Europe: A History (88 page)
Lithuania’s baptism followed decades of vacillation between the Latin and the Orthodox options. Jogaila’s father, Grand Duke Algirdas (r. 1341–77), had pursued a policy of ‘dynamic balance’. Throughout his reign, he teased both Avignon and Constantinople with the prospects of a conversion. In the 1370s it looked as though he would take the Orthodox path in order to supplant Moscow as leader of the Orthodox Slavs. In 1375 he persuaded the Patriarch of Constantinople to create a separate metropolitan of ‘Kiev, Rus’ and Lithuania’, in opposition to the older metropolitanate of ‘Kiev and all Rus’’, now controlled by Moscow. Jogaila, too, had leaned towards the Eastern option. In 1382 he was pushed towards Moscow, when his disaffected brother began to consort with the Teutonic Knights. As late as 1384 a provisional treaty was concluded by Jogaila’s Christian mother, Juliana of Tver, whereby Jogaila was to be betrothed to a Muscovite princess and Lithuania to Orthodoxy. The plans were probably ruined by the Tartars, who razed Moscow and destroyed the value of a Muscovite alliance. So, when the die was cast in favour of union with Catholic Poland, it was cast very suddenly. Jogaila reached agreement with the Polish and Hungarian-Angevin envoys at Kreva in August 1385. On 15 February 1386 he was baptized in Cracow, receiving the Christian name of Władysław. Three days later he was married to Jadwiga. On 4 March he was crowned co-king of Poland.
28
(See Appendix III, p. 1262.)
Oddly enough, when the sacred oaks were felled in Vilnius in 1387, it was not the last Christian conversion in Europe. At the time, the district of Samogitia or ‘Lower Lithuania’ was occupied by the Teutonic Knights, who did not care to take the same step. So the district did not receive its baptism until recovered by the Lithuanians in 1417.
29
Eleven centuries after Constantine, the long career of pagan Europe reached its term.
The Jagiellons quickly established themselves as a major force. Their future was assured once the Teutonic Knights were routed at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410. With one branch of the family ruling in Vilnius and the other in Cracow, the Jagiellons ruled the largest realm in Christendom. Though Roman Catholicism was the dominant cultural force, and Polish increasingly the language of the ruling nobility, they presided over a multinational community where Polish, Ruthenian, and Jewish interests were all strongly represented. (Lithuanian culture receded into the peasant mass of the north-east.) Jogaila’s son Ladislas/Władysław IV (d. 1444) reigned in Hungary as well as Poland, dying on crusade at distant Varna. His grandson Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (r. 1445–92), who was married to a Habsburg, was known as the ‘grandfather of Europe’. Indeed, when Kazimierz died in 1492, his heirs looked set to inherit the earth. Fate intervened in the form of the Turk. When Louis Jagiellończyk, King of Bohemia and Hungary, perished heirless on the field of Mohacs in 1526, his possessions reverted to the Habsburgs. And it was the Habsburgs who inherited central Europe. Even so, the Jagiellons had given rise to a civilization that long outlasted their eclipse,
[MICROBE]
MICROBE
C
ASIMIR
Jagiellorńczyk, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, was buried in the Holy Cross Chapel of Wawel Cathedral in Cracow in July 1492. In May 1973, 481 years later, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyła, gave permission to a team of conservationists to reopen the tomb, together with that of Casimir’s queen, Elizabeth of Austria. The occasion was not unique: the tomb of Casimir the Great (d. 1370) had been reopened in 1869, and the reburial gave occasion for a great Polish patriotic demonstration. The tomb of St Jadwiga (d. 1399) had been reopened in 1949.
Yet the exhumation of 1973 was, in all senses, disturbing. Within a short period of time, no fewer than sixteen persons directly involved had died of uncertain causes. The world’s press remembered the ‘Curse of the Pharaohs’ and speculated about 500-year-old bacilli. A Cracow journalist wrote a best-selling book on
Curses, Micobes and Scholars
which, in the best medieval fashion, reverted its readers’ attention to the topic of human mortality.
1
In late medieval Scandinavia, the three monarchies were overshadowed by the separate interests of a stormy nobility and by the commercial activities of the Hansa. The Viking communities had abandoned their sea-raiding by the thirteenth century, and had settled down to exploit the agriculture of the lowlands, the timber and iron mines, and the rich fishing grounds such as the famous herring-beds off Scania. The Hansa network based at Lübeck and at Visby linked Scandinavia both with Western Europe and with Russia.
In 1397 the remarkable Queen Margaret (1353–1412), who reigned in Denmark by inheritance, in Norway by marriage, and in Sweden by election, succeeded in forging a limited union of the three countries. But this Union of Kalmar was an agglomerate, not a compound; and it was due to disintegrate into its national components. In the favourite saying of Queen Margaret’s father, Waldemar IV Atterdag, ‘Tomorrow is another day.’
