by Simon Winder
Uses for paper
Just south of Basle there is a wonderfully engaging paper mill, powered by a mossy, thunderous waterwheel. Inside, you can easily follow the different rotating shafts linked to the wheel as they lift and drop the hammers which pound the rags into paper: perhaps the only example of a technical process I have been able to fully understand. Seeing how paper in its liquid form is so closely akin to pancake batter brought together two of my lifelong priorities in a way that was uniquely satisfying. The rest of the mill was devoted to instructive displays about the many uses of paper, but unfortunately ruined it all with a statement about how Americans and Europeans use toilet paper in different ways to wipe their bottoms. This may or may not be true, but I refuse to share the details.
The paper mill is Basle’s best shot in the long-running battle between Mainz, Strasbourg and Basle about who was most important in the invention and diffusion of printing. The details will always be obscure. It is true that Johannes Gensfleisch, known as Gutenberg, unhelpfully moved around between Mainz and Strasbourg allowing starchy civic patriots in the nineteenth century to commission statues for both cities. It is also true that Basle became an extremely important source of printed books very quickly. But so did many places. The speed with which printing raced across Europe from 1440 remains astonishing. In the space of a generation the way in which books were understood was transformed. From an English point of view, the key figure was William Caxton, living in Bruges as part of the entourage of Margaret of York. He seems to have first seen a printing press on a business trip to Cologne.
Gutenberg’s creation was fed by many sources. He was himself a goldsmith, but the forms of precision needed were common across many aspects of fifteenth-century life – the fitting of a wagon wheel (or indeed mill wheel) required precision, albeit on a robust scale; a suit of armour had many minutely tooled parts. My own hunch, for which there is no evidence, is that a key spur was the technological battle across the century for ever more precision in gun-making, where being fractions of an inch out one way could result in a weapon that squirted burning gasses all over its user or, the other way, made it blow up. Famously, Gutenberg’s initial experiments used a wine press, so a key element to the invention already existed.
In everyone’s minds there is always a direct line between printing and the Reformation: the new technology running rings around the authorities and spreading the Word in forms which simply could not be stopped. The great encounter in April 1521 between the Emperor Charles V and Martin Luther at Worms (in an imposing hall next to the cathedral, alas burned down by Louis XIV’s troops in 1689) becomes a face-off between hierarchical, medieval Latinate stuffiness and a demotic, modern, populist future; fussy illuminated manuscripts versus cheap, amusing prints showing the Pope being laughed at by devils. This also then becomes the transition between two entire worlds, with everyone wallowing in more than Gothic ignorance on one side and reading attractive novels on the other.
There is no doubt that the future of Europe was indeed played out in the consequence of Charles’s decision at Worms to outlaw Luther and that these consequences play out too through Gutenberg’s invention and had their most profound impact along the course of the Rhine. But there is much more to what happened than a mere Luther–Pope clash for the future of modernity. We cry out of course for a Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster narrative and Protestantism wants this to be true (even as Protestantism itself, of course, shattered into pieces), but it never was. In the notionally prelapsarian pre-Worms world Christianity already suffered from severe difficulties unrelated to printing presses. Most obviously it was a religion that had always been split. The Western European view (including that of the Pope) was on the whole to pretend that the Eastern Church did not exist, and hum loudly with fingers in ears each time that Constantinople made noises suggesting that Rome was merely its Johnny-come-lately low-comedy offshoot. Much of the elaborate ceremony around the Pope crowning Charlemagne and his successors as Roman Emperor and the elaborate iconography around the Theban Legion martyrs and ancient sites associated with Constantine was to counter the obvious problem that the real Roman Empire had had a continuous existence under a very different management in the East. This had been a key tension during the crusades. Part of these expeditions’ failure lay, not just in catastrophes like the crusader sacking of Constantinople in 1204, but in a linked series of fiascos that put an end to the entire realm of eastern Christianity – with Russia disappearing under Mongol rule and the Ottomans engulfing everything to the south, culminating in the final disaster of Constantinople falling in 1453.
