401–28), to the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1379–1446), who measured the dome of the Pantheon in Rome in order to build a still more daring dome for the cathedral in Florence, or to the sculptors Ghiberti (1378–1455) and Donatello (c.1386–1466). Political historians look back to Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), who first explained the mechanics of politics as power for power’s sake. Every one of these pioneers was a Florentine. As the first home of the Renaissance, Florence can fairly lay claim to be ‘the mother of modern Europe’, [FLAGELLATIO]

In those unmatched generations of versatile Florentines, no one ever outshone Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). The painter of perhaps the most celebrated picture in the world, La Gioconda (1506), he possessed seemingly limitless talents to pursue his equally limitless curiosity. His notebooks contain everything from anatomical drawings to designs for a helicopter, a submarine, a machine-gun. (Such mechanical inventions had been the rage in Germany at an even earlier period.’) His fame is surrounded by the mystery which derives from lost works, from the reputation of wizardry. It is said that, as a young boy in the street market in Florence, he bought cage-birds just to set them free. He did the same for the secrets of art and nature. He lived his last years in France, in the service of Francis I. He died in the Château de Cloux near Amboise on the Loire—in a part of the world which has been called ‘an Italy more Italian than Italy itself’.5 [LEONARDO]

The Renaissance was never confined to Italy or to Italian fashions, and its effects were steadily disseminated throughout Latin Christendom. Modern scholars sometimes overlook this fact. Such was the impact of the work of the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basle, 1860) that many people have been left unaware of the wider dimensions. In fact, the intellectual ferment of the period was observable from an early date in northern Europe, especially in the cities of Burgundy and Germany. In France it displayed many native strands in addition to imported Italian fashions. Nor was it confined to Italy’s immediate neighbours: it affected Hungary and Poland, for example, more deeply than Spain; and it met no insurmountable barrier until it reached the borders of the Orthodox world. Traces of the Renaissance were slight in countries absorbed by the Ottoman Empire; and in Muscovy they were limited to a few artistic imitations. Indeed, by giving a new lease of life to the Latin West, the Renaissance only deepened the gulf between East and West.

FLAGELLATIO

PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA (c.1415–92) painted the small study generally known as The Flagellation some time between 1447 and 1460. The picture, now in the Galleria Nazionale at Urbino, is remarkable for its diptych structure, for its architectural detail, for its stunning use of perspective, and, above all, for its enigmatic allegory (see Plate 39).1 The picture is divided into two distinct zones. On the left, a nocturnal flagellation scene takes place in the pearly interior of an antique courtyard. On the right, three large male figures converse in an open garden. The pale moonlight on the left is diffused by the daylight flooding in from the right.

The architectural elements are strangely ambiguous. The praetorium courtyard is severely classical. The heavy roof panels are supported by two rows of fluted Corinthian columns rising from a marble pavement. In the centre, a prisoner is tied to the column of the Helia capitolina, symbol of Jerusalem, surmounted by a golden statue. Yet two medieval houses with an overhanging belvedere appear alongside. Beyond is a patch of greenery and of blue sky. One section of the picture, therefore, was set in the past, the other in the present.

The two groups of figures do not betray any obvious connection. The flogging in the courtyard is watched by a seated official who wears a pointed ‘Palaeologi’ hat, by a turbaned Arab or Turk, and by an attendant in a short Roman toga. The foreground group in the garden consists of a bearded Greek dressed in round hat, maroon robe, and soft boots, a barefoot youth in red smock and laurel wreath, and a rich merchant dressed in a Flemish-style fur-hemmed brocade.

Piero uses perspective drawing to ensure that the small figure of the prisoner remains the central focus. The convergent lines of the beams, the roof panels and the columns, and the foreshortened marble squares of the pavement constitute a textbook exposition of an architectural setting which emphasizes the action within it.2

As for the allegory, a prominent exponent of Piero’s art has stated that the conflicting interpretations are too numerous to mention.3 The conventional view holds that The Flagellation portrays the scourging of Christ before Pilate. Many commentators have identified the barefoot youth as Oddantonio di Montefeltro. Yet the Byzantine accents are strong; and they suggest a number of interpretations connected to the Ottoman siege and conquest of Constantinople which dominated the news in the period. In which case, the prisoner may not be Christ, but St Martin, the seventh-century Roman Pope who met martyrdom at Byzantine hands. The presiding official may not be Pilate, but the Byzantine Emperor. The three foreground figures could be participants in the Council of Mantua (1459), where a Greek emissary begs the Western princes to mount a crusade to rescue the Eastern Empire.

A leading British authority, however, is adamant that the picture represents The Dream of St Jerome. Jerome once dreamed that he was being flogged for reading the pagan Cicero. This would explain the discordance between the two sections. The three foreground figures—two men and ‘a barefoot angel’—’are discussing the relation between classical and patristic literature embodied in the story of St Jerome’s dream’.4

Linear perspective was the artistic sensation of the era.5 It so excited Piero’s contemporary, Paolo Uccello, that he would wake his wife in bed to discuss it. It was a pictorial system for creating a realistic image of the three-dimensional world on a flat, two-dimensional surface. It set out to present the world as seen by the human eye, and as such marked a fundamental rejection of the hieratical proportions of medieval art. It was first discovered by Brunelleschi in his explorations of classical architecture, and expounded in many theoretical treatises headed by Alberti’s De Pictura(1435), by Piero’s own De Prospettiva Pingendi (pre-1475), and by Dürer’s Treatise on Measurement (1525). Its rules included the pictorial convergence of parallel lines towards an illusory ‘vanishing-point’ and ‘horizon line’, the decreasing size of objects in relation to their distance from the ‘viewing point’, and the foreshortening of features lying along the central line of vision.6 The pioneering examples of the system are to be found in the bronze panels of Ghiberti’s ‘Gates of Paradise’ (1401–24) in the Baptistery at Florence, and in Masaccio’s fresco of the Trinity (c.1427) in the nave of St Maria Novella. Other standard items include Uccello’s Battle/e of San Romagno (c.1450), Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1480), and Leonardo’s Last Supper (1497).

Perspective was to dominate representational art for the next 400 years. Leonardo called it ‘the rein and rudder of painting’.7 A modern critic was to call it ‘a uniquely European way of seeing’.8 Naturally, when modern artists eventually began to deconstruct traditional methods, linear perspective became one of their targets. Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) and his Scuola Metafísica explored the effects of dislocated perspective in paintings such as The Disquieting Muses (1917), as did Paul Klee in his Phantom Perspective (1920). It was left to the Dutchman M. C. Escher (1898–1970) to invent the visual riddles which show that in the last resort all lines on paper deal in illusions, [IMPRESSION]

LEONARDO

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452–1519) was a left-handed, homosexual engineer, best known for his sideline in painting. He was the love-child of a Florentine lawyer and a peasant girl from the village of Vinci. He is widely rated the most versatile of all Europe’s ‘geniuses’. Only a dozen or so of his paintings have survived, some of them unfinished. But they include a number of supreme masterpieces, including the Mona Lisa in Paris, the Last Supper in Milan, and the Lady with Otter in Cracow. His left-handedness caused him to write backwards, in a script that can only be read with a mirror. His sexual proclivity led him to support a parasitic companion, called Salai, and to live in constant fear of prosecution. His most valuable legacy may well lie in his voluminous scientific notebooks, containing sketches and explanations of thousands of devices and inventions which never saw the light of day.1 Not surprisingly, he has constantly attracted the attentions of all who try to measure the ingredients of genius. His name features on all sorts of lists of prominent Europeans who have allegedly shared his characteristics:

Left-handedness	Brain radiation levels2	Homosexuality
Tiberius Michelangelo C. P. E. Bach George II Nelson Carlyle Estimated IQ John Stuart Mill, 190 Goethe, 185 T. Chatterton, 170 Voltaire, 170 Georges Sand, 150 Mozart, 150 Lord Byron, 150 Dickens, 145 Galileo Galilei, 145 Napoleon, 140 Wagner, 135 Darwin, 135 Beethoven, 135 Leonardo, 135	(on the Brunler Scale where 500 = ‘genius’) Leonardo, 720 Michelangelo, 688 Cheiro (palmist), 675 Helena Blavatsky, 660 Titian, 660 Frederick the Great, 657 Raphael, 649 Francis Bacon, 640 Rembrandt, 638 Goethe, 608 Napoleon, 598 Chopin, 550 El Greco, 550 Rasputin, 526 Picasso, 515 Mussolini, 470 Einstein, 469 Freud,420	Sappho Alexander the Great Julius Caesar Hadrian Richard Lionheart A. Poliziano, scholar Botticelli Julius III, Pope Cardinal Carafa Henri III Francis Bacon James VI and I Jean-Baptiste Lully Oueen Christina Frederick the Great Alexander von Humboldt Hans Christian Andersen Tchaikovsky Wilde Proust Keynes

After Leonardo’s death, an experiment was made to replicate his genius. His half-brother, Bartolomeo, sought out a girl from the same village, as Leonardo’s mother, fathered a son by her, and raised the boy in one of Florence’s finest studios. Pierino da Vinci (1530–53) showed great talent: his youthful paintings were good enough to be misattributed to Michelangelo. But he died before his genius matured.3

The causes of the Renaissance were as deep as they were broad. They can be related to the growth of cities and of late medieval trade, to the rise of rich and powerful capitalist patrons, to technical progress which affected both economic and artistic life. But the source of spiritual developments must be sought above all in the spiritual sphere. Here, the malaise of the Church, and the despondency surrounding the Church’s traditional teaching, becomes the major factor. It is no accident that the roots of Renaissance and Reformation alike are found in the realm of ideas.

The New Learning of the fifteenth century possessed three novel features. One was the cultivation of long-neglected classical authors, especially those such as Cicero or Homer who had not attracted the medieval schoolmen. The second was the cultivation of ancient Greek as an essential partner to Latin. The third was the rise of biblical scholarship based on the critical study of the original Hebrew and Greek texts. This last activity provided an important bond between the secular Renaissance and the religious Reformation which was to place special emphasis on the authority of the Scriptures. Scholarly criticism of classical texts was growing rapidly long before the advent of printing. The lead, here again, had been given by Petrarch. He was emulated by Boccaccio, by Guarino, Filelfo, Bruni, Aurispa, and by that indefatigable collector and papal secretary G. F. Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). Poggio’s rival Lorenzo Valla (c.1406–57), was responsible both for the treatise De Elegantiis Latinae Linguae, which established the superiority of Ciceronian Latin, and for the exposure of the false Donation of Constantine. The Greek tradition, fostered by the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras (1355–1415) , sometime Professor of Greek at Florence, and by Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) poet and translator of Homer, was boosted by the wave of Greek refugees and their manuscripts after 1453. A later generation of scholars was dominated in Italy by the hellenist and orientalist G. Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), who explored the cabala, and by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99); in France by Jacques Lefevre d’Étaples (1455–1537) and Guillaume Budé (1467–1540); in Germany by the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), by the wandering knight Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), and by Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). Particularly relevant for the future of science was Ficino’s translation of the Alexandrian Hermes Trismegistus. The printing-machine made its entrée when the movement was well advanced, [CABALA] [PRESS]

Enthusiastic circles of such ‘humanists’ sprang up at all points, from Oxford and Salamanca to Cracow and Lwów. Their patrons, from Cardinal Beaufort to Cardinal Oleśnicki, were often prominent churchmen. All, in their devotion to the ancients, would have echoed the cri de coeur of one of their lesser brethren, Cyriac of Ancona: ‘I go to wake the dead.’ All paid homage to the greatest of their number—Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Gerhard Gerhards (c.1466–1536), a Dutchman from Rotterdam better known by his Latin and Greek pen-names of ‘Desiderius’ and ‘Erasmus’, was the principal practitioner of Christian humanism. Scholar at Deventer, chorister at Utrecht, secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, frequent visitor to London and Cambridge, and long-term resident of Basle, Erasmus ‘made himself the centre of the scientific study of Divinity… the touchstone of classical erudition and literary taste’.6 One of the first truly popular authors of the age of printing—his Moriae Encomium (Folly’s Praise of Folly, 1511) ran into 43 editions in his lifetime—he did more than anyone else to marry the new humanism with the Catholic tradition. His Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Handbook of a Christian Soldier, 1503) was another winner. Like his close friend Thomas More, he was no less a Pauline than a Platonist. His publication of the Greek New Testament (1516) was a landmark event. Its Preface contained the famous words:

I wish that every woman might read the Gospel and the Epistles of St Paul. Would that these were translated into every language … and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen but by Turks and Saracens. Would that the farmer might sing snatches of Scripture at his plough, that the weaver might hum phrases of Scripture to the tune of his shuttle …7

Most attractive, perhaps, was his beautifully paradoxical temperament. He was a priest with a strong streak of anticlericalism; a scholar with a deep loathing of pedantry; a royal and imperial pensioner who lacerated kings and princes; a true protestant against the abuses of the Church who took no part in the Reformation; a devoted humanist and a devoted Christian. His books remained on the Church’s Index for centuries but were freely printed in England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. He sported both a gentle spirit of moderation and a savage wit. ‘What disasters would befall’, he asked of the Rome of Julius II, ‘if ever the supreme pontiffs, the Vicars of Christ, should make the attempt to imitate His life of poverty and toil?’ The answer was that ‘thousands of scribes, sycophants … muleteers … and pimps’ would become unemployed.8 ‘Christ too’, he wrote to the outrage of the Inquisition, ‘was made something of a fool himself, in order to help the folly of mankind.’

Erasmus greatly influenced the language of the age. His collection of annotated Adagia (1508) was the world’s first bestseller, bringing over 3,000 classical proverbs and phrases into popular circulation:

 

	oleum camino	(to pour) oil on the fire
	ululas Athenas	(to send) owls to Athens
	iugulare mortuos	to cut the throat of corpses
	mortuum flagellas	you are flogging a dead (horse)
	asinus ad lyram	(to put) an ass to the lyre
	arare litus	to plough the seashore
	surdo oppedere	to belch before the deaf
	mulgere hircum	to milk a billy goat
	barba tenus sapientes	wise as far as the beard.10

Humanism is a label given to the wider intellectual movement of which the New Learning was both precursor and catalyst. It was marked by a fundamental shift from the theocratic or God-centred world-view of the Middle Ages to the anthropocentric or man-centred view of the Renaissance. Its manifesto may be seen to have been written by Pico’s treatise On the Dignity of Man; and, in time, it diffused all branches of knowledge and art. It is credited with the concept of human personality, created by the new emphasis on the uniqueness and worth of individuals. It is credited with the birth of history, as the study of the processes of change, and hence of the notion of progress; and it is connected with the stirrings of science—that is, the principle that nothing should be taken as true unless it can be tried and demonstrated. In religious thought, it was a necessary precondition for Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience. In art it was accompanied by renewed interest in the human body and in the uniqueness of human faces. In politics it gave emphasis to the idea of the sovereign state as opposed to the community of Christendom, and hence to the beginnings of modern nationality. The sovereign nation-state is the collective counterpart of the autonomous human person, [STATE]

Both in its fondness for pagan antiquity and in its insistence on the exercise of man’s critical faculties, Renaissance humanism contradicted the prevailing modes and assumptions of Christian practice. Notwithstanding its intentions, traditionalists believed that it was destructive of religion, and ought to have been restrained. Five hundred years later, when the disintegration of Christendom was far more advanced, it has been seen by many Christian theologians as the source of all the rot. According to one Catholic philosopher:

The difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages was not a difference by addition but by subtraction. The Renaissance … was not the Middle Ages plus Man, but the Middle Ages minus God.

