1492: The Year Our World Began (18 page)

Even in combination with the events of 1494, those of 1492 did not stimulate the Renaissance, liberate it from the confines of Florence, or disseminate it around the world. Lorenzo the Magnificent and Charles VIII no longer look like harbingers of modernity. The mental world they shared was chivalric. They looked back for their values: Lorenzo to antiquity, Charles to a fictional version of the classical and medieval past. Savonarola, perhaps, was a more important or representative figure for the future of the world. At first glance, he seems an even more regressive type than his chivalrically minded
contemporaries, sunk in the ostentatiously austere late-medieval piety that most people nowadays find baffling or irksome. His addiction to millenarianism, his confidence in visions, his prophetic stridency, his hatred of art, and his mistrust of secular scholarship align him with aspects of the modern world most moderns reject: religious obscurantism, extreme fanaticism, irrational fundamentalism. In some ways, the conflicts he brought to a head—the confrontation of worldly and godly moralities, the uncomprehending debate between rational and subrational or suprarational mind-sets, the struggle for power in the state between the partisans of secularism and spirituality or of science and scripture—are timeless, universal features of history. Yet they are also, in their current intensity and ferocity, among the latest novelties of contemporary politics. The culture wars of our own time did not begin with Savonarola, but he embodied some of their most fearsome features.

In his prescriptions for Christendom, Savonarola was not an innovator, but he seemed “swollen with divine virtue,” according to Machiavelli, who, as a youngster, heard the friar’s sermons as he huffed and puffed in the pulpit. He brought unique force to the expression of some long-standing priorities of the reforming prophets of the late medieval Church: revulsion from the Church’s involvement in the world and the corrupting effects of wealth and secular power; denunciation of the overweening power of the popes over clergy and the clergy over laypeople; horror at the way pharisees seemed to have taken over the Church, binding and laming the search for salvation with obedience to formulaic rules and meaningless rituals. He was convinced that Scripture contained the whole of God’s message, universally accessible, and that readers of Scripture needed no other knowledge except of prayer and mortification. His condemnation of Roman excess—though perhaps not quite as colorfully insulting as Luther’s, with its rich language of the lavatory and the whorehouse—anticipated in tone and content the invective of the founder of Protestantism:

Savonarola prefigured Luther, too, in his insistence on the doctrine of salvation by the free grace of God, which—except in the hands of reformers who used it to denounce the Church’s rules of charity and piety—was perfectly innocent, orthodox Catholicism, but which became the slogan of the Reformation:

An anonymous painting from 1498 shows what became of Savonarola, and how Florentines wanted the rest of us to remember his fate. Here, in place of the “vanities” the prophet had kindled in the same place a few years before, the flames consume Savonarola himself. It is a
depiction of his death at the stake: the pyre is gigantic, towering, more like a ship than a scaffold, with its skyward, mastlike reach, topped with a cross. A high causeway links it to the municipal palace, from where the preacher was led to public execution. But the man who once turned heads and sparked ardor in the hearts of the people is now strangely ignored. Children play, merchants pass through; it is business as usual in the Piazza della Signoria. Only those who carry wood to the pyre are engaged in Savonarola’s reckoning. The message of the image is obvious: Florence spared no pains or expense to burn the heretic, but did not want to appear to have taken any notice of him.

A few years after Savonarola’s immolation, Luther visited Florence. But he did not need to experience the place to adopt the martyred friar as a hero or succumb to his influence. Savonarola’s popularity with his followers, and the informal power he exercised in the Florentine republic after the fall of the Medici, ensured that almost every word he uttered from the pulpit found its way into print. Luther knew his sermons well, reprinted two of them, with an admiring preface of his own, and acknowledged him as a forerunner. “The Antichrist of that time made the memory of that great man perish,” he complained, “but see! He lives. And his memory is blessed.”
³²

Russia and the Eastern Marches of Christendom

June 7: Casimir IV, king of Poland and Grand Prince
of Lithuania, dies.

T
he messengers turned back. They were on their way from Moscow, the capital or courtly center of Muscovy—an upstart state that had become, in twenty years of aggressive dynamism, the fastest-expanding empire in Christendom. Their destination was the court of Casimir IV, king of Poland and sovereign—“Grand Prince” or “Grand Duke” in the jargon of the time—of Lithuania. Casimir was, by common assent, the greatest ruler in Christendom. His territory stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Its eastern frontier lay deep inside Russia, along the breakwater between the Dnieper and Volga valleys. Westward, it unfolded as far as Saxony and the satellite kingdoms of Bohemia, and Hungary, which Casimir more or less controlled. On the map, it was the biggest and most formidable-looking domain in the Latin world since the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Kremlin, the “citadel of Moscow,” as it appeared to an ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire in 1517, with the stone structures conspicuous among the wooden houses.
S. von Herberstein,
Notes Upon Russia
(London, 1852). Courtesy of The Hakluyt Society.

The envoys from Moscow, however, were undaunted. They were carrying breathtakingly defiant demands for the surrender of most of Casimir’s Russian dominions, which Muscovites had been infiltrating for years, into the hands of their own prince. They turned back, not because the power of Poland and Lithuania deterred them, nor because the summer roads were hot, boggy, and mosquito-ridden, but because the world had changed.

