by Andrew Marr
This was not democracy, but it was a radical spreading of power among wealthier men all over the country. It suggested that people did not necessarily have to put up with whoever ruled them, and posed the possibility of a new kind of nation in which people had rights, were not afraid of their rulers, and could think and act more freely. Something similar had already happened in Holland, but the British experiment had a more profound effect. It made Britain a magnet for persecuted minorities elsewhere in Europe, including the French Protestants, and showed there was one major country where people could publish more or less what they wanted to. It inspired thinkers in France, particularly.
But this experiment was picked up most dramatically by colonists in Britain’s thirteen seaboard settlements in North America, who drove the thinking of the British reformers to its logical conclusion by creating a state based on elections, rights and a written-down constitution. It was not simply a change of tack, but a dynamic change of the rules, whose consequences nobody really understood.
Indeed, it started an argument that is still going on between Beijing and Washington, Moscow and Brussels: what is the right balance between state authority and individual liberty? No successful state is a steady state. All successful states experience a relentless tug-of-war between conservatism, the wisdom of the tribe, and radicalism, or new thinking. The wisdom of the tribe really matters: it is the accumulated lessons of history, the mistakes as well as the answers, that a polity has gathered up so far. But if this wisdom is not challenged it ossifies. The political revolutions of the British and then the Americans encouraged individuals to alter the balance of powers, without destroying their states. In France, where a conservative monarchy collapsed, revolutionaries tried to wipe out the past entirely and create a new present based only on radical questioning, or ‘reason’; it was a bold but bloody failure, copied again and again.
The British-American experiment encouraged new thinkers in natural science to express their ideas more freely than was possible in most of Europe; that in turn would allow experimenters and financial speculators to make the breakthrough in energy use and manufacture that we call ‘the industrial revolution’; and that, in turn, gave ‘the West’ an advantage over the rest of the world that it would keep almost until our own times. This all comes later. What matters in this period is that the British–American experience did not seem the only sensible, or even the most sensible, answer to the question of how to achieve the right balance between wisdom and challenge, between the old and the new. The other fashionable idea was absolutism, the notion that a wise, watchful and energetic leader can safely guide a country between the whirlpools of decline and chaos. In rather different guises, and stripped of its quaint trappings, this idea is still rampantly popular among unelected rulers across much of our world.
And Yet It Moves
A day in August 1609: in one of the most gorgeously decorated rooms in the world, the Hall of the College in the Doge’s Palace in Venice, a voluble, red-bearded man caused a sensation. He handed to the Doge, ruler of the Serene Republic, surrounded by his counsellors and naval commanders, a leather-covered tube. After a hubbub of questions and answers, all these men then rushed out of the palace and across the square to Venice’s great church, the Basilica of St Mark, and climbed up to the top of the tower. The Doge squinted down the tube. One by one, in turn, so did the rest. On the mainland, miles away, shimmering buildings appeared before their eyes. On nearby islands, the Doge and his men saw people entering their churches; out at sea, galleys still more than two hours’ sailing time from Venice could be clearly observed. What they had here was a wonderful military and practical tool. The man who brought it would be richly rewarded.
He was a Pisan mathematician, now lecturing in Venetian territory, called Galileo Galilei. Galileo had stolen the idea from a poor Hollander, who had made his way down from Flanders, where spectacle-makers had invented the telescope, and who had hoped to make a fortune for himself in Italy. But Galileo, working hard on the lenses, improved the gadget hugely. Shrewdly, he had given the telescope to the Doge as a present. Then he went back to his workshop in nearby Padua and made even better ones. It was not long before he turned one of them upwards, to the night sky.
