A Criminal History of Mankind (53 page)

His younger contemporary Boccaccio also turned his back on a business career to write poetry, and wrote naturally in the ‘personal’ manner. He has been called the first writer - since he did nothing but write, and became famous solely for his writing (even Petrarch was a canon of the Church). But his major contribution to the new freedom of expression was his collection of bawdy tales,
The Decameron
, which celebrated love and sexuality with a frankness that had not been known since Catullus. It is unlikely that Boccaccio would have felt free to write
The Decameron
if the pope had been in Rome instead of Avignon; as it was, he kept the book a secret from his friend Petrarch. But legend has it that he presented a copy to the British ambassador, Geoffrey Chaucer. In due course, Chaucer had no hesitation in placing himself in the centre of The Canterbury Tales.

Boccaccio lived in Florence - a city whose importance in the history of the Renaissance is out of all proportion to its size. Its wealthy merchants hired great artists - Giotto, Masaccio, Ghiberti, Uccello, Brunelleschi, Donatello - and turned it into the most beautiful city in Europe. It was also the scene of one of the earliest experiments in a kind of socialism. In 1378, the chief justice, Salvestro de Medici, set out to curb the power of the merchants, and the lower paid wool-workers rebelled and demanded higher wages. They were successful, but the result was an immediate disastrous increase in unemployment. The guilds might be ruthless, but they kept the cash flowing in. The new government soon collapsed. But later, when Florence again felt the need for leadership with a democratic flavour, they recalled that a Medici had helped them against the rich and turned to the head of the family, Cosimo de Medici. The Medicis would be the masters of Florence for most of the fifteenth century -the city’s golden age.

As Florence expanded, and Rome again became the city of the popes, the rest of the Mediterranean was aware of the rise of a more sinister force: the Turks. They had been crushed by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, but after Hulagu was chased out of north Africa by the Mamelukes, they resumed their slow expansion. In 1290, the Ottoman dynasty was founded by Osman I. In 1331, Nicaea was taken by the Turks; seven years later, Nicomedia. In 1365, Adrianople - in Thrace - fell and was made the Turkish capital. Now the Turks were established on the western side of Constantinople, and it could only be a matter of time before the capital of eastern Christendom fell. In fact, they besieged Constantinople between 1391 and 1398, and finally withdrew after exacting an enormous tribute. A crusade was called against them in 1396, led by Sigismund of Hungary; an army of twenty thousand Christian knights tried to press forward too quickly and was totally defeated.

At this point, Europe was provided with one more breathing space by yet another incursion of the Mongols. Their leader was another descendant of Genghis Khan - on the female side - called Timur Lenk, Timur the Lame - better known in the west as Tamurlane, the hero of an immensely popular Elizabethan play by Christopher Marlowe. He spent nineteen years (from 1362 to 1380) making himself master of Transoxania, fighting invading nomads; then he spent another seven years conquering Iran. But Tamurlane, while undoubtedly a great general, seems to have been slightly insane. He was a mad, obsessive killer who felt that a conqueror’s chief business was to commit murder on a massive scale. His violence was pointlessly sadistic: when he conquered Sabzawar in 1383 he had two thousand prisoners built into a living mound, then bricked in. Later the same year, he had five thousand captives beheaded at Zirih and their heads made into an enormous pyramid. In 1386 he had all his prisoners at Luri hurled over a cliff. In Delhi he massacred a hundred thousand prisoners. This extraordinary madman invaded Anatolia in 1400, took the garrison of Sivas and had its four thousand Christian defenders buried alive. He stands out in world history as the most spectacular sadist of all time. Yet in the pageant of world history, he is very much a sideshow. If he had been another Genghis Khan, he would have consolidated his home base and then spread very slowly to the north, into Russia, the land of the Kipchak nomads.
This
was the country that was then awaiting unification and a strong ruler. If he had done this - as Arnold Toynbee has pointed out - Moscow might now be ruled from Samarkand instead of vice versa.

