by Ian Mortimer
The principal agent of change
The sixteenth century is simply littered with household names. It saw the world’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci in 1503. Michelangelo carved David, probably the world’s most famous sculpture, the following year. We have encountered Magellan, Cortes, Copernicus, Erasmus, Brahe, Bacon and Vesalius, but this was also the time of Nostradamus, Machiavelli and Paracelsus. Galileo and Shakespeare were both born in 1564 and thus lived the first 36 years of their lives in this century. But whereas four of the five great changes noted above cannot be attributed to an individual, one can. The split in the Church was closely bound up with Martin Luther. Moreover, Luther did not just start the Reformation; he shaped it with his sermons, hymns, translations, theological writings and correspondence – and the example of his own life, in such things as becoming one of the first priests to marry and start a family. He was not the only Protestant reformer but whether the theology of others would have been sufficiently clear, robust and inclusive to carry a significant proportion of the population is open to question. Whether they would have had the skills to win over so many secular leaders to their cause is even more doubtful. What is certain is that Luther’s stance in 1517 led to the most dramatic religious upheaval of the last thousand years. For that reason, he deserves the title of the principal agent of change for the sixteenth century.
1601–1700
The Seventeenth Century
The seventeenth century presents us with a huge paradox. On the one hand, it was the most miserable time to be alive since the Black Death. Famines killed millions. Many countries were devastated by internal conflict. Parts of Germany saw death rates of more than 50 per cent in the Thirty Years War. France lost a million citizens in the Fronde of 1648–53. England was torn apart by the civil wars of 1643–51. Several countries were locked into bitter disputes on land and at sea. And yet, despite all this conflict and devastation, most European nations today look back on the seventeenth century as their ‘golden age’. The Spanish Golden Age is said to have started with the end of the Reconquista in 1492 and to have extended to the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. In England, the years between the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) and the death of Shakespeare (1616) are often described as a ‘golden age’. The Dutch Golden Age and the French Golden Age are regarded to be roughly coterminous with the seventeenth century. All these countries saw artistic and literary achievements of the highest order. In France, you have the palace of Versailles, the art of Poussin and Claude Lorrain, and the plays of Molière. Spain can boast the art of Velázquez, Murillo and El Greco, and the literary works of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. In the Netherlands, we find Rembrandt, Franz Hals and Vermeer, and a whole host of genre painters. In Rome, the baroque flourished to its fullest extent and Caravaggio painted his chiaroscuro masterpieces. This unlikely combination of global crisis and cultural flowering brings to mind Orson Welles’s famous line in The Third Man: ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ While the idea that the Swiss enjoyed ‘five hundred years of democracy and peace’ is far from the truth, Welles’s point about war and cultural achievement going hand in hand really can be applied to the seventeenth century
Perhaps we can begin to understand this paradox if we reflect on the context of hardship. The prosperous might have lived in houses with chimneys, glass windows and more comfortable furniture, and they might have been better fed than their malnourished ancestors, but life expectancy at birth in late-seventeenth-century Paris was just 23. If you were the son of a bourgeois citizen of Geneva, then you might live to 30, and a daughter might make 35. Life expectancy at birth in England remained at a fairly constant 30 years – fluctuating from a low of 24.7 in a particularly bad year (1658) to a high of 35.3 in a particularly good one (1605). This was significantly lower than it had been in the previous century, when it sometimes exceeded 40 and seldom dropped below 30.1
A fundamental factor underpinning this dismal outlook was climate change. For the last 40 years, historians have referred to the seventeenth century as the ‘Little Ice Age’ but only recently has the full impact of the weather been appreciated. As we saw in the twelfth century, a drop in the average temperature of 0.5°C meant that the first and last frosts might appear 10 days sooner and later than was usual, wiping out the entire harvest.2 The risk of consecutive harvest failures rose dramatically with even this small drop in temperature, especially at high altitude. In addition, a heavy rainfall could damage a crop, reducing it by a third or even a half. As we saw in the chapter on the fourteenth century, it did not take a complete harvest failure for a farmer to have nothing to take to market: a yield of 3:1 rather than 5:1 could render him with nothing to spare. Whether this was due to the lack of nitrogen in the over-cultivated soil or a cold and wet summer did not make much difference: if he needed 70 per cent of his corn to feed his family and his animals and to set aside as seed corn for the next year, a depletion of one single harvest by just 30 per cent would leave him with nothing at all to sell. That was the start of a chain reaction. People living in the nearest market town were deprived of grain. The price of bread increased as more people competed for what little there was. And as they had to spend more money on food, they had less to spend on non-essential things such as furnishings, tools and trinkets. As demand for these items diminished, their prices fell and the artisans who made them had less money coming in at exactly the time when they needed to spend more on food. Ultimately, those at the bottom of the food chain grew weak, fell ill and died. Such was the effect of just one poor harvest with a yield of 50 per cent. Consecutive harvest failures thus killed thousands, including the farmers and their families, who were left with nothing to plant or eat. Even without a severe frost, an average summer temperature drop of 2°C could wipe out between 30 and 50 per cent of the crop – as happened in northern Europe in the 1640s.3
The results of such bad weather were horrific. A French commentator in 1637 declared that ‘posterity will not believe it: people lived off the plants in gardens and fields; they even sought out the carcasses of dead animals. The roads were paved with people . . . Finally, it came to cannibalism.’ Unfortunately, that writer was wrong: posterity could easily believe it. An observer at Saint-Quentin in 1651 wrote: ‘of the 450 sick persons whom the inhabitants were unable to relieve, 200 were turned out [of the town], and these we saw die one by one as they lay on the roadside . . .’ Ten years after that, another Frenchman stated that ‘the pasturage of wolves has become the food of Christians, for when they find horses, asses and other dead animals they feed off the rotting flesh’.4 France suffered a particularly severe winter in 1692, which was followed by the Great Famine of 1693–4, resulting in about 1.3 million deaths out of a total population of 22 million. The winter of 1695–6 killed 10 per cent of Norwegians and perhaps 15 per cent of Scots. A third of the population of Finland and a tenth of that of Sweden starved in the famine of 1696–7.
