William manchester a world lit only by fire the age (v5 0)

Books by William Manchester Biography DISTURBER OF THE PEACE: The Life of H L Mencken A ROCKEFELLER FAMILY PORTRAIT: From John D to Nelson PORTRAIT OF A PRESIDENT: John F Kennedy in Profile AMERICAN CAESAR: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL; Visions of Glory: 1874–1932 THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL; Alone: 1932–1940 History THE DEATH OF A PRESIDENT: November 20–November 25, 1963 THE ARMS OF KRUPP , 1587–1968 THE GLORY AND THE DREAM: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972 A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of An Age Essays CONTROVERSY: And Other Essays in Journalism, 1950–1975 IN OUR TIME Fiction THE CITY OF ANGER SHADOW OF THE MONSOON THE LONG GAINER Diversion BEARD THE LION Memoirs GOODBYE, DARKNESS: A Memoir of the Pacific War ONE BRIEF SHINING MOMENT: Remembering Kennedy Copyright Copyright © 1992 by William Manchester All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review Hachette Book Group 237 Park Avenue New York, NY 10017 Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com First eBook Edition: September 2009 ISBN: 978-0-316-08279-2 TO TIM JOYNER ATHLETE COMRADE SCHOLAR FRIEND Ein Kugel kam geflogen: Gilt es mir oder gilt es dir? Ihn hat es weggerissen; Er liegt mir vor den Füssen Als wära ein Stück von mir ARRAY Books by William Manchester Copyright List of Illustrations List of Maps Author’s Note I The Medieval Mind II The Shattering III One Man Alone Acknowledgments And Sources Chronology LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Girolamo Savonarola Painting by Fra Bartolomeo della Porta Alinari-Scala/Art Resource, NY Page 43 A sixteenth-century town wall From Life on a Medieval Barony by William Stearns Davis copyright 1923 by Harper & Brothers; copyright renewed 1951 by William Stearns Davis Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc Page 49 A medieval fair From Life on a Medieval Barony by William Stearns Davis copyright 1923 by Harper & Brothers; copyright renewed 1951 by William Stearns Davis Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc Page 51 Home of a medieval nobleman From the restoration by Viollet-le-Duc From Life on a Medieval Barony by William Stearns Davis copyright 1923 by Harper & Brothers; copyright renewed 1951 by William Stearns Davis Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc Page 52 King Francis I of France Painting by Jean Clouet Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 72 Pope Julius II Detail from fresco The Mass of Bolsena, by Raphael Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 75 Alexander VI, the Borgia pope Detail from mural The Resurrection, by Pinturicchio Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 77 Giulia Farnese Detail from painting The Transfiguration, by Raphael Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 78 Lucrezia Borgia Detail from mural La Disputa de Santa Caterina, by Pinturicchio Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 81 Cesare Borgia Painting by Marco Palmezzano Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 83 Nicolaus Copernicus Engraving, artist unknown Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 90 Leonardo da Vinci Chalk drawing, self-portrait Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 92 Niccolò Machiavelli Terra-cotta bust, artist unknown Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 101 Sir Thomas More Painting by Hans Holbein the Younger Copyright The Frick Collection, New York Page 109 Cupola of St Peter’s Michelangelo Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 116 Desiderius Erasmus Painting by Hans Holbein the Younger Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 122 The traffic in indulgences Detail from woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936 (36.77) Page 132 St Peter’s Square in Rome at the time of the coronation of Pope Sixtus V, in 1585 Painting from the Sala Sistina The Granger Collection, New York Page 134 Martin Luther Painting by Lucas Cranach Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 138 Pope Leo X Painting by Raphael Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 147 Emperor Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) Painting by Titian Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 155 The Reformation Monument, Geneva Page 177 John Calvin Painting, artist unknown Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 192 Pope Clement VII Painting by Sebastiano del Piombo Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 196 Castel Sant’ Angelo, Rome Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 198 Lutheran satire on papal reform Woodcut, artist unknown Illustration courtesy of American Heritage Picture Collection, American Heritage Magazine Page 200 King Henry VIII of England Painting by Hans Holbein the Younger Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 205 Anne Boleyn Engraving, artist unknown Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 210 Ferdinand Magellan Painting, sixteenth century, artist unknown Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 225 Balboa claims the Pacific Lithograph, nineteenth century The Granger Collection, New York Page 244 Magellan’s Armada de Molucca sails from Spain Wood engraving, nineteenth century The Granger Collection, New York Page 251 The Río de la Plata Bellin’s Atlas of 1781 Page 254 The death of Magellan Drawing, nineteenth century The Granger Collection, New York Page 281 LIST OF MAPS Europe and the Mediterranean, c 1190 Europe in 1519 Sixteenth-Century Distances Voyages of Discovery The Circumnavigation AUTHOR’S NOTE COMPLETE AT LAST, this book is a source of pride, which is pleasant, though in this instance somewhat odd It is, after all, a slight work, with no scholarly pretensions All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship on the early sixteenth century This being true, I thought it wise to submit my final manuscript to scrutiny by those steeped in the period, or in certain aspects of it For example, Dr Timothy Joyner, Magellan’s most recent biographer, examined the passages on Magellan His emendations were many and were gratefully received My greatest debt, however, is to James Boyden, an authority on the sixteenth century, who was a history professor at Yale when he began his examination of my text and had become a history professor at Tulane when he finished it I have never known a more scrupulous review than his His knowledge of the sixteenth century is both encyclopedic and profound He challenged me—and rightly so—in virtually every passage of the work Of course, that does not mean that he or anyone else with whom I consulted is in any way responsible for this volume Indeed, Professor Boyden took exception to several of my interpretations Obviously I, and I alone, am