Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

and merely delegated its authority to consuls, senate, or emperors, so

the Christian community should delegate, but should never surrender,

its powers to its representatives, the clergy; and these should be

held responsible to the people whom they represent. The derivation

of the papal supremacy from the Apostle Peter is, in Marsilius's view,

an historical error; Peter had no more authority than the other

Apostles, and the bishops of Rome, in their first three centuries, had

no more authority than the bishops of several other ancient

capitals. Not the pope but the emperor or his delegates presided

over the first general councils. A general council, freely elected

by the people of Christendom, should interpret the Scriptures,

define the Catholic faith, and choose the cardinals, who should choose

the pope. `061278 In all temporal matters the clergy, including the

pope, should be subject to civil jurisdiction and law. The state

should appoint and remunerate the clergy, fix the number of churches

and priests, remove such priests as it finds unworthy, take control of

ecclesiastical endowments, schools, and income, and relieve the poor

out of the surplus revenues of the Church. `061279

Here again was the strident voice of the upsurging national state.

Having, through the support of the rising middle classes, subdued

the barons and the communes, the kings now felt strong enough to

repudiate the claims of the Church to sovereignty over the civil

power. Seizing the opportunity presented by the deterioration of the

Church's international and intellectual authority, the secular

rulers now dreamed of mastering every phase of life in their realms,

including religion and the Church. This was the basic issue that would

be fought out in the Reformation; and the triumph of the state over

the Church would mark one terminus of the Middle Ages. (In 1535

Henry VIII, at the height of his revolt against the Church, had the

Defensor pacis translated and published at governmental expense.)

Marsilius, like Ockham and Luther, after proposing to replace the

authority of the Church with that of the people, was compelled, both

for social order and for his own security, to replace it with the

authority of the state. But he did not raise the kings into ogres of

omnipotence. He looked beyond the triumph of the state to the day when

the people might actually exercise the sovereignty that legal

theorists had long affected to vest in them. In ecclesiastical

reform he advocated democracy: each Christian community should

choose its representative to church councils, each parish should

choose its own priests, control them, dismiss them if need should

be; and no member of the parish should be excommunicated without its

consent. Marsilius applied similar principles to civil government, but

with hesitant modifications:

-

We declare, according to truth and the opinion of Aristotle, that

the legislator- the prime and proper effective cause of law- should be

the people, the whole body of citizens, or its weightier part

( valentiorem partem ), commanding or deciding by its own choice or

will, expressed verbally in a general assembly of the citizens.... I

say weightier part, taking into consideration both the number of

persons, and their quality, in the community for which the law is

enacted. The whole body of citizens, or its weightier part, either

makes law directly or commits this duty to some one or a few; but

the latter do not, and cannot, constitute the legislator in the strict

sense of the term; they act only in such matters, and for such

periods, as are covered by the authorization from the primary

legislator.... I call citizen him who participates in the civil

community with either deliberative or judicial authority, according to

his rank. By this definition boys, slaves, aliens, and women are

distinguished from citizens.... Only out of the deliberation and

will of the whole multitude is the best law produced.... A majority,

more readily than any of its parts, can discern the defects in a law

proposed for enactment, for an entire body is greater in power and

worth than any of its separate parts. `061280

-

This is a remarkable statement for its time (1324), and the

conditions of the age justify its hesitations. Even Marsilius would

not advocate equal suffrage for all adults in a Europe where hardly

one person in ten could read, communication was difficult, and class

divisions were mortised in the cement of time. Indeed, he rejected

complete democracy, wherein policy and legislation would be determined

by a count of noses ( egenorum multitudo - "a multitude of needy

people"); and to correct this "corruption of a republic" he was

willing that individuals should have political power commensurate with

their value to the community- though he did not say how or by whom

this was to be judged. He left room for monarchy, but added that "a

ruler who is elected is greatly to be preferred to rulers who are

hereditary." `061281 The king is to be a delegate and servant of the

public; and if he seriously misbehaves it may rightly depose

him. `061282

These ideas had a medieval, even an ancient, origin: the Roman

lawyers and the Scholastic philosophers had regularly endowed the

people with a theoretical sovereignty; the papacy itself was an

elective monarchy; the pope called himself servus servorum Dei -

"servant of the servants of God"; and Thomas Aquinas had agreed with

John of Salisbury on the right of the people to overthrow a lawless

king. But rarely in Christendom had these ideas been extended to so

explicit a formulation of representative government. Here in one

man, in the fourteenth century, were the ideas of both the

Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution.