Medieval civilization is frequently called ‘theocratic’—that is, it was governed by the all-pervasive concept of the Christian God. God’s will was sufficient to explain all phenomena. The service of God was seen as the sole legitimate purpose of all human enterprise. The contemplation of God was the highest form of intellectual or creative endeavour.
It is important to realize, therefore, that much modern knowledge about the Middle Ages has been coloured by the religious perspective of the churchmen who provided the information and wrote the chronicles. To some degree, modern observers may well have been misled ‘into supposing that mediaeval
civilisation was more intrinsically Christian than was probably the case’.
30
Even so, the central position of Christian belief can hardly be denied. On this point the growing schism between Latin and Orthodox Christianity made little difference. If the West was largely theocratic in outlook, the East was almost completely so. Indeed, the Orthodox world avoided most of the new influences which, from the fourteenth century onwards, made some of the broad generalizations less tenable (see Chapter VII).
There is a distinction to be made, however, between the ‘high culture’ of the educated élite and the ‘low culture’ of ordinary people. Recent scholars have contrasted ‘clerical culture’ with the ‘folklore tradition’. Since the educated minority was made up either of clerics or of clerics’ pupils, the formal culture of literate circles could be expected to adhere fairly closely to conventional religious teaching. By the same token, since large sectors of the population were illiterate, including untutored women and the unlettered aristocracy, it would not be surprising to find pagan survivals, heretical opinions, or decidedly irreligious viewpoints among them. Traditional medieval scholarship was largely confined to the sphere of high culture. Popular culture is one of the subjects of the ‘new Middle Ages’, as presented by the latest generation of medievalists.
Imagining the Middle Ages is, indeed, the problem. Historians have to stress not just what the medieval scene contained but also what it lacked. In its physical surroundings, it lacked many of the sights, sounds, and smells that have since become commonplace. There were no factory chimneys, no background traffic noise, no artificial pollutants or deodorants. Tiny isolated settlements existed in an overpowering wilderness of forest and heath, in a stillness where a church bell or the lowing of a cow could carry for miles, amidst a collection of natural but pungent whiffs from the midden and the wood fire. People’s perception of those surroundings lacked any strong sense of discrimination between what later times would call the natural and the supernatural, between fact and fiction, between the present and the past. Men and women had few means of verifying the messages of their senses, so all sorts of sensations were given similar credence. Angels, devils, and sprites were as real as one’s neighbours. The heroes of yesteryear, or of the Bible, were just as present (or as distant) as the kings and queens of one’s own country. Nothing was more fitting, or more obvious, than Dante’s story of a living man who could walk through heaven and hell, and who could meet the shades of people from all ages—undecayed, undifferentiated, undivided.
The medieval awareness of time and space was radically different from our own. Time was measured by the irregular motions of day and night, of the seasons, of sowing and reaping. Fixed hours and calendars were in the sacred preserve of the Church. Men travelled so slowly that they possessed no means of testing conventional geographical wisdom. Jerusalem lay at the centre of the three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe, allocated respectively to the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Beyond the continents lay the encompassing ocean, and beyond the ocean the line where heaven and earth merged imperceptibly into one.
[TEMPUS]
Medieval interest in the human body was as minimal as the understanding of it. The internal organs were not clearly differentiated, let alone the interdependent workings of the nervous, skeletal, circulatory, digestive, and reproductive systems. Instead, the body was thought to be composed of a marvellous combination of the four elements, the four humours, and the four complexions. Earth, fire, air, and water were matched with black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm, and permed against Man’s melancholic, choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic temperaments. Specialist knowledge grew very slowly. The early fourteenth century saw doctors practising post mortem dissection, and a corresponding improvement in textbooks, notably in the
Anatomia
of Mondini di Luzzi (1316) and of Guido da Vigevano (1345). Surgery benefited from new textbooks such as the
Chirurgica Magna
by Guy de Chauliac (1363). After the experience of the Black Death, quarantine against plague ships was instituted, first at Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in 1377, then at Marseilles in 1383.
Above all, it has been suggested that medieval people lived in a psychological environment of fear and insecurity that inhibited bold and independent thought. Exposure to the forces of nature, incessant warfare, widespread banditry, raids by Vikings, nomads, and infidels, plague, famine, and anarchy—all contributed to the conviction that man was feeble and God was great. Only in the asylum of a monastery could a forceful mind follow its own genius.
Medieval philosophy, therefore, remained essentially a branch of theology. The central task was to accommodate Aristotelian ideas with religious dogma, and more generally to reconcile reason with faith. The greatest of medieval philosophers, the Dominican St Thomas Aquinas (
c
.1225–74), achieved this by saying that human reason was divinely appointed, that faith was rational, and that, properly interpreted, the two could not be contradictory. Related problems were elaborated by three Franciscans, all from Britain: Roger Bacon (1214–92), John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), and William of Ockham (c.1285–1349). Bacon, the
doctor mirabilis
, spent fourteen years in prison for his ‘suspect novelties’. Duns Scotus, after whom, somewhat quaintly, the English language obtained the word ‘Dunce’, dissented from Aquinas, arguing that reason could only be applied to the realm of what was immediately perceptible. He was champion of the Immaculate Conception. Ockham, the
venerabilis inceptor
, excommunicated for his pains, was the leader of the so-called Nominalists. His demolition of the reigning Platonic notion of universals—abstract essences that were thought to exist independently of particular objects—undermined the philosophical foundations of many inflexible medieval conventions, including the social orders. ‘Ockham’s Razor’—the principle that facts should be interpreted with a minimum of explanatory causes—proved a powerful instrument for logical thinking. His complete separation of reason from faith opened the way for scientific and secular investigations. His watchword was
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
(entities should not be unnecessarily multiplied). When he was presented to the German Emperor, Lewis of Bavaria, he was supposed to have said, ‘If you will defend me with the sword, Sire, I shall defend you with the pen.’