By rights, the world should have been close to ending. According to Russian reckoning, 1492 marked the close of the seventh millennium of creation, and prophets and visionaries were getting enthusiastic or apprehensive, according to taste. Calendars stopped in 1492. There were skeptics, but they were officially disavowed, even persecuted. In 1490, the patriarch of Moscow conducted an inquisition against heretics, torturing his victims until they confessed to injudicious denunciations of the doctrine of the Trinity and the sanctity of the Sabbath. Among the proscribed thoughts of which the victims were accused was doubt about whether the world was really about to end.

The news that made the Muscovite messengers backtrack reached them in the second week of June. Casimir IV had collapsed and died while hunting in Trakal, not far from Vilnius, where they had been hoping to meet for negotiations. For Russia, the prospects defied the prophecies. Casimir’s death improved Muscovy’s outlook. The messengers rode hard for Moscow. It was time for new instructions and even more outrageous ambitions.

Between the Carpathian Mountains and the Balkan uplands in the south and the Baltic Sea in the north, eastern Europe’s geography is hostile to political continuity. Cut and crossed by invaders’ corridors, it is an environment in which—with its flat, open expanses, good communications, and dispersed populations—states can form with ease, survive in struggle, and thrive only with difficulty. There are forty thousand square miles of marshland in the middle of the region, covering much of what is now Belarus, around the upper Dnieper. Around this vast bog, the steppeland curls to the south and the bleak, ridgeless North European plain—choked with dense, dark forests—stretches uninterruptedly westward from deep inside Siberia. The lay of the land favors vast and fragile empires, vulnerable to external attack and internal rebellion. Armies can shuttle back and forth easily. Rebels can hide in the forests and swamps. Volatile hegemonies have come and gone in the region with bewildering rapidity. In the fifth century the Huns extended their sway from the steppelands to the east around the marshes and into the northern plain. In the ninth century a state the Byzantines called Great Moravia reached briefly from the marshes to the Elbe. In the late tenth and eleventh centuries a native Slav state occupied most of the Volga Valley. The most spectacular empire makers to unify the region arrived sweating from the depths of Asia in the thirteenth century, driving their vast herds of horses and sheep. The Mongols burst into Western history—like a scourge, as some chroniclers said, or, said others, like a plague.

The earliest records of Mongol peoples occur in Chinese annals of the seventh century. At that time, the Mongols emerged onto the
steppes of the central Asian land now called Mongolia, from the forests to the north, where they lived as hunters and small-scale pig breeders. Chinese writers used versions of the name “Mongols” for many different communities, with various religions and competing leaderships, but their defining characteristic was that they spoke languages of common origins that were different from those of the neighboring Turks. On the steppes they adopted a pastoral way of life. They became horse-borne nomads, skilled in sheep breeding, dairying, and war.

The sedentary peoples who fringed the steppelands hated and feared them. They hated them because nomadism and herding seemed savage. Mongols drank milk—which the lactose-intolerant sedentarists found disgusting. They drank blood—which seemed more disgusting still, though for nomads in need of instant nourishment it was an entirely practical taste. The sedentarists’ fear was better founded: Nomads needed farmers’ crops to supplement their diet. Nomad leaders needed city dwellers’ wealth to fill their treasure hoards and pay their followers. In the early twelfth century, the bands or alliances they formed got bigger, and their raids against neighboring, settled folk became more menacing. In part, this was the effect of the growing preponderance of some Mongol groups over others. In part, it was the result of slow economic change.

Contact with richer neighbors gave Mongol chiefs opportunities for enrichment as mercenaries or raiders. Economic inequalities greater than the Mongols had ever known arose in a society in which blood relationships and seniority in age had formerly settled everyone’s position. Prowess in war enabled particular leaders to build up followers in parallel with—and sometimes in defiance of—the old social order. They called this process “crane catching,” like caging valuable birds. The most successful leaders enticed or forced rival groups into submission. The process spread to involve peoples who were not strictly Mongols, though the same name continued to be used—we use it still—for a confederation of many peoples, including many who spoke Turkic languages, as the war bands enlarged.

The violence endemic in the steppes turned outward, with increasing confidence, increasing ambition, to challenge neighboring civilizations. Historians have been tempted to speculate about the reasons for the Mongols’ expansion. One explanation is environmental. Temperatures in the steppe seem to have fallen during the relevant period. People farther west on the Russian plains complained that a cold spell in the early thirteenth century caused crops to fail. So declining pastures might have driven the Mongols to expand from the steppes. Population in the region seems to have been relatively high, and the pastoral way of life demands large amounts of grazing land to feed relatively small numbers of people. It is not a particularly energy-efficient way to provide food because it relies on animals eating plants and people eating animals, whereas farming produces humanly edible crops and cuts out animals as a wasteful intermediate stage of production. So perhaps the Mongol outthrust was a consequence of having more mouths to feed.

