Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  Pinker also highlights the other traditional explanation – the increasing power of the state. Rather than simply arguing that the state was more willing to hang people, however, he argues that stronger centralised states stopped aristocrats and knights fighting and started the civilising process. As he puts it, ‘a man’s ticket to fortune was no longer being the baddest knight in the area but making a pilgrimage to the king’s court and currying favour with him and his entourage’.20 But lords had curried favour with kings for centuries, and at the same time terrorised the peasants back on their estates: the one did not imply the discontinuation of the other. Moreover, as we see from the above chart, Renaissance Italy, which was the home of courtly behaviour, saw an increase in homicide at this time. While Pinker is right to point to the growing power of the state as a reason for the decline of violence his description of the mechanism by which the state brought it about is misleading. To understand what was going on, we need to go beyond the traditional explanations and ask how and why people might embrace the power of the state.

  Let’s say you have a wonderful orchard in which the finest apples grow – so good that a number of your neighbours regularly steal them. After a while you decide you cannot tolerate their thieving ways any longer and start to beat them with a stick when you catch them. Most desist but a few carry on stealing, so you decide to lie in wait and strike the next thief over the head with a brick. The thieves hear about this and stop taking the apples, fearful of meeting you and your brick. What does this tell us about violence? When you were tolerating the theft, there was crime but no violence. When you were taking limited action against the thieves, there was both crime and violence. The threat of the brick marked the apparent end of both crime and violence. According to Pinker, we should categorise the last stage as non-violent, for no one is beating anyone else. However, if there were no threat of violence, the thieves would return. The violence is still there, only it is latent. This is more or less what happened in the sixteenth century: less violence was enacted and more of it transferred to a potential form.

  Pinker does not consider potential violence. His argument is that violence in all its forms has declined over the course of human history. This opinion has received much support in the last few years. A recent review article states that ‘a number of scholars simultaneously and independently of one another [broadly agree] that war and violence in general have progressively decreased in recent times . . . and even throughout history’.21 This judgement is sound if violence is defined purely as the enacted kind, and isolated from all other forms of force. But as my orchard story shows, to consider violence only in its enacted form is to see just half the picture. We have to consider force in all its forms if we want to understand what is happening when people refrain from attacking each other.

  In its potential state, force can be transferred from one authority to another – from an aggrieved victim to the legal system, for example. What stops an aggressive man from being violent is the thought that his victim might transfer his right to seek retribution to a more powerful body, such as the state, which will exact a more dire revenge. If there is no state to undertake this, the potential perpetrator has nothing to fear; he can be as violent as he wishes, as we can see in the high levels of aggression in primitive societies or the breakdown of law and order in Florence during the Black Death, when the becchini robbed and raped with impunity. Where the state is willing to take on the transferred debt of violence, however, it can crush the violent oppressor, including wealthy and powerful men. This is why lords gradually ceased to terrorise and mistreat their tenants: it was nothing to do with their currying favour at court, as Pinker claims, but a growing fear that they too would be punished by the state if they broke the law. The same goes for the rest of society. When people saw that the state was prepared to punish violent offenders, they thought twice before resorting to violence.

  So what made governments willing to act in the sixteenth century? It was not simply a greater readiness to hang offenders, as traditional explanations have tended to state. Ever since the twelfth century large numbers of criminals had been hanged for theft and other felonies. Rather the change was due to a phenomenon we have already discussed: increased literacy. Writing improved the lines of communication between the centralised state and its officials on the ground. As we have seen, a wealth of documentation was produced. Most importantly, records were kept of all the individuals in a locality. Over the decades, victims increasingly trusted the state to take responsibility for law and order. The wronged person who might once have felt honour-bound to draw the knife from his belt now thought, ‘I do not wish to risk my neck trying to get revenge; I will call the constable and seek justice through the law.’ He chose to transfer his retribution for three main reasons. First, he came to trust the legal system because it was becoming more efficient; second, he knew the legal system was more powerful than he was, and better equipped to enact revenge; and third, he himself feared falling foul of the law or starting a vendetta if he killed the original wrongdoer. At the same time the increasing efficiency of the legal system acted as a deterrent to the criminal too, by making it more likely that he would be apprehended. The would-be highway robber now decided: ‘If I am caught, it won’t be my pathetic victim who will enact revenge but the state.’ Thus better communications in society and a more efficient legal system acted as a brake on both the victim’s urge for retribution and the potential criminal’s readiness to kill.