An American Protestant was no less forgiving: ‘The Renaissance is the real cradle of that very un-Christian concept: the autonomous individual.’ A Russian Orthodox was the most uncompromising of all:

Renaissance humanism affirmed the autonomy of man, and his freedom in the spheres of cultural creation, science and art. Herein lay its truth, for it was essential that the creative force of humanity should surmount the obstacles and prohibitions that mediaeval Christianity put in its way. Unfortunately, however, the Renaissance also began to assert man’s self-sufficiency, and to make a rift between him and the eternal truths of Christianity … Here we have the fountain-head of the tragedy of modern history…. God became the enemy of Man, and man the enemy of God.11

By the same token, many people in recent times who do not hide their contempt for Christianity—Marxists, scientific sociologists, and atheists among them—have welcomed the Renaissance as the beginning of Europe’s liberation. Nothing would have horrified the Renaissance masters more. Few of them saw any contradiction between their humanism and their religion; and most modern Christians would agree. All the developments deriving from the Renaissance, from Cartesian rationalism to Darwinian science, have been judged by fundamentalists to be contrary to religion; yet Christianity has adapted, and has accommodated them. Left to itself, humanism will always find its logical destination in atheism. But mainstream European civilization did not follow that extreme road. Through all the conflicts which ensued, a new and ever-changing synthesis was found between faith and reason, tradition and innovation, convention and conviction. Despite the growing prominence of secular subjects, the overwhelming bulk of European art continued to be devoted to religious themes; and all the great masters were religious believers. Suitably enough, at the end of a long life, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1474–1564)—sculptor of the Florentine David (1504), painter of the Sistine Chapel, and architect of St Peter’s dome—turned for consolation to devotional poetry:

Giunto è già ‘l corso della vita mia,
con tempestoso mar per frágil barca,
al commun porto, ov’a render si varea
conto e ragion d’ogni’ opra trista e pia.
Onde l’affettuosa fantasia,
che l’arte me fece idol’ e monarca,
conosco or ben, com’era d’error carca,
e quel c’a mal suo grado ogn’uom desia.
Gli amorosi pensier, già vani e lieti,
che fien’or, s’a due morti m’avvicino?
D’una so ‘1 certo, e 1’ altra mi minaccia.
Né pinger né scolpir fía più che quieti
l’anima volta a quell’ Amor divino
c’aperse, a prender noi, ‘n croce le braccia.

(The course of my life has come, | by fragile ship through stormy seas, | to the common port, where one calls | to give account of all our evil and pious deeds. | Whence the fond fantasy, | which made Art my idol and monarch, | I now know to have been a cargo of error, | and see what every man desires to his own harm. | Those thoughts of love, once light and gay, | what of them if now two deaths beset me? | I know the certainty of one, whilst the other oppresses. | Nor painting nor sculpture brings real repose; | my soul turns to that love divine | which, to enfold us, opens its arms on the cross.)

Education played a capital role in Renaissance thinking. The humanists knew that to create a New Man one had to start from schoolboys and students. Educational treatises and experiments proliferated—from Vittorino da Feltre to Erasmus’s Instruction of a Prince. Their ideal, whilst conserving the bedrock of Christian instruction, was to develop both the mental and the physical talents of youth. To this end, gymnastics were taught alongside Greek and Latin. Vittorino’s academy in Mantua is often taken to be the first school of the new type. Later examples included the refounded St Paul’s School (1512) in London.

Renaissance music was marked by the appearance of secular choral music alongside polyphonic settings for the Mass. The supreme masters, Josquin des Prés (c.1445–1521) and Clément Jannequin (c.1485–1558), whose work was much prized in Italy as well as France, painted panoramas in sound. Pieces such as Jannequin’s Les Oiseaux, Les Cris de Paris, or La Bataille de Marignan abound with joy and energy. The art of the madrigal was widely disseminated, plied by an international school of lutenists.

Textbooks of Renaissance art tend to divide the subject into three neat periods. The Early Renaissance of fifteenth-century ‘innovation’ is followed by the High Renaissance of’harmony attained’ in the mid-sixteenth century, and by imitative Mannerism thereafter. The great innovative figures include Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), conqueror of perspective, Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), master of realistic action, and Sandro Botticelli (1446–1510), the magical blender of landscape and human form. The three supreme giants are generally acknowledged to be Leonardo, Raphael Santi (1483–1520), and the mighty Michelangelo. The imitators, of course, were legion. But imitation is a form of flattery, and the treatment of the human face and body, of landscape and fight, was transformed. Raphael’s Madonnas are a world apart in spirit from medieval icons.

Yet over-neat classifications must be resisted. For one thing, innovation continued. Nothing could be more innovative in the use of form and colour than the daring canvases of Antonio Allegri (Correggio, 1489–1534), of the Venetians Tiziano Vercelli (Titian, 1477–1576) and Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto, 1518–94), or of the Cretan Domenico Theotocopuli (El Greco, c.1541–1614), who found his way via Venice to Toledo. For another, the art of northern Europe, first prominent in Burgundy, developed strongly and independently. The German school forming around Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Lucas Cranach of Nuremberg (1472–1553), the landscapist Albrecht Altdorfer of Regensburg (1480–1538), and the portraitist Hans Holbein of Augsburg (1497–1543), was in contact with the South, but was anything but derivative. Finally, one has to take account of powerful and original artists who were more closely connected with continuing medieval traditions. Such would include the extraordinary altar-carver Veit Stoss or Wit Stwosz (c.1447–1533), who worked in Germany and Poland, the mysterious Master of Grünewald (C.1460–1528), the fantastic Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), with his visions of Hell, or the Flemish ‘peasant genre’ painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–69).

Renaissance architecture is usually characterized by reactions against the Gothic style. The Florentine ‘classical style’, whose earliest example is to be found in the Pazzi Chapel (1430), had many admirers. The classical villas of Andrea Palladio (1518–80) became an obsession with the European nobility. His finely illustrated Quattro Libri della Architectura (1570), published in Venice, was placed in all respectable libraries. When gunpowder rendered castles obsolete, building funds were spent on magnificent palaces, notably in the aristocratic residences of the Loire; on the monuments to municipal pride in the burgher houses and arcaded squares of Germany and Holland; and on Italianate city halls from Amsterdam to Augsburg, Leipzig, and Zamość

Renaissance literature was characterized by an explosion of the vernacular languages, which saw the world afresh in every way. The tentative work of the humanists gave way in the sixteenth century to the launch of full-blown national literatures. Indeed, the possession of a popular literary tradition in the vernacular was to become one of the key attributes of modern national identity. This tradition was established in French by the poets of the Pléiade, in Portuguese by Luiz de Camoens (1524–80), in Spanish by Miguel Cervantes (1547–1616), in Dutch by Anna Bijns (c.1494–1575) and Joost van den Vondel (b. 1587), in Polish by Jan Kochanowski (1530–84), in English by the Elizabethan poets and dramatists Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. In Italian, where the tradition was older and stronger, it was consolidated by Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) and Torquato Tasso (1544–95). [SINGULARIS]

Not all of Europe’s linguistic communities produced serious literature. Those who lagged behind, principally in Germany, Russia, and the Balkans, were still preoccupied with religious pursuits. Apart from Luther and the Narrenschiff or ‘Ship of Fools’ (1494) of Sebastian Brant (1457–1527), the poetry of the Silesians, Andreas Gryphius (1616–69) and Martin Opitz (1597–1639), historiographer to the King of Poland, and the picaresque novel Simplicissimus of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen (c.1625–76), little of note was published in Germany beyond religious tracts and popularVolksbücher such as the story of Doktor Faustus (1657) [FAUSTUS]. In Central Europe, an important branch of literature continued to be wirtten in Latin. The chief exponents of neo-Latin poetry included the German Conrad Pickel, alias ‘Celtis’ (1459–1508), first poet laureate of the Holy Roman Empire; Ianus Pannonius (1434–72), the Hungarian; the Italians Fracastorius (1483–1553) and Alciati (1492–1550); and the Poles Dantiscus (1485–1548) and Ianicius (1516–43).

Clearly, the Renaissance had something in common with the older movement for Church reform. Humanists and would-be reformers both fretted against fossilized clerical attitudes, and both suffered from the suspicions of the ruling hierarchy. What is more, by encouraging the critical study of the New Testament, both led the rising generation to dream about the lost virtues of primitive Christianity, much as others had dreamt about the lost age of classical Antiquity. In this connection, but not in the happiest of metaphors, it used to be said that ‘Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it’.

The Reformation. None the less, it is not possible to view the Reformation simply as an extension of the Renaissance. Unlike humanism, it appealed to the deepest devotional traditions of the Middle Ages, and it rode on a wave of a religious revival which affected not just the scholars but the masses. It was launched by men who had every intention of keeping the Catholic Church intact, and who only redoubled their campaign for a cleansed and unified religion when one branch of the reforming movement began to break away. It had nothing at all to do with the humanist spirit of tolerance. The common well springs of Renaissance and Reformation, therefore, should not be allowed to conceal the fact that they grew into streams flowing in very different directions. A similar split developed within the movement for Church reform. What started as a broad religious revival gradually divided into two separate and hostile movements, later known as the Catholic Reformation and the Protestant Reformation.

SINGULARIS

I NDIVIDUALISM is widely billed as one of the inherent qualities of ‘Western I civilization’, and Michel de Montaigne could claim to be one of the pioneer individualists:

The greatest thing on earth is to know how to belong to oneself. Everyone looks in front of them. But I look inside myself. I have no concerns but my own. I constantly reflect on myself; I control myself; I taste myself… We owe some things in part to society, but the greater part to ourselves. It is necessary to lend oneself to others, but to give oneself only to oneself.1

The roots of individualism have been identified in Platonism, in Christian theology of the soul, in the nominalism of medieval philosophy.2 But the main surge came with the Renaissance, which Burckhardt characterized by its brilliant individuals. The cultural interest in human beings, the religious interest in private conscience, and the economic interest in capitalist enterprise all put the individual centre stage. Starting with Locke and Spinoza, the Enlightenment elaborated the theme until the ‘liberty of the individual’ and ‘human rights’ joined the common stock of European discourse.

In the nineteenth century individualist theory developed along several divergent tracks. Kant had remarked that the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest was immoral; and it was left to John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1850) to reconcile the conflicting interests of individuals and of society. InSocialisme et liberté (1898) Jean Jaurès undertook a similar exercise in socialist terms. Yet there were always people ready to pursue the extremes. In The Individual and His Property (1844) Max Stirner condemned all forms of collective, whether ‘nation’, ‘state’, or ‘society’. In The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891) Oscar Wilde defended the absolute rights of the creative artist: ‘Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.’

In the twentieth century, both communism and fascism treated the individual with contempt. Even in democratic states, bloated government bureaucracies often oppressed those whom they were created to serve. The neo-liberal response gathered pace in the ‘Vienna School’ of the 1920s. Its leaders—Karl Popper (b. 1902), Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), and Friedrich von Hayek (b. 1899)—all emigrated. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) and Individualism and the Economic Order (1949) educated the postwar neo-conservatives. A fervent disciple once indignantly proclaimed: ‘There is no such thing as society.’

Such excesses tended to present the citizen as a mere consumer of goods, services, and rights. Politics threatened to degenerate into a ‘culture of complaint’. At some point, the counter-tendency was due to reassert itself in the equally venerable tradition of Duty.4

The religious revival, clearly visible at the end of the fifteenth century, was largely driven by popular disgust at the decadence of the clergy. Despite the declared intention of calling a General Council every ten years, the Church had not called one since the 1430s. The canonization of a long line of saints, from St Vincent Ferrer OP (cd. 1455) and St Bernardino of Siena (cd. 1450) to St Casimir of Poland (1458–84), could not detract from the blatant lack of saintliness in the Church as a whole. Europe was full of tales about simoniac bishops, nepotistic popes, promiscuous priests, idle monks, and, above all, the sheer worldly wealth of the Church.

Once again, the harbinger of things to come appeared in Florence. The ferocious hellfire sermons of a fanatical friar, Fra Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), raised a revolt in the 1490s which temporarily drove out the Medici and which only ended with the friar’s own burning. In Spain, under Cardinal Cisneros, religious discipline was combined with energetic scholarship. The new school of theology at the University of Alcalá, founded in 1498, gave birth to the Polyglot Bible (1510–20). In Italy, under Cardinal Giampietro Carafa (1476–1559), the future Paul IV and co-founder c.1511 of the Oratory of Divine Love, an influential circle of Roman churchmen bound themselves to a regime of intense devotional exercises and practical charity. From them there arose a series of new Catholic congregations of clerks regular, neither monks nor friars—among them the Theatines (1523), the Barnabites (1528), the Jesuits (1540), and the Oratorians (1575).

The stirrings of religious revival coincided with the nadir of the Church’s reputation, reached during the papacies of Rodrigo de Borgia (Alexander VI, 1492–1503) and Giuliano della Rovere (Julius II, 1503–13). Alexander’s passions were for gold, women, and the careers of his bastard children. Julius gratified ‘an innate love of war and conquest’: he is remembered as the pope who rode into battle in full armour, the rebuilder of St Peter’s, the refounder of the Papal States. In 1509, when he was planning to pay for his wars and for St Peter’s through the sale in Germany of ‘indulgences’—paper certificates guaranteeing relief from punishment in Purgatory—Rome was visited by a young Augustinian monk from Wittenberg in Saxony. Martin Luther was shocked to the bones by what he saw. ‘Even depravity’, wrote Ranke, ‘may have its perfection.’

Within ten years Luther (1483–1546) found himself at the head of the first ‘Protestant’ revolt. His lectures as Professor of Theology at Wittenberg show that his doctrine of’justification by faith alone’ had been brewing for some years; and as a man wresding with his inner convictions, he had little patience with the gentle humanists of the day. He was inordinately rude and bad-tempered. His language was often unrepeatable. Rome, to him, was the seat of sodomy and the Beast of the Apocalypse.

Luther’s fury was brought to the boil by the appearance in Germany of a friar, Johann Tetzel, who was selling indulgences. Tetzel had been banned from the territory of the Elector of Saxony, who had no desire to see his subjects pouring large sums into papal coffers. So by challenging Tetzel’s theological credentials, Luther was reinforcing the policy of his Prince. On 31 October 1517, All Saints’ Eve, he took the fateful step of nailing a sheet of 95 Theses, or arguments against indulgences, to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church. Or tradition so insists.

From that famous act of defiance several consequences flowed. First, Luther was embroiled in a series of public disputations, notably the one staged at Leipzig with Dr von Eck which preceded his formal excommunication (June 1520). In the course of his preparations he penned the primary treatises of Lutheranism—the Resolutions, Liberty of a Christian Man, Address to the Christian Nobility of German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God; and he publicly burned the papal Bull of Excommunication, Exsurge Domine. Secondly, German politics was split between the advocates and the opponents of Luther’s punishment. In 1521 the Emperor Charles V summoned Luther to appear under safe conduct before the Imperial Diet at Worms. Luther, like Hus at Constance, defended himself with fortitude:

I am overcome by the Scriptures I have quoted; my conscience is captive to God’s Word. I cannot and will not revoke anything, for to act against conscience is neither safe nor honest … Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. [Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.]