Marsilius was too far ahead of his time to be comfortable. He rose

rapidly with Louis of Bavaria, and fell rapidly with his fall. When

Louis made peace with the popes he was required to dismiss Marsilius

as a heretic. We do not know the sequel. Apparently Marsilius died

in 1343, an outcast alike from the Church that he had fought and

from the state that he had labored to exalt.

His temporary success would have been impossible had not the

rising legal profession given to the state an authority rivaling

that of the Church. Over the ruins of feudal and communal law,

beside and often against the canon law of the Church, the lawyers

raised the "positive law" of the state; and year by year this royal or

secular law extended its reach over the affairs of men. The law

schools of Montpelier, Orleans, and Paris turned out bold and subtle

legists who used Roman law to build up, as against papal claims, a

theory of divine right and absolute power for their royal masters.

These ideas were strongest in France, where they evolved into

L'etat c'est moi and Le roi soleil; they prevailed also in

Spain, preparing the absolutism of Ferdinand, Charles V, and Philip

II; and even in parliamentary England Wyclif expounded the unlimited

authority of the divine king. Lords and commons opposed the theory,

and Sir John Fortescue insisted that the English king could not

issue laws without the consent of Parliament, and that English

judges were bound, by their oath, to judge by the law of the land,

whatever the king might desire; but under Henry VII, Henry VIII, and

Elizabeth, England too would kneel to absolute rulers. Between the

rival absolutisms of popes and kings some idealistic spirits clung

to the notion of a "natural law," a divine justice implanted in the

human conscience, phrased in the Gospels, and superior to any law of

man. Neither the state nor the Church paid more than lip service to

this conception; it remained in the background, professed and ignored,

but ever faintly alive. In the eighteenth century it would father

the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of

the Rights of Man, and would play a minor but eloquent role in a

revolution that for a time upset both the absolutisms that had ruled

mankind.

Nicholas of Cusa fought, and then resigned himself to, the

absolutism of the papacy. In his varied career he showed the best face

of organized Christianity to a Germany always suspicious of the

Church. Philosopher and administrator, theologian and legist, mystic

and scientist, he combined in one powerful personality the best

constituents of those Middle Ages that were closing with his life.

Born at Cues, near Trier (1401), he learned a medley of scholarship

and devotion in the school of the Brethren of the Common Life at

Deventer. In a year at Heidelberg he felt the influence of Ockham's

nominalism; at Padua he was touched for a time with the skepticism

of Averroes; at Cologne he absorbed the orthodox tradition of Albertus

Magnus and Thomas Aquinas; all the elements were mixed in him that

would make him the most complete Christian of his time.

He never quite abandoned the mystical mood that had reached him from

Meister Eckhart; he wrote a classic of mysticism in De visione

Dei; and in a philosophic defense of such visions ( Apologia doctae

ignorantiae ) he coined a famous phrase- "learned ignorance." He

rejected the Scholastic rationalism that sought to prove theology by

reason; all human knowledge, he felt, is relative and uncertain; truth

is hidden in God. `061283 Generally he rejected astrology; but,

succumbing to the delusions of his epoch, he indulged in some

astrological calculations, and reckoned that the end of the world

would come in 1734. `061284 Amid a life crowded with ecclesiastical

activity he kept abreast of scientific thought. He urged more

experiment and more accurate measurements; he suggested timing the

fall of different bodies from different heights; he taught that the

earth "cannot be fixed, but moves like other stars"; `061285 every

star, however fixed it may seem, moves; no orbit is precisely

circular; the earth is not the center of the universe, except in so

far as any point may be taken as the center of an infinite

universe. `061286 These were sometimes judicious borrowings, sometimes

brilliant apercus.