Galileo was already known as a loud-mouthed, exuberant, greedy character who liked to challenge conventional thinking. His work was mostly practical; he advised rulers on ballistics, fortifications and the pumping of water. He had invented a military compass. But he was also known for questioning accepted thinking in the Christian world about nature, then dominated by Aristotle’s explanations formulated almost two thousand years earlier. In one of his books, Galileo had a follower of Aristotle ask who could be mankind’s guide if the Greek sage were to be abandoned. His interlocutor retorts: ‘Only the blind need a guide. Those with eyes and those with a mind must use these faculties to discern for themselves.’1 These two sentences express perfectly Galileo’s enthusiasm for practical, experimental science.
The great breakthrough in challenging the old orthodoxy concerning the Earth’s place in Creation had come sixty years earlier when a German–Polish polymath called Nicolaus Copernicus had published On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Many churchmen, Protestants as well as Catholics, had been shocked. Yet the idea of the Earth moving round the sun had not been immediately rejected by the Catholic Church, even though it contradicted the accepted view that God had placed sun, moon and planets on separate shell-like outer spheres to guide and help mankind. To start with, the possibility of the new thinking being accommodated to the Bible was debated. Not for long, though. When the radical roving friar Giordano Bruno, after a lifetime of disobedient speculation, was finally accused of heresy for numerous crimes including arguing that the sun was a star and the universe infinite, he was convicted. With a steel spike through his tongue to stop him talking, he was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
The gap between Galileo’s optimism about human intelligence and what happened to Bruno goes a long way towards explaining why the renaissance in learning did not lead to a breakthrough in technology and to an industrial revolution in Italy and Spain, in the 1600s, rather than in Britain, in the 1700s. Because we are so used to the order in which things did actually happen, we take utterly for granted that the great capitalist leap forward did not occur earlier. It was odd, though. For Italy and other parts of the European south had been immersed in the ideas of the Renaissance and had already developed an expertise in accounting, banking and small-scale engineering that might well have prompted a spurt in development, rather than a sputtering out.
‘Renaissance’ is not an entirely useful word. Although from the late 1200s through to the 1500s there was indeed a rediscovery and a fresh interest in the classical civilizations, the most interesting breakthroughs were new ones. So this was more birth than rebirth. By the 1400s northern Italy, and parts of northern Europe too, possessed most of the requirements for an enlightenment take-off. Europe’s first universities were offering to those who could afford to make use of it a lively education. As soon as printing was more widespread, ideas and arguments travelled fast. In Latin, there was a common language. There was competition, between powerful states such as Florence, Genoa and Venice. At times this overflowed into war, and the sciences of mathematics, ballistics, optics and medicine were advancing fast as rival rulers and armies struggled for advantage. Leonardo da Vinci’s enthusiasm for fortifications and novel weaponry is only the most famous example.
Below the level of celebrated inventors existed a powerful base of technical skill, craftsmen and designers able to make the working parts for guns, timepieces, spectacles, and engines for dredging, lifting and pumping. Guilds set professional standards, and common measurements were spreading. A vigorous trading network put the Italians in touch with the latest ideas and carried news from the Arab world and the rest of Europe. And trade brought with it a relatively sophisticated financial system, with long-distance transactions now possible. Italian th
inkers and inventors, as well as artists, had more options than ever before. Galileo was one of the many who kept moving from town to town for better deals, like a modern academic for hire. We find even a very early example of industrial manufacture. At the famous Arsenale in Venice, rigorously organized and with a workforce of sixteen thousand, the republic could produce one prefabricated, fully equipped fighting or merchant ship a day (something that took months elsewhere in Europe). This showed that, even if this was an isolated example, sixteenth-century Italians had something of the organizational capacity of twentieth-century manufacturers.
