The Reformation

by Will Durant

  In 1476 Matthias married Beatrice of Aragon, and welcomed to Hungary the gay Neapolitan spirit and refined Italian tastes of the granddaughter of Alfonso the Magnanimous. Intercourse between Hungary and Naples had been encouraged by the Angevin kinship of their kings, and many men at the Buda court had been educated in Italy. Matthias himself resembled the Italian Renaissance “despots” in his cultural proclivities as well as his Machiavellian statecraft. Lorenzo de’ Medici sent him two bronze reliefs by Verrocchio, and Lodovico il Moro commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a Madonna for the Hungarian King, assuring the artist that “he is able to value a great picture as few men can.”21 Filippino Lippi turned out another Madonna for Corvinus, and his pupils adorned with frescoes the royal palace at Esztergom. An Italian sculptor made a pretty bust of Beatrice;22 probably the famous Milanese goldsmith Caradosso designed the masterly Calvary of Esztergom; Benedetto da Maiano carved decorations for the palace at Buda; and divers Italians built the Renaissance-style tabernacle in the parish church of the Inner City of the capital.23

  Nobles and prelates joined the King in supporting artists and scholars; even the mining towns of the interior had rich men who sublimated wealth into art. Handsome buildings, civic as well as ecclesiastical, rose not only at Buda but at Visegrad, Tata, Esztergom, Nagyvárad, and Vác. Hundreds of sculptors and painters ornamented these edifices. Giovanni Dalmata made notable statues of Hunyadi János and other Hungarian heroes. At Kassa a veritable school of artists formed. There, for the high altar of the church of St. Elizabeth, “Master Stephen” and others carved (1474–77) an immense and complex reredos, whose central figures are quite Italian in their refinement and grace. In the parish church of Beszterczebánya another group carved in stone a great relief, Christ in the Garden of Olives, astonishing in its careful details and dramatic effect. A similar vigor of expression and artistry appears in the Hungarian paintings that survive from this age, as in the Mary Visiting Elizabeth, by “Master M.S.,” now in the Budapest Museum.24 Almost all the art of this Hungarian heyday was destroyed or lost in the Ottoman invasions of the sixteenth century. Some of the statues are in Istanbul, to which they were carried by the victorious Turks.

  Matthias’ interests were literary rather than artistic. Humanists, foreign or native, were welcomed at his court, and received lucrative sinecures in the government. Antonio Bonfini wrote a history of the reign in a Latin modeled on Livy. Janós Vitez, Archbishop of Gran, collected a library of ancient classics, and provided funds to send young scholars to study Greek in Italy. One of these, János Pannonius, spent seven years at Ferrara, won admission to Lorenzo’s circle at Florence, and, back in Hungary, astonished the court with his Latin verses and Greek discourses. “When Pannonius spoke Greek,” wrote Bonfini, “you would think he must have been born in Athens.” 25 Probably in Italy alone could one find, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, such a galaxy of artists and scholars as received sustenance at Matthias’ court. The Sodalitas Litteraria Danubia, founded at Buda in 1497, is among the oldest literary societies in the world.26

  Like his Medici contemporaries, Corvinus collected art and books. His palace became a museum of statuary and objets d’art. Tradition has it that he spent 30,000 florins ($750,000?) yearly on books, which in many cases were costly illuminated manuscripts. Yet he did not, like Federigo da Montefeltro, reject printed works; a press was established at Buda in 1473, three years before printing reached England. The Bibliotheca Corvina, which held 10,000 volumes when Matthias died, was the finest fifteenth-century library outside of Italy. It was housed in his Buda palace in two spacious halls, with windows of stained glass looking on the Danube; the shelves were richly carved, and the books, mostly bound in vellum, were curtained with velvet tapestries.27 Matthias seems to have read some of the books; at least he used Livy to induce sleep; and he wrote to a humanist: “O scholars, how happy you are! You strive not after blood-stained glory, nor monarchs’ crowns, but for the laurels of poetry and virtue. You are even able to compel us to forget the tumult of war.”28