In 1433 Nicholas went to Basel to present to the ecclesiastical

council there the claims of a friend to the archiepiscopal see of

Cologne. His plea failed, but he took the opportunity of presenting to

the council- then at odds with the pope- a work of some moment in

the history of philosophy. He called it De concordantia Catholica,

and its general purpose was to find terms of accord between the

councils and the popes. In an elaborate analogy with a living

organism, he pictured the Church as an organic unity, incapable of

successful functioning except through the harmonious co-operation of

its parts. Instead of concluding, as the popes might have done, that

the parts should be guided by the head, Nicholas argued that only a

general council could represent, express, and unify the interdependent

elements of the Church. He repeated Aquinas and Marsilius, and

almost plagiarized Rousseau and Jefferson, in an idealistic passage:

-

Every law depends upon the law of nature; and if it contradicts this

it cannot be a valid law.... Since by nature all men are free, then

every government... exists solely by the agreement and consent of

the subjects.... The binding power of any law consists in this tacit

or explicit agreement and consent. `061287

-

The sovereign people delegates its powers to small groups equipped

by education or experience to make or administer laws; but these

groups derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. When

the Christian community delegates its powers to a general council of

the Church, that council, and not the pope, represents the sovereign

authority in religion. Nor can the pope rest his claim to

legislative absolutism on the supposed Donation of Constantine, for

that Donation is a forgery and a myth. `061288 A pope has a right to

summon a general council, but such a council, if it judges him

unfit, may rightly depose him. And the same principles hold for

secular princes. An elective monarchy is probably the best

government available to mankind in its present depraved condition; but

the secular ruler, like the pope, should periodically convene a

representative assembly, and should submit to its decrees.

Nicholas' later life was a model for prelates. Made a cardinal

(1448), he became in person a Catholic Reformation. In a strenuous

tour through the Netherlands and Germany, he held provincial synods,

revived ecclesiastical discipline, reformed the monasteries and

nunneries, attacked priestly concubinage, furthered the education of

the clergy, and raised, at least for a time, the level of clerical and

popular morality. "Nicholas of Cusa," wrote the learned Abbot

Trithemius, "appeared in Germany as an angel of light and peace amid

darkness and confusion. He restored the unity of the Church,

strengthened the authority of her Supreme Head, and sowed a precious

seed of new life." `061289

To his other titles Nicholas could have added that of humanist. He

loved the ancient classics, encouraged their study, and planned to

print for wide circulation the Greek manuscripts that he himself had

brought from Constantinople. He had the true scholar's tolerance. In a

Dialogue on Peace, composed in the very year when Constantinople

fell to the Turks, he pleaded for mutual understanding among the

religions as diverse rays of one eternal truth. `061290 And in the

dawn of modern thought, when the rising freedom of the intellect was

an intoxication, he wrote sound and noble words:

-

To know and to think, to see the truth with the eye of the mind,

is always a joy. The older a man grows, the greater is the pleasure

that this affords him.... As love is the life of the heart, so is

the endeavor after knowledge and truth the life of the mind. Amid

the movements of time, the daily labor, perplexities, and

contradictions of life, we should lift our gaze fearlessly to the

clear vault of heaven, and seek ever to obtain a firmer grasp of...

the origin of all goodness and beauty, the capacities of our own

hearts and minds, the intellectual fruits of mankind throughout the

centuries, and the wonderful works of Nature around us; but

remembering always that in humility alone lies true greatness, and

that knowledge and wisdom are profitable only in so far as our lives

are governed by them. `061291

-

Had there been more such Nicholases there might have been no Luther.