  It would be simplistic to suggest that this was the only root cause of the decline of private violence. Running alongside it was an element of heightened individualism, which formed an integral part of the ‘civilising process’. An enhanced sense of self can be seen in the growing tendency in the second half of the century for people to write diaries in which they expressed their internal lives. People’s increased sense of themselves and their own suffering clearly facilitated their awareness of the suffering of others: we find much more empathy in the works of Shakespeare and the writers of the late sixteenth century than we do in the texts of their medieval forebears. At the same time, individualism and self-awareness were slowly changing the nature of self-respect in society. Consider that high murder statistic for Oxford in 1340: part of the reason for it was that, as in Dodge City, you had a large number of young, ambitious men with knives on their belts and friends at their sides, egging them on. The knives were still around in 1577, when William Harrison commented in his Description of England that almost every young man in London insisted on carrying a dagger. But Harrison was very disapproving of the practice. Men of good character were now expected to go to the law if they had a grievance. The heavily puritan society of early Elizabethan England, which frowned on violence for religious reasons, no doubt further undermined the confidence that young men felt when they went about town armed with a dagger. Where once a degree of dignity had attended the man who took revenge in person, now greater respect was accorded the man who considered such violence beneath him.

  Finally we need to note that the state continued to reduce private violence directly, as it had always done, by channelling it into public enterprises, including war. Medieval kings had controlled the factions within their kingdoms by concentrating the violent tendencies of their subjects on external enemies, through crusades or wars on neighbouring kingdoms. The same phenomenon can be seen in modern times: mid-twentieth-century America saw a significant drop in killings on home soil during the Second World War.22 Thus governments helped reduce the homicide rate by giving young men in particular a socially respectable purpose on which to expend their destructive energies. It is therefore not entirely paradoxical that the century that saw the emergence of the handgun and massive armies also saw the decline of personal violence. The state itself exercised a civilising influence, of a sort, by co-opting private force for public ends.

  The foundation of European empires

  The decades that followed Columbus’s first voyage saw an astonishing amount o
f land mapped by European explorers. The Treaty of Tordesillas had divided the unknown world between Spain and Portugal, and both countries wasted no time in trying to maximise their advantage. Columbus’s fourth voyage explored the eastern shores of Central America in 1502. That same year, and again in 1504, Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine banker, and Gonçalo Coelho made two expeditions to explore Brazil on behalf of the Portuguese, sailing down the coast as far as Rio de Janeiro. Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed Central America and discovered the Pacific in 1513. At the same time, the Portuguese continued their exploration of the East, reaching Mauritius in 1507, Malacca in 1511 and China in 1513. Desperate not to lose their own stake in this global race, the Spanish dispatched a Portuguese captain, Ferdinand Magellan, and 270 men in five ships to seek a western passage to China in 1519. They found the southern tip of South America and sailed around it and across the Pacific to the Philippines. Magellan and almost all his men died on the journey but 18 men returned in one creaking ship under the command of Juan Sebastian Elcanó in 1522, having sailed all the way around the world. In just 30 years European sailors had gone from not knowing what lay on the other side of the Atlantic to circumnavigating the globe.

  The speed of discovery did not abate. Indeed, one discovery led to another. Before Elcanó had returned to Spain, Hernando Cortes had brought about the collapse of the Aztec Empire. The Inca Empire soon followed. Buenos Aires was founded as a Spanish settlement in 1536. All has now been traversed and all is known,’ declared the Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara in 1552.23 By 1570, when Abraham Ortelius produced the first modern atlas, the outlines of North and South America were indeed known, including much of the inland detail for the southern continent, and the eastern seaboard of North America. Europe, Asia and Africa were shown very much as we think of them today. Australia and Antarctica were the only great land masses yet to be discovered. Ortelius’s map does include an ‘Australian’ continent – based on the assumption that Tierra del Fuego was the northern tip of an Antarctic land mass – but it was not long before the real Australia was sighted, in 1606. The sixteenth century was thus undoubtedly the one in which Europe discovered most of the previously unknown world.

  The difference this made to life in the West was colossal. For a start, it hugely expanded the geographic limits of Christendom. Previously there had been relatively sharp borders – points beyond which the Catholic Church did not exercise any influence and where travellers had to accept the rule of potentates who had no loyalty or obligations like those of Christian rulers. The Atlantic had been crossed in 1500 but it took decades for the newly discovered lands to be brought within the orbit of Christendom. By 1600, however, Latin America was ruled from Europe. The continent had European governors, used European languages for its administration, and transported gold and commodities directly to Europe. In Africa and the Far East, although sovereignty of the land remained in the hands of local rulers, the Portuguese were able to trade with many different nations. The Spanish too had set up an international trading empire, shipping silver directly from Latin America to China by way of Manila in the Philippines, which they founded in 1571. Whereas the Venetians had once seen the world come to their marketplace, the Spanish and Portuguese made their marketplace the world.

  The resulting social and economic changes did not just affect Spain and Portugal. For the first time, Europe saw the effects of long-term inflation as large quantities of gold and silver flowed from Latin America into the coffers of the Spanish treasury and thence into the European economy. Tales of a fabulous el dorado were matched for wealth by the reality of the Potosi silver mines, discovered by Spain in 1545. Of course, such stories and discoveries encouraged more explorers and conquerors to seek their fortunes. English adventurers followed their Spanish rivals. John Hawkins of Plymouth led three triangular expeditions, buying or capturing black slaves in Africa and exchanging these for gold and silver with the Spanish in Hispaniola before sailing back to England. Francis Drake, who sailed with Hawkins on his third expedition, commanded the second circumnavigation of the world, in 1577–80, and Thomas Cavendish led the third, in 1585–8; both men returned with enormous wealth. But they were just the most successful of a huge number of fortune-hunters, who ranged from semi-official privateers to outright brigands and ruthless pirates. By the end of the century, the Portuguese, Spanish and English had been joined by the French and Dutch in attempting to exploit the world’s resources.

