A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  Plunder, however, is a very different thing from prosperity. The gold and silver were carried on Spanish galleons to the Spanish court, but ended up almost anywhere else. A lot went to decorate churches. Charles V spent so much of it on his desperate wars to maintain Habsburg control of the Netherlands, and against the rival French in Italy, that it enriched Flemish victuallers, German armourers and all kinds of mercenaries. He spent more of the loot on paying off his debts to Genoese and Venetian creditors; and they in turn sent it flying further east to China to buy silk, porcelain and other luxuries. There, the Ming empire had by now replaced the Mongol Yuan rulers and established another golden age. Except that it was at times too golden, or rather too silver-addicted, for the plunder from America, having moved through Spain and the eastern Mediterranean, then caused a monetary crisis for the Ming.

  If this global whirl of Inca metal were not enough, we must also remember the pirates. The French and English, cut out of the grisly bonanza, used their ships to intercept galleons and carry their booty home. England’s Queen Elizabeth turned a blind eye to the piracy, and when the heroic Devon rascal Francis Drake made the journey around South America and into Peruvian waters to steal gold and silver from the Spanish (who had, after all, stolen it from the Incas), Elizabeth’s own share was enough to pay off England’s entire foreign debt.7 The pirates had a significance that goes far beyond the romance of individual stories: by luring more Englishmen and Frenchmen across the Atlantic in search of plunder, piracy both improved Northern seamanship and established beachheads in the Caribbean, which would later ease the spread of empire.

  As for the homeland of the Spanish conquerors themselves, in the words of the economic historian David Landes, Spain ‘became (or stayed) poor because it had too much money’.8 The Spanish bought all manner of fabrics, foods and exotic goods from their rivals. They exulted in the good fortune that allowed them to enjoy a consumer, or consumption, economy without increased productivity – very much as the West wallowed in its credit-fuelled consumer boom during the early part of the twenty-first century. This was spotted at the time. Landes quotes the Moroccan ambassador to Madrid towards the end of this long splurge, in 1690, who noted that the Spanish had the largest income of all the Christians:

  But the love of luxury and the comforts of civilisation have overcome them, and you will rarely find one of this nation who engages in trade or travels abroad for commerce, as do the other Christian nations such as the Dutch, the English, the Genoese and their like. Similarly, the handicrafts practised by the lower classes and common people are despised by this nation.

  It is hard to imagine a more complete programme for national decline than that. In the New World, Spain would build a dozy, already decaying empire of aristocrats, priests and large landowners, and would never experience the jolt into modernity that animated her rivals. Atahualpa was not the only emperor who had failed to spot what was coming.

  Man in Black

  The look of things, the outward style, can be profound – not trivial at all. During the Reformation one kind of Christian worship, conducted by gorgeously dressed men chanting Latin in their rich, multicoloured churches, was assaulted by another kind. The Germany of Martin Luther was a land of black and white, The stark, black German prose of his preaching, with its urgent choices, strides purposefully over the snow-white of the paper. The spiny black letters impressed with the soot-and-egg mix of early printers’ ink carried tens of thousands of sermons once delivered by his voice into people’s hands across northern Europe. For those who couldn’t read, crude black-and-white woodcuts – as different as it is possible to imagine from the richly coloured altar-pieces that had preceded them – would convey the reformers’ messages. Their clothes were plain white, dark, black. Their language was the guttural jab-jab of common German. Their faces glare back from early portraits, severe and uncompromising.

  The north was in revolt against the south. There, all the Italianate glitter and gleam of the papacy, with its polychrome churches and gilded Madonnas, represented a Church that had grown worldly. No wonder that Martin Luther, sturdy and bullish and a great self-dramatizer, became the German hero, confronting popes and emperors, standing, as he put it, ‘in the mouth of the great Behemoth, between his great teeth’. German history before Luther is the history of rulers and knights, of emperors, archbishops and fables. In many ways he seems the first modern German, arms akimbo, unfrightened, staring back at us in the well known portrait. He was a plain man, but no peasant. His father had worked in the coalmines of Saxony and had done well enough to become a burgher, with a rich wife and an impressive stone-built house. He had sent Martin to a good, if brutal, school, and like so many upwardly mobile parents wanted his son to become a lawyer. But from early on, Martin Luther showed a darkly questioning side to his personality, an itchy restlessness.

