Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  It all worked. Largely because of Loyola and his followers, the Counter-Reformation, as it came to be called, halted the spread of reform and saved Catholicism.

  In addition to spurring internal reform, the Council of Trent destroyed the last hope for compromise with the Protestants. Tolerance was surrender. Gone were the lightning strikes and finger-in-the-dike diplomacy that had characterized the first half of the century. Protestants and Catholics—Calvinists and Jesuits—dug ecclesiastic trenches, two great armies prepared to pound it out. And they did, in one of the bloodiest and most barbaric centuries in human history.

  To know the history of Europe over the next hundred years is to marvel that the human race survived. It is impossible to cite every instance of savagery, cruelty, and degradation undertaken in the name of God, but certain events stand out to give an overall sense of the insanity. One occured in France, where, in spirit, Calvin and Loyola came up against each other in battle for the first time.

  IN 1559 HENRY II DIED, and the crown of France fell to his eldest son, Francis II, just fifteen years old. Francis relied heavily on the judgment of his chief minister, Charles de Guise. The Guise family were rich, powerful, and disciples of the new, militant Jesuit Catholicism.

  But Calvin had made a point of concentrating on his homeland as well. By 1559, the Calvinists—or Huguenots as they were called, after the Eidguenots, the Genevan patriots who had led the revolt against Savoy-had made significant inroads, particularly in the south, Marguerite's old territory. The Huguenots were led by the Bourbon family, headed by Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, Marguerite's daughter, and every bit as militant as Charles de Guise. She gathered a large army around her under the command of General Condé and Admiral Coligny.

  Then, in 1560, at the age of sixteen, Francis died and was succeeded by his ten-year-old brother, Charles IX. Because he was underage, the queen mother, Catherine de' Medici, a direct descendent of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Pope Leo X, was appointed regent.

  Catherine, a Renaissance Catholic, feared the Jesuit Guises and used the only force at hand—the Protestant Bourbons—to try to keep them under control and herself in power. In the short term, the result was a tentative, unexpected, legislated religious tolerance. But tolerance cannot be imposed by fiat, and the resultant jockeying for political power eventually erupted into three separate wars of religion between 1562 and 1570. Desperate for peace, Catherine finally sought to cement a treaty by marrying off her beautiful Catholic daughter Marguerite to Jeanne d'Albret's very Huguenot son, Henry, king of Navarre.

  In August 1572, five thousand Protestants traveled to Paris at the express invitation of the royal family to attend a wedding that was to heal the wounds and make France one. The city was so crowded that revelers were forced to sleep in the streets.

  The Guise family, in the spirit of Loyola, turned apparent defeat into opportunity. They convinced Catherine that the Huguenots were planning to murder her and take over France. The new allies first bungled an assassination attempt on Coligny, the most influential Huguenot at court and a father figure to Charles, now twenty-two, then went to work on the weak-minded king. Catherine cornered her son and hammered at him until late into the night. Charles finally broke down and shrieked, “Kill them! Kill them all!”

  The Guises were happy to comply. They had the gates to the city locked to prevent escape and, at 3 A.M. on August 24, Saint Bartholomew's Day, turned the Catholic soldiers loose on Paris.

  The result was a frenzy of slaughter rarely seen even in the most ferocious battles of war. Of the five thousand Protestants who had come to Paris, perhaps fewer than ten percent escaped alive. They were killed with swords, clubs, and knives; thrown from windows or drowned in the Seine. Bodies were hacked at and dumped in the streets. The killing soon went beyond religion as Parisians used the massacre as an excuse to get rid of anyone against whom they held a grudge. Husbands murdered unfaithful wives; landlords rid themselves of unwanted tenants; businessmen killed rivals. The dead choked the streets, and drainage channels ran red with blood.

  The killing went on for three days as thousands of bloated cadavers, rotting in the summer heat, filled Paris. Insects and crows descended to share the feast. In some parts of the city, it was impossible to get from one place to another without navigating over and around stinking corpses. The king himself had to wade through the dead to get to the Louvre.