  The centralized power that Matthias had organized only briefly survived his death (1490). The resurgent magnates dominated Ladislas II, and embezzled revenues that should have paid the troops. The army mutinied, the soldiers went home. Freed from taxation, the nobles wasted their income and energies in riotous living, while Islam pressed against the borders and a bitterly exploited peasantry seethed with revolt. In 1514 the Hungarian Diet declared a crusade against the Turks, and called for volunteers. Peasants in great number flocked to the cross, seeing little to choose between life and death. Finding themselves armed, the thought spread among them, Why wait to kill distant Turks, when hated nobles were so near? A soldier of fortune, György Dózsa, led them in a wild jacquerie; they overran all Hungary, burning castles and massacring all nobles—men, women, children—who fell into their hands. The nobles called in aid from all directions, armed and paid mercenaries, overwhelmed the disorganized peasants, and punished their leaders with frightful torments. For two weeks Dózsa and his aides were kept without food; then he was tied to a red-hot iron throne, a red-hot crown was placed upon his head, a red-hot scepter forced into his hand; and his starved companions were allowed to tear the roasted flesh from his body while he was still conscious. From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

  The peasants were not slaughtered, for they were indispensable; but the Tripartite Code (1514) decreed that “the recent rebellion... has for all time to come put the stain of faithlessness upon the peasants, and they have thereby forfeited their liberty, and have become subject to their landlords in unconditional and perpetual servitude.... Every species of property belongs to the landlords, and the peasant has no right to invoke justice and the law against a noble.” 29

  Twelve years later Hungary fell to the Turks.

  CHAPTER X

  Portugal Inaugurates the Commercial Revolution

  1300–1517

  THROUGH no natural advantages except a seacoast, but by sheet courage and tenacious enterprise, little Portugal in this period made herself one of the strongest and richest of European states. Founded as a kingdom in 1139, her government, language, and culture reached an established form under her best-beloved ruler, Diniz “the Laborer”—administrator, reformer, builder, educator, patron of the arts, and skilled practitioner of literature and love. His son Affonso IV, after some precautionary murders, matured into a beneficent reign, in which a growing trade with England bound the two countries into a political amity that has endured till our time. To confirm a prudent alliance with rising Castile, Affonso urged his son Pedro to marry Donna Costanza Manuel. Pedro married her, but continued to love the lovely Inés de Castro, herself of royal lineage. After Costanza’s death Inés was an obstacle to a second diplomatic marriage for Pedro; Affonso, after due reluctance, had her killed (1355). Camoëns, the Portuguese Milton, recounted this famous romance in his national epic, The Lusiads:

  So against Iñez came that murderous crew...

  The brutes their swords in her white breasts imbrue, ..

  And in mad wrath themselves incarnadine,

  Nor any vengeance yet to come divine.1

  Pedro supplied the vengeance when, two years later, he inherited the throne. He murdered the murderers, exhumed the corpse of his beloved, crowned her queen, then reburied her in regal style. He ruled with a severity nurtured by this tragedy.

  A less exalted romance disordered the reign of his successor. Fernando I lost his head and heart to Leonora, wife of the lord of Pombeiro, repudiated his engagement to a Castilian princess, and married Leonora despite her living husband and a scandalized Church. After Fernando’s death (1383), Leonora assumed the regency, made her daughter Beatriz queen, and betrothed her to John I of Castile. The people revolted against the prospect of becoming a Castilian appanage; a Cortes at Coimbra declared the Portuguese throne elective, and chose as king Don Joao—John—son of Pedro and Inés. Castil
e undertook to establish Beatriz by force; John improvised an army, borrowed 500 archers from England, and defeated the Castilians at Aljubarrota on August 14, 1385—which is annually celebrated as Portugal’s Independence Day.

  “John the Great” now opened a reign of forty-eight years, and a dynasty—the house of Aviz—that held the throne for two centuries. Administration was reorganized, law and the judiciary were reformed, the Portuguese language was made official, and its literature began. Scholars here, as in Spain, continued till the eighteenth century to use Latin, but Vasco da Lobeira wrote in the native tongue a chivalric romance, Amadís da Gaula (c. 1400), which became in translation the most popular secular book in Europe. National art expressed itself proudly in the church of Santa Maria da Victoria, built at Batalha by John I to commemorate “the Battle” of Aljubarrota; here Milan’s cathedral is rivaled in size, and Notre Dame of Paris in the intricate splendor of buttresses and pinnacles. In 1436 a chapel of elegant design and decoration was added to receive the remains of the “bastard king.”