Casting an eye over Europe, you might have reasonably predicted that the great advance from agricultural and aristocratic civilizations to fully urban and industrial ones would begin around the River Po, rather than the Trent or the Aire, and a century and a half earlier than it did. Educated Italians had become vigorous, competitive and curious, as well as wealthy. Their curiosity was aimed at the natural world, and technologies to control it: though when we think of the Renaissance today we think first of ‘art’ rather than of science or commerce, as we saw with Leonardo, this was not a division that would have been understood at the time. In their discoveries about perspective, colour and distance, lighting and anatomy, other Italian and Dutch painters had proved themselves intense, steady, analytical lookers. They also had to be skilled craftsmen and amateur chemists too, collecting the ingredients, then grinding, mixing, thinning and thickening their colours, ensuring in the process that they would stay fresh and clear. Many used ground-glass lenses to help with their looking.
What was Galileo doing, then, other than using his lenses and his powers of reason to look harder than anyone had before, albeit at objects rather further away than was then usual? He has been called the father of ‘science’, but he would not have understood the word. His father was a musician and an early experimenter in opera; Galileo was fascinated by the physics of music, just as he was by the proportions of Dante’s Hell. His was a world that feels very close to that of the Enlightenment and the early industrial revolution.
The difference was that Renaissance Italy, and most of Renaissance Europe, existed under the authority not just of autocratic local rulers but of a larger power, which by Galileo’s time was imposing itself ever more rigorously. The rebirth of classical learning had been used to buttress the Catholic Christian world. Plato was turned into a kind of unwitting early Christian prophet, Aristotle became a pillar of Christian orthodoxy, Ptolemy a champion of the biblical version of the cosmos. Even the Greek and Roman myths were reinterpreted as Christian allegories. Dante, steeped in the pagan Cicero, used the pagan Virgil as his guide to a Christian underworld. The Genoese polymath Leon Battista Alberti studied the Roman architect Vitruvius and ancient Roman ruins (as well as Arab optics); but he was also a devout Christian priest who used his knowledge to build Christian churches, such as the glorious Florentine Santa Maria Novella.
Michelangelo was steeped in the classics. When the great sculpture of the Laocoön – all snakes and muscled writhing – was dug up under a vineyard on Rome’s Esquiline Hill in 1506, having been buried since ancient times, he was promptly summoned to view it. (He has even been accused of forging it.) Michelangelo’s David is a hulking, contemplative Greek giant, except that he is also a Jewish-Christian hero. Again and again, the great trick of the Renaissance was to dress Christian culture in an imperial toga and to make classical philosophy the servant of popes. This has given mankind some of the greatest artefacts ever made, but it put a limit on the scientific advances that could be allowed.
Galileo used his telescope to study first the moon, then Jupiter’s moons, then the vast scatter of previously unseen stars. It rammed home to him the impossibility of the Ptolemaic system, with such force that he believed he could win the Vatican over. He was able to have long and serious conversations with leading Vatican thinkers including the cardinal (later made a saint) Robert Bellarmine, who was the main intellectual force behind the Counter-Reformation at the time. But it was not only the fate of Bruno, whose crimes against orthodoxy went rather further than astronomy, that should have made Galileo cautious.
In Venice, one of his great friends was Friar Paolo Sarpi, an eminent scholar and statesman who had led the struggle against the Vatican over the pope’s ultimate authority inside that cynical and materialistic republic. Sarpi had also fought hard for Venetian independence in secular matters. Pope Paul V had responded by excommunicating the Doge and all Venetian officials. This was a drastic step for those at the sharp end. In the words of one of Galileo’s biographers, ‘All of the Venetian republic was cut off from the body of Christ, until the authority of the pope was recognized . . . Baptisms and burials were to cease. Marriages were dissolved and children declared illegitimate. Husbands could desert their wives, and children did not have to obey their parents.’2 Sarpi responded by having the Jesuits expelled from Venice, and although a compromise was eventually arrived at, Friar Sarpi had paid a high price. Assassins jumped him one night and stabbed him fifteen times, sticking a thin dagger right through his head.
Incredibly, Sarpi survived, while his attackers fled to the Papal States. But this was an eloquent statement of the Vatican’s determination to enforce obedience. Threatened by the Protestant Reformation and by new ideas of all kinds, these were the decades of the Pope Militant, the fighting papacy that insisted on absolute deference and, increasingly, on absolute orthodoxy.
