 CHAPTER 39 THE RENOUSANCE People once more dared to be happy just because they were alive. They tried to save the remains of the older and more agreeable civilization of Rome and Greece and they were so proud of their achievements that they spoke of a renaissance, or rebirth of civilization. The renaissance was not a political or religious movement, it was a state of mind. The men of the renaissance continued to be the obedient sons of the mother church. They were subjects of kings and emperors and dukes and murmured not. But their outlook upon life was changed. They began to wear different clothes, to speak a different language, to live different lives in different houses. They no longer concentrated all their thoughts and their efforts upon the blessed existence that awaited them in heaven. They tried to establish their paradise upon this planet, and, truth to tell, they succeeded in a remarkable degree. I have quite often warned you against the danger that lies in historical dates. People take them too literally. They think of the Middle Ages as a period of darkness and ignorance. Click, says the clock, and the renaissance begins, and cities and palaces are flooded with the bright sunlight of an eager intellectual curiosity. As a matter of fact it is quite impossible to draw such sharp lines. The thirteenth century belonged most decidedly to the Middle Ages. All historians agree upon that, but was it a time of darkness and stagnation merely? By no means. People were tremendously alive. Great states were being founded, large centres of commerce were being developed, high above the turreted towers of the castle and the peaked roof of the town hall rose the slender spire of the newly built Gothic cathedral. Everywhere the world was in motion, the high and mighty gentlemen of the city hall, who had just become conscious of their own strength, by way of their recently acquired riches, were struggling for more power with their feudal masters. The members of the guilds, who had just become aware of the important fact that numbers count, were fighting the high and mighty gentlemen of the city hall. The king and his shrewd advisers went fishing in these troubled waters and caught many a shining bass of profit, which they proceeded to cook and eat before the noses of the surprised and disappointed councillors and guild-brotheren. To enliven the scenery during the long hours of evening, when the badly lighted streets did not invite further political and economic dispute, the troubadours and the minisingers told their stories and sang their songs of romance and adventure and heroism and loyalty to all fair women. Meanwhile youth, impatient of the slowness of progress, flocked to the universities and thereby hangs a story. The middle ages were internationally minded. That sounds difficult, but wait until I explain it to you. We modern people are nationally minded. We are Americans, or Englishmen, or Frenchmen, or Italians, and speak English or French or Italian, and go to English and French and Italian universities, unless we want to specialise in some particular branch of learning which is only taught elsewhere, and then we learn another language, and go to Munich or Madrid or Moscow. But the people of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rarely talked of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians. They said, I am a citizen of Sheffield, or Bordeaux, or Genoa. As they all belonged to one and the same church, they felt a certain bond of brotherhood. And as all educated men could speak Latin, they possessed an international language which removed the stupid language barriers which have grown up in modern Europe and which placed the small nations at such an enormous disadvantage. Just as an example take the case of Erasmus, the great preacher of tolerance and laughter who wrote his books in the sixteenth century. He was the native of a small Dutch village. He wrote in Latin, and all the world was his audience. If he were alive today he would write in Dutch. Then only five or six million people would be able to read him. To be understood by the rest of Europe and America his publishers would be obliged to translate his books into twenty different languages. That would cost a lot of money, and most likely the publishers would never take the trouble or the risk. Six hundred years ago that could not happen. The greater part of the people were still very ignorant and could not read or write at all. But those who had mastered the difficult art of handling the goosequill belonged to an international republic of letters which spread across the entire continent and which knew of no boundaries and respected no limitations of language or nationality. The universities were the strongholds of this republic. Unlike modern fortifications they did not follow the frontier. They were to be found wherever a teacher and a few pupils happened to find themselves together. There again the middle ages and the renaissance differed from our own time. Nowadays when a new university is built the process, almost invariably, is as follows. One rich man wants to do something for the community in which he lives, or a particular religious sect wants to build a school to keep its faithful children under decent supervision, or a state needs doctors and lawyers and teachers. The university begins as a large sum of money which is deposited in a bank. This money is then used to construct buildings and laboratories and dormitories. Many professional teachers are hired, entrance examinations are held, and the university is on the way. But in the middle ages things were done differently. A wise man said to himself, I have discovered a great truth, I must impart my knowledge to others. And he began to preach his wisdom wherever and whenever he could get a few people to listen to him, like a modern soapbox orator. If he was an interesting speaker the crowd came and stayed. If he was dull they shrugged their shoulders and continued their way. By and by certain young men began to come regularly to hear the words of wisdom of this great teacher. They brought copy books with them and a little bottle of ink and a goose quill and wrote down what seemed to be important. One day it rained. The teacher and his pupils retired to an empty basement or the room of the professor. The learned man sat in his chair and the boys sat on the floor. That was the beginning of the university, the universitas, a corporation of professors and students during the middle ages when the teacher counted for everything and the building in which he taught counted for very little. As an example let me tell you of something that happened in the 9th century. In the town of Salerno, near Naples, there were a number of excellent physicians. They attracted people desirous of learning the medical profession and for almost a thousand years, until 1817, there was a university of Salerno which taught the wisdom of Hippocrates, the great Greek doctor who had practiced his art in ancient Hellas in the 5th century before the birth of Christ. Then there was Abelard, the young priest from Brittany who early in the 12th century began to lecture on theology and logic in Paris. Thousands of eager young men flocked to the French city to hear him. Other priests who disagreed with him stepped forward to explain their point of view. Paris was soon filled with a clamoring multitude of Englishmen and Germans and Italians and students from Sweden and Hungary and around the old cathedral which stood on a little island in the Seine there grew the famous University of Paris. In Bologna in Italy a monk by the name of Gratian had compiled a text book for those whose business it was to know the laws of the church. Young