A World Lit Only by Fire (7 page)

The mighty storm was swiftly approaching, but Europeans were not only unaware of it; they were convinced that such a phenomenon
could not exist. Shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition, they trudged into the sixteenth
century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon-toed gait of rickets victims, their vacant faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly
toward the future they thought they knew—gullible, pitiful innocents who were about to be swept up in the most powerful,
incomprehensible, irresistible vortex since Alaric had led his Visigoths and Huns across the Alps, fallen on Rome, and extinguished
the lamps of learning a thousand years before.

W
HEN THE CARTOGRAPHERS
of the Middle Ages came to the end of the world as they knew it, they wrote:
Beware: Dragons Lurk Beyond Here
. They were right, though the menacing dimension was not on maps, but on the calendar. It was time, not space. There the fiercest
threats to their medieval mind-set waited in ambush. A few of the perils had already infiltrated society, though their presence
was unsuspected and the havoc they would wreak was yet to come. Some of the dragons were benign, even saintly; others were
wicked. All, however, would seem monstrous to those who cherished the status quo, and their names included Johannes Gutenberg,
Cesare Borgia, Johann Tetzel, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Jakob Fugger, François Rabelais, Girolamo Savonarola, Nicolaus
Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Niccolò Machiavelli, William Tyndale, John Calvin, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Emperor Charles V, King
Henry VIII, Tomás de Torquemada, Lucrezia Borgia, William Caxton, Gerardus Mercator, Girolamo Aleandro, Ulrich von Hutten,
Martin Waldseemüller, Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and—most fearsome of all, the
man who would destroy the very world the cartographers had drawn—Ferdinand Magellan.

H
IS NAME RICOCHETS down the canyons of nearly five centuries—ricochets, because the trajectory of his zigzagging life, never
direct, dodged this way and that, ever elusive and often devious. We cannot even be certain what to call him. In Portuguese
documents his name appears alternately as Fernão de Magalhães and Fernão de Magalhais. Born the son of a fourth-grade nobleman,
in middle age he renounced his native land and, as an immigrant in Seville, took the nom de guerre Fernando de Magallanes.
Sometimes he spelled it that way, sometimes as Maghellanes. In Sanlúcar de Barrameda, before embarking for immortality on
September 20, 1519, he signed his last will and testament as Hernando de Magallanes. Cartographers Latinized this to Magellanus
—a German pamphleteer printed it as “Wagellanus”—and we have anglicized it to Magellan. But what was his real nationality?
On his historic voyage he sailed under the colors of Castile and Aragon. Today Lisbon proudly acclaims him: “
Êle é nosso!
”—“He is ours!”—but that is chutzpah. In his lifetime his countrymen treated him as a renegade, calling him
traidor
and
transfuga
—turncoat.

One would expect the mightiest explorer in history to have been sensitive and proud, easily stung by such slurs. In fact he
was unoffended. By our lights, his character was knotted and intricate. It was more comprehensible to his contemporaries,
however, because the
capitán-general
of 1519–1521 was, to an exceptional degree, a creature of his time. His modesty arose from his faith. In the early sixteenth
century, pride in achievement was reserved for sovereigns, who were believed to be sheathed in divine glory. Being a lesser
mortal, and a pious one, Magellan assumed that the Madonna was responsible for his accomplishments.

At the time he may have underrated them. That is more understandable. He was an explorer, a man whose destiny it was to venture
into the unknown; what he found, therefore, was new. He had some idea of its worth but lacked accurate standards by which
to measure it. Indeed, he couldn’t even be certain of what he was looking for until he had found it, and the fact that he
had no clear view of his target makes the fact that he hit it squarely all the more remarkable.

His Spanish sponsors did not share his sense of mission. They sought profit, not adventure. His way around that obstacle seems
to have been to ignore it and mislead them. Sailing around the world was unmentioned during his royal audience with Carlos
I, sovereign of Spain, who, as the elected Holy Roman emperor Charles V, was to play a key (if largely unwitting) role in
the great religious revolution which split Christendom and signaled the end of the medieval world. Carlos’s commission to
Magellan was to journey westward, there to claim Spanish possession of an archipelago then in the hands of his Iberian rival,
Manuel I of Portugal. These were the Spice Islands—the Moluccas, lying between Celebes and New Guinea. Now an obscure part
of Indonesia, they are unshown on most maps, but then the isles were considered priceless. Officially, the capitán-general’s
incentive lay in the king’s pledge to him. Two of the islands would become Magellan’s personal fief and he would receive 5
percent of all profits from the archipelago, thus making his fortune.

But as Timothy Joyner points out in his life of Magellan, this Moluccan plan was a disaster. Indeed, as the leader of the
expedition, Magellan was killed before he could even reach there. He had, however, landed in the Philippines. This was of
momentous importance, for eastbound Portuguese had reconnoitered the Spice Islands nine years earlier. Therefore, in overlapping
them, he had closed the nexus between the 123rd and 124th degrees of east longitude and thus completed the encirclement of
the earth.