While the Pope might have allowed himself a small sherry at this last news, the wider story could only be that Christianity was fading. Both Mongols and Ottomans may have still permitted Christianity, but it was a subjects’ faith. In 1529 the Ottomans would try and fail to take Vienna and their failure stabilized the zone of the Pope’s domains; but another way of looking at it would be that the Ottomans now ruled a vast area containing many of the key centres of human civilization, from just east of Vienna to the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, whereas if they were to successfully fight their way through the Holy Roman Empire there would only be France left before they reached the Atlantic. The dramas of Christian Europe happened in a small space.
This sense of Christianity being penned in, its universalism mocked, was made far worse by the way that there were innumerable forms of heresy even within its heartlands. The Waldensians had survived through countless persecutions, twisting and turning since the twelfth century and suffering a further round of massacres in the late fifteenth century. Most awkwardly, the Kingdom of Bohemia was in the hands of the thoroughly non-papal Hussites, who had successfully fought off several major crusades to get them out.
There was also the degree to which, regardless of Luther, the Pope’s authority had been under attack for centuries, at times reducing him to a laughably self-inflated Italian baron. Everyone has their favourite Pope story (it is always worth reading about the Cadaver Synod, obviously) but the Great Schism from 1378, which featured three rival popes, had a ruinous impact on the prestige of the office. This was finally resolved at the Council of Konstanz in 1417, but this did nothing to assuage an elaborate, intellectually powerful view that the Pope should only operate in conjunction with the important men who elected him. Curiously, some of the territories which were most critical of the papacy, particularly the Rhineland, in practice proved most impervious to Luther: in other words, being sceptical of the Pope’s special powers was a long, honourable and purely Catholic tradition. The Council of Konstanz was also important because it provided the key, unencouraging precedent for Luther. It was here that Jan Hus came under safe conduct from the Emperor to make the Hussite case, only to end up wearing a paper hat covered in drawings of devils and being burned alive. Hus hung heavily in the air at Worms for both sides – killing him had not ended Hussitism and it had damaged the Emperor’s status. But, still, Luther was kind of annoying … His being whisked away by his allies, disguised and hidden in a Saxon castle, may well have prevented him from being imprisoned or executed, but it also made him into even more of a European celebrity.
The deepest critiques of Catholicism lay in the lands of the Bishop of Utrecht, a large exclave of territory east of Utrecht itself which since the sixteenth century has been called the Overijssel. Many forms of private devotion were scattered throughout Europe. The great majority of prayers did not involve the structure of a church, but private shrines, pamphlets, images in households, books of hours. There was simply no serious means of regulating any of this activity, with potentially any amount of heresy in just one street of houses. Overijssel turned out to be important as the home of the inward, private world of the Brotherhood of the Common Life and because it was the source of The Imitation of Christ, a book attributed to Thomas à Kempis, whose alarmingly scrambled-up bones are now kept in a box in a church in Zwolle together with a charming little painting of him being inspired. One
of the most popular books ever written, it is an extraordinarily spiky, strange experience filled with the most crushing direct demands and awkward questions. It is disturbingly self-sufficient and plunges the reader into a world where The Imitation of Christ and the Bible are all a poor sinner needs. The Pope’s plan to build a glossy new St Peter’s Cathedral seems to be happening on a different planet.
The Imitation was a bestseller in manuscript – hundreds of copies still survive today. This was, of course, a much smaller circulation than print, but it was also a different habit, with each copy being read by many dozens of individuals before it fell apart. Before Gutenberg there was in other words a very effective, ancient habit of widespread reading, sharing and access. Orthodox Catholics could also embrace à Kempis – it became with the Bible one of the two books always on the desk of Ignatius of Loyola, Superior General of the Jesuits. But it nonetheless was a symptom of a Christianity dangerously (from the Vatican’s point of view) unreliant on the Vatican.
