The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  After his return to Venice, the Italian city of Genoa captured Marco in a war. To pass the time in prison Marco told another prisoner about his travels, and this man helped him to retell his story in a book. The Travels of Marco Polo had a great success. He wrote it long before the age of printing in the West, but Europeans copied and recopied Marco’s book thousands of times.

  The import of the Travels lies in what he told the Europeans. China, Marco said, had the greatest ruler in the world, messengers who swiftly carried royal orders everywhere, money that (amazingly) was printed, and vast amounts of silk and cloth of gold (most alluring to the European merchants). Japan, which he had only heard about, was very wealthy, “so that no one could count its riches.” India, where the Polos stopped on the homeward voyage, was so hot that even kings wore nothing but loincloths. Its people were devout, and India was rich in diamonds, pearls, and spices (also tempting to a merchant). Everyone obeyed the laws, and traveling merchants safely slept outdoors with sacks of jewels beneath their heads. All in all, Marco Polo gave his fellow Europeans appealing glimpses of a wider world.

  BEGINNING IN THE later 1400s Europe looked as if it had a destiny within that wider world. For one thing, Europeans now became the leading makers and sellers in the world. Until this time, Europeans had imported costly goods, like silk and paper, that were made in Asia and North Africa. But as the Middle Ages ended, they discovered how to make their own fine goods, the ones that only wealthy folk could buy. These included paper, perfumed soap, handsome woolens, goblets, mirrors, clocks, and (something new) eyeglasses. They made them for themselves and also for the export trade to Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.

  In the case of paper, Europeans now used river-water power to run machines that shredded rags, thus making lint, which used to be the sole ingredient in paper. (In other places workers shredded cloth by hand.) Because they saved on labor costs, Europeans’ paper cost less than their foreign competition’s. Other examples of Europe’s rising economic role: Christian Venice made lamps of glass for use in mosques in Muslim lands, adorning them with phrases from the Qur’an. And European foundries made the cannons that the (Asian) Turks employed in 1453 to smash the walls of Constantinople.

  European merchants thrived and some got very rich, far richer than that Scottish merchant Godric, who had sailed his ship from port to port four centuries before. The biggest of the biggest were the Fuggers, in the south of what today is Germany. In the late 1470s the brothers who controlled the Fugger business found they needed help. The two convinced their youngest brother, Jacob, who had planned to be a monk, to join them. Jacob proved to be a business genius; soon he ran the firm. The Fuggers traded everywhere in velvets, spices, jewels, and guns, and mined for copper, silver, mercury, and gold. Jacob’s motto was “I want to profit while I can,” and he was known as “Jacob the Rich.” He wasn’t sure that God would overlook his greed, so in his final years he tried to make up for it by building houses for the poor.

  In these same years when businessmen were on the rise, Europeans saw another major change, the making of the printed book. Printed books were something like computers in our times: an invention that transformed the way we humans store and spread our knowledge. Before the 1400s, copyists made books by hand at great expense. A person who desired a copy of a book had first to borrow someone else’s copy, and then find a scribe to do the work. The scribe would copy each and every word, writing with a goose quill pen, in lampblack ink, on pages cut from sheepskin. To copy a Bible took about fifteen months.

  In the middle 1400s German craftsmen found a better way to make a book. (They probably borrowed the idea partly from the Chinese, who for a thousand years had been printing books with wooden blocks.) A printer first poured molten metal into molds. The result was many little metal sticks, each of which had the shape of a letter on one end. A compositor then set a book in type by picking out the sticks (the letters) that he needed to form words, and grouping them in lines. After he had several dozen lines of type he locked them and set them on a printing press. Another man rubbed ink across the type, laid a piece of paper on it, and then pulled a lever. A mechanism pushed the paper down against the ink-rubbed type, thus printing all those lines of words. Then the workman printed other pages of the book, and a binder sewed them all together.

  In the early 1450s Europe may have boasted just one printer, a German named Johannes Gutenberg. He produced what may have been the earliest printed book, a handsome Bible. But only several decades later printers were at work in all the major cities. Since books were so much cheaper now, many Europeans learned to read, and printers rushed to offer them the books they wanted. In the 1470s an Italian printer apologized for his careless work. Other men were printing the same book, he said, so he had to rush his book through the press “faster than you can cook asparagus.” Another printer had a placard on his door that said, “Talk of nothing else but business, and dispatch that business fast.”

  Printers turned out countless sacred books, a lot of easy reading, and a bit of everything else. Some books would shape the future since they made their readers think. These books included tracts of Protestant reformers, sly attacks on kings, medical textbooks, travel diaries, business handbooks, and theories about the earth and sun. Long ago a historian observed, “He who first shortened the labour of copyists by device of Movable Type was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new democratic world.”

  THESE BUSY DECADES also were the age of what we sometimes call “new monarchs.” Kings were trying, more perhaps than rulers ever had before, to dominate their lands. Usually their tactics were to raise their revenues from taxes, use these funds to raise an army, and employ the army to suppress the wealthy nobles. (The wealthy nobles sometimes maintained armies of their own and fought against their kings.) Rulers wanted all power in their hands.

