Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XII

APOCALYPSE

1420: T

ABOR

There had never been anywhere quite like it. The castle, perched on a rock above the Lužnice river, had been abandoned decades before, and the blackened ruins of the settlement that had once surrounded it were choked by weeds. It was not an obvious place to seek shelter. The site had to be cleared, and a new town built from scratch. There was an urgent need of fortifications. The nights were bitterly cold. Yet still the refugees came. All March they had been making the trek, drawn from every class of society, from every corner of Bohemia. By the end of the month, camped out in tents within the half-built perimeter walls, there were contingents of men who had been blooded in battle while making their journey there, and women with their children, in flight from burning villages; tavern-keepers from Prague and peasants armed with flails; knights, and clerics, and labourers, and vagrants. ‘Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.’¹ As it had been in the Acts of the Apostles, so it was now. All shared in the common danger – and all shared a common status. Every man was called brother, and every woman sister. There were no hierarchies, no wages, no taxes. Private property was illegal. All debts were forgiven. The poor, it seemed, had inherited the earth.

The town was called by those who had moved to it Tabor. The name was one that broadcast a defiant message to its gathering enemies. In the Bible, it was recorded that Jesus had climbed a mountain to pray. ‘And as he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.’² The site of this miracle had long been identified by Christian scholars as a mountain in Galilee: Tabor. The radiance of the divine had suffused its summit, and heaven been joined with earth. Now it was happening again. The Bohemians who flocked to the lonely crag above the Lužnice were following in the footsteps of those crowds who once, beneath open skies, had gathered to hear the preaching of their Lord. ‘Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.’³ These were words that the radicals among the followers of Pelagius had seized on, and which had been troubling the wealthy since the time of Paulinus; but no one – not Martin, not Francis, not Waldes – had ever thought to do as the Taborites were now doing, and attempt to build an entire new society upon them. As lords laboured alongside peasants, toiling day and night to provide Tabor with an impregnable screen of fortifications, they were not merely constructing a stronghold, but aiming to rebuild the entire world.

In this ambition, at any rate, they were following in well-worn footsteps. The immense edifice of the Catholic Church, raised in defiance of earthly monarchs, and fashioned with such boldness and effort to serve the needs of all the Christian people, stood as the ultimate monument to what a revolution might achieve. The lava of its radicalism, though, had long since set. By an irony that was not yet familiar, the papal order had become the status quo. Increasingly, three centuries and more after the heroic age of Gregory VII, there were many Christians who, when they contemplated the claims to a universal rule of the papacy, could no longer recognise in it an agent of reformatio. Instead, so they dreaded, it had become an impediment to the change that was so clearly and desperately needed. The shadow of divine disapproval was unmistakable. A third of Christendom, it was estimated, had perished of the plague. Wars were ravaging its most prosperous kingdoms. On its eastern flank, the Byzantine Empire – which, following the expulsion of the crusaders from its capital in 1261, had been struggling to recover from the terrible blow inflicted on it back in the pontificate of Innocent III – was imperilled by a yet more formidable enemy. A new Muslim power, the empire of the Ottoman Turks, had expanded across the Hellespont, directly threatening Constantinople. Its armies had even begun to probe the defences of Hungary. Yet nothing was ultimately more debilitating to the claims of the Roman Church to be the bride of Christ than the enduring abomination of the papal schism. Attempts to resolve it had only made the crisis worse. In 1409, a council of bishops and university masters, meeting in Pisa, had declared both rival popes deposed, and crowned a new candidate of its own – but this, far from delivering Christendom a single pope, had merely left it stuck with three. Small wonder, then, confronted by such a scandal, that a few bold souls, pushing at the very limits of what it was acceptable to think, had begun to contemplate a nightmarish possibility: that the papacy, far from holding the keys to the gates of heaven, might in truth be an agent of hell.