  We must imagine a world in which Hell is real and close; where the woods and lanes are haunted by fiends and witches; and where the only possible way out of all this is to secure Christ’s help. Germany in Luther’s time was not a comfortable or safe place to be. Apart from suffering plague and the threat of famine in bad years, it was politically weak. In the east, the Teutonic knights had bowed to the Poles. In the north, the Danes had taken Holstein. In the west, the Swiss confederation was winning its independence. More important – and this was the case throughout Luther’s life – the Muslim armies of the Ottomans were threatening all of Europe. These early years of the Reformation coincide with sensational Ottoman challenges such as the fall of Belgrade in 1521, the capture of Rhodes in 1522, the crushing of the Hungarians in 1526, the siege of Vienna three years later, and then further drives into Poland, across the Mediterranean to Malta, and the long fight with Venice. Though the Southern Catholic powers would eventually beat the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and though both Malta and Vienna held out, many Christians believed they were living through the end of Christendom, the last people of a doomed civilization.

  Germany existed as a territory and language area claimed by that ‘religious and pseudo-classical myth’, the Holy Roman Empire.9 It did not exist as a nation. Amongst the political minestrone of duchies, princedoms, archbishoprics and free cities there were three hundred or so semi-autonomous principalities, many with their own laws, currencies and family feuds. War and the plague had cut Germany’s population. A new and terrible disease, syphilis, was spreading across Europe. ‘Ghost villages’, which had simply been abandoned, were a common sight. A series of savage peasant rebellions had erupted in southern and western Germany, though not on the scale of the ‘Peasant War’ of Luther’s adulthood, which would claim at least a hundred thousand lives.

  So Luther’s world felt rickety and impermanent. Death lurked behind every tree. When he was a twenty-one-year-old student, he tells us, one day in 1505 during a summer thunderstorm he had a revelation while walking along a country road. As the lightning crashed down, he promised that if he survived he would enter a monastery. Luther promptly gave up his studies and became a monk in a notably tough, though not extreme, order. For more than a dozen years he was a model monk, hard-driven at his lessons and duties by his ambitious superiors, and studying the conventional texts of Catholicism almost to the point of nervous breakdown. He did well enough to be sent to Rome by his monastery on a diplomatic mission, albeit an unsuccessful one. He was then sent to the new university of Wittenberg to teach.

  Universities were starting up across Germany at this time. They offered a way for principalities and ambitious towns to mark themselves out and attract new talent. Wittenberg was one of twenty or so, and known for being forward-looking and experimental. The small town, scarcely more than a walled village, was ruled by Friedrich the Wise, the Elector of Saxony. A shrewd and independent-minded character, Friedrich was one of the seven German ‘electors’ whose status allowed them to choose the Holy Roman Emperor (not, at this point, a hereditary title), and he had considerable political clout in northern Germany.
Later, at the time of his great religious rebellion, Luther would depend on Friedrich for his very survival.

  At Wittenberg, Luther’s thinking about sin and redemption challenged much of the traditional teaching. Scholars argue still about just how radical his theology really was – it was certainly not unique. The essence of the problem was this. The earlier medieval scholastic tradition insisted that the God of love condemned sinful mankind to Hell on the basis of laws so strict and fierce that they could not be kept to the letter. Luther’s view was that mankind was entirely sinful, corrupt, fallen, and could not be transformed into a creature deserving of Heaven simply by repeating prayers or doing good works.

  So how could anyone be saved? In a world so intensely religious, this was an urgent question.

