A History of the World (46 page)

Then, during 1524–5, a huge peasant rebellion started up across Europe, from the lands of the Teutonic knights and Hungary, to Switzerland and then central Germany itself. It was uncoordinated and desperate. To the established order of late medieval Europe it was terrifying. One of Luther’s early followers, the charismatic priest Thomas Müntzer, led the most extreme movement, predicting the wiping-out of all earthly authority in an imminent apocalypse. He and his supporters briefly created a semi-communistic ‘League of God’ in the city of Mülhausen, until like the other rebellions it was shattered by the military power of the princes. Across Germany, the battle-hardened forces of the emperor, who had just returned from victories against the French in Italy, crushed the peasant armies, exacting terrible revenge. Luther egged them on. In his April 1525 pamphlet originally called
An Admonition to Peace
(surely the worst piece of headlining in German journalism) he wrote: ‘Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.’
¹³

The original ‘rebel’ was now firmly on the side of the German princes who would, in turn, shift their allegiance to Lutheran
Christianity. In Saxony, Hesse, Schleswig, Brunswick and Brandenburg they came over. So did most of the northern towns and cities. Though Charles V tried hard for conciliation, and planned ways to reunite his empire, there were simply too many rulers and influential soldiers now with Luther’s cause to make that practicable. Luther told his ally and fellow reformer Philipp Melanchthon that ‘agreement in doctrine is plainly impossible, unless the pope will abolish his papacy’. Luther’s theology had become more conservative in its social effects; he was a fierce advocate of a husband’s rights over his wife, and hostile to easy marriages. Against suitors he wrote: ‘If I raised a daughter with so much expense and effort, care and trouble, diligence and work and had bet all my life, body and property on her for so many years, should she not be better protected than a cow who had wandered into the forest?’ He also became a bitter anti-Semite.

In 1531 a treaty between Lutheran princes, known as the Schmalkaldic League, made the political split irrevocable. There was then a golden pause. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 allowed a time of rebuilding and economic growth, during which German culture flourished and German universities became famous – a time when even Elizabethan English plays and actors travelled to Germany to find fame. Yet the great divide that Luther had wrenched open would poison the future of Europe. The Thirty Years War was looming. This would be a catastrophe driven by spear and flintlock, rape and famine, and would bring down on German soil a hell every bit as terrible as the punishment Luther had spent his life so dreading, and that the cheerful monks had sold indulgences to escape from.

Pagans and Pirates

Luther’s revolution, amplified and hardened by John Calvin in Geneva and by other reformers, such as Scotland’s forbidding John Knox, had come about partly because of a common sense that history
must
soon end. Christ’s awesome second coming was surely due, not least because Christendom was so threatened. Christian Europe, which would soon dominate much of the rest of the world, still felt hemmed in, divided, on the retreat. We cannot understand the ferocity of the reformers with their bleak warnings, or the paranoid excesses of the
Catholic Counter-Reformation, led by fanatical Jesuits and by the Inquisition, unless we understand how frightened Christians were. The Ottoman Empire now controlled more of the Mediterranean coastline and waters than did the Christians. Fear of ‘the Turk’ haunted the imaginations of Christian children, scolded at bedtime. It took Shakespeare to portray the ‘Moor’ as fully human.

Nor was the threat of ‘the Moor’ or ‘the Turk’ limited to the capture of Mediterranean islands, the defeat of Christian fleets or the taking of Christian lands and walled towns. For many Christians, travelling by sea, or even just living near the sea, became perilous. Some of the raids were spectacular. In 1544 Muslim corsairs attacked the Bay of Naples and seized seven thousand men, women and children; ten years later they took six thousand from the ‘toe’ of Italy, then in 1566 four thousand from Granada in southern Spain, after which it was said to be ‘raining Christians’ in Algiers.
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Around most of the Christian coasts of the Mediterranean, life became more dangerous. In Corsica and Sardinia, and around much of Italy, seaside villages were deserted and rebuilt further inland. At sea, the enemy’s culling rate of Christian ships was extraordinary. In one short period, between 1609 and 1616, the Royal Navy admitted that 466 English and Scottish ships – though many of these were relatively small – had been seized by Algerian corsairs. A similar rate of attrition was suffered by Dutch, French, German and Spanish shipping, all feeding the hungry need for slaves felt by the Muslim rulers of North Africa, who used the men as labourers and the women as domestic or sexual servants.

