A World Lit Only by Fire (41 page)

I
N
R
OME
M
ICHELANGELO
, 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.

H
OW 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.

D
URING THE
D
ARK
A
GES
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.

T
HAT 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.