  The massacres spread across France. When it was all done, as many as thirty thousand Protestants had been slaughtered.

  Catholics across Europe rejoiced. Pope Gregory XIII and his cardinals attended a solemn Mass of thanksgiving for “this signal of favor shown to Christian people,” and ordered a special medal struck to commemorate the occasion.

  Henry of Navarre only survived because of Marguerite's protection. He got out of Paris, not to return until decades later at the head of a great army. Even then, he was forced to convert to Catholicism in order to be crowned Henry IV, king of France. “Paris is worth a Mass,” he is reported to have said, shrugging, as he became the first in a line that would endure for almost two centuries, until another conflagration in 1789.

  While the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre was a spasmodic, internecine bloodletting, what happened in the Netherlands was calculated slaughter imposed from without. In 1555, Charles V had handed rule of the Netherlands (which included Belgium) to his son Philip, king of Spain. What the new king inherited was a nation grown wealthy on commerce and shipping, a people with a refined taste for art and fashion, leisure and letters, and most importantly, a remarkably tolerant attitude toward religion. Philip, as ferociously Catholic as his father, was determined to stamp out heresy, and so he brought the Inquisition to the Netherlands.

  In 1567, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of Alva, descended on Brussels with an army of ten thousand Spanish career soldiers. Garbed in black, the tall, dark, and spare Alva saw himself as the wrath of God, the Avenging Angel of Death. He set up the Inquisition as the “Council of Troubles”—Netherlander called it the Council of Blood. He established a network of spies and informers. Suspected heretics were rousted from their beds in the dead of night and arrested. Trials were only for show—heretics were executed en masse. Ports were closed to prevent emigration. Anyone caught helping a Protestant to escape was also indicted as a Protestant and executed. Alva himself invited two of the leading opposition leaders to a lavish dinner at the palace, let them eat, and then had them arrested, jailed, and killed.

  William of Orange, the leader of the opposition and a Catholic, declared himself a Calvinist to try and enlist foreign support. He raised army after army and attacked but was unable to dislodge the Spanish. To discourage continued opposition, Alva had entire towns exterminated. In Gelderland, five hundred men were tied back to back and thrown into the river to drown. Haarlem, a Calvinist center, was systematically starved. The city held out for seven months, its citizens reduced to eating rats and leather, before finally surrendering. Thousands of emaciated soldiers and townspeople were slaughtered when they at last opened the gates.

  It was death, terror, and more death. When Alva left the Netherlands in 1573, he boasted that he had executed eighteen thousand heretics. The devastated Netherlands would not recover until Spain's attention turned to the ultimate in religious butchery, the Thirty Years' War.

  In the Thirty Years' War every hatred, ambition, and fear that had been unleashed by the spread of knowledge erupted in an orgy of sustained horror. Although central Europe, mostly Germany, was the battleground, there was not a country in Europe that did not contribute combatants and victims. From 1618 to 1648, Catholic fought Calvinist, Calvinist fought Lutheran, Hapsburg fought Bourbon, nationalist fought imperialist. The wreckage was unthinkable. Cities were revisited again and again by a succession of marauding armies that killed, burned, raped, stole every bit of food in sight, then ruined the fields so that nothing further could be grown. In the Netherlands they had eaten rats and leather to survive; in Germany they ate ea
ch other. No statistic is more chilling than this: there were 11 million people living in Germany in 1618, at the start of the war; by 1648, the war's end, only 13 million were left. The plague was not so efficient.

  SOMEHOW, IN THE MIDST of the devastation, civilization managed to inch forward. Sometimes it leapt. In 1628, the court physician to King Charles I of England published a seventy-two-page, flimsily bound book entitled Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Ani-malibus (On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals). The text, like the title, was in Latin.