priests and many laymen then came from all over Europe to hear Gratian explain his ideas. To protect themselves against the landlords and the innkeepers and the boarding-house ladies of the city they formed a corporation or university and behold the beginning of the University of Bologna. Next there was a quarrel in the University of Paris. We do not know what caused it but a number of disgruntled teachers together with their pupils crossed the channel and found a hospitable home in a little village on the Thames called Oxford and in this way the famous University of Oxford came into being. In the same way in the year 1222 there had been a split in the University of Bologna. The discontented teachers again followed by their pupils had moved to Padua and their proud city thenceforward boasted of a university of its own. And so it went from Valladolid in Spain to Krakow in distant Poland and from Poitiers in France to Rostock in Germany. It is quite true that much of the teaching done by these early professors would sound absurd to our ears trained to listen to logarithms and geometrical theorems. The point, however, which I want to make is this, the middle ages and especially the 13th century were not a time when the world stood entirely still. Among the younger generation there was life, there was enthusiasm and there was a restless, if somewhat bashful, asking of questions and out of this turmoil grew the renaissance. But just before the curtain went down upon the last scene of the medieval world a solitary figure crossed the stage of whom you ought to know more than his mere name. This man was called Dante. He was the son of a Florentine lawyer who belonged to the Aligari family and he saw the light of day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his ancestors while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. Francis of Assisi upon the walls of the Church of the Holy Cross. But often when he went to school his frightened eyes would see the puddles of blood which told of the terrible and endless warfare that raged forever between the Guelphs and the Gibilinis, the followers of the Pope and the adherents of the emperors. When he grew up he became a Guelph because his father had been one before him just as an American boy might become a Democrat or a Republican simply because his father had happened to be a Democrat or a Republican. But after a few years Dante saw that Italy, unless united under a single head, threatened to perish as a victim of the disordered jealousies of a thousand little cities. Then he became a Gibilini. He looked for help beyond the Alps. He hoped that a mighty emperor might come and reestablish unity and order. Alas, he hoped in vain. The Gibilinis were driven out of Florence in the year 1302. From that time on until the day of his death amidst the dreary ruins of Ravenna in the year 1321 Dante was a homeless wanderer eating the bread of charity at the table of rich patrons whose names would have sunk into the deepest pit of oblivion but for this single fact that they had been kind to a poet in his misery. During the many years of exile Dante felt compelled to justify himself and his actions when he had been a political leader in his hometown and when he had spent his days walking along the banks of the Arno that he might catch a glimpse of the lovely Beatrice Portinari who died the wife of another man a dozen years before the Gibilini disaster. He had failed in the ambitions of his career. He had faithfully served the town of his birth and before a corrupt court he had been accused of stealing the public funds and had been condemned to be burned alive should he venture back within the realm of the city of Florence. To clear himself before his own conscience and before his contemporaries Dante then created an imaginary world and with great detail he described the circumstances which had led to his defeat and depicted the hopeless condition of greed and lust and hatred which had turned his fair and beloved Italy into a battlefield for the pitiless mercenaries of wicked and selfish tyrants. He tells us how on the Thursday before Easter of the year 1300 he had lost his way in a dense forest and how he found his path barred by a leopard and a lion and a wolf. He gave himself up for lost when a white figure appeared amidst the trees. It was Virgil, the Roman poet and philosopher, sent upon his errand of mercy by the Blessed Virgin and by Beatrice, who from high heaven watched over the fate of her true lover. Virgil then takes Dante through purgatory and through hell. Deeper and deeper the path leads them until they reach the lowest pit where Lucifer himself stands frozen into the eternal ice surrounded by the most terrible of sinners, traitors and liars and those who have achieved fame and success by lies and by deceit. But before the two wanderers have reached this terrible spot, Dante has met all those who in some way or other have played a role in the history of his beloved city. Emperor and popes, dashing knights and whining usurers, they are all there, doomed to eternal punishment or awaiting the day of deliverance when they shall leave purgatory for heaven. It is a curious story. It is a handbook of everything the people of the 13th century did and felt and feared and prayed for. Through it all moves the figure of the lonely Florentine exile, forever followed by the shadow of his own despair. And behold, when the gates of death were closing upon the sad poet of the Middle Ages, the portals of life swung open to the child who was to be the first of the men of the Renaissance. That was Francesco Petrarcha, the son of the Notary public of the little town of Arezzo. Francesco's father had belonged to the same political party as Dante. He too had been exiled, and thus it happened that Petrarcha, or Petrarch, as we call him, was born away from Florence. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Montpellier in France that he might become a lawyer like his father. But the boy did not want to be a jurist. He hated the law. He wanted to be a scholar and a poet. And because he wanted to be a scholar and a poet beyond everything else, he became one, as people of a strong will are apt to do. He made long voyages, copying manuscripts in Flanders, and in the cloisters along the Rhine, and in Paris, and Lige, and finally in Rome. Then he went to live in a lonely valley of the wild mountains of Vecluse, and there he studied and wrote, and soon he had become so famous for his verse and for his learning, that both the University of Paris and the King of Naples invited him to come and teach their students and subjects. On the way to his new job he was obliged to pass through Rome. The people had heard of his fame as an editor of half-forgotten Rome and authors. They decided to honour him, and in the ancient forum of the Imperial City Petrarch was crowned with the laurel wreath of the poet. From that moment on his life was an endless career of honour and appreciation. He wrote the things which people wanted most to hear. They were tired of theological disputations. Poor Dante could wander through hell as much as he wanted, but Petrarch wrote of love and of nature and the sun, and never mentioned those gloomy things which seemed to have been the stock and trade of the last generation. And when Petrarch came to a city all the people flocked out to meet him, and he was received like a conquering hero. If he happened to bring his young friend Boccaccio, the storyteller, with him, so much the better. They were both men of their time, full of curiosity, willing to read everything once, digging in forgotten and musty libraries that they might find still another manuscript of Virgil, or Ovid, or