by Ian Mortimer
Whereas in the eleventh century the Church had done much to promote peace across Europe, now it proceeded to tear itself apart. Nations were set against nations on account of whether they were Catholic or Protestant, and religious factions within those countries fought each other in civil wars that threatened everyone. There is no better example of the old adage that ‘the path to hell is paved with good intentions’. Luther had only wanted to stop the corruption within the Church – a laudable aspiration by anybody’s standards – but what he triggered was more than a hundred years of war in Europe, the persecution of religious minorities by European governments for the next three hundred years, and religious intolerance that in some places has lasted to the present day. Just to look at the conflicts of the sixteenth century is sobering. The first fighting broke out in the German Peasants’ War of 1524–5, a widespread social uprising inspired by the teachings of Luther and Thomas Müntzer. It was brutally quashed by German princes – Protestant and Catholic alike – and the vicious persecutions that followed foreshadowed the bloodbaths that were meted out to Catholics in the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) and the Prayerbook Rebellion (1549) in England, and to Protestants in the Low Countries (from 1566) and in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris (1572).
The violent tensions between nation states in the second half of the century was exacerbated by religious suspicions. Espionage by foreign agents was widely feared, and governments began to spy on their own people. In cities that had once been broadly open to newcomers, refugees were consigned to Protestant or Catholic ghettos. Those belonging to a minority sect were taxed heavily and their freedoms restricted. When English and Spanish ships met on the high seas, it was assumed on account of their religious differences that they were enemies and that they might legitimately fire on one another. In England, which had hitherto resisted the use of torture for political purposes, the government started to inflict intense pain on Catholics to force them to reveal their secrets. In Spain, the Inquisition was extended to eradicate Protestantism. The Council of Trent reaffirmed the legitimacy and orthodoxy of the Catholic Church and sought to reinvigorate it through a series of internal reforms, including the tightening of discipline among the clergy, and the prohibition of heretical literature. The new order of the Jesuits was particularly encouraged to evangelise, administer the Church more scrupulously, and stamp out heresy. The resentment between Catholics and Protestants grew ever deeper as the century progressed, and religious and political differences combined in an explosive mix that threatened people’s well-being on Earth as well as their path to Heaven.
The Reformation dealt a tremendous blow to the political authority of the Church. The higher clergy had for centuries acted as a sort of unofficial opposition to rulers, not just advising but also restraining them. The best-known example in England is that of Thomas Becket, the twelfth-century archbishop of Canterbury, who opposed Henry II of England and eventually paid for doing so with his life.5 In most countries, prelates had constituted one of the ‘estates’ of the realm, alongside the nobility and the commoners, and thus occupied an important part in the government. In thirteenth-century France six of the twelve peers of the realm were prelates. In medieval Germany three of the seven electors who chose the king of the Germans – who often went on to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor – were archbishops. Now, in many places, the authority of Church leaders collapsed along with the hegemony of the Church itself. In 1559, all of the English bishops, who had been appointed by the deceased Catholic queen, Mary I, refused to accept the Elizabethan settlement, which forbade their celebration of Mass and their allegiance to the pope. Elizabeth I accordingly removed them from their positions and handed the empty bishoprics to clergymen who agreed not only to obey her but also to surrender valuable Church lands to her as soon as they were in office. Such men were not in a position to restrain their monarch. Before 1529 almost every chancellor of England, the highest post in the government, had been a bishop or an archbishop. Mary I appointed three prelates to that position in succession during her short reign (1553–8), but after her death never again was the great seal put in the hands of a clergyman. In Catholic countries like France, the higher clergy were still appointed to positions of authority – Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin are famous seventeenth-century examples of prelates who were also statesmen – but they were now servants of the state, not independent men who held the government to account. The Reformation thus swept away an important brake on royal power. More than that, it entwined secular strength with divine authority in investing kings and queens with the position of head of their national Church, as decreed in the maxim cujus regio, ejus religio (literally: ‘who rules, his religion). This was the conclusion of the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555 that brought an end to hostilities between Lutheran states in Germany and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V of Spain. It meant that the official religion of the state should be the faith of the ruler. Luther could never have foreseen or intended this: he had unwittingly set off a chain reaction that now gave kings absolute power – and to deny that power was not just treasonable, it could be heretical too.
