9

Renaissance and Reformation
1450–1525

The new learning

The Renaissance and the Reformation were processes as well as periods. The one was essentially aesthetic and intellectual, its impact initially confined to centres of wealth and learning. In the short term it had little impact on the narrative of European power. The other was theological and ecclesiastical, and its impact soon became political. Together they stand like two portals marking the exit from the Middle Ages and from a millennium in which the way Europeans viewed the world had been conditioned primarily by their faith, under the tutelage of the church.

As we have seen, the Italian Renaissance was stimulated by Petrarch’s ‘walk back into the pure radiance of the past’. Poets, painters and sculptors had since the fourteenth century found inspiration in the writings and artefacts of Greece and Rome. Scholars reworked the humanism of the classics, reviving the concept of a morality that emerged from the thoughts and actions of individuals, rather than from the supernatural. To this was added an interest, borrowed from Aristotle and taken up by Augustine, in the free will of the individual. In northern Europe, the Dutch scholar Erasmus (1469–1536) subjected the words of the Bible to textual analysis, the better to comprehend his faith. England’s Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) satirized the states of modern Europe and described a proto-communist land of Utopia, based in part on Plato.

This opening of the mind stimulated a scientific revolution, initially a rediscovery of the mathematics, astronomy and geography of the ancients, Aristotle, Ptolemy and Pythagoras. The medieval mappa mundi had portrayed the Earth as flat and surrounded by metaphorical dragons. Although most scholars now accepted its spherical form, they still placed the planet at the centre of the universe while map-makers placed Jerusalem at the centre of the known world. In 1543 a Pole, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), announced that the Earth went round the sun, to the dismay and disbelief of the church. Though the church was not hostile to these movements, it saw itself losing its licence over knowledge. In 1455 a revolution in communication had come. A German, Johannes Gutenberg (c.1400–1468) in Mainz, produced a Bible using lines of moveable metal type held in a frame and printed from it. Writers could now more easily disseminate their views, not least on matters of faith, across borders and into courts, colleges and churches, by-passing costly manuscripts.

In the practical world of navigation, the lateen sail enabled ocean-going ships to voyage into the wind. This was to the age of discovery what the longship had been to the Vikings. It offered a new freedom of the high seas, and a broadening of the concept of an outside world. Europe’s awareness of the Orient had been fragmentary, reliant on the tales of the Venetian Marco Polo (1254–1324), and the accounts of returning traders and sailors. Europeans became increasingly conscious that other civilizations to the east might have more to contribute to humanity than exotic silks and spices. Their cultures merited study. The elaborate design of the fourteenth-century porch of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol is traceable to Isfahan in Persia.

While the impact of the Renaissance was gradual, the impact of the Reformation was immediate. As the teachings of Wycliffe and Hus gained currency, their supporters looked beyond theologians to ask how much they could know for sure about the world about them. A new discipline of reasoning took hold in centres of learning in England, France, the Low Countries and Germany. As individuals argued, so they formed into groups, factions and parties, creating divisions that would be exploited as yet another round in Europe’s timeless dynastic struggles began in earnest.

Isabella, Ferdinand and Columbus

In the 1420s, Portugal’s Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ began to dispatch ships down the African coastline, eager to find a trade route to India that avoided the risks and costs of crossing Arabia. Henry himself never travelled, living as a virtual hermit in Sagres, on his country’s southern tip. There he studied his maps and awaited the return of his captains, each year bringing back tales of new lands. By the 1450s Henry was sending fleets to the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, Guinea and Senegal. In 1456 the Cape Verde Islands, market for quantities of gold, were reached. Suddenly Europe’s western boundary of the Atlantic seemed permeable. To Daniel Boorstin, Henry’s enterprise was the true Renaissance, ‘an adventure of the mind, a thrust of someone’s imagination … The pioneer explorer was one lonely man, thinking.’

In Spain, only Granada was still in Muslim hands. Cordoba had been conquered by Castile in 1236, but Granada survived as a trading centre and haven for refugees from religious intolerance. In 1469, Castile was joined to its neighbour Aragon through the marriage of Isabella of Castile (lived 1451–1504) to Ferdinand (lived 1452–1516), heir to the throne of Aragon. Both were still in their teens, but soon became rulers of their respective countries, and from 1479 joint rulers of both. They together forged a new state and founded a dynasty that was to bring the Holy Roman Empire to its apotheosis.

Ferdinand was an assiduous soldier and administrator, Isabella was forceful and fanatically pious. She determined to ban all other faiths and sects from Spain. In 1478 her Dominican confessor, Torquemada, persuaded her that the conversion of Jews in formerly Moorish Andalusia was insufficiently rigorous, and she in turn persuaded Pope Sixtus to initiate an ‘inquiry’ into these conversions. This became the Spanish Inquisition, led by Torquemada from 1483 to 1498. John Julius Norwich reflects on the irony that ‘the originator of one of the most beautiful buildings in the world [the Sistine Chapel] should also have been the inspiration for one of its most odious institutions’.

