A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  This certainly does not mean these monarchies were any less brutal than their forebears. They were prepared to use any means to cement their power against one another and against their subjects. Intrigue, murder, kidnapping and torture were their stock in trade. Their philosophy is best expressed in the writings of Machiavelli, the Florentine civil servant whose life’s ambition was to see Italy unified in a single state and who drew up guidelines by which a ‘prince’ was to achieve this goal. His hopes were frustrated. But his writings specify a list of techniques which could have been taken straight from the repertoire of the Spanish monarchs or Henry VIII.

  Isabella and Ferdinand followed the conquest of Granada by doing something the Islamic kingdoms had never done to the Christians – using the Inquisition to kill those who refused to convert to Christianity or flee the country. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the Muslim population, which had been in the country for 900 years, had been expelled. Jewish people who had been tolerated through almost eight centuries of Islamic rule were forced to emigrate, making new lives for themselves in north Africa, in the Turkish-ruled Balkans (where a Spanish-speaking Jewish community remained in Salonica until Hitler’s armies took the city in the Second World War) and in eastern Europe. Even the converts to Christianity, the conversos , were not secure. There was a wave of persecution against them in the 1570s.

  The harsh methods of Henry VII, Henry VIII and their successors in England were not only directed against the power of the old feudal barons. They were also directed against vast numbers of the poorest people – those who were left to roam the country without a livelihood as the barons dismissed their old armies of retainers and landowners, ‘enclosed’ old common lands and deprived smallholding peasants of their plots. Successive monarchs treated them as ‘voluntary criminals’. 37 A law of 1530 decreed:

  Whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to cartwheels and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, and then to swear an oath to go back to their birthplace or where they have lived for the last three years and to ‘put themselves to labour’.

  The law was later amended:

  For the second offence for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear to be sliced off; but for the third offence the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal. 38

  The new ideas

  The period of the ‘discovery’ of America and the ‘new monarchies’ was also the period of the Renaissance – the ‘rebirth’ of intellectual life and art that began in the Italian cities and spread, over a century, to the rest of western Europe. Across the continent there was a rediscovery of the learning of classical antiquity and, with it, a break with the narrow worldview, stultifying artistic conventions and religious superstition which characterised the European Middle Ages. The result was a flowering of art and literature and scientific advances such as the European world had not known since the times of Plato, Aristotle and Euclid.

  This was not the first attempt to make such a break, despite the claims of some history books. There had been an earlier breakthrough two centuries before, with the translation of works from Latin, Greek and Arabic in Toledo, the efforts of thinkers like Abelard and Roger Bacon, and the writings of Boccaccio, Chaucer and Dante. But it had ground to a halt with the great crisis of the fourteenth century, as church and state worked to extirpate ideas that might link with the class struggle in town and country. The universities, from being centres of intellectual exploration, were increasingly characterised by scholastic disputes which seemed to have no practical relevance.

  The Renaissance represented a return to the intellectual, cultural and scientific endeavours of the thirteenth century, but on a much higher level and with a much broader base. In its birthplace in the Italian city states, it did not immediately challenge head on the sterility of the late medieval worldview. Those states were dominated by merchant oligarchs who flaunted wealth arrived at by non-feudal means and pushed the members of the old feudal nobility aside, but who used their wealth and power to secure positions within the framework established by feudalism. The dominant family in Florence, for example, was the Medicis. They started off as merchants and bankers, but two of them ended up as popes and another as the queen of France. The culture they promoted reflected their contradictory position. They commissioned paintings and sculptures by craftsmen from plebeian backgrounds who gave brilliant visual expression to the new society emerging in the midst of the old. Michelangelo’s God Giving Life to Adam and his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel are religious works which celebrate humanity. Among his greatest works is the series of giant statues of slaves or prisoners which show men struggling to free themselves from the stone in which they are trapped. The literature encouraged by the oligarchs, on the other hand, was in some ways a step backwards from the tradition of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. As the Italian revolutionary Gramsci noted nearly 70 years ago, while Dante wrote in the Italian dialect of the Florentine people, the language of Renaissance ‘humanism’ was that of a thin intellectual elite, Latin. This provided a channel of communication to scholars across Europe, but not to the mass of people of Florence, Milan or Venice. What is more, there was still an almost superstitious reverence for the ancient texts, so that a quotation from a Greek or Roman author still seemed like the clinching point in an argument.

  As the Renaissance spread across Europe, its content began to change. There was a growing number of translations from the Greek or Latin into colloquial languages. And there was a growing willingness not simply to read the ancients, but to challenge their findings – best exemplified by the scientific advances of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. The sixteenth century may have begun with the regurgitation of 2,000-year-old ideas, but within little more than another century there was an explosion of new writings in the languages of the masses – Rabelais in French; Shakespeare, Marlowe and Ben Jonson in English; Cervantes in Spanish. This was not just a matter of putting stories, plays or many of the new ideas on to paper. It was also a matter of giving form to the everyday speech used by millions. The age which saw the ‘new monarchies’ also saw the first rise of national languages.

