A History of the World (44 page)

Again and again the writings of Pizarro’s followers harp on the gold and silver, obsessively weighing it, rather than on the people or the landscape. The Spanish in the New World, for all the beauty of their architecture and the brilliance of their music, would not prove especially creative or enlightened empire-builders. They took over a world that had already long been at war with itself, and whose cultural offerings to Eurasia would be limited. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán may at the time have been the biggest city on the planet apart from Constantinople, and with its canals, palaces and religious art (not to mention its ruthless domination of subject peoples, and its dark obsession with death and the afterlife) it bore a striking resemblance to Venice; but Aztec religion horrified Europeans, and Aztec art was disregarded. The Maya, who in Yucatán took longer to subdue, were already long past their peak; but their intricate architecture and astrology were equally uninteresting to Europeans of the 1500s.

In North America, very soon, other European settlements would lure a different kind of adventurer – religiously dissident, hardy farmers who really did want a new world, a begin-again society. There, despite attempts to recreate a European-style aristocracy in Virginia
and Carolina, the demand for rough democracy (for male Europeans, at least) proved irresistible.

To Mesoamerica the Spanish brought aristocrats, soldiers and priests. Their immense mouldering terrain of churches, convents, haciendas, indentured peasants and slaves produced few new ideas or exports, and eventually proved vulnerable to the North Americans and to Enlightenment-influenced rebellions at home. And once the Spanish monarchy had lost its authority to Napoleon’s regiments and effectively collapsed, Mexico declared independence – not in order to create a new, more democratic society but for quite the opposite reason: to maintain the position of the local aristocrats against worryingly radical moves in Spain.
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The careers of José de San Martín of Argentina and Simón Bolívar from Venezuela are stirring local epics, but they, in turn, were unable to found nations that could challenge the United States, the British or the European empires.

The speed of the Spanish advance during the early stages of the Conquest had been made possible as much by the diseases they carried in and on their bodies as by the weapons in their hands, bold and risk-taking as the Spaniards were. Spanish microbes had reached the Inca capital Cuzco well before Pizarro got there. Smallpox had a devastating effect in the Andes, as elsewhere in South America. It had provoked the civil war, which was raging just as Pizarro landed, by killing the Inca emperor and setting rival sons against one another. From Mexico to the Pacific islands, epidemics had the same effect.

It was the length of the Americans’ immunity-destroying quarantine from the germs current in Eurasia, which lasted for some thirteen thousand years at least, that made the impact so great, particularly in the densely populated centre of the American continent. It has been estimated that around 95 per cent of the people living there before the Europeans arrived were killed by the diseases brought across the ocean – measles, smallpox, malaria, diphtheria, typhus and tuberculosis. One may doubt the accuracy of detailed percentages, but it seems a scale of death unmatched at any time in European history.

What did the Spanish, and the rest of Europe, get in return? Oddly few diseases: only syphilis, and that not certainly from Mesoamerican contact. The main thing Spain got was a huge, sudden influx of specie. Gold-fever infected the Spanish, as the Inca empire collapsed. Pizarro’s secretary Pedro Sancho began his self-justifying account with the
words: ‘Concerning the great quantity of silver and gold which was brought from Cuzco . . .’ Those first piles of ingots were only the beginning. Once Inca culture had been stripped bare, within twenty years new mining and extractive techniques allowed the full-scale exploitation of the fabled mountain of silver at Potosí, now in Bolivia. At the cost, it is said, of ten native American lives for every
peso
minted there, Potosí would provide two-thirds of the fifty thousand tons of silver that passed from America to Europe during the century and a half to come.

