by Andrew Marr
Printing was an almost overnight craze. The Bibles were admired across Germany, the Low Countries, Italy and Spain. Gutenberg’s presses were turned over to other printed work, including grammars for schoolboys, savage tracts attacking the Turks, calendars; and above all, indulgences, made out like huge cheques, with only the time, date and signature to be filled in by hand.
Germany was soon awash with print. Some of the tens of thousands of pamphlets were medical and scientific; others were downright rude. Luther himself, in a sermon on marriage, complained that booksellers were peddling material ‘which treats of nothing but the depravity of women’.
So Luther’s theses too, nailed up or not, were quickly printed and distributed. He combined them into a single sermon, reprinted twenty-five times in two years. (At the same time, he also changed his pen-name from the Greek for ‘the free one’, Eleutherius, to the homely German Luter, and then Luther.) His arguments aroused intense interest among a clergy and laity already debating the question of indulgences, the correct notion of sin, and papal authority. During his heyday, Luther is reckoned to have produced, on average, a pamphlet about once a fortnight; his followers, such as the simple shoemaker-writer ‘Hans Sachs’, and his Catholic foes, contributed many more. Wittenberg had once depended on its ruler’s interesting collection of saintly body parts as a revenue-earner. Now it became a boom town because so much printing work was brought to it for the simple reason that Luther lived there.11
It could not be long before his arguments were heard in Rome. Set-piece confrontations were arranged. First, he took on fellow Augustinian monks in Heidelberg – and rather effectively; next, at Augsburg, one of Leo X’s brightest cardinals; then a brilliant rival theologian in Leipzig, where he was tricked into supporting the Czech reformer Jan Hus, who had been burned at the stake for heresy. Luther was himself condemned as a heretic in a papal bull, which he promptly burned in Wittenberg. Now his relish for a fight really took over. In three famous broadsides, The Christian Nobility of the German Nation (addressing those very members of society), Babylonian Captivity, addressing the clergy, and The Freedom of a Christian, aimed at all readers, Luther demolished many of the arguments the Church’s authority had rested on. These included the special function of priests, their organization as clergy, and the supremacy of the pope.
He had taken the bull – and the bulla – by the horns. Again, this would have been impossible without printing presses: the last of these three books was published in thirty-six editions within two years, and translated into Dutch, English, Spanish, Czech and Latin. All Europe was blazing with argument. In faraway England, Henry VIII told his bishops to think up rebuttals to present against Luther. In April 1521 the newly appointed Holy Roman Emperor, the teenage Habsburg Charles V, confronted Luther in person at Worms, where the empire’s ruling council, or ‘diet’, was meeting. Confronted by his own books and told to recant, Luther famously refused. There is no evidence that he actually said: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ The words were written into his speech later, by an editor after Luther’s death. But they are too good, too resonantly right, to scrub out. For it was a potentially perilous confrontation. Luther might have expected to be burned at the stake despite the offer of safe passage to Worms.
After Worms, Luther was spirited away for his own safety by his ruler Friedrich, who kept him in the fabulously Germanic Wartburg Castle. There, disguised with a beard and a false name, Luther again did something amazing – he began translating the Bible into sharp, pungent popular German. He produced a New Testament quickly and then, over several years, a complete Bible. He boasted that he took his style not from the Latin, but from the street: ‘Ask the mother in the home, the children in the alleys, the common man in the market, about it and watch what comes out of their mouths.’ Many of his coinages, such as Herzenslust for ‘heart’s content’ and Morgenland for ‘the east’, remain in modern German. Luther said he wanted ‘to make Moses so German that nobody would suspect he was a Jew’, and his translation has been called ‘the central document in the evolution of the German language’.12
The Bibles were soon on sale at the already famous Leipzig book fair, priced at roughly the cost of a calf, or two weeks’ wages for a schoolmaster, and by Luther’s death it is reckoned half a million were in circulation. Other Bibles in local European languages and dialects had a big effect too – Britain’s King James Bible is an obvious example – but in some ways Luther’s impact on German is better compared to Shakespeare’s on English. The historian C.V. Wedgwood put it well when she said that German phrasing came to him almost too easily, ‘bursting forth in plentiful homely images, gross, earthy, graphic . . . his Bible was perhaps the most astonishing and highly personal translation ever compassed’.