After that, he was spirited away by the Saxon Elector’s men and hidden in the Wartburg Castle. The ban pronounced by the Diet against Luther could not be enforced. Religious protest was turning into political revolt.

Germany in 1522–5 was convulsed by two major outbursts of unrest: the feud of the Imperial Knights (1522–3) at Trier and the violent social disturbances of the Peasants’ War (1524–5), which began at Waldshut in Bavaria. Luther’s defiance of the Church may have been a factor in the defiance of political authority; but he had no sympathy for the peasants’ ‘twelve articles’ drawn up in Swabia by Christoph Schappeler and Sebastian Lotzer of Memmingen. When fresh rebel bands appeared in Thuringia, Luther published his appeal Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants, trenchantly defending the social order and the princes’ rights. The peasant rebels were crushed in a sea of blood.

The Lutheran revolt took definite shape during three later sessions of the Imperial Diet. The Emperor’s opponents took their chance to consolidate their position whilst he was distracted by the wars against France and the Turks. At Speyer in 1526, in the Recess Declaration of the Diet, they managed to insert a clause for princely liberty in religion anticipating the famous formula: Cuius regio, eius religio (whoever rules has the right to determine religion). At the second Diet of Speyer in 1529, they formally lodged the Protest which gave them their name, bemoaning the annulment of the Recess. At Augsburg in 1530, they presented a measured summary of their beliefs. This Confession of Augsburg, composed by Melanchthon, was the Protestant manifesto—after which an adamant Emperor set April 1531 as the deadline for their submission. In response, the Protestant princes formed the armed League of Schmalkalden. From then on, the Catholic and the Protestant camps were clearly defined, [GESANG]

GESANG

MARTIN Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 46—‘God is our refuge and strength’—was first set to music in J. Klug’s Gesangbuch of 1529. It showed that ‘the nightingale of Wittenberg’ was a poet and composer as well as church reformer and theologian. It turned out to be perhaps the greatest hymn in the Christian repertoire:

Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, ein gute Wehr und Waffen. Er hilft uns frei aus aller Not, die uns jetzt hat betroffen. Der alt böse Feind mit Ernst er’s jetzt meint, gross Macht und viel List, sein grausam Rüstung ist auf Erd ist nich seins gleichen.1

A safe stronghold our God is still, A trusty shield and weapon; He’ll help us clear from all the ill That hath us now o’ertaken The ancient prince of Hell Hath risen with purpose fell; Strong mail of craft and power He weareth in this hour; On earth is not his fellow.2

Luther, as a monk, was familiar with church music. He had a good tenor voice, and wanted all people to share his enjoyment of singing in church. Musical participation was to be the liturgical counterpart to his theological doctrine of the communion of all believers. He gave high priority to congregational music-making. His Formula Missae (1523) reformed the Latin Mass, providing a basis for the later Swedish liturgy. The Geystliche Gesangk Buchlein (1524), published by his disciple J. Walter, provided an anthology of polyphonic choral settings. In 1525 he brought the world’s first musical press to Wittenberg. His Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdienst (1526) supplied a form of the vernacular sung Mass. It concluded with a version of the Hussite hymn ‘Jesus Christus, unser Heiland’. Heinrich Lufft’s Enchiridion (also 1526) constituted the first ever congregational hymn-book. Within five years of the Diet of Worms, Luther’s followers were musically fully equipped.

The Lutheran musical tradition had far-reaching consequences. It required every parish to keep its cantor, its organist, its choir school, and its body of trained singers and instrumentalists. As a result, it played a prominent role in turning Germany into the most musically educated nation in Europe—the richest resource for Europe’s secular music-making. The genius of J. S. Bach could have found no more fertile soil than in Lutheranism.

A hypothesis exists which maintains that it was the German language and its rhythms which lay at the root of Germany’s musical pre-eminence. This may or may not be true. But one can find Luther saying in 1525 that ‘both text and notes, accent, melody and performance ought to grow from the true mother tongue and its reflections’. Luther’s emphasis on the use of the vernacular deeply affected German education. There is a direct link between the hymns and masses of Luther, Walter. Rhaw, and Heinrich Schutz (1585–1672), and the later glories of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.3

To celebrate the Lutheran tradition in isolation no doubt does a disservice to Catholic music, and to the fruitful interactions of various Christian traditions. But one only has to compare the sterile music of Calvinism, whose ban on ‘Popish polyphony’ reduced the Geneva Psalter (1562) to a collection of metrical unisons, to see the felicity of Luther’s music-making.

In many ways the Church of England shares Luther’s musicality, developing a wonderful tradition launched by Tallis, Gibbons, and Byrd. In its stunning simplicity, Tallis’s Canon, composed by a monk of Waltham Abbey who became a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, is the Anglican equivalent of Ein’ feste Burg, and an eight-part round to boot:

Glory to thee, my God, this night
For all the blessings of the light.
Keep me, oh keep me, King of Kings
Beneath thine own almighty wings.

Nor should one neglect the magnificent musical tradition of the Orthodox Church, which adopted polyphony as readily as Luther did. In this case the ban on musical instruments inspired a very special expertise in choral part-singing. The Catholic Church always permitted instrumental accompaniment. The earliest surviving church organ, dating from 1320, is still operational at Sion in the Valais. But in Russia and Ukraine the polyphony had to be generated by human voices alone, thereby fostering a culture which is as ready to make music as to appreciate it. In this context, Tchaikovsky was no more of an accident than Bach was.

Meanwhile, the Lutheran protest movement was swelled by a series of parallel events, each of which widened the nature of Protestantism. In 1522 in Switzerland, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), hellenist, correspondent of Erasmus, and ‘people’s priest’ at Zurich, challenged the Roman Church both on ecclesiastical organization and on doctrine. Like Luther, he started by denouncing indulgences; and he shared Luther’s concept of justification by faith. But he also rejected the authority of bishops; and he taught that the Eucharist was no more than a simple, symbolic ceremony. He was killed at Kappel in 1531, carrying the Protestant banner in a war against the five Catholic forest cantons that had split the Swiss Confederation. He launched an important Protestant trend, in which local congregations or communities claimed the right to control their affairs, [HOLISM]

In the 1520s radical preachers and sects proliferated in Germany. Andreas Karlstadt (1480–1541), who quarrelled with Luther, went off to Basel. The ‘Prophets of Zwickau’—Storch, Stuebner and Thomae—were old-fashioned mil-lenarians. The mystic Thomas Muentzer (1490–1525), possessed both communist and anarchist traits, modelling his group on the Czech Taborites. After many wanderings, he was caught at the head of a band of expropriators during the Peasants’ War in Thuringia, and executed at Muhlhausen. The Anabaptists or ‘Rebaptisers’ emerged among some disgruntled Swiss Zwinglians. Rejecting all established authority, they declared all previous baptisms invalid. They also sought to found an ideal Christian republic on evangelical principles, renouncing oaths, property, and (in theory) all violence. In 1534–5 at Munster in Westphalia under two Dutchmen—Jan Matthijs of Haarlem and Jan Beukelz of Leiden—they briefly created a ‘Kingdom of the Elect’ that was crushed with great cruelty. The cages which once held the remains of their leaders, still hang from the spire of St. Lambert’s Church. The Anabaptists were Christendom’s first fundamentalists, persecuted by Protestants and Catholics alike. They recovered as ‘Mennonites’ under the Frieslander, Menno Simons (1496–1561), sowing a spiritual legacy for later Baptists, Unitarians and Quakers. Christian Spiritualism, in contrast, drew support from Bavarian Denckians, Swabian Franckians and Silesian Schwenkfeldians.

HOLISM

IN February 1528 the wonderful ‘Dr Paracelsus’ lost his brief appointment as Basle’s city physician. He had been barred from the university, had offended the guild of apothecaries, and had sued a prelate for refusing to pay him a full professional fee. When he publicly accused the magistrates of bias, he risked arrest and fled. His ideas were no more acceptable to the scholastic medicine of his day than to the supposedly scientific medicine of a later age.

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), known as Paracelsus, was born at Einsiedeln in the canton of Schwyz. He was the contemporary of Luther, Erasmus, and Michelangelo. He graduated from the medical faculty at Ferrara in 1524. But he dropped higher study and spent seven years travelling, learning the lore of herbalists, gypsies, and magicians, and earning his keep at the artisan grade of barber-surgeon. He visited Spain and Portugal, Russia and Poland, Scandinavia and Constantinople, Crimea and possibly Egypt. Formerly a Catholic, he often associated with the radical sects such as the Anabaptists and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. Arrested in Salzburg in 1525 for supporting rebellious peasants, he narrowly escaped execution. Apart from Basle, his longer sojourns were at Strasbourg, Nuremberg, St Gallen, Meran in Tyrol, St Moritz, Bad Pfeifers, Augsburg, Kromau in Moravia, Bratislava, Vienna and Villach. He was a prolific author on everything from theology to magic—the centrepiece being Opus Paramirium (1531), his ‘Work Beyond Wonders’.

Paracelsus rejected the reigning notion that medical knowledge was to be garnered from ancient texts. At Basle, he had joined some students who were burning the works of Avicenna. Instead, he proposed to learn on the one hand from practical observations and on the other from ‘the four pillars’—natural philosophy, astrology, alchemy, and ‘Virtue’ (by which he meant the innate powers of people, plants, and minerals). His empirical bent led to a series of brilliant treatments and techniques in amputations, antisepsis, homeopathy, and balneology. His other lines led him to an alternative system of biochemistry based on sulphur, salt, and mercury, and gave him a lasting reputation for wizardry. Not for 400 years was even part of Europe’s medical profession prepared to consider his holistic precept—that the good doctor seeks the harmony of all factors affecting the patient’s well-being, including the environmental, the psychosomatic and the supernatural.

Paracelsus lived at a time when no one understood the workings of the digestive, circulatory, neural, or reproductive systems, let alone genes or chromosomes. Yet many of his insights resonate across the centuries:

Both the man and the woman each have half a seed, and the two together make a whole seed … There is in the matrix [womb] an attractive force (like amber or a magnet)… Once the will has been determined, the matrix draws unto itself the seed of the woman and the man from the humours of the heart, the liver, the spleen, the bone, the blood … and all that is in the body. For every part of the body has its own particular seed. But when all these seeds come together, they are only one seed.1

In 1529 King Henry VIII of England initiated the policy which was to separate the English Church from Rome. The initial cause lay in Henry’s obsessive desire for a male heir and in the Pope’s refusal to grant him a divorce. Henry, who had earlier earned the title of Fidei Defensor for denouncing Luther, had little religious motivation; but he gained great support in Parliament, and immense material advantage, by attacking the Church’s privileges and property. The Act of Annates (1532) cut financial payments to Rome. The Act of Appeals (1533) curtailed Rome’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The Act of Supremacy (1534) abolished papal authority completely, raising the King to be Supreme Head of the Church of England. Subjects such as Thomas More or Cardinal John Fisher, who declined to accede, were executed for treason. The Ten Articles (1536) and Six Articles (1539) asserted the inviolability of the Roman Mass and of traditional doctrine. The direct association of Church and State—later called Erastianism—brought Anglicanism closer to Orthodox than to Catholic practice, [UTOPIA]

In 1541, at the second attempt, Jean Calvin (1509–64) was persuaded to take control of the church in Geneva. A fugitive Frenchman, more radical than Luther, Calvin founded the most widely influential branch of Protestantism. A scholar raised in the spirit of Lefèvre d’Étaples and a sometime Catholic lawyer, he had been protected by the circle of Marguerite d’Angoulême. He was converted to the new thinking after hearing a homily on the sovereignty of the Scriptures by the Rector of the Sorbonne, Nicholas Cop. Fearing repressions, he resigned his benefice in his native Noyon and fled to Basle. There, in 1535, he published his seminal Institution de la religion chrétienne.

Calvin expressed original ideas on theology, on the relations of Church and State, and especially on private morality. He was nearer to Luther than to Zwingli on the Eucharist; but his revival of the doctrine of predestination proved shocking. He saw humanity to be divided into the Damned and the Elect. By this, he taught his disciples to think of themselves as an embattled minority, a band of righteous brothers surrounded by a hostile world, ‘Strangers among Sinners’:

Ainsi les Bourgeois du Ciel n’aiment point le Monde, ni les choses qui sont au Monde … il s’écrient avec le Sage: ‘Vanité des Vanités; tout n’est que vanité et rongement d’Esprit’. (The inhabitants of the city of Heaven do not love the World, nor the things of the World … They cry with the Prophet, ‘Vanity of vanities; everything is nothing but vanity and the devouring of the spirit.’)

On Church organization, too, Calvin’s innovations far exceeded those of Zwingli. He insisted not only on the separation of Church and State but also on the competence of local congregations. On the other hand, he also expected that the temporal power would be inspired by religious precepts, and by a desire to enforce all judgements of the Church organs. In matters of toleration, therefore, he was no more flexible than the Inquisition or Henry VIII. [SYROP]

UTOPIA

UTOPIA, meaning ‘No Place’, was the name coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More for his book describing his search for an ideal form of government. Translated into English in 1551, after the author’s martyrdom, as A Frutefull, pleasant and wittie worke of the beste state of a publique weale, and of the new yle called Utopia, and also into French, German, Spanish, and Italian, it became a bestseller. In it More described a land where property was held in common, both men and women benefited from universal education, and all religions were tolerated.1

Utopian thinking supplies a deep human need for an ideal vision of a better world. The genre has attracted many practitioners, from Plato’s Republic to Bacon’s New Atlantis and Harrington’s Oceana. Similar effects may be gained by imagining the horrors of Dystopia or ‘Bad Place’. Such was the intent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In the twentieth century, utopianism has generally been associated with left-wing thinking. Soviet Russia was widely thought by its admirers to have been a modern utopia, free of the evils of capitalist democracy. ‘I have seen the future,’ said an American visitor in 1919, ‘and it works.’ Such opinions have since been disgraced by knowledge of the mass murders committed in the name of ‘socialism’ and ‘progress’. Modern liberals have moved on to the more humdrum task of bettering the lot of individuals.2 [HARVEST] [VORKUTA]

What is not so readily accepted is that Fascism too had its utopias. After the initial phase of brutal conquest, many Nazis, like many Communists, dreamed of a beautiful, harmonious future. The French writer ‘Vercors’, for example, recounts the musings of a German officer in occupied France, who looks forward to the glorious future of Franco-German union. ‘It will be a replay of Beauty and the Beast’.3 After the war, in Eastern Europe’s Communist prisons, many democrats imprisoned for opposition to Communism had to listen to the broken dreams of their convicted Nazi cell-mates.4 The Fascist utopia, like that of the Communists, was false, and generated immense suffering. But there were those who dreamed it sincerely, [LETTLAND]

In ethical matters, Calvin established a new and inimitable code which made his followers instantly recognizable. The good Calvinist family was to abhor all forms of pleasure and frivolity—dancing, songs, drinking, gaming, flirtation, bright clothes, entertaining books, loud language, even vivacious gestures. Their life was to be marked by sobriety, self-restraint, hard work, thrift, and, above all, godliness. Their membership of the Elect was to be manifest in their appearance, in their conduct, in their church-going, and in their worldly success. To the old Catholic burden of sin they added the new burden of keeping up appearances. In art, they were to avoid all direct portrayal of the Deity, all mystical symbols and allegories. They were to find the sole source of joy and guidance in the daily reading of the Bible. Here was what the English-speaking world would come to know as the Puritan.