  Luther solved it when he concluded that God simply brushed aside the sinfulness of those who had true faith – those who were saved, the elect. Sin was too powerful to be defeated by human action. Only a miracle of divine love could overcome it. Christ’s sacrifice, taking on himself mankind’s sinfulness, was the means by which that miracle happened. To be saved, all you needed was true faith in this. The obvious problem with Luther’s view is that it implied that sinful behaviour did not necessarily matter. Trying to overcome sin in a day-to-day way was pointless. Faith was all that counted. Luther’s response to such an objection was that the saved would be so grateful, they would not want to sin. (This, as many later generations of Protestants would realize, was a little too easy: the Scottish writer James Hogg’s satire, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, skewered the ease with which hypocrites could have their sinful cake and eat it.)

  Luther’s thinking was that of a Christian intellectual who had come to loathe the cerebral, sophisticated classical Greek thought of Plato and Aristotle, on which traditional Church theology rested. His main impulse, when he had reached his conclusion about sin, was emotional and personal, an urgent sense of release and joy that demanded to be communicated – and which had nothing to do with the Church hierarchy or liturgies. He described himself as feeling ‘born again’, an experience still at the heart of modern evangelical Protestantism.

  This would always have driven a man like Luther, an odd mix of bruiser and dreamer, into a fight with the Church authorities. But it was the practice of selling indulgences that tipped him over the edge. What was an indulgence? In its most literal sense, it was the transfer of a little of the goodness of Christ and the saints (the ‘treasury of merit’) to a human sinner. The receiver of the indulgence then had less time to spend in Purgatory – today sometimes seen as the dull airport lounge of the system, minus the duty-free shops, but then portrayed as a place of purging and agonizing fires, even of torture – before arriving in Heaven. It was not quite a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it was certainly a get-to-Heaven-quicker card.

  How did you obtain an indulgence? Prayers and good works could win you one. Travelling to see and touch the relics of saints would, too – and this also brought useful revenue to whichever church or town had the relics (Wittenberg itself had a world-class collection of fragments of wood, bones, thorns and hair). But apart from prayers, good works and relics there was a more reliable route: hard cash. Priests had long suggested that recipients of indulgences might want to make a ‘charitable offering’, to say thank you, as it were. In time, this became a plain cash transaction. As Christ’s vicar on earth, the pope could simply sell indulgences. They became his money supply, notes that came in different denominations. He could not only sell them to buy the purchaser time off Purgatory, he could also sell them for the purchaser’s already-dead parents, who might be crying out to their children for the coins to be paid. Reform-minded clerics from Italy and Holland, France and Switzerland, had spoken out against the crass commercialization of indulgences before now: Luther’s blast would be altogether angrier.

  The papacy has given history an impressive number of decadent villains, and Leo X, Luther’s adversary, was one of them. He was a Medici, the son of the great Florentine ruler Lorenzo the Magnificent, and brought up in an atmosphere of war, artistic exhibitionism and political intrigue. Made a cardinal when he was thirteen, he had little interest in religion as such. When Italian politics landed him the role of pope at the age of thirty-seven, Leo is reported to have said that since God had given him the papacy, ‘then let us enjoy it’. A fat, sweaty and hospitable man, he turned Vatican life into a perpetual Roman carnival of indecent plays, bull-fights, dances, banquets and races. Gold poured from his hands in a glittering stream of favours, patronage and personal retail therapy.

  Leo’s most expensive problem was St Peter’s Basilica. The original church had been built under St Constantine in the 330s, over St Peter’s supposed burial site. It had fallen into disrepair and was being replaced by a gargantuan new church, intended to awe the world with its scale and beauty. But in 1517 the church was a giant embarrassment, little more than a mucky building site. The huge expense was crippling the papacy. Leo’s solution was to declare a fund-raising drive through ever more, and more expensive, indulgences. In Germany a hyper-ambitious archbishop who was raising funds for his own purposes, would act as Leo’s agent. The German people would have to be squeezed, and then squeezed again.