And that in particular it might be Antichrist. At the end of days, Saint John had foretold, a beast with ten horns and seven heads was destined to emerge from the sea; this same beast, according to venerable tradition, would be a false prophet, a blasphemy against the church, and destined to rule the world. Rival popes, recognising an obvious way to rally their supporters when they saw it, had not hesitated to hurl the name of Antichrist at one another; but there were some Christians, marking the propaganda war with contempt, who had scorned to back either side. Their dissidence, communicated via the very network of universities that provided the Church with its clerical elite, had reverberated across Christendom. It was in Oxford that the theologian John Wycliffe had openly dared to denounce both factions in the schism as demonic, and the papacy itself as lacking all divine foundation; but it was in Prague that these sparks of subversion had ignited the most explosive reaction. Already, by the time of Wycliffe’s death in 1384, the city was a tinder box. The Bohemian nobility, subject as they were to emperors who stood in a line of inheritance from Otto the Great, chafed under German dominance. Czech-speaking scholars at the university, similarly disadvantaged, nurtured their own grievance. Meanwhile, out in the slums, the resentment was of the rich. The most popular preachers were those who condemned the wealth of monasteries adorned with gold and sumptuous tapestries, and demanded a return to the stern simplicity of the early days of the Church. The Christian people, they warned, had taken a desperately wrong turn. The reforms of Gregory VII, far from serving to redeem the Church, had set it instead upon a path to corruption. The papacy, seduced by the temptations of earthly glory, had forgotten that the gospels spoke most loudly to the poor, to the humble, to the suffering. ‘The cross of Jesus Christ and the name of the crucified Jesus are now brought into disrepute and made as it were alien and void among Christians.’⁴ Only Antichrist could have wrought such a fateful, such a hellish abomination. And so it was, in the streets of Prague, that it had become a common thing to paint the pope as the beast foretold by Saint John, and to show him wearing the papal crown, but with the feet of a monstrous bird.

To imagine that an entire order might be overturned had rarely come naturally to people. In Babylon, the ideal of kingship honoured by its inhabitants had reached back millennia, to the very beginnings of civilisation; in Greece, philosophers had cast society as the expression of a divinely ordered pattern; in Rome, anything that smacked of res novae, ‘new things’, had invariably been regarded as a catastrophe at all costs to be avoided. Not the least revolutionary aspect of Christianity had been the sanction that it provided for the very notion of revolution. Yet the papacy, which in the age of Gregory VII had weaponised it as no other institution had ever thought to do, was now become the embodiment of the status quo. The moderni, those reformers who back in the twelfth century had proclaimed the world to be standing on the threshold of eternity, had turned out to be mistaken. Modernitas – the new age that, with its dawning, would herald the end of time – had failed to arrive. This did not mean, though, that it never would. The prognosis provided by the Book of Revelation was clear. To read in the cracking of the world the events foretold by Saint John was inevitably to feel a certain shiver of dread; but also, perhaps, to dream that upheaval and transformation might be for the best.

One man more than any other had come to serve as a lightning rod for the gathering storm. In 1414, when church leaders from across Christendom met in the imperial city of Constance, on the edge of the Swiss Alps, their agenda had been an especially demanding one. As well as the running sore of the papal schism, there had been a second challenge: the defiant heresy of Prague’s most celebrated preacher. Jan Hus, a man of immense charisma, intellectual brilliance and personal integrity, had emerged from the scholarly confines of the city’s university to become the toast of Bohemia. Denouncing both the church hierarchy in Prague and the German-speaking elites who had long been profiting from imperial favour, he had helped to bring an already febrile mood to boiling point. The more rapturously his teachings were greeted, the more radical they had become. Inspired by Wycliffe, Hus had openly derided the claim of the papacy to a primacy sanctioned by God. That he had refrained from going the whole hog and denouncing it as Antichrist had not prevented his excommunication; nor, in turn, had excommunication served to rein in his defiance. Quite the contrary. Enjoying as he did adulatory support both in the slums of Prague and in the castles of Czech noblemen, Hus had stood firm. Increasingly, it seemed that the very structures of authority in Bohemia were collapsing. If this was a cause of panic in papal circles, then it was no less so for the imperial high command. Particularly alarmed was Sigismund, a ginger-haired veteran of the Turkish front and prince of the royal blood, who in 1410 had been proclaimed emperor-elect. Desperate to secure a compromise that all the various factions in Bohemia could accept, he had invited Hus to travel to Constance and negotiate directly with the delegates. Hus had accepted. Leaving the castle in Bohemia where he had been sheltering from papal agents, he had done so under a safe conduct personally guaranteed by Sigismund. On 3 November, he had arrived in Constance. Three weeks later, he had been arrested. Put on trial, he had refused to recant. Sentenced to death as a heretic, he had been burnt at the stake. His ashes had been dumped in the Rhine.

