Millennium
Page 17
Conclusion
Some readers may be surprised that I have not highlighted printing as a major fifteenth-century change. This is not to lessen the importance of the printing press: it is probably the single most important invention of the last thousand years. But it is another example of something invented in one century that has a bigger impact in another one. The fact is that the Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz in 1455 was in Latin and thus unintelligible to the majority of people.12 Moreover, most of the books published before 1500 were expensive, rivalling the production standards of fine manuscripts with wide borders and meticulously laid-out text. Not all those who could afford them could read, and many people who could read were unable to afford them. The illiterate majority had no interest in them at all. Thus Johannes Gutenberg did not change the world any more than the inventor of the compass did. The great changes that arose from printing were brought about by other people, who put his invention to wider use in the next century.
The most significant change of the fifteenth century can be summed up in the word ‘discovery’ – the discovery of the world and the discovery of the self. While the subtle changes of self-perception would have gone largely unnoticed, Columbus’s discovery of the New World was tangible and a universal talking point. It is extraordinary that within just eight years, between 1492 and 1500, European navigators found two new continents (North and South America) and a seaborne route to Asia. And that came straight after the exploration of the southern half of Africa. Imagine waking up to the news on your radio and hearing that explorers have found another three continents full of fabulous wealth. The comparison is not as preposterous as it seems, for our confidence that such places do not exist closely resembles that of the scholars who advised the kings of Portugal, Castile and England to turn Columbus down. How wrong they were – but how quickly they made up for their mistake. The earliest globe, in which the world was mapped in three dimensions for the first time, dates from 1492 – the same year that Columbus sailed west.13
The principal agent of change
It may be obvious from the above which fifteenth-century individual had the most significant effect on the West. However, we should note that Columbus was just one of many mariners who made discoveries. English seafarers regularly sailed into Icelandic waters, fishing for cod, in the first decades of the century. Greenland remained part of Christendom until after 1409, so some sailors knew how to cross vast stretches of the Atlantic. The men of Bristol set out on two explorations of the ocean in 1480 and 1481, searching for the mythical ‘Isle of Brasil’. And it seems that one of the main reasons why John Cabot sailed from Bristol in 1496 and 1497 was because these sailors had found land across the Atlantic, which would put them ahead of Columbus.14 There are also tantalising clues that Cabot may have followed the American coast a long way south, which would mean his Venetian-English expedition beat the Portuguese to the discovery of South America. Whatever the truth of the matter, the spirit of discovery was clearly in the air in the 1480s and 1490s, and we should not inflate Columbus’s pioneering role on account of his later fame and talent for self-promotion. Both Prince Henry the Navigator and John II of Portugal were even more persistent and determined than Columbus, and should be credited with providing the political and economic drive for European expansion. Columbus badgered the princes of Europe for seven years to sponsor his expedition, but Henry the Navigator spent fifteen years trying to persuade his mariners just to sail beyond Cape Bojador. John II’s vision of a seaborne trading empire, linked by fortified factories, allowed the small country of Portugal to establish footholds in India without the expense of administering a territorial empire. It is tempting to say that these men each deserve to be regarded as the principal agent of change.
At the end of the day, however, it was Columbus’s discovery that proved the biggest thunderbolt to hit Europe since the Black Death. It was his ambition for a lordship of his own that set Spain on a path of building a massive overseas empire. It is down to Columbus that Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the world today, after Chinese. And it was Columbus’s talent for self-publicity that ensured that all of Europe knew his name. It was thus down to him that all of a sudden people had to come to terms with a profound question: if the great writers of the ancient world did not know about two whole continents, what else had they missed?
1501–1600
The Sixteenth Century
In modern reckoning, the sixteenth century began on 1 January 1501. It was not that way at the time – unless you were living in Genoa, Hungary, Norway or Poland. In Venice, the new year started on 1 March 1501. In England, Florence, Naples and Pisa it began on 25 March. In Flanders, New Year’s Day was Easter Day – a different day from year to year. In Russia it fell on 1 September, and in Milan, Padua, Rome and many German states, the year started on 25 December. Most confusingly of all, the new year in France began on one of four different days – Christmas Day, 1 March, 25 March or Easter Day – depending on the diocese in which you lived. Only in 1564, with the Edict of Roussillon, was the French year standardised as starting on 1 January, taking effect from 1567. If ever you thought the past was simpler than the present, this calendar problem should make you think again.