CHAPTER XIII: The Conquest of the Sea: 1492-1517

I. COLUMBUS

-

IT was "manifest destiny" that someone in this age would dare the

perils of the Atlantic to find India or "Cathay." For two thousand

years legend had told of an Atlantis across the sea; and later myths

had placed beyond the Atlantic a fountain whose waters conferred

eternal youth. The failure of the Crusades compelled the discovery

of America; the domination of the eastern Mediterranean by the

Turks, the closing or obstruction of land routes by the Ottomans at

Constantinople and by anti-Christian dynasties in Persia and

Turkestan, made the old avenues of East-West trade costly and

dangerous. Italy and even France might cling to the remnants of that

trade over every discouragement of tolls and war, but Portugal and

Spain were too far west to make such arrangements profitably; their

problem was to find another route. Portugal found one around Africa;

nothing was left for Spain but to try a passage west.

The growth of knowledge had long since established the sphericity of

the earth. The very errors of science encouraged audacity by

underestimating the width of the Atlantic, and picturing Asia as lying

ready for conquest and exploitation on the farther side.

Scandinavian mariners had reached Labrador in 986 and 1000, and had

brought back news of an immense continent. In 1477, if we may

believe his own account, Christopher Columbus visited

Iceland, `06131 and presumably heard proud traditions of Leif

Ericsson's voyage to "Vinland." All that was needed now, for the great

adventure, was money. Bravery abounded.

Columbus himself, in the Mayorazzo or will that he made before

setting out on his third voyage across the Atlantic, named Genoa as

his birthplace. It is true that in his extant writings he always calls

himself by the Spanish name Cristobal Colon, never by the Italian name

Cristoforo Colombo; but this was presumably because he was writing

in Spanish, living in Spain, or sailing for a Spanish sovereign, not

because he had been born in Spain. Possibly his forebears had been

Spanish Christianized Jews who had migrated to Italy; the evidence

of Hebraic blood and sentiment in Columbus is almost

convincing. `06132 His father was a weaver, and Cristoforo appears

to have followed that craft for a time in Genoa and Savona. The

biography written by his son Ferdinand credits him with studying

astronomy, geometry, and cosmography at the University of Pavia, but

the university records do not list him, and he himself tells us that

he became a sailor at fourteen. `06133 For in Genoa every road leads

down to the sea.

In 1476 a ship on which he was heading for Lisbon was attacked by

pirates; the vessel foundered; Columbus relates that with the

support of some wreckage he swam six miles to the shore; but the great

admiral had high powers of imagination. A few months later (he says)

he sailed for England as seaman or captain, thence to Iceland,

thence to Lisbon. There he married, and settled down as a maker of

maps and charts. His father-in-law was a mariner who had served Prince

Henry the Navigator; doubtless Columbus heard from him some glowing

tales of the Guinea coast. In 1482, probably as an officer, he

joined a Portuguese fleet that sailed that coast to Elmina. He read

with interest, and many annotations, Pope Pius II's Historia rerum

gestarum, which suggested the circumnavigability of Africa. `06134

But his studies more and more inclined him to the west. He knew that

Strabo, in the first century of our era, had told of an attempt to

circle the globe. He was familiar with Seneca's lines: "An age will

come in after years when Ocean will loose the bonds of things, and

an immense land will appear, and the prophet Tiphys will reveal new

worlds, and Thule [Iceland?] will no longer be the end of the

earth." `06135 He had read The Book of Ser Marco Polo, which

glorified the riches of China and placed Japan 1,500 miles east of the

mainland of Asia. He made over a thousand notes in his copy of

Pierre d'Ailly's Imago mundi. He accepted the prevailing estimate of

the earth's circumference as 18,000 to 20,000 miles; and combining

this with Polo's displacement of Japan, he reckoned that the nearest

Asiatic islands would be some 5,000 miles west of Lisbon. He had heard

of a letter (1474) in which the Florentine physician Paolo

Toscanelli had advised King Affonso V of Portugal that a shorter way

to India than that around Africa could be found by sailing 5,000 miles

west. Columbus wrote to Toscanelli, and received an encouraging reply.