Firearms
When Francis Bacon declared in 1620 that guns had ‘changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world’, he was not referring to fifteenth-century cannon. Such weapons were predominantly used for destroying the walls of castles and cities. They were sophisticated versions of medieval siege engines and thus of the greatest significance in large-scale conflicts rather than private squabbles. Their importance is reflected in the developments in defensive architecture. Around 1500 Italian military engineers started to experiment with the trace italienne: polygonal star-shaped fortifications with very thick, sloping walls that not only provided bastions capable of resisting an enemy’s cannonballs but also permitted the defenders to cover every potential assault point with their own artillery. In many ways, however, large guns and the trace italienne represented a continuation of the medieval contest of wall against machine. It was hand-held weapons that constituted the major change. In 1500 even the more portable guns were cumbersome mini cannon that one person could barely lift, let alone shoot swiftly and accurately. While a man could handle and fire such a gun on his own, by the time he had loaded it, aimed it and ignited the gunpowder, his enemies would have overrun him. Thus almost all the advantages still lay with the old technology. A squadron of crossbowmen were cheaper to maintain, easier to train and quicker to transport than a squadron of gunners equipped with early arquebuses. Crossbow bolts were more accurate too. As for English longbows, arquebuses could not rival their cheapness of production, speed of shot, or portability. If a hundred gunners had run into a hundred archers in 1500, there would have been no doubt as to the outcome. After the first volley of wayward shots from the arquebuses had carried off a handful of archers, the rest of the gunners would have been mown down by the bowmen in a matter of seconds. The sixteenth century saw this imbalance reversed. If the same forces had met in 1600, it would have been the bowmen who quailed and ran for cover.
Several technological innovations led to this new precedence. The introduction of standardised shot for guns of a specific calibre allowed bullets to be cast cheaply in large numbers and shared between soldiers. The introduction of the wheel-lock firing mechanism, although expensive, permitted an efficient way of firing pistols and long-barrelled guns that did not burn miles of match. In 1584 William, prince of Orange, became the first head of state to be assassinated by a pistol, and by the end of the century over half of the troops on both sides in the conflict between Spain and the Dutch were armed with portable long-barrelled guns.6 The Swiss mercenaries who dominated European land battles at the start of the sixteenth century increasingly had to fight with muskets after a series of defeats culminating in the battle of Pavia (1525). Another indication of the growing importance of firearms was that full armour practically vanished from the battlefield: a breastplate, backplate and helmet were all that most European soldiers now wor
e. Suits of heavy plate armour were more trouble than they were worth, inhibiting movement, sight and hearing. They also meant that aristocratic commanders who could afford expensive armour were easy to pick out and shoot. At close range, a bullet from an arquebus could penetrate even the best plate armour.
Some historians have spoken of a ‘military revolution’ in the period from 1560 to 1660. They argue that this century saw the introduction of the taxation and parliamentary representation necessary to support large armies of infantry armed with firearms, which in turn underpinned the development of the modern nation state.7 In reality, military technology and strategy had been in a state of flux for centuries, at least since the development of the stirrup for knightly combat in the early eighth century. It therefore makes more sense to describe the last 1,200 years as a period of military evolution, rather than a few intermittent revolutions.8 In addition, the concept of a ‘military revolution’ at this time originated in a study of Swedish and Danish history; however, the same innovative combination of taxation, parliamentary representation and large infantry armies using projectile weapons had occurred in England two hundred years earlier.9 Nevertheless, it is unquestionable that the development of firearms in the sixteenth century constitutes a major change from the chivalric world dominated by the nobility.
You can start to appreciate the transformation when you think of a king on the battlefield in the years 1500 and 1600. At both dates his life would have been of paramount importance: if the king was killed, the battle was lost and very probably the war too. Despite this, it was important in the medieval mind for the king to be seen to lead his army in person, not least because by being present he could most effectively demonstrate that a victory for his side was the judgement of God. In 1500, if a king wanted to reduce the risk of being killed on the battlefield, he could wear armour and stay out of the killing range of the enemy archers. Even if he charged into the melee, it was unlikely that a crossbowman would be able to pick him out and pierce his armour from a distance, and his bodyguard could protect him from enemy knights getting too close. If a king rode into a fight in 1600, however, he ran the risk of someone pulling out a pistol and shooting him at close range. Even if he lurked on the sidelines he risked a daring shot from a musketeer. Battlefields had become more dangerous places over the course of the century. Guns made the area a smoke-filled, shudderingly noisy place of terror and confusion in which the whole order of things could be upset. A commoner could shoot a nobleman or even a king and not realise it. Thus the advent of firearms required that kings step back from the battlefield and leave the command to experienced professional soldiers. While in 1500 it was still not unusual for kings to command in person – Richard III of England fought and died at Bosworth in 1485; Louis XII and Francis I were both captured in battle, in 1498 and 1525 respectively; James IV of Scotland was killed while commanding at Flodden in 1513; and King Sebastian of Portugal perished at El-Ksar El-Kebir in Morocco in 1578 – after 1600 it was very rare for a ruling monarch to approach closer than the very edge of a battlefield. That in turn had ramifications. When a medieval king had led his army on campaign in person, he had no one else to blame if everything went wrong. It was God’s judgement on him. If he merely placed his trust in a general, then defeat did not necessarily mean that he no longer enjoyed divine support: he could simply blame the general’s incompetence. People increasingly rejected the idea that military defeat represented God’s judgement. Conflict became much more of a secular matter.