The full formation of Calvinist principles had to await the definitive publication of the Institution in 1559 and the second Helvetic Confession, drawn up by H. Bullinger (1504–75), Zwingli’s successor at Zurich, in 1566.

Calvin’s successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza (1519–1605), a Greek scholar and theologian, introduced a rigid, determinist view of predestination that was vigorously opposed by the followers of Jakub Hermans (Arminius, 1560–1609), Professor at Leyden in Holland. The Arminians emphasized the doctrine of free will, and the efficacy of Christ’s death for all believers, not just for the Elect.

The spread of Protestantism has to be described both in socio-political as well as in geographical terms.

Lutheranism appealed directly to independent-minded princes. It confirmed the legitimacy of their rule whilst maintaining the existing social order. It was quickly adopted in several states—notably in Wurtemberg, Hesse, Anhalt, electoral and ducal Saxony, Neumark, and Pomerania—and in most north German cities from Bremen to Riga. It entered a prolonged crisis in 1540, when Luther condoned the bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse by advising the new faith’s leading patron ‘to tell a good strong lie’. Until the Formula of Concord (1580), it survived several decades of schism between the strict ‘Gnesio-Lutherans’ and the more liberal ‘Melanchthonians’. In Denmark and Norway, through the preaching of’the Danish Luther’, Hans Tausen, it became the state religion in 1537. It helped perpetuate Denmark’s loss of Sweden, where it was not fully established until 1593; and it accelerated the collapse of the Teutonic States in Prussia (1525) and in Livonia (1561).

Calvinism, in contrast, coincided less with state politics than with the inclinations of particular social groups. In Western Europe it often appealed to the rising urban bourgeoisie, and in France to an impressive cross-section of the nobility. In Eastern Europe, also, it appealed both to the landed gentry and to the magnates. In the kingdom of England, Calvinism began to make an impact after the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The reign of the boy king Edward VI produced much confusion, and the interval of the ultra-Catholic Queen Mary, a crop of Protestant martyrs, notably at Oxford. Thereafter, under Elizabeth I, the Church Settlement enshrined in the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571) reached a judicious synthesis of Erastian, Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, and traditional Catholic influences. From then on, Anglicanism has always provided an umbrella for two main political and theological tendencies—the ‘High Church’ of Anglo-Catholicism and the ‘Low Church’ of the Calvinistic evangelicals. Despite merciless persecution under Elizabeth, both recusant Catholics and non-conformist puritans survived underground. The latter re-emerged in force in the seventeenth century and, under Cromwell’s Commonwealth (1649–58), briefly controlled the state.

SYROP

ON Saturday, 12 August 1553 a fugitive from the Holy Inquisition rode into the village of Louyset on the French side of Geneva. Four months earlier he had been arrested in Lyons on charges of heresy and, after interrogation by the Inquisitor General, condemned to death. He had escaped from prison, and had been wandering ever since. His aim was to take a boat across the lake from Geneva, and to make for Zurich. Geneva was the stronghold of Calvin, Zurich of the Zwinglians.

Prior to his arrest, the fugitive had been employed as physician to the Archbishop of Vienne. A native of Navarre, he had studied at Toulouse, Paris, Louvain, and Montpellier. He was the author of several medical treatises, of a study of Ptolemy’s Geography, and of two anti-trinitarian theological works—De Trinitatis Erroribus (1521) and the anonymous Christianismi restitutio (1553). For the past eight years he had corresponded with some animosity with Calvin, whom he had once met.1

On the Sunday, having sold his horse, he walked into Geneva, found a room at La Rose, and went to an afternoon service. In church, he was recognized by someone and denounced to the city authorities. By the next morning he was facing the same questions from a Calvinist interrogator that he had faced from the Catholic Inquisitor. He was Fr. Miguel Serveto de Villanova, otherwise ‘Servetus’ (1511–53).

Calvin’s conduct towards Servetus was, to put it mildly, unchristian. He had once warned him against coming to Geneva. He had even supplied the Inquisition at Lyons with a specimen of his correspondent’s handwriting. He now set aside Geneva’s laws concerning religious toleration, and recommended that Servetus be beheaded. Instead, by order of the court, he was burned alive at Champel on 27 October.

Nowhere in Europe could radical thinkers feel really safe. The Russian Orthodox Church had burned its ‘Judaizers’. Byzantium, too, had its Inquisition. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), philosopher and renegade Dominican, who was burned at the stake in Rome, was also, it seems, an English spy.2 Poland-Lithuania was an isolated haven, where from 1565 episcopal courts could not enforce their verdicts. The anti-trinitarians tarried in Transylvania before moving on to Poland. Their leader, the Siennese Fausto Sozzini (1539–1604) to whom Servetus is sometimes compared, had also lived in Lyons and Geneva, where, enrolled in the Italian Church, he had kept quiet.

Long after his death, Servetus was remembered as a symbol of the interdependence of Protestant and Catholic bigotry. Monuments to his memory would be erected in Madrid (1876), Paris (1907), and Vienne (1910). Had he lived longer, he would have enjoyed the success of the four editions of his work on medicinal syrops, Syroporum universa ratio (1537).

Thanks to the efforts of John Knox (1513–72), Calvinism became the sole established religion in Scotland in 1560, in a form known as Presbyterianism. Though subject to Anglican influences, the Scottish Kirk stayed apart.

In France the Calvinists were dubbed Huguenots. They spread rapidly in the former Albigensian lands in the south and west, and in the urban populations of all provinces. They formed the backbone of the Bourbon Party during the Wars of Religion, and an essential feature of the French religious scene until their ultimate expulsion in 1685.

In the Netherlands the rise of Calvinism, especially among the burghers of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Leyden, provided a basic factor in the split between the Catholic provinces to the west and the United Provinces to the east. The Dutch Reformed Church has played a central role in the country since its establishment as the state religion in 1622.

In Germany Calvinism was long opposed both by Lutherans and Catholics. It received its major support from the adherence in 1563 of the Elector-Palatine, Frederick III, who imposed the Heidelberg Catechism on all his subjects; from Christian I of Saxony (d. 1591), and in 1613 from the conversion of the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg. Brandenburg-Prussia was unusual in tolerating both Calvinism and Lutheranism. [FAUSTUS]

In Poland-Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary Calvinism appealed to a wide section of the landed gentry. In some parts, such as Transylvania or the Duchy of Cieszyn, its presence proved durable. The Hungarian city of Debrecen has been ‘the Calvinist Rome’ ever since. In Lithuania it claimed the allegiance of many magnates, including Europe’s largest landowners—the Radziwills.

The effects of Protestantism can be observed in every sphere of European life. By emphasizing the necessity of Bible-reading, it made a major impact on education in the Protestant countries, and hence on popular literacy. In the economic sphere it made a major contribution to enterprise culture, and hence to the rise of capitalism. In politics it proved a major bone of contention both between states and between rival groupings within states. By dividing the Catholic world in two, it spurred the Roman Church into the Reform which it had repeatedly postponed. Above all, it dealt a fatal blow to the ideal of a united Christendom. Until the 1530s, Christendom had been split into two halves—Orthodox and Catholic. From the 1530s onwards it was split into three: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. And the Protestants themselves were split into ever more rival factions. The scandal was so great, and the fragmentation was so widespread, that people stopped talking about Christendom, and began to talk instead about ‘Europe’.

FAUSTUS

THE real-life ‘Dr Faustus’ was a vagabond mountebank and fairground conjurer, who died at Staufen in Breisgau in 1541. Supposedly a graduate of Cracow like Copernicus, he frequented numerous German universities, presenting himself as Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior. He became notorious for his blasphemies, for his ‘miracles’ such as changing water into wine, and for his claim to be in league with the Devil. His exploits inspired a stream of so-called Faustbuchs. The first of them, compiled at Frankfurt in 1587, was translated into Danish in 1588, into French and Dutch in 1592, into English before 1594, and into Czech in 1602.

As a fictional figure, Faust made his debut in 1594 in the play by Christopher Marlowe, where he appears as a man of overweening ambition, striving to become ‘great Emperor of the world’. He enjoys a season of power before the Devil reclaims his own. In Germany he featured in a lost drama by Lessing, and in a novel by F. M. Klinger (1791), before being adopted as the central protagonist of Goethe’s two-part verse tragedy (1808, 1832). Ferruccio Busoni’s opera, Doktor Faust (1916) remained unfinished.

Goethe’s Faust defies easy summary. Faust’s pact with Mephisto promises him rejuvenation, and he lives to be a hundred. Gib meine Jugend mir zurück! In Part I, which deals with the ‘smaller world’ of private emotion, Faust wrestles with the conflict between his duty to the Devil and his love for Gretchen. In Part II, which treats the grosse Welt of society and politics, he is the minister of a wastrel Emperor. When he dies, Gretchen intervenes, and the Devil is cheated; Heavenly choirs greet the progress of a redeemed soul, as Love triumphs:

Der früh Geliebte,

Nicht mehrGetrübt,

Er kommt zurück!

      (The beloved of long ago, no more befogged, is coming back!)

Goethe’s masterpiece inspired two operas, by Gounod and Berlioz, and the Faust Symphony (1857) by Liszt. In more recent times, Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus (1947) revived the legend for a grim judgement on contemporary Germany. A musician, Adrian Leverkühn, seduced by the works of Wagner and Nietzsche, contracts the diabolical curse of syphilis from a femme fatale, and expires after composing a nihilistic cantata, D. Fausti Weheklag. At its close, a sustained diminuendo from a solo cello recalls ‘the light in the night’, hinting that German civilization may not, after all, engender total despair.2

The Counter-Reformation was given its name by Protestant historians who assumed that it was born to oppose the Protestant Reformation. Catholic historians see it differently, as the second stage of a movement for Church reform which had a continuous history from the conciliarists of the late fourteenth century to the Council of Trent. One must stress, however, that the Counter-Reformation was not some sort of autarkic historical engine operating in isolation. Like the Renaissance and the Reformation, it interacted with all the other great phenomena of the age.

The paralysis reigning at the centre of the Catholic Church eased during the pontificate of Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, 1534–49). Known as ‘Cardinal Petticoat’, Paul III was a flagrant nepotist, brother of a papal concubine, and the lavish patron of Michelangelo and Titian. At the same time he saw the urgency of change. He revitalized the Sacred College, commissioned the key inquiry into Church reform, Consilium de emendanda ecclesia (1537), patronized the Jesuits, established the Holy Office, and launched the Council of Trent. Until the 1530s the Sacred College of Cardinals, which elected the Popes, was one of the Church’s weaker pillars. But with its budget cut, and its numbers increased by several brilliant appointments, it became the Vatican’s power-house for change. Its outstanding names included Cardinals Caraffa (later Paul IV, 1555–9), Cervini (later Marcellus II, 1555), and the Englishman Reginald Pole, who missed election in 1550 by one vote. The next run of popes was of a different stamp. Pius IV (1559–65) did not hesitate to condemn to death the criminal nephews of his predecessor. The austere and fanatical Pius V (1566–72), sometime Inquisitor-General who walked barefoot in Rome, was later canonized. Gregory XIII (1572–85), who rejoiced at the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, was wholly political.

The Society of Jesus has been called the corps d’élite of Catholic Reform. It combined the fierce piety and military lifestyle of its Basque founder, Íñigo López de Recalde (St Ignatius Loyola, 1491–1556), author of the Spiritual Exercises (1523). Approved in 1540 by Paul Ill’s BullRegimini Militantis Ecclesiae, it operated under direct papal command. Its members were organized in ranks under their General, and were trained to think of themselves as ‘companions of Jesus’. Their aims were to convert the heathen, to reconvert the lapsed, and, above all, to educate. Within a few decades of their formation, their missionaries appeared all over the world from Mexico to Japan. Their colleges sprang up in every corner of Catholic Europe, from Braganza to Kiev. ‘I have never left the Army,’ said St Ignatius; ‘I have only been seconded to the service of God.’ And elsewhere: ‘Give me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be mine for ever.’ At his canonization it was said, ‘Ignatius had a heart large enough to hold the universe.’

Despite their successes, the Jesuits aroused immense fear and resentment, among Catholics as well as Protestants. They were famed for their casuistry in dispute, and were widely thought to hold that ‘the end justifies the means’. They came to be seen as the Church’s secret thought police, accountable to no one. Already in 1612 the forged Monita Secreta, published in Cracow, purported to reveal the instructions of their worldwide conspiracy under the formidable General Acquaviva, ‘the Black Pope’. The Society was suppressed in 1773 but restored in 1814.

The Holy Office was established in 1542 as the supreme court of appeal in matters of heresy. Staffed by leading cardinals, it assumed supervision of the Inquisition and in 1557 issued the first Index, the list of prohibited books. In 1588 it became one of the nine reorganized Congregations, or executive departments of the Roman Curia. It worked alongside the Office for the Propagation of the Faith, which was charged with converting the heathen and heretics, [INDEX] [INQUISITIO] [PROPAGANDA]

The Council of Trent, which met in three sessions, 1545–7,1551–2, and 1562–3, was the General Council for which Church reformers had been praying for decades. It provided the doctrinal definitions and the institutional structures which enabled the Roman Church to revive and to meet the Protestant challenge. Its decrees on doctrine were largely conservative. It confirmed that the Church alone could interpret the Scriptures, and that religious truth derived from Catholic tradition as well as from the Bible. It upheld traditional views of original sin, justification, and merit, and rejected the various Protestant alternatives to transubstantiation during the Eucharist. Its decrees on organization reformed the Church orders, regularized the appointment of bishops, and established seminaries in every diocese. Its decrees on the form of the Mass, contained in a new Catechism and a revised Breviary, affected the lives of ordinary Catholics most directly. After 1563 the same Latin Tridentine Mass could be heard in most Roman Catholic churches throughout the world.

Critics of the Council of Trent point to its neglect of practical ethics, its failure to give Catholics a moral code to match that of the Protestants. ‘It impressed on the Church the stamp of an intolerant age,’ wrote an English Catholic, ‘and perpetuated … the spirit of an austere immorality.’ The Protestant historian Ranke stressed the paradox of a Council which had intended to trim the Papacy. Instead, by oaths of loyalty, detailed regulations, and punishments, the entire Catholic hierarchy was subordinated to the Pope. ‘Discipline was restored, but all the faculties of directing it were centred in Rome.’ Several Catholic monarchs, including Philip II of Spain, so feared the Tridentine decrees that they curtailed their publication.