  In France in 1422, Charles VII, a boy of seventeen, inherited the throne and the problems that his father, who was often mad, had never solved. A major problem was the noblemen, the castle dwellers who would take no orders from the king. The other problem was the English, who had raided France since early in the 1300s in what was now the “Hundred Years’ War.” The English ruled great chunks of northern and southwestern France, including the capital, Paris. Charles lacked the money for an army strong enough to drive them out. Most Frenchmen didn’t care if he did or didn’t.

  Charles looked like the last man in France who could solve these problems. He was puny, timid, and gloomy. Because the English held his capital, he lived south of it in the provincial town of Bourges. He was too indolent to drag himself to Reims, where kings of France were always crowned, so the mocking French had named him “king of Bourges.”

  Then, however, France encountered something new, the force of national pride. In a village in northeastern France, a teenage girl named Joan brooded over “the pity that was in the Kingdom of France.” She heard the voices of saints telling her that God had chosen her to help her king win back his land. She went to the court of Charles, and she persuaded this pathetic man to let her join his little army. Amazingly, with utter confidence that God was on their side, Joan inspired the troops and got them fighting.

  While Joan was fighting north of Paris, though, the English captured her. Despite what she had done for him, Charles made no attempt to save her, and a Church court tried her as a religious heretic. The judges were Frenchmen who backed the English, and they had no trouble deciding that Joan was the tool of the Devil. The English and their French collaborators burned her at the stake. A secretary to the English king cried, “We are lost! We burned a saint!”

  Surprisingly, Charles finally pulled himself together. He called meetings of the French “estates” (churchmen, nobles, and well-off commoners) and got them to permit him to collect a special wartime tax. (This tax was later called the taille, or “cut.”) He spent most of the resulting income building up his army, and he used the army to repel the Engli
sh. By 1453 the French had won their country back, and ended the long war.

  Charles and the kings who followed him always needed money, but they knew that the estates would not allow a tax in peacetime. So they ceased requesting their permission to collect the taille; they simply did it. Because they had the troops that they had hired with the money they had earlier collected, the kings could stifle any protests. Their income from the taille became a major source of kingly power and one reason why France, for centuries, was Europe’s greatest power.

  After Charles had died, his able son Louis XI spent his revenues on soldiers, bribes, and smart advisers, and he used them to domesticate the nobles. He could be very cruel. For years he kept some enemies shut up in iron cages that a bishop had designed for him. (Louis later held that bishop in one of his cages for fourteen years.) The king’s immense ambition was to overcome his mortal foe, the wealthy duke of Burgundy. France became a single country when, in 1477, soldiers in the pay of Louis crushed the army of the duke. Two days later, searchers found the body of the duke, stripped by looters. His head was split from scalp to chin.

  While Charles and Louis won control of France, England seemed to fall apart. Mighty nobles fought each another for the throne, or at least to rule the man upon the throne. Near the finish of these civil wars, Richard, duke of Gloucester, seized the throne from his twelve--year-old nephew (and may have had him murdered). But then a wealthy noble, Henry Tudor, who had a shaky claim to the throne, raised an army and in 1485 defeated Richard (who died in battle, with the crown of England lying on a nearby bush). Then Parliament, the English legislature, made Henry king.

  One by one, the king got rid of rivals. He exiled or beheaded some survivors of the wars, obliged the others to disband their private armies, and seized his enemies’ estates. The sister of the late boy king had a better title to the throne than Henry, but Henry married her. That took care of that, but hostile claimants to the kingship were another matter. Among them was a boy named Lambert Simnel, who pretended to be an earl with a title to the throne. Some nobles rallied to his banner, but King Henry crushed the rebels, and he made the boy a scullery worker in his kitchen. Another boy pretended to be the younger brother of the late (perhaps murdered) boy king. Backed by several European kings he thrice invaded England, but Henry caught and hanged him.

  Henry made finance his special project. He closely checked the royal ledgers, initialing every page with “H” as he approved it. With his own great fortune, and the lands he took from enemies, and the taxes he persuaded Parliament to approve, he made himself ten times as rich as England’s richest lord.

  In Spain the story of the rise of royal power differs for this simple reason: until the end of the Middle Ages no country known as “Spain” existed. Three small kingdoms nearly filled the Iberian Peninsula: Portugal on the west, Castile in the center, and Aragon on the east. (A little Moorish, Muslim, kingdom held the south.) But in 1469, Isabella, who was going to inherit Castile from her half-brother King Henry the Impotent, married her cousin Ferdinand, who was going to inherit Aragon. When she later inherited Castile and he Aragon, they in effect united the two kingdoms to form one country, known by the ancient name of the region, Spain.

  That was the easy part. The bigger problem was the usual one: making everybody stay in line. So Ferdinand and Isabella did the things that other kings were doing: collecting taxes, choosing loyal governors, and smashing castles of unruly nobles with cannons. They also ordered towns to hire squads of archers and shoot down bandits in the hills.