‘The time of greatest suffering, prophesied by Christ in his scriptures, the apostles in their letters, the prophets, and Saint John in the Apocalypse, is now at hand; it has begun; it stands at the gates!’⁵ Five years on from the death of Hus, the Taborites had gathered in their rocky stronghold confident that they would soon be seeing him again – him and all the risen saints. Far from extinguishing the flames of Hussite subversion, the Council of Constance had served only to stoke them further. Not even its success in finally ending the schism and installing again a single pope upon the throne of Saint Peter had been enough to redeem its reputation in Bohemia. In the wake of Hus’ execution, denunciations of the papacy as Antichrist had begun to be made openly across Prague. Of Sigismund as well – for it was presumed that it was by his treachery that Hus had been delivered up to the flames. Then, in 1419, an attempted crackdown by conservatives had precipitated open revolt. Hussites had stormed the city hall; flung their opponents out of its windows; seized control of churches across Prague. It was out in the mountains, though, that the true revolution was coming to a head. There, when the faithful assembled in flight from their homes, it was in the conviction that Prague was Babylon. The past and the future, manifest as they had always been in the books of the Bible, were now being mapped onto the contours of Bohemia. Nowhere was this more evident than behind the rising walls of Tabor. Radiant with light as the clothes of Christ had been, the emerging stronghold blazed as well with every kind of precious stone, as it had been foretold that the New Jerusalem would blaze. Or so it seemed to the Taborites. Labouring in the mud, mixing mortar, hauling stone, they knew what was approaching. Christ was destined to return within months. All sinners would perish. The reign of the saints would begin. ‘Only God’s elect were to remain on earth – those who had fled to the mountains.’⁶

The Taborites were hardly the first Christians to believe themselves living in the shadow of Apocalypse. The novelty lay rather in the scale of the crisis that had prompted their imaginings: one in which all the traditional underpinnings of society, all the established frameworks of authority, appeared fatally compromised. Confronted by a church that was the swollen body of Antichrist, and an emperor guilty of the most blatant treachery, the Taborites had pledged themselves to revolution. But it was not enough merely to return to the ideals of the early Church: to live equally as brothers and sisters; to share everything in common. The filth of the world beyond Tabor, where those who had not fled to the mountains still wallowed in corruption, had to be swept away too. Its entire order was rotten. ‘All kings, princes and prelates of the church will cease to be.’ This manifesto, against the backdrop of Sigismund’s determination to break the Hussites, and the papacy’s declaration of a crusade against them, was one calculated to steel the Taborites for the looming struggle. Yet it was not only emperors and popes whom they aspired to eliminate. All those who had rejected the summons to Tabor, to redeem themselves from the fallen world, were sinners. ‘Each of the faithful ought to wash his hands in the blood of Christ’s foes.’⁷

Many Hussites, confronted by this unsparing refusal to turn the other cheek, were appalled. ‘Heresy and tyrannical cruelty,’ one of them termed it. Others muttered darkly about a rebirth of Donatism. The summer of 1420, though, was no time for the moderates to be standing on their principles. The peril was too great. In May, at the head of a great army of crusaders summoned from across Christendom, Sigismund advanced on Prague. Ruin of the kind visited on Béziers two centuries earlier now directly threatened the city. Moderates and radicals alike accepted that they had no choice but to make common cause. The Taborites, leaving behind only a skeleton garrison, duly marched to the relief of Babylon. At their head rode a general of genius. Jan Žižka, one-eyed and sixty years old, was to prove the military saviour that the Albigensians had never found. That July, looking to break the besiegers’ attempt to starve Prague into submission, he launched a surprise attack so devastating that Sigismund was left with no choice but to withdraw. Further victories quickly followed. Žižka proved irresistible. Not even the loss late in 1421 of his remaining eye to an arrow served to handicap him. Crusaders, imperial garrisons, rival Hussite factions: he routed them all. Innovative and brutal in equal measure, Žižka was the living embodiment of the Taborite revolution. Noblemen on their chargers he met with rings of armoured wagons, hauled from muddy farmyards and manned by peasants equipped with muskets; monks he would order burnt at the stake, or else personally club to death. Never once did the grim old man meet with defeat. By 1424, when he finally fell sick and died, all of Bohemia had been brought under Taborite rule.

On his deathbed, so his enemies reported, Žižka had ordered the Taborites to flay his corpse, feed his flesh to carrion beasts, and use his skin to make a drum. ‘Then, with this drum in the lead, they should go to war. Their enemies would turn to flight as soon as they heard its voice.’⁸ The anecdote was tribute both to Žižka’s fearsome reputation and to the continuing success of his followers on the battlefield after his death. In truth, the Taborite drum had begun to sound a muffled beat even while Žižka was alive. In the summer of 1420, in the wake of the great victory over Sigismund, it had still been possible for the Taborites to believe that Christ’s return was imminent. Readying Prague for their Lord’s arrival, they had systematically targeted symbols of privilege. Monasteries were levelled; the bushy moustaches much favoured by the Bohemian elite forcibly shaved off wherever they were spotted; the skull of a recently deceased king dug up and crowned with straw. As the months and then the years passed, however, and still Christ failed to appear, so the radicalism of the Taborites had begun to fade. They had elected a bishop; negotiated to secure a king; charged the most extreme in their ranks with heresy and expelled them from Tabor. Žižka, displaying a brusque lack of concern for legal process that no inquisitor would ever have contemplated emulating, had rounded up fifty of them and burnt the lot.* Well before the abrupt and crushing defeat of the Taborites by a force of more moderate Hussites in 1434, the flame of their movement had been guttering. Christ had not returned. The world had not been purged of kings. Tabor had not, after all, been crowned the New Jerusalem. In 1436, when Hussite ambassadors – achieving a startling first for a supposedly heretical sect – succeeded in negotiating a concordat directly with the papacy, the Taborites had little choice but to accept it. There would be time enough, at the end of days, to defy the order of the world. But until it came, until Christ returned in glory, what option was there except to compromise?