Plunder, however, is a very different thing from prosperity. The gold and silver were carried on Spanish galleons to the Spanish court, but ended up almost anywhere else. A lot went to decorate churches. Charles V spent so much of it on his desperate wars to maintain Habsburg control of the Netherlands, and against the rival French in Italy, that it enriched Flemish victuallers, German armourers and all kinds of mercenaries. He spent more of the loot on paying off his debts to Genoese and Venetian creditors; and they in turn sent it flying further east to China to buy silk, porcelain and other luxuries. There, the Ming empire had by now replaced the Mongol Yuan rulers and established another golden age. Except that it was at times too golden, or rather too silver-addicted, for the plunder from America, having moved through Spain and the eastern Mediterranean, then caused a monetary crisis for the Ming.

If this global whirl of Inca metal were not enough, we must also remember the pirates. The French and English, cut out of the grisly bonanza, used their ships to intercept galleons and carry their booty home. England’s Queen Elizabeth turned a blind eye to the piracy, and when the heroic Devon rascal Francis Drake made the journey around South America and into Peruvian waters to steal gold and silver from the Spanish (who had, after all, stolen it from the Incas), Elizabeth’s own share was enough to pay off England’s entire foreign debt.
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The pirates had a significance that goes far beyond the romance of individual stories: by luring more Englishmen and Frenchmen across the Atlantic in search of plunder, piracy both improved Northern seamanship and established beachheads in the Caribbean, which would later ease the spread of empire.

As for the homeland of the Spanish conquerors themselves, in the words of the economic historian David Landes, Spain ‘became (or
stayed) poor because it had too much money’.
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The Spanish bought all manner of fabrics, foods and exotic goods from their rivals. They exulted in the good fortune that allowed them to enjoy a consumer, or consumption, economy without increased productivity – very much as the West wallowed in its credit-fuelled consumer boom during the early part of the twenty-first century. This was spotted at the time. Landes quotes the Moroccan ambassador to Madrid towards the end of this long splurge, in 1690, who noted that the Spanish had the largest income of all the Christians:

It is hard to imagine a more complete programme for national decline than that. In the New World, Spain would build a dozy, already decaying empire of aristocrats, priests and large landowners, and would never experience the jolt into modernity that animated her rivals. Atahualpa was not the only emperor who had failed to spot what was coming.

Man in Black

The look of things, the outward style, can be profound – not trivial at all. During the Reformation one kind of Christian worship, conducted by gorgeously dressed men chanting Latin in their rich, multicoloured churches, was assaulted by another kind. The Germany of Martin Luther was a land of black and white, The stark, black German prose of his preaching, with its urgent choices, strides purposefully over the snow-white of the paper. The spiny black letters impressed with the soot-and-egg mix of early printers’ ink carried tens of thousands of sermons once delivered by his voice into people’s hands across northern Europe. For those who couldn’t read, crude black-and-white woodcuts – as different as it is possible to imagine from the richly coloured altar-pieces that had preceded them – would convey the reformers’ messages.
Their clothes were plain white, dark, black. Their language was the guttural jab-jab of common German. Their faces glare back from early portraits, severe and uncompromising.

The north was in revolt against the south. There, all the Italianate glitter and gleam of the papacy, with its polychrome churches and gilded Madonnas, represented a Church that had grown worldly. No wonder that Martin Luther, sturdy and bullish and a great self-dramatizer, became the German hero, confronting popes and emperors, standing, as he put it, ‘in the mouth of the great Behemoth, between his great teeth’. German history before Luther is the history of rulers and knights, of emperors, archbishops and fables. In many ways he seems the first modern German, arms akimbo, unfrightened, staring back at us in the well known portrait. He was a plain man, but no peasant. His father had worked in the coalmines of Saxony and had done well enough to become a burgher, with a rich wife and an impressive stone-built house. He had sent Martin to a good, if brutal, school, and like so many upwardly mobile parents wanted his son to become a lawyer. But from early on, Martin Luther showed a darkly questioning side to his personality, an itchy restlessness.

