How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (47 page)

For example, Puritan pastors and congregations in Massachusetts openly supported a wife’s
right
to orgasms. During the seventeenth century, when James Mattock’s wife complained first to her pastor and then to the entire congregation that her husband was not sexually responsive to her, the members of the First Church of Boston expelled him for denying conjugal “fellowship unto his wife for a space of two years together.”
⁴⁶
In fact, court records for the years 1639 to 1711 reveal that about one of every six divorce petitions filed by women “involved charges of male sexual incapacity.”
⁴⁷
Nor was impotence the only grounds for female dissatisfaction that the courts recognized. John Williams’s wife was granted a divorce on her complaint of his “refuysing to perform marriage duty unto her.”
⁴⁸
Indeed, it was widely agreed that husbands who failed to sexually gratify their wives bore primary responsibility for the wife’s extramarital affairs. Elizabeth Jerrad was granted a divorce and exonerated of adultery because of her husband’s inattention, the court ruling to “release her from her matrimoniall tye to sayd Robert Jarrad that so she may allso be freed from such temptation as hath occasioned her gross & scandolouse fall
into the sinn of uncleaness.”
⁴⁹
New England courts consistently “upheld the view that women had a right to expect ‘content and satisfaction’ in bed,” according to the historian Richard Godbeer.
⁵⁰

Two other major claims about Puritan “achievements” are far more significant than—but just as ill founded as—the claims about Puritan sexual repression: that Puritans invented capitalism and that they produced the “Scientific Revolution” of the sixteenth century.

As mentioned in chapter 6, at the start of the twentieth century the German sociologist Max Weber published his immensely influential study
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
.
⁵¹
In it Weber proposed that capitalism originated only in Europe because, of all the world’s religions, only Puritan Protestantism provided a moral vision that led people to restrain their material consumption while vigorously seeking wealth. Weber argued that prior to the Reformation, restraint on consumption was invariably linked to asceticism and hence to condemnations of commerce. Conversely, the pursuit of wealth was linked to profligate consumption. Either cultural pattern was inimical to capitalism. According to Weber, the Protestant ethic shattered these traditional linkages, creating a culture of frugal entrepreneurs content to systematically reinvest profits in pursuit of ever greater wealth, and therein lay the key to capitalism and the ascendancy of the West.

Perhaps because it was such an elegant thesis, it was widely embraced despite being so obviously wrong. Even today,
The Protestant Ethic
enjoys an almost sacred status among sociologists,
⁵²
although economic historians quickly dismissed Weber’s surprisingly undocumented
⁵³
monograph on the irrefutable grounds that the rise of capitalism in Europe
preceded
the Reformation by centuries. As the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper explained, “The idea that large-scale industrial capitalism was ideologically impossible before the Reformation is exploded by the simple fact that it existed.”
⁵⁴
Only a decade after Weber published, the celebrated scholar Henri Pirenne noted a large literature that “established the fact that all of the essential features of capitalism—individual enterprise, advances in credit, commercial profits, speculation, etc.—are to be found from the twelfth century on, in the city republics of Italy—Venice, Genoa, or Florence.”
⁵⁵
As noted in chapter 6, the first examples of capitalism appeared in the great Catholic monasteries as early as the ninth century.
⁵⁶

As for Puritans as the leaders of the “Scientific Revolution,” this claim will be disposed of in chapter 15. For now we can state simply that
Catholics played as important a role as Protestants in the great scientific achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and very few, if any, of the Protestant scientific stars of this era were Puritans.

The Catholic Reformation

Probably the most profound and lasting consequence of the Protestant Reformations was that they prompted the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation. At the Council of Trent (1551–1552, 1562–1563), the Catholic Church ended simony (the sale of church offices), enforced priestly celibacy, and made available official, inexpensive Bibles in local languages (vulgates). In short, the Church of Piety permanently replaced the Church of Power. At Trent the Church also decided to establish a network of seminaries to train men for the local priesthood. No longer would there be priests who did not know the Seven Deadly Sins or who preached the Sermon on the Mount. By the eighteenth century, in most places the Church was staffed by literate men well versed in theology. Even more important, the seminaries produced priests whose vocations had been shaped and tested in a formal, institutional setting.
⁵⁷

But there was a dark side to the Catholic Reformation. The new spirit of strictness shifted the Church’s economic and intellectual outlook. A reemphasis on asceticism set the Church against business and banking to such an extent that the false argument that Protestantism gave birth to capitalism could be taken seriously.
⁵⁸
The same sort of thing happened with science. Although Western science is rooted in Christian theology and arose in the medieval universities, the Catholic Reformation imposed such severe intellectual restrictions that Catholic universities declined in scientific significance. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, therefore, there flourished the mistaken belief that the Reformation gave birth to a scientific evolution.

Organized Diversity

If the Reformation failed to result in an era of religious liberty, it did at least produce organized diversity within Christendom. There was, of course, the division between Catholics and Protestants, but just as important
was the diversity
among
Protestants. In fact, from earliest days, the term
Protestant
was a somewhat misleading label, meaning little more than that a person was a Christian who was not a Roman Catholic. Toleration, not only across the Catholic/Protestant divide but also among Protestants, came only after centuries of bloodshed.

