A Short History of the World (13 page)

After a tempestuous voyage down the east coast of South America, a passage of water was spotted in October 1520 that led to the calm waters of another ocean. Magellan named the new ocean ‘Mar Pacifico’ as it was so peaceful compared to the Atlantic. He then set sail to find the Spice Islands, but just as Columbus had underestimated the size of the Atlantic Ocean, so Magellan underestimated the size of the Pacific, which is twice the size of the Atlantic. Not for another 14 weeks did they reach present-day Guam, a small island in the Pacific from where they sailed on to the Philippines. It was here, that after all he had gone through, Magellan was killed after having become involved in a battle between local chieftains.

One ship from the fleet,
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captained by Juan Sebastian del Cano, did manage to reach Spain in September 1522, having completed the first ever circumnavigation of the globe. Barely one-tenth of the men who had embarked on the trip returned, but return they did, with 26 tonnes of cloves that paid for the entire expedition. Del Cano achieved fame for the first circumnavigation of the world, but since Magellan had visited south-east Asia on a previous expedition, he gets the credit today for being the first man to go all the way around the world, albeit in two separate voyages. An epic tale of endurance, and one of the greatest adventures in the history of navigation, the voyage showed the true scale of our planet for the first time, and proved that it was possible to sail around the world.
 

The Spanish immediately claimed the Spice Islands, a claim which was fiercely contested by the Portuguese who paid the Spanish a huge quantity of gold to relinquish their claim after an amendment was made to the Treaty of Tordesillas. Portugal’s domination of trade in the Indian Ocean was confirmed and, as consolation, Spain was given the rights to trade in the Philippines. The two countries dominated trade in the area until other European powers were able to develop their navies and merchant fleets a hundred or so years later.

Around this time, two things happened in Europe that were to have huge and lasting consequences for the history of Europe and, by association, for the world: first, in 1517, the German monk, Martin Luther, shocked by what he had seen on a journey to Rome, wrote a number of criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church that launched one of the biggest revolutions in European history. Second, in 1519, the deeply Catholic Charles I of Spain inherited the Habsburg lands and became Charles V, emperor of the largest western empire since Roman times.
 

The European Reformation (1517-1598)

Luther was not the first man to challenge the teachings of the Church. Preachers such as John Wycliffe of England and Jan Hus of Bohemia had already stated that people had the right to read the Bible and to interpret it for themselves. They had been persecuted by the Church as a result. The Church had done itself no favours during the previous centuries, regularly demanding money from its flock and growing rich and lazy on the proceeds, so when the general population in Europe became more urbanised and educated, they began to resent the demands of the clergy.
 

Luther had been horrified by what he had seen in a journey to Rome in 1510, namely the Church selling indulgences – documents issued by the Church to reduce time in purgatory and grant the buyer remission from the need to do penance for sins. His reading of the Bible had led him to the conclusion that one did not need to labour to win God’s favour, as one could not in that way influence how God behaves towards us. Christians were saved by faith and faith alone, and no amount of good works, or indeed even the purchase of indulgences, made any difference at all. The consequence of this was that he rejected the authority of the Pope, denied that priests had any special power over laymen, and asserted the Bible as the sole source of Christian truth:

 
One did not need to do penance, to make costly pilgrimages, to venerate the wasted carcasses of supposed saints; one did not need to make sacrifices. Above all one did not need to buy the tawdry goods the Church peddled to its deluded flock in order to raise the cash it needed for its wars, for its vast buildings, for the paintings, the sculptures, the carved woodwork, the golden goblets and the bejewelled inlaid cases in which the relics of the sanctified laid, and that it relentlessly commissioned from all the finest and most expensive artists and craftsmen in Europe.
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In 1517, as the Ottomans were capturing Egypt from the Mamluks, whose economy had also suffered from the discovery of the maritime spice route, Luther wrote his famous 95 arguments against the sale of indulgences and sent them to his local bishop. With the help of his friends and of the printing presses, Luther’s arguments spread like wildfire, leading Pope Leo X to condemn Luther's teachings in a papal decree.
 

Not one to be told what to do, Luther burned the decree, as a result of which, in 1521, he was invited by Emperor Charles V to recant his views. With the Ottomans at the back door, the last thing Charles needed was a divided Germany. Luther refused and would only recant, he said, if the scriptures told him to do so, an act for which we was outlawed as a heretic. Fortunately for Luther, many of the German princes were keen to remain independent from the encroaching Spanish power and he gained the protection of one of them.
 

Luther’s challenge to traditions and to ecclesiastical authority made him the focus for pent-up religious and economic discontent, and many peasants used the opportunity to air their resentment of the church authorities. It seemed obvious to many of them that the church favoured their oppressors. When the complaints gained traction they turned into a rebellion and then, in 1525, into a full-scale peasant revolt. Unfortunately for the peasants, Luther had ‘
released a conflagration upon Europe far greater and far more radical than any he had himself intended
’,
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and instead of supporting them, he gave his support to German nobles intent on putting out the flames of insurrection.
 

