Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  The Hypnerotomachiawas one of the few books printed by Aldus in which he did not identify himself as the printer. Over the years it was sometimes rumored to be mystical or satanic, filled with cryptic references and hidden meanings. (Perhaps demonstrating the relative value of the occult and the erotic, it was the one famous woodcut that was most sought after, and today, after numerous snippings, there are almost no original volumes left with the notorious Priapus illustration intact.)

  It was in another of those illustrations—the artist remains unknown—that Aldus noticed a drawing of a dolphin encircling the post of an anchor. The design was actually an impresa, a form of pictorial puzzle popular in Italy at the time. The picture illustrates a motto, in this case, festina lente (“Make haste slowly”), a saying of Augustus Caesar recorded by Suetonius. The anchor was symbolic of slowness and the dolphin of speed. One year later, Aldus would adopt this design as the emblem for the Aldine Press, and today it remains as perhaps the most famous printer's mark in all of publishing history.

  But it was his experiments with style that were to complete Aldus's vision and result in an innovation that made Aldus Manutius one of the seminal forces in intellectual history.

  Books may have gotten thinner thanks to improved typography, but they were no smaller. Printers, including Aldus, turned out only bulky, unwieldy folios or quartos, which were usually read on lecterns and therefore not terribly convenient as study aids.

  Folio and quarto refer to the surface area of a page and thus the dimensions of a book. The terms indicate how many times a 32-by-n-inch sheet of printer's paper was folded in order to create a gathering. A folio was folded once, creating two leaves, which translated into four printed pages, and a quarto twice, creating four leaves or eight printed pages. The greater the number of folds, obviously, the smaller the size of the book.

  Aldus realized that the smaller and more efficient you made the vehicle, the more quickly and effectively you could transmit information. In 1500, he commissioned the Bolognese punch-cutter Francesco Griffo to create a new typeface for books printed in Latin. It was to be narrower than roman type and slanted to resemble the cursive style that had originated in the papal chancery and that humanists were then using to correspond with one another. All lowercase letters were to be the same height and combined with the small roman capitals that Aldus had employed in his previous Latin editions. The new design, graceful and pleasing to the eye, allowed more words to fit on a page without sacrificing any ease in reading. Then, rather than producing two folds, Aldus folded his sheet three times, producing a gathering of eight leaves—octavo—or sixteen text-rich 5-by-8-inch pages. When he was done, Aldus had produced a book half the size of anything that had gone before without making it appreciably thicker, a handy volume that could fit perfectly into a saddlebag.

  The Aldine octavos, produced without illustrations, were a huge and immediate success. The moment the works of Virgil, the first edition to be printed in the new format, came off the presses in 1501, books became democratized—lightweight, personal, and portable, suitable for home, office, or travel. Aldus obtained an official monopoly over the production of this type of book from the Venetian senate, but both the octavo form and italic type were almost instantly pirated by printers across Italy, Germany, and France, including Griffo, who was miffed at being cut out of the action. Within just a year or two octavos became the standard, and texts printed in one corner of Europe were now regularly shipped to another.

  As his fame increased, Aldus's household expanded, to eventually include not only his family, but thirty-three translators, correctors, typesetters, and pressmen as well. He met once a day with the complete staff to discuss, in Greek (lapsing into any other language resulted in a fine), what to publish and who would do what on each project. It was as much think tank as printing house. Many of those attracted by the heady atmosphere were noted scholars in their own right, and clashes of temperament were inevitable.

  In 1507, Aldus received a letter from the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, in which Erasmus proposed that he come to Venice to supervise a new edition of his Latin translation of Euripides. Erasmus, later to gain the reputation as the greatest mind in Europe, was at the time only moderately well known. After the Euripides had been completed, Erasmus remained in the household, working on both other translations and on his own Adagia (Adages). Erasmus was unused to the feverish Aldine pace. Manuscript pages were grabbed up as soon as they were finished and rushed to be typeset with no chance for revision. “The labor was such that there was no time to scratch one's ears,” he complained.

