A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age

by William Manchester

  Now Magellan moves from vessel to vessel, counting first the stores needed to feed the 265 members of his crews—quantities of rice, beans, flour, garlic, onions, raisins, pipes and butts of wine (nearly 700 of them), anchovies (200 barrels), honey (5,402 pounds), and pickled pork (nearly three tons); then the thousands of nets, harpoons, and fishhooks which will be needed to supplement diets; next, astrolabes, hourglasses, and compasses for navigation; iron and stone shot for his cannon, and thousands of lances, spikes, shields, helmets, and breastplates, should they land on hostile shores, as is likely; forty loads of lumber, pitch, tar, beeswax, and oakum, hawsers, and anchors are insurance against shipwrecks; mirrors, bells, scissors, bracelets, gaily colored kerchiefs, and brightly tinted glassware are intended to befriend natives in the East. … The inventory goes on and on. It seems endless, but the admiral’s interest never flags.

  IN ROME MICHELANGELO, having completed Moses and the Sistine Chapel, is dedicating a sonnet to his lifelong idol, Dante. The paint is still drying on Sebastiano del Piombo’s Christopher Columbus. Titian has just finished The Assumption, Raphael a portrait of Leo X with his sacred College of Cardinals, and Dürer a miniature of Jakob Fugger, the German merchant prince, intimate of popes and sovereigns. Earth is fresh on the graves of Leonardo da Vinci, dead at sixty-seven in a French castle near Amboise; the emperor Maximilian I, who died in his sixtieth year at Wiener Neustadt; Johann Tetzel, the indulgence hawker, gone at fifty-four in Leipzig; and the once lovely Lucrezia Borgia, who succumbed in northern Italy at the age of thirty-nine. Lucrezia’s last years were devoted to piety and the education of her son Giovanni, whose father, Pope Alexander VI, was also his grandfather.

  Jakob Fugger is not dead, but he is approaching the end, making more money every day. His colossal fortune is estimated at 2,032,652 guilders. In England Lord Chancellor Wolsey has just moved into Hampton Court palace. Among the works now popular with literate Europeans are More’s Utopia, Alexander Barclay’s The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, and Machiavelli’s Il principe. Erasmus is enjoying his third popular success, Colloquia familiaria. Inspired by his renown, satire and morality plays are fashionable in the theater. Among the stage triumphs are Peter Dorland van Diest’s Everyman, John Skelton’s Magnificence, and Gil Vicente’s Auto da Glória.

  Among the least-read works of the time are Copernicus’s Little Commentary and the Borgia pope’s bulls apportioning the New World between Spain and Portugal. Spain and France are arming heavily, preparing for a new war over Italian spoils. All crowned heads are ignoring the growing signs of a far greater conflict, the religious revolution, although nearly two years have passed since Luther posted his theses on the door of the Wittenberg church. Now he is drafting An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, calling on the German nobility to rise against Rome.

  HOW MUCH Magellan is aware of all this is unknown. Probably very little. He has never been much interested in public affairs, and even if he were, following them closely would be impossible for him. For example, he will be at sea, beyond anyone’s reach, when Luther takes his stand at Worms. Thus he will die ignorant of Christendom’s coming schism, a tragedy for devout Catholics like him; he would have readily sacrificed his life defending the Church. Most of the rest of the contemporaneous tumult in Europe would seem irrelevant to him, although he would be wrong. All these events form a mosaic, and his expedition will become part of it. History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects, and is affected by, everything else. This is never clear in the present. Only time can sort out events. It is then, in perspective, that patterns emerge.