Lucretius, or any of the other old Latin poets. They were good Christians, of course they were, everyone was, but no need of going around with a long face and wearing a dirty coat, just because some day or other you were going to die. Life was good. People were meant to be happy. You desired proof of this? Very well, take a spade and dig into the soil. What did you find? Beautiful old statues, beautiful old vases, ruins of ancient buildings. All these things were made by the people of the greatest empire that ever existed. They ruled all the world for a thousand years. They were strong, and rich, and handsome. Just look at that bust of the Emperor Augustus. Of course they were not Christians, and they would never be able to enter heaven. At best they would spend their days in Purgatory, where Dante had just paid them a visit. But who cared? To have lived in a world like that of ancient Rome was heaven enough for any mortal being, and any way we live but once, let us be happy and cheerful for the mere joy of existence. Such in short was the spirit that had begun to fill the narrow and crooked streets of the many little Italian cities. You know what we mean by the bicycle craze or the automobile craze. Someone invents a bicycle. People who for hundreds of thousands of years have moved slowly and painfully from one place to another go crazy over the prospect of rolling rapidly and easily over hill and dale. Then a clever mechanic makes the first automobile. No longer is it necessary to pedal and pedal and pedal. You just sit and let little drops of gasoline do the work for you. Then everybody wants an automobile. Everybody talks about Rolls Royces and Flivers and Carburators and Mileage and Oil. Explorers penetrate into the hearts of unknown countries that they may find new supplies of gas. Forests arise in Sumatra and in the Congo to supply us with rubber. Rubber and oil become so valuable that people fight wars for their possession. The whole world is automobile mad and little children can say car before they learn to whisper papa and mama. In the 14th century the Italian people went crazy about the newly discovered beauties of the buried world of Rome. Soon their enthusiasm was shared by all the people of Western Europe. The finding of an unknown manuscript became the excuse for a civic holiday. The man who wrote a grammar became as popular as the fellow who nowadays invents a new spark plug. The humanist, the scholar who devoted his time and his energies to a study of homo, or mankind, instead of wasting his hours upon fruitless theological investigations, that man was regarded with greater honor and a deeper respect than was ever bestowed upon a hero who had just conquered all the cannibal islands. In the midst of this intellectual upheaval an event occurred which greatly favored the study of the ancient philosophers and authors. The Turks were renewing their attacks upon Europe. Constantinople, capital of the last remnant of the original Roman Empire, was hard-pressed. In the year 1393 the emperor, Manuel Paleolog, sent Emmanuel Chrysolaris to Western Europe to explain the desperate state of old Byzantium and to ask for aid. This aid never came. The Roman Catholic world was more than willing to see the Greek Catholic world go to the punishment that awaited such wicked heretics. But however indifferent Western Europe might be to the fate of the Byzantines, they were greatly interested in the ancient Greeks, whose colonists had founded the city upon the Bosporus ten centuries after the Trojan War. They wanted to learn Greek that they might read Aristotle and Homer and Plato. They wanted to learn it very badly, but they had no books and no grammars and no teachers. The magistrates of Florence heard of the visit of Chrysolaris. The people of their city were crazy to learn Greek. Would he please come and teach them? He would, and behold, the first professor of Greek, teaching Alpha, Beta, Gamma to hundreds of eager young men, begging their way to the city of the Arno, living in stables and in dingy attics that they might learn how to decline the verb and enter into the companionship of Sophocles and Homer. Meanwhile in the universities the old schoolmen teaching their ancient theology and their antiquated logic, explaining the hidden mysteries of the Old Testament and discussing the strange science of their Greek, Arabic, Spanish, Latin edition of Aristotle, looked on in dismay and horror. Next they turned angry. This thing was going too far. The young men were deserting the lecture halls of the established universities to go and listen to some wild-eyed humanist with his newfangled notions about a reborn civilization. They went to the authorities. They complained, but one cannot force an unwilling horse to drink and one cannot make unwilling ears listen to something which does not really interest them. The schoolmen were losing ground rapidly. Here and there they scored a short victory. They combined forces with those fanatics who hated to see other people enjoy a happiness which was foreign to their own souls. In Florence, the center of the great rebirth, a terrible fight was fought between the old order and the new. A Dominican monk, sour of face and bitter in his hatred of beauty, was the leader of the medieval rearguard. He fought a valiant battle. Day after day he thundered his warnings of God's holy wrath through the wide halls of Santa Maria del Fiore. Repent, he cried, repent of your godlessness, of your joy in things that are not holy. He began to hear voices and to see flaming swords that flashed through the sky. He preached to the little children that they might not fall into the errors of these ways which were leading their fathers to perdition. He organized companies of Boy Scouts devoted to the service of the great God whose prophet he claimed to be. In a sudden moment of frenzy, the frightened people promised to do penance for their wicked love of beauty and pleasure. They carried their books and their statues and their paintings to the marketplace and celebrated a wild carnival of the vanities with holy singing and most unholy dancing while Savonarola applied his torch to the accumulated treasures. But when the ashes cooled down the people began to realize what they had lost. This terrible fanatic had made them destroy that which they had come to love above all things. They turned against him. Savonarola was thrown into jail. He was tortured, but he refused to repent for anything he had done. He was an honest man. He had tried to live a holy life. He had willingly destroyed those who deliberately refused to share his own point of view. It had been his duty to eradicate evil wherever he founded. A love of heathenish books and heathenish beauty in the eyes of this faithful son of the church had been an evil. But he stood alone. He had fought the battle of a time that was dead and gone. The Pope in Rome never moved a finger to save him. On the contrary, he approved of his faithful Florentines when they dragged Savonarola to the gallows, hanged him, and burned his body amidst the cheerful howling and yelling of the mob. It was a sad ending, but quite inevitable. Savonarola would have been a great man in the 11th century. In the 15th century he was merely the leader of a lost cause. For better or worse, the Middle Ages had come to an end when the Pope had turned humanist and when the Vatican became the most important museum of Roman and Greek antiquities. End of chapter 39, read on December 29th, 2008 in San Diego, California. Chapter 40 of the Story of Mankind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Michelle Crandall. The Story of Mankind by Hendrik von Lohn. Chapter 40, The Age of Expression. The people began