Agreement on a date for New Year’s Day was by no means the limit of the complexity, however. All the aforementioned conventions were based on the Julian calendar of Ancient Rome. By this measurement of time, each period of twelve months was more than ten minutes short of an actual year as determined by the Earth’s orbit of the Sun. Ten minutes per year might not seem a lot, but by the sixteenth century, 25 December was ten days adrift from Christmas Day in the presumed year of Christ’s birth. In 1582, therefore, Pope Gregory XIII proposed a radical solution: to drop ten days out of the calendar and not to have a leap year in every year divisible by 100 unless it was also divisible by 400, thereby shortening every 400 years by three days (this is the system in use across the world today). Most of the Catholic Church adopted the new Gregorian calendar from Thursday, 4 October 1582; the following day now became Friday, 15 October. Of course this created a whole new layer of differences in date, as most Protestant countries kept the Julian calendar until the eighteenth century. Although both England and Florence celebrated New Year 1583 on 25 March, the Florentine celebrations took place ten days before the English ones. Such things reveal how intricately varied early-modern Europe was – even with regard to matters of daily routine that we take for granted.
The introduction of the Gregorian Calendar is only one of the thousands of changes in everyday life in the sixteenth century. In 1500, only the exceptionally wealthy travelled by coach; by 1600, it was said that ‘the world runs away on wheels’, and people were complaining of the dangers of road traffic accidents – with some justification. In marked contrast to medieval houses, which were sparsely furnished with maybe a trestle table, a pair of benches, beds, chests, utensils and little else, sixteenth-century houses contained a plethora of wooden and fabric furnishings, such as curtains, valances, carpets, cushions, cupboards and chairs. As for mealtimes, few people in northern Europe ate breakfast in 1501. The medieval two-meal rhythm of the day persisted: dinner was at about 11 a.m. and supper at about 5 p.m. But as more people moved into towns, and made their living by working long hours for other townsmen, the time at which they could have supper was pushed back into the evening. This meant that dinner, the main meal of the day, had to be eaten a couple of hours later and became lunch. It followed that you had to eat an early meal, breakfast, in order to get through to lunchtime. School also helped bring about this change, for more and more boys went to school, and the long lessons required that they eat breakfast. Hence breakfast was ubiquitous in towns by 1600.
The sixteenth century also saw the population expand again after a long period of stagnation. People started to complain of overpopulation. The shift towards individualism continued apace, with mirrors, or ‘looking glasses’, being available for just half a l
abourer’s daily wage by 1600. The personal diary as we know it evolved, as people increasingly wrote chronicles of the events that took place in their communities, interwoven with their personal experiences and reflections. More and more wealthy people had their portraits painted, so it is much easier to say what sixteenth-century gentlemen and wealthy ladies looked like, while the faces of their medieval forebears are almost entirely lost to us. The well-off frequently incorporated panes of glass in the windows of their houses, allowing them to enjoy daylight indoors to a far greater degree than their ancestors. They started building and maintaining recreational gardens, with formal designs, fountains and classical sculptures; previously gardening had been almost wholly practical, intended to produce vegetables, herbs or medicines. For many townspeople, life was much less of a struggle than it had been for their forebears. Lifestyle choices became a subject for conversation at banquets and for consultation in advisory manuals.
It was different for those at the bottom of society, of course. It is a salutary thought that as Shakespeare’s early plays were performed for the first time, thousands of people in England were dying of starvation in the great famine of 1594–7. But less wealthy people saw their lifestyles change too. According to William Harrison’s Description of England (1577), the common folk had experienced three major upgrades in their living standards in recent years. First, there was a great proliferation of chimneys in towns. This might not sound very exciting to you but it was a great improvement for those who had previously been forced to warm themselves at an open fire in the centre of their hall. The smoke from an open fire never ceases to swirl around you, making your clothes smell and your eyes water, and blackening the inside of your lungs as well as the beams, rafters and walls of your house. Second, ordinary people now slept on flock beds with pillows and linen sheets; previously they had had to make do with a straw mattress and a blanket on the floor, with a log to serve as a pillow. Third, a great many people now ate with pewter spoons off pewter plates and drank out of pewter tankards, whereas before almost all tableware had been made of wood.
By 1600 most people followed a routine that you will probably recognise. They washed their face and hands and cleaned their teeth when they got up in the morning. They had breakfast and went to school or work for about eight o’clock. They ate lunch around midday, and came home and ate supper with metal knives and spoons off plates, warming themselves at a fireplace. They lay down to rest in sheets on a mattress on a proper bed frame, with their head on a soft pillow. If your main concern is the routine of daily life, you may well conclude that the sixteenth century saw the greatest developments of the millennium. However, the same period also saw changes of a far more profound nature.
Printed books and literacy
There were about 250 printing presses in Europe at the start of the sixteenth century; between them these had produced an estimated 27,000 editions by 1500. If every edition had a print run of 500 copies, then as many as 13 million books might have been circulated among a population of just 84 million people.1 While such a figure is impressive, it requires some context. It was certainly not the case that 15 per cent of the population owned a book. Even the great majority of literate people did not own any printed texts, let alone the 90 per cent who could not read or write. Most books were printed in Latin and were theological in nature, which significantly reduced their appeal. Wealthy people who did collect books, on the other hand, were likely to own several. If 10 million books still survived in 1500, they were probably in the possession of about half a million owners, and many of those owners were institutions. It is safe to say that less than 1 per cent of the population of Europe owned a book. The popular media of 1500 were still the pulpit and the marketplace, not the printed word.
