A Little History of the World (33 page)

What is most remarkable, however, is that at a time when people were at their most superstitious there were still some who had not forgotten the ideas of Leonardo da Vinci and the other great Florentines, people who went on using their eyes in order to see and make sense of the world. And it was they who discovered the real magic, magic that lets us look into the past and into the future and enables us to work out what a star billions of miles away is made of, and to predict precisely when an eclipse of the sun is due and from what part of the earth it will be visible.

This magic was arithmetic. Of course these people didn’t invent it, for merchants had always been able to add and subtract. But they became increasingly aware of the number of things in nature that are governed by mathematical laws. How a clock with a pendulum 981 millimetres long needs exactly one second per swing, and why this is so. They called these the laws of nature. Leonardo da Vinci had already said that ‘Nature doesn’t break her own laws.’ And so it was known with certainty that if you take any natural event and measure and record it precisely, you will discover that, given the same circumstances, the result will always be the same, no matter how often it is repeated – indeed, it
cannot
be different. This was an extraordinary discovery, and a far greater magic than anything the poor witches were accused of. For now the whole of nature – the stars and drops of water, falling stones and vibrating violin strings – was no longer just one incomprehensible tangle that made people fearful and uneasy. If you knew the correct mathematical formula you had a magic spell for everything. You could say to a violin string: ‘To make an A, you must be this long and this tight and move backwards and forwards 435 times in a second.’ And the note the string made would prove it.

The first man to understand the extraordinary magical power of applying mathematical calculation to things in nature was an Italian called Galileo Galilei. He had devoted many years to observing, analysing and describing such things when, one day, someone denounced him for writing exactly what Leonardo had observed but not explained. What he had written was this: the sun does not move – on the contrary, it is the earth which moves round the sun, together with the planets. This discovery had already been made by a Polish scholar named Copernicus, after many years of calculation. It had been published in 1543, not long after Leonardo’s death and shortly before his own, but the theory had been denounced as un-Christian and heretical by Catholic and Protestant priests alike. They pointed to a passage in the Old Testament in which Joshua, the great warrior, asks God not to let dusk fall until his enemy is destroyed. In answer to his prayer, we read: ‘The sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves on their enemies.’ If the Bible says the sun stood still, people argued, then the sun must normally be in motion. And to suggest that the sun did not move was therefore heretical, and contradicted what was written in the Bible. So in 1632, when he was nearly seventy years old, Galileo, who had devoted his whole life to scholarship, was brought before the religious tribunal known as the Inquisition, and made to choose between being burned as a heretic or renouncing his theory about the movement of the earth around the sun. He signed a declaration saying that he was but a poor sinner, for he had taught that the earth moved round the sun. In this way he avoided being burned, the fate of so many of his predecessors. Nevertheless, when he had signed the declaration, he is said to have muttered under his breath: ‘And yet it moves.’

None of these fixed ideas was in the end able to prevent Galileo’s ideas and methods and all the discoveries he made from influencing and inspiring people in ever-increasing numbers. And if today, thanks to mathematical formulas, we can make nature do whatever we want, so that we have telephones, aeroplanes and computers, and all the rest of our modern technology, we should be grateful to all those who, like Galileo, investigated nature’s mathematical laws at a time when it was almost as dangerous a thing to do as it was to be a Christian in Nero’s day.

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A
N
U
NLUCKY
K
ING AND A
L
UCKY KING
The only important country not to join in the fighting of the Thirty Years War was England. Lucky English, you may say. But they too were going through troubled times even if the end, when it came, was not as devastating as it was in Germany. Now you may remember that in 1215 King John of England signed a great Charter of Liberties – the Magna Carta – in which he made a solemn promise that he and his successors would never act without first consulting the barons and the nobility. For nearly four hundred years English monarchs kept this promise, until one day a new king, Charles I, the grandson of the beheaded Mary Stuart, came to the throne, and he didn’t wish to abide by the agreement. He disliked having to consult the nobility and the elected members of his parliament. He preferred to govern as he pleased, and this cost the country a great deal of money.

The English didn’t like it at all. Many of them were strict and zealous Protestants, called Puritans, who had a deep loathing for all forms of wealth and display. A farmer and member of parliament named Oliver Cromwell was their leader in the conflict that eventually broke out between Parliament’s supporters and those of the king which split the country in two. (People called Cromwell’s supporters Roundheads because they wore their hair close-cropped, unlike the long-haired royalists who were known as Cavaliers.) Cromwell was a deeply religious man and a brave, determined and ruthless commander. His soldiers were well trained and no less ardent than he was. After many battles the king was taken prisoner and brought to trial at Westminster, where he was charged with high treason. He refused to recognise the court and made no effort to defend himself, for he believed that only God could be the judge of the king of England. Charles was sentenced to death, and in 1649 he was beheaded. Oliver Cromwell then ruled England, not as king, but as ‘Lord Protector of the Commonwealth’, as he described himself. And this wasn’t just a title, because it is exactly what he did. Following in Elizabeth’s footsteps he devoted himself to increasing England’s power – through her colonies in America and trading settlements in India, and by building a strong fleet and expanding sea trade – and did his utmost to weaken England’s Dutch neighbours. After his death, however, kings soon ruled England once again. But government was now less difficult than it had been before and went on becoming easier. And since that time no other English monarch has ever dared break the ancient promises laid down in the Magna Carta.