to feel the need of giving expression to their newly discovered joy of living. They expressed their happiness in poetry and in sculpture and in architecture and in painting and in the books they printed. In the year 1471, there died a pious old man who had spent 72 of his 91 years behind the sheltering walls of the cloister of Mount St. Agnes, near the good town of Zwoll, the old Dutch Hanseatic city on the river Yzal. He was known as Brother Thomas and because he had been born in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas A. Kempis. At the age of 12, he had been sent to Deventer where Gerard Groot, a brilliant graduate of the universities of Paris, Cologne and Prague and famous as a wandering preacher, had founded the society of the brothers of the common life. The good brothers were humble laymen who tried to live the simple life of the early apostles of Christ while working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house painters and stone masons. They maintained an excellent school that deserving boys of poor parents might be taught the wisdom of the fathers of the church. At this school, little Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and how to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows, had put his little bundle of books upon his back, had wandered to Zwoll and with a sigh of relief, he had closed the door upon a turbulent world which did not attract him. Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden death. In central Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of Johannes Huss, the friend and follower of John Wycliffe, the English reformer, were avenging with a terrible warfare the death of their beloved leader who had been burned at the stake by order of that same council of Constance which had promised him a safe conduct if he would come to Switzerland and explain his doctrines to the Pope, the emperor, 23 cardinals, 33 archbishops and bishops, 150 abbots and more than 100 princes and dukes who had gathered together to reform their church. Here you see a picture of a stake burning with John Huss at it. In the West, France had been fighting for 100 years that she might drive the English from her territories and just then was saved from utter defeat by the fortunate appearance of Joan of Arc and no sooner had this struggle come to an end than France and Burgundy were at each other's throats engaged upon a struggle of life and death for the supremacy of Western Europe. In the South, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of heaven down upon a second Pope who resided at Avignon in Southern France and who retaliated in kind. In the Far East, the Turks were destroying the last remnants of the Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final crusade to crush the power of their tartare masters. But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never heard. He had his manuscripts and his own thoughts and he was contented. He poured his love of God into a little volume. He called it the imitation of Christ. It has since been translated into more languages than any other book, Save the Bible. It has been read by quite as many people as have ever studied the holy scriptures. It has influenced the lives of countless millions. And it was the work of a man whose highest ideal of existence was expressed in the simple wish that he might quietly spend his days sitting in a little corner with a little book. Here you see a picture of a cathedral with people lined up outside waiting to get in. Good Brother Thomas represented the purest ideals of the Middle Ages, surrounded on all sides by the forces of the victorious Renaissance. With the humanists loudly proclaiming the coming of modern times, the Middle Ages gathered strength for a last sally. Monasteries were reformed. Monks gave up the habits of riches and vice. Simple, straightforward and honest men, by the example of their blameless and devout lives, tried to bring the people back to the ways of righteousness and humble resignation to the will of God. But all to no avail. The New World rushed past these good people. The days of quiet meditation were gone. The great era of expression had begun. Here and now let me say that I am sorry that I must use so many big words. I wish that I could write this history in words of one syllable, but it cannot be done. You cannot write a textbook of geometry without reference to a hypotenuse and triangles and a rectangular parallelepiped. You simply have to learn what those words mean or do without mathematics. In history and in all life, you will eventually be obliged to learn the meaning of many strange words of Latin and Greek origin. Why not do it now? When I say that the Renaissance was an era of expression, I mean this. People were no longer contented to be the audience and sit still while the emperor and the pope told them what to do and what to think. They wanted to be actors upon the stage of life. They insisted upon giving expression to their own individual ideas. If a man happened to be interested in statesmanship like the Florentine historian Nicola Machiavelli, then he expressed himself in his books which revealed his own idea of a successful state and an efficient ruler. If on the other hand, he had a liking for painting, he expressed his love for beautiful lines and lovely colors in the pictures which have made the names of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Raphael and a thousand others, household words, wherever people have learned to care for those things which express a true and lasting beauty. Here you see a picture which shows a man working on an old manuscript and a man written of a book contrasted with a man who's looking at a printed book which is made in a day on a new printing press. If this love for color and line happened to be combined with an interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo da Vinci who painted his pictures, experimented with his balloons and flying machines, drained the marshes of the Lombardian plains and expressed his joy and interest in all things between heaven and earth in prose, in painting, in sculpture and in curiously conceived engines. When a man of gigantic strength like Michelangelo found the brush and the palette too soft for his strong hands, he turned to sculpture and to architecture and hacked the most terrific creatures out of heavy blocks of marble and drew the plans for the Church of St. Peter, the most concrete expression of the glories of the triumphant church. And so it went. All Italy and very soon all of Europe was filled with men and women who lived that they might add their might to the sum total of our accumulated treasures of knowledge and beauty and wisdom. In Germany, in the city of Mainz, Johann Zum Gens Fleisch, commonly known as Johann Gutenberg, had just invented a new method of copying books. He had studied the old woodcuts and had perfected a system by which individual letters of soft lead could be placed in such a way that they formed words and whole pages. It is true he soon lost all his money in a lawsuit which had to do with the original invention of the press. He died in poverty, but the expression of his particular inventive genius lived after him. Soon Aldus in Venice and Etienne in Paris and Plantin in Antwerp and Froben in Basel were flooding the world with carefully edited editions of the classics printed in the Gothic letters of the Gutenberg Bible or printed in the Italian type which we use in this book or printed in Greek letters or in Hebrew. Then the whole world became the eager audience of those who had something to say. The day when learning had been a monopoly of a privileged few came to an end and the last excuse for ignorance was