  The king's doctor had come up with the ideas in the book thirteen years before but was wary of putting them down on paper. Although no one in England was being burned at the stake anymore, the subject matter promised to be more than a little controversial, and prison or even execution was not out of the question. So, erring on the side of prudence, the author first published his tract not in England but in Frankfurt. To further hedge his bets, he included a dedication to Charles that was even more fawning than usual:

  Most Illustrious Prince!

  The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them… from which all power proceeds. The King, in like manner, is the foundation of his kingdom, the sun of the world around him, the heart of the republic, the fountain whence all power, all grace doth flow… Accept therefore, with your wonted clemency, I most humbly beseech you, illustrious Prince, this, my new Treatise on the Heart; you, who are yourself the new light of this age, and indeed its very heart.

  The dedication was signed, “Your Majesty's most devoted servant, William Harvey.”

  William Harvey was the last person one would think of as timid. As a student at Oxford, he went armed to class and pulled his dagger at the slightest provocation. He was known as much for brawling as for studying, and his views of women were not, even by the standards of the day, enlightened. “We Europeans know not how to order and govern our Women,” he observed. “The Turks, [who favored veils and harems] are the only people who use them wisely.” In his sixties he accompanied the king to Edgehill for the battle against Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads, and had to be dragged away by friends in order to avoid being killed.

  But between the whoring and the brawling, William Harvey managed to marry the daughter of the personal physician to Elizabeth I, become a favorite at court, get the best seats at the Globe Theatre, study for five years in Padua under one of the great anatomists of his day, and, in his seventy-two pages, become the first man to fully describe the circulation of blood through the body.

  Harvey was that rare combination of dogged experimenter and intuitive theorist, perhaps the most fully formed anatomist since Galen. He brought together a number of pieces of disparate and conflicting information, added some observations of his own, and reconciled the contradictions in a cogent, unifying theory.

  Harvey began with the fifteen-hundred-year-old assumption that blood was concocted in the liver and consumed by organs and other parts of the body. Using only simple arithmetic, Harvey concluded that this could not possibly be true. If each contraction of the heart forced one half-ounce of blood along on its journey, in only one half-hour the heart would pump about five hundred ounces, more blood than the entire body contained. Did other anatomists really believe that merely by digesting food, the body could replenish its entire blood supply forty-eight times every day? It was far more likely that the blood supply was constant and that blood was returned to the heart after passing through the body.

  This assumption was buttressed by another bit of observation, this one by Fabricius of Aquapendente, Harvey's old professor at Padua. In 1574, four years before Harvey was born, Fabricius had observed during dissections that human arm and leg veins seemed to have tiny oneway valves that arteries lacked. Fabricius, a Galenist, assumed that these valves were “to ensure a really fair distribution of the blood,” although why they were found only in veins remained a mystery.

  To Harvey, however, this discovery solved a mystery rather than creating one. If, as he hypothesized, blood was constantly circulating through the body, moving out from the heart through the arteries and back to the heart through the veins, then one-way valves were meant to keep blood from backing up and impeding the flow.

  Harvey went on to refute the theory that the heart did its work when it expanded, the “bigger is better” notion of muscle function. Rather, he said, it was the contraction that was the key. He described pulmonary circulation, the circularity and balance of the system, and gave the details of his experiments, proving that the system could operate in no other way.

  There was one last piece of the puzzle, and here Harvey could not rely on observation or past discoveries. If blood circulated as he suspected, how did it get from the arteries to the veins? In Christianismi Restitutio, Servetus had hypothesized the existence of tiny blood vessels, but Servetus had been dead for seventy-five years and his work forgotten. Others who later theorized about pulmonary circulation, such as Realdo Colombo (whose work in the 1560s was cited by Harvey), were either unaware of or unwilling to credit Servetus as a source.

  As it turned out, Harvey used exactly the same hypothesis as had Servetus. Although he admitted he could neither prove nor demonstrate the existence of these tiny blood vessels, the rest of the theory was so perfect that he was sure they must exist.

