Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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George of Castriota, and he was probably of modest Slavonian
lineage; but legends precious to his people endow him with royal
Epirote blood and an adventurous youth. In his boyhood, we are told,
he was given as hostage to Murad II, and was brought up at the
Adrianople court of the Ottomans. The Sultan so liked his courage
and bearing that he treated him as a son and made him an officer in
the Turkish army. Converted to Mohammedanism, George received the
mighty name of Iskender Bey- i.e., Alexander the Prince- which busy
time shortened to Scanderbeg. After leading the Turks in many
battles against the Christians, he repented his apostasy, and
plotted escape. He renounced Islam, seized the Albanian capital
Kruja from its Turkish governor, and proclaimed revolt (1442).
Mohammed II sent army after army to chasten him; Scanderbeg defeated
them all by the rapidity of his military movements and the genius of
his elusive strategy; finally Mohammed, distracted by larger wars,
gave him a ten-year armistice (1461). But the Venetian Senate and Pope
Pius II persuaded Scanderbeg to break the truce and renew the war
(1463). Mohammed, denouncing the Christians as literally faithless
infidels, returned to the siege of Kruja. Scanderbeg defended it so
tenaciously that the Sultan again raised the siege; but amid the
debris of victory Scanderbeg died (1468). Kruja surrendered in 1479,
and Albania became a province of Turkey.
Meanwhile the insatiable Mohammed absorbed the Morea, Trebizond,
Lesbos, Negroponte (the old Euboea), and the Crimea. In 1477 one of
his armies crossed the Isonzo, ravaged northeastern Italy to within
twenty-two miles of Venice, and then, laden with booty, returned
into Serbia. Frightened Venice, which had fought long and
tenaciously for its possessions in the Aegean and the Adriatic,
yielded all claim to Kruja and Scutari, and paid an indemnity of
10,000 ducats. Western Europe, which had failed to help Venice,
denounced her for making and keeping peace with the infidel. `060917
The Turks had now reached the Adriatic, and only the waters that
Caesar had crossed in a rowboat separated them from Italy, Rome, and
the Vatican. In 1480 Mohammed sent an army across these waters to
attack the Kingdom of Naples. It took Otranto with ease, massacred
half the 22,000 inhabitants, enslaved the rest, and cut an
archbishop in two. `060918 The fate of Christianity and monogamy
teetered in the scales. Ferrante of Naples ended his war with
Florence, and sent his best forces to recapture Otranto. Mohammed
had entangled himself in besieging Rhodes; amid that enterprise he
died; Rhodes remained Christian till Suleiman; the Turks left Otranto,
and retired into Albania (1481). The Ottoman tide for a moment
ceased to flow.
VI. THE HUNGARIAN RENAISSANCE: 1456-90
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In the half-century of security that Hunyadi had won for Hungary his
son Matthias Corvinus led the nation to its historic culmination.
Matthias was only sixteen at his accession, and not entirely royal
in form; his legs were too short for his trunk, so that he seemed tall
only when on a horse; however, he had the chest and arms, the strength
and courage, of a gladiator. Not long after his coronation he
challenged to single combat a German knight of massive frame and
power, who in a tournament at Buda had felled all competitors; and
Matthias threatened to have him executed if he failed to fight with
all his vigor and skill. The Hungarian historians assure us that the
young King, aided by the horns of this dilemma, decisively
vanquished the giant. `060919 Matthias matured into a good soldier and
general, defeated the Turks wherever he encountered them, absorbed
Moravia and Silesia, failed to conquer Bohemia. He fought four wars
against the Emperor Frederick III, took Vienna, and annexed Austria
(1485); the first Austro-Hungarian Empire was Hungarian.