The particular religious ethos promoted by the Counter-Reformation emphasized the discipline and collective life of the faithful. It reflected the wide powers of enforcement given to the hierarchy, and the outward show of conformity which believers were now required to display. It insisted on regular confession as a sign of submission. It was supported by a wide range of communal practices—pilgrimages, ceremonies, and processions—and by the calculated theatricality of the accompanying art, architecture, and music. Catholic propaganda of this vintage was strong both on rational argument, and on devices for impressing the senses. The Baroque churches of the era, crammed with altars, columns, statues, cherubs, gold leaf, icons, monstrances, candelabra, and incense, were designed to leave nothing to the private thoughts of the congregation. Unlike the Protestant preachers, who stressed individual conscience and individual probity, all too often the Catholic clergy seemed to urge their flock to blind obedience.

INQUISITIO

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SEVILLE. Jesus Christ has returned to earth, and has been caught performing miracles. He is promptly arrested. The Grand Inquisitor conducts the prisoner’s interrogation in person. ‘Why have you come to meddle with us?’ he asks. And answer received he none.

Among many recriminations, the Inquisitor accuses Christ of misleading people with the gift of Free Will. Man is by nature a rebel and given the choice will always choose the path to damnation. For their own good, he implies, people must be denied their freedom in order to save their souls. ‘Did you forget that a tranquil mind, and a tranquil death, is dearer to Man than freedom in the knowledge of Good and Evil?’

Moreover, the Inquisitor claims, the facts of History support his case. People are too weak to resist temptation. For 1,500 years, they have wallowed in sin and suffering, incapable of heeding Christ’s behests. ‘You promised them bread from Heaven, but can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, vicious, and always ignoble race of men? We are more humane than you.’

The Inquisitor charges that Christ did not rebut the Devil’s challenge, and did not give proof of his Divinity. He failed the threefold test on Mystery, Miracle, and Authority. The Papacy, in fact, is secretly on the Devil’s side. ‘We have been with him, and not with you,’ the Inquisitor reveals, referring to the Catholic-Orthodox Schism, ‘for eight centuries’.

The Inquisitor bitterly foretells the victory of faithless materialism. ‘Do you know that centuries will pass, and mankind will proclaim … that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, and only starving people? “Feed them first, and then demand virtue!” That’s what will be written on the banners with which they will destroy your temple.’

In the Inquisitor’s dungeon, the conclusion seems inevitable.’You have been disgorged from Hell’, he tells Christ; ‘You are a heretic. Tomorrow I shall burn you!’

At the last moment, Christian forgiveness triumphs. Christ kisses the Inquisitor on the cheek. Overcome by the power of love, the Inquisitor relents, and the prison gate is opened….

Such a summary might serve as introductory student notes on ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’. The creator of ‘The Legend’ was a young Russian author, Ivan Karamazov, who lived with his father and brothers in the 1860s. The Karamazovs’ own saga, like the ‘Legend’, which forms one of its central episodes, poses the eternal questions of Good and Evil. Father Karamazov is a nasty debauchee, against whom the elder son, Dmitri, has already rebelled. Ivan and Aloysha, Dmitri’s half-brothers, are respectively the sceptical atheist and the trusting optimist. But it is the fourth, bastard son, Smyerdyakov or ‘Stinker’, who kills the Father before killing himself. At the trial, Ivan is racked by guilt for inciting the deed, and tries to take the blame. But in an atrocious miscarriage of justice, the innocent Dmitri is condemned. In a final scene, the family’s children show their elders how to live in harmony.1

The creator of The Brothers Karamazov (1880) was Feodor Dostoyevsky.2 In it, he re-worked many of the themes and insights of a lifetime’s writing. In the view of Sigmund Freud, it is ‘the most magnificent novel ever written.’ About the Creator of Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky had no doubts.

Dostoyevsky invented the Grand Inquisitor’s Legend as the vehicle for European literature’s most penetrating critique of the Christian Church. In it, he presages the moral objections to totalitarianism. He imagines a fictional event. It well illustrates the author’s prejudices against Catholicism, but also his belief in the essential unity of Christendom.

On the surface, Dostoyevsky was a Russian chauvinist. He disliked ‘merciless’ Jews; he despised Catholics, especially Poles, whom he often portrayed as criminals; and he hated socialists. He took the Russian Orthodox Church to be what its name proclaimed—the only True Faith. ‘In the West there is no longer any Christianity’, he ranted; ‘Catholicism is transforming itself into idolatry, whilst Protestantism is rapidly changing into atheism and to variable ethics.’ Allegedly, his formula was: ‘Catholicism = Unity without Freedom. Protestantism = Freedom without Unity; Orthodoxy = Freedom in Unity, Unity in Freedom.’

Many critics consider that Dostoyevsky put the Inquisitor’s arguments more forcefully than Christ’s. In the confrontation between Church and Faith, the Faith appears to lose. This was probably his intention, since he rated logic far lower than belief. ‘Even if it were proved to me that Christ were outside the Truth’, he once wrote, ‘I would still stay with Christ.’

Dostoyevsky’s critique of the West was unremitting (which may explain his star rating among Western intellectuals). Yet he saw the division of Christendom as an instance of the Evil which would ultimately be overcome. He believed fervently that evil could be conquered. Sin and suffering precede redemption. The scandals of the Church were a necessary prelude to Christian harmony. By this reasoning, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition were an indication of Christianity’s ultimate triumph. In his heart of hearts, the old reactionary was a universal Christian, and, in the spiritual sense, a devout European.

Above all, Dostoyevsky believed in the healing power of faith. On the title-page of The Brothers Karamazov, he added the verse ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ Those same words were carved on his tombstone.

PROPAGANDA

PROPAGANDA is the child of conflicting belief, and of people’s determination to spread their own doctrines against all others. Its origins undoubtedly lay in the religious sphere. It is in essence biased, being most successful when it appeals to hatred and prejudice. It is the antithesis of all honest education and information.

To be most effective, propaganda needs the help of censorship. Within a sealed informational arena, it can mobilize all means of communication—printed, spoken, artistic, and visual—and press its claims to maximum advantage. To this end, the Roman Officium de Propaganda Fidei, from which the term derives, worked alongside the Inquisition. It became one of the Vatican’s permanent congregations in 1622.

Propaganda was no less prevalent in Protestant and Orthodox countries, where the Churches were subordinated to state power. Political propaganda, too, had always existed, though without the name. It was boosted by printing, and later by newspapers and broadsheets. It was most in evidence in wartime, especially during civil and religious wars. During the 1790s, French soldiers were given to appearing in the enemy camp armed only with leaflets.

In the twentieth century, the scope for propaganda was dramatically expanded by the advent of new media, such as film, radio, and TV; by the techniques of marketing, mass persuasion, commercial advertising, and ‘PR’; by the appearance of Utopian ideologies; and by the ruthlessness of the totalitarian state. ‘Total propaganda’ and the art of ‘the Big Lie’ was pioneered by the Bolsheviks. Lenin, after Plekhanov, distinguished between the high-powered propagandist, who devised the strategy, and the low-level agitator, who put it into practice. Where Soviet agitprop led, the Fascists were quick to follow.

Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:

1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.

2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.

3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.

4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure, and by ‘psychological contagion’.

5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.

In this regard, one of the supreme masters acknowledged his antecedents. ‘The Catholic Church keeps going’, said Dr Goebbels, ‘because it has been repeating the same thing for two thousand years. The National Socialist Party must do likewise.’

One of the more insidious forms of propaganda, however, is that where the true sources of information are hidden from recipients and propagators alike. This genre of so-called ‘covertly directed propaganda’ aims to mobilize a network of unsuspecting ‘agents of influence’ who pass on the desired message as if they were acting spontaneously. By feigning a coincidence of views with those of the target society, which it seeks to subvert, and by pandering to the proclivities of key individuals, it can suborn a dominant élite of opinion-makers by stealth.

Such, it seems, was the chosen method of Stalin’s propaganda chiefs who spun their webs among the cultural circles of leading Western countries from the 1920s onwards. The chief controller in the field was an apparently harmless German Communist, an erstwhile colleague of Lenin in Switzerland and sometime acquaintance of Dr Goebbels in the Reichstag, Willi Munzenberg (1889–1940). Working alongside Soviet spies, he perfected the art of doing secret business in the open. He set the agenda of a series of campaigns against ‘Anti-militarism’, ‘Anti-imperialism’, and above all ‘Anti-fascism’, homing in on a handful of receptive milieux in Berlin, Paris, and London. His principal dupes and recruits, dubbed ‘fellow-travellers’ by the sceptics, rarely joined the Communist Party and would indignantly deny being manipulated. They included writers, artists, editors, left-wing publishers, and carefully selected celebrities—hence Romain Rolland, Louis Aragón, André Malraux, Heinrich Mann, Berthold Brecht, Anthony Blunt, Harold Laski, Claud Cockburn, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and half the Bloomsbury Set. Since all attracted strings of acolytes, dubbed ‘Innocents’ Clubs’, they achieved a ripple effect that was aptly called ‘rabbit breeding’. The ultimate goal has been nicely defined; ‘to create for the right-thinking, non-communist West the dominating political prejudice of the era: the belief that any opinion that happened to serve … the Soviet Union was derived from the most essential elements of human decency.’

Such cynicism has few parallels. It can be judged by the fate which the Great Leader reserved for all his most devoted propagandists such as Karol Radek, and probably Munzenberg himself, who was found mysteriously hanged in the French mountains. Brecht’s comment on Stalin’s victims was less of a joke than he thought. ‘The more innocent they are’, he wrote, ‘the more they deserve to be shot’.3

The Counter-Reformation saw a plentiful harvest of Catholic saints. There were the Spanish mystics: St Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) and St John of the Cross (1542–91); there was a long line of servants of the sick and the poor: St Philip Neri (1515–95), St Camillo de Lellis (1550–1614), St Vincent de Paul (1576–1660), St Louise de Marillac (1591–1660); and there were the Jesuit saints and martyrs: St Francis Xavier (1506–52), St Stanislaw Kostka (1550–68), St Aloysius Gonzaga (1568–91), St Peter Canisius (1521–97), St John Berchmans (1599–1621), and St Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). They won back much lost ground.

The impact of the Counter-Reformation was felt right across Europe. Traditional support for the Church was strongest in Italy and Spain, but pockets of nonconformity had to be smoked out even there. The Spanish Netherlands, trapped between France and the United Provinces, were turned into a hotbed of Catholic militancy in which the University of Louvain (Leuven) and the Jesuit College at Douai took the lead. Yet an important reaction against the prevailing zeal was provoked by Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), Bishop of Ypres and a fervent critic of the Jesuits. In his digest of the works of St Augustine, the Augustinus (1640), Jansen attacked what he took to be the theological casuistry and superficial morality of his day, placing special emphasis on the believer’s need for Divine Grace and for spiritual rebirth. Though he never wavered in his loyalty to Rome, and rejected the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, several of his propositions on the issue of Divine Grace approached the Protestant standpoint, and were duly condemned as such. (See Chapter VIII.)

Switzerland was rent by the hostility of the Catholic and the Protestant cantons. The doctrines of Zurich and Geneva penetrated many of the alpine villages of the surrounding regions. They were eradicated by violent means on the Italian border by St Charles Borromeo, Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan (1538–84), and contested in Savoy by the more gentle persuasion of St Francis de Sales (1567–1622), author of the bestselling Introduction to the Devout Life (1609). [MENOCCHI]

In France, many Catholics stood aloof from the new militancy, partly in line with the Gallican tradition and the Concordat of 1516, and partly from France’s hostility to the Habsburgs. But a pro-Roman ‘ultramontane’ party grew in prominence round the faction of the Guises. Their darkest deed was committed at the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve on 23 August 1572, when 2,000 Huguenots were butchered in Paris—after which the Pope celebrated a Te Deum and the King of Spain ‘began to laugh’. In the seventeenth century Jansenism offered a middle way, an antidote to the partisanship of contending ultras and Huguenots.

MENOCCHI

IN 1599 a simple miller from Montereale in Friuli, Comenico Scandella, I was burned at the stake for heresy, just two years before Giordano Bruno suffered the same penalty in Rome. The papers of his case, which have survived at Udine, open the world of unconventional belief which historians penetrate with difficulty. After two trials, long interrogation, imprisonment, and torture, the Holy Inquisition insisted that he had denied ‘the virginity of the Blessed Virgin, the divinity of Christ, and the Providence of God’.

Known as ‘Menocchio’, the miller of Montereale, sometime village mayor, was father of eleven children, a rampant gossip, an outspoken anticleric, and a voracious reader. When he was arrested, his house contained:

 

a vernacular Italian Bible;

// Fioretto della Bibbia (a Catalan biblical anthology in translation);

// Rosario della Madonna by Alberto da Castello, OP;

A translation of the Legenda Aurea, ‘the Golden Legend’;

Historia del Giudicio, in fifteenth-century rhyme;

// Cavalier Zuanne de Mandavilla (a translation of Sir John Mandeville’s Travels);

// Sogno di Caravia (Venice, 1541);

// Supplemento delle Cronache (a version of Foesti’s chronicle);

Lunario al Modo di Italia (an almanac);

an unexpurgated edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron;

an unnamed book, identified by a witness as the Koran.

Menocchio had talked at length with one Simon the Jew, was interested in Lutheranism, and would not admit the biblical Creation story. Echoing Dante1 and numerous ancient myths, he insisted that the angels were produced by nature ‘just as worms are produced from cheese’.2

The Kingdom of England was targeted for reconversion in a campaign that spawned the Forty Catholic martyrs led by St Edmund Campion SJ (1540–81) and many other victims. Ireland was confirmed in its Catholicism, especially after the brutal Elizabethan expedition of 1598. But religious unity in Ireland was shattered by the planting of a Scottish Presbyterian colony in Ulster in 1611, and by the Anglican inclinations of the Anglo-Irish gentry.

In the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, the Counter-Reformation became inextricably confused with the dynasty and its politics. Indeed, that special brand of Catholicism, the pietas austríaca, which emerged at the turn of the seventeenth century became the prime ingredient of a wide cultural community that has outlived Habsburg rule. It was once called ‘Confessional Absolutism’. The Collegium Germanicum in Rome played a strategic role. The Jesuits took an unrivalled hold over education in Vienna and Prague through the efforts of the Dutchman, Canisius. Western Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Silesia, Bohemia, and, at a later date, western Galicia all belonged to this same sphere. Baroque culture, it has been argued, represented the ivy which not only covered the ramshackle Habsburg edifice but helped to hold it together (see p. 529).

Elsewhere in Germany, an uneasy modus vivendi between Catholics and Protestants had been reached in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg: each prince was to decide on the religion of his subjects; Lutheranism was to be the only Protestant denomination allowed; Lutherans living in Catholic states were to be tolerated. Germany was turned into a religious patchwork where, however, the Catholic princes and emperors, feared a further Protestant advance. As from the 1550s, ‘Spanish priests’ set up Jesuit centres at Cologne, Mainz, Ingolstadt, and Munich, creating durable Catholic bastions in the Rhineland and Bavaria. Calvinist enclaves, in the Palatinate and Saxony and elsewhere, were not secured until the second half of the century. In December 1607 the Duke of Bavaria provocatively seized the city of Donauwörth in Swabia in order to stop Protestant interference with Catholic processions. Ten Protestant princes thereon convened an Evangelical Union to defend their interests, only to be confronted by the rival activities of a Catholic League. It is difficult to say, therefore, whether the outbreak of the Thirty Years War occurred in 1618 or beforehand.

