They were achievers. Genuine paladins are even likelier to have been objectionable. Yet their flaws, though deplorable, are irrelevant; in the end their heroism shines through untarnished. Had Ferdinand Magellan met Jesus Christ, the Galilean might have felt a pang of disappointment—which the capitán-general might have shared—but Magellan, like Christ, was also a hero. He still is. He always will be. Of all the tributes to him, therefore, the Magellanic Clouds are the most appropriate. Like them, his memory shines down upon the world his voyage opened, illuminating it from infinity to eternity.
THE FULL significance of the great voyage was not grasped until much later, but its most profound implication had begun to emerge two months before the Victoria’s return to Spanish waters, when she was anchored off Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands. There the shore party became entangled with the Portuguese over what at first appeared to be a trivial argument. They disagreed over which day of the week it was. Throughout their long absence, now approaching three years, Pigafetta had scrupulously dated each day’s entry, beginning with “Tuesday, September 20, 1519,” when the Armada de Molucca left Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and continuing with “Wednesday,” “Thursday,” and so on. Arriving here he noted that the date was Wednesday, July 9, 1522. But crewmen who landed to pick up supplies reported that in Santiago it was Thursday, July 10.
Don Antonio was puzzled. It was inconceivable that he could have missed a day. He checked with Albo, who, on instructions from Magellan, had also kept a record of the days in his ship’s log. Albo agreed: It was Wednesday, no question about it. The Cape Verde Portuguese, they decided, had somehow fallen into error. However, when they reached Sanlúcar on what they knew to be Saturday, September 6, the Spaniards greeting them insisted that it was Sunday, September 7. Somehow the flota had dropped twenty-four hours out of the calendar.
None of the great geographers, neither Aristotle, Ptolemy, nor Pierre d’Ailly, had anticipated this riddle. Sixteenth-century European men of science, as startled as Pigafetta and Albo, toiled over their desks until they came up with what, they unanimously agreed, was the only possible solution. Copernicus, they concluded, was right. The earth was rolling eastward, completing a full cycle every day. Magellan and his men had been sailing westward, against that rotation; having traversed a full circle, the circumnavigators had gained exactly twenty-four hours. Geocentrism—the age-old conviction that the earth was the center of the universe—was therefore discredited. The earth was not only round; it was moving. In fact, it was revolving around its own axis.
Magellan was not there to savor the moment, but it was his finest. In many ways it was the crowning triumph of the age, the final, decisive blow to the dead past. Those with the most to lose ignored their defeat, denied the discovery, and denounced those who endorsed it as heretics. Couriers had galloped off to report both the circumnavigation and the confusion over dates to the pope. He now rejected the obvious explanation. Actually, he would have been betraying his predecessors in Saint Peter’s chair if he had accepted it. The Church had always held that whenever observed experience conflicted with Holy Scripture, observation had to yield. And the authority of the Bible, historically interpreted, denied the possibility of a heliocentric system.
Accordingly, the Holy Office in Rome declared that the notion of a moving earth circling the sun was “philosophically foolish and absurd and formally heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrines of Holy Scripture in many places, both according to their literal meaning and according to the common exposition and interpretation of the Holy Fathers and learned theologians.” Twenty-eight successive pontiffs agreed. It took the Church three hundred years to change its mind. Copernicus’s De revolutionibus was removed from the Catholic Index in 1758, but the ban on Galileo’s Dialogue continued until 1822, exactly three centuries after Albo’s log and Don Antonio’s diary had become available to the Holy See.
Nevertheless, patristic mulishness could not diminish the glory of the armada’s achievement. The power of the medieval mind was forever broken. Medieval certitude had been weakened by the Renaissance. Nationalism, humanism, rising literacy, the new horizons of trade—all these had challenged blind, ritualistic allegiance to the assumptions of a thousand years. But Magellan’s voyage exposed its central myth. Europe was no longer the world, and the world was no longer the center of the universe. Since the earth was revolving daily, heaven and hell could not be located where they had been thought to be, and in rational minds there was a growing skepticism that either of them existed. God without heaven was inconceivable, at least the medieval God was, but here reason ended. Christendom found the prospect of a godless world intolerable. Because faith in a higher power was needed, it would be necessary to find, or even to fabricate, another Creator, a new King of Kings and Lord of Lords — “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer” (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”), Voltaire would write in 1770.