His victories made the monarchy transiently supreme over the
nobility; here, as in Western Europe, centralization of government was
the order of the day. At Buda, and in the King's palace at Visegrad,
his court equaled any royal grandeur of the age; great noblemen became
his servitors; his ambassadors were noted for the splendor of their
dress, equipage, and retinue. Matthias' diplomacy was cunning and
unscrupulous, amiable and generous; he bought with gold what would
have cost twice as much by arms. Meanwhile he found time and zest to
restore every department of the government, and to labor in person
as a careful administrator and impartial judge. Roaming in disguise
among the people, the soldiery, and the courts, he inspected at
first hand the behavior of his officials, and corrected incompetence
and injustice without favoritism or fear. He did what he could to
protect the weak from the strong, the peasants from their rapacious
lords. While the Church continued to claim the country as papal
property, Matthias appointed and disciplined prelates, and enjoyed the
furore when he made a seven-year-old Italian lad the primate of
Hungary. The merchants of Ferrara, with rival humor, sent the new
archbishop an assortment of toys. `060920
In 1476 Matthias married Beatrice of Aragon, and welcomed to Hungary
the gay Neapolitan spirit and refined Italian tastes of the
granddaughter of Alfonso the Magnanimous. Intercourse between
Hungary and Naples had been encouraged by the Angevin kinship of their
kings, and many men at the Buda court had been educated in Italy.
Matthias himself resembled the Italian Renaissance "despots" in his
cultural proclivities as well as his Machiavellian statecraft. Lorenzo
de' Medici sent him two bronze reliefs by Verrocchio, and Lodovico
il Moro commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a Madonna for the
Hungarian King, assuring the artist that "he is able to value a
great picture as few men can." `060921 Filippino Lippi turned out
another Madonna for Corvinus, and his pupils adorned with frescoes
the royal palace at Esztergom. An Italian sculptor made a pretty
bust of Beatrice; `060922 probably the famous Milanese goldsmith
Caradosso designed the masterly Calvary of Esztergom; Benedetto da
Maiano carved decorations for the palace at Buda; and divers
Italians built the Renaissance-style tabernacle in the parish church
of the Inner City of the capital. `060923
Nobles and prelates joined the King in supporting artists and
scholars; even the mining towns of the interior had rich men who
sublimated wealth into art. Handsome buildings, civic as well as
ecclesiastical, rose not only at Buda but at Visegrad, Tata,
Esztergom, Nagyvarad, and Vac. Hundreds of sculptors and painters
ornamented these edifices. Giovanni Dalmata made notable statues of
Hunyadi Janos and other Hungarian heroes. At Kassa a veritable
school of artists formed. There, for the high altar of the church of
St. Elizabeth, "Master Stephen" and others carved (1474-77) an immense
and complex reredos, whose central figures are quite Italian in
their refinement and grace. In the parish church of Beszterczebanya
another group carved in stone a great relief, Christ in the Garden of
Olives, astonishing in its careful details and dramatic effect. A
similar vigor of expression and artistry appears in the Hungarian
paintings that survive from this age, as in the Mary Visiting
Elizabeth, by "Master M.S.," now in the Budapest Museum. `060924
Almost all the art of this Hungarian heyday was destroyed or lost in
the Ottoman invasions of the sixteenth century. Some of the statues
are in Istanbul, to which they were carried by the victorious Turks.
Matthias' interests were literary rather than artistic. Humanists,
foreign or native, were welcomed at his court, and received
lucrative sinecures in the government. Antonio Bonfini wrote a history
of the reign in a Latin modeled on Livy. Janos Vitez, Archbishop of
Gran, collected a library of ancient classics, and provided funds to
send young scholars to study Greek in Italy. One of these, Janos
Pannonius, spent seven years at Ferrara, won admission to Lorenzo's
circle at Florence, and, back in Hungary, astonished the court with
his Latin verses and Greek discourses. "When Pannonius spoke Greek,"
wrote Bonfini, "you would think he must have been born in
Athens." `060925 Probably in Italy alone could one find, in the last
quarter of the fifteenth century, such a galaxy of artists and
scholars as received sustenance at Matthias' court. The Sodalitas
Litteraria Danubia, founded at Buda in 1497, is among the oldest
literary societies in the world. `060926
Like his Medici contemporaries, Corvinus collected art and books.