Spain now saw a campaign of conversion, expulsion or execution, first of Jews then of Muslims. Evidence would be collected of suspect practices by supposed converts, with tortures and burnings at the stake. This was despite pressure from the pope for tolerance, reflected in allowing appeals to Rome against the Inquisition. These were ignored by Torquemada. Then in 1492 came the annus mirabilis of the so-called dual monarchy. After a ten-year campaign, Ferdinand captured Granada and the last emir handed over the keys to the Alhambra palace.

Ferdinand offered the Moors freedom of movement and religion, and instantly reneged on his promise. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 demanded the conversion or expulsion of all non-Catholics from Granada, as from the rest of Spain. Some 40,000 Jews converted and more than 100,000 fled into exile, most of them initially to Portugal. The great library of Granada, some 5,000 Islamic books, went up in flames. It is believed that 2,000 Jews died at the Inquisition’s hands.

A newly emboldened Spain now found itself in open rivalry with Portugal. In 1488 a Portuguese sea captain, Bartolomeu Dias, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and realized the prospect of a new sea route to the Orient. Portuguese trading posts sprang up along this coast. Within a decade another Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, had reached India, and the Arab monopoly on Europe’s commerce with the Orient was broken.

Spain decided to compete. In 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand celebrated the fall of Granada by supporting the project of a Genovese admiral, Christopher Columbus, to find an alternative route to the Orient to Portugal’s by sailing west across the Atlantic. It was a measure of how little European science had advanced in a millennium that Columbus relied on the second-century Ptolemy’s calculation of the Earth’s circumference (at three-quarters of its actual length). He assumed that he would reach China in three months. He even took with him a Chinese interpreter. If Columbus’s crew had known how far China really was, they would never have set sail.

Columbus’s return from the Caribbean stirred a frenzy of exploration, part commercial, part nationalist, part missionary. As early as 1494 the monarchs of Portugal and Spain averted conflict between themselves by agreeing the Treaty of Tordesillas, mediated by the pope. This divided the ‘New World’ either side of a line of longitude 1,100 miles west of Cape Verde, with the lands to its west going to Spain and to its east, that is Africa, to Portugal. The line was later found to slice into the shore of South America, which became Portuguese Brazil and speaks Portuguese to this day.

The Medici, Savonarola and the Borgia papacy

The year 1492 also saw the death of the Florentine banker and Renaissance grandee Lorenzo de’ Medici ‘the Magnificent’. He had been moneylender to all Europe and even to the Ottoman sultans. He was a bastion of its emerging capitalist economy and patron of the masters of the High Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–94), Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Of these, Leonardo was the quintessential product of the Renaissance, self-educated and self-made. He was, above all, insatiably curious about the workings of nature and humanity. He was the perfect foil for Lorenzo, not just a grandee but an artist, poet, bibliophile and civic leader. The bulk of Lorenzo’s fortune went on art and charity, since ‘I consider that it gave great honour to our State … to have money well-expended’. One ancient custom the Medici were unable to avoid was the bequest of an incompetent heir.

Two years after Lorenzo’s death, the Medici family was expelled from Florence in an uprising led by a friar, Girolamo Savonarola. He preached hellfire and the damnation of sinners, outdoing Hus in accusing the papal church of every kind of corruption. From 1494 to 1498 he ruled Florence as a ‘popular republic’. The papacy was ‘a prostitute sitting on the throne of Solomon’. Savonarola instituted a ‘bonfire of the vanities’, committing hundreds of Renaissance treasures to the flames. The Virgin, he said, ‘seems dressed as a whore’. After four years, the same mob that had welcomed Savonarola overthrew him, and he was burned alive as a heretic.

The papacy was now in the hands of a family that made the Medici look like saints, the Borgias. The second Borgia pope, Alexander VI, arrived in office in 1492 as father of eight children (by three women), five of whom he made cardinals. He celebrated with a bullfight in front of St Peter’s. One of his sons, Cesare, became a legend of dissolution and hooliganism. Disfigured by the syphilis brought back to Europe by sailors from America – a return for the diseases they had taken there – Cesare was beyond any law. His sister, Lucretia, was married three times, two husbands being killed by her jealous brother. The Venetian ambassador wrote that ‘every night four or five men are discovered assassinated, bishops, prelates and others. All Rome trembles for fear of being murdered.’ Cesare lost power only when Alexander died in 1503, going into exile in Spain and dying there four years later, aged just thirty-one.

