A World Lit Only by Fire (18 page)

In the Age of Faith, as Will Durant called the medieval era, one secret of the papacy’s hold on the masses was its capacity
to inspire absolute terror, a derivative of the universal belief that whoever wore the tiara could, at his pleasure, determine
how each individual would spend his afterlife—cosseted in eternal bliss or shrieking in writhing flames below. His decision
might be whimsical, his blessings were often sold openly, his motives might be evil, but that was his prerogative. Earthly
life being “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Thomas Hobbes’s memorable phrase, only the deranged would invite the disfavor and
retribution of the Holy See.

This accounts for the last extraordinary moments of Girolamo Savonarola’s life. For seven years his Florentine followers had

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), a self-portrait

turned out to cheer his indictments of Pope Alexander VI’s depravity. Now, on the day of his last public appearance, which
was also his execution, they flocked into the Piazza della Signoria to taunt and jeer his final agony. He had given Florence
the best government the city had ever had. His only local enemies were the Arrabbiati, a political party resentful of his
reforms. None of the witnesses to his agony could doubt that every charge he had laid at the door of the Borgia pontiff’s
Vatican apartments was true. The explanation for their switch, otherwise inexplicable, is that the pope had threatened to
excommunicate the city’s entire population if Florentines refused to turn on him. None had paused to wonder why God should
be party to so monstrous an injustice. As children they had been taught that a pope possessed that terrible power, and they
had never thought to question it.

Leonardo, sui generis, questioned everything. Rather than accept the world God had created, as Christians had always done,
he probed endlessly into what human ingenuity could achieve by struggling
against
it. So mighty was his intellect and so broad the spectrum of his gifts—he was, among other things, a master of engineering,
biology, sculpture, linguistics, botany, music, philosophy, architecture, and science—that presenting an adequate summary
of his feats is impossible. However, it is worth noting that at a time when Europe was mired in ignorance, shackled by superstition,
and lacking solid precedents in every scholarly discipline, this uneducated, illegitimate son of an Anchiano country girl
anticipated Galileo, Newton, and the Wright brothers.

He did it by flouting absolute taboos. Dissecting cadavers, he set down intricate drawings of the human body—God’s sacred
image—and wrote his
Anatomy
in 1510. Meantime he was diverting rivers to prevent flooding; establishing the principle of the turbine by building a horizontal
waterwheel; laying the groundwork for modern cartography; discovering screw threads, transmission gears, hydraulic jacks,
and swiveling devices; creating detailed, practical plans for breech-loading cannons, guided missiles, and armored tanks;
building the world’s first revolving stage; developing a canal system whose locks are still in use; and, after exhaustive
research into water currents and the flight of birds, designing a submarine, then a flying machine, and then—four centuries
before Kitty Hawk—a parachute. Along the way he left an artistic heritage which includes
The Adoration of the Magi
, the
Mona Lisa
, and the
Last Supper
.

Medieval minds retained the orbs and maces of authority, yet they could not cope with men like Copernicus and Leonardo. Of
course, that did not prevent them from trying. Leonardo was lefthanded; his notes, seven thousand pages of which have been
preserved, were written in mirror script. Though quite legible, they can be read only by holding them up to a looking glass.
In the sixteenth century that was enough to envelop him in suspicion. The existence of Satan and his extraordinary powers
was believed to be irrefutable. Leonardo was capable of marvels, men whispered, but—and here they would nod knowingly —
his inspiration was anything but divine. They knew where and how he would spend
his
afterlife; it had been memorably described two centuries earlier in the
Divine Comedy
of Dante Alighieri, which had included hell’s terrible warning to immigrants: “
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate
.”

Among the attentive listeners to this rubbish—predicting that upon his death the most gifted man in the pope’s realm would
be told to abandon all hope before entering what lay beyond—was the new pontiff. In secret audiences Pope Leo X received
the whisperers, nodded thoughtfully, and sent them away with expressions of gratitude. These smears came late in 1513, the
worst possible time for Da Vinci. He was sixty-one years old and in straits. Encouraged by the Vatican’s patronage of Michelangelo
and Raphael, and told that he could expect support from Giuliano de’ Medici—a brother of Leo—he appeared in Rome to ask
the Holy See for support. He didn’t get it. The Holy Father not only denied him alms but decreed that his future research
—particularly his sacrilegious mutilations of the divine image—would be either restricted or proscribed. Luckily, the French
crown, not for the first time, came to the rescue of Italian genius. Francis I invited the great pariah to Paris as “first
painter and engineer to the king.” He left his native land immediately and forever, spending his last years in a little castle
near Amboise, working to the end on architectural blueprints and canal designs.

B
EFORE THE
D
ENSE
, overarching, suffocating medieval night could be broken, the darkness had to be pierced by the bright shaft of learning
—by literature, and people who could read and understand it. Here Durant is informative. Until late in the fifteenth century
most books and nearly all education had been controlled by the Church. Volumes had been expensive, and unprofitable for writers,
who, unprotected by copyright, lived on pensions or papal grants, in monastic orders, or by teaching. Few reached wide audiences.
Scarcely any libraries possessed more than 300 books. The chief exceptions were those of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, with
600; of the king of France, with 910, and of Christ Church priory, Canterbury, with some 2,000. So valuable were they that
each volume was chained to a desk or lectern.