  The patterns of Magellan’s age are now clear. Its clarifying event was the shattering of the medieval world—medium aevum, as Renaissance humanists called it. That historic collapse was the legacy of countless events and influences, which combined to create the greatest European upheaval since the barbarians’ conquest of Rome. The religious revolution—which destroyed the Renaissance—was merely the most conspicuous thread in a very long rope. Others were the fall of Constantinople to Muhammad II in 1453, the humanists’ discovery of wisdom in the values of classical civilization, thereby dooming Scholasticism, a medieval attempt to fuse pagan learning and Christianity. As the Church relinquished its monopoly of education, renascent Europe became aware of a widening, unbridgeable gulf between reason and faith. The masses remained pious; the learned found serenity in rational thought.

  Meantime the growth of commerce, particularly the prosperity of England and Germany, expanded the middle and merchant classes. These, growing in power and influence, became exasperated with the arrogant prelates even as the supernational authority of Roman pontiffs was being challenged by rising nation-states and strengthened monarchies. Secularism spread, fueled by the invention of printing, the growth of literacy, and the wider knowledge of the Scriptures in vernacular versions. All these forces raised doubts, discredited custom, bred skepticism, loosened standards, undermined the comfort and support of tradition, and, as Christendom decayed as a distinctive civilization, led to the emergence of modern Europe.

  All this meant change, and was therefore resented by the medieval mind. It is perhaps significant that the science which showed the least progress in these years was geology. Because of its divine authorship, the biblical account of creation was above criticism. “If a wrong opinion should obtain regarding the creation as described in Genesis,” declared Pietro Martire Vermigli, the Italian reformer, “all the promises of Christ fall into nothing, and all the life of our religion would be lost.”

  The menace of Copernicus was even greater. The Scriptures assumed that everything had been created for the use of man. If the earth were shrunken to a mere speck in the universe, mankind would also be diminished. Heaven was lost when “up” and “down” lost all meaning—when each became the other every twenty-four hours. “No attack on Christianity is more dangerous,” Jerome Wolf wrote Tycho Brahe in 1575, “than the infinite size and depth of the universe.”

  Finally, the exploration of lands beyond Europe—of which Magellan’s voyage was to be the culmination—opened the entire world, thus introducing the modern age. The discoveries also undermined pontifical dogma on the character of the globe, introducing yet another threat to papal prestige. One of Rome’s oldest arguments was that the Church’s teachings must be true because everyone believed in the divinity of Christ. That had been plausible in the Middle Ages, but now, as reports poured in from navigators, travelers, conquistadores, and even missionaries, Europeans realized that other religions flourished in newly discovered lands, and those who worshiped alien gods there appeared to be none the worse for it.

  DURING THE DARK AGES literal interpretation of the Bible had led the Church to endorse the absurd geographical dicta of Topographia Christiana, a treatise by the sixth-century monk Cosmas. Cosmas, who had traveled to India and should have known better, held that the world was a flat, rectangular plane, surmounted by the sky, above which was heaven. Jerusalem was at the center of the rectangle, and nearby lay the Garden of Eden, irrigated by the four Rivers of Paradise. The sun, much smaller than the earth, revolved around a conical mountain to the north. The monk’s arguments were fragile, and not everyone accepted them—the Venerable Bede, among others, insisted that earth was round—but Cosmas scorned them. Rome, agreeing with him, rejected their protests as an affront to common sense.

  This patristic dismissal of so elementary a fact was a sign of how deep the wisdom of the ancient world had been buried. More than three hundred years before the birth of Christ, Aristotle had determined that the planet must be a sphere; after an eclipse he had pointed out that only an orb could throw a circular shadow on the moon. The existence of India and Spain was known in Athens. However, few other geographical or scientific facts were available to Aristotle, and this led him into error. Holding that land was heavier than water, and that the masses of each must balance, he had inferred that the distance between the Iberian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent
could not be great, and that, consequently, there was no land between them — that is, no North or South America. Therein lay the origin of Columbus’s error, which others would challenge and which Magellan, ultimately, would discredit.