A New Earth

Pulling back the veil from the prophecies in the Bible was a dangerous thing to attempt. The Franciscans, admirers of Joachim of Fiore though they might be, had learned to tread carefully. Any friar tempted to do as the Taborites had done and draw on scripture to speculate about the end days, was carefully monitored. In 1485, when a German Franciscan named Johann Hilten finished a detailed study of the prophetic passages in the Bible, his superiors were less than amused. The papacy, Hilten foretold, was in its last days. Its ‘disturbance and destruction’⁹ was sure. When placed under house arrest in Eisenberg, in the friary that had been donated to the order by Saint Elizabeth, Hilten doubled down. It was not only the papacy that was doomed, he warned. So too was monasticism. A man was coming, a great reformer, destined to bring about its ruin. So sure of this was Hilten that he even provided a date: ‘the year 1516 after the birth of Christ’.*

It was not only the decayed condition of the Church that had been weighing on his mind. There was geopolitics too. In 1453, Constantinople had finally fallen to the Turks. The great bulwark of Christendom had become the capital of a Muslim empire. The Ottomans, prompted by their conquest of the Second Rome to recall prophecies spoken by Muhammad, foretelling the fall to Islam of Rome itself, had pressed on westwards. In 1480, they had captured Otranto, on the heel of Italy. The news of it had prompted panic in papal circles – and not even the expulsion of the Turks the following year had entirely settled nerves. Terrible reports had emerged from Otranto: of how the city’s archbishop had been beheaded in his own cathedral, and some eight hundred others martyred for Christ. True or not, these stories gave a decided edge to another of Hilten’s prophecies. Both Italy and Germany, he warned, were destined to be conquered by the Turks. Their streets, like Otranto’s, would be washed in the blood of martyrs. Such were the horrors that would presage the coming of Antichrist. Once again, Hilten made sure to give precise dates for his prophecies. The end of the world, he specified, was due in the 1650s.

Hilten’s forebodings drew on an ancient wellspring. Saint John, when he warned that Satan, at the end of days, would lead entire nations out of the four corners of the earth, and that in number they would be ‘like the sand on the seashore’,¹⁰ had himself been channelling primordial fears. A dread of migrants came naturally to the peoples of settled lands. Darius, condemning barbarians as agents of the Lie, had articulated a perspective that Caesars too had come to share. Christians, though, were not merely the heirs of Roman paranoia. ‘Preach the good news to all creation’:¹¹ so the risen Jesus had instructed his disciples. Only when the gospel had been brought to the ends of the earth would he finally return in glory. The dream of a world become one in Christ was as old as Paul. Hilten, prophesying the fall of Christendom to the Turks, had foretold as well their conversion. That Islam was destined to vanish upon the approach of the end days, and the Jews too be brought to Christ, had long been the devout conviction of every Christian who dared to map the contours of the future. Hilten too, for all the blood-curdling quality of his prognostications, never thought to doubt it.

Across Christendom, then, dread of what the future might hold continued to be joined with hope: of the dawning of a new age, when all of humanity would be gathered under the wings of the Spirit, that holy dove which, at Jesus’ baptism, had descended upon him from heaven. The same sense of standing on the edge of time that in Bohemia had led the Taborites to espouse communism elsewhere prompted Christians to anticipate that all the world would soon be brought to Christ. In Spain, where war against Muslim potentates had been a way of life for more than seven hundred years, this optimism was particularly strong. Men spoke of El Encubierto, the Hidden One: the last Christian emperor of all. At the end of time, he would emerge from concealment to unify the various kingdoms of Spain, to destroy Islam for good, to conquer Jerusalem, to subdue ‘brutal kings and bestial races’¹² everywhere, and to rule the world. Even as the people of Otranto were repairing the sacrilege done to their cathedral, and Johann Hilten was foretelling the conquest of Germany by the Turks, rumours that El Encubierto had come at last were sweeping Spain. Isabella, the queen of Castile, did not rule alone. By her side, her equal in everything, was her husband, the king of the neighbouring realm: Ferdinand of Aragon. Before the combined might of these two monarchs, the truncated rump of al-Andalus stood perilously exposed. Of the great Muslim empire that had once reached to the Pyrenees and beyond, only the mountainous kingdom of Granada, on the southernmost shore of Spain, survived. Its continuing independence, to monarchs as devout and ambitious as Ferdinand and Isabella, was a standing affront. In 1482, their forces duly embarked on its conquest, fortress by fortress, port by port. By 1490, only Granada itself still held out. Two years later, on 2 January 1492, its king finally surrendered. Ferdinand, handed the keys to the royal palace, could be well pleased. The conquest of Spain’s final Muslim stronghold was a feat worthy of El Encubierto.