I feel I need to make one last, totally unprovable pre-Lutheran and non-Gutenberg assertion, the result of spending two decades wandering the art galleries of the Rhine and Low Countries. There seems to be an absolute explosion of very vivid, high-quality altar paintings from around the 1490s. Fifteenth-century art is often extremely special and high end (van Eyck, van der Weyden) but associated with the court and wealthy donors, whereas now suddenly every small church seems to be getting a picture. They are piled waist-deep in the Frankfurt City Museum, gathered in from countless Hessian villages. Often anonymous, they are works of incredibly direct emotional shock – appalling scenes of the Crown of Thorns being crushed onto Jesus’s head (a German speciality as a subject). Even today, to look at them feels like being slapped in the face. They are designed to break the viewer’s complacency, a visual version of The Imitation of Christ, demanding a direct, unmediated relationship between the emotional extremity of the events painted and the individual looking at them. There is no way of knowing if this is true, of course, but even if printing is set aside, by the time Luther gets to Worms there were already many important ways in which the Church as an institution has been undermined and in which countless Christians felt a direct relationship to the Bible not requiring any more elaborate framework than perhaps a comfy chair. The ‘Protest’ as it was refined by Luther’s followers was meant to provoke the total overhaul of Christianity. This failed: the Protest itself split incoherently and, in a totally unanticipated move, Catholicism itself successfully reformed, broke out of its Western European confines and conquered much of the world. The nature and parameters of that failure would be fought over at the cost of millions of lives for the next hundred and fifty years.
CHAPTER SIX
The New World » Margaret of Austria » The life and adventures of Charles V » The Oranges » Rebellion » The Catholic case
The New World
In the summer of 1520 my favourite German of all time, Albrecht Dürer, decided to leave his home town of Nuremberg and spend a year with his wife, Agnes Frey, travelling around the Netherlands. The most famous painter, engraver and designer in northern Europe, Dürer was anxious to meet up with the young Charles of Spain, who was coming to Aachen to be crowned King of the Romans, to ensure – perhaps a bit banally – that his imperial pension still got paid. This worked out and the Emperor Charles V’s written order to Nuremberg town council to pay Dürer one hundred Rhenish florins a year still exists.
I cannot remember a time when I have not worshipped Dürer – but just through ignorance I had no idea that for the year he stayed in the Rhineland and Netherlands he kept a diary. This extraordinary document seems to have started life as merely a space in which to tally his expenses, and a lot of it is indeed cluttered with the cost of lunch, the payment of tolls and a meticulous record of every tip that he gave. In their way these jottings alone are themselves compelling, conjuring up a whole world of larrikins, vintners, drabs, tapsters and lurky-men in a sneak preview of the scenes of Low Countries drunken chaos which the Brueghels would celebrate a few years later. The expenses themselves sometimes have a strange intimacy. Dürer buys a small human skull in Cologne (‘2 white pf.’) and in Antwerp he pays a ninety-three-year-old man to sit for him (‘3 st.’). The astounding result is his painting of St Jerome, which he sells to a merchant in the Portuguese colony in Antwerp, who sends it back to Lisbon, where it can still be seen today.
Dürer wanders around the Netherlands seeing the most wondrous new things. He is in the workshop in Antwerp where the triumphal arch for Charles of Spain’s visit to Brussels is being constructed. He goes to Brussels and watches Raphael’s vast tapestries for the Sistine Chapel being made, presumably using the cartoons which still can be seen today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London – the tapestries themselves being destroyed later in the decade during the Sack of Rome, one of Charles’s biggest cock-ups. He hears a report that a whale has been washed up on the island of Walcheren and races over to Zeeland for a look, is almost shipwrecked, but arrives too late as the carcass has been lifted off by the tide. But now he is on Walcheren he visits the Abbey of the White Canons in Middelburg and sees Jan Gossaert’s triptych – which ‘is not so good in the modelling as in the colour.’ We will never know how perceptive this was as the paintings were destroyed in a fire four decades later. He goes to the Brussels Town Hall and admires Rogier van der Weyden’s panels of The Judgement of Trajan and The Judgement of Archimbault (the latter a made-up ruler of Brabant) – both destroyed in 1695 during the War of the League of Augsburg.