  He was honored in his sons. Duarte—Edward—succeeded him and governed almost as well; Pedro codified the law; Henrique—“Henry the Navigator”—inaugurated the commercial revolution that was to transform the map of the globe. When John I captured Ceuta from the Moors (1415), he left the twenty-one-year-old Henry as governor of that strategic stronghold, just across the Strait from Gibraltar. Excited by Moslem accounts of Timbuktu and Senegal and the gold, ivory, and slaves to be had along the West African coast, the ambitious youth determined to explore that terrain and add it to Portugal. The Senegal River that his informants spoke of might lead eastward to the headwaters of the Nile and to Christian Abyssinia; a water route would be opened across Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea—therefore to India; the Italian monopoly of trade with the East would be broken; Portugal would be a major power. The conquered region might be converted to Christianity, and African Islam would be flanked on north and south by Christian states, and the Mediterranean become safe for Christian navigation. Henry does not appear to have thought of a route around Africa,2 but that was the historic result of his work.

  About 1420 he set up at Sagres, on the southwestern tip of Portugal and Europe, an informal clearing house of nautical knowledge and enterprise. For forty years he and his aides, including Jewish and Moslem astronomers and map makers, gathered and studied there the accounts of sailors and travelers, and sent out into perilous seas frail vessels powered with sails and oars and thirty to sixty men. One of Henry’s captains had already (1418) rediscovered Madeira, which had been seen by Genoese mariners seventy years before and then forgotten; now Portuguese colonists developed its resources; soon its sugar and other products repaid the cost of colonization, and encouraged the Portuguese government to meet Henry’s appeals for funds. Noting the Azores marked on an Italian map of 1351, he commissioned Gonzalo Cabral to find them; it was done, and in 1432–44, one after another, these jewels of the sea were added to the Portuguese crown.

  But it was Africa that lured Henry most insistently. Catalan and Portuguese navigators had sailed some 900 miles down the west coast as far as Bojador (1341–46). There, however, the enormous westward bulge of the great continent into the Atlantic disheartened mariners seeking the south; they crept back to Europe with self-excusing tales of horrible natives, a sea so thick with salt that no prow would cleave it, and assurances that any Christian who passed Bojador would be transformed into a Negro. With similar apologies Captain Gilianes returned to Sagres in 1433. Henry ordered him forth again, and bade him bring back a clear account of the lands and seas south of the forbidding cape. So prodded, Gilianes reached to 150 miles beyond Bojador (1435), and was astonished to find lush vegetation in equatorial regions where, according to Aristotle and Ptolemy, only deserts could exist under the burning sun. Six years later Nuno Tristão sailed down to Capo Blanco, and brought home some sturdy Negroes, who were at once baptised and enslaved; feudal barons put them to work on Portuguese plantations, and the first major result of Henry’s labors was the inauguration of the African slave trade. Fresh financial support now came to the Prince. His ships went out nominally to explore and convert, really to get gold, ivory, and slaves. Captain Lanzarote in 1444 brought back 165 “blackamoors,” who were set to tilling the lands of the monastic-military Order of Jesus Christ. A Portuguese contemporary described the capture of these “black Moors”:

  Our men, crying out, “Sant’ Iago! San Jorge! Portugal!” fell upon them, killing or capturing all they could. There you might have seen mothers catch up their children, husbands their wives, each one escaping as best he could. Some plunged into the sea; others thought to hide themselves in the corners of their hovels; others hid their children under the shrubs... where our men found them. And at last our Lord God, Who gives to all a due reward, gave to our men that day a victory over their enemies; and in recompense for all their toil in His service they took 165 men, women, and children, not counting the slain.3

  By 1448 over 900 African slaves had been brought to Portugal. We should add that the Moslems of North Africa had anticipated the Christians in developing a slave trade, and African Negro chieftains themselves bought Negro slaves from the Portuguese with ivory and gold.4 Man was a commodity to human beasts of prey.

