Renaissance and Reformation
The Verge by Patrick Wyman

2,684 words

Patrick Wyman
The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World
Grand Central Publishing, 2021

A phrase which originates with the alchemical writers of the late Middle Ages is a prediction which has probably come true at least once for any reader: “One book opens another.” A book which has an above-average chance of doing just that is The Cambridge Modern History.

At five volumes comprising over 100 long essays and running to almost 6,000 pages, this compendium was conceived by English historian and politician Lord Acton in 1907, and covers European History from the 15^th to the 17^th century. It’s the core text in my own attempt to come to grips with history, given that I am one of those students of the abstract (that would be philosophy) who doesn’t even know the order of the English kings and queens. An essay a day makes it a four-month read or so (for an outlay of 99p for an e-book) and although this tome could already have opened dozens of other books, I wanted to get through it without distraction. That didn’t happen, as I began to realize that the two movements in European history that really interest me are the Renaissance and the Reformation, and any connection between the two. So it was that I was led to Patrick Wyman’s historical study The Verge.

The book is relatively limited in its timeframe of 1490-1530, but that suited me fine. Its subtitle is Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, and it seemed that I had come to the right place. Rather than an overview, Wyman takes nine individuals and views this momentous epoch through their eyes. These include more and less famous figures of the time, and so among them are Martin Luther, Emperor Charles V, and Suleiman the Magnificent. But these luminaries are joined by Aldus Manutius and his contribution to printing, and the tale of English weaver John Heritage told as a tale of early capitalism. Wyman begins, however, with a name known even to schoolboys like me who didn’t pay attention in class.

That Christopher Columbus’ name in Spanish is Cristobal Colón I knew from having arrived in Costa Rica and made my own Central American discovery when I found out that the unit of currency here is the colón. That fact alone shows you there is no “woke” here, because any similarly named reminder of white colonialism in Europe would have either been changed or be under pressure to do so. Like the old Italian lira, it’s a high-denomination currency, so 700 colones sounds good but will buy you about half a dozen eggs (or an electronic copy of The Cambridge Modern History), but retaining the name shows that this country still respects the gringo who first discovered it on behalf of the superior global power. Central Americans understand something British blacks do not, or choose not to: without the white man they would still be swilling around in the mud. It was colonialism that saved them.

Portugal and Spain did not produce the greatest mariners of the age because they were necessarily economically strong. They produced these technically brilliant seafarers because of their overwhelming desire to be economically stronger. Wyman sees the inextricable link between Columbus’ technical genius and his awareness that his mission was as economical as it was nautical:

He also learned how these long-distance voyages – routine, but fiendishly complicated in both financing and logistics – were paid for and organized.

The power of, for example, the dominant Genoese bankers of the time (Columbus was actually Genoese) was every bit as much of an incentive as what Ezra Pound called the need to “set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea.”

Encouraged by the prevalent economic interest in seamanship, and his own hard-won expertise, Columbus was one of many whose careers were boosted by the relatively recent invention of the printing-press, which “made it possible for an autodidact without much in the way of formal schooling to acquire more elite learning.”

Columbus’ discoveries are firmly entrenched in history regardless of whether or not he was always where he thought he was, but Wyman shows the economics of the discovery of the New World, a treasure trove which went on to have great effects on European economies. As long as the expedition was economically viable in terms of investment versus likely return, then “Royals took the credit, and vaguely plausible ideas about Christian conversion justified the expeditions.” In addition, from Columbus’ point of view, he received the governorship of the West Indies. Perhaps Columbus should have stayed in his shipping lane, however, as his governance “showcased a disastrous mixture of cruelty, delusion, and panic”, and he ended his days in a world he never made, merely discovered. He lost his governance, and the monarchy stripped him of his monopoly. This must have been bitter gall, as Gomes – Columbus’ predecessor, before de Gama, at the start of the Hispanic Age of Discovery – had to buy into his monopoly. Columbus couldn’t even earn his.

In the end, the Royal court that provided the economic framework for Columbus’ discovery of the New World, that of Spain’s Catholic monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, had no further use for Columbus, and cut him adrift. It is to Isabella of Castile that Wyman next turns his attention.