Last emperor or not, Ferdinand was certainly free now to look to broader horizons. Among the cheering crowds watching the royal entry into Granada was a Genoese seafarer by the name of Christopher Columbus. His own mood was downbeat. For years he had been trying to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to fund an expedition across the uncharted waters of the western ocean. Confident that the world was smaller than geographers had calculated, he was notorious in courts across Christendom for his claim that there lay across the Atlantic a short and ready route to the riches of the Orient: to ‘India’, as Europeans termed it. Wealth, though, was not an end in itself. Shortly before the fall of Granada, Columbus, pressing his suit, had pledged the profits of his enterprise to a very particular cause: the conquest of Jerusalem. Ferdinand and Isabella, listening to this, had smiled, and said that this plan for a crusade pleased them, and that it was their wish too. Then nothing. Columbus’ appeal for funding had been rejected by a panel of experts appointed by the two monarchs to investigate his proposal. Turning his back on Granada, its palace now topped by a cross, he rode despondently away. After only a day on the road, though, he was overtaken by a messenger from the royal court. There had been a change of heart, he was told. The two monarchs were ready to sponsor him.

Columbus sailed that August. In the event, despite making landfall barely two months after his departure from Spain, he did not reach India. The day after his first Christmas in the West Indies (as he would come to call the islands he had arrived among), he prayed to God that he would soon discover the gold and spices promised in his prospectus; but the wealthy entrepôts of the Orient were destined always to lie beyond his grasp.* Nevertheless, even as the realisation of this began to dawn on Columbus, he betrayed no disappointment. He understood his destiny. In 1500, writing to the Spanish court, he spoke in unabashed terms of the role that he had been called to play in the great drama of the end times. ‘God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of Saint John after having spoken of it through the mouth of Isaiah. And he showed me the spot where to find it.’¹³ Three years later, during the course of a voyage blighted by storms, hostile natives and a year spent marooned on Jamaica, Columbus’ mission was confirmed for him directly by a voice from heaven. Speaking gently, it chided him for his despair, and hailed him as a new Moses. Just as the Promised Land had been granted to the Children of Israel, so had the New World been granted to Spain. Writing to Ferdinand and Isabella about this startling development, Columbus insisted reassuringly that it had all been prophesied by Joachim of Fiore. Not for nothing did his own name mean ‘the dove’, that emblem of the Holy Spirit. The news of Christ would be brought to the New World, and its treasure used to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Then the end of days would come. Columbus could even identify the date. Just as Johann Hilten had done, he specified the 1650s.

This sense of time as a speeding arrow, its destination sure, was one that Columbus always took for granted. It gave to him – even as he might feel small before the ineluctable potency of God’s plans, and the vagaries of his own career – his feelings of self-assurance, of purpose, of destiny. Yet there existed in the New World, in cities as yet unglimpsed beyond the western horizon, a very different understanding of time. In 1519, more than a decade after Columbus’ death, a Spanish adventurer named Hernán Cortés disembarked with five hundred men on the shore of an immense landmass that was already coming to be called America. Informed that there lay inland the capital of a great empire, Cortés took the staggeringly bold decision to head for it. He and his men were stupefied by what they found: a fantastical vision of lakes and towering temples, radiating ‘flashes of light like quetzal plumes’,¹⁴ immensely vaster than any city in Spain. Canals bustled with canoes; flowers hung over the waterways. Tenochtitlan, wealthy and beautiful, was a monument to the formidable prowess of the conquerors who had built it: the Mexica. It was also a monument to something much more: their understanding of time itself. The city, only recently built, existed in the shadow of other, earlier cities, once no less magnificent, but long since abandoned. The emperor of the Mexica, going on foot, would often make pilgrimage to one of these massive ruins. No more awesome warning could have been served him that the world was endlessly mutable, governed by cycles of greatness and collapse, than to visit the wreckage of such a city. The anxiety of the Mexica that their own power might crumble shaded readily into an even profounder dread: that the world itself might darken and turn to dust. So it was, across Tenochtitlan, that they had raised immense pyramids; on the summit of these, at times of particular peril, when the very future of the cosmos seemed to hang in the balance, priests would smash knives of flint into the chests of prisoners. Without sacrifice, so the Mexica believed, the gods would weaken, chaos descend, and the sun start to fade. Only chalchiuatl, the ‘precious water’ pumped out by a still-beating heart, could serve to feed it. Only blood, in the final reckoning, could prevent the universe from winding down.