His palace became a museum of statuary and objets d'art. Tradition
has it that he spent 30,000 florins ($750,000?) yearly on books, which
in many cases were costly illuminated manuscripts. Yet he did not,
like Federigo da Montefeltro, reject printed works; a press was
established at Buda in 1473, three years before printing reached
England. The Bibliotheca Corvina, which held 10,000 volumes when
Matthias died, was the finest fifteenth-century library outside of
Italy. It was housed in his Buda palace in two spacious halls, with
windows of stained glass looking on the Danube; the shelves were
richly carved, and the books, mostly bound in vellum, were curtained
with velvet tapestries. `060927 Matthias seems to have read some of
the books; at least he used Livy to induce sleep; and he wrote to a
humanist: "O scholars, how happy you are! You strive not after
blood-stained glory, nor monarchs' crowns, but for the laurels of
poetry and virtue. You are even able to compel us to forget the tumult
of war." `060928
The centralized power that Matthias had organized only briefly
survived his death (1490). The resurgent magnates dominated Ladislas
II, and embezzled revenues that should have paid the troops. The
army mutinied, the soldiers went home. Freed from taxation, the nobles
wasted their income and energies in riotous living, while Islam
pressed against the borders and a bitterly exploited peasantry seethed
with revolt. In 1514 the Hungarian Diet declared a crusade against the
Turks, and called for volunteers. Peasants in great number flocked
to the cross, seeing little to choose between life and death.
Finding themselves armed, the thought spread among them, Why wait to
kill distant Turks, when hated nobles were so near? A soldier of
fortune, Gyorgy Dozsa, led them in a wild jacquerie; they overran
all Hungary, burning castles and massacring all nobles- men, women,
children- who fell into their hands. The nobles called in aid from all
directions, armed and paid mercenaries, overwhelmed the disorganized
peasants, and punished their leaders with frightful torments. For
two weeks Dozsa and his aides were kept without food; then he was tied
to a red-hot iron throne, a red-hot crown was placed upon his head,
a red-hot scepter forced into his hand; and his starved companions
were allowed to tear the roasted flesh from his body while he was
still conscious. From barbarism to civilization requires a century;
from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
The peasants were not slaughtered, for they were indispensable;
but the Tripartite Code (1514) decreed that "the recent rebellion...
has for all time to come put the stain of faithlessness upon the
peasants, and they have thereby forfeited their liberty, and have
become subject to their landlords in unconditional and perpetual
servitude.... Every species of property belongs to the landlords,
and the peasant has no right to invoke justice and the law against a
noble." `060929
Twelve years later Hungary fell to the Turks.
CHAPTER X: Portugal Inaugurates the Commercial Revolution: 1300-1517
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THROUGH no natural advantages except a seacoast, but by sheer
courage and tenacious enterprise, little Portugal in this period
made herself one of the strongest and richest of European states.
Founded as a kingdom in 1139, her government, language, and culture
reached an established form under her best-beloved ruler, Diniz "the
Laborer"- administrator, reformer, builder, educator, patron of the
arts, and skilled practitioner of literature and love. His son Affonso
IV, after some precautionary murders, matured into a beneficent reign,
in which a growing trade with England bound the two countries into a
political amity that has endured till our time. To confirm a prudent
alliance with rising Castile, Affonso urged his son Pedro to marry
Donna Costanza Manuel. Pedro married her, but continued to love the
lovely Ines de Castro, herself of royal lineage. After Costanza's
death Ines was an obstacle to a second diplomatic marriage for
Pedro; Affonso, after due reluctance, had her killed (1355).
Camoens, the Portuguese Milton, recounted this famous romance in his
national epic, The Lusiads:
-
So against Inez came that murderous crew...
The brutes their swords in her white breasts imbrue,..
And in mad wrath themselves incarnadine,
Nor any vengeance yet to come divine. `06101
-
Pedro supplied the vengeance when, two years later, he inherited the
throne. He murdered the murderers, exhumed the corpse of his
beloved, crowned her queen, then reburied her in regal style. He ruled
with a severity nurtured by this tragedy.
A less exalted romance disordered the reign of his successor.
Fernando I lost his head and heart to Leonora, wife of the lord of
Pombeiro, repudiated his engagement to a Castilian princess, and
married Leonora despite her living husband and a scandalized Church.
After Fernando's death (1383), Leonora assumed the regency, made her
daughter Beatriz queen, and betrothed her to John I of Castile. The
people revolted against the prospect of becoming a Castilian appanage;
a Cortes at Coimbra declared the Portuguese throne elective, and chose
as king Don Joao- John- son of Pedro and Ines. Castile undertook to
establish Beatriz by force; John improvised an army, borrowed 500
archers from England, and defeated the Castilians at Aljubarrota on
August 14, 1385- which is annually celebrated as Portugal's
Independence Day.