To northern Europe, tales of the Borgia papacy fused with those of the Spanish Inquisition to indicate a church with little claim to respect. The reformism of the Council of Constance had vanished. The church’s maltreatment of fellow humans in the name of Christ was reminiscent of the sadism of ancient Rome, or at least reflected that of secular authorities at the time. Nor could Protestants claim any special sanctity, retaliating by torturing and burning Catholics, from Elizabethan England to seventeenth-century Switzerland. Amid such instability, the age bred its own political philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), a perceptive student of the acquisition of power in times of turbulence. Though portrayed as a political cynic, he was in truth the reverse, an observant realist who saw that only through security could a moral prince gain influence over the conduct of affairs.

The rise of the dynasts: Spain and Austria

In Spain, the ageing Isabella and Ferdinand had other concerns, primarily those of succession. Never in western Europe’s history was that question so critical. The continent was cohering into three centres of political power: Spain with its outreach across the Atlantic, France fearing encirclement within its historical borders, and the unstable Holy Roman Empire, embracing Germany and the ever-reluctant Italy. After the death of Isabella’s only son, her surviving daughters would marry variously: two to the king of Portugal and one, Catherine, to a prince and then a king of England. Another, Joan the Mad, was to marry Philip the Handsome, Habsburg son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1493–1519). These marriages would furnish the architecture of European power into the eighteenth century.

Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) was beautiful and intelligent. The English king Henry VII was the Tudor Lancastrian victor over the Yorkist Richard III in England’s dynastic Wars of the Roses. Sensitive to the accusation of usurpation and desperate for status, Henry in 1488 engaged his son Arthur to the three-year-old Catherine, who was finally dispatched to England in 1501 at the age of sixteen. They married, but Arthur died soon afterwards, the match allegedly unconsummated. Catherine remained in England and went on to marry Arthur’s younger brother Henry, who had in 1509 taken the throne as Henry VIII. The marriage was initially happy and Catherine was a popular and lively consort, friend of Erasmus and More. Her crucial failing was not to bear Henry a son.

Her sister Joan’s fate was no less vexed. Her father-in-law, Maximilian, was king of Austria and Germany and Holy Roman Emperor from 1493. He was notional ruler of much of Italy and, by marrying Mary of Burgundy, ruler also of Burgundy and Flanders. To this estate he added his talents at matrimonial diplomacy. One daughter was betrothed, at the age of three, to the dauphin of France. Others were married to rulers of Bohemia and Hungary. The marriage of his Italian niece to Sigismund I of Poland expedited a Polish renaissance. No heiress in Europe was said to be safe from a Habsburg ring. ‘Let others wage war,’ it was said of Maximilian, ‘but thou, O happy Austria, marry; for those kingdoms which Mars gives to others, Venus gives to thee.’

The strategy was not always successful. France bitterly contested Maximilian’s marital claim to Burgundy. In 1499 the Swabian Wars also lost the empire its hold on the Alpine cantons of Switzerland. Despite later marrying a Sforza of Milan, Maximilian was no more successful than his predecessors in securing his sovereignty in Italy. None the less, as Joan’s Spanish siblings died, her own inheritance grew until it embraced all of Spain and its overseas empire.

Then came catastrophe. When Joan’s mother, Isabella, died in 1504, her father, Ferdinand, promptly had his daughter declared insane. Rumour held that she was not insane, but was showing un-Catholic allegiances. She was incarcerated for the rest of her life in Valladolid. Then in 1506 Philip, her husband, also died, leaving her with two sons and four daughters. Her eldest son, Charles, would thus inherit both her Spanish empire and the Habsburg empire from Maximilian, who was still alive.

On Ferdinand’s death in 1516, the sixteen-year-old Charles assumed the Spanish throne. Since he spoke only French and Flemish, he was told he had to learn Spanish to rule in Madrid. As heir through his dead father to his grandfather, Maximilian, he would assume the crowns of Germany and Austria, but one other title was at issue, that of Holy Roman Emperor. This depended on the decision of the seven electors. The elderly Maximilian now had to ensure their votes. This in turn meant fending off a challenge from France’s new king, Francis I, who was spending enormous sums on bribing the electors. Maximilian would have to out-bribe him.

Imperial politics became fiendish. The electors included a German aristocrat, Albrecht of Brandenburg, who in 1518 was sufficiently eager for Maximilian’s bribe to have acquired his electorship through buying a cardinal’s hat from Pope Leo X. Leo’s church was close to bankruptcy through the expense of rebuilding St Peter’s and of Raphael’s decoration of the Vatican rooms. Leo agreed with Albrecht to share Maximilian’s bribe. Jacob Fugger, banker of Augsburg and the Medicis’ successor as one of the richest men of all time, was on hand to lend money as required. The security for any loans embraced contracts for selling papal indulgences in Germany.