In this world of growing religious intolerance, Poland-Lithuania occupied a place apart. A vast territory with a very varied population, it had contained a mosaic of the Catholic, Orthodox, Judaic, and Muslim faiths even before Lutheranism claimed the cities of Polish Prussia or Calvinism a sizeable section of the nobility. Such was the position of the ruling szlachta that every manor could run its religious affairs with the same liberty as German princedoms. From 1565 the verdicts of ecclesiastical courts could not be enforced on the private estates of noblemen. At the very time that Cardinal Hozjusz, President of the Council of Trent and Bishop of Warmia, was introducing the Jesuits, Poland was receiving all manner of heretics and religious refugees—English and Scottish Catholics, Czech Brethren, Anabaptists from Holland, or, like Faustus Sozzini (Socinius), Italian Unitarians. In 1573, with Calvinists commanding a majority in the Senate, the Polish parliament passed a statute of permanent and universal toleration, from which only the Socinians were excepted. Under Sigismund III Vasa (r. 1587–1632), a fervent pupil of the Jesuits, the ultramontane party gradually reasserted the Catholic supremacy. But progress was slow; and non-violent methods alone were available. In this period Poland could rightly boast of its role both as the bulwark of Christendom against Turk and Tartar and as Europe’s prime haven of toleration.

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the Counter-Reformation reverberated far and wide. The Vatican, under Gregory XIII (1572–85), entertained hopes of netting not only Sweden and Poland but even Muscovy. In Sweden those hopes remained high until the victory of the Protestants in the civil war of the 1590s dashed Jesuit plans for good. In Moscow the papal nuncio Possevino was received by Ivan the Terrible, only to find that the Tsar’s main interest in Catholicism lay in the workings of the papal litter. Clumsy pressure from the Catholic side probably pushed Ivan’s son, Fedor, into creating the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589, thereby finalizing the emergence of the separate Russian Orthodox Church.

Moscow’s démarche provoked a crisis among the Orthodox in neighbouring Poland-Lithuania, who till then had always looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople. With the new Muscovite Patriarch claiming jurisdiction over them from across the frontier, many of those Orthodox now sought the protection of Rome. In 1596, at the Union of Brest, the majority of their bishops chose to found a new Uniate communion—the Greek Catholic Church of Slavic Rite. They retained their ritual, and their married clergy, whilst admitting the supremacy of the Pope. Most of the Orthodox churches in Byelorussia and Ukraine, including the ancient cathedral of St Sophia in Kiev, passed into the hands of the Uniates. For a time the old ‘disuniate’ remnant was officially banned by the state.

Moscow, however, was never reconciled to these developments. The furious determination of the Russian Orthodox Church to punish and forcibly to reconvert the Uniates remained constant throughout modern history. Nowhere has the stereotype of the dastardly, scheming Jesuit remained stronger. The Russo-Polish wars, when in 1610–12 the Poles briefly occupied the Kremlin, only served to cement the religious hatreds. On the great Russian monastery at Zagorsk near Moscow, a commemorative tablet underlines the popular Russian view of the Counter-Reforrnation: ‘Typhus—Tartars—Poles: Three Plagues’.

In Hungary, a similar Uniate communion emerged from the Union of Uzhgorod (1646). In this case, the Orthodox Ruthenes of the sub-Carpathian region chose to seek union with Rome along the lines adopted in neighbouring Ukraine. (Their decision was still causing ructions between Roman Catholic and Uniate Ruthenes in the USA in the 1920s.)

All over Europe, religious fervour profoundly affected the progress of the arts. The more severe forms of Protestantism questioned the very propriety of artistic endeavour. The plastic arts were often channelled into secular subjects, since religious subjects had become suspect. In some countries, such as Holland or Scotland, music was reduced to hymn-singing and metrical psalms. In England, in contrast, Thomas Tallis (c.1505–85) and others launched the wonderful tradition of Anglican cathedral music. In the Catholic countries, all branches of the arts were exposed to demands for sumptuous and theatrical displays of the Church’s glory and power. The trend is known as ‘Baroque’. In music, it was associated with the names of Jan Peterzoon Sweelinck (1562–1621), of Heinrich Schutz (1585–1672), and above all of Giovanni Palestrina (1526–94), magister capellae at St Peter’s, whose ninety-four extant masses reveal huge variety and inventiveness. Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), pioneer of monody as opposed to polyphony, rediscoverer of dissonance, and proponent of Italy’s ‘New Music’, occupies a special place in the evolution of Europe’s secular music. He was largely employed in Venice, as always a counterpoint to the arts of Rome. Baroque painting was dominated by Michelangelo Caravaggio (1573–1610), a pardoned murderer; by the Fleming Paul Rubens (1577–1640), and by the Spaniard Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). In architecture, the ubiquitous Baroque churches were often modelled on the Jesuit GesÙ Church (1575) in Rome.

Religious fervour came to the fore in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Passions and hatreds once reserved for the campaigns against Islam now fired the conflicts between Christians. Protestant fears of Catholic domination surfaced in the Wars of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany, 1531–48, which ended with the Peace of Augsburg; in the French Wars of Religion, 1562–98; in the Swedish civil war, 1598–1604; in the Thirty Years War, 1618–48. Catholic fears of Protestant domination inspired many episodes such as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) in England, Irish resistance to Mountjoy and Cromwell, Polish resistance to the Swedes in 1655–60. In the East, the extended campaigns between Russians and Poles—1561–5,1578–82,1610–19,1632–4,1654–67—took on all the trappings of a Holy War between Catholic and Orthodox. Religious fanaticism could be made to inspire armies. In the sixteenth century the invincible Spaniards were taught to believe that they were fighting for the only true faith. In the seventeenth century the psalm-singing troopers of Gustavus Adolphus, or of Cromwell’s marvellous New Model Army, were taught exactly the same.

The French Wars of Religion were spectacularly un-Christian. Persecution of the Huguenots had begun with the chambre ardente under Henri II. But the King’s sudden death in 1559, and that of the Duke of Anjou, provoked prolonged uncertainty about the succession, [NOSTRADAMUS] This in turn enflamed the ambitions of the Catholic faction led by the Guises, and of the Bourbon-Huguenot faction led by the Kings of Navarre. A vain attempt at religious reconciliation at the Colloquy of Passy (1561) was bracketed by two violent provocations—one by the Protestants at Amboise in 1560 and the second by the Catholics at Vassy in 1562. Thereafter the rival factions set at each other’s throats with a will, fanned by the schemes of the Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici. The massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve was but the largest of the series. Vicious skirmishing reminiscent of the earlier English wars produced few set battles, but plenty of opportunity for the dashing adventurers such as the Protestant Baron d’Adrets or the Catholic Blaise de Montluc. Eight wars in thirty years were peppered with broken truces and foul murders. In the 1580s, such was the power of the Guises’ Holy League, intent alike on suppressing toleration and on reining in the homosexual king, that the latter ordered the assassination of the Duke and Cardinal de Guise (1588). (Their father, François de Guise, the famous general, had been murdered at Orleans in 1563.) In response, on 1 August 1589 at St Cloud, the King himself was assassinated by a furious monk, Jacques Clément. This left Henri of Navarre as sole contender for the throne. When the Catholic clergy refused to anoint a lapsed heretic, he cynically undertook to reconvert; he was crowned at Chartres in 1594 and entered Paris in triumph. Paris vaut bien une messe (Paris is well worth a Mass) sums up the moral tone. The resultant Edict of Nantes (1598) was no better. Having fought all his life in the name of religious liberty, Henri IV now undertook to limit toleration of the Huguenots to aristo-cratic houses, to two churches per district, and to 120 named strongholds. Intense fears and suspicions remained.

Given the persistence of religious pluralism in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Poland-Lithuania, it is erroneous to view Europe in this period in terms of a simple division between the ‘Protestant North’ and the ‘Catholic South’. The Irish, the Belgians, and the Poles, among others, have every right to insist that the North was not uniformly Protestant. Both Orthodox Christians and Muslims have good reason to object to the South being classified as uniformly Catholic. The Protestant-Catholic divide was an important feature of Central Europe, and of Germany in particular. But it cannot be applied with any precision to the Continent as a whole. Attempts by Marx or Weber to correlate it with later divisions based on social or economic criteria would seem to be Germanocentric to a fault. One might as well ask why the Protestant God was so successful in endowing his followers with coalfields.

One thing was clear. Senseless bloodletting in the name of religion inevitably sparked off a reaction in the minds of intelligent people. The Wars of Religion offered fertile soil for the fragile seeds of reason and science.

The Scientific Revolution, which is generally held to have taken place between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, has been called ‘the most important event in European History since the rise of Christianity’.18 It followed a natural progression from Renaissance humanism, and was assisted to some extent by Protestant attitudes. Its forte lay in astronomy, and in those sciences such as mathematics, optics, and physics which were needed to collect and to interpret astronomical data. But it changed mankind’s view both of human nature and the human predicament. It began with observations made on the tower of the capitular church of Frombork (Frauenburg) in Polish Prussia in the second decade of the sixteenth century; and it culminated at a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College in London on 28 April 1686.

The difficulty with the Scientific Revolution, as with any fundamental shift in human thought, lies in the fact that its precepts did not accord with prevailing ideas and practices. The so-called ‘age of Copernicus, Bacon and Galileo’ is a misnomer: in most respects this was still the age of the alchemists, the astrologers, and the magicians. Nor should modern historians mock the achievements of those whose theories were eventually proved mistaken. It is fair to say that the alchemists misunderstood the nature of matter. It is not fair to say that researchers who have seen the constructive aspects of alchemy are ‘tinctured by the lunacy which they try to describe’. It would be hard to find a more ‘whiggish interpretation’ of scientific history.19

Mikolaj Kopernik (Copernicus, 1473–1543), who had studied both at Cracow and at Padua, established that the Sun, not the Earth, lay at the centre of the solar system. His heliocentric ideas coincided with the common astrological habit of using the sun as the symbol of unity. But the point is: he proved the hypothesis by detailed experiments and measurements. Son of a German merchant family from Thorn (Toru) and a loyal subject of the King of Poland, whom he had actively defended against the Teutonic Knights, he lived for thirty years in Frombork as a canon of the province of Warmia (Ermeland). He was employed by the King in the pursuit of monetary reform; and his treatise Monetae cudendae ratio (1526), about ‘bad money driving out good’, expounded Gresham’s Law thirty years before Gresham. His theory of heliocentrism, first advanced in 1510, was fully supported with statistical data in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, 1543). It was published on the initiative of a mathematical colleague from Lutheran Wittenberg, G. J. von Lauchen (Rheticus), dedicated to Pope Paul III, and delivered to its author on his deathbed. At a stroke it overturned reigning conceptions of the universe, dashing the Aristotelian ideas about a central, immobile, and unplanetlike Earth. Its immediate impact was much reduced because a fearful editor replaced Copernicus’s introduction with a misleading preface of his own.

The Copernican theory gestated for almost a century. The Dane Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) rejected heliocentrism; but through observing the pathways of comets he destroyed another ancient misconception, namely that the cosmos consists of onion-like crystalline spheres. Brahe’s colleague in Prague, Johann Kepler (1571–1630), established the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, and enunciated the laws of motion underlying Copernicus. But it was the Florentine, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), one of the first to avail himself of the newly invented telescope, who really brought Copernicus to the wider public. Fortunately for posterity, Galileo was as rash as he was perceptive. Having discovered that ‘the moon is not smooth or uniform, but rough and full of cavities, like the earth’, he exploded the prevailing theory of ‘perfect spheres’. Moreover, he defended his findings with scathing comments on his opponents’ biblical references. ‘The astronomical language of the Bible’, he suggested to the dowager Duchess of Tuscany, was ‘designed for the comprehension of the ignorant’. This, in 1616, earned him a summons to Rome, and a papal admonition. And Galileo’s praise for Copernicus put Copernicus onto the Index. When Galileo persisted, however, and published his Dialogo dei due massimi Sistemi del mondo (Dialogue on the two main world systems, 1632), which expounded the superiority of Copernicus over Ptolemy, he was formally tried by the Inquisition, and forced to recant. His supposed parting comment to the inquisitors, Eppur si muove (Yet it does move), is apocryphal, [LESBIA]

Practical science remained in its infancy during the era when the Copernican theory was in dispute. Some important assertions were made, however, by the sometime Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the father of scientific method. In his Advancement of Learning (1605), the Novum Organum (1620), and the New Atlantis (1627), Bacon stated the proposition that knowledge should proceed by orderly and systematic experimentation, and by inductions based on experimental data. In this he boldly opposed the traditional deductive method, where knowledge could only be established by reference to certain accepted axioms sanctioned by the Church. Significantly, Bacon held that scientific research must be complementary to the study of the Bible. Science was to be kept compatible with Christian theology. ‘The scientist became the priest of God’s Book of Nature.’ One of Bacon’s ardent followers, John Wilkins (1614–72), sometime Bishop of Chester and a founder member of the Royal Society, wrote the curious Discovery of a World on the Moon (1638) containing the idea of lunar travel: ‘The inhabitants of other worlds are redeemed by the same means as we are, by the blood of Christ.’

LESBIA

IN 1622, in a little-publicized ecclesiastical trial, a Florentine abbess called Benedetta Carlini was accused of irregular practices. She had boasted of mystical visions; she had claimed to possess the sacred stigmata; and she had raised suspicions through some form of sexual offence. She was subsequently demoted, and spent forty-five years incarcerated.

In 1985, amidst much greater publicity, a leading American publisher launched an account of the trial under the guise of ‘a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy’.1 Unfortunately, the materials of the trial did not quite coincide with the implications of the title. The post-Renaissance inquisitors had focused on the defendant’s religious beliefs. They not only failed to emphasize the lurid details of a lesbian ‘lifestyle’; they simply were not interested. One disappointed reviewer commented that at no time before the present century were men capable of comprehending the notion of lesbianism. At the same time, ‘the apparently oxymoronic term “lesbian nun” easily tickles the curiosity … and guarantees the sale of a certain number of books.’

It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.

Important advances, too, were made by philosophers with a mathematical bent, notably by the two dazzling Frenchmen, René Descartes (1596–1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623–62), and their successor, Benedictus Spinoza (1632–77). Descartes, a soldier-adventurer who witnessed the Battle of the White Mountain (see p. 564), lived much of his life in exile in Holland. He is most associated with the uncompromising rationalist system named after him (Cartesianism) and elaborated in his Discours sur la méthode (1637). Having rejected every piece of information which came to him through his senses, or on the authority of others, he concluded that he must at least exist if he was capable of thinking: Cogito, ergo sum, ‘I think, therefore I am’, is the launch-pad of modern epistemology. At the same time, in a philosophy which divided matter from spirit and which delved into everything from medicine to morals, Descartes emphasized the mechanistic view of the world which even then was taking hold. Animals, for example, were viewed as complex machines, as were human beings.