To the Spaniards, the spectacle of dried gore on the steps of Tenochtitlan’s pyramids, of skulls grinning out from racks, was literally hellish. Once Cortés, in a feat of unparalleled audacity and aggression, had succeeded in making himself the master of the great city, its temples were razed to the ground. So Charlemagne, smashing with his mailed horsemen through dripping forests, had trampled down the shrines of Woden and Thunor. The Mexica, who had neither horses nor steel, let alone cannon, found themselves as powerless as the Saxons had once been to withstand Christian arms. The true clash, though, had been not between Toledo sword and stone axe, but between rival visions of the end of the world. The Spanish were prepared for it as no Christian people had ever been before. A decade before the conquest of Granada, Ferdinand had proclaimed it his intention ‘to dedicate Spain to the service of God’.¹⁵ In 1478, he had secured permission from the pope to establish, as the one institution common to both Aragon and Castile, an inquisition directly under royal control. 1492, the year of Granada’s fall and of Columbus’ first voyage, had witnessed another fateful step in the preparation of Spain for its mission to bring the gospel to the world. The Jews, whose conversion was destined to presage Christ’s return, had been given the choice of becoming Christian or going into exile. Many had opted to leave Spain; more, including the chief rabbi of Castile himself, had accepted baptism. It was hardly to be expected, then, three decades on, that agents of the Spanish monarchy would spare the altars of a people who knew nothing of the God of Israel. Travelling to Mexico in Cortés’ wake, Franciscans were revolted by the demands of sacrifice imposed by the Mexica’s gods. None doubted they were demons. There was Huitzilopochtli, the great patron of the Mexica, whose temple in Tenochtitlan, it was said, had been consecrated with the blood of eighty thousand victims; Xipe Totec, ‘the Flayed One’, whose devotees wore the skins of those offered to their patron, and stabbed their penises with cactus thorns; Tlaloc, the god of the rains, whose favours could be won only by the sacrifice of small children who had first been made to weep. Such cruelties cried out to the heavens. ‘It was the clamour of so many souls, and so much blood shed as an affront to their Creator,’ wrote one Franciscan, that had inspired God to send Cortés to the Indies – ‘like another Moses in Egypt.’¹⁶

Yet even Cortés himself had lamented the cost. The glories of Tenochtitlan had been obliterated; its canals filled with floating corpses. In the Spaniards’ wake had come killers even more terrible: diseases borne from Europe, against which the Indians had no resistance. Millions upon millions would die. And then there were the Spanish themselves. The wealth of the Indians, fallen into Christian hands, was not spent on bringing the world into the fold of Christ. Instead, shipped back to Spain, it was used to fund wars against the king of France. The Indians, crushed beneath the hooves of Spanish greatness, were worked as slaves. Resistance was savagely punished. Friars who travelled to the New World, labouring to bring the natives to Christ, reported in consternation on the atrocities they had seen: men wrapped in straw and set on fire; women cut to pieces like sheep in an abattoir; newborn infants smashed against rocks, or tossed into boiling rivers.

What kind of Moses, then, had Columbus and Cortés proved?

Sheep among Wolves

In 1516, any lingering hopes that Ferdinand might prove to be the last emperor were put to rest by his death. He had not led a great crusade to reconquer Jerusalem; Islam had not been destroyed. Nevertheless, the achievements of Ferdinand’s reign had been formidable. His grandson, Charles, succeeded to the rule of the most powerful kingdom in Christendom, and to a sway more authentically globe-spanning than that of the Caesars. Spaniards felt no sense of inferiority when they compared their swelling empire to Rome’s. Quite the contrary. From lands unknown to the ancients came news of feats that would have done credit to Alexander: the toppling against all the odds of mighty kingdoms; the winning of dazzling fortunes; men who had come from nowhere to live like kings.