The key event that changed this was the publication of the Bible in the local vernacular. There simply was no other book that people were so eager to read for themselves. They wanted to study the word of God personally, without the intervention of a priest, in order to improve their standing on Earth in the eyes of their fellow men as well as God, and increase their chances of going to Heaven after death. They also wanted to understand it for the benefit of their families and friends, so they could advise them how to live a holy life. The Bible was thus the ultimate self-help book. Vernacular Bibles had existed in the medieval period, and some – such as the French Bible Historiale of Guyart des Moulins, the Provençal Bible attributed to Peter Waldo, and the English Bible of John Wycliffe – had been very influential. But these had only been available in manuscript, which meant they were both scarce and expensive. Printing made Bibles available in much larger numbers at a fraction of the cost. Even so, it was not the printing per se that made the difference, but the printing in the local vernacular. Learning to read in Latin is nigh on impossible without the necessary schooling, which very few people had received, so vernacular Bibles helped many people learn to read, as well as allowing them to study the word of God. It was thus the combination of three things – the printing press, the use of the local vernacular and the spiritual significance of the Bible – that challenged the dominance of the pulpit and the marketplace and ultimately turned Europe into a literate society.
Individual nations saw vernacular Bibles printed at varying times. German-speaking countries were the first to receive one, when Johannes Mentelin produced his translation in 1466. The first Italian Bible was printed at Venice by Niccoló Malemi in 1471; the first Czech Bible followed in 1488. A New Testament in French appeared at Lyons in 1476, and in 1487, Jean de Rély produced a printed version of Des Moulins’ Bible Historiale. These early versions were translated from the Latin Vulgate; translations from the Greek only followed after the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam produced a Greek edition of the New Testament in 1516. Martin Luther finished a German version of the New Testament in 1522, based on Erasmus’s Greek edition, and he collaborated in a German translation of the Old Testament, published in 1534. New French Bibles were produced in 1523 (New Testament) and 1528 (Old Testament). William Tyndale translated Erasmus’s New Testament into English and printed it at Worms in 1526, but fell foul of the authorities for his choice of words and was burnt at the stake in 1536 for his supposedly heretical mistranslations. By then he had only completed about half the Old Testament; his work was finished by John Rogers in 1537, shortly after Miles Coverdale printed the first complete English Bible. In 1539, the English government authorised the publication of a vernacular Bible, the ‘Great Bible’, and insisted a copy be made available in every parish. The Danes and Norwegians could own the New Testament in their own language in 1524 and the whole Bible in 1550; Swedish speakers had the New and Old Testaments in 1526 and 1541 respectively, Spanish speakers in 1543 and 1569, Polish speakers in 1554 and 1563, and Welsh speakers in 1563 and 1588. The Finns saw the beginning of written Finnish literature with the publication of Mikael Agricola’s New Testament in 1548. Few European communities did not have a vernacular Bible by 1600, although both the Portuguese and the Russians had to wait until the eighteenth century for complete Bibles in their languages.
The importance of this huge surge of people learning to read by studying the Bible in their own language cannot be overstated. Prior to about 1530, about half of the books published in England were in English and half in Latin, but in the 1530s, the proportion printed in English shot up to 76 per cent. After the publication of the Great Bible in 1539, it passed 80 per cent. It was a snowball effect: the more books there were in the vernacular – especially Bibles – the more people learnt to read and consequently the more demand there was for new books. In England, book production increased from just over 400 titles in the first decade of the century to over 4,000 in the last decade. An Italian writer complained in 1550 that there were so many books available that he did not even have time to read their titles.2 On top of this, individual books were read more frequently. Where once each Latin book had had one rich owner who kept it locked in his library and only shared it wit
h trusted, highly educated friends, now most vernacular texts were passed around and read a dozen times over by different people.
With so much knowledge available in book form, the value of reading became increasingly obvious to all. Schools mushroomed in number. Universities blossomed. Printing became the natural vehicle for imparting and receiving information. It was particularly advantageous to those wishing to acquire or disseminate scientific theories. In the days before printing, scientific books had been laboriously written out by hand by copyists who often did not understand the concepts they were describing, with the result that they made many mistakes. The spread of scientific ideas was therefore flawed as well as slow. Printing allowed scientific ideas to spread more quickly and accurately, with the result that the scientific community of Europe became much more of a single body, considering each other’s innovations and criticisms at the same time. This gave scientists far greater impact than they had previously enjoyed. When Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) was published in 1543, the proliferation of copies meant that many astronomers simultaneously discussed its findings. In addition, the text could not be suppressed by the Church authorities, even though they wished to maintain the unquestioned truth of a planetary system in which the Earth was the centre of the universe.