  While Erasmus got along well with Aldus himself (“He is building up a library that has no other limits than the world itself he wrote later), this bonhomie did not extend to other members of the firm. In Opulentia Sordida (Stingy Wealth), he called Torresani the prince of cheapskates, a man of riches who nonetheless let his guests go hungry on sour wine and thin soup. The food issue got him in trouble with Musurus as well. At Aldus's house, there was no breakfast, lunch was at one, and dinner, such as it was, not until ten. Erasmus eventually eschewed the common table and took his meals in his room. He wrote that during his stay at the Aldine Press he almost starved. Musurus replied that Erasmus drank enough for Geryon (a three-headed, triple-bodied monster slain by Hercules) but only did the work of half a man.

  Still the collaboration served both Erasmus and Aldus. The octavo Collectanea Adagiorium, essentially an annotated series of one-liners complete with genesis and commentary, was Erasmus's first big bestseller. The original edition, published some years earlier in Paris, had about eight hundred of these pithy little sayings, culled from old Greek and Latin texts. By the time the Aldus household was through bombarding him with new material, there were over 3,200. (When Erasmus finally left Venice, Aldus offered him some complimentary author copies. “Not unless you give me a horse as well,” Erasmus replied, looking at the bulky volume.) Sixty different editions were to appear during Erasmus's lifetime, translated into English, Italian, German, and Dutch. The Adagio, in many ways, has never been out of print. From Erasmus we get “To champ at the bit;” “Where there is smoke there is fire;” “A necessary evil;” “Know thyself; “One foot in the grave;” “Many hands make light work;” and that old standby, “To leave no stone unturned.”

  FROM 1501 TO 1515, Aldus published forty-eight titles in octavo in Greek, Italian, and Latin. Among the works he chose to print were those of Petrarch, Horace, Ovid, Thucydides, and Plato, many for the first time. Aldine volumes remain some of the most simple and elegant in printing history. When he died in 1515, he lay in state in the church next to his house, and humanist scholars paid him homage by erecting stacks of Aldine octavos around the bier that held his body. According to his wish, Aldus Manutius was buried at Carpi.

  Aldus changed the face of Western civilization even more profoundly than had Gutenberg. Aldine octavos were to the sixteenth century what personal computing was to the twentieth. Suddenly, more information was available to an individual reader than had previously been available to most institutions. Ordinary citizens were now linked across Europe. They read what they wanted, which meant that they could think what they wanted. Most of all, they had the power that came from the knowledge that there were others who thought like them.

  Although Michael Servetus was born only ten years after the Al-dine edition of Virgil was published, the world he entered was almost unrecognizable compared with that of his parents. The number of books in circulation in Europe had multiplied exponentially. Not only were the classics now translated and disseminated among a widespread multitude of new (usually young) readers, but it soon occurred to this new generation—as it has to another generation five hundred years later-that you could send information out just as easily as you could take it in. Books could be written as well as read—if you had something to say you could have your ideas disseminated just as widely as those of Aristotle. All you needed was an idea or a point of view to try and capture
the attention of the world. And if what was in your book was radical, controversial, revolutionary, or even heretical, so be it. There was no longer any effective power to stop it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HUESCA, WHERE MIGUEL Serveto grew up, while techni-cally a part of Spain, was heavily influenced both by France to the north and the independent kingdom of Navarre less than twenty miles to the west. Navarre was ruled by the Albrets, a noble French family that later in the century would spawn the great king Henri IV. In 1512, the ruthless and powerful Ferdinand, king of Aragon, Charles Vs grandfather, who had wanted Navarre for some time, convinced his son-in-law, Henry VIII (married to his daughter, Catherine of Aragon), to invade France by way of northern Spain. While their combined armies were passing through Navarre, Ferdinand conveniently used the English troops to help seize the kingdom for Spain. The part of Navarre south of the Pyrenees was annexed to Castile soon after. (Ferdinand eventually double-crossed Henry by making a secret, separate peace with the French king Louis XII. Henry promptly retaliated by making his own secret peace with Louis, throwing in the hand of his beautiful younger sister, Mary, in marriage.)

