A Little History of the World (30 page)

One conqueror in particular, a former student of law named Hernando Cortez, was possessed by the wildest ambition. He wanted to march deep into the heart of the country and seize all its legendary treasures. In 1519 he left the coast at the head of 150 Spanish soldiers, thirteen horsemen and a few cannons. The Indians had never seen a white man before. Nor had they seen a horse. Horrified by the cannons, they were convinced that the Spanish bandits were powerful magicians, or even gods. Still, they made many brave attempts to defend themselves, attacking the soldiers by day as they marched and in their camp at night. But from the outset Cortez took terrible revenge, setting fire to villages and killing Indians in their thousands.

Before long, messengers came from a mighty king whose country lay further inland. They begged him to turn back and gave him magnificent gifts of gold and feathers of many colours. But the gifts only served to increase his curiosity and his greed. So on he marched, enduring unimaginable hardships, and forcing many Indians into his army as great conquerors had always done. At last he came to the kingdom of the mighty king who had sent the messengers with their gifts. The king’s name was Montezuma, and his land was called Mexico, as was its capital city. Montezuma waited respectfully for Cortez and his small force outside the city, which stood on an island at the centre of a great chain of lakes. The Spaniards were astonished when they were led across a long causeway into the city and saw the splendour, beauty and might of this great capital that was as big as any city in Europe. It had wide, straight streets and a great number of canals and bridges. And there were many squares and great marketplaces to which tens of thousands of people came each day to buy and sell.

In his report to the king of Spain Cortez wrote: ‘Here they trade in all kinds of merchandise: in foodstuffs and in jewellery made of gold, silver, pewter, brass, bone, mussel and lobster shell and feathers, in cut and uncut gems, in lime and brick, in timber, both rough and prepared … ’ In some streets, he says, they sell nothing but birds and animals of all kinds, while in others they sell infinite varieties of plants. He talks of pharmacies and barbers’ shops, bakeries and inns, merchants selling rare garden plants and fruits, utensils and pigments for painting, and how, in the marketplace, three judges always sat, ready to settle any dispute as it arose. And he describes the city’s monumental temples, each in itself as big as a town, with their tall towers and brightly decorated rooms covered in huge and terrifying depictions of gods to whom dreadful human sacrifices were made.

He was particularly impressed by Montezuma’s royal palace. Spain, he said, had nothing to compare with it. This palace was several storeys high, raised on pillars faced with jasper, its vast halls enjoying views as far as the eye could see. Beneath it stretched a fine park, with bird-ponds and a great zoo in which all sorts of wild animals were caged. Montezuma was attended by a sumptuous court of high-ranking officials who showed him the greatest deference. He changed his dress four times a day, always appearing in new and different robes never to be worn again. One approached him with one’s head bowed, and when he was carried through the streets of Mexico in a sedan chair, the people had to throw themselves to the ground before him and must never be seen to look upon his face.

Cortez used guile to trap this mighty sovereign. As if paralysed by their disrespect and insolence, Montezuma didn’t lift a finger against the white intruders. For according to an ancient saying, white gods, sons of the sun, would one day come from the east to take possession of Mexico, and Montezuma believed the Spaniards to be these gods. In fact they behaved more like white devils. They took advantage of a ceremony in a temple to attack and kill all the Mexican nobility, knowing that they would be unarmed. In the ensuing revolt Cortez forced Montezuma to appeal to the angry crowds from the palace roof. But the people ignored him. They hurled stones at their own king, and Montezuma fell, mortally wounded. In the carnage that followed, Cortez demonstrated his true courage. For, by some miracle, his little band of Spaniards fled the town in all its uproar and, carrying the sick and wounded, made their way back to the coast through that hostile land. Of course he soon returned with fresh troops and they burned and destroyed the whole of that magnificent city. And that was only the beginning. There and in other parts of America the Spaniards proceeded to exterminate the ancient, cultivated Indian peoples in the most horrendous way. This chapter in the history of mankind is so appalling and so shameful to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it.

Meanwhile the Portuguese had discovered the true sea route to the Indies, where their behaviour was little better than that of the Spaniards. All the wisdom of ancient India meant nothing to them. They too wanted gold, and nothing else would do. In the end, so much gold reached Europe from India and America that burghers grew richer and richer as knights and landowners grew poorer and poorer. And because all the ships sailed out westwards and returned from the west, it was Europe’s western ports that benefited most and grew in power and importance. Not only those of Spain and Portugal, but the ports of France and England and Holland as well. However, Germany played no part in these overseas conquests. For they had far too many problems to deal with at home.

