Europe: A History (91 page)
PRESS
T
HE
printing-press of Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg, which started work c.1450 in the Rhineland city of Mainz, did not initiate the art of printing. It was the successor to an ancient line of Chinese woodblocks, metal engraving plates, and stone lithographs. Even so, it launched a revolution in information technology. Like many inventions, it created an original process through the combination of several existing techniques, including those of the Roman wine-press, the goldsmith’s punch, and impressionable paper. Also, through the use of movable metal type cast in replica moulds, it saw the first application of ‘the theory of interchangeable parts’—one of the basic principles of a later machine age. It possessed the inestimable facility for the text of a book to be set up, edited, and corrected before being reproduced in thousands of identical copies.
Gutenberg is probably best remembered for his 43-line and 36-line Bibles. But in some ways his printing of the
Catholicon
or ‘Book of Universal Knowledge’ represents a more distinctive milestone. This encyclopedia had been compiled by the Genoese Giovanni Balbo in the thirteenth century. In Gutenberg’s printed edition, it marked the first item of secular literature in mass circulation. It contains a brief preface from the publisher:
With the help of the Most High, at whose will the tongues of infants become eloquent… this noble book has been printed and accomplished without the help of reed, stylus, or pen, but by the wondrous agreement, proportion, and harmony of punches and types, in the Year of the Lord’s Incarnation 1460, in the notable city of Mainz of the renowned German nation.
1
Within the period of
incunabula
before 1500, when printing was in its swaddling clothes, the main roman, italic, and gothic type-styles emerged; and the presses spread quickly to Basle (1466), Rome (1467), Pilzno in Bohemia (1468), Paris (1470), Buda (1473), Cracow (1474), Westminster (1476), and Cetinje in Montenegro (1493). Printing reached Moscow in 1555.
The power of the printed word inevitably aroused the fears of the religious authorities. Hence Mainz, the cradle of the press, also became the cradle of censorship. In 1485, the local Archbishop-Elector asked the city council of nearby Frankfurt-am-Main to examine the books to be exhibited at the Lenten Fair, and to help in the suppression of dangerous publications. As a result, in the following year, Europe’s earliest censorship office was set up jointly by the electorate of Mainz and the city of Frankfurt. The first edict issued by the Frankfurt censor against printed books banned vernacular translations of the Bible.
2
[INDEX]
In contrast to Christendom, the Islamic world exercised a total ban on printing until the nineteenth century. The consequences, both for Islam and for the spread of knowledge in general, can hardly be exaggerated.
3
The strategic shift was signalled by two landmark events: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 and the fall of Granada to the Spaniards in 1492. The consequences were immense. The shift gave rise in the religious sphere to the last vain attempt to reunite the two divided halves of Christendom; in the economic sphere to the search for new trade routes. In the realm of geopolitics, it ensured that the emergent kingdom of Spain was bathed in Catholic triumphal-ism, whilst the emergent principality of Moscow was immersed in the resentments of the Orthodox defeat. The liberated West, led by Spain, was preparing for the conquest of new worlds. The embattled Orthodox East, led by Moscow, dug in behind its mental stockade. Each in its own way was preparing a further round in the medieval quest for a Christian empire.
Given the Ottoman encirclement of Constantinople (see p. 386), Christian leaders were driven to reconsider the healing of the Schism between the Greek and Latin Churches. The result was the ill-starred Union of Florence of 1439, one of the most pathetic episodes in the scandalous annals of Christian disunity. The Greeks had been petitioning the Papacy for decades, and a Venetian Pope, Eugene IV (1431–47), finally recognized the emergency. Indeed, being pressured beyond endurance by the reforming Council of Basle, he saw that mending relations with the Orthodox might strengthen his own position. The negotiations which opened in Ferrara in January 1438 and continued in Florence were led by the Pope; by the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeologos (r. 1425–48) and his Patriarch; and by twenty-two bishops, who had deserted their colleagues in Basle to attend. Not surprisingly, the desperate Greeks gave way on all matters of substance, readily accepting the Roman doctrines of papal supremacy, purgatory, the Eucharist, and the
Filioque
. The way was cleared for reinstating the unity of the Church on papal terms. In the decree
Laetantur coeli
of 6 July 1439, the union was formally sealed. The text of the union was read from the pulpit of Santa Croce in Latin by Cardinal Julian and in Greek by Archbishop Bessarion of Nicaea; and the two churchmen symbolically embraced.