But Tamurlane seemed to lack even a grain of political good sense. Russia was a bare land of empty steppes. He felt that a conqueror’s business was to besiege wealthy cities and decapitate all the inhabitants, and Persia and India were more suitable for this purpose than Russia. In 1395, he even went into Russia on a punitive expedition against Toqatmysh nomads and came within a few days march of the squalid little wooden town called Moscow; but he failed to recognise the prize that lay within his grasp - Russia was still struggling against the Tartars - and turned back towards Samarkand, then to India. His own soldiers objected to attacking their Turkish kinsmen in northern India; but for Tamurlane, it was the only thing worth doing and his will prevailed. In 1405 he set out on an expedition against China, but fortunately died on the way. He was, in a sense, a kind of dinosaur, the last of the old Assyrian-style conquerors who thought in terms of mass-murder and torture. Inevitably, his empire collapsed within half a century of his death.

In 1402, Tamurlane had brought the Ottoman Empire to the point of dissolution; but in the following year he retired, and the Turks were able to return to the business of capturing Constantinople. It took them until 1453, and then it was done with the aid of incredibly powerful guns. One cannon fired a ball weighing a quarter of a ton; when it was tested, the cannonball went for almost a mile and buried itself six feet in the ground. The Turks burst into the city on 29 May 1453; the emperor was killed, and the Christian population was dragged off into slavery.

In fact, the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II proved to be an error of gigantic proportions. It had been the gateway to the east, the great international crossroads where cultures and merchants intermingled. As soon as Mahomet became its master he recognised the danger of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and tried to persuade the Greeks to stay on. It was too late; the life had drained out of the city of Constantine.

It was still not the end of Turkish ambition. They were masters of Greece; they dreamed of becoming masters of Italy. When Cosimo de Medici was in Venice - in exile from Florence - the Venetians had only just concluded a peace with the Turks after sixteen years of war; they paid for it by handing over some of their trading stations. Half a century later, the war broke out again, and Venice was forced to hand over more trading stations and pay an immense annual tribute to be allowed to trade in the Black Sea. In 1480, the Turks invaded Italy and took Otranto, and in the following year they besieged the knights of St John in Rhodes - fortunately, Mahomet II died and the siege was called off.

In short, the Turks were now expanding all around the Mediterranean, and strangling trade. There had even been a point when they commanded the gateway to the Mediterranean itself, a North African town called Ceuta which looked across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar. If the Turks had been - like the Arabs before them - willing to exchange ideas and trade, it would have made no serious difference; but they seemed to be particularly difficult and bloody-minded - for centuries afterwards, the phrase ‘to play the Turk’ meant to behave with stupid ferocity, like a dog in a manger.

So in 1415 the Portuguese sent an expedition against Ceuta. Portugal was a young country which had been founded by commoners during the second crusade. It had a fairly small population and a long sea coast, and it was natural they should become sea traders. Ceuta threatened its livelihood. King John of Portugal sent his son, Prince Henry, with a fleet of ships, and they were lucky enough to be driven by favourable winds and to take the Turks by surprise. Prince Henry sank their fleet, then systematically destroyed Ceuta. Now, at least, European merchants could come and go as they pleased into the Mediterranean.

But the Turks continued to play the Turk, and to block the overland trade routes to the east - to Persia, India and China. And since the Europeans of the fifteenth century had developed a taste for silks and spices, this was disastrous. They had discovered that spices would preserve meat through the long winter, and leave behind a rather more interesting taste than salt. They also believed - quite erroneously - that the smell of spices could prevent the plague, and every nobleman carried an orange stuck with cloves of cinnamon to sniff when he had to walk through a slum quarter. The east was full of cheap spices. But the Turks blocked the route, or charged such enormous duties that it was not worth the long journey.

Europe had still not forgotten Prester John, that great Christian monarch who lived somewhere on the other side of the Turks. If they could find a direct sea route to
his
lands, the problem would be solved. But no one had any idea of whether such a route existed.

The Portuguese had sailed down the west coast of Africa for a thousand miles or so, to Cape Bojador, south of the Canaries; but there the water turned white and looked very dangerous - it was culled the Boiling Sea. No one had ventured farther south than that.