removed from this world when Elsevier of Harlem began to print his cheap and popular editions. Then Aristotle and Plato, Virgil and Horace and Pliny, all the goodly company of the ancient authors and philosophers and scientists offered to become man's faithful friend in exchange for a few paltry pennies. Humanism had made all men free and equal before the printed word. End of Chapter 40, recorded by Michele Crandall, Fremont, California, May 2009. Chapter 41 of The Story of Mankind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Story of Mankind by Hendrik von Lohn. Chapter 41, The Great Discoveries. But now that people had broken through the bonds of their narrow medieval limitations, they had to have more room for their wanderings. The European world had grown too small for their ambitions. It was the time of the great voyages of discovery. The Crusades had been a lesson in the liberal art of traveling, but very few people had ever ventured beyond the well-known beaten track which led from Venice to Jaffé. In the 13th century, the Polo brothers, merchants of Venice, had wandered across the great Mongolian desert, and after climbing mountains as high as the moon, they had found their way to the court of the great Khan of Cathay, the mighty emperor of China. The son of one of the Polos, by the name of Marco, had written a book about their adventures which covered a period of more than twenty years. The astonished world had gaped at his descriptions of the golden towers of the strange island of Zipangu, which was his Italian way of spelling Japan. Many people had wanted to go east, that they might find this gold land and grow rich, but the trip was too far and too dangerous, and so they stayed at home. Of course, there was always the possibility of making the voyage by sea, but the sea was very unpopular in the Middle Ages and for many very good reasons. In the first place, ships were very small. The vessels on which Magellan made his famous trip around the world, which lasted many years, were not as large as a modern ferry boat. They carried from twenty to fifty men who lived in dingy quarters, too low to allow any of them to stand up straight, and the sailors were obliged to eat poorly cooked food as the kitchen arrangements were very bad, and no fire could be made whenever the weather was the least bit rough. The medieval world knew how to pickle herring and how to dry fish, but there were no canned goods and fresh vegetables were never seen on the bill of fare as soon as the coast had been left behind. Water was carried in small barrels, it soon became stale, and then tasted of rotten wood and iron rust, and was full of slimy growing things. As the people of the Middle Ages knew nothing about microbes, Roger Bacon, the learned monk of the 13th century, seems to have suspected their existence, but he wisely kept his discovery to himself. They often drank unclean water, and sometimes the whole crew died of typhoid fever. Indeed the mortality on board the ships of the earliest navigators was terrible. Of the two hundred sailors, who in the year 1519 left Seville to accompany Magellan on his famous voyage around the world, only 18 returned. As late as the 17th century, when there was a brisk trade between Western Europe and the Indies, a mortality of 40% was nothing unusual for a trip from Amsterdam to Batavia and back. The greater part of these victims died of scurvy, a disease which is caused by lack of fresh vegetables and which affects the gums and poisons the blood until the patient dies of sheer exhaustion. Under those circumstances you will understand that the sea did not attract the best elements of the population. Famous discoverers like Magellan and Columbus and Vasco de Gama traveled at the head of crews that were almost entirely composed of ex-jailbirds, future murderers, and pickpockets out of a job. These navigators certainly deserve our admiration for the courage and the pluck with which they accomplished their hopeless tasks in the face of difficulties of which the people of our own comfortable world can have no conception. Their ships were leaky, the rigging was clumsy. Since the middle of the 13th century they had possessed some sort of a compass which had come to Europe from China by way of Arabia and the Crusades, but they had very bad and incorrect maps. They set their course by God and by guess. If luck was with them they returned after one or two or three years. In the other case their bleached bones remained behind on some lonely beach. But they were true pioneers. They gambled with luck. Life to them was a glorious adventure and all the suffering, the thirst and the hunger and the pain were forgotten when their eyes beheld the dim outlines of a new coast or the placid waters of an ocean that had lain forgotten since the beginning of time. Again I wish that I could make this book a thousand pages long. The subject of the early discoveries is so fascinating but history, to give you a true idea of past times should be like those etchings which Rembrandt used to make. It should cast a vivid light on certain important causes on those which are best and greatest. All the rest should be left in the shadow or should be indicated by a few lines. And in this chapter I can only give you a short list of the most important discoveries. Keep in mind that all during the 14th and 15th centuries the navigators were trying to accomplish just one thing. They wanted to find a comfortable and safe road to the empire of cafe, China, to the island of Zipangu, Japan and to those mysterious islands where grew the spices which the medieval world had come to like since the days of the Crusades and which people needed in those days before the introduction of cold storage when meat and fish spoiled very quickly and could only be eaten after a liberal sprinkling of pepper or nutmeg. The Venetians and the Genoese had been the great navigators of the Mediterranean but the honor for exploring the coast of the Atlantic goes to the Portuguese. Spain and Portugal were full of that patriotic energy which their age-old struggle against the Moorish invaders had developed. Such energy, once it exists, can easily be forced into new channels. In the 13th century King Alfonso III had conquered the kingdom of Algarve in the southwestern corner of the Spanish peninsula and had added it to his dominions. In the next century the Portuguese had turned the tables on the Mohammedans, had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and had taken possession of Ciota, opposite the Arabic city of Ta-Rifa, a word which in Arabic means inventory and which by way of the Spanish language has come down to us as tariff and Tangiers which became the capital of an African addition to Algarve. They were ready to begin their career as explorers. In the year 1415 Prince Henry, known as Henry the Navigator, the son of John I of Portugal and Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt, about whom you can read in Richard II, a play by William Shakespeare, began to make preparations for the systematic exploration of northwestern Africa. Before this that hot and sandy coast had been visited by the Phoenicians and by the Norsemen who remembered it as the home of the hairy wild man, whom we have come to know as the gorilla. One after another Prince Henry and his captains discovered the Canary Islands, rediscovered the island of Madeira which a century before had been visited by a Genoese ship, carefully charted the Azores which had been vaguely known to both the Portuguese and the Spaniards and caught a glimpse of the mouth of the Senegal River on the west coast of Africa which they supposed to be the western mouth of the Nile. At last by the middle of the 