"John the Great" now opened a reign of forty-eight years, and a
dynasty- the house of Aviz- that held the throne for two centuries.
Administration was reorganized, law and the judiciary were reformed,
the Portuguese language was made official, and its literature began.
Scholars here, as in Spain, continued till the eighteenth century to
use Latin, but Vasco da Lobeira wrote in the native tongue a chivalric
romance, Amadis da Gaula (c. 1400), which became in translation
the most popular secular book in Europe. National art expressed itself
proudly in the church of Santa Maria da Victoria, built at Batalha
by John I to commemorate "the Battle" of Aljubarrota; here Milan's
cathedral is rivaled in size, and Notre Dame of Paris in the intricate
splendor of buttresses and pinnacles. In 1436 a chapel of elegant
design and decoration was added to receive the remains of the "bastard
king."
He was honored in his sons. Duarte- Edward- succeeded him and
governed almost as well; Pedro codified the law; Henrique- "Henry
the Navigator"- inaugurated the commercial revolution that was to
transform the map of the globe. When John I captured Ceuta from the
Moors (1415), he left the twenty-one-year-old Henry as governor of
that strategic stronghold, just across the Strait from Gibraltar.
Excited by Moslem accounts of Timbuktu and Senegal and the gold,
ivory, and slaves to be had along the West African coast, the
ambitious youth determined to explore that terrain and add it to
Portugal. The Senegal River that his informants spoke of might lead
eastward to the headwaters of the Nile and to Christian Abyssinia; a
water route would be opened across Africa from the Atlantic to the Red
Sea- therefore to India; the Italian monopoly of trade with the East
would be broken; Portugal would be a major power. The conquered region
might be converted to Christianity, and African Islam would be flanked
on north and south by Christian states, and the Mediterranean become
safe for Christian navigation. Henry does not appear to have thought
of a route around Africa, `06102 but that was the historic result of
his work.
About 1420 he set up at Sagres, on the southwestern tip of
Portugal and Europe, an informal clearing house of nautical
knowledge and enterprise. For forty years he and his aides,
including Jewish and Moslem astronomers and map makers, gathered and
studied there the accounts of sailors and travelers, and sent out into
perilous seas frail vessels powered with sails and oars and thirty
to sixty men. One of Henry's captains had already (1418)
rediscovered Madeira, which had been seen by Genoese mariners
seventy years before and then forgotten; now Portuguese colonists
developed its resources; soon its sugar and other products repaid
the cost of colonization, and encouraged the Portuguese government
to meet Henry's appeals for funds. Noting the Azores marked on an
Italian map of 1351, he commissioned Gonzalo Cabral to find them; it
was done, and in 1432-44, one after another, these jewels of the sea
were added to the Portuguese crown.
But it was Africa that lured Henry most insistently. Catalan and
Portuguese navigators had sailed some 900 miles down the west coast as
far as Bojador (1341-46). There, however, the enormous westward
bulge of the great continent into the Atlantic disheartened mariners
seeking the south; they crept back to Europe with self-excusing
tales of horrible natives, a sea so thick with salt that no prow would
cleave it, and assurances that any Christian who passed Bojador
would be transformed into a Negro. With similar apologies Captain
Gilianes returned to Sagres in 1433. Henry ordered him forth again,
and bade him bring back a clear account of the lands and seas south of
the forbidding cape. So prodded, Gilianes reached to 150 miles
beyond Bojador (1435), and was astonished to find lush vegetation in
equatorial regions where, according to Aristotle and Ptolemy, only
deserts could exist under the burning sun. Six years later Nuno
Tristao sailed down to Capo Blanco, and brought home some sturdy
Negroes, who were at once baptised and enslaved; feudal barons put
them to work on Portuguese plantations, and the first major result
of Henry's labors was the inauguration of the African slave trade.