Unfortunately, none of the parties to the Union actually possessed the means for putting it into effect. The Pope was bitterly denounced by the rump of the Council of Basle, which moved swiftly to elect the last of the antipopes, Felix V (1439–49). The German bishops stayed aloof. The French bishops, elated by the recent enactment of the antipapal Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, leaned towards the Council. The attempt to end the Schism with Constantinople had provoked yet another schism within the Roman Church itself. The Orthodox Church was no more enthusiastic. In Constantinople, the clergy who had signed the Union were repudiated. ‘We need no Latins,’ the mob shouted. ‘God and the Madonna who have saved us from Persians and Arabs will save us now from Muhammad.’ In Alexandria, a synod convened by the eastern Patriarchs condemned the Union outright. In Moscow, the Metropolitan Isidore returned from Florence wearing a
Latin cross and was promptly imprisoned. His bishops rebelled against the ‘treason of the Greeks’, and proceeded to elect a new Metropolitan without reference to the Patriarch of Constantinople. This was the start of separate Russian Orthodox tradition.
MATRIMONIO
S
IGISMUND DE ZORZI
and his wife, patricians of fifteenth-century Ragusa, had twelve children—six boys and six girls. In the order of their birth, c.1427–49, the children were Johannes, Franciscus, Vecchia, Junius, Margarita, Maria, Marinus, Antonius, Helisabeth, Aloisius, Artulina, and Clara.
Three boys and one of the girls did not marry. Even so, finding suitable marriage partners for the other eight must have kept their parents busy over at least two decades. Margarita (No. 5) was the first to be betrothed in 1453, closely followed by Maria (No. 6, 1455) and the eldest daughter, Vecchia (1455). The eldest son, Johannes, did not marry until 1459, when he must have been at least 32 years of age. He was followed the next year by his sister, Helizabeth (No. 9), who was about 16 years his junior. Franciscus (No. 2) waited until 1465, when he was about 36, whilst 1471 saw the betrothals both of Artulina (No. 11), aged about 24, and Junius (No. 4), aged about 38.
The pattern of marriages in this one family was not unusual. They match not only those of other patrician families in Ragusa but also studies from Renaissance Italy. It conforms to what historical demographers have called the Mediterranean Marriage Pattern (MMP), characterized by high levels of celibacy and by a gross discrepancy in the age at marriage of sons and daughters.
1
Ragusa was a city-republic living from Adriatic shipping and the overland Balkan trade.
2
(It gave its name to the English word ‘argosy’.) Its population of c.20,000 was dominated by a score of closely intermarried patrician clans who held all the municipal offices. Marriage in medieval Ragusa was a serious business. Detailed
pacta matrimonialia
were drawn up between the bride’s father and the prospective son-in-law. Dowries were fixed on average at 2,600
hyperi
(866 gold ducats). The standard penalty for not proceeding within the agreed period from betrothal to wedding and consummation was 1,000 gold ducats. The average age at betrothal, usually two to three years before marriage, was 18 for girls, 33.2 for men. As the de Zorzi example shows, brothers usually had to wait until their sisters had been provided for.
The underlying factors of Ragusa’s ‘marriage culture’ were economic, biological, mathematical, and customary. Men held back from matrimony until they could support a family and could expect a share of their father’s legacy to augment the wife’s dowry. Many waited so long that they never married at all. Women entered matrimony much earlier, but not just to maximize their child-bearing capacity. They had to compete for the pool of reluctant grooms. Families preferred their sons-in-law, who would normally become business partners, to be mature, and to take early responsibility for their daughters’ ‘honour’.
The ramifications of marriage strategy in history are so complex that macro-theorizing on the subject has proved less satisfactory than empirical local studies. The theory which divided the whole of Europe into two simple zones of a late-marrying ‘European
[sic]
Marriage Pattern’ and an early-marrying ‘East European Marriage Pattern’
3
carries much less conviction than the micro-analysis of matrimony in medieval Florence
4
or Renaissance Ragusa.
