Heretics and Heroes Read online

  The historic encounter between the natives of the Americas and the societies of Europe may be said to be complex, not all of it to be summed up in the few paragraphs I have written. Certainly, the richer and more structured societies the Spaniards would encounter among the Aztecs, the Inca, and the Maya (and their criminal despoliation) require a more extensive treatment than is possible here.12 But in all instances, whoever the tribes, whoever the Europeans, whatever the excuse, the cumulative result is depressingly similar: a genocide as extensive and as cruel as any in history.13

  Columbus, as Fernández-Armesto points out, “was predisposed to success, unresponsive to setbacks and blind to any obstacle, of however incontestably material a nature, that might lie in his path. He had a deep conviction of self-righteousness and the unlimited capacity for self-deception that usually accompanies that quality. He was intensely religious, and his religion was strongly providential”—that is, providential in regard to himself and his enterprise, though utterly lacking in regard to anyone who was not his patron or similarly on his side. He was, as Fernández-Armesto observes, “made of the quintessence of wishful thinking,” a traveling salesman, full of empty charm. He was, in short, very nearly our contemporary, a completely self-made man, the first to claim our attention across the centuries.

  It is impossible to imagine Columbus, as he was, existing before the disaster of the Black Death, which emptied so much of Europe and opened land ownership and other enterprises for the first time to men of no provenance. If that field across the way belonged to my now dead neighbor and his dead family, and there are no enforceable claims upon it, what is to prevent me from claiming it? If the town’s chief business (say, shoemaking or distribution of farm products), which kept us all employed and a few of us in riches, is now in idleness because of so many deaths, what is to prevent me from starting it up again and claiming ownership? Of course, I must carefully cloak my desires and my plan in the raiments of piety: I want only what God himself wants. To be quite successful, I must actually believe that this is so.

  It is a shock for the historian, contemplating this overnight transformation of medieval sensibility (in which virtually everything and everyone had a place and stayed there) into the more upwardly mobile, if slimier, sensibility of the characters in a David Mamet drama. Francis of Assisi, meet Bernie Madoff.

  If I intend to make my fortune as an exploiter of one kind or another—an exploiter of something beyond myself, since I know that in myself I have nothing, not family or holdings or even knowledge—I must find something or someone appropriate to exploit, that is, something or someone virtually begging to be ripped off. And at this point we hear, almost for the first time in Western history, the sounds of racism. The ancient Greeks had been racist, believing themselves to be hoi aristoi, the best, and all others to be seriously deficient, barbarians of one sort or another. But the Greek attitude never found a foothold in Catholic Europe; and the Christian Middle Ages, intolerant about religion, were full of cultural, rather than racial, chauvinism. Those who persecuted Jews and, more occasionally, Muslims within their midst were not racists, for they found their old antagonists quite acceptable the moment they converted to Christianity. Medieval people may have been anti-Judaic; they were not anti-Semitic. (Anti-Semitism would require the aura of specious scientific proof, something that lay in the future.)

  But it is in this period that the African slave trade begins to get under way and that several varieties of humans—Canary Islanders, black Africans, the Irish tribes “beyond the Pale” of English colonization, and the native tribes of the Americas—begin to be dehumanized, casually considered subhuman, fit only for manual labor or worse. It is also in this period that we first hear mention of Jewish “blood”—at least in Spain, which serves as a harbinger of attitudes that will eventually infect all of Europe. And it is in the Spain of this period that the phrase sangre azul (blue blood) begins to be bandied about—in reference to those whose lightness of skin allows the blueness of their veins (particularly on the backs of their hands or the undersides of their arms) to be displayed for all to acknowledge.

  The science of the Greeks had been largely lost in the early medieval centuries, the centuries of barbarian invasions of the old Roman Empire, of wholesale destruction of books, and of near-universal loss of literacy. By the time of Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, science had been reborn but was still in its second infancy: it had a long way to go. The discovery of America served as a goad to the energetic expansion of science. All maps had to be redrawn; and all geography had to be reconceived and rewritten. Inevitably, new questions arose in cosmology: if we had been so wrong about the continents of our own planet, what might we have wrong about the rest of the universe?