The typographical revolution did not come all at once. The Chinese had designed wooden typography before 1066 and used it
to print paper money; block printing in Tabriz dated from 1294, and the Dutch may have experimented with it in 1430. Practical
use of it awaited other discoveries—oily ink, for example, and paper. The ink was quickly found. Paper took longer. Muslims
had introduced its manufacture to Spain in the 900s, to Sicily in the 1100s, to Italy in the 1200s, and to France in the 1300s.
During that same century linen began to replace wool in the wardrobes of the upper classes; discarded linen rags became a
cheap source of paper, and its price declined. The stage was set for the main event.

Its star, of course, was Johannes Gutenberg Gensfleisch, who preferred to be known by his mother’s maiden name (his father’s
name, Gensfleisch, being German for “gooseflesh”). In 1448 he had moved from Strasbourg to Mainz, where, with the help of
Peter Schöffer, his typesetter, he developed engraved steel signatures for each number, letter, and punctuation mark. Metal
matrixes were formed to hold the figures, and a metal mold to keep them in line. Gutenberg then borrowed money to buy a press
and, in 1457–1458, published his superb Bible of 1,282 outsized, double-columned pages. It was one of the great moments in
the history of Western civilization. He had introduced movable type.

The invention of printing was denounced by, among others, politicians and ecclesiastics who feared it as an instrument which
could spread subversive ideas. But they were a minority. Copies of the first type-printed book were studied all over Europe;
Gutenberg had built a bonfire in Mainz, and printers throughout Christendom flocked to kindle their torches from it. Presses
duplicating his—but at no profit to him, since patents, like copyrights, did not exist—appeared in Rome (1464), Venice
(1469), Paris (1470), the Netherlands (1471), Switzerland (1472), Hungary (1473), Spain (1474), England (1476), Denmark (1482),
Sweden (1483), and Constantinople (1490).

Who were the first readers, and how many were there? Historians have reasoned that businessmen needed books for trade and
industry, and middle- and upper-class women wanted them for romantic escape. The difficulty here is that by the most positive
estimate over half of the Continent’s male population was illiterate, and the rate among women was higher—perhaps 89 percent.
(East of Vienna and north of the Baltic both figures were a great deal worse.) Exact calculations are impossible, but we know
that reading was taught before writing. An examination of signed depositions, wills, applications for marriage certificates,
bonds, and subscribers to declarations and protests permits a rough reckoning of illiteracy by both class and occupation.

Literacy rates varied from place to place and from time to time, but some general figures are available. The percentage of
those who could not read at all was o percent in the clergy and professions. Among gentry it was 2 percent, yeomen 35 percent,
craftsmen 44 percent, peasants 79 percent, and laborers 85 percent. By trade, 6 percent of the grocers were illiterate, 9
percent of the haberdashers, 12 percent of all merchants, 27 percent of bakers, 36 percent of innkeepers, 41 percent of brewers,
44 percent of tailors, 45 percent of blacksmiths, 48 percent of butchers, 59 percent of sailors, 64 percent of carpenters,
73 percent of gardeners, 76 percent of masons, 88 percent of bricklayers, 90 percent of the shepherds, and 97 percent of all
thatchers.

In one important sense these figures, though reasonably accurate, are misleading. They represent comprehension of the vernacular,
or colloquial, tongues—Spanish, Portugese, English, French, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, German, and Tuscan (Italian). Some grasp
of the vernacular was sought by everyone who wished to raise himself in the world, but in most of Europe Latin was still the
language of the elite—the Church, scholars, scientists, governments, and the courts. During 1501, for example, in France
eighty volumes were published in Latin and only eight in French; in Aragon, between 1510 and 1540, one hundred and fifteen
were printed in Latin and just five in Spanish. Indeed, throughout the sixteenth century Latin dominated works displayed at
the annual Frankfurt book fair. Several reasons account for its survival. It was still the language of international communication;
if you wanted to address the European public and be universally understood, you had to use it. In countries whose languages
were rarely learned by foreigners—Flemish, German, and, yes, English—Latin was the language of choice.

Those who preferred the colloquial were few, and were sometimes resented by their peers; when the great French surgeon Ambroise
Paré chose to publish his work on the method of treating gunshot wounds as
La méthode de traicter les playes faites par les arquebuses et aultres bastons à feu
, he was reproached by colleagues on the Faculty of Medicine at Paris. The Church aggressively opposed vernacular languages.
Authors hesitated to use their native tongues because they were at the mercy of printers’ foremen and compositors. Thus, in
an English manuscript, “be” could come out as “bee,” “grief” as “greef,” “these” as “thease,” “sword” as “swoord,” “nurse”
as “noorse,” and “servant” as “servaunt.” Yet in the long run native languages were destined to triumph. The victory was not
altogether glorious. It meant that the dream of a unified Christendom, with a single Latin tongue, was doomed.

That outcome was not evident in the early 1500s. The curricula at monastic schools were unchanged. All teaching there was
in Latin; younger monks and country youth were led through primary instruction in the
trivium
—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics (the art of reasoning)—and bright students were encouraged to tackle the
quadrivium:
astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. The monks had made some progress in botany and geology, collecting curious minerals,
herbs, and dried bird and animal skins, but a monk reincarnated from the eighth century would have found little that was unfamiliar.
Boys from the surrounding countryside who attended classes picked up a kind of pidgin Latin, adequate for the comprehension
of political and religious pamphlets. Later that would become important.