Yet his achievements were slighted. Death is always a misfortune, at least to the man who has to do the dying. In Magellan’s
case it was exceptionally so, however, for as a dead discoverer he was unhonored in his own time. Even Magellan’s discovery
of the strait which bears his name was belittled. Only a superb mariner, which he was, could have negotiated the foggy, treacherous,
350-mile-long Estrecho de Magallanes. In the years after his death, expedition after expedition tried to follow his lead.
They failed; all but one ended in shipwreck or turned homeward, and the exception met disaster in the Pacific. Frustrated
and defeated, skippers decided that Magellan’s exploit was impossible and declared it a myth. Nearly sixty years passed before
another great sailor, Sir Francis Drake, successfully guided
The Golden Hind
through the tortuous passage and survived to tell the tale.

Had fortune and a viceregal role in the Moluccas been Magellan’s real inducement, he would have been a failure by his own
lights. But his original motives remain obscure. Desperately searching for sponsorship of his voyage, he may have feigned
interest in the Spice Islands. There is no proof of that, but it would have been in character. And were that the case, he
would have confided in no one; he was always the most secretive of men. Moreover, the true drives of men are often hidden
from them. Magellan’s vision may or may not have been cloudy, but clearly his real inspiration was nobler than profits. And
in the end he proved that the world was round.

In so doing, he did much more. He provided a linchpin for the men of the Renaissance. Philosophers, scholars, and even learned
men in the Church had begun to challenge stolid medieval assumptions, among them pontifical dogma on the shape of the earth,
its size, and its position and movement in the universe. Magellan gave men a realistic perception of the globe’s dimensions,
of its enormous seas, of how its landmasses were distributed. Others had raised questions. He provided answers, which now,
inevitably, would lead to further questions—to challenges which continue on the eve of the twenty-first century.

The Spanish court was less than ecstatic. It had wanted Magellan to hoist its flag over the Moluccas, thereby breaking Portugal’s
monopoly of the Oriental spice trade: cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and pepper. Spices made valuable preservatives, but trafficking
in them had other, sinister implications. They were also used, and used more often, to disguise the odors and the ugly taste
of spoiled meat. The regimes that encouraged and supported the spice trade were, in effect, accomplices in the poisoning of
their own people. Moreover, medieval Europeans were extremely vulnerable to disease. This was the down side of exploration.
The discoverers and their crews had carried European germs to distant lands, infecting native populations. Then, when they
returned, they bore exotic diseases which could spread across the continent unchecked.

Sometimes the source of an epidemic could be quickly traced. Typhus, never before known in Europe, swept Aragon immediately
after Spanish troops returned from their Cyprian triumph over the Moors. More often the origin was never identified. No one
knows why Europe’s first outbreak of syphilis ravaged Naples in 1495, or why the “sweating sickness” devastated England later
the same year—“Scarce one among a hundred that sickened did escape with life,” wrote the sixteenth-century chronicler Raphael
Holinshed—or the specific origins of the pandemic Black Death, which had been revisiting Europe at least once a generation
since October 1347, when a Genoese fleet returning from the Orient staggered into Messina harbor, all members of its crews
dead or dying from a combination of bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague strains. All that can be said with certainty
is that the late 1400s and early 1500s were haunted by dark reigns of pestilence, that life became very cheap, and that this
wretched situation can scarcely have discouraged explorers eager to investigate what lay over the horizon.

The mounting toll of disease—each night gravediggers’ carts creaked down streets as drivers cried, “Bring out your dead!”
and in Germany entire towns, a chronicler of the time wrote, had become like cemeteries “
in ihrer betru benden Einsamkeit
” (“in their sad desertion”)—was far from the only sign that society seemed to have lost its way. In some ways the period
seems to have been the worst of times—an age of treachery, abduction, fratricide, depravity, barbarism, and sadism. In England,
by royal decree, the Star Chamber sent innocent men to the gallows ignorant of both their accusers and the charges against
them. In Florence, the fief of Lorenzo de’ Medici, local merchants were licensed to organize the African slave trade, after
which the first “blackbirders” arrived in Italian ports with their wretched human cargoes. Tomás de Torquemada, a Dominican
monk, presided over the Spanish Inquisition—actually conceived by Isabella of Castile—which tortured accused heretics
until they confessed.

Torquemada’s methods reveal much about one of the age’s most unpleasant characteristics: man’s inhumanity to man. Sharp iron
frames prevented victims from sleeping, lying, or even sitting. Braziers scorched the soles of their feet, racks stretched
their limbs, suspects were crushed to death beneath chests filled with stones, and in Germany the very mention of
die verfüchte Jungfer
—the dreaded old iron maid—inspired terror. The
Jungfer
embraced the condemned with metal arms, crushed him in a spiked hug, and then opened, letting him fall, a mass of gore, bleeding
from a hundred stab wounds, all bones broken, to die slowly in an underground hole of revolving knives and sharp spears.

Jewry was luckier—slightly luckier—than blacks. If the pogroms of the time are less infamous than the Holocaust, it is
only because anti-Semites then lacked twentieth-century technology. Certainly they possessed the evil will. In 1492, the year
of Columbus, Spain’s Jews were given three months to accept Christian baptism or be banished from the country. Even those
who had been baptized were distrusted; Isabella had fixed her dark eye on converted Jews suspected of recidivism—
Marranos
, she called them; “pigs”—and marked them for resettlement as early as 1478. Eventually between thirty thousand and sixty
thousand were expelled. Meantime the king of Portugal, finding merit in the Spanish decree, ordered the expulsion of
all
Portuguese Jews. His soldiers were instructed to massacre those who were slow to leave. During a single night in 1506 nearly
four thousand Lisbon Jews were put to the sword. Three years later the systematic persecution of the German Jews began.