It was easier for the kings of France. There they had no great charter. Moreover, they ruled over a prosperous, well-populated country which was in no danger of collapse, even after the terrible wars of religion. But above all, at the time of the Thirty Years War the real ruler of France had been that formidably gifted minister, Cardinal Richelieu. He achieved at least as much for France as Cromwell did for England – if not more. Richelieu had been especially good at winning over the knights and the nobility. Through skill and cunning – like a good chess-player who knows how to exploit every move and turn a small advantage into a greater one – he gradually reduced their powers until he was able to assume them all himself, including, as you saw, the power of France in Europe. And because he had helped weaken the German emperor in the Thirty Years War, and because Spain had been reduced to poverty and Italy dismembered, and because England wasn’t yet very powerful, by the time Richelieu died France was the dominant country in Europe. A year after the cardinal’s death, in 1643, King Louis XIV ascended the throne. He was then four years old and still holds the world record for the length of his reign. He ruled until 1715: that is, for seventy-two years. And what’s more, he really did rule. Not, of course, when he was a child, but as soon as his guardian, Cardinal Mazarin, had died (Mazarin had been Cardinal Richelieu’s successor), he was determined to rule himself. He gave orders that no passport was to be issued to any Frenchman unless he himself had granted it. The court was highly amused, imagining his interest to be no more than a young king’s whim. He would soon tire of ruling. But he didn’t. For to Louis, kingship was no mere accident of birth. It was as if he had been given the leading role in a play which he would have to perform for the rest of his life. No one before or since has ever learnt that role so well, or played it with such dignity and ceremony to the end.

All the powers that Richelieu, and later Mazarin, had held, Louis XIV now took upon himself. The nobility had few rights other than that of watching him perform his role. This solemn performance – the so-called
lever
– began early, at eight o’clock in the morning, when he deigned to rise. First to enter the bedchamber were the royal princes of the blood together with the chamberlain and the doctor. Then two great curled and powdered wigs, like flowing manes, were ceremoniously extended to him on bended knee. Depending on his inclination, he chose one, and then inserted himself into a magnificent dressing gown, before seating himself beside the bed. Only at this point were the noblemen of highest rank, the dukes, permitted to enter the bedchamber, and while the king was shaved his secretaries, officers and various officials all entered in their turn. After which the doors were thrown wide to admit a host of splendid dignitaries – marshals, governors, princes of the Church and royal favourites – all there to gaze with admiration upon the solemn spectacle of His Majesty the King getting dressed.

Everything was regulated down to the last detail. The greatest honour was to be permitted to offer the king his shirt, which had first been carefully warmed. This honour belonged to the king’s brother or, in his absence, to the person next in rank. The chamberlain held one sleeve, a duke the other and the king inserted himself. And so it went on, until the king was fully dressed, in brightly coloured silk stockings, silk knee-breeches, a satin brocade doublet and a sky-blue sash, with his sword at his side, and an embroidered coat and a lace collar which a high official with the title of Guardian of the King’s Collars held out to him on a silver tray. The king then left his bedchamber, plumed hat on his head and cane in hand, smiling and elegant, to make his entry into the Great Hall with a well-turned and courteous greeting for each, while all those around gaped at him with awestruck expressions and declared that today he was more beautiful than the sun god Apollo, stronger than Hercules, hero of the ancient Greeks. He was the God-given sun itself,
le Roi Soleil
– the Sun King – on whose warmth and light all life depended. Just like the pharaoh, you might think, for he had been called the Son of the Sun. But there was one big difference. The ancient Egyptians really believed it, while for Louis XIV it was only a sort of game which he and everyone present knew was no more than a ceremonious, well-rehearsed and magnificent performance.

In his antechamber after morning prayers the king announced the programme for the day. There then followed many hours of real work which he undertook in order to have personal control over all affairs of state. Apart from this there was a lot of hunting, and there were balls and theatrical productions by great poets and actors which the court enjoyed and which he, too, always attended. Every meal involved a ceremony no less wearisome and solemn than the
lever
, and even his going to bed was a complicated ballet-like production that gave rise to some comical moments. For example, everyone had to bow to the king’s bed, like the faithful before the altar in church, even when the king wasn’t in it. And whenever the king played cards and made conversation there was always a swarm of people standing around him at a respectful distance, hanging on his every word.