Pascal, a native of Clermont-Ferrand and an inmate of the Jansenist Port-Royal in Paris, took the mechanical ideal to the point where he was able to produce the first ‘computer’. His Lettres provinciales (1656) are still quoted in Jesuit literature as a cup of poison. Yet his collectedPensées(1670) are a delectable blend of the fashionable rationalism and of sound common sense. ‘Le coeur a ses raisons’, he wrote, ‘que la Raison ne connalt point’ (the heart has its reasons which Reason cannot know). Or again: ‘People are neither angels nor beasts. Yet bad luck would have it that anyone who tries to create an angel creates a beast.’ Amidst growing hints about the conflict between science and religion, he proposed his famous gamble in favour of Faith. If the Christian God exists, he argued, believers will inherit everlasting life. If not, they will be no worse off than unbelievers. In which case, Christian belief is worth the risk.

Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew and a lens-grinder by profession, had been expelled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for heresy. He shared Descartes’s intensely mathematical and logical view of a universe formed by first principles, and Hobbes’s concept of a social contract. He was a pantheist, seeing God and nature as indistinguishable. The highest virtue lay in restraint guided by a full understanding of the world and of self. Evil derived from a lack of understanding. Blind faith was despicable. ‘The Will of God’ was the refuge of ignorance.

In England, the advocates of ‘experimental philosophy’ began to organize themselves in the 1640s. An inner circle, led by Dr Wilkins and Dr Robert Boyle (1627–91), formed an ‘Invisible College’ in Oxford during the Civil War. They joined together in 1660 to found the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. Their first meeting was addressed by the architect Christopher Wren. Their early membership included a number of magicians, whose influence was not overtaken by the new school of scientists, such as Isaac Newton, for another twenty years. With Newton, modern science came of age (see Chapter VIII); and the example of the Royal Society radiated across Europe.

As always, old ideas mingled with the new. By the second half of the seventeenth century, Europe’s leading thinkers were largely agreed on a mechanical view of the universe operating on principles analogous to clockwork. Galileo had divined the principle of force—the basic element of mechanics; and force, as applied to everything from Boyle’s Law of Gases to Newton’s Laws of Motion, could be precisely calculated. At last, it seemed, the universe and all it contained could be explained and measured. What is more, the laws of nature, which were now yielding their secrets to the scientists, could be accepted as examples of God’s will. The Christian God, whom Aquinas had equated with Aristotle’s ‘first Cause’, was now equated with ‘the Great Clockmaker’. There was to be no more conflict between science and religion for nearly two hundred years, [MAGIC] [MONKEY]

Europe overseas is not a subject that starts with Columbus or the Caribbean. One experiment, in the crusader kingdoms of the Holy Land, was already ancient history. Another, in the Canaries, had been in progress for seventy years. But once contact had been made with distant islands, Europeans sailed overseas in ever-increasing numbers. They sailed for reasons of trade, of loot, of conquest, and increasingly of religion. For many, it provided the first meeting with people of different races. To validate their claim over the inhabitants of the conquered lands, the Spanish monarchs had first to establish that non-Europeans were human. According to the Requirement of 1512, which the conquistadors were ordered to read out to all native peoples: ‘The Lord Our God, Living and Eternal, created Heaven and Earth, and one man and woman, of whom you and I, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants …’ To confirm the point, Pope Paul III decreed in 1537 that ‘all Indians are truly men, not only capable of understanding the Catholic faith, but… exceedingly desirous to receive it’.22 [GONCALVEZ]

The earlier voyages of exploration were continued and extended. The existence of a vast fourth continent in the West was gradually established by trial and error, some time in the twenty years after Columbus’s first return to Palos. Responsibility for the achievement was hotly disputed. Columbus himself made three more voyages without ever knowing where he had really been. Another Genoese, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot, 1450–98), sailed from Bristol aboard the Matthew in May 1497 under licence from Henry VII; he landed on Cape Breton Island, which he took to be part of China. The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512), once the Medicis’ agent in Seville, made three or four transatlantic voyages between 1497 and 1504. He then obtained the post of piloto mayor or ‘Chief Pilot’ of Spain. It was this fact which determined, rightly or wrongly, that the fourth continent should be named after him. In 1513 a stowaway, Vasco NÚñez de Balboa (d. 1519), walked across the isthmus of Panama and sighted the Pacific. In 1519–22 a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan (c.1480–1521) circumnavigated the world. It proved beyond doubt that the earth was round, that the Pacific and Atlantic were separate oceans, and that the Americas lay between them, [SYPHILUS]

The presence of a fifth continent in the antipodes was not suspected for another century. In 1605 a Spanish ship out of Peru and a Dutch ship out of Java both sailed to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The main outlines of the great Zuidland or ‘Southland’ (Australia and New Zealand) were charted by the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman (1603–59) in 1642–3.

The Portuguese were quickest to exploit the commercial opportunities of the new lands. They claimed Brazil in 1500, Mauritius in 1505, Sumatra in 1509, Malacca and the ‘Spice Islands’ (Indonesia) in 1511. To protect their trade, they established a chain of fortified stations stretching from Goa in India to Macao in China. The Spaniards, in contrast, did not hesitate to apply their military might. Lured by the dream of El Dorado the conquistadores, who had so recently subdued Iberia, now turned their energies to the conquest of America. They settled Cuba in 1511 and used it as a base for further campaigns. In 1519–20 Hernando Cortez (1485–1547) seized the Aztec empire in Mexico in a sea of blood. In the 1520s and 1530s permanent settlements were established in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and New Granada (Colombia and Venezuela). From 1532 Francisco Pizarro (c.1476–1541) seized the empire of the Incas in Peru.

SYPHILUS

FOR many years it had no official name. Italians, Germans, Poles, and English all called it ‘the French disease’. The French called it ‘the Neapolitan disease’. The Neapolitans called it ‘the Spanish disease’. The Portuguese called it ‘the Castilian disease’ and the Turks ‘the Christian disease’. The Spanish doctor who was one of the first to treat it, Dr Ruy Diaz de Isla, called it ‘the Serpent of Hispaniola’.1

Syphilis supposedly made its European debut in Barcelona in 1493. Diaz de Isla later claimed to have treated the master of the Niña, Vicente Pinzón; and it was assumed to have crossed the Atlantic with Columbus’s crew. At all events, whether carried by sailors or slaves, or both, it reached Naples in 1494 in time to welcome the invading French army. When the French king’s mercenaries dispersed in the following year, they took it with them to almost every European country. In 1495 the Emperor Maximilian issued a decree against ‘the Evil Pox’, taken to be God’s punishment for blasphemy. In 1496 the city of Geneva tried to clean out its syphilitic brothels. In 1497, in distant Edinburgh, a statute ordered sufferers to the island of Inchkeith on pain of branding. Of Charles Vlll’s campaign in Italy, Voltaire would later write: ‘France did not lose all she had won. She kept the pox.’

For reasons that are unclear, the spirochete microbe, Treponema pallidum, which causes syphilis, assumed a specially virulent form when it reached Europe. It bored into the human genitals, exploiting the scabrous fissures that were common in the unwashed crotches of the day, forming highly contagious chancres. Within weeks it covered the body in suppurating pustules, attacked the central nervous system, and destroyed all hair. It killed within months, painfully. Physicians chose to apply mercury to the pustules, unwittingly poisoning their patients. Over six or seven decades, the spirochete created its own resistance and calmed down. Henceforth, it would be the cause of a common three-stage venereal disease that left its deformed and sterile hosts a longer span. By then, amongst millions, its victims had included Pope Julius II, Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII, and Ivan the Terrible. It was not tamed until the advent of penicillin. The impact of syphilis was necessarily far-reaching. It has been linked to the sexual puritanism which took hold on all classes short of the aristocracy; to the banishment of hitherto popular, and licentious, bathhouses; to the institution of hand-shaking in place of public kissing; and, from 1570 onwards, to the growing fashion for wigs.

In 1530 the Italian poet, Girolamo Fracastoro, composed a poem about a shepherd struck down by the French disease. In due course, this was used by learned men to give the disease its learned name. The shepherd’s name was Syphilus.3

European colonization in North America began in 1536 with the founding of Montreal in Canada by the Breton sailor Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) and in 1565 of St Augustine in Florida by Pedro Menéndez. Menéndez had just destroyed a nearby Huguenot settlement (in the future South Carolina), where he hanged America’s first religious exiles ‘as Lutherans’. Three years later the Huguenots’ compatriot, Dominique de Gourgues, arrived on the same spot and hanged the Spanish garrison ‘as robbers and murderers’. Western civilization was on the move.

The Dutch and the English were relative latecomers to colonization, but in the late sixteenth century they both began to reap its benefits. Having founded Batavia in Java in 1597, the Dutch set out to wrest the East Indies from the Portuguese. The English colony of Virginia, discovered in 1598, received its first successful settlement at Jamestown in 1607. ‘The Mayflower, carrying 120 puritan ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ and their families, landed in their Plymouth Colony on 11 (21) December 1620. The Massachusetts Bay Colony followed ten years later. Although religious refugees from England, they did not prove tolerant. The colony of Rhode Island (1636) was founded by dissenters expelled from Massachusetts. By that time the existence of a worldwide network of European colonies, and their seaborne lines of communication, was an established fact.

The international sea trade multiplied by leaps and bounds. To the west, the transatlantic route was long dominated by Spain. By 1600, 200 ships a year entered Seville from the New World. In the peak decade of 1591–1600,19 million grams of gold and nearly 3 billion grams of silver came with them. The southerly route via the Cape of Good Hope was worked first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch, who also provided the main commercial link between the North Sea and the Mediterranean. To the east, the Dutch also pioneered a huge trade in Baltic grain. The growing demand for food in West European cities was met by the growing capacity of the Polish producers to supply. This Baltic grain trade reached its peak in 1618, when 118,000 lasts or ‘boatloads’ left Danzig for Amsterdam. The English trade in cloth to the Low Countries had reached record levels somewhat earlier, in 1550. English adventurers launched a Muscovy Company (1565), a Levant Company (1581), and the East India Company (1600).

The nexus of all these activities was located in the Low Countries. Antwerp, which was the main entrepôt of both the Spanish and the English trade, reigned supreme until the crash of 1557–60; thereafter the focus moved to Amsterdam. The year 1602, which saw the foundation both of the Dutch East India Company and of the world’s first stock exchange in Amsterdam, can be taken to mark a new era in commercial history, [INFANTA]

As overseas trade expanded, Europe received a wide range of new staple foods, as well as exotic ‘colonial’ products including pepper, coffee, cocoa, sugar, and tobacco. Europe’s diet, cuisine, and palate were never the same again. The haricot bean, which was first recorded in France in 1542, the tomato, which spread far and wide via Italy in the same period, and the capsicum pepper, which was grown throughout the Balkans, were all American in origin.

INFANTA

IN 1572 Martin de Voos painted a family portrait for Antoon Anselme, an I Antwerp magistrate. He portrayed the husband and wife seated at a table, one holding their son and the other their daughter. The picture is surmounted by a scrolled inscription which announces that the master of the house was born on 9 February 1536, his wife, Johanna Hooftmans, on 16 December 1545, their son, Aegidius, on 21 August 1565, and their daughter, Johanna, on 26 September 1566. It illustrates the emergence of the modern concept of the family made up of distinct individuals, both children and adults.1

In 1579 Sanchez Coello painted a portrait of the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain, aged thirteen. She was the complete little lady, resplendent in jewelled headdress, curled hair, high ruff, formal gown, and ringed fingers. The tradition would last in the Spanish court until the 1650s, and the famous series by Velazquez of another Infanta, Margharita of Austria, daughter of Philip IV. Once again, the exquisite seven- or eight-year old is shown as a lady in miniature, dressed in corset and crinoline, and topped by the ringlets of a lady’s coiffure. Children were still thought of as persons of lesser stature, not fully grown, but not qualitatively different from their parents.2 (See Plate 51.)

In earlier times, neither the nuclear family nor the age of childhood had been recognized as distinct entities. All generations lived together in large households. Children passed straight from swaddling clothes into adult dress. They participated in all the household’s games and activities. In all but the richest classes, they had little or no schooling; if they were taught at all, they were taught together. They were usually put out to work as domestics or apprentices at the age of seven or eight. They died in such numbers that everyone had the greatest incentive for them to grow up fast. Families existed, but they ‘existed in silence’. Childhood, too, existed; but it was granted no special status, and it was ended as soon as possible.

The ‘discovery of childhood’ was a process which took shape between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It can be traced in the dress and iconography of the times, in the invention of toys, games, and pastimes specifically for children, in changing morals and manners; above all, in a radical new approach to education.

Medieval children had largely learned by living, eating, and sleeping with their elders, all of whose activities they observed at first hand. They were not isolated or protected from the adult world. Only boys from higher society attended school, and they did so in all-purpose, all-age groups. One of the earliest instances of a school being divided into classes was recorded at St Paul’s School in London in 1519. With age-grouping, and the extension of schooling, came a great increase in imposed discipline. Christian morality, codes of conduct, and humiliating punishments were imposed from above. Schoolboys were the first to be introduced to a prolonged and graduated progression towards adulthood. Girls, sometimes married as early as thirteen, were much more likely to miss out.

Childhood implies innocence. Yet immodesty in children, and in relationships with them, had long been taken as natural. The boyhood conduct of Louis XIII (b. 1601) was observed in every detail by the court physician, Dr Héroard. The Dauphin was not reprimanded for groping his governess in bed, for instance, nor for showing off his first erections, which went up and down ‘like a drawbridge’. Married at fourteen, he was placed in the nuptial bed by his mother, to whom he returned ‘after about an hour and performing twice’, ‘with his cock all red’.3

The ‘ages of Man’, as summarized by the soliloquy in As You Like It, clearly constituted a well-formed scheme by Shakespeare’s time. But every century has made its contribution to generational concepts. If childhood was discovered in early modern Europe, adolescence was discovered by the Romantics, after Goethe’s Werther, and ‘senior citizens’ by the post-industrial era.

Europe’s intercourse with America, heretofore a largely hermetic ecological zone, led to a vast Exchange of people, diseases, plants, and animals. This ‘Columbian Exchange’ worked decidedly in Europe’s favour. European colonists braved hardship and deprivation, and in some places faced hostile ‘Indians’. But their losses were minuscule compared to the genocidal casualties which they and their firearms inflicted. They brought some benefits, but with them depopulation and despoliation on a grand scale. Europe received syphilis; but its ravages were not to be compared to the pandemics of smallpox, pleurisy, and typhus which literally decimated the native Americans. The Europeans re-introduced horses; in return they received two foods of capital importance, potatoes and maize, as well as the turkey, the most substantial and nutritious of domestic poultry. Potatoes were adopted in Ireland at an early date, and moved steadily across northern Europe, becoming the staple of Germany, Poland, and Russia. Maize, which was variously known as ‘American corn’ and ‘American fallow’, enriched exhausted soil and greatly facilitated both crop rotation and livestock farming. It was well established in the Po valley in the sixteenth century. It was inhibited from crossing the Alps until climatic conditions improved some hundred years later, but its long-term impact was enormous. There is good reason to count American additions to the food supply as one of the major factors underlying the dramatic growth of Europe’s population at the end of the early modern period.23 [SYPHILUS]

Descriptions of the arrival of Europeans in America have recently undergone fundamental revision. They have been ‘decolumbianized’. What was once ‘the discovery’ is now called an ‘encounter’ or a ‘meeting of cultures’.24 It would be better to be honest and call it a conquest. Columbus, too, has been downgraded. The primacy of his voyages has been handed to Vikings or Irishmen, or even to a Welshman in a coracle. His landing on San Salvador (Watling Island) has been relocated to Samana Cay in the Bahamas.25 The ‘peerless navigator’ is now said to have been a ruthless and rapacious ‘colonialist pirate’, alternatively a quixotic Jew sailing in search of the lost tribes of Israel.26 He is even said to have heard about the other continent from American women already in Europe.27 The sources for Columbus’s activities are meagre, the myths abundant.28 The real discoverers of America are those who went in the steps of the conquistadores, often friars like Bernardino de Sahagún, ‘the world’s first-anthropologist’, and who tried to understand what was happening.29

Intercourse with America had a profound impact on European culture. A gulf began to open between those countries which had ready access to the New World and those which did not. ‘Philosophy is born of the merchant. Science is born of commerce. Henceforth, Europe is almost cut into two. The West is preoccupied with the sea. The East is preoccupied with itself.’