TEMPUS
G
IOVANNI DA
DONDI (1318–89), Professor of Astronomy at Padua, was by no means the first clockmaker. Dante mentions a clock in his
Paradiso;
and there are records of clocks in London’s St Paul’s in 1286 and in Milan in 1309. But Dondi’s treatise //
Tractus Astarii
(1364) provides the earliest detailed description of clockwork. It presented a seven-dialled astronomical clock, regulated by an escapement of the crown-wheel-and-verge type. (It has inspired several modern replicas, one of which is displayed in the Science Museum, Kensington, another in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington.)
1
(See Appendix III, p. 1250.)
The original invention of clockwork is usually attributed to an eighth-century Chinese, Liang Lin-son. But practical applications were not made in Europe until the end of the thirteenth century. The first clocks simply struck an hour bell. A machine of this type, built in 1386, still operates in Salisbury cathedral. Later models had dials, showing not only the hours of the day but also phases of the moon, the passage of the planets, even the calendar of saints’ days and religious festivals. The finest examples were built at Milan (1335), Strasbourg (1354), Lund (1380), Rouen (1389), Wells (1392), and Prague (1462). Mechanical clocks gradually supplanted earlier types of timepiece such as shadow-clocks, sundials, hourglasses, and clepsydras. They were specially attractive for the northern countries, where sunshine was unreliable. They were constructed in all the great cathedrals, on city squares and gates, and above all in monasteries.
The twenty-four-hour clock, with hours of a fixed duration, revolutionized daily habits of time-keeping. Most people had lived by the variable rhythms of sunrise and sunset. Where systems of hours had been known and used, they varied in length from season to season, and from country to country. Daytime ‘temporal hours’ differed both from the ‘watches’ of the night and from the ‘canonical hours’ of the Church, divided into matins, laude, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline. Ordinary folk took the idea of a fixed daily routine, regulated by equalized hours, from the medieval monks. These provided the necessary prelude to the later norms of urban life, and to the artificial disciplines of industrialized society. The clock is a ‘totalitarian taskmaster’ with a powerful socializing influence. Newtonian physics sanctified the idea that the whole universe was one great ‘celestial clock’; and it has taken the greatest of modern minds, including Einstein and Proust, to show how unnatural the mechanistic perception of time really is.
2
[COMBRAY]
[e =
mc
2
]
Landmarks in the evolution of clockwork included miniaturization, which gave rise to domestic clocks in the fifteenth century, and to personal watches in the sixteenth; the pendulum (1657), which greatly increased reliability; the marine chronometer (1761), which solved the long-standing
problem of measuring longitude at sea; and the keyless mechanism (1823), which led to popular pocket and wrist watches. The ultimate timepiece, an atomic clock accurate to one second in 3,000 years, was built at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory in 1955.
Over the centuries, clockmaking developed from a highly specialized craft to a mass production industry. The early centres were found at Nuremberg and Augsburg, and at Paris and Blois. Switzerland benefited by the influx of Huguenot craftsmen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England became predominant. France led the field with case design and ornamental clocks. The Black Forest specialized in wooden ‘cuckoo clocks’. In the nineteenth century Swiss industry, based at Geneva and at La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Jura, gained worldwide supremacy in high-quality machine-made watches.
The craft of clockmakers grew out of the earlier guilds of locksmiths and jewellers. Famous names include Jacques de la Garde of Blois, maker of the first watch (1551); Christian Huygens (1629–95) of the Hague, inventor both of the pendulum and of the spiral-balance hairspring; John Arnold, Thomas Earnshaw, and John Harrison (1693–1776), masters of maritime chronometry; Julien Leroy (1686–1759), clockmaker to Versailles; Abraham-Louis Bréguet (1747–1823), inventor of the self-winding
montre perpetuelle;
and Edward John Dent (1790–1853), designer of Big Ben. Antoni Patek of Warsaw and Adrienne Philippe of Berne joined forces in 1832 to found Patek-Philippe, the leading Swiss firm of the day.
By that time clocks and watches were a universal feature of urbanized Western society. The peasants of Eastern Europe adapted more slowly. For millions of Soviet soldiers, the Red Army’s advance into Europe in 1944–5 provided the great chance to ‘liberate’ and to possess a watch.