  The explorers brought back more than just gold and silver; they also returned with many specimens of the flora and fauna that they found in the countries they visited. Turkeys, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, maize and cocoa are perhaps the most obvious new foodstuffs to have arrived, but in addition there were flavourings such as vanilla, allspice and chilli peppers. Rubber and cotton appeared in Europe, and so did dyes that were previously difficult or impossible to obtain, such as brazilwood and cochineal. The introduction of tobacco presented the previously non-smoking Europeans with an entirely new way of consuming a natural crop. The spices that had been brought to Europe from the East at enormous cost in the Middle Ages – cloves, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg and sugar – were now shipped in such large quantities that their prices fell dramatically. Much the same can be said for other Eastern imports, such as silk, coconuts and aubergines. In 1577 William Harrison expressed astonishment at ‘how many strange herbs, plants and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americas, Taprobane [Sri Lanka], the Canary Isles and all parts of the world’. Kings, noblemen and wealthy merchants all collected exotic items from the furthest regions, exhibiting them in their houses for the amusement of their guests – Native American canoes, Indian daggers, Chinese porcelain, Arabian musical instruments. The traders brought people of different races to Europe too. Natives from the Americas tended to be shown as curiosities. Those from sub-Saharan Africa were traded as slaves. The Portuguese were the foremost slave-trading nation but England and Spain also took part in the business. Queen Elizabeth I herself financed one of Sir John Hawkins’s slaving expeditions in the 1560s. It is ironic that the slave trade, having been declared barbarous and forbidden in the eleventh century by William the Conqueror, was supported in the sixteenth by his royal successor.

  Conclusion

  The sixteenth century changed what you could eat and when you might eat it. It changed what you read. It saw many people move from the country into towns. In northern Europe it introduced a whole new range of domestic comforts and saw the likelihood of you being murdered hugely reduced. And it brought to the fore some of the deepest concerns of mankind – what the interior of the human body looked like; what the place of the Earth in the universe was; how Creation was far larger than previously thought; and what you should do to save your soul. In trying to ascertain the predominant change of the century, however, it strikes me that there are two particularly strong candidates: the shift to a literate society, and the expansion of the world. Trying to decide which of those two was the more significant factor distinguishing the West in 1600 from its state in 1500 is nigh on impossible. That dilemma itself shows what an astonishing century it was.

  Applying the salutary test of what happened here in Moreton-hampstead, we can see that the changes mentioned above were ubiquitous. Parish documents were created as a matter of course, and records relating to Moreton and its people were kept in Exeter and London. It is highly likely that the first printed books came to Moreton in the sixteenth century. Firearms would have made their way here for the first time too. The local militia was entirely reorganised and the muster rolls for 1569 reveal local men armed with long-barrelled guns. With regard to religion, the fear that imbued society when Henry VIII wrenched England away from the Roman Catholic Church led to the Prayerbook Rebellion of 1549, which started at Sampford Courtenay (14 miles from Moreton) and culminated in a series of battles that left more than 5,000 men dead. A vast number of men from Devon – a county with two coasts – sailed to Africa and the New World with Dev
onian captains such as John Hawkins, Francis Drake and Richard Grenville, returning with exotic flora and fauna, and bringing back black slaves to be pageboys and servants in the houses of the wealthy. On the domestic front, the introduction of chimneys and glass windows is evident all round this part of England. In the house in which I live, the Stoning family built a substantial fireplace in the hall, with an external chimney, showing off to the neighbours. Traces of mullioned windows, which would once have held leaded glass, also attest to the comfort they enjoyed.

  Despite these things, perhaps the most significant development of all was the very realisation that society was changing. In previous centuries, people had known that war, famine, pestilence and plague altered their circumstances temporarily: these events would come and go. But at the end of the sixteenth century, people began to look back and see that life had changed fundamentally and would never be the same again. They could not ‘undiscover’ the New World. New books and new discoveries came to their attention every year. In the north of Europe, people could see the ruined abbeys all around them and they knew that the age of monasticism had passed. They saw the derelict castles – redundant since cannon had rendered their walls vulnerable – and understood that the age of chivalry had passed too. Towns and counties started to publish their own histories, aware of their waxing and waning fortunes. Indeed, history writing itself took off, with historians using a wide range of documents to piece together a reasoned analysis of the past, rather than just repeating snippets from old chronicles verbatim. It was not just that the sixteenth century saw enormous changes; it was that people were aware for the first time that these changes were happening. That awareness is another significant difference between the medieval and the modern mind.