On top of these food shortages, people had to contend with the changing patterns of disease. There were several calamitous outbreaks of plague in the larger European cities: Milan in 1629; Venice in 1630; Seville in 1647; Oslo in 1654; Naples and Genoa both in 1656; and Vienna in 1679. London saw a succession of major outbreaks in 1603, 1625 and 1665, and Amsterdam did likewise in 1624, 1636, 1655 and 1663–4. Smallpox – which had previously been regarded as a children’s disease – took on a far more deadly form from about 1630, becoming the second-most feared illness for both adults and children. With starvation and disease both looming large, death played an even more significant part in people’s lives, snatching away young siblings, parents and children, and focusing minds intently on God.
This backdrop of famine and disease goes some way to explain t
he paradox of the century and its simultaneous ‘golden ages’. People suffered terribly, but what was later remembered of the period was not the suffering itself, but the things people did to escape it. And they were prepared to do practically anything. Men who could not feed their starving families by scratching a living from the soil left the land that had sustained their forebears for generations and moved to the city: about 6,000 people came to London every year. Large numbers emigrated, so that by 1700, the population of the American colonies stood at over a quarter of a million. One fifth of the adult male population of Scotland abandoned the country, many of them heading off to seek a better life in Poland, of all places. About a quarter of a million Portuguese men left their native soil to seek their fortunes elsewhere in the Portuguese empire.5 For many Frenchmen and Spaniards, war was their friend. The quarter of a million men in Louis XIV’s army in the 1690s might have been barely 5 foot 7 inches in height – their growth having been stunted in childhood – but, as they destroyed all the towns in the Rhineland, they were no doubt pleased not to be back in Paris, suffering the chronic bread shortages there.6 As for the Dutch, their ‘golden age’ is attributable not only to their victory in the Eighty Years War against the Spanish but also to the great riches of their empire.
The extreme disparities of wealth in all these countries also enhanced cultural achievements, leading to competition between everyone – from businessmen and architects to writers and musicians – and leaving a legacy of great treasures. The artists of the age, surrounded by the empty eyes of the starving and the prim smiles of the emerging bourgeoisie, could not fail to be moved to pity and contempt. What passed down to later generations was a sense of the great intensity of life at this time. In a world where everyone was struggling to survive and advance their careers, those who had the greatest ability were forced to exploit it to the full. To paraphrase the famous words of the seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell, people knew they did not have ‘world enough and time’. They needed to grasp every opportunity that arose, to innovate and experiment, and thereby to help themselves.
The Scientific Revolution
In the previous century, scholars had begun to realise that what they read in the venerated texts of ancient writers was not always true. The discrepancies between Galen’s anatomy and the human body have already been mentioned, as have the geographical lacunae of ancient geographers. Both of these disciplines had to go through a lengthy process of experimentation to discover the limitations of ancient knowledge. Intercontinental navigators contributed to scientific discovery because they required more sophisticated mathematical methods for determining their position, direction and speed at sea. Their explorations yielded previously unknown plants from the New World, which in turn forced botanists to produce new studies of the world’s flora. These discoveries also posed new scientific questions. Those who were genuinely interested in understanding the true nature of things (as opposed to citing ancient authorities) began to adopt what quickly came to be recognised as the scientific method: to postulate a research question and identify a suitable data set that would allow a hypothesis to be advanced to answer it, and then to test this hypothesis and discard it in favour of a new one if the original proved inadequate. Such a model of research was outlined in England by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organon in 1620 but by that time it was already being applied by most natural philosophers across the continent. Historians generally refer to this shift as the Scientific Revolution.
