A World Lit Only by Fire (2 page)

I
HAD MISCALCULATED
because I had not realized how parochial my previous work had been. Virtually everything in my seventeen earlier books had
been contemporaneous. Now, moving back nearly five centuries, I was entering an entirely different world, where there were
no clocks, no police, virtually no communications; a time when men believed in magic and sorcery and slew those whose superstitions
were different from, and therefore an affront to, their own.

The early sixteenth century was not entirely new to me. Its major figures, their wars, the Renaissance, the religious revolution,
the voyages of exploration—with all these I had the general familiarity of an educated man. I could have drawn a reasonably
accurate freehand map of Europe as it was then, provided I wasn’t expected to get the borders of all the German states exactly
right. But I had no sense of the spirit of the time. Its idioms fell strangely on my ear. I didn’t know enough to put myself
back there—to see it, hear it, feel it, even smell it—and because I had never pondered the minutiae of that age, I had
no grasp of the way the webs of action were spun out, how each event led inexorably to another, then another …

Yet I knew from experience that such chains of circumstance are always there, awaiting discovery. To cite a small, relatively
recent example: In the first year of John F. Kennedy’s presidential administration, four developments appeared to be unrelated
—America’s humiliation at the Bay of Pigs in April, Kennedy’s confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev in Austria six weeks later,
the raising of the Berlin Wall in August, and, in December, the first commitment of American ground troops to Indochina. Yet
each event had led to the next. Khrushchev saw the Cuban fiasco as evidence that the young president was weak. Therefore he
bullied him in Vienna. In the mistaken belief that he had intimidated him there, he built the Wall. Kennedy answered the challenge
by sending four hundred Green Berets to Southeast Asia, explaining to those around him that “we have a problem making our
power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”

A subtler, more progressive catena may be found in nineteenth-century social history. In 1847 the old, slow, expensive flatbed
press was rendered obsolete by Richard Hoe’s high-speed rotary “lightning” press, first installed by the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
. Incorporating lithographic and letter-press features, some of which had been patented in France, Hoe went on to design and
build a web press capable of printing—on both sides of a sheet at the same time—eighteen thousand sheets an hour. Vast
supplies of cheap paper were required to feed these new presses. Ingenious Germans provided the answer in the 1850s: newsprint
made from wood pulp. Now a literate public awaited them. W. E. Forster’s Compulsory Education Act, passed by Parliament in
1870, was followed by similar legislation throughout western Europe and the United States. In 1858 only 5 percent of British
army recruits could read and write; by the turn of the century the figure had risen to 85.4 percent. The 1880s had brought
the institution of free libraries, which was followed by an explosion in journalism and the emergence of the twentieth-century
mass culture which has transformed Western civilization.

Though the early 1500s offer a larger, much more chaotic canvas, perspective provides coherence there, too. The power of the
Catholic Church was waning, reeling from the failure of the crusades, corruption in the Curia, debauchery in the Vatican,
and the breakdown of monastic discipline. Even so, Martin Luther’s revolt against Rome seemed hopeless until, abandoning the
custom of publishing in Latin, he addressed the German people in their own language. This had two immense but unforeseen consequences.
Because of the invention of printing and the increase in literacy throughout Europe, he reached a huge audience. At the same
time, the new nationalism which was fueling the rising phenomenon of nation-states—soon to replace the fading Holy Roman
Empire—led loyal Germans to support Luther for reasons that had nothing to do with religion. He won a historic victory,
which was followed by similar success in England, where loyal Englishmen rallied to Henry VIII.

As each such concatenation came into focus, I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the
shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start—an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting. The
period became a kind of kaleidoscope for me; every time I shook it, I saw a new picture. Of course, the images I saw, and
describe in this work, cannot presume to universal validity. Another writer, peering into another kaleidoscope, would glimpse
different views. In fact, that was precisely the experience of Henry Osborn Taylor. Finishing his two-volume work
The Mediaeval Mind
in January 1911, the pietistic Taylor was suffused with admiration for the medieval churches, the pageantry of the age, its
romance, its “spiritual passion,” and, above all, its interpretation of “Christ’s Gospel.” He explained candidly: “The present
work is not occupied with the brutalities of mediaeval life, nor with all the lower grades of ignorance and superstition abounding
in the Middle Ages. … Consequently I have not such things very actively in mind when speaking of the mediaeval genius. That
phrase, and the like, in this book, will signify the more informed and constructive spirit of the mediaeval time.”

No matter how hard I shake my kaleidoscope, I cannot see what he saw. One reason is that my approach is more catholic than
his. I share his conviction that “a realization of the power and import of the Christian Faith is needed for an understanding
of the thoughts and feelings moving the men and women of the Middle Ages, and for a just appreciation of their aspirations
and ideals,” but I do not see how that can be achieved without a careful study of brutality, ignorance, and delusions in the
Middle Ages, not just among the laity, but also at the highest Christian altars. Christianity survived despite medieval Christians,
not because of them. Fail to grasp that, and you will never understand their millennium.

Only after one has contemplated the age in its entirety do its larger patterns emerge. Often these are surprising. For me
the most startling, and the culmination of my work, was a reappraisal of the extraordinary Magellan, whose biography I had
left in New England. I had foolishly thought that the times in which he lived would put him in context. Instead, I realized,
Magellan was essential to a comprehension of his times—both a key to the period and, in many ways, its apotheosis. How I
reached that conclusion is the story of this book.

W.M.