[ZADRUGA]
Ragusa retained its independence until 1805, when it was occupied by the French. After a century of Habsburg rule, it was joined in 1918, as Dubrovnik, to Yugoslavia, and to the Republic of Croatia in 1992. The medieval city in which the de Zorzi lived was twice devastated—by the earthquake of 1667 and by the Serbian naval bombardments of 1991–2. Among the many Renaissance buildings in the Stari Grad which took a direct hit was the Sponza Palace, home of the city archives and of the marriage registers.
5
The Ottomans pressed on. At Varna on the Black Sea coast, in 1444, the Ottoman Sultan Murad II destroyed the last of the crusades which papal money could send against him. In 1448 he crushed the last of the Hungarian expeditions across the Danube. Only in Albania, under Skanderbeg, did resistance to the Sultan flourish. Feeble, friendless, but still defiant, Constantinople awaited its destiny,
[VLAD]
The final siege of Constantinople began on 2 April 1453, Easter Monday, and lasted for eight weeks. The twenty-year-old Sultan, Mehmet II (r. 1451–81), handsome and secretive, was eager to attack, having been frustrated as a boy, when his plan for a campaign against the Walls had been rejected. The bachelor Emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologos (r. 1448–53), still optimistically searching for a bride, awaited him without illusions. Preparations had been thorough. The cities of Thrace and the Black Sea coast were ravaged to prevent assistance. A fleet of triremes and transport barges was assembled at Gallipoli. A castle was built at the narrowest point of the Bosporus at Rumeli Hisar. A 26-ft (7.9-m) bronze cannon, hurling stone shot of 12 hundredweight (609 kilos) each, had been specially cast by the Sultan’s Hungarian engineer, and was pulled from Adrianople by 60 oxen. Inside the city, weapons were collected and money raised to pay the troops. Outside the walls, the ditches were deepened and the moat by the Blachernae Gate flooded. Embassies were duly sent to Venice, to the Vatican, to France and Aragon. A company of 700 men arrived under Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a Genoese captain who was given command of the land walls. On the day that the
first Turkish detachments came into view, a procession of migrating storks flew over the Straits. The city gates were closed. A great iron chain was stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn. Only 7,000 defenders stood to arms against the onslaught of 80,000.
VLAD
V
LAD
III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–76), otherwise known as ‘Dracula’ and ‘Vlad the Impaler’, quickly passed into legend as a byword for cruelty. In recent times, the sexual overtones of his perversion have attracted much notoriety. Yet he was an historical figure, whose birthplace at Sighişoara, and castles at Poenari and Bran, can be visited in present-day Romania. His principality of Wallachia lay on the left bank of the lower Danube, squeezed between the great Kingdom of Hungary, which regarded him as its vassal, and the growing empire of the Ottoman Turks, to whom he paid tribute. During the Crusade of Varna in 1443–4, when he was an adolescent boy, he was sent as a hostage to the court of the Ottoman Sultan, Murad II; and the buggery to which he was subjected can be considered the likely psychiatric source of his later obsessions.
The use of the
pala
or ‘pointed stake’ was well known to the Turks as a form of punishment. But in the hands of Vlad III it became an instrument of veritable mass terror. In the more refined variant, a needle-thin stake, specially sharpened and greased, was rammed in the victim’s rectum and out through the mouth in such a way that the death throes could last for days. Vlad III came to power in 1456, only three years after the Turkish Conquest of Constantinople, and saw himself as champion of the Christian princes confronting the Infidel. One expedition across the Danube reputedly brought him 23,883 prisoners for impaling, not counting those mercifully beheaded or burned alive. At home, his reign began with the mass killing of the Wallachian nobility, perhaps twenty thousand men, women, and children impaled on a forest of stakes beneath the castle window.
1
Dracula’s arrest and imprisonment by Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, led in 1463 to the publication in Vienna of a German account of his misdeeds,
Geschichte Dracole Wayde
, which was the basis for all subsequent literature. A Russian version produced in 1488 was certainly known to Ivan the Terrible, who seems to have made use of it. Its pages serve to remind us of the strange connection between religious fanaticism and pathological cruelty which persisted in both East and West. The annals of the Spanish Inquisition, or of the Marian persecution in England as related in John Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
(1563), belong to the same sickening genre as the horrors of the Wallachian vampire-prince.
2
[LUDI] [TORMENTA]