His purpose matured, and seethed in his brain.

About 1484 he proposed to John II of Portugal that the King should

equip three vessels for a year of exploration across the Atlantic

and back; that Columbus should be appointed "Great Admiral of the

Ocean" and perpetual governor of whatever lands he might discover; and

that he should receive a tenth of all revenues and precious metals

thereafter derived from those lands by Portugal. `06136 (Obviously the

idea of spreading Christianity was secondary to material

considerations.) The King submitted the proposal to a committee of

savants; they rejected it on the ground that Columbus's estimate of

the distance across the Atlantic as merely 2,400 miles was far too

small. (It was approximately correct from the Canary Islands to the

West Indies.) In 1485 two Portuguese navigators proposed a similar

project to King John, but agreed to finance it themselves; John gave

them at least his blessing; they sailed (1487), followed too

northern a route, encountered rough westerly winds, and turned back in

despair. Columbus renewed his appeal (1488); the King invited him to

an audience; Columbus came just in time to witness the triumphant

return of Bartholomeu Dias from a successful rounding of Africa.

Absorbed in prospects of an African route to India, the Portuguese

government abandoned consideration of a passage across the Atlantic.

Columbus turned to Genoa and Venice, but they too gave him no

encouragement, for they had a vested interest in the eastward route to

the East. He commissioned his brother to sound out Henry VII of

England, who invited Columbus to a conference. When the invitation

reached him he had already committed himself to Spain.

He was now (1488) some forty-two years old; tall and thin, with long

face, ruddy complexion, eagle nose, blue eyes, freckles, bright red

hair already turning gray, and soon to be white. His son and his

friends described him as modest, grave, affable, discreet, temperate

in eating and drinking, fervently pious. Others alleged that he was

vain, that he paraded and inflated the titles he received, that he

ennobled his ancestry in his imagination and his writings, and that he

bargained avidly for his share in the New World's gold; however, he

was worth more than he asked. He deviated occasionally from the Ten

Commandments, for at Cordoba, after his wife's death, Beatriz Enriquez

bore him an illegitimate son (1488). Columbus did not marry her, but

he provided well for her in his life and his will; and as most

dignitaries in those agile times had such by-products, no one seems to

have been put out by the accident.

Meanwhile he had laid his petition before Isabella of Castile (May

1, 1486). She referred it to a group of advisers presided over by

the saintly Archbishop Talavera. After long delay they reported the

plan to be impracticable, arguing that Asia must be much farther

west than Columbus supposed. Nevertheless Ferdinand and Isabella

gave him an annuity of 12,000 maravedis ($840?), and in 1489 they

furnished him with a letter ordering all Spanish municipalities to

provide him with food and lodging; perhaps they wished to keep an

option on his project lest by some chance it should bestow a continent

on a rival king. But when the Talavera committee, after

reconsidering the scheme, again rejected it, Columbus resolved to

submit it to Charles VIII of France. Fray Juan Perez, head of the

monastery of La Rabida, dissuaded him by arranging another audience

with Isabella. She sent him 20,000 maravedis to finance his trip

to her headquarters at the siege city of Santa Fe. He went; she

heard his plea kindly enough, but her advisers once more

discountenanced the idea. He resumed his preparations for going to

France (January 1492).

At this critical juncture a baptized Jew prodded the march of

history. Luis de Santander, finance minister to Ferdinand,

reproached Isabella for lack of imagination and enterprise, tempted

her with the prospect of converting Asia to Christianity, and proposed

to finance the expedition himself with the aid of his friends. Several

other Jews- Don Isaac Abrabanel, Juan Cabrero, Abraham Senior-

supported his plea. `06137 Isabella was moved, and offered to pledge

her jewels to raise the needed sum. Santander judged this unnecessary;

he borrowed 1,400,000 maravedis from the fraternity of which he

was treasurer; he added 350,000 out of his own pocket; and Columbus

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