  In 1445 Diniz Dias reached the fertile promontory named Cape Verde; in 1446 Lanzarote explored the mouth of the Senegal; in 1456 Ca Da Mosto found the Cape Verde Islands. In that year Prince Henry died, but the enterprise continued with the impetus that he had given it and the economic gains that now financed it. Joao da Santarem crossed the equator (1471), Diogo Cäo reached the Congo River (1484); finally, half a century after Henry’s first expedition, Bartholomeu Dias, fighting his way through tempest and shipwreck, rounded the southernmost point of Africa (1486). He rejoiced to find that he could now sail eastward; India lay straight ahead, and seemed almost in his grasp; but his weary men forced him to turn back. Mourning the rough seas that had broken the spirit of his men, he named the southern tip of the continent Cabo Tormentoso; but King John II, seeing India around the bend, renamed the point the Cape of Good Hope.

  Neither Dias nor the King lived to see fulfilled the dream that now stirred all Portugal—an all-water route to India. In 1497 King Manuel, jealous of the honors and wealth that Columbus was bringing to Spain, commissioned Vasco da Gama to sail around Africa to India. Forced by storms to take a circuitous route, the twenty-eight-year-old captain voyaged some 5,000 miles through 137 days to the Cape of Good Hope, then, through a hundred perils and tribulations, 178 days and 4,500 miles more to Calicut, a main nexus of east-west and north-south trade in Asia; there he anchored on May 20, 1498, ten months and twelve days after leaving Lisbon. Landing, he was at once arrested as a pirate, and narrowly escaped execution. With remarkable courage and address he overcame Indian suspicions and Moslem jealousies, won permission for the Portuguese to trade, took on a rich cargo of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and jewelry, and left Calicut August 29 for an arduous year-long return to Lisbon. The Portuguese had finally found a route to India free from the costly transshipments and tolls suffered by the sea-and-land routes from Italy through Egypt or Arabia or Persia. The economic results were to be, for a century, more vital to Europe than those that flowed from the discovery of America.

  Proud of having reached the real India while the Spanish navigators were floundering in the supposed Indies of the Caribbean, the Portuguese till 1500 hardly thought of trying a passage west. But in that year Pedro Cabral, driven from the course that he had set for India via Africa, stumbled upon Brazil; and again in that year Gaspar Corte-Real rediscovered Labrador. In 1503 Amerigo Vespucci, sailing under the Portuguese flag, explored the Rio Plata and Paraguay; and in 1506 Tristão da Cunha found the South Atlantic island that bears his name. Portuguese statesmen, however, saw little profit in Brazil, whereas every cargo from India fattened the royal treasury and the purses of merchants and mariners.

  The Portuguese gover
nment kept full control of the new trade, since the commerce required unremitting military protection. Moslem merchants had long since been established in Indian posts; some Indian potentates joined them in resisting the Portuguese invasion; trade and war, money and blood, now mingled in the far-flung commercial revolution. In 1509 Alfonso de Albuquerque became the first governor of Portuguese India. Waging campaign after campaign against Moslems and Hindus, he captured and fortified Aden and Hormuz on the Arabian coast, Goa in India, and Malacca in the Malay Peninsula; and from Malacca he brought home a million ducats’ worth of booty. So armed, Portugal became for 150 years the master of European trade with India and the East Indies. Portuguese merchants established themselves as far east as the Moluccas (1512), and rejoiced to find the nutmegs, mace, and cloves of these “Spice Islands” tastier and cheaper than India’s. Still insatiate, Albuquerque sailed with twenty vessels into the Red Sea, and proposed to the Christian king of Abyssinia that they join forces in digging a canal from the Upper Nile to the Red Sea, so diverting the river and turning all Moslem Egypt into a desert. Trouble summoned Albuquerque back to Goa, where he died in 1515. In the following year Duarte Coelho opened Cochin China and Siam to Portuguese trade; and in 1517 Fernāo Peres de Andrade established commercial relations with Canton and Peking.