Not everything is a vanished glory though. Dürer sees Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child sculpture in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, installed four years earlier and still there today. He is shown van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in Ghent and says it is ‘a most precious painting, full of thought, and the Eve, Mary and God the Father are especially good.’ The paintings were then less than a century old – very roughly in relation to Dürer what Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is to us. So what he saw was old, but in a tradition he recognized and felt part of – even as he was, through his own wanderings in the Netherlands, also helping to infect everyone with the Renaissance ideas that would shortly make van Eyck seem merely naive or, in the much later crushingly nasty old art-historian term, ‘Flemish Primitive’.
The riches of the diary are pretty inexhaustible. One of the things he makes a note of is when he gives out, sells or swaps some of his woodcuts and engravings. The idea that he has a satchel packed with copies of his St Jerome in His Study, The Six Knots, Melencolia I and The Knight, Death and the Devil I find simply flabbergasting. He is chucking them at friends and colleagues across the Netherlands, some of the greatest works in all northern art – some presumably getting crumpled or having wine spilled on them or being carried off by a dog. Each mention in the diary seems obscurely exciting: these were recent works and one can only assume Dürer was very proud of them. Art historians have enjoyed tracking down the influence of these gifts on subsequent generations of artists, but the occasional borrowing of a profile or a decorative element seems less important than the wonder of sitting in a pub in Antwerp, holding a recently printed-off copy of Melencolia I and with its artist awaiting your reaction (I am confident I would have stuttered something deflatingly banal).
Dürer records all kinds of things – his alarm at hearing Luther has been arrested (the Diet of Worms was going on during his trip), fearing that Luther has been killed, although we now know that his abduction was a trick to whisk him to safety. He expresses his overwhelming admiration for Luther and bemoans Erasmus’s failure to come out in open support of him – he also pops in on Erasmus himself and does a miraculous drawing of him in old age. He goes to Charles’s coronation. All the time he is drawing and these sketches can be precisely linked to his journey: some Irish mercenaries, Livonian women in court dress, the Scheldt waterfront, an African servant. He draws perhaps the most enjoyable little page of s
ketches ever: a random selection of lions and castles, a baboon and a shaman-like lynx with its eyes closed.
A whole great era in the Netherlands can be seen through Dürer’s eyes and the effect is both powerful and frustrating – we will never know more than these few words, the occasional judgements, the arguments about a specific toll. At the heart of the diary though, and which leaps high above its inadequacies, is the way that Dürer quite by accident is standing in the very spot where human history has just changed in the most fundamental and irrevocable way. There are other candidates for this high honour (Barcelona perhaps, with Ferdinand and Isabella meeting Columbus on the palace steps with his parrots and ‘Indian’ captives) but Antwerp in 1520 has a fair claim to be the sustained point where the Old World and the wider world came together. There are many clues in the text and in Dürer’s own sketches. Most famously there is his superb drawing of a walrus, the first in Western art. The animal was dead and a note on the drawing says it was caught in the ‘Dutch Sea’ (i.e. North Sea), which is unlikely – but it suggests rather that the Dutch were now fishing high in the Arctic. The walrus, with its mournful, doglike eyes, is an unwilling pinniped ambassador from a region previously almost unknown to Western Europeans outside northern Scandinavia.
As pregnant with the future is Dürer’s relationship with the Portuguese merchant who bought St Jerome. The merchant makes his guest a present of sugar loaves and barley sugar. I was idly wondering where these came from – they were clearly viewed as valuable but Brazil was not up and running yet. Coincidentally I had been in Madeira a couple of years earlier and one of the many remarkable aspects of Madeira is a museum of religious art which features some very battered Flemish sculptures and paintings. In any event, it turns out that Dürer’s Portuguese patron, Rodrigo Fernandez d’Almada, imported his sugar from the plantations in Madeira and was the very man who had exported these sculptures and paintings to Madeira. I was left astonished. Madeira’s pioneering use of Africans as slaves made it a sort of laboratory for the monstrous evil that Europeans were just beginning to spring on West Africa and the New World.