  Even after the annexation, the culture of Navarre remained much more French than Spanish. This wasn't surprising, as Spain was considered a country of inferiors. The Spanish were also seen as having something of a racial problem. There were more Jews and Muslims in Spain than almost anywhere else in Europe, and the Spanish Inquisition had compounded the problem by at first allowing them to remain in Spain if they converted to Christianity. Still, the converted Muslims and Jews, who believed in a single deity, found it particularly difficult to accept the doctrine of the Trinity.

  This created a class of titular Catholics whom the rest of Europe derisively called Marranos—a. word that in Spanish means hog, pig, or someone without principles—an epithet that soon slid over to cover Spaniards of any stripe. There was a sixteenth-century joke that made the rounds: “A Spaniard, after having confessed all his sins, returned to the confessor to say that he had forgotten one small sin (peccadig/io), namely, that he did not believe in God.” A celebrated Italian poet, Lu-dovico Ariosto, came up with the phrase peccadiglio di Spagna, which compared anyone who did not believe in Christ and the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to a Spaniard. The Spanish, of course, later rectified their error of tolerance by the wholesale slaughter of any Jews or Muslims who had foolishly thought to remain in Spain, but it didn't do any good. The slurs stuck.

  Whereas Isaac Newton's mother thought he was a simpleton because he could not seem to concentrate on farm chores and chose to lie around and read or stare into space all day, there was never any question in Huesca that Anthon Serveto's eldest son was a prodigy. The nurturing of gifted children has not changed all that much in five hundred years. Then, like now, they tended to get the best teachers, were doted on by parents and other adults, resented by less talented siblings, looked on as being somewhat odd by their peers, and, in general, grew up to believe that they were better, smarter, and more worthy than anyone else.

  Of all his exceptional talents, it was Miguel's facility with languages that was initially most striking. By the time he was thirteen years old, in addition to his native language, he could read French, Greek, Latin, and, most significantly, Hebrew. In most of Christian Europe, Hebrew was a forbidden language. It was considered dangerous, mystical, and subversive. The Church was adamantly against it: knowledge of Hebrew meant that the Old Testament could be read in its original form without resorting to approved translations. The French would not openly teach Hebrew until 1531, when Francis I, in a particularly tolerant mood, and under pressure from French intellectuals, opened the Lecteurs Ejoyaux in Paris for the study of classical languages and included Hebrew in the curriculum.

  But the rules of Christendom tended to blur in rural Spain, whose society, despite the Inquisition, reflected countless centuries of Jewish and Muslim cultural influence. Miguel evidently studied under, or at least was acquainted with, someone of Semitic origin since Hebrew, when it was taught at all, was almost always taught in secret, and by a Jew. Because of Servetus's views on the Trinity, his enemies would later hypothesize that he was himself a Jew, but there is nothing to indicate that this was so.

  It is much more likely that Miguel, growing up in a time of political and religious upheaval, was bombarded by heterodoxy on all sides. He watched the Jews and Muslims resist Catholicism and the Navarrese resist Spain, both powerless minorities fighting a desperate battle for freedom. He learned to identify with the outcast long before he was to discover that he would be one himself.

  MEANWHILE, THE INFORMATION revolution of the sixteenth century surged ahead. Books continued to flood Europe. There were the classics, of course, and how-to books on subjects like agronomy and navigation. But most popular were the books by the new, young authors who commented on the pressing issues of the day, and no issue was more pressing than the scandalous state of the Church.

  This was a rich topic with no shortage of material upon which to draw. Corruption in Rome had reached unprecedented, almost laughable levels. Everything had a price. The popes used their powers to grant dispensations, create ecclesiastic offices, levy tithes, and elevate favorites to continually replenish coffers drained by debauchery and excess. In the recent past, there was the single-minded, fiendish hedonism so casually and regularly practiced by Pope Alexander VI (r. 1493–1503) and his family, the Borgias. “The exceptional infamy that attaches to Alexander VI is largely due to the fact that he did not add hypocrisy to his other vices,” observed a bishop at the time.