  Aristotle’s spherical theory of the globe had been the cornerstone of classical geography. The Greeks arbitrarily divided the planet into five zones, two of them polar, too cold to be inhabitable; two others temperate; and one an equatorial region. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, their medieval successors, later concluded that the equator, because of its great heat, must be incapable of sustaining life. Their conviction that man could not survive in the tropics, widely accepted, persisted until the fifteenth century.

  With the exceptions of Pliny, Macrobius, and Agrippa, whose contributions were slight, the Romans added nothing to geographical knowledge. However, in Alexandria, on the outskirts of the empire, a school of Egyptian astronomers led by Ptolemy and Hipparchus flourished four centuries after Aristotle. Their calculation of the earth’s circumference (twenty-five thousand geographical miles) was surprisingly accurate. They also partitioned the globe into 360 degrees, lined its surface with parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude, and, with their invention of the astrolabe, which measured latitude by “shooting the sun,” provided an instrument which was to be used by mariners, including Magellan, until the Elizabethan Age.

  But the Alexandrians, like the Greeks, erred. They concluded that the earth was both immovable and the center of the universe. Furthermore, Ptolemy’s Geógraphiké hyphégésis (Guide to Geography), which greatly influenced medieval geographers, inferred that Asia extended much farther east than it actually does. Here again, those who were misled included Columbus, whose belief that Asia could be reached by sailing westward was thereby strengthened. Any doubts in his mind were resolved by Imago mundi, a comprehensive world geography by Pierre d’Ailly, a fourteenth-century cardinal and master of the College of Navarre. D’Ailly took the Aristotelian view that Europeans could reach India by sailing westward. Imago mundi became Columbus’s favorite bedside book. His copy, with heavy marginal scribblings, is preserved in Seville’s Biblioteca Colombina.

  During the long medieval night, Hellenic and Egyptian learning was preserved by Muslim scholars in the Middle East, where it was discovered by early Renaissance humanists. After poring over it, Pope Pius II, Cardinal Borgia’s early critic, wrote his influential Historia rerum ubique gestarum. Though largely a rehash of Ptolemy, Pius’s Historia was by no means uncritical; earlier works notwithstanding, he reached the startling conclusion that Africa could be circumnavigated. His premise that an equator existed, even though it was invisible, went unchallenged; by then the spherical shape of the planet, and the Greek partition of it into climatic zones, was accepted except by those who insisted upon literal interpretation of the Scriptures.

  THAT IS, it was accepted by scholars. Average people still assumed that the earth was flat, and their knowledge of the world beyond the horizon was largely derived from mythical lore. The sources of these fables were protean. Some could be traced to Homer. Others derived from romantic yarns told by wanderers; or the legends of Alexander the Great and Saint Thomas the Apostle; or the imaginative figments of Ctesias, a Greek who lived in the Persian court four centuries before Christ; or the Roman concoctions of Pliny and Gaius Julius Solinus; or in the extraordinarily popular fourteenth-century hoax Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight. Written in the Anglo-French of the time, the Travels is purportedly a collection of true narratives, retold by Mandeville. Actually all are fictive, but the narratives are so persuasive that “Sir John Mandeville” (or, in some versions, “Johan Maundville, chevaler”) was often believed where the Marco Polo genuine article was not.

  Most medieval myths were set in Asia, which fascinated men then. Until the Tatar Peace of the mid-thirteenth century, no European had traveled east of Baghdad. The crusades and pilgrimages had provided some grasp of Palestine and Syria, but the Orient —“Cathay”—was considered magical, fantastic, and endowed with incredible wealth. Paradise was thought to be there somewhere, and it says much for medieval knowledge of the mysterious East that long after the first reports of Genghis Khan’s terrible campaigns reached the Continent in 1221, he was believed to be a great Christian monarch who was devoting his life to the conversion of infidels.