  Despite his fears, Harvey's work was celebrated almost immediately in England. In the rest of Europe, particularly among medical faculties, the last Galenic strongholds, there was a good deal of initial skepticism. But Harvey's theories were so elegant, so clear, and so obviously correct, that by the time of his death in 1657, William Harvey was almost universally recognized as the man who brought the study of the human body into the modern age.

  With Christianismi Restitutio destroyed, Calvin and Loyola dominating the religious landscape, and Harvey acknowledged as the man who had discovered circulation, it seemed certain that Michael Servetus would fade into an all but forgotten footnote

  PART III

  The Trail

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IN 1665, THE year before the Great Fire, London was a city of coffeehouses and taverns, joints of mutton, pickled oysters, morning drafts of ale, lutes, cards, and ninepins. The years of dour, puritanical Cromwell were over, and on the throne sat the rakish Restoration king, Charles II, whose manners and loose morals fueled the boisterous comedies of the period. “Be silent, good people; I am the Protestant whore,” the actress Nell Gwyn hollered out the window of her coach at the jeering crowd that had mistaken her for the king's French mistress.

  The period was almost unique in history for its combination of sexual and intellectual fervor. In Isaac Newton had begun studying mathematics and astronomy at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1662 the king had chartered the Royal Society with ninety-eight “fellows,” including Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry; Robert Hooke, the great natural scientist, who first coined the word cell after looking under a microscope at a slice of cork; and the poet, essayist, and playwright John Dryden. John Milton was writing Paradise Lost, and John Locke would write about the rights of man. In the coffeehouses (tea wouldn't take over as the national drink for another century) and taverns, Samuel Pepys met his friends to tell stories, swap verses, gossip about parliamentary ins and outs, and keep a diary that would immortalize it all.

  In 1665 London teemed with refugees. Some were Protestants who had fled the Continent; some were Royalists whose estates had been looted and decimated by Cromwell's men and for whom the Restoration provided only hollow triumph; some were Catholics, attracted by Charles's own flirtation with Rome. Expatriates were everywhere, trying to rebuild shattered lives or recoup some small portion of shattered fortunes. They capitalized on the freewheeling commerce both over and under the table while waiting until it was safe to go home. Everything was bought and sold, including remnants of the great estates-furniture, art, jewelry, silver… and books. Books by the thousands. In 1665 it was in London
, more than any other city in the world, that the book trade boomed.

  Most of these books were themselves refugees, thrown adrift in one of two great conflicts. In England itself, after the Civil War between the Royalists and the Puritans in the 1640s, Cromwell's Parliament had levied heavy fines on Royalist supporters. Some of these were paid by the sale of luxury items, in which libraries often figured prominently. The bulk of the supply, however, came from the Continent. Many of the great libraries of Germany, the Low Countries, and Eastern Europe had been dismantled and shipped in crates to London in hopes that they would be protected against onrushing Catholic armies. During the Thirty Years' War especially, England, largely immune from the horror, had become a place of refuge for both aristocrats on the run and their possessions.

  Inevitably, many of the books had been “lost” in transit, only to resurface in shops and stalls that ranged from the snobby and elite to the openly disreputable. At the very top were booksellers lucky enough to own a shop in Westminster Hall. Westminster booksellers catered to the rich and famous. Samuel Pepys's bookseller, Mrs. Michell, took messages for him; she and her husband dined with him on occasion. There were also many respectable booksellers in Saint Paul's Churchyard and at the Temple Gate.

  In less savory sections of London, less prestigious (not to mention less honest) bookmen claimed their share of the booming market. They were none too thorough when it came to examining the provenance of any particular volume. Book scouts combed the countryside, pilfering any book that might not already be for sale or that carried too high a price tag. Booksellers often employed agents to cross the Channel and coax a rare book out of a gentleman's library in Bohemia, Germany, Switzerland, or the Netherlands, and into circulation in the London market. Stock came and went so quickly that many booksellers, interested only in quick profit, had no idea of the quality, rarity, or real value of what they were selling.