It was not long before the Reformation swept through Western Europe, as ‘
national and dynastic rivalries had now fused with religious zeal to make men fight on where earlier they might have been inclined to compromise
’.
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While Luther had the most influence in Germany, the Swiss and the Dutch were heavily influenced by the Protestant teachings of an exile from France, John Calvin, who preached predestination, namely that God had already decided who would be damned and who would be saved.
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Protestants in France, known as Huguenots, were brutally suppressed and war raged between Protestants and Catholics there until the Protestants were granted freedom of worship in 1598 by Henry IV under the Edict of Nantes.
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In England, the new teaching would give King Henry VIII just the reason he needed to renounce the authority of the Pope completely and divorce his Catholic wife and daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Catherine of Aragon.

The Reformation had a huge impact, both positive and negative, on the development of the West. It allowed great parts of Europe to throw off the shackles of Catholic dogma and develop the freedom of thought that was necessary for innovation; but it also separated the Christians of northern and southern Europe, a division that ultimately led to religious wars that did not abate until 1648.
 

The Habsburgs take over Europe

By the time Charles became Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, his Habsburg family, through a number of successful marriages, owned the largest western empire since Roman times including Spain, the Netherlands, Austria and a number of smaller countries, not to mention Spain’s rich, though unexplored, colonies in the Americas. His empire encompassed so many cultures and languages that he was said to have spoken Spanish to God, French to his mistress, and German to his horse. King of Spain already since 1516, he began to regard the country as the most important part of his empire, leaving the German-speaking provinces to be governed by his brother, Ferdinand.

Emperor for 39 years in a hugely important period for Europe, Charles V spent his reign fighting against the French over lands in Italy and the Netherlands,
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against a defensive league of Protestant princes in Germany, against the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean, and even against the Pope, sacking Rome in 1527 and driving the Pope into exile because the Vatican had allied itself with the French. Overseas, Charles oversaw the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, including the conquest of both the Aztec and Inca empires.
 

The Aztecs and the Incas meet the Iron Age (1200–1520/1531)

Not long after the first Europeans landed in the Americas, word spread of kingdoms rich with gold. As it turned out, gold was indeed found, and beyond people’s wildest dreams. Two major empires in the Americas at this time were the Aztec Empire of present-day Mexico and the Inca Empire, possibly the largest empire in the world at the time, covering an area incorporating lands in present-day Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia. Prior civilisations in the area, such as the Olmecs and the Mayans, had expired for reasons unknown. By the time the conquistadors arrived in the early 16th century, the 300-year old Aztec and the Inca empires were at the height of their civilisations.
 

The lust for gold experienced by the conquistadors led to the brutal conquest of these empires. Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztecs between 1519 and 1520 and Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas a decade later. Both conquests are noteworthy due to the few Europeans it required to conquer vastly superior numbers of natives.
 

In the case of Cortes, the Aztec emperor Montezuma, reigning from the large city of Tenochtitlan, may have taken Cortes for a returning god and lowered his guard. The Aztecs were also terrified by guns and horses, neither of which they had seen before; indeed, there is no record of horses being present in the Americas before the Europeans arrived there in 1492. Cortes also found allies among the local population who had been subjugated by Aztec emperors. The Aztecs believed that without human sacrifice, the sun would not rise and the world would end. Finally, Cortes famously burned the ships in which his troops had travelled, forcing them to either fight or die.
 

Pizarro captured the Incan king, Atahualpa, and held him for ransom until the Incas filled a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide and 8 feet high with gold. Pizarro then reneged on his promises and murdered the king (although not before christening him into the Catholic faith!). According to various sources, the Spanish managed to defeat an Incan army of up to 80,000 soldiers with only 168 people. European diseases killed huge numbers of the local population before the forces even joined in battle, and when natives were able to come together to defend themselves, the result was what you would expect from the clash of a Stone Age and an Iron Age culture: the native Americans had no chance of defeating iron and steel weapons with weapons of stone and wood.
 

Back in Spain, Charles V encouraged the union of his son, Philip, to the Catholic Mary Tudor of England in order to link Spain, England and the Netherlands in a union of Catholic states. He was determined that Protestantism would not be permitted to gain a stronger foothold in Europe, afraid of the dissent it would encourage; to all intents and purposes there was little difference to him between Protestants and Turks. The defence of Luther by a group of German princes, however, together with the wars against the French and the Ottomans, distracted Charles and prevented him from putting down the religious revolt in Germany while he had the opportunity to do so.
 

By the time he was ready to make a move, Protestantism was too deeply entrenched – at least in northern Germany – and, in 1555, at the Peace of Augsburg, Charles was forced to grant Lutheranism official status within the Holy Roman Empire.
 
Worse still, in his opinion, it allowed the 225 German princes to choose the official religion
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within the domains they controlled.
 

As regards the Ottomans, they remained a thorn in Charles’ side, unsuccessfully attempting to take Vienna in 1529,
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and remaining a strong naval force in the Mediterranean until well after his death. Under Suleiman I the Magnificent, the Ottomans would continue to make war against both the Habsburg Empire in the west and the Shiite Safavid Persians, with whom they shared a huge common frontier, in the east. Yet through a series of incompetent Sultans, an over-extended empire and an increasingly repressive attitude to free thought, the Ottoman Empire would see slow but inevitable decline from the 17th century onwards.