  Are all human beings descended from Adam and Eve or is there some other explanation for the immense diversity of peoples? Are these natives on the far side of the globe really human? Could God have intended them to be saved by the blood of Christ when, at least before the arrival of Europeans bearing Christianity, all their dead, never having heard the gospel, had gone to Hell? What does this say about God? Or what criticism might it imply about our theological presuppositions? In light of these things, what theological revisions might be necessary? Could these natives be surviving instances of Edenic beings? Or are they rather subhumans, such as the monsters mentioned in the Odyssey (for instance, cannibals, Lotus-eaters, and Cyclopes) and in the book of Genesis (for instance, the Nephilim, who were believed to be the offspring of giant demons and earthly women)? But if these creatures are truly human, what does it mean to be human?

  These may not have been questions posed by Columbus’s sailors, but such questions as these threw intellectual Europe into a wild tizzy of speculation and revisionism—a confusion as unending as ours would be if extraterrestrials were to land among us. This New World awakened a European drama of ceaseless questioning, a questioning that, like the spirits released by Pandora, could never again be contained.

  “New World” also entered common speech, serving as an everyday reference to novelty, excitement, even unthinkably exquisite experience. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, in his Elegie XIX, the Jacobean poet John Donne undresses his mistress, removing each of her articles of clothing till she is completely naked:

  Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,

  Before, behind, between, above, below.

  O my America! My new-found-land,

  My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d,

  My Myne of precious stones, My Emperie,

  How blest am I in this discovering thee!

  It is most unlikely that Donne ever read Las Casas. As he entered his beloved’s “Myne of precious stones,” he was not thinking of Tainos being worked to death in Spanish mines. He was, however, thinking about what all those naked natives had given him (and his age) license to think about:

  Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,

  As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,

  To taste whole joyes.14

  His mind was filled with marvels, whether related by deceptive travelers or imagined—just as Thomas More had imagined the island of Utopia, just as William Shakespeare would imagine the island of Prospero in The Tempest, just as generations of science fiction writers would eventually imagine fantastic voyages to “other worlds.” In Europe, at a safe distance from the horrors being perpetrated on the natives, America commonly served as a prelapsarian Eden, sometimes even as an Eden of a particularly lubricious sort, seldom if ever as the Hell it became for so many.

  1345–1498: HUMANISTS RAMPANT

  In early April of the same year that Columbus discovered the New World, an itinerant Greek scholar returned to Florence to the fabulous court of Lorenzo de’ Medici—Lorenzo il Magnifico, as everyone called him—with a weighty cache of precious Greek manuscripts. The riches the scholar—Ianos Lascaris (also known as Giovanni Rhyndacenus)—meant to lay at the feet of his patron did not represent the star
t of the Renaissance, which had broken through Italian soil almost simultaneously with the Black Death. Rather, Lascaris’s great gift was a sure sign that the Renaissance was now close to blooming in all its racy perfection.

  It should never be forgotten that, despite its eventual influence across Europe, the Renaissance (as we call it, following the historic French influence on English letters), il Rinascimento (as it was called in Florence), the great Rebirth, was, to begin with, an entirely homegrown northern Italian phenomenon.

  Francesco Petrarca, known to the English-speaking world as Petrarch, is credited with being the first figure of the Renaissance. Son of a banished White Guelph—the same party Dante had once taken a prominent part in—Petrarch grew up, not in his ancestral Florence, but in the south of France at papal Avignon, a very Italian town. By the time he was sixteen, however, Petrarch was studying law at Bologna at the insistence of his father, who was concerned about his son’s peculiar intellectual interests and wanted to make sure the boy would eventually be able to earn a living. Long before he was packed off to Bologna, Petrarch was collecting (and reading appreciatively) the works of Cicero, consummate orator and philosopher of ancient Rome, and of Virgil, greatest of all Latin poets. Petrarch’s other early literary hero was the late Latin rhetorician and theologian Augustine of Hippo, a Christian bishop and a man solidly on Plato’s team (as we saw in the Prologue). Old Petrarch, alarmed at his son’s bizarre interests, even burned some of the boy’s precious books but at length, like the good Italian papà he was, threw up his hands and relented.