Fortunately, Prince Henry of Portugal had money to spare, since he was the Grand Master of the Order of Christ, which had replaced the Templars. He hired map-makers, navigators and ship-designers, and opened a school to train sailors for long-distance exploration. This problem of the sea route to the realm of Prester John became his obsession, so that he earned himself the title of Henry the Navigator. In fact, all his navigating was done from an armchair - he had no desire to risk his own life. His shipwrights built a new type of vessel called a caravel, designed for the open sea instead of (like most ships of his time) the Mediterranean. And in 1427 his caravels sailed out into the Atlantic nearly eight hundred miles from the shores of Portugal. They discovered the islands called the Azores, and Portuguese settlers were soon on their way there.

Cape Bojador still remained a barrier to the south. In 1433, the sailors on a caravel refused to venture into the Boiling Sea, and turned back. Henry, from his armchair, insisted that they had nothing to be afraid of; the boiling seas were probably due to shallows, and all they had to do was to sail out into the ocean and round them. He proved to be correct; the following year, the same ship sailed beyond Cape Bojador and landed on the other side. The sailors found a pleasant land with vines and flowering plants and took samples back to Portugal. Soon Henry’s ships were exploring the coast of Africa and setting up trading posts.

Henry the Navigator died in 1460, his dream of finding the route to India still unrealised. Twenty-eight years later, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. His successor, Vasco da Gama, reached the mouth of the Zambesi and discovered that the Arabs had preceded him by the overland route. But an Arab pilot guided him across to Calicut, in India. When he finally returned home, he had lost three-quarters of his men from scurvy and several of his ships. The Portuguese sent warships to deal with the hostile Arabs and built trading posts all round the coast of Africa.

Meanwhile, a Genoese adventurer named Christopher Columbus had also been in Portugal trying to raise money for his own pet project - finding a way to China and India by sailing west across the Ocean Sea (as the Atlantic was then called). The Portuguese turned him away and he took his project to Spain. Here his luck improved when the Spanish queen, Isabella, became his patroness. Delays were interminable; it was six years before he was ready to start. But on the morning of 3 August 1492, the
Santa Maria
, the
Pinta
and the
Nina
sailed from Palos.

According to the maps of that time, the island of Japan (Zipangn) should be due west of the Canaries, so Columbus began by turning south, then west. Luck had taken him in the right direction – into the north-west winds that roared up the coast of Africa. For weeks, these winds carried them into the Atlantic. The sailors became increasingly nervous - some believed they might fall off the edge of the world. Columbus kept two log books, one showing the real distance and the other a greatly reduced distance, to keep his officers quiet. But when the crew threatened mutiny, he had to promise that if there was no land within three days they would return to Spain.

On the third day - 11 October - a branch with green leaves drifted past the ship. By mid morning of the following day, the delighted sailors were splashing ashore towards a group of naked human beings who looked at them curiously. Columbus had landed on one of the Bahamas; he called it San Salvador. He went on to discover Haiti and Cuba. Then, leaving behind a colony to search for gold, he sailed back to Spain. The total voyage had taken seven months. Columbus was received like a hero and loaded with honours and riches. Yet it is typical of him that he also claimed the large reward that was supposed to go to the first sailor who sighted land. The persistence that enabled Columbus to discover America was partly the sheer manic obsessiveness of the typical Right Man. It was to be responsible for most of his later misfortunes.

When the second ship, the
Pinta
, arrived back in Palos, it brought a rather more dubious gift to the old world - a sexual disease that the captain, Martin Pinzon, had picked up from a native woman. It was called syphilis, and within ten years had spread all over the ports of Europe and the near east - an ironic testimony to how far communications had improved.

Columbus made three more voyages - on the third of which he discovered the mainland of America, landing at the place now called Colon on the Isthmus of Panama. But the remainder of his life was something of an anticlimax. His arrogance and stubbornness caused endless trouble, and at one point he was loaded with chains and sent back to Spain. Totally blind to his own shortcomings, he remained convinced that he was a misunderstood saint. He died, exhausted and embittered, at the age of fifty-five.