  With “unbelievers” the king and queen were harsh. In 1492 they conquered the remaining Muslims in the south of Spain, and drove them out. In the same triumphant year the two expelled the Spanish Jews, robbing them of most of what they owned. They turned their temples into churches and their graveyards into pastures. The “Catholic monarchs” (as everybody called them) were certain that by ousting Jews and Muslims they were pleasing God. They may have also felt, if they didn’t put it into words, that by ridding Spain of other faiths they made their subjects one united people.

  BY THE FINAL decade of the 1400s western Europe’s monarchs had their homes in order. Now they could afford to add a room or two. We shall tell this story (briefly), because it explains so much about the Europeans’ fighting skills, and the role they were about to play in world affairs. In 1494 King Charles VIII of France (the son of Louis XI) resolved to seize the realm of Naples in the south of Italy. He had inherited a doubtful claim to Naples, and he claimed to want it as a base from which to wage a war against the Muslim Turks. What he really craved was land and glory. But for France to conquer Naples, even if it could, would be a foolish move, since the two were far apart. With little trouble Charles’s army marched through Italy to Naples and defeated it. But other countries started to oppose him and, just then, his troops began to melt away, ravaged by disease. So the king and army marched back home, bearing loot and syphilis. They slithered past an allied army that almost trapped them in a mountain pass.

  Charles’s failure should have taught his fellow kings to ponder well before they started foreign escapades. But of course it didn’t. They felt the lure not just of Naples but of all Italian cities. Italy was not an infant nation, as theirs were, but a group of city-states (like ancient Greece) that were temptingly rich and weak. So the wars that Charles began continued, with European countries fighting one another over Naples, Florence, Venice, and Milan. The fighting over Italy ended in 1529, with Spain in possession of Naples and Milan. But these Italian wars were followed by a general European one. European warring would continue, though with pauses, until 1945.

  War was both a chronic sickness and a force in shaping Europe’s domineering ways. Because they fought so much, the Europeans got quite good at killing. Already by the time of the Italian wars, the days of men in armor clanking down the battlefield on horses were long gone. Men, meaning gentlemen, still fought on horses, but the infantry were more important. The soldiers most admired were the hardy Spanish swordsmen and the dreaded Swiss, who fought in clusters holding long, sharp pikes, like porcupines.

  It was guns, however, that began to star on battlefields. As we said in chapter 5, the Chinese long before had taught the world what happens when you light a mix of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. When Europeans learned about gunpowder, they used it first to fire big balls of stone or iron from heavy cannons. These guns were hard to move, and they might explode and kill their crews, but they battered down the walls of castles.

  By the early 1500s, gunsmiths turned out lighter cannons that were easier to haul from place to place. Gunners fired them now not just at castles but also at opposing armies. Captains fastened them to ships and used them to blast their way into enemies’ harbors. At about the same time, gunsmiths also started making iron tubes, carried on the shoulder, that used gunpowder to shoot bullets made of lead. With one of these little portable cannons (or early muskets) a soldier could kill an enemy from two hundred yards away.

  Armies of the time were pitiless. Here (condensed) is how a well-informed Italian pictured Charles VIII’s attack against a fortress: “This was a strong position, well-supplied and manned. But the French bombarded it for a few hours and then assaulted it with such ferocity that they took it by storm that very same day. Then, because of their natural fury and in order to discourage other places from resisting by this example, they slaughtered great numbers. After having committed every other possible kind of atrocity, they set the buildings on fire.

  “This manner of warfare filled the whole kingdom [of Naples] with terror; because in victories [before this], however achieved, the cruelty of the victors usually did not go beyond disarming the defeated soldiers and setting them free, sacking towns taken by force and taking prisoner the inhabitants until they paid a ransom, but always sparing the lives of those who had not been killed in the heat of battle.”2

  2Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy, ed. John R. Hale, trans. Cecil Grayson (1964), 185–86.
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  TAXES, WEAPONS, LIES, and slaughter — in the early 1500s these unpleasant subjects filled the thoughts of Niccolò Machiavelli. This famous student of politics grew up in Florence (see map, page 128) while the able Medici family ruled the city (and while two other gifted Florentines, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti, were learning to paint and sculpt). After an unusual Medici (a bungler) was driven from the city, Machiavelli served an anti-Medici government for fourteen years as Florence’s “secretary.” He had a part in almost all that Florence did. He helped run a war against the nearby town of Pisa, and he went on missions to a king of France and to a Holy Roman Emperor. He learned a lot while representing Florence at the camp of Cesare Borgia, the ruthless son of the pope, while Cesare waged a war in central Italy. He witnessed Cesare’s pleasure on the day he caught and caged some men who had betrayed him, and strangled several others.

  In 1512 the Medici returned to power and Machiavelli lost his job. They suspected him of plotting, and had him tortured on the rack, but when they found no evidence against him they released him. Just to play it safe he lived outside the city for a while. There he quickly wrote two books, a long one about ancient Rome, which no one reads today, and a short, electrifying one called The Prince.