So Luther had a nationalistic effect as well as a religious one. Slowly, one by one, northern German aristocrats and free towns came over to his side. Something similar was happening in Switzerland, Holland and Denmark too, where other reformers were busy. But it was obvious quite soon that Luther’s religious reformation and the beginnings of a new Church could not be neatly separated from social challenge, and even revolution. Pro-Luther crowds started destroying religious art. Strikes by miners and peasants against tax-gathering clerics used Luther-like arguments. Rebel clerics took the lead in mocking their old leaders and the old orders. Luther, who depended on the protection of an aristocrat and was himself from a prosperous family, began to seem nervous, insisting on the importance of temporal authority.
Then, during 1524–5, a huge peasant rebellion started up across Europe, from the lands of the Teutonic knights and Hungary, to Switzerland and then central Germany itself. It was uncoordinated and desperate. To the established order of late medieval Europe it was terrifying. One of Luther’s early followers, the charismatic priest Thomas Müntzer, led the most extreme movement, predicting the wiping-out of all earthly authority in an imminent apocalypse. He and his supporters briefly created a semi-communistic ‘League of God’ in the city of Mülhausen, until like the other rebellions it was shattered by the military power of the princes. Across Germany, the battle-hardened forces of the emperor, who had just returned from victories against the French in Italy, crushed the peasant armies, exacting terrible revenge. Luther egged them on. In his April 1525 pamphlet originally called An Admonition to Peace (surely the worst piece of headlining in German journalism) he wrote: ‘Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.’13
The original ‘rebel’ was now firmly on the side of the German princes who would, in turn, shift their allegiance to Lutheran Christianity. In Saxony, Hesse, Schleswig, Brunswick and Brandenburg they came over. So did most of the northern towns and cities. Though Charles V tried hard for conciliation, and planned ways to reunite his empire, there were simply too many rulers and influential soldiers now with Luther’s cause to make that practicable. Luther told his ally and fellow reformer Philipp Melanchthon that ‘agreement in doctrine is plainly impossible, unless the pope will abolish his papacy’. Luther’s theology had become more conservative in its social effects; he was a fierce advocate of a husband’s rights over his wife, and hostile to easy marriages. Against suitors he wrote: ‘If I raised a daughter with so much expense and effort, care and trouble, diligence and work and had bet all my life, body and property on her for so many years, should she not be better protected than a cow who had wandered into the forest?’ He also became a bitter anti-Semite.
In 1531 a treaty between Lutheran princes, known as the Schmalkaldic League, made the political split irrevocable. There was then a golden pause. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 allowed a time of rebuilding and economic growth, during which German culture flourished and German universities became famous – a time when even Elizabethan English plays and actors travelled to Germany to find fame. Yet the great divide that Luther had wrenched open would poison the future of Europe. The Thirty Years War wa
s looming. This would be a catastrophe driven by spear and flintlock, rape and famine, and would bring down on German soil a hell every bit as terrible as the punishment Luther had spent his life so dreading, and that the cheerful monks had sold indulgences to escape from.
Pagans and Pirates
Luther’s revolution, amplified and hardened by John Calvin in Geneva and by other reformers, such as Scotland’s forbidding John Knox, had come about partly because of a common sense that history must soon end. Christ’s awesome second coming was surely due, not least because Christendom was so threatened. Christian Europe, which would soon dominate much of the rest of the world, still felt hemmed in, divided, on the retreat. We cannot understand the ferocity of the reformers with their bleak warnings, or the paranoid excesses of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, led by fanatical Jesuits and by the Inquisition, unless we understand how frightened Christians were. The Ottoman Empire now controlled more of the Mediterranean coastline and waters than did the Christians. Fear of ‘the Turk’ haunted the imaginations of Christian children, scolded at bedtime. It took Shakespeare to portray the ‘Moor’ as fully human.