Ferdinand and Isabella were a love-match as well as a strategic union between families in order to gain territory and other sources of revenue. They also reigned at a time when leadership was viewed somewhat more in the raw than was the case as the power of monarchy declined. Kings were expected to rule their people benevolently, certainly, but they were also supposed to wage and win wars for the greater glory of their developing nations, an increase in weal, and, of course, God. The fault-lines running through the time are shown, however, by the febrile nature of political opinion across France, featuring as it did:

[V]iolent disagreement over the proper role and behaviour of the king and the powers of royal government, varying from extreme weakness to tyrannical overreach.

It would be tiresome to list the ways in which our current age of instant global communication differs from times that were only just hauling themselves out of the medieval era, but the importance of physical presence has been entirely done away with. It is utterly pointless for world leaders to meet in person, a waste of time and simply buckets of fish thrown into a pool of tame media. But the Zoom call was not an option for European monarchs wishing to raise 3,000 pikemen while negotiating with financiers and fending off Papal enquiry as to exactly what they were up to. Personal meetings were the way-stations to political agreement or otherwise, internally to a nation or otherwise. When kings wished to wage war, they had no standing army and relied on the lords of the various fiefdoms to raise divisions for them. Personal trust was paramount, and the promise of war the best way of achieving it:

War would also put the nobles in close proximity to the rulers. This mattered a great deal. For the political elite, rulership was personal, not institutional.

Banking and the new financial institutions are ever-present throughout the book. The role of economics in history is certainly a good way to approach economics as a subject rather than the dryness of its eventual – and current – formulations. Consider the following detail of Jakob Fugger, with his area of expertise left blank:

Jakob Fugger was famous for his encyclopaedic knowledge of (blank). It is likely that Venice during the 1470s exposed him to the most cutting-edge examples of that art and science.

What can this encyclopedic knowledge be of, this thing that is both art and science at the height of the Renaissance? Architecture? Alchemy? None of the above. It was book-keeping. Take any major war, industrial innovation, or marriage of the period, and behind the scenes, in the counting-houses of Europe, you will find Fugger and his family bank.

So far, we’ve met a seafaring explorer, a shrewd queen, and a hyper-numerate banker, all joined by the thread of money and its systems of application. I knew, at least, the names of Columbus, Isabella, and Fugger, but the next chapter is where Wyman makes this a compendium of the obscure as well as the familiar. Chapter four introduced a name new to me, Götz von Berlichingen, a man best described as a cross between Robocop and von Clausewitz.

Wyman introduces each chapter by dropping the reader in to a very real situation. It’s a novelistic device and it works well. We join von Berlichingen just as he has lost his hand to a cannonball in 1504. He had a metal hand fitted and was thenceforth known as “Götz of the Iron Hand”. Two centuries later, Goethe made him the hero of a play. He was a knight when knights were being superseded by military firepower, but he still ruled the battlefield in an era of 65 years which saw only five years of peace in Europe.

Von Berlichingen was a maniac, a berserker, there isn’t any other way of putting it. These mercenaries just finished work at one scene of slaughter and moved on to the next, fighting and slaying for whoever paid best, usually funded by Fugger or those like him:

Most of his wars were small, essentially legal disputes carried out by violent means rather than the great conflicts of kings and emperors.

Men such as this would have had little time for reading, but Wyman turns next to an unsung hero of the printing-press, Aldus Manutius.

The role of printing in this period is a recurring theme throughout the book, and this was not just a triumph of the mechanical arts, but a main part of the engine room that drove both the Renaissance and the Reformation. Manutius was a schoolmaster, and his work making the Greek classics available in print was driven by a love of scholarship as much as technics.  Book production had “shifted from monasteries to private bookshops by the time of Gutenberg in the 1440s”, and Manutius capitalized on this shift of the base of production.

It is always pleasant for fledglings to European history – and I am trying to fly with the shell on my head – to see a familiar face turn up in the drama. When Aldus Manutius was present at a Ciceronian gathering of Europe’s finest minds, his host was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the brilliant philosopher  whose Oration on the Dignity of Man is one of my favorite Renaissance texts. But Manutius was not concerned merely to provide a service to the Italian upper classes, rather “he saw printing as something positive and transformative, a means of bringing the wisdom of ancient literature to the masses.”