  What Petrarch discovered in his reading was an ancient literary and philosophical tradition that, though once vigorous, had been rent and left in tatters by subsequent ages. These ages—from the death of Augustine, the last great Latinist, in the early fifth century, to the time of Petrarch—the young man labeled “the Dark Ages,” a label that would stick. Now in the mid-fourteenth century, thought Petrarch, the time had come to renew the once vibrant tradition, so full of exploratory jaunts, surprising divagations, and delicious subtleties.

  On the one hand, there were the dreary methods of the schools and universities, which, in part because of a lack of books, relied on much memorization. Even at so august an institution as the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest institution of higher learning, chartered in the mid-twelfth century, the amount of rote learning was enough to crush the spirit of the keenest student. And the content of what had to be memorized was even worse: proofs of this and that, set in the unalterable form of thesis statement, list of authorities backing the thesis, objections to the thesis (in the form of straw men, easily vanquished), proof demonstration relying on Aristotelian logic, and wham! that was the end of that subject, whether science, law, or philosophy.15

  On the other hand, classical writers such as Cicero, Virgil, and even Augustine offered not numbing rote but pleasure—the pleasure of minds exploring, embracing, revising, and even loving ideas for their own sake. Thus did the first shoot of the Renaissance poke its way through the seemingly inhospitable ground of the mid-fourteenth century, the same period as that of Petrarch’s friend Boccaccio and of the leveling horrors of the Black Death. But while Boccaccio looked back on Dante with supreme admiration, Petrarch did no such thing. Dante, in Petrarch’s estimation, belonged to the insufferable Dark Ages, just another whimpering breast-beater caught in a trap of his own phantasmagoric fears.

  In Petrarch’s mistaken demotion of Dante we may easily read an instance of Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence,” an example of the pattern by which a new age so often sneers at even the most timeless influences of the age that went before. Petrarch was indeed a very limited man, only somewhat talented and somewhat learned. He was a somewhat good, if somewhat boring, poet and a somewhat good scholar, though he never set himself the task of learning the language of the ancient Greeks—in the catalogue of whose authors he would have discovered the ultimate sources of the Latin writers he so admired. For Petrarch, his Latin-speaking ancestors from the Italian peninsula supplied all needed inspiration. He collected books—in his day an unusual activity and probably the contribution we have the most to thank him for. In 1345 he even discovered a previously unknown collection of Cicero’s letters, Ad Atticum.

  The collection of books—crumbling old manuscripts, many with titles and contents long lost to scholarship, many in languages other than Latin, in Greek especially, but also in Hebrew, Arabic, and what was then called Chaldean (Aramaic)—was the great enterprise on which the Renaissance was built. Or rather, it was the satiating pleasure that Petrarch and, after him, so many others derived from their collections, from their loving attention to the great writers of the past, to the thoughts and feelings of the classical authors of the Golden and Silver Ages, and from their resolve to bring about a splendid new age in imitation of what once had been.

  This pleasure—in collecting, understanding, savoring, imitating (and even surpassing)—becomes the essential hallmark of the Renaissance and its rich abundance of activities. Combined with what we may call the “new realism” (or the “new detachment” or even the “new selfishness”) consequent upon the Black Death, this new sense of pleasure will make for a new age. Men like Petrarch came to be called humanists, that is, people interested in human subjects rather than in the divine or theological subjects that had so enticed the previous age. This did not mean that they were irreligious or antireligious. (Petrarch himself was a Catholic priest, though openly in love with a married woman, Laura, about whom he wrote obsessively.) It did mean that, like the ancient authors, their chief interest was in the lives and fates of human beings, not in the unknowable life of God, certainly not in the highly artificial philosophical and theological structure called scholasticism, supposedly inspired by Aristotelian logic, which had come to dominate university instruction throughout Europe. For those who had suffered in adolescence under the oppressive, unpalatable dominion of the scholastics, the activities encouraged by the Renaissance seemed welcome as a scented spring after a long, lugubrious winter.