He insisted that it was unnecessary. He scorned l’infâme, as he called the Church, but not God’s existence—“toute la nature crie qu’il existe.” Yet he protested too much. Doubt plagued Voltaire. Strong, ardent, and devout men have been struggling with its challenge for nearly five centuries. They have met with varying degrees of success. Worldwide there are now a billion Christians alive. Confidence in an afterlife, however, is another matter. The specter of skepticism haunts shrines and altars. Worshipers want to believe, and most of the time they persuade themselves that they do. But suppressing doubt is hard. Secular society makes it harder. Hardest of all is the sense of loss, the knowledge that the serenity of medieval faith, and the certitude of everlasting glory, are forever gone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES
BIBLIOGRAPHIES are useful guides for readers who want to learn more, but they can be deceptive. Traditional bibliographical structure is sometimes misleading; the order of the works which are cited is determined by the alphabetical order of the first letter in scholars’ last names. Furthermore, every entry appears as the equal of every other, which is an affront to common sense. A writer of history may have used only a single anecdote from one source, while another source served as the underpinning of his entire book.
Let me set down those works which have been the underpinning of this volume. First—for their scope and rich detail—are three volumes from Will Durant’s eleven-volume Story of Civilization: volume 4, The Age of Faith; volume 5, The Renaissance; and volume 6, The Reformation. The events of those twelve centuries, from the sack of Rome in A.D. 410 to the beheading of Anne Boleyn in 1536, emerge from Durant’s pages in splendid array.
Another towering monument of historicism is the eight-volumed The New Cambridge Medieval History, particularly volume 1, The Christian Roman Empire and the Foundation of the Teutonic Kingdoms; volume 5, Contest of Empire and Papacy; volume 6, Victory of the Papacy; volume 7, Decline of Empire and Papacy; and volume 8, The Close of the Middle Ages. This great work leads to the equally comprehensive The New Cambridge Modern History, fourteen volumes, especially volume 1, The Renaissance: 1493–1520, and volume 2, The Reformation, 1520–1559. Other general works which I found useful were the three volumes of Sidney Painter’s A History of the Middle Ages, 284–1500, James Westfall Thompson’s two-volume The Middle Ages, 300–1500, R.H.C. Davis’s popular A History of Medieval Europe, from Constantine to Saint Louis, and The Dictionary of National Biography, From the Earliest Times to 1900 in twenty-two volumes.
Those who audit the past rarely agree in their interpretations of it. But all writers, though they view history through discrepant prisms, deal with the same facts. In searching for them, the work to which I turned most often is recent: The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, the fifteenth edition of the greatest of encyclopedias. As the editors observe in their foreword, the excellence of such a work “rests on the authority of the scholars who wrote the articles.” Therefore they recruited the best. The major articles in the New Britannica often run to thirty thousand words o
r more, and their authors are celebrated. Among those whose contributions were of great value to me were Georges Paul Gusdorf of the University of Strasbourg on the history of humanistic scholarship, Roland H. Bainton of Yale on the Reformation, Martin Brett of the University of Auckland on the Middle Ages, the Reverend Ernest Gordon Rupp of Cambridge on Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus, his Cambridge colleague Geoffrey R. Elton on King Henry VIII, Colin Alistair Ronan of the Royal Astronomical Society on Copernicus, Robert M. Kingdon of the University of Wisconsin on John Calvin; Michael de Ferdinandy of the University of Puerto Rico on Emperor Charles V, the Reverend Francis Xavier Murphy of Rome on Pope Alexander VI, and Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich of the University of Munich on Leonardo da Vinci.
Life on a Medieval Barony, which appeared in 1924, was the work of William Stearns Davis, then a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. Davis was writing about the thirteenth century, but his picture of a medieval community is valid in depicting the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I couldn’t have recreated medieval Europe without it. It has been a favorite of mine for fifty years.
Two handy reference books—provided they are used with caution—recount the historical past, day by day. They are The Timetables of History, by Bernard Grun, and The People’s Chronology, by James Trager.
MY ASSISTANT, Gloria Cone, has been tireless and loyal, and once more I am grateful for the assistance and support provided by the staff of Wesleyan University’s Olin Memorial Library, led by J. Robert Adams, Caleb T. Winchester Librarian. Joan Jurale, the head reference librarian—who stands at the very top of her demanding profession—was especially helpful. So were Edmund A. Rubacha, reference librarian; Susanne Javorski, art librarian; Erhard F. Konerding, documents librarian; and Steven Lebergott, head of interlibrary loans. Others on the Olin staff who were particularly helpful to me were Alan Nathanson, bibliographer, and Ann Frances Wakefield.
Finally, I again express my gratitude to Don Congdon, my literary agent and cherished friend for forty-three years; Roger Donald, my charming, indefatigable editor for seventeen years; and my superb copy editor, Peggy Leith Anderson, who in my long experience is truly without peer.
W.M.
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Armstrong, Edward. The Emperor Charles V. 2 vols. London, 1910.
Atkinson, J. Martin Luther and the Birth of Protestantism. Baltimore, 1968.
Bainton, R. H. Erasmus of Christendom. New York, 1969.
——. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. New York, 1950.
——. Hunted Heretic: The Life of Michael Servetus. Boston, 1953.
——. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. Boston, 1953.
——. The Travail of Religious Liberty. Philadelphia, 1951.
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——. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Relation to Modern Thought and Knowledge. London, 1885.
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Bedoyére, Michel de la. The Meddlesome Friar and the Wayward Pope: The Story of the Conflict Between Savonarola and Alexander VI. London, 1958.
Beer, Max. Social Struggles in the Middle Ages. London, 1924.
Belloc, Hilaire. How the Reformation Happened. London, 1950.
Benesch, Otto. The Art of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. Rev. ed. London, 1965.
Benzing, Josef, and Helmut Claus. Lutherbibliographie. Verzeichnis der gedruckten Schriften Martin Luthers bis zu dessen Tod. Baden-Baden, 1989.
Berence, Fred. Lucrèce Borgia. Paris, 1951.
Beuf, Carlo. Cesare Borgia, the Machiavellian Prince. Toronto, 1942.
Boissonnade, Prosper. Life and Work in Medieval Europe. New York, 1927.
Bornkamm, Heinrich. Luthers geistige Welt. Gütersloh, Germany, 1953.
Brandi, Karl. The Emperor Charles V: The Growth and Destiny of a Man and a World Empire. New York, 1939.
Brion, Marcel. The Medici: A Great Florentine Family. New York, 1969.
Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown, Conn., 1959.
Bruce, Marie Louise. Anne Boleyn. New York, 1972.
Bryce, James. The Holy Roman Empire. New York, 1921.
Burchard, John. “Pope Alexander VI and His Court.” Extracts from the Latin Diary of the Papal Master of Ceremonies, 1484–1506. Ed. F. L. Glaser. New York, 1921.
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Burtt, E. A. A Critical and Comparative Analysis of Copernicus, Kepler, and Descartes. London, 1924, 1987.
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Coughlan, Robert. The World of Michelangelo: 1475–1564. New York, 1966.
Coulton, G. G. The Black Death. New York, 1930.
——. Chaucer and His England. London, 1921.
——. Inquisition and Liberty. London, 1938.
——. Life in the Middle Ages. 4 vols. Cambridge, England, 1930.
——. The Medieval Scene. Cambridge, England, 1930.
——. The Medieval Village. Cambridge, England, 1925.
——. Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation. Cambridge,
England, 1938.
Creighton, Mandell. Cardinal Wolsey. London, 1888.
——. History of the Papacy During the Reformation. 5 vols. London, 1882–94.
Crump, C. G., and Jacob, E. F. The Legacy of the Middle Ages. Oxford, 1926.
David, Maurice. Who Was Columbus? New York, 1933.
Davis, William Stearns. Life on a Medieval Barony: A Picture of a Typical Feudal Community in the Thirteenth Century. New York, 1923.
DeRoo, Peter. Material for a History of Pope Alexander VI. 5 vols. Bruges, Belgium, 1924.
DeWulf, Maurice. History of Medieval Philosophy. 2 vols. London, 1925.
Dickens, A. G. The English Reformation. New York, 1964.
——. Reformation and Society in Sixteenth-Century Europe. New York, 1966.
The Dictionary of National Biography, From the Earliest Times to 1900. 22 vols. London, 1967–68.
Dictionnaire de Biographie Française. Paris, 1967.
Dill, John. Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire. London, 1905.
Dillenberger, John. Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings. New York, 1961.
Dillenberger, John, and Claude Welch. Protestant Christianity Interpreted Through Its Development. New York, 1954.
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Rome, 1962.
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Quests for Spices and New Worlds. Hamden, Conn., 1988.
D’Orliac, Jehanne. The Moon Mistress: Diane de Poitiers. Philadelphia, 1930.
Duby, Georges. L’Économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans L’occident médiéval. 2 vols. Paris, 1962.
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Durant, Will. The Age of Faith. New York, 1950.
——. The Reformation. New York, 1957.
——. The Renaissance. New York, 1953.
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Ehrenberg, Richard. Das Zeitalter der Fugger. 2 vols. Jena, Germany, 1896.
Enciclopedia Italiana. Rome, 1962.
Erasmus, Desiderius. Colloquies. 2 vols. London, 1878.
——. Education of a Christian Prince. New York, 1936.
——. Epistles. 3 vols. London, 1901.
——. The Praise of Folly. Trans, with an introduction and commentary by
Clarence H. Miller. New Haven, 1979.
Erikson, E. H. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York, 1958.
Erlanger, Rachel. Lucrezia Borgia: A Biography. New York, 1978.
Farner, O. Zwingli the Reformer: His Life and Work. Hamden, Conn., 1964.
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800. London, 1976.
Ferguson, Wallace. The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Boston, 1948.
Ferrara, Oreste. The Borgia Pope. Trans, from Spanish. London, 1942.
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