15th century they saw Cape Verde or the Green Cape and the Cape Verde Islands which lie almost halfway between the coast of Africa and Brazil. But Henry did not restrict himself in his investigations to the waters of the ocean. He was Grand Master of the Order of Christ. This was a Portuguese continuation of the Crusading Order of the Templars which had been abolished by Pope Clement V in the year 1312 at the request of King Philip the Fair of France who had improved the occasion by burning his own Templars at the stake and stealing all their possessions. Prince Henry used the revenues of the domains of his religious order to equip several expeditions which explored the hinterland of the Sahara and of the coast of Guinea. But he was still very much the son of the Middle Ages and spent a great deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a search for the mysterious Prestor John, the mythical Christian priest who was said to be the emperor of a vast empire situated somewhere in the east. The story of this strange potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the 12th century. For 300 years people had tried to find Prestor John and his descendants. Henry took part in the search. 30 years after his death, the riddle was solved. In the year 1486, Bartholomew Diaz, trying to find the land of Prestor John by sea, had reached the southernmost point of Africa. At first he called it the storm cape on account of the strong winds which had prevented him from continuing his voyage toward the east but the Lisbon pilots who understood the importance of this discovery in their quest for the India water route changed the name into that of the Cape of Good Hope. One year later, Pedro de Covalam, provided with letters of credit on the house of Medici, started upon a similar mission by land. He crossed the Mediterranean and after leaving Egypt he traveled southward. He reached Aden and from there traveling through the waters of the Persian Gulf which few white men had seen since the days of Alexander the Great 18 centuries before. He visited Goa and Calicut on the coast of India where he got a great deal of news about the island of the moon, Madagascar, which was supposed to lie halfway between Africa and India. Then he returned, paid a secret visit to Mecca and to Medina, crossed the Red Sea once more and in the year 1490 he discovered the realm of Pristar John who was no one less than the Black Negus or King of Abyssinia whose ancestors had adopted Christianity in the fourth century, 700 years before the Christian missionaries had found their way to Scandinavia. These many voyages had convinced the Portuguese geographers and cartographers that while the voyage to the Indies by an eastern sea route was possible, it was by no means easy. Then there arose a great debate. Some people wanted to continue the explorations east of the Cape of Good Hope. Others said, no we must sail west across the Atlantic and then we shall reach Cathay. Let us state right here that most intelligent people of that day were firmly convinced that the earth was not as flat as a pancake but was round. The Ptolemyan system of the universe invented and duly described by Claudius Ptolemy the great Egyptian geographer who had lived in the second century of our era which had served the simple needs of the men of the Middle Ages had long been discarded by the scientists of the Renaissance. They had accepted the doctrine of the Polish mathematician Nikolaus Copernicus whose studies had convinced him that the earth was one of a number of round planets which turned around the sun. A discovery which he did not venture to publish for 36 years. It was printed in 1548, the year of his death from fear of the Holy Inquisition, a papal court which had been established in the 13th century when the heresies of the Albigensis and the Waldences in France and in Italy, very mild heresies of devoutly pious people who did not believe in private property and preferred to live in Christ-like poverty, had for a moment threatened the absolute power of the bishops of Rome. But the belief in the roundness of the earth was common among the nautical experts and, as I said, they were now debating the respective advantages of the Eastern and the Western routes. Among the advocates of the Western route was a Genoese mariner by the name of Cristoforo Colombo. He was the son of a wool merchant. He seems to have been a student at the University of Pavia, where he specialized in mathematics and geometry. Then he took up his father's trade, but soon we find him in Chios in the Eastern Mediterranean traveling on business. Thereafter we hear of voyages to England, but whether he went north in search of wool or as the captain of a ship, we do not know. In February of the year 1477, Colombo, if we are to believe his own words, visited Iceland, but very likely he only got as far as the Faroe Islands, which are cold enough in February to be mistaken for Iceland by anyone. Here Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen who in the 10th century had settled in Greenland and who had visited America in the 11th century, when Leaf's vessel had been blown to the coast of Vineland, or Labrador. What had become of those far Western colonies no one knew? The American colony of Thorfinn Carlsefny, the husband of the widow of Leaf's brother Thornstein, founded in the year 1003, had been discontinued three years later on account of the hostility of the Eskimos. As for Greenland, not a word had been heard from the settlers since the year 1440. Very likely the Greenlanders had all died of the Black Death, which had just killed half the people of Norway. However that might be, the tradition of a vast land in the distant west still survived among the people of the Faroe and Iceland, and Colombo must have heard of it. He gathered further information among the fishermen of the northern Scottish islands, and then went to Portugal, where he married the daughter of one of the captains who had served under Prince Henry the Navigator. From that moment on, the year 1478, he devoted himself to the quest of the western route to the Indies. He sent his plans for such a voyage to the courts of Portugal and Spain. The Portuguese, who felt certain that they possessed a monopoly of the eastern route, would not listen to his plans. In Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose marriage in 1469 had made Spain into a single kingdom, were busy driving the Moors from their last stronghold, Granada. They had no money for risky expeditions. They needed every peseta for their soldiers. Few people were ever forced to fight as desperately for their ideas as this brave Italian. But the story of Colombo, or Colón, or Columbus, as we call him, is too well known to bear repeating. The Moors surrendered Granada on the 2nd of January of the year 1492. In the month of April of the same year, Columbus signed a contract with the King and Queen of Spain. On Friday, the 3rd of August, he left Palos with three little ships and a crew of 88 men, many of whom were criminals, who had been offered indemnity of punishment if they joined the expedition. At two o'clock in the morning of Friday, the 12th of October, Columbus discovered land. On the 4th of January of the year 1493, Columbus waved farewell to the 44 men of the little fortress of La Navidad, none of whom was ever again seen alive, and returned homeward. By the middle of February, he reached the Azores, where the Portuguese threatened to throw him into jail. On the 15th of March, 1493, the Admiral reached Palos and together with his Indians, for he was convinced that he had discovered some outlying islands of the Indies and called the natives Red Indians. He hastened to Barcelona to tell his faithful patrons that he had been successful and that the road to the gold and the silver of cafe and Zipangu was at the disposal of their most Catholic majesties. Alas, Columbus never knew the truth. Towards the end of his life, on his 4th voyage, when he had touched the mainland of South America, he may have suspected that all was not well with his discovery, but he died in the firm belief that there was no solid continent between Europe and Asia and that he had found the direct route to China. Meanwhile, the Portuguese, sticking to their eastern route, had been more fortunate. In the year 1498, Vasco de Gama had been able to reach the coast of Malabar and return safely to Lisbon with a cargo of spice. In the year 1502 he had repeated the visit. But along the western route, the work of exploration had been most disappointing. In 1497 and 1498, John and Sebastian Cabot had tried to find a passage to Japan, but they had seen nothing but the snowbound coasts and the rocks of Newfoundland, which had first been cited by the Northmen five centuries before. Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who became a pilot major of Spain and who gave his name to our continent, had explored the coast of Brazil but had found not a trace of the Indies. In the year 1513, seven years after the death of Columbus, the truth at last began to dawn upon the geographers of Europe. Vasco Núñez de Baboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama, had climbed the famous peak in Darien and had looked down upon a vast expanse of water, which seemed to suggest the existence of another ocean. Finally in the year 1519 a fleet of five small Spanish ships under command of the Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand de Magellan, sailed westward and not eastward since that route was absolutely in the hands of the Portuguese who allowed no competition in search of the spice islands. Magellan crossed the Atlantic between Africa and Brazil and sailed southward. He reached a narrow channel between the southernmost point of Patagonia, the land of the people with the big feet and the fire island, so named on account of a fire, the only sign of the existence of natives which the sailors watched one night. For almost five weeks the ships of Magellan were at the mercy of the terrible storms and blizzards which swept through the straits. A mutiny broke out among the sailors. Magellan suppressed it with terrible severity and sent two of his men on shore where they were left to repent of their sins at leisure. At last the storms quieted down, the channel broadened and Magellan entered a new ocean. Its waves were quiet and placid. He called it the Peaceful Sea, the Mare Pacifico. Then he continued in a western direction. He sailed for 98 days without seeing land. His people almost perished from hunger and thirst and ate the rats that infested the ships, and when these were all gone they chewed pieces of sail to still their gnawing hunger. In March of the year 1521 they saw land. Magellan called it the Land of the Ladrones, which means robbers, because the natives stole everything they could lay hands on. Then further westward to the Spice Islands. Again land was sited, a group of lonely islands. Magellan called them the Philippines. After Philip, the son of his master Charles V, the Philip II of unpleasant historical memory. At first Magellan was well received, but when he used the guns of his ships to make Christian converts, he was killed by the Aborigines, together with a number of his captains and sailors. The survivors burned one of the three remaining ships and continued their voyage. They found the Maluccas, the famous Spice Islands. They sited Borneo and reached Tidor. There one of the two ships, too leaky to be of further use, remained behind with her crew. The Vittoria, under Sebastian Delcano, crossed the Indian Ocean, missed seeing the northern coast of Australia, which was not discovered until the first half of the 17th century, when ships of the Dutch East India Company explored this flat and inhospitable land, and after great hardships reached Spain. This was the most notable of all voyages. It had taken three years. It had been accomplished at a great cost, both of men and money. But it had established the fact that the earth was round and that the new lands discovered by Columbus were not a part of the Indies, but a separate continent. From that time on, Spain and Portugal devoted all their energies to the development of their Indian and American trade. To prevent an armed conflict between the rivals, Pope Alexander VI, the only avowed heathen who was ever elected to this most holy office, had obligingly divided the world into two equal parts by a line of demarcation which followed the 50th degree of longitude west of Greenwich, the so-called division of Tordesillas of 1494. The Portuguese were to establish their colonies to the east of this line. The Spaniards were to have theirs to the west. This accounts for the fact that the entire American continent, with the exception of Brazil, became Spanish and that all of the Indies and most of Africa became Portuguese until the English and the Dutch colonists who had no respect for papal decisions took these possessions away in the 17th and 18th centuries. When news of the discovery of Columbus reached the Rialto of Venice, the Wall Street of the Middle Ages, there was a terrible panic. Stocks and bonds went down 40 and 50%. After a short while when it appeared that Columbus had failed to find the road to Cathay, the Venetian merchants recovered from their fright. But the voyages of Digama and Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern water route to the Indies. Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice, the two great commercial centers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance began to be sorry that they had refused to listen to Columbus, but it was too late. Their Mediterranean became an inland sea. The overland trade to the Indies and China dwindled to insignificant proportions. The old days of Italian glory were gone. The Atlantic became the new center of commerce and therefore the center of civilization. It has remained so ever since. See how strangely civilization has progressed since those early days, 50 centuries before when the inhabitants of the Valley of the Nile began to keep a written record of history. From the River Nile it went to Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. Then came the turn of Crete and Greece and Rome. An inland sea became the center of trade and the cities along the Mediterranean were the home of art and science and philosophy and learning. In the 16th century it moved westward once more and made the countries that border upon the Atlantic become the masters of the earth. There are those who say that the world war and the suicide of the great European nations has greatly diminished the importance of the Atlantic Ocean. They expect to see civilization cross the American continent and find a new home in the Pacific, but I doubt this. The westward trip was accompanied by a steady increase in the size of ships and a broadening of the knowledge of the navigators. The flat bottomed vessels of the Nile and the Euphrates were replaced by the sailing vessels of the Phoenicians, the Aegeans, the Greeks, the Carthaginians and the Romans. These in turn were discarded for the square-rigged vessels of the Portuguese and the Spaniards and the latter were driven from the ocean by the full-rigged craft of the English and the Dutch. At present, however, civilization no longer depends upon ships. The aircraft has taken and will continue to take the place of the sailing vessel and the steamer. The