  The new religions

  Twenty-five years after Spanish troops took Granada and Columbus landed in the West Indies, a 34-year-old friar and theology teacher, Martin Luther, nailed a piece of paper to the door of a church in Wittenberg, south Germany. It contained 95 points (‘theses’) attacking the sale of ‘indulgences’ by the Catholic church. These were documents which absolved people from their sins and promised a passport to heaven. His action precipitated the biggest split in the western church since Constantine had embraced Christianity 12 centuries before. It seemed that nothing the church or the Holy Roman Empire did could stop support for Luther growing. The cities of southern Germany and Switzerland – Basel, Zurich, Strasbourg, Mainz – swung behind him. So did some of the most powerful German princes, like those of Saxony, Hesse and Brandenburg. Soon there were converts in Holland and France – despite countermeasures by the authorities like the burning alive of 14 Lutheran artisans in the town square of Meaux in 1546. 39 Henry VIII of England broke with the Catholic church after the pope (an ally of the Spanish crown) would not countenance his divorce from the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon.

  Luther began with theological arguments – over indulgences, over church ceremonies, over the role of priests as intermediaries between believers and God, over the right of the pope to discipline the priesthood. But the Catholic church had been such a central part of medieval society that the issues could not avoid being social and political. Effectively, what Luther did was challenge the institution that exercised ideological control on behalf of the whole feudal order. Those who benefited from that ideological control were bound to fight back. Disputes over these issues were to plunge most of Europe into a succession of wars and civil wars over the next century and a quarter – the Smalkaldic war in Germany, the religious civil wars in Fra
nce, the long war of Dutch independence from Spain, the Thirty Years War which devastated the lands of Germany, and the English Civil War.

  Luther was a brilliant polemicist, pouring out tract after tract stating his case, as well as a translation of the Bible which decisively influenced the development of the German language. Yet this, in itself, does not explain the impact of his actions. There was a long tradition of opposition to the Roman Catholic church based on ideas very similar to Luther’s. There had been an underground ‘Waldensian’ church with groups in major European cities for 200 years. The Hussites had fought a century before behind very similar ideas in Bohemia, and there were still many ‘Lollard’ followers of the late fourteenth-century reformer Wycliffe in England. But these movements had never succeeded in tearing apart the church and the society within which it existed. Luther did exactly this, as did other reformers who differed with him on points of doctrine – Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva.

  To understand why this happened it is necessary to look at the wider economic and social changes which had occurred since the crisis of the fourteenth century – changes which laid the ground for the new religions, just as they laid the ground for the new monarchies, the conquests in the new world and the new learning of the Renaissance. The feudal economy and feudal society were giving birth to something new, and Protestantism was one of its birth cries.

  The economy in transition

  West European society had been experiencing slow but cumulative changes over hundreds of years, changes which were often barely perceptible to those living through them. First, there was the slow, intermittent, but continual advance in the techniques of production as artisans, shipbuilders and military engineers took up innovations arriving from elsewhere in Eurasia and north Africa and added their own improvements. So by the beginning of the sixteenth century there were scores of devices which were unknown in the twelfth century and often even in the fourteenth – mechanical clocks in every important town, windmills as well as water mills, blast furnaces capable of producing cast iron, new ways of building and rigging ships and new devices for establishing their positions, the cannon and the musket for waging war, the printing press which provided for the mass copying of texts only previously available as highly treasured manuscripts in select libraries.

  These technical innovations were the absolute precondition for all of the wider changes. Columbus may have been able to find a way to the Americas without the astrolabe from the Arab lands and the compass from China – it is more than possible that others had done so before him – but he would not have been able to chart the regular sea route that made return visits and the Spanish conquests possible. The monarchs’ armies would have been able to win one-off battles without their improved crossbows and firearms, but they would not have been able to defeat the armoured cavalry of knights, flatten the castles of the lords or defeat peasant pikemen. Renaissance thinkers in northern Italy would have been able to revive some interest in Greek and Roman writings without the printing press, but the influence of these writings could not have spread across most of Europe without their reproduction in thousands of copies. In the same way, Luther’s challenge to the papacy would not have been able to find such a huge audience. In fact, the printing press ensured the ground was already prepared for his ideas. In England, for instance, the printing houses ensured ‘a delayed but maximum force’ for the anti-clerical arguments found in Wycliffe, in Langland’s Piers Ploughman and, to a lesser extent in Chaucer, so that ‘the 14th century invaded the 16th’. 40

  But the techniques alone could accomplish nothing. They had to be put to use, sometimes at considerable cost. Weapons had to be manufactured, minerals mined, printing presses financed, ships built, armies provisioned. Such things could only be done on the required scale because the social as well as the technical organisation of production had undergone massive changes.