Maximilian was successful, and he died in 1519 with Charles’s inheritance safe. At the age of nineteen, the young man took the imperial throne as Charles V (1519–56). His combined empire was unprecedented, stretching in various forms from the Polish border across central and western Europe (other than France) to Spain, and across to the New World. To the north it was bounded by the Baltic Sea, to the south by the Mediterranean. All this passed under the absolute power of a feeble and unprepossessing youth.

Martin Luther and the Diet of Worms

The marketing of indulgences to repay the Fugger loans became fanatical. Leo stipulated that they could be bought not only by sinners but as gifts for sinners. They could be bought on behalf of dead relatives, claimed to be at that very moment suffering agonies in purgatory for want of such purchase. Indulgence ‘futures’ could even be bought as insurance, by the living for sins not yet committed. Scenes of the fate awaiting sinners in the afterlife were horrifically portrayed by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. The remission of sins became salesmanship on an industrial scale.

This was all too much for one plain-speaking German friar and son of a mine-owner, Martin Luther. He visited Rome and was shocked by what he saw. He returned to Germany to contemplate, as many others had done, the present state of the institutional church and its relationship to his faith. In particular, he waged war on indulgences, inveighing against money being extorted from worshippers as if ‘the soul flies out of purgatory the moment money tinkles in the box’. In 1517 Luther drew up ninety-five theses ‘for discussion’ – whether he pinned them to a Wittenberg church door is now doubted.

Luther appealed to the spirit of Wycliffe and Hus, asserting that faith was a personal relationship between man and God. It did not require the intercession of Catholic priests or obscurantist dogmas, let alone the terrorizing of the poor into parting with their savings. Salvation was not a purchasable reward, but God’s gift of love. Luther was a deeply thoughtful man, but also brash and unsubtle, certainly no tolerant compromiser. He declared the papacy ‘to be more corrupt than Babylon and Sodom’. He hated Jews, and later found himself in conflict with other reformers, notably his early hero, Erasmus. While Erasmus remained committed to reforming the church from within, Luther would have none of it. Erasmus said of Luther, ‘I laid an egg. Luther hatched a bird of quite different species.’ Luther ended by calling Erasmus a ‘viper, liar, the very mouth and organ of Satan’.

Many German rulers could see political advantage in Luther’s stance. The church’s landed wealth was detested by aristocrats, merchants and populace alike, and was vulnerable to seizure. The church hit back. In 1521 a diet, or legislative assembly, was assembled at Worms, chaired by Charles V and with Luther present. Charles declared that ‘a single monk, led astray by private judgment, has set himself against the faith held by all Christians for a thousand years and more. He impudently concludes that all Christians up till now have erred.’ Charles said he would stake his body and soul on opposing him.

Luther replied with his famous declaration of dissent: Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders, Here I stand, I can do no other. Despite an imperial guarantee of safe conduct, he recalled Hus’s fate in 1415 and decided it was best to flee, to find sanctuary in The Wartburg with the Elector of Saxony. With the assistance of the artists Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer, he proceeded to publish illustrated essays defiant of the church. The Reformation spawned a publishing empire.

A quieter theologian than Luther might have been able to unite the German-speaking world against Rome, or at least direct it towards tolerance and reform. Luther was a political conservative. When in 1525 the German peasantry rose against their landlords, he supported their suppression, declaring that everyone ‘stab, smite and slay … the thievish, murderous hordes of peasants’. He campaigned against other Reformers, the Anabaptists, Ulrich Zwingli’s Protestants of Zurich and Calvin’s dissenters of Geneva. He derided Copernicus’s thesis that the Earth went round the sun as the work of ‘an upstart astrologer … this fool’.

Germany now split roughly north and south, for and against Luther’s Reformation. First to join his cause in 1525 were the Teutonic knights of Prussia. The northern Netherlands, north Germany and Prussia did so too. Charles’s Habsburg lands, together with Austria, Hungary and Flanders, remained loyal to Rome. The Holy Roman Empire was thus divided, and the devotion of the Habsburgs to Catholicism was to keep it so for more than three centuries.

Charles V proved a more substantial figure than had at first seemed likely. He was uncharismatic and cautious, with a keen conscience and a shrewd head. But his empire encircled and overshadowed Europe’s most populous country, France, ruled at the time by a flamboyant Francis I (1515–47), defeated by Charles for the Holy Roman emperorship. At the same time, the throne of England was occupied by the young Henry VIII (1509–47), whose wife Catherine was Charles’s aunt. These three princes, Charles, Francis and Henry, were to bring down the curtain on medieval Europe. They did so with Luther’s words pounding in the background from Gutenberg’s presses.