  Born Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander bought the papacy by promising one of the other candidates a high position and all the gold and silver that could be stuffed into the saddlebags of four mules if he would not pursue the office. He was described by a contemporary as “a handsome man with a pleasant look and a honeyed tongue, who lures women to love him, and attracts those on whom he casts his eyes more powerfully than a magnet draws iron.” An earlier pope, Pius II, had had to admonish Rodrigo for participating in an orgy in a Sienese garden when he was a young cardinal. As pope, Alexander carried on his sexual exploits with undiminished vigor.

  But rampant sensuality was only one aspect of Alexander's personality. He was also a fond parent. When Alexander's youngest son, Cesare, killed his older brother, Giovanni, in order to get ahead in the world, Alexander mourned his eldest son for six months. Then, in order to demonstrate to Cesare that the incident was forgotten, he allowed him to murder his brother-in-law, Alfonso, who was sure to object to Cesare's desire to engage in an incestuous relationship with his sister Lucrezia, a woman of singular beauty, with long golden hair. A while later Alexander had to make provision for a mysterious infans Romanies (Roman infant), which appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

  Between them, Alexander and Cesare played politics as though it were a macabre game of Monopoly. When France invaded Italy in 1494, Alexander wasn't above appealing to the reviled, infidel Turks for help. The sultan responded by sending forty thousand ducats to raise an army, promising an additional thirty thousand if Alexander would dispense with his brother and rival, Djem, who happened to be a hostage in Rome at the time. Djem died of a mysterious illness within the month, and Alexander collected the entire seventy thousand. When Cesare wanted to get rid of some allies whom he suspected of duplicity, he invited four of them to his camp and had them strangled after dinner. “Never was Rome so full of criminals,” moaned Cardinal Ægid-ius, “never was the multitude of informers and robbers so audacious… Money, power, and lust governed everything.”

  But it was mealtime poisoning, not strangulation, that was the Borgia specialty, although their track record was spotty. Alexander died after ingesting some poison intended for his host. Cesare, younger and stronger, only got sick. Poisoning was so common that the English Victorian wit Max Beerbohm later observed, “No Roman ever was able to say, ‘I dined last night with the Borgias.’”

  By the
time of Miguel Serveto's boyhood in Huesca, it had become common practice for not only the pope but also cardinals and bishops to live in splendor. Often a high Church official kept a large house for himself and another for his mistress (one pope kept his mistress in the Vatican). They dressed in expensive silks and jewels and ate often and well. Delicacies such as peacock tongue were frequently on the menu, and a certain Cardinal Cornaro gave sixty-five-course dinners with each course consisting of three different dishes. Nightingales flew out of pies and naked little boys jumped out of puddings.

  That all this had been able to go on for as long as it did was due in no small part to the intellectual isolation of most of the Continent. There might be rumors of excess and even anecdotal information, but without hard evidence, or the promulgation of differing views, most people were inclined to accept the status quo as inevitable.

  All of this now changed. Books criticizing the Church became instant bestsellers and their authors celebrities. And the biggest celebrity of all was Desiderius Erasmus.

  Erasmus (who seems to have given himself the name Desiderius, which means “desired beloved”) was without question the leading literary light of his time. Born poor and illegitimate in Holland in 1466, the son of a priest and his mistress, he went on, through his books and scholarship, to become a household name, sought after by every prince in Europe. Henry VIII wrote him a long, personal letter beseeching him to come to England (“We shall regard your presence among us as the most precious possession that we have”); Francis I offered him a highly prestigious position at his new college; Charles V solicited his services as advisor. He was painted by Holbein and entertained by cardinals; Pope Leo X was his intimate friend. His correspondence reads like a Who's Who of the sixteenth century: Sir Thomas More, Pope Adrian VI, Marguerite of Navarre, the king of Poland, Cardinal Wolsey, Martin Luther—the list goes on and on.