14

Exposing Muslim Illusions

I
n 1520, four years after Charles V became king of Spain, and three years after Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses, Suleiman became the tenth sultan to rule the Ottoman Empire. Immediately, the twenty-six-year-old Turk began to pursue his boyhood dream of conquering the West and imposing the True Faith on the Christian infidel.
¹
It would be a two-pronged attack: sending a huge army overland into Europe through the Balkans and taking control of the Mediterranean in order to land armies on the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain. The plan was so monumental that Suleiman continues to be known as “Suleiman the Magnificent”—even though, after he had scored a few unimportant victories, Europeans smashed his armies and sank his navy, just as they had done to his ancestors’ forces centuries before during the Crusades.

Despite this record, far too many recent Western historians promulgate politically correct illusions about Islamic might, as well as spurious claims that once upon a time Islamic science and technology were far superior to that of a backward and intolerant Europe. But, as Suleiman discovered, wishing doesn’t make it so.

Misleading Victories

Over the centuries Muslims had come to remember the conquest of the crusader kingdoms as a major demonstration of their superior military
power. It was nothing of the sort. It hadn’t taken much military might to overwhelm the few hundred Knights Templar and Knights Hospitallers left defending the crusader kingdoms after Europeans had decided, for financial reasons, to abandon the kingdoms to their fate. The notion of Muslim superiority over the crusaders also flies in the face of the fact that only sixteen years after the fall of the last crusader stronghold of Acre in 1291, a few of the surviving Knights Hospitallers seized Rhodes, an island barely eleven miles off the shores of Turkey, and held it for several centuries while they plundered and devastated Ottoman shipping. We will return to the case of Rhodes, but other bases for Muslim overconfidence must be treated first.

Constantinople Falls

The fall of Constantinople in 1453, which ended the existence of the Byzantine Empire, was the cause of wild celebrations across Islam and of great consternation in the West. Both reactions were unwarranted. By this time Byzantium consisted of little more than the capital city, and therefore its fall to the Ottomans was of little geopolitical significance. Similarly, its capture by Ottoman forces was an unimpressive military feat.
²

Constantinople was defended by little more than its massive walls, which crusaders had easily scaled when they sacked the city in 1204. By the time the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II encircled Constantinople with an army of 80,000, including 10,000 members of the elite Janissary force, the Byzantines could man the walls with only about 7,000 defenders (2,000 of them volunteers sent from the West).
³
This meant that the Byzantine commander had at best only about 560 soldiers to defend each mile of the walls, or one defender about every ten feet.
⁴

Even so, the sultan’s forces did not scale the walls and sweep the defenders away as the crusaders had done so easily (despite their having a much smaller force than did the Byzantine defenders). Instead, the sultan counted on blasting huge gaps in the walls with gigantic cannons that a Hungarian engineer had cast for him.
⁵
The largest of these cannons came to be known as the Basilica. It was twenty-seven feet long and able to fire a thousand-pound ball. Several others were about twenty feet long. But the big guns did not live up to the sultan’s expectations. First of all, to transport the Basilica to Constantinople had required seventy oxen and two hundred men.
⁶
Once on site, the Basilica took so long to reload and
resight that it could be fired only seven times a day. The several other huge guns could not fire much faster. As a result, the Byzantines could plug up holes in the walls as quickly as the Ottoman guns could create them.
⁷
In addition, Byzantine troops took advantage of poor Ottoman security to kill the gun crews and disable several of the guns. Finally, after being fired for about a week, the Basilica exploded, killing the gun crew, its Hungarian creator, and many bystanders. The sultan barely escaped unharmed.

Although he ordered the lesser guns to continue firing, Mehmed decided to try other tactics. Among these was a massive effort by thousands of slave miners to dig tunnels under the walls of the city. But the Byzantines dug countertunnels that allowed them to enter the Ottoman tunnels and kill the miners. Mehmed then realized that to take Constantinople he would need to use his immensely superior numbers to fight his way over the walls. Shortly after midnight on May 29, 1453, the assault began. Ottoman casualties were so heavy that the sea surrounding three sides of the city was filled with bodies bobbing “like melons,” in the words of one eyewitness.
⁸
Eventually, however, the Ottoman attackers captured several gates, whereupon tens of thousands of their comrades stormed into the city.

What followed was mass slaughter and enslavement. According to an Ottoman account, “They took captive the youths and maidens … and they slew the miserable common people.” A Christian eyewitness wrote that the Ottomans “slew mercilessly all the elderly” and threw “newborn infants … into the streets.”
⁹
The esteemed historian Steven Runciman, surely no enemy of Islam,
¹⁰
summed up: “They slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination.… But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives … would bring them greater profit.… Many of the lovelier maidens and youths were almost torn to death as their captors quarreled over them.… Some of the younger nuns preferred martyrdom and flung themselves down well-shafts … [Prisoners destined for slavery] were about fifty thousand.”
¹¹
Constantinople was now an empty city, awaiting an Ottoman population.