Mainly, it seems, out of greed, Galileo then left the relatively secure haven of Venice and returned to work for Florence. Though he was provocative and argumentative, and the religious backlash against him gathered force, he always assumed he could talk his way out of trouble. When Cardinal Bellarmine summoned him on 26 February 1616 and told him that he must abandon any idea that the sun stood still and the Earth revolved around it – and, furthermore, that he must promise not to hold, teach or defend such a notion either in writing or in words – Galileo agreed; but he seems to have come to the hasty conclusion that this was not a ‘real’ last warning. Meanwhile, all the works of Copernicus were put on the Vatican’s list of banned books.
Ill and ageing, Galileo was more or less silent for a while. But then he returned to the attack: his bullish character and love of a good argument with ignorant priests made the final trial almost an inevitability. In 1632, after his book Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems had mocked the arguments of the new pope (a one-time friend), Galileo was threatened with torture and being burned alive. After long and menacing interrogations, he eventually recanted, declaring that the Earth did not move round the sun. He was condemned nonetheless as being ‘vehemently suspected of heresy’. Legend has it that he defiantly muttered, ‘And yet it moves’, after publicly abjuring the Copernican system. His punishment was imprisonment, first in Rome, then later at home in Tuscany, where he continued to write.
No enlightenment and no scientific revolution could have emerged from a place where thinkers were forced to ‘abjure, curse and detest’ ideas they had been driven to by examining the physical world. Renaissance Italy had the makers, the thinkers, the bankers and the competition for take-off, but it also had the Inquisition. The tragedy was that in the north of Europe, although the climate was freer, at the time it mostly lacked the energy of northern Italy. In the north, Galileo was very quickly compared to Christopher Columbus as the discoverer of new worlds – but as an explorer who had spilled no blood and made even more important discoveries. When he was old, under house arrest and on the verge of blindness and death, the Dutch tried to pay him to help them discover the secret of measuring longitude at sea, vital for safer ocean sailing. He was flattered and tempted, but an embarrassed Catholic Church banned him from taking Amsterdam’s gold. Some years afterwards the problem was cracked by a Dutchman, Christiaan Huygens, and later more effectively still by the Englishman John Harrison.
Meanwhile, writings advocating the Copernican system stayed on the Vatican’s list of banned books
until 1835.3 The power of enlightenment and its revolutionary effect on the human story had moved north.
Absolutism and Its Enemies
The next major idea to dominate Europe was that centralizing and modernizing version of monarchy, ‘absolutism’. This could fairly be described as a dull notion exuberantly embellished with stone and scandal. Half the capital cities of Europe still have palaces, arches or other monuments to the rule of some family of absolutists. Some of the most exotic characters in Western history – Russia’s Catherine the Great and Peter the Great, Prussia’s Frederick the Great – were absolute monarchs from this period. At its most ambitious, the idea was to bulldoze the tangle of local privileges, civic rights, tolls, traditions and charters inherited from the medieval centuries, in the name of the king, who would substitute a single, efficient, properly organized central authority. This authority would improve roads, excavate canals, raise taxes for a standing army and establish reliable laws for all subjects. ‘The state? It’s me,’ said Louis XIV, France’s Sun King. He did not mean it entirely as a joke.
Louis and those rulers who copied him worked hard to undermine the old semi-autonomous power of the provincial aristocratic landowners and clerical foundations, creating mesmerizing courts to stun, intimidate and lure. In many ways they provided the basis for the nation-states that followed. Outside France, the most assertive absolutists were the Russian Romanovs, who created a new capital, St Petersburg, and who modelled themselves on Western rulers and especially on the royal house of Prussia, the Hohenzollerns, whom we will meet later. But in this era the greatest rivals of Louis’s family, the Bourbons, were the Habsburgs, whose territories were even larger and who we have already come across in Spain.