Yet there lay over the brilliance of these achievements a pall of anxiety. No people in antiquity would ever have succeeded in winning an empire for themselves had they doubted their licence to slaughter and enslave the vanquished; but Christians could not so readily be innocent in their cruelty. When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’¹⁷ Even in the Indies, though, there were Spaniards who worried whether this was truly so. ‘Tell me,’ a Dominican demanded of his fellow settlers, eight years before Cortés took the road to Tenochtitlan, ‘by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully in their own land?’¹⁸ Most of the friar’s congregation, too angered to reflect on his questions, contented themselves with issuing voluble complaints to the local governor, and agitating for his removal; but there were some colonists who did find their consciences pricked. Increasingly, adventurers in the New World had to reckon with condemnation of their exploits as cruelty, oppression, greed. Some, on occasion, might even come to this realisation themselves. The most dramatic example occurred in 1514, when a colonist in the West Indies had his life upended by a sudden, heart-stopping insight: that his enslavement of Indians was a mortal sin. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, like Augustine in the garden, Bartolomé de las Casas found himself born again. Freeing his slaves, he devoted himself from that moment on to defending the Indians from tyranny. Only the cause of bringing them to God, he argued, could possibly justify Spain’s rule of the New World; and only by means of persuasion might they legitimately be brought to God. ‘For they are our brothers, and Christ gave his life for them.’¹⁹

Las Casas, whether on one side of the Atlantic, pleading his case at the royal court, or on the other, in straw-thatched colonial settlements, never doubted that his convictions derived from the mainstream of Christian teaching. Formulating his objections to Spanish imperialism, he drew on the work of Aquinas. ‘Jesus Christ, the king of kings, was sent to win the world, not with armies, but with holy preachers, as sheep among wolves.’²⁰ Such was the judgement of Thomas Cajetan, an Italian friar whose commentary on Aquinas was the great labour of his life.* Appointed head of the Dominicans in 1508, and a cardinal in 1517, he spoke with a rare authority. News of the sufferings inflicted on the Indians filled him with a particular anger. ‘Do you doubt that your king is in hell?’²¹ he demanded of one Spanish visitor to Rome. Here, in his shock that a Christian ruler should think to justify conquest and savagery in the name of the crucified Christ, was the expression of a scholarly tradition that reached all the way back to Alcuin. Cajetan, in his efforts to provide the Indians with a legal recourse against their oppressors, never imagined that he was breaking new ground. The discovery of continents and peoples unimagined by Aquinas did not render the great Dominican any the less qualified to serve as a guide as to how they should be treated. The teachings of the Church were universal in their reach. That the kingdoms of the Indians were legitimate states; that Christianity should be imposed, not by force, but solely by means of persuasion; that neither kings, nor emperors, nor the Church itself had any right to ordain their conquest: here, in Cajetan’s opinion, were the principles fit to govern a globalised age.

There was, in this innovative programme of international law, a conscious attempt to lay the foundations of something enduring. Cajetan did not think that the discovery of a New World presaged the return of Christ. The days when popes imagined themselves living in the end times were gone. The concern now of the papacy and its servants was to invest in the long term. Evidence for this in Rome itself was to be found amid a great din of hammering and chiselling. On the opposite side of the Tiber from the Lateran, in the Vatican, the ancient quarter where Saint Peter lay buried, work had begun in 1506 on an immense new church, intended to be the largest in the world. In the Lateran, at a council held in 1513, a formal prohibition had been issued against preaching the imminence of Antichrist. In the spring of 1518, when Cajetan arrived in Augsburg on his first foreign mission, his aim was pre-eminently a diplomatic one: to form a united German front against the Turks. Rather than interpreting the Ottoman onslaught on Christendom as a fulfilment of prophecies in the Book of Revelation, he preferred to see it as something quite else: a military challenge best met by raising taxes.

Yet Cajetan, now that he was beyond the Alps, could not help but feel the swirl and tug of apocalyptic expectations all around him. Hilten had died at the turn of the century, confined to a cell in Eisenach, and writing at the end – so it was said – in his own blood; but prophecies of the kind that he had so forcefully articulated, of the ruin of the papacy and the coming of a great reformer, were still circulating widely. 1516, the year foretold by Hilten as the one in which the great reformer was destined to appear, had come and gone; but Cajetan could not afford to relax. Even as he pressed the German princes to invest in a crusade against the Turks, he knew that financial demands from the Church were generating widespread resentment. In 1517, a theological dispute about the methods employed by Dominicans to raise funds for the papal building programme had led to a particular stir in the Saxon fortress town of Wittenberg. There, a friar who served the recently founded university as its professor of biblical studies had issued a formal objection, in the form of ninety-five written theses. Various Dominicans, closing ranks against this display of impudence, had responded with indignant counter-blasts. Academic spats like this were nothing unusual, of course, and attempts to resolve it followed a process that would have been perfectly familiar to Abelard. The papacy, sent the ninety-five theses by the local archbishop, had pondered them for eight months before finally pronouncing, in August 1518, that they were indeed heretical. The author had been summoned to Rome. Yet this, far from settling the matter, had only stoked the flames. Already, in Wittenberg, writings by the local inquisitor had been burnt in the market square. Cajetan, tracking events from his residence in Augsburg, fretted that the bush-fires of controversy might spread out of control. As papal legate, it was his responsibility to stamp them out. The best and most Christian way of doing this, he decided, was to summon the troublesome author of the ninety-five theses to Augsburg, and persuade him in person to recant. Austere, learned and devout, Cajetan was a man whom even those normally suspicious of inquisitors knew that they could trust. His invitation was accepted. On 7 October 1518, Martin Luther arrived in Augsburg.