  Thus credulous men swallowed whole the stories of the giants Gog and Magog, of a jungle race with long teeth and hairy bodies, of griffins, of storks who fought with pygmies, of people who created their own shade by lying down and blotting out the sun with an enormous single foot, of men with dogs’ heads who barked and snarled, and of the opulent patria of Ophir, in whose storehouse lay King Solomon’s jewels and gold. Ophir was only one of many fabulous lands which existed only in fantasy. Others were the lost continent of Atlantis, a legend dating back to Plato; El Dorado; Rio Doro, the River of Gold; the Empire of Monomotapa; the Island of the Seven Cities of Cibola, said to have been discovered in the Atlantic by seven bishops, fugitives from Moorish Spain; and St. Brendan’s Isle, based on the implausible tale of Saint Brendan, who was said to have found an enchanted land in the waters northwest of Ireland. In Magellan’s time many of these places could be found in atlases. Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator encountered a sea captain who said he had landed on the Island of the Seven Cities. As late as 1755 St. Brendan’s Isle was believed to be situated five degrees west of the Canary Islands, and Brazil Rock, also imaginative, was not stricken from Britain’s admiralty charts until 1873.

  These were typical of the phantoms which confused and misled explorers sailing into unknown waters. Given the state of maps then, it is hardly surprising that so many ships failed to return; the wonder is that any of them found anything. Africa was shown as adjacent to India. The Indian Ocean and the Red Sea were small bodies of water. Egypt was placed in Asia; so was Ethiopia. Navigators poring over charts found such bewildering legends as “India Ethiope” and “India Egyptii,” and the fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas, which may be seen today in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, is a farrago of distortions and inventions, including islands of griffins, the realm of Gog and Magog, a land of pygmies placed between India and China, an island called “Iana” where Malaya should be, and another island, “Trapabona,” where there is nothing but open sea.

  ALTHOUGH the rest of Europe was unaware of them, a few adventurous souls living on the western and northern edges of the continent had been venturing into the unknown since the Dark Ages. Beginning in the sixth century, Irishmen had first visited, and then settled, the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe islands. Undoubtedly the Irish reached farther than that, for Vikings occupying Iceland in the ninth century found them already there. Then the Norsemen took over. After a thousand-mile voyage through some of the most dangerous seas in the world, Norway’s Erik the Red landed on Greenland at the end of the tenth century. Circa A.D. 1000, Erik’s son Leif reached North America. These feats were a prelude to the expansion of Europe, but they cannot be regarded as the first stages of that expansion. Ireland itself was virtually undiscovered, and to people south of Scandinavia the Vikings were pagan plunderers, almost as remote as Orientals and certainly not part of the civilized world. Moreover, Norse and Celtic medieval discoveries were never followed up. Since they were scarcely known outside the ranks of the explorers, they had no impact on the rest of the continent.

  The Middle East was another matter. While the vast majority of Europeans knew almost nothing of the real Asia, some of them had been toiling busily on its fringes for three centuries. They were traders, which is significant; profit, not curiosity, was to be the prime motive behind the age of exploration. Because they were Genoese, Venetian, and, to a lesser degree, Pisan, and because they were highly successful, these merchants became major stokers of Italy’s prosperity. Their subsequent decline —after audacious Spaniards and Portuguese had discovered new ways to reach the Orient—dealt a mortal blow to that boom. The slump that follow
ed was as responsible for the end of the Italian Renaissance as the religious rebellion against Rome.

  Beginning with the crusades—from A.D. 1100 to nearly 1300—Oriental goods had reached the West through three main arteries. One was overland, on caravan roads across northern China and central Asia to the shores of the Black Sea. The other two reached the Middle East via the Indian Ocean. Cargoes were either sailed around the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, past Yemen, up the Red Sea, and from there by land to Alexandria and Gaza; or—this way was favored by dealers in the highly profitable spice trade—up the Persian Gulf and thence by caravan to the Levantine coast. The entrepreneurs who awaited them at the end of each route transshipped the goods to Italy, southern France, and the Iberian Peninsula. There wagons took over, hauling the payloads to northern Europe.