Of all the observable phenomena that made men think anew, it was the stars that most gripped people’s attention and forced them to apply innovative methods of investigation. The ‘new star’ or supernova of 1572, most famously witnessed by Tycho Brahe, did not enter the Earth’s atmosphere. It followed that it was a new, movable part of the firmament. Such a phenomenon directly contradicted Aristotle’s teaching, in which the stars formed a crystalline structure around the Earth and planets. Brahe built a new laboratory and charted all the stars he could in order to try to explain the form of the heavens. Shortly before his death in 1601, he was joined by the young German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, who observed a ‘new star’ of his own in 1604. Using Tycho’s data, Kepler formulated the first two of his famous laws of planetary motion and published them in his Astronomia Nova (1609). These were scientifically tested theories: Kepler’s data for the motion of the planet Mars allowed him to establish that it followed an elliptical orbit; this in turn gave him the means to predict its future movement. Whereas once the movement of the planets had been a thing of wonder and faith, now it was a matter of scientific knowledge and understanding.
While Kepler was nursing his manuscript through the press, a lensmaker in the Dutch town of Middelberg, Hans Lippershey, built a telescope that could enlarge images three times. In 1608, he patented the idea. Very soon, word of his invention was carried abroad. In England, the following year, Thomas Harriot built a telescope with which he observed the surface of the Moon. In Italy, Galileo constructed a telescope capable of magnifying images 33 times and used it to observe the four largest moons of Jupiter. He published the results in 1610 in Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger). It was an apt title: these telescopes were like ships that brought back sights and knowledge previously far beyond men’s dreams. Kepler joined Galileo in exploring the moons of Jupiter, building an improved telescope in 1611 and publishing his findings the same year. He produced his and Brahe’s compendium of the measurements of over a thousand heavenly bodies in the Rudolphine Tables in 1627. These allowed other astronomers to see for themselves whether the planets orbited the Sun as Kepler claimed.
What followed over the rest of the century was an outpouring of astronomical endeavour and experimentation. Observatories were constructed in Leiden (1633), Gdansk (1641), Copenhagen (1637–42), Paris (1667–71) and Greenwich (1675–6). Experimenting with refracting telescopes, Johannes Hevelius realised that the longer the instrument, the greater the detail he could see. In 1647, he built a 12-foot telescope that magnified an image 50 times. In 1673, he built one that was 150 feet long, encased in a wooden tube. The new marvel was not particularly practical, as it could only be used outside, suspended with ropes from a 90-foot pole, and shook in the slightest breeze, but it gives a good indication of the lengths to which astronomers were prepared to go. It required a genius to improve upon it. That genius was Isaac Newton, who invented the reflecting telescope in 1668: this produced a magnification of 40 times despite being only a foot long. With such instruments at their disposal, astronomers began the systematic exploration of space. Many of them are still household names: Giovanni Cassini of Genoa, who helped set up the Paris Observatory and discovered the moons of Saturn; John Flamsteed, the first English Astronomer Royal, who catalogued three times as many stars as Brahe; and Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch polymath whose work on lenses and telescopes allowed him to see the rings of Saturn properly for the first time and to measure the distance between the Earth and the Sun at 24,000 times the Earth’s radius (a margin of error of just 2.3 per cent).
So what? Space did not affect life on Earth, so was there any real value in all of this? Actually, at the start of the seventeenth century, many people believed that the stars did have a direct effect on life on Earth. Astrology was not just a superstition of those eager to have their horoscope read: the stars were believed to be connected to everything else in nature. If you had a disease, a physician would want to know when it started so he could check which planets were in the ascendant. Similarly, a surgeon would advise you to have your blood let when the stars seemed particularly fortuitous. The courts of European monarchs had official astrologers. Even natural philosophers took astrology seriously: one of Kepler’s original reasons for studying the stars was his desire to cast more accurate horoscopes. Thus, when the old world of star-gazing collided with the new science of astronomical observation, it, had an enormous impact. People could now see that the stars were spheres following predictable orbits, not the se
mi-magical arbiters of human fortune and suffering. They could see that the Moon was a barren lump of mountainous rock. So how could such things affect people’s health and well-being? Some people began to wonder whether the further planets were inhabited by people like them. Did God’s Creation extend to other worlds? And as the stars were clearly not fixed in a crystalline structure, what else had Aristotle got wrong? Where was Heaven, which was supposed to lie on the far side of the stars? The very fact that we can ask ‘so what?’ in relation to astronomy itself marks a considerable development in scientific understanding since 1600.
Astronomy powered scientific investigation in other areas too. It was interest in the planets that led the English physician William Gilbert to postulate in De Magnete (1600) that space was a vacuum, electricitas a force, and the Earth a giant magnet with a core of iron which revolved daily on its axis. In Italy, Galileo was as much interested in physical laws on Earth as in the night skies. As a young man, he famously observed the swinging of a chandelier in Pisa Cathedral and noted that the pendulum took the same amount of time to complete a single arc even as the distance reduced. Later his research into the properties of pendulums led him to design a pendulum-driven clock. It was never constructed but the idea passed to Christiaan Huygens, who built the first example in 1656. Far more accurate than any earlier timepiece, it became the pattern for clocks for the next 300 years. In 1675 the English natural philosopher Robert Hooke proposed that the pendulum clock might be used to measure gravity; the necessary experiment was accordingly carried out and the theory proved to be correct by Jean Richer in 1671. Huygens also worked with the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who designed the first mechanical calculator and, at the same time as Isaac Newton, developed the mathematical method of calculus.