Fresh financial support now came to the Prince. His ships went out
nominally to explore and convert, really to get gold, ivory, and
slaves. Captain Lanzarote in 1444 brought back 165 "blackamoors,"
who were set to tilling the lands of the monastic-military Order of
Jesus Christ. A Portuguese contemporary described the capture of these
"black Moors":
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Our men, crying out, "Sant' Iago! San Jorge! Portugal!" fell upon
them, killing or capturing all they could. There you might have seen
mothers catch up their children, husbands their wives, each one
escaping as best he could. Some plunged into the sea; others thought
to hide themselves in the corners of their hovels; others hid their
children under the shrubs... where our men found them. And at last our
Lord God, Who gives to all a due reward, gave to our men that day a
victory over their enemies; and in recompense for all their toil in
His service they took 165 men, women, and children, not counting the
slain. `06103
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By 1448 over 900 African slaves had been brought to Portugal. We
should add that the Moslems of North Africa had anticipated the
Christians in developing a slave trade, and African Negro chieftains
themselves bought Negro slaves from the Portuguese with ivory and
gold. `06104 Man was a commodity to human beasts of prey.
In 1445 Diniz Dias reached the fertile promontory named Cape
Verde; in 1446 Lanzarote explored the mouth of the Senegal; in 1456 Ca
Da Mosto found the Cape Verde Islands. In that year Prince Henry died,
but the enterprise continued with the impetus that he had given it and
the economic gains that now financed it. Joao da Santarem crossed
the equator (1471), Diogo Cao reached the Congo River (1484); finally,
half a century after Henry's first expedition, Bartholomeu Dias,
fighting his way through tempest and shipwreck, rounded the
southernmost point of Africa (1486). He rejoiced to find that he could
now sail eastward; India lay straight ahead, and seemed almost in
his grasp; but his weary men forced him to turn back. Mourning the
rough seas that had broken the spirit of his men, he named the
southern tip of the continent Cabo Tormentoso; but King John II,
seeing India around the bend, renamed the point the Cape of Good Hope.
Neither Dias nor the King lived to see fulfilled the dream that
now stirred all Portugal- an all-water route to India. In 1497 King
Manuel, jealous of the honors and wealth that Columbus was bringing to
Spain, commissioned Vasco da Gama to sail around Africa to India.
Forced by storms to take a circuitous route, the twenty-eight-year-old
captain voyaged some 5,000 miles through 137 days to the Cape of
Good Hope, then, through a hundred perils and tribulations, 178 days
and 4,500 miles more to Calicut, a main nexus of east-west and
north-south trade in Asia; there he anchored on May 20, 1498, ten
months and twelve days after leaving Lisbon. Landing, he was at once
arrested as a pirate, and narrowly escaped execution. With
remarkable courage and address he overcame Indian suspicions and
Moslem jealousies, won permission for the Portuguese to trade, took on
a rich cargo of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and jewelry,
and left Calicut August 29 for an arduous year-long return to
Lisbon. The Portuguese had finally found a route to India free from
the costly transshipments and tolls suffered by the sea-and-land
routes from Italy through Egypt or Arabia or Persia. The economic
results were to be, for a century, more vital to Europe than those
that flowed from the discovery of America.
Proud of having reached the real India while the Spanish
navigators were floundering in the supposed Indies of the Caribbean,
the Portuguese till 1500 hardly thought of trying a passage west.
But in that year Pedro Cabral, driven from the course that he had
set for India via Africa, stumbled upon Brazil; and again in that year
Gaspar Corte-Real rediscovered Labrador. In 1503 Amerigo Vespucci,
sailing under the Portuguese flag, explored the Rio Plata and
Paraguay; and in 1506 Tristao da Cunha found the South Atlantic island
that bears his name. Portuguese statesmen, however, saw little
profit in Brazil, whereas every cargo from India fattened the royal
treasury and the purses of merchants and mariners.
The Portuguese government kept full control of the new trade,
since the commerce required unremitting military protection. Moslem
merchants had long since been established in Indian posts; some Indian
potentates joined them in resisting the Portuguese invasion; trade and
war, money and blood, now mingled in the far-flung commercial
revolution. In 1509 Affonso de Albuquerque became the first governor
of Portuguese India. Waging campaign after campaign against Moslems
and Hindus, he captured and fortified Aden and Hormuz on the Arabian
coast, Goa in India, and Malacca in the Malay Peninsula; and from
Malacca he brought home a million ducats' worth of booty. So armed,
Portugal became for 150 years the master of European trade with
India and the East Indies. Portuguese merchants established themselves