Nor was the threat of ‘the Moor’ or ‘the Turk’ limited to the capture of Mediterranean islands, the defeat of Christian fleets or the taking of Christian lands and walled towns. For many Christians, travelling by sea, or even just living near the sea, became perilous. Some of the raids were spectacular. In 1544 Muslim corsairs attacked the Bay of Naples and seized seven thousand men, women and children; ten years later they took six thousand from the ‘toe’ of Italy, then in 1566 four thousand from Granada in southern Spain, after which it was said to be ‘raining Christians’ in Algiers.14 Around most of the Christian coasts of the Mediterranean, life became more dangerous. In Corsica and Sardinia, and around much of Italy, seaside villages were deserted and rebuilt further inland. At sea, the enemy’s culling rate of Christian ships was extraordinary. In one short period, between 1609 and 1616, the Royal Navy admitted that 466 English and Scottish ships – though many of these were relatively small – had been seized by Algerian corsairs. A similar rate of attrition was suffered by Dutch, French, German and Spanish shipping, all feeding the hungry need for slaves felt by the Muslim rulers of North Africa, who used the men as labourers and the women as domestic or sexual servants.
As Christian villagers retreated from the shoreline and Christian ships became more cautious, the raiders went further afield. They turned up in the Thames estuary again and again, and took English fishermen from just off Essex and Kent. With the help of a renegade Dutch seaman, Jan Janszoon of Haarlem, who converted to Islam and called himself Murat Reis, they raided Iceland in 1627, burning the church on the island of Heimaey and taking 242 people, as well as more from the mainland near Reykjavik. Janszoon was also on the scene in 1631, when 327 people were taken from the village of Baltimore in West Cork. (He was captured himself later on, by the Knights of Malta, but later escaped and lived to a grand old age. His claimed descendants include John F. Kennedy, Humphrey Bogart and many Spencers and Churchills, one of them a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II.)
Though the high point of Muslim coastal slave-taking was between 1530 and 1640, it continued until the 1780s; and for every major raid, it is believed, there were scores of smaller ones when boats would suddenly appear in coves – villagers would run from their fields, and the corsairs would seize those they could. It is reckoned that, overall, one and a quarter million Christians were enslaved, far more than the numbers of black Africans that were taken across the Atlantic by whites during most of this time. Many would die of plague or ill-treatment in desperate circumstances in Africa. A few converted, and some were rescued or bought out by priests and wealthy families.
All this was a major source of European terror and of a certain strand of storytelling, dimly reflected in Christmas pantomimes and winter tales into modern times. Until recently it has been largely written out of mainstream history, reflecting, in part, white guilt about the Atlantic slave trade, which later became far greater, by a factor of nine or ten. In part, it surely reflects sheer embarrassment. But for Europeans of Luther’s time, the gnawing-away at the coasts caused much fear and insecurity.
The more spectacular attacks, though, came from the eastern edge of the European world, as the mighty Ottoman Empire spread ever further. After the rule of the first conqueror-sultan (who had taken Constantinople), his successors spread Islam deep into the Christian world. They faced fierce resistance. The battle of Kosovo, or more poetically, the ‘Battle of the Field of Blackbirds’, in 1389, was a devastating slaughter of Serbs by Ottomans. But it was decades before the Ottomans finally took Bosnia and Serbia. In Wallachia a man who signed himself Wladislaus Dragwlya was cheered on by the pope and half of Christendom for his victories against Mehmet II in 1459 and 1462. This Christian leader had lived as a boy in the Ottoman court, a hostage sent by his father along with his younger brother. The brother converted to Islam and served the Ottomans; the older boy learned the Koran and Turkish, but turned against Islam.