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As you will remember, there were popes ruling in Rome after 1400 who cared more for might and magnificence than for their role as priests, and it was they who commissioned the most famous artists to build beautiful churches. This was especially true of two Medici popes, members of the family that had already done so much for the prestige and adornment of Florence. During their reigns the grandest and most magnificent buildings rose into the skies above Rome. Old St Peter’s – a church thought to have been founded by Constantine the Great and in which Charlemagne had been crowned emperor – was too plain for their taste. They planned to build a new church, far bigger and more beautiful than any seen before. But it would cost a great deal of money. Where this money came from mattered less to the popes of the day than getting hold of it and completing their wonderful church. And in their desire to please the pope, priests and monks collected money in a way which did not conform with the teachings of the Church. They made the faithful pay for the forgiveness of their sins, and called it ‘selling indulgences’. They did this in spite of the Church’s own teaching, according to which only sinners who repented might be forgiven.

Now there was at that time in Wittenberg, in Germany, a monk who belonged to the order of the Augustinians. His name was Martin Luther. When, in 1517, one of these sellers of indulgences came to Wittenberg to collect money for the new St Peter’s, whose construction that year was under the supervision of Raphael, the most famous painter in the world, Luther was determined to draw attention to the irreligious nature of this way of raising funds. He nailed a kind of poster to the doors of the church, on which he had written ninety-five theses – or points for discussion – denouncing this trade in divine forgiveness. What shocked Luther most was that people might think that they could atone for their sins with money, that God’s free, forgiving mercy could be bought. He had always seen himself as a sinner living, like all sinners, in fear of God’s wrath. Only one thing could save him from God’s punishment and that was God’s infinite mercy which, as Luther believed, could not be bought, for if it could, it would no longer be mercy. Before God, who sees all and knows all, even a good person is a sinner who deserves to be punished. Only faith in God’s freely given mercy can save him, and nothing else.

In the bitter arguments that now broke out on the subject of indulgences and their abuse, Luther’s opinions took on an increasingly insistent and forceful tone, both in his teaching and his writings. Nothing but faith matters, said Luther. All else is superfluous. And that also goes for the Church and the priests who, when they celebrate Mass, intercede on behalf of the faithful so that they, too, may share in God’s mercy. God’s mercy needs no intercessors. All an individual needs to be saved is his own unshakable belief and faith in his God. Faith means believing in the great mysteries of the Gospel
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believing that we are eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood from the chalice when we take Holy Communion. No one can help another person to obtain God’s grace. Every believer is, as it were, his own priest. A priest of the Church is no more than a teacher and helper, and as such may live like other men, and even marry. A believer must not be content to accept the teaching of the Church. He must look to the Bible for God’s purpose and seek it out for himself. For, in Luther’s opinion, the truth was only to be found in the Bible.

Luther was not the first to have such thoughts. A hundred years earlier a priest called Jan Hus had taught much the same in Prague. In 1415 he was brought before a council of Church dignitaries in Constance, and despite the promise of an imperial safe conduct, was burned as a heretic. Many of his followers were persecuted and killed in a succession of long and bloody battles that devastated half Bohemia.

The same fate might have befallen Luther and his followers, but times had changed. Thanks largely to the invention of the art of printing, Luther’s writings were bought and read throughout Germany. They were written in a style that was vigorous and rousing – and often very coarse. Many people were won over by his arguments. When the pope came to hear of it, he threatened to excommunicate Luther. But Luther’s following was by now so great that he no longer cared. He burned the pope’s letter in public, and then he really was excommunicated. Next he announced that he and his followers had left the Church altogether. Germany was in an uproar, and many people sided with him, for the luxury-loving pope, with all his wealth, was not at all popular in Germany. Nor was there much opposition from the German princes, for if the bishops and archbishops were to lose their power, the Church’s vast estates would fall to them. So they, too, joined the Reformation, which was the name that was given to Luther’s attempt to reawaken the Christian piety of old.

Now at about this time – that is, in 1519 – the emperor Maximilian, the ‘Last Knight’, died. His grandson, the Habsburg Charles V, who was also a grandson of the Spanish queen, Isabella of Castile, became the new German emperor. He was just nineteen years old and had never set foot in Germany, having only lived in Belgium, Holland and Spain, which also formed part of his inheritance. As king of Spain he also ruled over newly discovered America, where Cortez had recently made his conquests. And so anyone who wished to flatter him could say that over his kingdom the sun never set (it being daytime in America when it is night-time here). His vast realm – comprising as it did the ancient hereditary Habsburg lands of Austria, the Low Countries inherited from Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Spain and the German empire – had only one rival in Europe, and this was France. However, the French kingdom, under its able king, Francis I, though far smaller than Charles V’s empire, was more united, richer and more stable. These two kings now embarked on a fearfully complicated and long drawn-out war over Italy, the richest country in Europe. Successive popes backed first one, then the other, until finally, in 1527, Rome was sacked and pillaged by the emperor’s German troops and Italy’s wealth destroyed.

But in 1519, when Charles V first came to power, he was a very devout young man, still on excellent terms with the Pope, and anxious, once his coronation at Aachen was over, to settle the case of the heretic Luther. It would have been simplest to have him arrested, but Frederick, Duke of Saxony, the Prince of Wittenberg, where Luther was living, would not allow it. Known as Frederick the Wise, he was to be Luther’s great protector and would one day save his life.