A World Lit Only by Fire (56 page)

^*
Because of the complex method used to determine when Easter would fall each year, Easter tables reckoned the future dates
of the celebration. Easter in turn determines the dates of all other movable feasts in the Christian calendar.

^*
This is a rough conversion. Providing modern equivalents of original currencies is extremely difficult. The sort of basic
consumption items for which we have figures—e.g., grain, oil, wine—have tended to grow absolutely less expensive with
the productivity of modern agriculture. Moreover, there were at least twenty distinct ducats afloat in the sixteenth century,
each with a different value, and a similar number of florins, guilders, livres, pounds, et cetera. The florin and the ducat
with the largest circulation had the same value. For the purpose of this narrative, that value may be considered analogous
to twenty-five dollars today.

^*
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as it was called after the mid-1400s, was also the First Reich, a cultural nation
(
Kulturvolk
) of some three hundred different sovereign states. After Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Otto
von Bismarck created the Second Reich, a nation-state (
Staatsvolk
) over which the Hohenzollerns reigned until its defeat in 1918. The Third Reich (1933–1945) was, of course, Adolf Hitler’s
Nazi Germany.

^*
Thais was an Athenian
hetaira
(courtesan) who, in the fourth century
B.C
., became Alexander the Great’s mistress. She is said to have persuaded him to burn down the Achaemenian capital of Persepolis
during a drunken revel. Dryden’s
Alexander’s Feast
is based on the incident, which is probably apocryphal.

^*
In a letter to Duke George of Saxony. Here, for the first time, he gave his movement the name by which history knows it.

^*
Most German universities remained loyal to the Church. Two exceptions were Erfurt, where Luther had been a student, and Wittenberg,
where he taught.

^*
Appearing this early, the word “Protestant” is slightly anachronistic. It would not enter the language for another eight years.
In 1529 at a Speyer Reichstag, a Catholic bloc voted to rescind toleration of Lutheranism, which had been granted three years
earlier. The protesting minority were called Protestants. The term is introduced here because even at the outset of the Reformation
not all Protestants were Lutherans.

^*
In the 1560s the Council of Trent, after rescinding many of the bans, allowed dissemination of most of his works in expurgated
editions.

^*
“Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” and “Love your enemies,
bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

^*
He was also the last non-Italian elected pope until John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla of Poland) in 1978.

^*
“Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and
Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.”

^*
Who became Henry’s third wife and deserves to be remembered as one of the few genuine ladies of the age. The sister of the
duke of Somerset, Jane spurned the king’s advances as long as his queen lived. She asked him never to speak to her when they
were alone and returned his letters and gifts unopened. Her first act as queen was to reconcile Henry and Catherine’s daughter.

^*
Or Aranda de Duero, also in Castile, or Barcelona, in Aragón. Since the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, uniting Castile
and Aragón, the court had become a traveling circus. Madrid did not become the capital of Spain until 1561.

^*
Vespucci claimed that he had sailed to fifty degrees south latitude in 1502, but he has never been taken seriously.

^*
He christened the islands San Lázaro. Twenty years later they were renamed for Philip II, “the most Catholic of kings.”

^*
Comparable distances: Columbus’s first crossing, 3,900 miles; Liverpool to New York, 3,576 miles; San Francisco to Yokohama,
5,221 miles.