A World Lit Only by Fire (6 page)

Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason. If war took a man even a short distance from a nameless hamlet,
the chances of his returning to it were slight; he could not identify it, and finding his way back alone was virtually impossible.
Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall
tree scarred by lightning. There were no newspapers or magazines to inform the common people of great events; occasional pamphlets
might reach them, but they were usually theological and, like the Bible, were always published in Latin, a language they no
longer understood. Between 1378 and 1417, Popes Clement VII and Benedict XIII reigned in Avignon, excommunicating Rome’s Urban
VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII, who excommunicated them right back. Yet the toiling peasantry was unaware
of the estrangement in the Church. Who would have told them? The village priest knew nothing himself; his archbishop had every
reason to keep it quiet. The folk (
Leute, popolo, pueblo, gens, gente
) were baptized, shriven, attended mass, received the host at communion, married, and received the last rites never dreaming
that they should be informed about great events, let alone have any voice in them. Their anonymity approached the absolute.
So did their mute acceptance of it.

In later ages, when identities became necessary, their descendants would either adopt the surname of the local lord—a custom
later followed by American slaves after their emancipation—or take the name of an honest occupation (Miller, Taylor, Smith).
Even then they were casual in spelling it; in the 1580s the founder of Germany’s great munitions dynasty variously spelled
his name as Krupp, Krupe, Kripp, Kripe, and Krapp. Among the implications of this lack of selfhood was an almost total indifference
to privacy. In summertime peasants went about naked.

In the medieval mind there was also no awareness of time, which is even more difficult to grasp. Inhabitants of the twentieth
century are instinctively aware of past, present, and future. At any given moment most can quickly identify where they are
on this temporal scale—the year, usually the date or day of the week, and frequently, by glancing at their wrists, the time
of day. Medieval men were rarely aware of which century they were living in. There was no reason they should have been. There
are great differences between everyday life in 1791 and 1991, but there were very few between 791 and 991. Life then revolved
around the passing of the seasons and such cyclical events as religious holidays, harvest time, and local fetes. In all Christendom
there was no such thing as a watch, a clock, or, apart from a copy of the Easter tables in the nearest church or monastery,
anything resembling a calendar.
^*
Generations succeeded one another in a meaningless, timeless blur. In the whole of Europe, which was the world as they knew
it, very little happened. Popes, emperors, and kings died and were succeeded by new popes, emperors, and kings; wars were
fought, spoils divided; communities suffered, then recovered from, natural disasters. But the impact on the masses was negligible.
This lockstep continued for a period of time roughly corresponding in length to the time between the Norman conquest of England,
in 1066, and the end of the twentieth century. Inertia reinforced the immobility. Any innovation was inconceivable; to suggest
the possibility of one would have invited suspicion, and because the accused were guilty until they had proved themselves
innocent by surviving impossible ordeals—by fire, water, or combat—to be suspect was to be doomed.

E
VEN DURING
the Great Schism, as the interstice of the rival popes came to be known, the Holy See remained formidable. In 1215 the medieval
papacy had reached its culmination at the Fourth Lateran Council, held in a Roman palace which, before Nero confiscated it,
had been the home of the ancient Laterani family. The council, representing the entire Church, was brilliantly attended. Its
decrees were of supreme importance, covering confession, Easter rites, clerical and lay reform, and the doctrine of transubstantiation,
an affirmation that at holy communion bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The council glorified
Vicars of Christ in language of unprecedented majesty and splendor; pontiffs were explicitly permitted to exert authority
not only in theological matters, but also in all vital political issues which might arise. Later in the thirteenth century
Saint Thomas Aquinas celebrated the accord of reason and revelation, and in 1302
Unam Sanctam
—a bull affirming papal supremacy—was proclaimed. Even during its Avignon exile the Church progressed, centralizing its
government and creating an elaborate administrative structure. Medieval institutions seemed stronger than ever.

And yet, and yet …

Rising gusts of wind, disregarded at the time, signaled the coming storm. The first gales affected the laity. Knighthood,
a pivotal medieval institution, was dying. At a time when its ceremonies had finally reached their fullest development, chivalry
was obsolescent and would soon be obsolete. The knightly way of life was no longer practical. Chain mail had been replaced
by plate, which, though more effective, was also much heavier; horses which were capable of carrying that much weight were
hard to come by, and their expense, added to that of the costly new mail, was almost prohibitive. Worse still, the mounted
knight no longer dominated the battlefield; he could be outmaneuvered and unhorsed by English bowmen, Genoese crossbowmen,
and pikemen led by lightly armed men-at-arms, or sergeants. Europe’s new armies were composed of highly trained, well-armed
professional infantrymen who could remain in the field, ready for battle, through an entire season of campaigning. Since only
great nation-states could afford them, the future would belong to powerful absolute monarchs.