Middletown, Connecticut
December 1991

T
HE DENSEST of the medieval centuries—the six hundred years between, roughly,
A.D
. 400 and
A.D
. 1000—are still widely known as the Dark Ages. Modern historians have abandoned that phrase, one of them writes, “because
of the unacceptable value judgment it implies.” Yet there are no survivors to be offended. Nor is the term necessarily pejorative.
Very little is clear about that dim era. Intellectual life had vanished from Europe. Even Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman
emperor and the greatest of all medieval rulers, was illiterate. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, which lasted some seven
centuries after Charlemagne, literacy was scorned; when a cardinal corrected the Latin of the emperor Sigismund, Charlemagne’s
forty-seventh successor, Sigismund rudely replied, “
Ego sum rex Romanus et super grammatica
”—as “king of Rome,” he was “above grammar.” Nevertheless, if value judgments are made, it is undeniable that most of what
is known about the period is unlovely. After the extant fragments have been fitted together, the portrait which emerges is
a mélange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.

Europe had been troubled since the Roman Empire perished in the fifth century. There were many reasons for Rome’s fall, among
them apathy and bureaucratic absolutism, but the chain of events leading to its actual end had begun the century before. The
defenders of the empire were responsible for a ten-thousand-mile frontier. Ever since the time of the soldier-historian Tacitus,
in the first century
A.D
., the vital sector in the north—where the realm’s border rested on the Danube and the Rhine—had been vulnerable. Above
these great rivers the forests swarmed with barbaric Germanic tribes, some of them tamer than others but all envious of the
empire’s prosperity. For centuries they had been intimidated by the imperial legions confronting them on the far banks.

Now they no longer were. They had panicked, stampeded by an even more fearsome enemy in their rear: feral packs of mounted
Hsiung-nu, or Huns. Ignorant of agriculture but expert archers, bred to kill and trained from infancy to be pitiless, these
dreaded warriors from the plains of Mongolia had turned war into an industry. “Their country,” it was said of them, “is the
back of a horse.” It was Europe’s misfortune that early in the fourth century the Huns had met their masters at China’s Great
Wall. Defeated by the Chinese, they had turned westward, entered Russia about
A.D
. 355, and crossed the Volga seventeen years later. In 375 they fell upon the Ostrogoths (East Goths) in the Ukraine. After
killing the Ostrogoth chieftain, Ermanaric, they pursued his tribesmen across eastern Europe. An army of Visigoths (West Goths)
met the advancing Huns on the Dniester, near what is now Romania. The Goths were cut to pieces. The survivors among them —
some eighty thousand—fled toward the Danube and crossed it, thereby invading the empire. On instructions from the Emperor
Valens, imperial commanders charged with defense of the frontier first disarmed the Gothic refugees, next admitted them subject
to various conditions, then tried to enslave them, and finally, in
A.D
. 378, fought them, not with Roman legions, but using mercenaries recruited from other tribes. Caesar would have wept at the
spectacle that followed. In battle the mercenaries were overconfident and slack; according to Ammianus Marcellinus, Tacitus’s
Greek successor, the result was “the most disastrous defeat encountered by the Romans since Cannae”—six centuries earlier.

Under the weight of relentless attacks by the combined barbaric tribes and the Huns, now Gothic allies, the Danube-Rhine line
broke along its entire length and then collapsed. Plunging deeper and deeper into the empire, the invaders prepared to penetrate
Italy. In 400 the Visigoth Alaric, a relatively enlightened chieftain and a zealous
religieux
, led forty thousand Goths, Huns, and freed Roman slaves across the Julian Alps. Eight years of fighting followed. Rome’s
cavalry was no match for the tribal horsemen; two-thirds of the imperial legions were slain. In 410 Alaric’s triumphant warriors
swept down to Rome itself, and on August 24 they entered it.

Thus, for the first time in eight centuries, the Eternal City fell to an enemy army. After three days of pillage it was battered
almost beyond recognition. Alaric tried to spare Rome’s citizens, but he could not control the Huns or the former slaves.
They slaughtered wealthy men, raped women, destroyed priceless pieces of sculpture, and melted down works of art for their
precious metals. That was only the beginning; sixty-six years later another Germanic chieftain deposed the last Roman emperor
in the west, Romulus Augustulus, and proclaimed himself ruler of the empire. Meantime Gunderic’s Vandals, Clovis’s Franks,
and most of all the Huns under their terrible new chieftain Attila—who had seized power by murdering his brother—ravaged
Gaul as far south as Paris, paused, and lunged into Spain. In the years that followed, Goths, Alans, Burgundians, Thuringians,
Frisians, Gepidae, Suevi, Alemanni, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Lombards, Heruli, Quadi, and Magyars joined them in ravaging what
was left of civilization. The ethnic tide then settled in its conquered lands and darkness descended upon the devastated,
unstable continent. It would not lift until forty medieval generations had suffered, wrought their pathetic destinies, and
passed on.

T
HE
D
ARK
A
GES
were stark in every dimension. Famines and plague, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly
thinned the population. Rickets afflicted the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods which turned
into major disasters because the empire’s drainage system, like most of the imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning.
It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans
were still the best on the continent. Most others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European
harbors until the eighth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany,
England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries. The serfs’
basic agricultural tools were picks, forks, spades, rakes, scythes, and balanced sickles. Because there was very little iron,
there were no wheeled plowshares with moldboards. The lack of plows was not a major problem in the south, where farmers could
pulverize light Mediterranean soils, but the heavier earth in northern Europe had to be sliced, moved, and turned by hand.
Although horses and oxen were available, they were of limited use. The horse collar, harness, and stirrup did not exist until
about
A.D
. 900. Therefore tandem hitching was impossible. Peasants labored harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more
often than their animals.