Guns had a social impact throughout society. When Edward III had pioneered the use of massed longbows he had enjoyed a unique advantage over his rivals. Firearms blasted this to ribbons. Soldiers did not need to have been trained from childhood to fire an arquebus or musket; they could learn in a matter of weeks. Thus it was once again the larger, better-equipped army that dominated the battlefield, and so the old rule of engagement – that the larger force is stronger – was restored. In the 1470s the armies of France and Spain had numbered 40,000 and 20,000 men respectively. By the 1590s the French maintained an army of 80,000 men and the Spanish one of 200,000.10 Early in the seventeenth century armies were larger still: the Dutch kept 100,000 men in arms, the Spanish 300,000, and the French 150,000.11 Across Europe, kings and princes had to tax their people heavily in order to pay for the weapons, training and men to field a large enough army for their military purposes. Governments dealing with the threat of invasion recognised that they needed a better civil defence than the old practice of country folk grabbing a sword or billhook and rallying to the beacons’ warning. Bands of militia were trained and equipped with small arms. Gunpowder depots were organised to supply them. Forts with low, wide walls in the style of the trace italienne were built to guard harbour entrances. Large nations with the ability to tax widely and raise enormous armies could sweep small nations off the map, so smaller countries too had to be prepared to defend themselves. The result was an arms race across the continent. War was no longer an occasional (if frequent) event: preparing for war became an aspect of everyday life for hundreds of thousands of people as governments used the breathing spaces of peace to strengthen their defences and prepare for the next conflict.
The development of guns also had an impact beyond the continent for it allowed European nations to dominate the world’s oceans and, later in the century, to make inroads into new territories. On this point we need to be quite specific: it was not firearms that allowed the Spanish to conquer South America – that was down to a combination of factors, including indigenous prophesies, superstitions, local civil wars, smallpox and the fact that stone-headed clubs and short-range bows and arrows were no match for Toledo steel blades and armour. However, the Spanish certainly relied on cannon to protect their vessels travelling to and from the New World. English and Moroccan sailors were only too keen to take advantage of poorly protected shipping laden with gold and silver. This led to a naval arms race comparable to the competition for better hand-held weapons. For their seaborne empire, the Portuguese depended on firearms to an even greater extent than the Spanish. As the sixteenth-century Portuguese writer Diogo do Couto pointed out, his compatriots in the Indian Ocean and the Far East had to contend with enemies who were armed with weapons almost as sophisticated as their own.12 Wherever they built a trading post or ‘factory’ they had to defend it with fortifications, cannon and small arms. In this way European nations, which had not controlled any of the world’s oceans in 1500, were masters of them all by 1600. They thus dominated the world’s long-distance international trade, even if they were divided amongst themselves. And thanks to their maritime firepower, they would continue to rule the seas well into the twentieth century.
The decline of private violence
You would have thought that the development of handguns would have resulted in an increase in the murder rate; in fact, quite the reverse happened. In the Middle Ages, violence had been endemic and a part of everyday life. The homicide rate was normally around 40–45 victims per 100,000 people but at times it could be much higher. In the university town of Oxford in the 1340s, it reached no per 100,000 inhabitants, which was not so very far from the rate of Dodge City, one of the most dangerous towns in the American Wild West, at its gun-slinging height.13 Often the violence was completely unpremeditated. Fights over women and arguments in taverns were common. The historian Manuel Eisner, who has made a special study of this subject, notes that two of the 145 homicides tried in London in 1278 were murders that took place following games of chess.14 But in the fifteenth century, the number of killings started to fall, and in the sixteenth it suddenly dropped by half. As the graph below shows, there was a remarkably consistent decline in the average homicide rate – by about 50 per cent every hundred years – from 1500 until 1900.
This decline begs the question: why? What caused people across Europe to stop killing each other? There are two traditional explanations. The first is based on the work of the German social historian Norbert Elias, who postulated
in his book The Civilising Process (1939) that people’s wilder behaviour was tamed in the early modern period through the adoption of new social rules and a greater attention to etiquette. Aristocratic violence, which once had been much more common than aggression among common folk, was brought to heel by duelling and similar codes of conduct now associated with ‘gentlemen’. The rising urban classes civilised themselves, proud of a religious life that abhorred violence, and started to control the working folk through preaching morality in church. Gradually everyone came to accept the same code of civilised behaviour. The second traditional explanation is simply that governments became more efficient at punishing the perpetrators of crime, so that through the deterrent of the gallows, violent offences were checked.
Homicide rates (per 100,000 people)15
A few years ago, the psychologist Steven Pinker tackled this question in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). He largely adopted the ‘civilising process’ theory and suggested that it was triggered by two fundamental causes: an ‘economic revolution’ (by which he meant the benefits enjoyed by people trading with each other), and the increasing power of the state.16 With regard to the former, as he puts it, ‘if you’re trading favours or surpluses with someone, your trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to you alive than dead’.17 Pinker’s book makes many interesting points but on close inspection his explanation of the decline of violence in the early-modern period is flawed. The nearest thing to this sort of ‘economic revolution’ took place in the thirteenth century. Indeed, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the homicide rate was declining most sharply in England and Germany, per capita incomes in both countries were stagnant or falling. Gross domestic product (GDP) in relation to population fell by 6 per cent in England, and in Germany it collapsed by a third.18 The English decline was felt particularly badly by the working class, whose income fell in real terms by almost a half.19 There simply is no correlation between the economy and the decline of private violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.