  In Luther’s Saxony, the squeezer-in-chief was a remarkable salesman called Johann Tetzel. Tetzel was a blow-hard televangelist from the age of pulpit oratory. He would arrive in town trailing a long procession of solemn, berobed priests and followers, and carrying the papal insignia and Leo X’s bull (a papal declaration, with the round seal, or bulla, hanging from it, showing its authenticity). Oak and iron coffers to receive the loot would be opened, a grand stall set up, and Tetzel would begin. His message was straightforward. If you wanted to avoid hundreds or even thousands of years suffering in Purgatory – pay up. If you wanted to release your dear mother or father from the torments – pay up. According to your wealth and ability – pay up. If this sounds like a satire on his style, the jingle for which he is remembered gives the authentic Tetzel style:

  When the coin in the coffer rings

  A soul from Purgatory springs.

  For Luther, this was more than the robbing of honest Germans to build a swanky new church in Italy. It was a terrible sin, which would condemn the innocent buyers of indulgences to hellfire, because it meant they would not properly repent or confront their sinfulness, or seek Christ’s forgiveness. The most profound matters of faith and punishment had been turned into a cash transaction. It was this that finally exhausted his patience. Protestant Christians the world over know that on 31 October 1517, Martin Luther strode to the oaken doors of Wittenberg’s Castle Church and nailed to them a list of ninety-five ‘theses’, or arguments for debate – an act of defiance aimed at the papacy. It may be so. The original doors are long gone and have been replaced by metal ‘heritage’ replicas.

  Not a man crippled by personal modesty, Luther himself never mentioned the nailing of the theses. It was probably a later story. In Luther’s day the church doors were certainly used as a notice-board, a place for announcements of all kinds. So for this locally famous academic monk to nail up some religious arguments would have been possible, though hardly necessary. Nor did Luther intend to start a revolution, or even directly challenge the institution of the papacy. These were points for discussion, in Church Latin, albeit made in his usual punchy style. His students at Wittenberg University would have heard it all before. Luther was still a Catholic, and much of what he said was still official doctrine.

  To appreciate why Luther’s arguments spread so fast, we need to turn to another small town in Germany, this time in the north-west, Mainz-on-the-Rhine. Here, fifteen years before Luther was born, Johannes Gutenberg had died after inventing Europe’s first real printing press. The Chinese and Koreans had long used wood-block printing, and even ceramic printing. Woodcuts had been made in Europe too, long before Gutenberg. What he did was to bring together a system of casting individual metal letters, and groups of letters, so t
hey could be arranged in lines of words, then inked and pressed into dampened paper or animal-skin vellum.

  We know relatively little about Gutenberg himself, except that he was skilled in metalwork – we might describe him as a jobbing engineer – and at cutting precious stones; and he was an ambitious entrepreneur, eager to borrow money to build his business. Urban Germany, with its coalmines and stocks of iron ore, and its long-established tradition of making armour, arms and clocks, was not going through an industrial revolution – quite. But it was experiencing an industrious boom, a rise in the status and ambition of craftworkers who would pass on their skills.

  Gutenberg bought paper from Italy, experimented with metal alloys and ink mixtures, and hired at least eighteen helpers for his six presses. He intended to produce a printed Bible and wanted it to look as reassuringly like a handwritten one as possible – rather in the way TV drama at first mimicked theatre, or early bloggers tried to mimic newspaper pages online. His planned first run of 180 Bibles of 1,282 pages each was a huge gamble, and in 1454 he had to raise money from all across Europe. His Bible took six months for the casting of the metal type, and two years to set and print. Then it was hand-coloured and illustrated, to make it look ‘real’. The effect was similar to contemporary handwriting, compared at the time to woven black-and-white cloth, or textile – hence our word ‘text’. The whole process took about three years, as long as it took a scribe to write out a Bible by hand.10 The scribe, however, produced one, Gutenberg 180.