The rise of the mercantile class is exemplified by a wool merchant and entrepreneur, Englishman John Heritage. The discovery of Heritage’s accounts gives an insight into his class:

They were the indispensable middlemen who bound the countryside where the vast majority of the population lived and worked, to the urban centers of trade that connected each part of Europe to the greater whole.

A proto-capitalist system developed whereby debts were exchanged and used as assets, one of the riskier aspects of later financial practice. Heritage and his ilk, social climbers in a post-Plague world, turned the wool business from haggling on market day to an administrative system which boosted both production and trade. Credit became ever more important in greasing the system. As money increasingly became a god, however, God himself was becoming increasingly neglected, until the arrival of a friar who vowed to take Christianity back to its formative state, and to defeat Mammon by protesting, by being protestant, against the Catholic Church: Martin Luther.

Luther is a fascinating figure who threatened the church every bit as much as did Savonarola in Florence, but escaped the fiery fate of the Italian preacher. The Ninety-Five Theses did for Luther what Childe Harolde did for Byron and Harry Potter did for Rowling. It made him famous, it got him noticed by both rich and poor, and it meant a whole lot more work.

Luther had grown up in a mining family, and so was in touch with the common working man. His university career took him out of that world and into the study of philosophy, which Luther later “came to loathe with all his heart.” Something else he loathed was the Catholic system of indulgences, which for a financial outlay “could free the soul of a beloved relative from Purgatory and transfer them directly to Paradise.” Purgatory was “a relatively new development”, and Luther saw it for what it was, another tool in the extortion racket the Church was becoming.

There are obvious parallels between the role of printing in the spread of the Reformation and its reformist ideals, and today’s information society. Just as Western governments panic about the free flow of information on the Internet, so too the Church was threatened by the printing-press, which ensured that they “could no longer control the message”. Unfettered information is always the enemy of power, and “Luther and his fellow reformers were not just tapping into an existing technology; they were creating a brand-new reading public.” Half a million copies of Luther’s works came into being in three years, impossible under the old monastic system of transcription. Luther spread the word of God both figuratively and literally. There were, however, the adherents of a different god to contend with in Europe: Allah.

Suleiman the Magnificent was a fine example of the new Ottoman warrior class, but one which was able to adapt to the discoveries of its European neighbors, from whom “the Ottomans acquired bureaucratic practices, systems of tax registration and taxation, and organizational norms built around the sultan’s household”. Nowadays, of course, Islam still takes the West’s ideas and uses it against them, and the adaptation of Western economic practices allowed an empire to threaten the whole of Europe:

Armed with the desire for plunder, an inchoate sense of religious obligation, and an increasingly statelike organizational structure, the Ottomans rolled through the chaotic Balkans without meeting much effective resistance.

Resistance would come at Poitiers and Vienna.

Wyman’s final figure in this frenetic and fast-moving period is Charles V, grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand on one side, and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, Charles’ destiny was always written in the stars. Wyman sees Charles as the representative of an age:

Charles V serves as an emblematic stand-in for Europe as a whole in this period, an embodiment of what it could and could not do – the foundations of states, financial systems, technology to produce and disseminate the written word, transformative military developments, and key religious innovations.

Mr. Wyman’s book is a whistle-stop tour of an age which flew by the seat of its pants. Common interests between key classes led to a fertile cross-pollination which propelled both Renaissance and Reformation:

Aldus Manutius could not have spoken a word of John Heritage’s language, but he absolutely would have understood the nature of the wool trader’s account book, what it recorded, and how he operated.

The Verge, as well as the brilliant pictures it paints, with its novelistic style and attention to details and their connections, is also the story of the rise of capitalism and what it enables. Capital, says Wyman, “is at the heart of this story”, and historical movements are seen to be the products rather than the drivers of the new working practices with regards to money:

What brought these disparate trends – things as varied as the spread of printing presses and the use of mercenary armies – together was a particular set of attitudes towards credit, debt, loans, and investment. These attitudes governed how Europeans employed capital, their assets. We can think of them as economic institutions.

The Verge is an excellent, readable book which shows Europe at a time when money was just starting to make the world go round.