Early modern society was not conceived in terms of class, which is a more recent invention, but in terms of social orders or ‘estates’—in Latin status, in German Stände, in French état. These basic social groups were defined by their function, by the legal restrictions and privileges which were imposed in order to facilitate that function, and by their corporate institutions. Wealth and income played only a secondary role. Heredity was the main criterion for determining to which estate (save the clergy) any particular family might belong.

The nobility, for example, descendants of medieval knighthood, were defined by their military function and by laws giving them special rights to landownership and to the government of their properties. With the growth of standing armies, their exclusive military function was somewhat diminished, but their position as the backbone of the ruling caste remained. Through their regional assemblies they ran local politics in the countryside, and they usually enjoyed full jurisdiction over the inhabitants of their lands. In most countries they were headed by an upper crust such as the peers of England or the grandees of Spain; or else they were divided, as in Germany, into numerous ranks. The burgher estate, built on the liberties of self-governing cities and of the city guilds, was also stratified between the patricians, the freemen, and the propertyless plebs. It was usually protected by royal charters, and enjoyed full jurisdiction within the city walls. The peasants consisted of an enserfed majority and a minority who remained free or who were emerging from serfdom. The status of the serfs could vary considerably depending whether they lived on church, crown, or noble land.

The existence of many fragmented jurisdictions was incompatible with state despotism, and hence with Muscovite Tsarism or Ottoman rule. Here was the social base which rendered western absolutism rather different from eastern autocracy. It was built on a mass of practices inherited from the earlier period and, despite innovations, was still essentially medieval. In the West as in the East, the social constraints on individuals remained very onerous by modern standards. Everyone, and not just the serf, was expected to belong to a corporate body and to abide by its rules. Renaissance individualism used to be celebrated by historians like Burckhardt exactly because they welcomed the first frail attempts to break free from the prevailing social curbs and compartments. When an exception was made, as when Michelangelo was released from his guild of artisans, it took a Pope to make it.31

The price revolution, Europe’s first encounter with inflation, was initially attributed to the wickedness of usurers. From the 1550s, through the researches of the University of Salamanca, it was attributed to the influx of Spanish gold and silver. ‘What makes Spain poor’, wrote a commentator, ‘is her wealth.’ Although the view of contemporaries was blurred by the wild fluctuation of prices and by governments’ repeated attempts to cope by debasing their coinage, it is perfecdy clear that the general trend throughout the sixteenth century was for a steady price rise. Grain prices in France, for example, where the supply of coin was relatively scarce, were over seven times higher in 1600 than in 1500.

The cost of living, especially in Western Europe, rose dramatically (see Appendix III, p. 1263). Explaining this, recent scholars have laid less emphasis on bullion and more on population growth, on land hunger, and on rising rents and taxation. In the sixteenth century, Europe’s five giant cities of 100,000 + rose to perhaps fourteen: Constantinople, Naples, Venice, Milan, Paris, Rome, Palermo, Messina, Marseilles, Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Moscow. Peasants flooded into the growing towns; wages lagged behind prices; beggars proliferated. Landowners maximized their profits; governments, constantly hit by the falling value of their income, raised taxes. There was little relief until the early seventeenth century.

The social consequences of the price revolution are the subject of immense controversy. The expansion of the money economy encouraged social mobility, especially in England and Holland. The commercial bourgeoisie was gready strengthened. Capitalism reached the point of take-off. Yet the growth of cities in the West was closely linked to the parallel growth of ‘neoserfdom’ in the East. The nobility of Germany, Poland, and Hungary strengthened their position whilst their counterparts further west were thrown into confusion. English historians of the period cannot agree whether the gentry was rising or falling. The English Civil War has been variously attributed to the self-assertion of a confident gentry against a ruined aristocracy and to the desperation of a gentry impoverished by the price revolution.33 [CAP-AG]

Particularly interesting are the links between economic and religious developments. The Protestant Reformation had always been explained in religious and political terms. But Marxists have not been alone in seeing a correlation between ‘the Protestant ethic’ and commercial enterprise. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) and Richard Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), though much criticized in detail, have inspired a whole school of comment. Capitalism, after all, needed its ideologues as well as its technicians. In this, Protestant writers undoubtedly played an important role in opposing deep-seated attitudes about usury. But they did so at a rather later date than historians once supposed. Tawney relies heavily for evidence on the English Puritan Richard Baxter; Weber, anachronistically, on the eighteenth-century American Benjamin Franklin. It was not until 1658 that the state of Holland ruled that no banker should be denied communion for practising usury. Theory, therefore, lagged well behind practice, [USURY]

In reality, capitalism thrived no less in Catholic than in Protestant cities. Fugger of Augsburg was no Puritan. He thrived because of expanding trade and industry, and because war, for all its destructiveness, stimulated demand for goods and for financial services. Protestant divines were less effective as advocates of capitalist techniques than the numerous refugee entrepreneurs who flooded into Protestant countries.

It was through these migrations that the seeds of medieval capitalism were scattered throughout Europe. The biggest businessman in Geneva, Francesco Turrettini (1547–1628), was a refugee from Lucca. Louis de Geer (1587–1652), financier and industrialist to Gustavus Adolphus in Sweden, came from Liege. Marcus Perez (1527–72), William the Silent’s original bankroller, was a Jewish converso from Spain.34

The military changes of the era—which like most things are now classed as a ‘Revolution’—had far-reaching effects. In essence, they involved the introduction of new weaponry, principally the pike, the musket, and improved artillery; the establishment of systematic training, which required professional cadres and instructors; and the growth of standing armies, which only the richest princes could afford.

One thing followed from another. The 16-ft Swiss infantry pike provided the long-desired means for stopping cavalry charges. But it could only be effectively deployed in a mobile square of pikemen, who had to wheel and manoeuvre with precision to face the swirling line of attack. As the Spaniards discovered, it was best used in conjunction with muskets, whose firepower could actually bring the attackers down. The musket’s accuracy, however, and its reloading rate, left much to be desired. It was only effective when a body of musketeers were trained to fire in unison, moving smartly in and out of the pike square between salvoes. Though it first appeared in 1512 at Ravenna, it was only widely adopted from the 1560s in the wars of the Low Countries. The combination of pike and musket demanded elaborate drill techniques, together with the steadiness and esprit de corps of disciplined professionals.

An answer to the pike square was found in the development of massed artillery. The cannon, which was fast rendering medieval fortifications obsolete, now came to be widely used on the battlefield for opening up gaps in the enemy line. Yet expanded artillery trains required complex technical support, an efficient iron industry, high-quality gunpowder, expensive transport, and professional gunners.

In naval warfare, the increased calibre of the cannon stimulated a rapid growth in the size, tonnage, and manoeuvrability of ships. Warships had to be turned into floating gun platforms. The increased range of ships stimulated the science of navigation, which depended in turn on precision instruments, on sound astronomical data and cartography, and on advanced mathematics.

On land, great thought was given to rescuing the art of fortification from the effects of artillery bombardment. The trace italienne, which appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, set out a sophisticated system of ditches, entrapments, and low, angled bastions, which denied the cannoneers easy targets and access, whilst exposing them to withering counterfire. Antwerp, fortified in this way by Italian engineers in 1568, started a trend which was to bring back the prevalence of siege warfare. By the time of the celebrated Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), the engineers had regained the advantage over the artillerymen (see p. 619). Cavalry never became obsolete, but was forced to adapt. It was increasingly divided into dedicated regiments; of light horse for reconnaissance and skirmishing; of lancers for battlefield offence; and of mounted dragoons for mobile firepower.

The military commanders who supervised these developments were faced with a welter of unfamiliar technological and organizational problems. Part-time gentlemen soldiers could no longer cope. The emergence of salaried career officers was accompanied by the consolidation of a professional military and naval caste. Military careers offered prospects not only for sons of the old nobility but for all talents. Rulers had to found military academies for their training.

Rulers also had to find new sources of income for their armies, and a new bureaucracy to administer them. Once they had done so, however, they found that they possessed an incomparable political instrument for reducing the power of the nobles and for forcing their subjects to obey. The modern state without the military revolution is unthinkable. The road from the arquebus to absolutism, or from the maritime mortar to mercantilism, was a direct one.

Yet the military revolution is another subject where would-be theorists have been tempted to use their localized studies from parts of Western Europe for making unwarranted generalizations about the whole continent. It is often implied that East European methods of warfare, in which the cavalry did not cede supremacy to the infantry, were somehow retarded. They were not. The armies of Poland or Muscovy needed no lessons from their Western counterparts. They were soon familiar with the latest technical and organizational developments; but fighting across the vast empty expanses of the East, in a harsh climate, they met logistical problems unknown in the battlegrounds of northern Italy or the Netherlands. When Poland’s wonderful winged hussars met Western-style infantry, as they did against the Swedes at Kirchholm in 1605, they wreaked terrible slaughter. They repeated the performance when they faced hordes of orientalstyle light horse at Klushino in 1610 or at Chocim in 1621 (see below). At the same time, thanks to the flexible, cell-like structure of their units, the towarzysze or hussar ‘comrades’ were able to forage and skirmish and to sustain themselves in hostile country where all less adaptable armies were devoured. In their encounters with the Poles, the Muscovites experienced many decades of failure, often because of ill-conceived Western innovations. But they possessed first-class artillery from an early date; and it was the Russian artillery which finally broke Sweden’s military supremacy at Poltava.35

‘The nation-state’ and ‘nationalism’ are terms which are frequently applied, or misapplied, to the sixteenth century. They are more appropriate to the nineteenth, when they were invented by historians looking for the origins of the nation-states of their own day. They should certainly not be used to convey premature preoccupations with ethnic identity. What they can properly convey, however, is the strong sense of sovereignty which both monarchs and subjects assumed, as the unity of the Middle Ages disintegrated. Their overriding raison d’état had an economic dimension associated with mercantilism, as well as the purely political one.

II Principe (The Prince), written in 1513, served as the handbook for all such rulers who wished to reach a position of untrammelled command. It is often judged to be the starting-point of modern political science. Its author, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), historian, dramatist, and Florentine diplomat, who had observed Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI, ‘the great deceiver’, at close quarters, wrote his book in the hope that it would inspire a prince to fulfil Dante’s old dream of a unified Italy. But its appeal was universal. By separating politics from moral scruples, it gave voice to the art of Machtpolitik or untrammelled power politics. At one level this ‘Machiavellianism’ caused grave scandal. Concepts such as frodi onorevoli (honourable frauds) or scelleratezze gloriose (glorious rascalries) became notorious. At a more serious level, if The Prince is read in conjunction with the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli can be seen to have been a devoted advocate of limited government, of the rule of law and of liberty. His low view of human nature provides the ground base on which constitutional structures have to be built. But it is his cynical aphorisms that were best remembered. ‘The nearer people are to the Church of Rome,’ he wrote, ‘the more irreligious they are.’ ‘A prince who desires to maintain his position must learn to be good or not as needs may require.’ ‘War should be the only study of a prince. He should look upon peace only as a breathing space which … gives him the means to execute military plans.’ Machiavelli has had no shortage of disciples.

On the subject of the model Renaissance prince, most historians would think in the first place of the Italian despots like Lorenzo the Magnificent or Ludovico Sforza. After that they would probably propose those formidable neighbours and rivals, Francis I and Henry VIII, whose meeting on the ‘Field of Cloth of Gold’ (1520) exemplified so many quirks and qualities of the age. Yet none deserves more attention than Matthias Hunyadi ‘Corvinus’, King of Hungary (r. 1458–90).

Corvinus—so called from the raven in his coat-of-arms—was a social upstart, the son of a baron and crusader from Transylvania, Iancu of Hunedoara, (János Hunyadi), who had made his name fighting the Turks. He used his Transylvanian base and a strong mercenary army to subdue the Hungarian magnates, and to initiate a reign where Italian culture was made the mark of political prestige. He had been educated by the humanist Archbishop Vitez; he was married to a neapolitan princess, Beatrice of Aragon; and he succeeded to a royal court which had cultivated its Italian ties since Angevin times. The court at Buda was filled with books, pictures, and philosophers, and was in touch with all the leading scholars of the day, from Poliziano to Ficino. It also boasted a great library, which as a collection of incunabula and manuscripts was the chief rival of the Medicis’ library in Florence. In 1485, when Corvinus captured Vienna, he looked to be on the brink of founding a Hungaro-Austrian monarchy that would soon make a solid bid for control of the Empire. In the event, all plans were brought to naught by his sudden death. His scholarly son was rejected by the Hungarian nobles in favour of a Jagiellon. With some small delay, the pickings were taken by the Habsburgs and the Turks. Like the books of the plundered royal library, the traces of Renaissance Hungary were scattered to the winds, [CORVINA]

Of course, the strengthening of royal power in some quarters does not mean that one can talk about the general advent of absolutism, except as one of several competing ideals. In France, the restraints on the king were still so great that scholars can debate at length whether, under Francis I, for instance, French government was ‘more consultative’ or ‘less decentralised’.36 In England, after the assertion of Tudor monarchy, it was Parliament which asserted itself under the subsequent rule of the Stuarts. In the Holy Roman Empire the imperial Diet gained ground against the Emperor. In Poland-Lithuania republicanism triumphed over monarchy.

True enough, some Renaissance scholars, like Budé, looked to the Roman Empire for their views on monarchy; but others like Bishop Goślicki (Goslicius) looked back to the Roman Republic. Of the two most influential political treatises of the period, the De la République (1576) of Jean Bodin favoured constitutional monarchy, whilst the Leviathan (1651) of Thomas Hobbes made eccentric use of contract theory to favour absolutism. Without much evidence, Hobbes maintained that kings held unlimited rights because at some unspecified time in the past their subjects had supposedly surrendered their own rights. The resultant Leviathan, a ‘monster composed of men’—his metaphor for the modern state— was a regrettable necessity, the only alternative to endless conflict:

During the time when men live without a common power to keep them in awe, they are in that condition which is called war… where every man is enemy to every man. In such condition, there is no place for industry … no navigation … no arts, no letters, no society, and … continual fear of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The Renaissance stimulated the study of Roman law; but the period was equally marked by the reinforcement and collation of separate national laws and, in the treatise Dejure belli et pacis (1625) of Hugo De Groot (Grotius, 1583–1645), by the emergence of international law.