We must imagine a world in which Hell is real and close; where the woods and lanes are haunted by fiends and witches; and where the only possible way out of all this is to secure Christ’s help. Germany in Luther’s time was not a comfortable or safe place to be. Apart from suffering plague and the threat of famine in bad years, it was politically weak. In the east, the Teutonic knights had bowed to the Poles. In the north, the Danes had taken Holstein. In the west, the Swiss confederation was winning its independence. More important – and this was the case throughout Luther’s life – the Muslim armies of the Ottomans were threatening all of Europe. These early years of the Reformation coincide with sensational Ottoman challenges such as the fall of Belgrade in 1521, the capture of Rhodes in 1522, the crushing of the Hungarians in 1526, the siege of Vienna three years later, and then further drives into Poland, across the Mediterranean to Malta, and the long fight with Venice. Though the Southern Catholic powers would eventually beat the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and though both Malta and Vienna held out, many Christians believed they were living through the end of Christendom, the last people of a doomed civilization.

Germany existed as a territory and language area claimed by that ‘religious and pseudo-classical myth’, the Holy Roman Empire.
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It did not exist as a nation. Amongst the political minestrone of duchies, princedoms, archbishoprics and free cities there were three hundred or so semi-autonomous principalities, many with their own laws, currencies and family feuds. War and the plague had cut Germany’s population. A new and terrible disease, syphilis, was spreading across Europe. ‘Ghost villages’, which had simply been abandoned, were a common sight. A series of savage peasant rebellions had erupted in southern and western Germany, though not on the scale of the ‘Peasant War’ of Luther’s adulthood, which would claim at least a hundred thousand lives.

So Luther’s world felt rickety and impermanent. Death lurked behind every tree. When he was a twenty-one-year-old student, he tells us, one day in 1505 during a summer thunderstorm he had a revelation while walking along a country road. As the lightning crashed down, he promised that if he survived he would enter a monastery. Luther promptly gave up his studies and became a monk in a notably tough, though not extreme, order. For more than a dozen years he was a model monk, hard-driven at his lessons and duties by his ambitious superiors, and studying the conventional texts of Catholicism almost to the point of nervous breakdown. He did well enough to be sent to Rome by his monastery on a diplomatic mission, albeit an unsuccessful one. He was then sent to the new university of Wittenberg to teach.

Universities were starting up across Germany at this time. They offered a way for principalities and ambitious towns to mark themselves out and attract new talent. Wittenberg was one of twenty or so, and known for being forward-looking and experimental. The small town, scarcely more than a walled village, was ruled by Friedrich the Wise, the Elector of Saxony. A shrewd and independent-minded character, Friedrich was one of the seven German ‘electors’ whose status allowed them to choose the Holy Roman Emperor (not, at this point, a hereditary title), and he had considerable political clout in northern Germany. Later, at the time of his great religious rebellion, Luther would depend on Friedrich for his very survival.

At Wittenberg, Luther’s thinking about sin and redemption challenged much of the traditional teaching. Scholars argue still about just
how radical his theology really was – it was certainly not unique. The essence of the problem was this. The earlier medieval scholastic tradition insisted that the God of love condemned sinful mankind to Hell on the basis of laws so strict and fierce that they could not be kept to the letter. Luther’s view was that mankind was entirely sinful, corrupt, fallen, and could not be transformed into a creature deserving of Heaven simply by repeating prayers or doing good works.

So how could anyone be saved? In a world so intensely religious, this was an urgent question.

Luther solved it when he concluded that God simply brushed aside the sinfulness of those who had true faith – those who were saved, the elect. Sin was too powerful to be defeated by human action. Only a miracle of divine love could overcome it. Christ’s sacrifice, taking on himself mankind’s sinfulness, was the means by which that miracle happened. To be saved, all you needed was true faith in this. The obvious problem with Luther’s view is that it implied that sinful behaviour did not necessarily matter. Trying to overcome sin in a day-to-day way was pointless. Faith was all that counted. Luther’s response to such an objection was that the saved would be so grateful, they would not
want
to sin. (This, as many later generations of Protestants would realize, was a little too easy: the Scottish writer James Hogg’s satire,
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
, skewered the ease with which hypocrites could have their sinful cake and eat it.)