Yet the Mongols were doing what steppelanders had always sought to do: dominate and exploit surrounding sedentary peoples. The difference was that they did it with greater ambition and greater efficiency than any of their predecessors. In the late twelfth or early thirteenth century a new ideology animated Mongol conquests, linked to the cult of the sky, which was probably a traditional part of Mongol ideology but which leaders encouraged in pursuit of programs of political unification of the Mongol world. Earth should imitate the universal reach of the sky. Mongol leaders’ proclamations and letters to foreign rulers are explicit and unambiguous in their claims: the Mongols’ destiny was to unify the world by conquest.

Wherever the Mongol armies went, their reputation preceded them. Armenian sources warned Westerners of the approach of “precursors of the Antichrist…of hideous aspect and without pity in their bowels,…who rush with joy to carnage as if to a wedding feast or orgy.” Rumors piled up in Germany, France, Burgundy, Hungary, and even in Spain and England, where Mongols had never been heard of before. The invaders looked like monkeys, it was said, barked like dogs, ate raw flesh, drank
their horses’ urine, knew no laws, and showed no mercy. Matthew Paris, the thirteenth-century English monk who, in his day, probably knew as much about the rest of the world as any of his countrymen, summed up the Mongols’ image: “They are inhuman and beastly, rather monsters than men, thirsting for and drinking blood, tearing and devouring the flesh of dogs and men…. And so they come, with the swiftness of lightning to the confines of Christendom, ravaging and slaughtering, striking everyone with terror and with incomparable horror.”
¹

When the Mongols struck Russia in 1223, the blow was entirely unexpected: “No man knew from whence they came or whither they departed.”
²
Annalists treated them as if they were a natural phenomenon, like a briefly destructive bout of freak weather or a flood or a visitation of pestilence. Some Russian rulers even rejoiced at the greater destruction the Mongols visited on hated neighbors. But the first Mongol invasion was no more than a reconnaissance. When the nomads returned in earnest in 1237, their campaign lasted for three years. They devastated and depopulated much of the land of southern and northeastern Russia and ransomed or looted the towns.

The Mongols’ vocation for world rule, however, was theoretical. They demanded submission and tribute from their victims, but they were not necessarily interested in exercising direct rule everywhere. They had no wish to adapt to an unfamiliar ecosystem, no interest in occupying lands beyond the steppe, and no need to replace existing elites in Russia. They left the Christian Russian principalities and city-states to run their own affairs. But Russian rulers received charters from the khan’s court at Saray on the lower Volga, where they had to make regular appearances, loaded with tribute and subject to ritual humiliations, kissing the khan’s stirrup, serving at his table. The population had to pay taxes directly to Mongol-appointed tax gatherers—though as time went on, the Mongols assigned the tax gathering to native Russian princes and civic authorities. They passed their gleanings on to the state, centered at Saray, where the Mongols came to be known as the Golden Horde, perhaps after the treasure they accu
mulated.

The Russians tolerated this situation, partly because the Mongols intimidated them by selective acts of terror. When the invaders took the great city of Kiev in 1240, it was said, they left only two hundred houses standing and strewed the fields “with countless heads and bones of the dead.”
³
Partly, however, the Russians were responding to a milder Mongol policy. In most of Russia, the invaders came to exploit rather than to destroy. According to one chronicler, the Mongols spared Russia’s peasants to ensure that farming would continue. Ryazan, a Russian principality on the Volga, south of Moscow, seems to have borne the brunt of the Mongol invasion. Yet there, if the local chronicle can be believed,

Many cities escaped lightly by capitulating at once. Novgorod, that famously commercial city, which the Mongols might have coveted, they bypassed altogether.

Moreover, the Russian princes were even more fearful of enemies to the west, where the Swedes, Poles, and Lithuanians had constructed strong, unitary monarchies capable of sweeping the princes away if they ever succeed in expanding into Russian territory. Equally menacing were groups of mainly German adventurers, organized into crusading “orders” of warriors, such as the Teutonic Knights and the Brothers of the Sword, who took monastic-style vows but dedicated themselves to waging holy war against pagans and heretics. In practice, these orders were self-enriching companies of professional fighters, who built up territorial domains along the Baltic coast by conquest. In campaigns between 1242 and 1245, Russian coalitions fought off invaders on the western
front, but they could not sustain war on two fronts. The experience made them submissive to the Mongols.

Muscovy hardly seemed destined to dominate the region. The principality owed its existence to the Golden Horde. Muscovite princes proved that they could manipulate Mongol hegemony to their own advantage, but they remained the Mongols’ creatures. Indeed, it was hard to imagine Muscovy unless backed by Mongol power. In the mid–thirteenth century, Alexander Nevsky, prince of Novgorod, showed the way to make use of the Mongols. He created the basis of his own myth as a Russian national hero by submitting to the Golden Horde and turning west to confront Swedish and German aggressors. His dynasty levered Muscovy to prominence by stages. His son Daniel (1276–1303), who became ruler of Moscow, proclaimed the city’s independence from other Russian principalities and ceased payment of tribute, except to the Mongols. Daniel’s grandson became known as Ivan the Moneybag (1329–53) from the wealth he accumulated as a farmer of Mongol taxes. He called himself “Grand Prince” and raised the see of Moscow from a bishopric to an archbishopric.