As Christian villagers retreated from the shoreline and Christian ships became more cautious, the raiders went further afield. They turned up in the Thames estuary again and again, and took English fishermen from just off Essex and Kent. With the help of a renegade Dutch seaman, Jan Janszoon of Haarlem, who converted to Islam and called himself Murat Reis, they raided Iceland in 1627, burning the church on the island of Heimaey and taking 242 people, as well as more from the mainland near Reykjavik. Janszoon was also on the scene in 1631, when 327 people were taken from the village of Baltimore in West Cork. (He was captured himself later on, by the Knights of Malta, but later escaped and lived to a grand old age. His claimed descendants include John F. Kennedy, Humphrey Bogart and many
Spencers and Churchills, one of them a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II.)

Though the high point of Muslim coastal slave-taking was between 1530 and 1640, it continued until the 1780s; and for every major raid, it is believed, there were scores of smaller ones when boats would suddenly appear in coves – villagers would run from their fields, and the corsairs would seize those they could. It is reckoned that, overall, one and a quarter million Christians were enslaved, far more than the numbers of black Africans that were taken across the Atlantic by whites during most of this time. Many would die of plague or ill-treatment in desperate circumstances in Africa. A few converted, and some were rescued or bought out by priests and wealthy families.

All this was a major source of European terror and of a certain strand of storytelling, dimly reflected in Christmas pantomimes and winter tales into modern times. Until recently it has been largely written out of mainstream history, reflecting, in part, white guilt about the Atlantic slave trade, which later became far greater, by a factor of nine or ten. In part, it surely reflects sheer embarrassment. But for Europeans of Luther’s time, the gnawing-away at the coasts caused much fear and insecurity.

The more spectacular attacks, though, came from the eastern edge of the European world, as the mighty Ottoman Empire spread ever further. After the rule of the first conqueror-sultan (who had taken Constantinople), his successors spread Islam deep into the Christian world. They faced fierce resistance. The battle of Kosovo, or more poetically, the ‘Battle of the Field of Blackbirds’, in 1389, was a devastating slaughter of Serbs by Ottomans. But it was decades before the Ottomans finally took Bosnia and Serbia. In Wallachia a man who signed himself Wladislaus Dragwlya was cheered on by the pope and half of Christendom for his victories against Mehmet II in 1459 and 1462. This Christian leader had lived as a boy in the Ottoman court, a hostage sent by his father along with his younger brother. The brother converted to Islam and served the Ottomans; the older boy learned the Koran and Turkish, but turned against Islam.

Better known today as Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler, he proved a formidable guerrilla fighter and rallied Transylvania against the invaders, surviving imprisonment in Hungary before dying in battle in Romania in 1476. His relish for executing prisoners, criminals and
rivals by impalement undermined his popularity, however. At one point Dracula had twenty thousand dying and dead enemies hanging from sharpened poles, speared through their rears, around his capital. The boyars, the local princes, began to feel that relatively humane Muslim occupation might be preferable to paranoid and sadistic Christian freedom.

One of the great losers in all this was the extraordinary Jagiellon dynasty of Lithuania-Poland.

In the late 1300s Lithuania was much bigger than today’s small state. Indeed, it was the biggest single nation in Europe, stretching through today’s Ukraine, Belarus and parts of Russia. Officially it stayed as a pagan country, repulsing the bloody crusading incursions of the Teutonic knights in favour of a family of ancient gods and goddesses. These were mostly divinities of the usual things (fire, the moon, fate, death, evening stars), though, rather appealingly, they also had a god of good grooming. This pantheon met its end only in 1386, when the ruler Jogaila married Queen Jadwiga of Poland and converted to Christianity. His knights and courtiers, seeing which way the wind was blowing, now engaged in mass baptisms in the local rivers.

To the effective union of Lithuania and Poland, Hungary was later added, making the Jagiellon dynasty one of the most powerful in Europe. They, with the Habsburgs to their south, were the effective guardians of the Christian world against Eastern and later Ottoman attack. The battle of Mohacs, still remembered in Hungary today as a moment of national catastrophe, finished off the Jagiellons too. Buda, then Hungary’s capital and the place where Vlad had been imprisoned, fell to the Ottomans in 1541.