By
A.D
. 1500 most of these sovereign dynasties were in place, represented by England’s Henry VII, France’s Louis XII, Russia’s Ivan
III, Scandinavia’s John I, Hungary’s Ladislas II, Poland’s John Albert, and Portugal’s Manuel I. Another major player was
on the way: in 1492, when the fall of Granada destroyed the last vestiges of Moorish power on the Iberian peninsula, Spaniards
completed the long reconquest of their territory. The union of their two chief crowns with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon
and Isabella of Castile laid the foundations for modern Spain; together they began suppressing their fractious vassals. Germany
and Italy, however, were going to be late in joining the new Europe. On both sides of the Alps prolonged disputes over succession
delayed the coalescence of central authority. As a result, in the immediate future Italians would continue to live in city-states
or papal states and Germans would still be ruled by petty princes. But this fragmentation could not last. A kind of centripetal
force, strengthened by emerging feelings of national identity among the masses, was reshaping Europe. And that was a threat
to monolithic Christendom.

The papacy was vexed otherwise as the fifteenth century drew to a close. European cities were witnessing the emergence of
educated classes inflamed by anticlericalism. Their feelings were understandable, if, in papal eyes, unpardonable. The Lateran
reforms of 1215 had been inadequate; reliable reports of misconduct by priests, nuns, and prelates, much of it squalid, were
rising. And the harmony achieved by theologians over the last century had been shattered. Bernard of Clairvaux, the anti-intellectual
saint, would have found his worst suspicions confirmed by the new philosophy of nominalism. Denying the existence of universals,
nominalists declared that the gulf between reason and revelation was unbridgeable—that to believe in virgin birth and the
resurrection was completely unreasonable. Men of faith who might have challenged them, such as Thomas à Kempis, seemed lost
in a dream of mysticism.

At the same time, a subtle but powerful new spirit was rising in Europe. It was virulently subversive of all medieval society,
especially the Church, though no one recognized it as such, partly because its greatest figures were devout Catholics. During
the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) the rediscovery of Aristotelian learning—in dialectic, logic, natural science,
and metaphysics—had been readily synthesized with traditional Church doctrine. Now, as the full cultural heritage of Greece
and Rome began to reappear, the problems of synthesis were escalating, and they defied solution. In Italy the movement was
known as the Rinascimento. The French combined the verb
renaître
, “revive,” with the feminine noun
naissance
, “birth,” to form Renaissance—rebirth.

F
IXING A DATE
for the beginning of the Renaissance is impossible, but most scholars believe its stirrings had begun by the early 1400s.
Although Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Saint Francis of Assisi, and the painter Giotto de Bondone—all of whom seem to have
been infused with the new spirit—were dead by then, they are seen as forerunners of the reawakening. In the long reach of
history, the most influential Renaissance men were the writers, scholars, philosophers, educators, statesmen, and independent
theologians. However, their impact upon events, tremendous as it was, would not be felt until later. The artists began to
arrive first, led by the greatest galaxy of painters, sculptors, and architects ever known. They were spectacular, they were
most memorably Italian, notably Florentine, and because their works were so dazzling—and so pious—they had the enthusiastic
blessing and sponsorship of the papacy. Among their immortal figures were Botticelli, Fra Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca,
the Bellinis, Giorgione, Della Robbia, Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael, and, elsewhere in Europe, Rubens, the Brueghels, Dürer,
and Holbein. The supreme figure was Leonardo da Vinci, but Leonardo was more than an artist, and will appear later in this
volume, trailing clouds of glory.

When we look back across five centuries, the implications of the Renaissance appear to be obvious. It seems astonishing that
no one saw where it was leading, anticipating what lay round the next bend in the road and then over the horizon. But they
lacked our perspective; they could not hold a mirror up to the future. Like all people at all times, they were confronted
each day by the present, which always arrives in a promiscuous rush, with the significant, the trivial, the profound, and
the fatuous all tangled together. The popes, emperors, cardinals, kings, prelates, and nobles of the time sorted through the
snarl and, being typical men in power, chose to believe what they wanted to believe, accepting whatever justified their policies
and convictions and ignoring the rest. Even the wisest of them were at a hopeless disadvantage, for their only guide in sorting
it all out—the only guide anyone ever has—was the past, and precedents are worse than useless when facing something entirely
new. They suffered another handicap. As medieval men, crippled by ten centuries of immobility, they viewed the world through
distorted prisms peculiar to their age.

In all that time nothing of real consequence had either improved or declined. Except for the introduction of waterwheels in
the 800s and windmills in the late 1100s, there had been no inventions of significance. No startling new ideas had appeared,
no new territories outside Europe had been explored. Everything was as it had been for as long as the oldest European could
remember. The center of the Ptolemaic universe was the known world—Europe, with the Holy Land and North Africa on its fringes.
The sun moved round it every day. Heaven was above the immovable earth, somewhere in the overarching sky; hell seethed far
beneath their feet. Kings ruled at the pleasure of the Almighty; all others did what they were told to do. Jesus, the son
of God, had been crucified and resurrected, and his reappearance was imminent, or at any rate inevitable. Every human being
adored him (the Jews and the Muslims being invisible). During the 1,436 years since the death of Saint Peter the Apostle,
211 popes had succeeded him, all chosen by God and all infallible. The Church was indivisible, the afterlife a certainty;
all knowledge was already known.
And nothing would ever change
.