answerable for the result Another oddity of this book is that it was written, so to speak, inside out Ordinarily a writer does not begin to put words on paper until he knows much he is going to say Determining how to say it is the last step—the most taxing, to be sure, but one preceded by intricate preparations: conception, research, mastering material, structuring the work Very rarely are the writing and reading experiences even remotely parallel, and almost never does a narrative unfold for the writer as it will later for those turning his pages The fact that it happened this time makes the volume unique in my experience Actually, at the outset I had no intention of writing it at all In the late summer of 1989, while toiling over another manuscript —the last volume of a biography of Winston Spencer Churchill—I fell ill After several months in and out of hospitals, I emerged cured but feeble, too weak to cope with my vast accumulation of Churchill documents Medical advice was to shelve that work temporarily and head south for a long convalescence I took it The fact that I wasn’t strong enough for Winston did not, however, mean I could not work H L Mencken once observed that writing did for him what giving milk does for a cow So it is for all natural writers Putting words on paper is essential to their inner stability, even to their peace of mind And as it happened, I had a small professional commitment to meet — providing an introduction to a friend’s biography of Ferdinand Magellan That manuscript was back in my Connecticut home and I was now in Florida, but the obstacle seemed small; I hadn’t intended to write about Magellan anyhow Instead, I had decided, I would provide the great navigator with context, a portrait of his age It could be done, I thought, in several pages—a dozen at most I actually thought that I HAD MISCALCULATED because I had not realized how parochial my previous work had been Virtually everything in my seventeen earlier books had been contemporaneous Now, moving back nearly five centuries, I was entering an entirely different world, where there were no clocks, no police, virtually no communications; a time when men believed in magic and sorcery and slew those whose superstitions were different from, and therefore an affront to, their own The early sixteenth century was not entirely new to me Its major figures, their wars, the Renaissance, the religious revolution, the voyages of exploration—with all these I had the general familiarity of an educated man I could have drawn a reasonably accurate freehand map of Europe as it was then, provided I wasn’t expected to get the borders of all the German states exactly right But I had no sense of the spirit of the time Its idioms fell strangely on my ear I didn’t know enough to put myself back there—to see it, hear it, feel it, even smell it—and because I had never pondered the minutiae of that age, I had no grasp of the way the webs of action were spun out, how each event led inexorably to another, then another … Yet I knew from experience that such chains of circumstance are always there, awaiting discovery To cite a small, relatively recent example: In the first year of John F Kennedy’s presidential administration, four developments appeared to be unrelated —America’s humiliation at the Bay of Pigs in April, Kennedy’s confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev in Austria six weeks later, the raising of the Berlin Wall in August, and, in December, the first commitment of American ground troops to Indochina Yet each event had led to the next Khrushchev saw the Cuban fiasco as evidence that the young president was weak Therefore he bullied him in Vienna In the mistaken belief that he had intimidated him there, he built the Wall Kennedy answered the challenge by sending four hundred Green Berets to Southeast Asia, explaining to those around him that “we have a problem making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” A subtler, more progressive catena may be found in nineteenth-century social history In 1847 the old, slow, expensive flatbed press was rendered obsolete by Richard Hoe’s high-speed rotary “lightning” press, first installed by the Philadelphia Public Ledger Incorporating lithographic and letter-press features, some of which had been patented in France, Hoe went on to design and build a web press capable of printing—on both sides of a sheet at the same time—eighteen thousand sheets an hour Vast supplies of cheap paper were required to feed these new presses Ingenious Germans provided the answer in the 1850s: newsprint made from wood pulp Now a literate public awaited them W E Forster’s Compulsory Education Act, passed by Parliament in 1870, was followed by similar legislation throughout western Europe and the United States In 1858 only percent of British army recruits could read and write; by the turn of the century the figure had risen to 85.4 percent The 1880s had brought the institution of free libraries, which was followed by an explosion in journalism and the emergence of the twentieth-century mass culture which has transformed Western civilization Though the early 1500s offer a larger, much more chaotic canvas, perspective provides coherence there, too The power of the Catholic Church was waning, reeling from the failure of the crusades, corruption in the Curia, debauchery in the Vatican, and the breakdown of monastic discipline Even so, Martin Luther’s revolt against Rome seemed hopeless until, abandoning the custom of publishing in Latin, he addressed the German people in their own language This had two immense but unforeseen consequences Because of the invention of printing and the increase in literacy throughout Europe, he reached a huge audience At the same time, the new nationalism which was fueling the rising phenomenon of nation-states—soon to replace the fading Holy Roman Empire—led loyal Germans to support Luther for reasons that had nothing to with religion He won a historic victory, which was followed by similar success in England, where loyal Englishmen rallied to Henry VIII As each such concatenation came into focus, I came to a dead stop and began major revisions * 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, 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 ... 1963 THE ARMS OF KRUPP , 1587–1968 THE GLORY AND THE DREAM: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972 A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of An Age Essays... mural La Disputa de Santa Caterina, by Pinturicchio Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 81 Cesare Borgia Painting by Marco Palmezzano Alinari/Art Resource, NY Page 83 Nicolaus Copernicus Engraving, artist... philosopher was inspired by a false report Alaric’s sack of Rome, it was said, had been the act of a barbaric pagan seeking vengeance for his idols (This was inaccurate; actually, Alaric and a majority