Perhaps, in greeting his troublesome guest, Cajetan reflected on how, almost four centuries before, Peter the Venerable had similarly welcomed a monk summoned to Rome on a charge of heresy and afforded him peace. Like Abelard, Luther was a theologian whose capacity for daring speculation was combined with a quite exceptional talent for self-publicity. It was typical of him that, travelling to Augsburg, he should have done so on foot. Intellectually brilliant, he knew as well how to present himself as a man of the people. As quick with a joke as he was with a Latin tag, as adept at speaking the language of taverns as he was at debating with scholars, he had followed up his ninety-five theses with an escalating volume of pamphlets. Indeed, such was public enthusiasm for what Luther had to say that Wittenberg, a town so poor and remote that it barely had an economy at all, was well on its way to becoming Europe’s most improbable centre of the publishing industry. In the space of barely a year, as Luther himself modestly observed, ‘it has pleased heaven that I should become the talk of the people’.²² To win such a man back from the brink of heresy would redound as gloriously to Cajetan’s order as the redemption of Abelard had redounded to Cluny’s. There was little, then, of the inquisitor about the Cardinal’s initial welcome. Fondly he spoke to the gaunt, spare man before him like a father to a son. Far from haranguing Luther, Cajetan aimed to persuade him in a gentle tone of his errors, and thereby spare him a trial in Rome. Recognisably, the cardinal spoke as the philosopher who had condemned the use of force against the Indians.

His hopes were to be bitterly disappointed. Over the course of his first meeting with Luther, Cajetan found his voice steadily rising. By the end of it, he was shouting his opponent down. At stake, the cardinal had come to realise, were not the details of Luther’s ninety-five theses, but an altogether more fundamental question: how Christians were best to pursue holiness. To Cajetan, the answer appeared self-evident. Outside of the Roman Church, there could be no salvation. Its immense structure was nothing less than the City of God. Generation upon generation of Christian had laboured to build it. The popes who had followed in a line of succession from Saint Peter himself, and the lawyers who had compiled books of canons and commentaries, and the scholars who had succeeded in integrating divine revelation with pagan philosophy – all had contributed to its edifice. Yet Luther, it began to dawn on Cajetan, was content to put all of this in question. He seemed to despise every buttress of the Church’s authority: Aquinas, and canon law, and even the papacy itself. Over them all, defiantly and unyieldingly, he affirmed the witness of scripture. ‘For the pope is not above but under the word of God.’²³ Cajetan, stupefied that an obscure monk should think to place his personal interpretation of the Bible on such a pedestal, dismissed the argument as ‘mere words’; but Luther, quoting verses with a facility that came naturally to a professor of scripture, appealed for the first time to a concept that he had discovered in Paul: ‘I must believe according to the testimony of my conscience.’²⁴

The result was deadlock. After three meetings, during which Luther obdurately held firm to his position, Cajetan lost patience for good. Expelling the monk from his presence, he ordered him not to return unless he was ready to recant. Luther took the cardinal at his word. Released from his monastic vows by the head of his order, who had accompanied him to Augsburg, he clambered over the city wall and beat a speedy retreat. Naturally, the moment he was back in Wittenberg, he made sure to publish a full account of all his dealings with Cajetan. Luther understood, infinitely better than his adversary, how important it was to seize control of the narrative. His very life now seemed likely to depend on it. ‘I was afraid because I was alone.’²⁵ Yet fear was not Luther’s only emotion. He felt exhilaration as well, and a sense of exultation. Now that he was no longer a monk, and his bonds to the dimension of Catholic religio had been cut once and for all, he was free to forge something different: a new and personal understanding of religio.

The need for it was pressing. Time was running out. The hour of judgement was drawing near. The signs of it were everywhere. Two months after leaving Augsburg, Luther confessed in private to a dark and growing suspicion: ‘that the true Antichrist mentioned by Paul reigns in the court of Rome’.²⁶

Only by means of a new reformatio, Luther was coming to believe, could the Christian people hope to be redeemed from its darkening shadow.