So far, we have seen a fairly straightforward picture of aggressive Muslim conquest on the one hand, and anxious Christian defence on the other. The true picture was not so straightforward. For in the middle of Europe stood the great Catholic ruler and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who to many Christians, the followers of Luther and other reformers, was seen as a greater threat than any Ottoman. His rule was less tolerant of religious difference than Muslim authority was. His grand designs for a renewed, huger empire based firmly on his family authority scared Venetians, Dutch and Frenchmen even more than the advancing armies of Ottoman janissaries. So perhaps it
is not so surprising that the best-known (and best) portrait we have of Mehmet II, conqueror of Constantinople, is by Gentile Bellini, who was sent there only twenty-five years after the city’s fall by the Doge of Venice to record that scourge of all Christians. Or that in the 1460s there was already a large colony of Florentines in Galata, the town just over the water from Constantinople, running fifty businesses. Galata had churches – the only thing forbidden them was the noisy ringing of bells, which might disturb Islamic tranquillity – taverns, and Lenten carnivals.

Nor should we be surprised that Jews, French Protestants, Lutherans and Orthodox Christians mingled safely under Muslim rule on the shores of the Bosporus. Or that François I of France, fighting the Habsburgs, looked for help in 1525 from Suleiman the Magnificent. Or even that dialogues were constantly going on between Protestant rulers and the Muslims, ranging from letters between Queen Elizabeth I and Sultan Murad III discussing an Anglo-Ottoman military pact, to an offer by Suleiman to provide troops to help Lutherans in Flanders. Many Protestants and Ottomans thought that the simplicity of their devotions and their shared dislike of statues and icons made them natural allies against the Catholics – a division based not on Christ against Muhammad but on ‘men of faith’ against ‘idolators’. This goes a long way towards explaining why it was impossible for Charles V or the popes to rally ‘Christendom’ as a single force against its enemies.

Ivan, Yermak and the Making of Russia

Why is Russia so big? Why is it the shape it is? These may seem naive questions. But there was no obvious reason why the vast sweep of forest, tundra and mountains of Siberia should be ruled by riverine Slavs living to the west, rather than by Chinese and Mongols to the east. A map of the post-Genghis world would lead one to expect a smaller Russia. And Vladimir Putin’s Russia today is one of the world’s largest countries, with its huge oil, gas and mineral wealth, its vast hinterland and its claim on the Arctic, because of battles and explorations that took place in the 1580s.

Russia is so big, above all, because of the personal ambition of one Moscow Czar, Ivan IV, known to history as Ivan the Terrible (though
non-Russian speakers should note he translates just as well as ‘Ivan the Mighty’).

The Russians did not start by striving to create an empire, however, any more than the English intended to create Canada, or the United States. In all such cases Europeans were simply exploiting a small technological advantage to win themselves goods which to them felt (or were) essential. Among them are products that have already featured in this history, and will do again, such as salt, timber, iron and (before plastics) ivory, but also one that has not – fur. Before the modern age of synthetic materials, animal skins and furs were among the few ways people could keep themselves warm; and this was particularly important during the cold climatic spell, or ‘little ice age’, running from the 1550s right through to the early nineteenth century, with particular freezes in the 1650s and late 1700s.

It is from this time that we get some of the loveliest Dutch landscapes of frozen canals and peasant revelries, the great London frost fairs on the iron-hard Thames, and recordings of huge snowfalls in Spain and Portugal. From time to time Iceland found herself completely cut off by sea ice, and famines ravaged North America, France and Scandinavia. For anyone who could afford them, the pelts of bears, foxes, squirrels, beaver, mink and marten were an essential protection. The fur-trimmed ceremonial robes of some of today’s judges, lord mayors and guild officials, for instance, date back to this period, when anyone who could pay for it wanted to be able to snug up on a bench, on a civic throne, or anywhere they fancied, in rich furs. The poorer made do with the pelts of rabbits or foxes, but the real warmth came from the thicker, glossier skins of animals that lived in the great northern forests, from Alaska to Newfoundland in one direction, and to European Russia in the other.