  In the early feudal period, production had been for immediate use – for keeping the peasant family alive and for enabling the lord to live in luxury. What mattered were what Adam Smith and Karl Marx later called ‘use values’ – the necessities of life for the peasant family and luxuries to satisfy the extravagant tastes of the feudal lord. The pressure to expand production, either by the peasant working harder or by the use of new techniques, could only come from the peasant’s desire to live a little better or the lord’s desire to consume even more extravagantly. As Marx also put it, the level of exploitation of the peasants was limited by ‘the size of the stomach of the feudal lord’. In such a society exchange and money played a marginal role. If someone wanted to build up their wealth, they would grab land rather than hoard gold.

  By the beginning of the fifteenth century things were already very different. The production of things to sell – to exchange for gold or silver which in turn could be exchanged for other things – was increasingly prevalent. What Smith and Marx called ‘exchange value’ became increasingly important. The peasant family might still produce most of its own food and clothing, but it required money to pay rent, to buy farming tools and to provide for itself if the harvest failed. The lords and monarchs required money on a massive scale. Long-distance trade meant exotic luxuries could be obtained from the other end of the world, at a price. And if someone could obtain enough money, he (or sometimes she) could acquire an army capable of conquering others (armies were increasingly made up of mercenaries), or obtain the ships and hire the sailors necessary for voyages of discovery, trade or piracy. Overall, money began to become what it is today.

  Over time, this would transform the world of work entirely, so that it ceased to be about meeting human needs and became simply a means by which those with money could make more money. This process was far from complete at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Most artisans would still expect to receive a customary price for any job and have the freedom to celebrate on feast days and saints’ days, and most peasants still saw their work as tied to the routine of the seasons, not the treadmill of the commodity markets. But this transformation was, nevertheless, under way and had been for a couple of centuries. The slow spread of the market networks through town and country had encroached on the lives of growing numbers of people. Close to major towns, ports or navigable rivers, whole areas of the countryside were being turned over to the production of ‘industrial crops’ – flax for linen, grapes for wine making, olives for oil, woad or saffron for dyeing – or to herding to meet a growing demand for meat in the towns and among the upper classes. Merchants were increasingly using the ‘putting-out’ system to pressurise handicraft workers to accept lower payments based on supply and demand rather than the old customary prices – and encouraging the growth of new, rurally based industry when, as was often the case, the urban artisans refused to sacrifice their way of life to the god of merchant profiteering. In areas like the uplands of south Germany, Bohemia and Transylvania great financiers like the Fugger family – who financed the wars of the Spanish and Holy Roman monarchs – were establishing mines worked by waged labour.

  It was the role already played by production for the market which made the outcome of the crisis of the fourteenth century very different to that of the crises which had beset the Roman Empire in the fifth century and China in the third and thirteenth centuries. On those occasions, famine, civil war and foreign invasion had produced a fragmentation into great estates, largely cut off economically from each other and from the wider society. The crisis of the fourteenth century, by contrast, was followed by an extension of market relations throughout Europe. Even where feudal serfdom revived, it was serfdom designed to produce crops which the lord could sell at a handsome profit to great traders.

  The crisis did not destroy the towns. Even though vast numbers of villages were deserted in the aftermath of the famines and plagues, most towns remained intact. And by the middle of the fifteenth century they were in the forefront of a new economic expansion which was encouraging the use of the new technologies, like those of printing and shipp
ing. The towns did not all gain from this new period. The very spread of the market, of production for exchange instead of for immediate use, meant the fortunes of individual towns were accident-prone. Some that had done very well in the previous period now suffered a reverse from the impact, through the market, of unforeseeable changes in production or of political events in distant lands. Others which had lagged behind now leapt ahead. Barcelona, Florence and the great Hanseatic trading cities of northern Europe and the Baltic all declined to various degrees in the sixteenth century, while other cities in the northern Low Country (the present-day Netherlands), southern Spain, south east Germany and England began to flourish.

  The market had another effect. It transformed the conditions under which millions lived. After the middle of the fifteenth century prices began to rise and the living standards of the mass of people to fall. Real wages, which had often doubled in the century after the Black Death, fell by between half and two-thirds from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, 41 while the peasantry were subject to increased pressures to pay various sorts of dues to the lords.

  There was frenzied money making among the rich of the country and town alike. The gold lust of Columbus, Cortés and Pizarro was one expression of this. Another was the church’s trade in indulgences which led to Luther’s first outburst; likewise the turn to renewed serfdom in eastern Europe and to the first forms of capitalist farming in parts of western Europe. Money was becoming the measure of everything. Yet the official values of society were still those embodied in the hierarchy of the old feudalism.

  The church had been absolutely central to the medieval values. Its ceremonies embodied the behaviour expected of the different classes – often represented visually in its carvings and stained glass windows. Yet the church itself was afflicted by the gold lust. Members of great merchant families like the Medicis or Borgias became popes in order to increase their own wealth, and expected to pass it on to illegitimate sons. Teenage boys were appointed to lucrative bishoprics. Clergymen took the incomes from several churches and expected to appear at none of them. Nobles relied on the tithes paid to the church for as much as half their income. Priests and monks squeezed impoverished peasants by lending money at high interest rates, even though usury was meant to be a sin.