  These humanists might better be called philologists. Though these scholars spoke, to begin with, a simplified, late-medieval Latin, their intensive and extensive reading enabled them to create new dictionaries, new grammars, and new manuals in the art of rhetoric, modeled especially on the Latin and Greek classics. Appreciation of ancient Greek, knowledge of which had very nearly died out in Western Europe, was markedly reinvigorated by the flight of Greek scholars from the Byzantine Empire, now overwhelmed by the Turks. Many, probably most, of these scholars came to Italy, where they felt exceedingly comfortable and were received with high enthusiasm.

  One of the Greeks was Ianos Lascaris, who found in Lorenzo the Magnificent the patron whom many an intellectual in need could only dream of attracting. Lorenzo, scion of the Medici banking family, whose tremendous lending institution dominated not only its hometown of Florence but much of capitalist Europe, was a supremely gracious if hard-driving athlete of immense appetite and, it must be admitted, impeccably good taste. The only thing he seemed to lack was physical beauty—he had a large, skewed nose and bumpy brows, if a face pulsing with life and vigor—but he certainly appreciated beauty beyond himself, especially in music, the plastic arts, literature, and young women. His poems, at least in the opinion of this reader, were a lot better than those of Petrarch, who wrote mostly in bland, imitative Latin. Lorenzo fashioned lapidary verses in the simple, open Tuscan of his time, yet tacking close to the immaculately chosen subjects of Horace and the invigoratingly lyrical dash of Catullus:

  Quanto sia vana ogni speranza nostra,

  Quanto fallace ciaschedun disegno,

  Quanto sia il mondo d’ignoranza pregno,

  La maestra del tutto, Morte, il mostra.

  How vain is every hope, each breath.

  How false is every single plan.

  How full of ignorance is man

  Against the monstrous mistress, Death.

  So begins on
e of Lorenzo’s sonnets. But often, such meditation only impels him to urge his reader to take whatever pleasure the moment may offer, as in the opening verse of his “Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne,” written for a public pageant of the same title:

  Quant’è bella giovinezza

  Che si fugge tuttavia!

  Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:

  Di doman non c’è certezza.

  How very beautiful is youth

  That slips our grasp and flies away!

  So if you like, be merry, gay:

  Uncertainty’s tomorrow’s only truth.16

  These lines, repeated throughout the poem, gain force with each restatement. And though this sentiment had never disappeared entirely from European literature, it had hardly been heard with such intensity since pagan Horace in the first century BC had raised the famous cry “Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!” (Seize the day, trust little in tomorrow!) Though the humanists were Christians, their adherence to their religion—certainly by the end of the fifteenth century—was often more formal than deeply felt.

  Lorenzo himself loved nothing so much as a good party. “The early years” of his inheritance, writes Christopher Hibbert,

  were notable in Florence for a succession of entertainments: pageants, tournaments, masques, spectacles and parades; musical festivals, revels, dances and amusements of every kind. For generations, indeed, Florence had been famous all over Europe for such festivities. No city had more spectacular nor more numerous entertainments.… There were carnivals, horse races and football games, dances in the Mercato Vecchio [Old Market], mock battles in the Piazza Santa Croce and water displays beneath the bridges of the [River] Arno. Sometimes the Piazza della Signoria would be turned into a circus or hunting-field; wild animals would be let loose; boars would be goaded by lances; and the Commune’s lions would be brought out of their cage behind the Palazzo and incited—rarely successfully—to set upon dogs. On one occasion at least these escapades got out of hand: three men were killed by a rampaging buffalo, and afterwards a mare was set loose among stallions, a sight which one citizen thought the “most marvelous entertainment for girls to behold,” but which in the opinion of another, more respectable diarist, “much displeased decent and well-behaved people.”