Better known today as Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler, he proved a formidable guerrilla fighter and rallied Transylvania against the invaders, surviving imprisonment in Hungary before dying in battle in Romania in 1476. His relish for executing prisoners, criminals and rivals by impalement undermined his popularity, however. At one point Dracula had twenty thousand dying and dead enemies hanging from sharpened poles, speared through their rears, around his capital. The boyars, the local princes, began to feel that relatively humane Muslim occupation might be preferable to paranoid and sadistic Christian freedom.
One of the great losers in all this was the extraordinary Jagiellon dynasty of Lithuania-Poland.
In the late 1300s Lithuania was much bigger than today’s small state. Indeed, it was the biggest single nation in Europe, stretching through today’s Ukraine, Belarus and parts of Russia. Officially it stayed as a pagan country, repulsing the bloody crusading incursions of the Teutonic knights in favour of a family of ancient gods and goddesses. These were mostly divinities of the usual things (fire, the moon, fate, death, evening stars), though, rather appealingly, they also had a god of good grooming. This pantheon met its end only in 1386, when the ruler Jogaila married Queen Jadwiga of Poland and converted to Christianity. His knights and courtiers, seeing which way the wind was blowing, now engaged in mass baptisms in the local rivers.
To the effective union of Lithuania and Poland, Hungary was later added, making the Jagiellon dynasty one of the most powerful in Europe. They, with the Habsburgs to their south, were the effective guardians of the Christian world against Eastern and later Ottoman attack. The battle of Mohacs, still remembered in Hungary today as a moment of national catastrophe, finished off the Jagiellons too. Buda, then Hungary’s capital and the place where Vlad had been imprisoned, fell to the Ottomans in 1541.
So far, we have seen a fairly straightforward picture of aggressive Muslim conquest on the one hand, and anxious Christian defence on the other. The true picture was not so straightforward. For in the middle of Europe stood the great Catholic ruler and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who to many Christians, the followers of Luther and other reformers, was seen as a greater threat than any Ottoman. His rule was less tolerant of religious difference than Muslim authority was. His grand designs for a renewed, huger empire based firmly on his family authority scared Venetians, Dutch and Frenchmen even more than the advancing armies of Ottoman janissaries. So perhaps it is not so surprising that the best-known (and best) portrait we have of Mehmet II, conqueror of Constantinople, is by Gentile Bellini, who was sent there only twenty-five years after the city’s fall by the Doge of Venice to record that scourge of all Christians. Or that in the 1460s there was already a large colony of Florentines in Galata, the town just over the water from Constantinople, running fifty businesses. Galata had churches – the only thing forbidden them was the noisy ringing of bells, which might disturb Islamic tranquillity – taverns, and Lenten car
nivals.
Nor should we be surprised that Jews, French Protestants, Lutherans and Orthodox Christians mingled safely under Muslim rule on the shores of the Bosporus. Or that François I of France, fighting the Habsburgs, looked for help in 1525 from Suleiman the Magnificent. Or even that dialogues were constantly going on between Protestant rulers and the Muslims, ranging from letters between Queen Elizabeth I and Sultan Murad III discussing an Anglo-Ottoman military pact, to an offer by Suleiman to provide troops to help Lutherans in Flanders. Many Protestants and Ottomans thought that the simplicity of their devotions and their shared dislike of statues and icons made them natural allies against the Catholics – a division based not on Christ against Muhammad but on ‘men of faith’ against ‘idolators’. This goes a long way towards explaining why it was impossible for Charles V or the popes to rally ‘Christendom’ as a single force against its enemies.
Ivan, Yermak and the Making of Russia
Why is Russia so big? Why is it the shape it is? These may seem naive questions. But there was no obvious reason why the vast sweep of forest, tundra and mountains of Siberia should be ruled by riverine Slavs living to the west, rather than by Chinese and Mongols to the east. A map of the post-Genghis world would lead one to expect a smaller Russia. And Vladimir Putin’s Russia today is one of the world’s largest countries, with its huge oil, gas and mineral wealth, its vast hinterland and its claim on the Arctic, because of battles and explorations that took place in the 1580s.