next center of civilization will depend upon the development of aircraft and water power, and the sea once more shall be the undisturbed home of the little fishes, who once upon a time shared their deep residence with the earliest ancestors of the human race. End of Chapter 41, read by Kara Schellenberg, www.kray.org, on January 26, 2009, in San Diego, California. Chapter 42, Buddha and Confucius Concerning Buddha and Confucius The discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spaniards had brought the Christians of Western Europe into close contact with the people of India and of China. They knew, of course, that Christianity was not the only religion on this earth. There were the Mohamedians and the Heathenish tribes of Northern Africa who worshiped sticks and stones and dead trees, but in India and in China the Christian conquerors found new millions who had never heard of Christ and who did not want to hear of him because they thought their own religion, which was thousands of years old, much better than that of the West. As this is a story of mankind and not an exclusive history of the people of Europe and our Western hemisphere, you ought to know something of two men whose teachings and whose example continue to influence the actions and the thoughts of the majority of our fellow travelers on this earth. Here you see a picture of Asia and the Indian subcontinent and it shows where the three great religions have most influence. In India, Buddha was recognized as the great religious teacher. His history is an interesting one. He was born in the sixth century before the birth of Christ within sight of the mighty Himalaya Mountains where 400 years before Zarathustra or Zaraster, the first of the great leaders of the Aryan race, the name which the Eastern branch of the Indo-European race had given to itself, had taught his people to regard life as a continuous struggle between Araman and Ormuz, the gods of evil and good. Buddha's father was Sudodhana, a mighty chief among the tribes of the Sakyas. His mother, Mahamaya, was the daughter of a neighboring king. She had been married when she was a very young girl, but many moons had passed beyond the distant ridge of hills and still her husband was without an heir who should rule his lands after him. At last, when she was 50 years old, her day came and she went forth that she might be among her own people when her baby should come into this world. It was a long trip to the land of the Kalyans where Mahamaya had spent her earliest years. One night she was resting among the cool trees of the Garden of Lumbini. There, her son was born. He was given the name of Satarta, but we know him as Buddha, which means the enlightened one. In due time, Satarta grew up to be a handsome young prince, and when he was 19 years old, he was married to his cousin Yasodhara. During the next 10 years, he lived far away from all pain and all suffering behind the protecting walls of the royal palace, awaiting the day when he should succeed his father as king of the Sakyas. But it happened that when he was 30 years old, he drove outside of the palace gates and saw a man who was old and worn out with labor and whose weak limbs could hardly carry the burden of life. Satarta pointed him out to his coachman, Chana, but Chana answered that there were lots of poor people in this world and that one more or less did not matter. The young prince was very sad, but he did not say anything and went back to live with his wife and his father and his mother and tried to be happy. A little while later, he left the palace a second time. His carriage met a man who suffered from a terrible disease. Satarta asked Chana what had been the cause of this man's suffering, but the coachman answered that there were many sick people in this world and that such things could not be helped and did not matter very much. The young prince was very sad when he heard this, but again he returned to his people. A few weeks passed. One evening, Satarta ordered his carriage in order to go to the river and bathe. Suddenly, his horses were frightened by the sight of a dead man whose rotting body lay sprawling in the ditch beside the road. The young prince, who had never been allowed to see such things, was frightened, but Chana told him not to mind such trifles. The world was full of dead people. It was the rule of life that all things must come to an end. Nothing was eternal. The grave awaited us all and there was no escape. That evening, when Satarta returned to his home, he was received with music. While he was away, his wife had given birth to a son. The people were delighted because now they knew that there was an heir to the throne and they celebrated the event by the beating of many drums. Satarta, however, did not share their joy. The curtain of life had been lifted and he had learned the horror of man's existence. The sight of death and suffering followed him like a terrible dream. That night, the moon was shining brightly. Satarta woke up and began to think of many things. Never again could he be happy until he should have found a solution to the riddle of existence. He decided to find it far away from all those whom he loved. Softly, he went into the room where Yasudhara was sleeping with her baby. Then he called for his faithful Chana and told him to follow. Together, the two men went into the darkness of the night, one to find rest for his soul, the other to be a faithful servant unto a beloved master. The people of India among whom Satarta wandered for many years were just then in a state of change. Their ancestors, the native Indians, had been conquered without great difficulty by the warlike Aryans or distant cousins and thereafter, the Aryans had been the rulers and masters of tens of millions of docile little brown men. To maintain themselves in the seat of the mighty, they had divided the population into different classes and gradually a system of caste of the most rigid sort had been enforced upon the natives. The descendants of the Indo-European conquerors belonged to the highest caste, the class of warriors and nobles. Next came the caste of the priests. Below these followed the peasants and the businessmen. The ancient natives, however, who were called pariahs formed a class of despised and miserable slaves and never could hope to be anything else. Even the religion of the people was a matter of caste. The old Indo-Europeans, during their thousands of years of wandering had met with many strange adventures. These had been collected in a book called the Vida. The language of this book was called Sanskrit and it was closely related to the different languages of the European continent, to Greek and Latin and Russian and German and to score others. The three highest castes were allowed to read these holy scriptures. The pariah, however, the despised member of the lowest caste was not permitted to know its contents. Woe to the man of noble or priestly caste who should teach a pariah to study the sacred volume. The majority of the Indian people, therefore, lived in misery. Since this planet offered them very little joy, salvation from suffering must be found elsewhere. They tried to derive a little consolation from meditation upon the bliss of their future existence. Brahma, the all creator, who was regarded by the Indian people as the supreme ruler of life and death, was worshiped as the highest ideal of perfection. To become like Brahma, to lose all desires for riches and power, was recognized as the most exalted purpose of existence. Holy thoughts were regarded as more important than holy deeds and many people went into the desert and lived upon the leaves of trees and starved their bodies that they might feed their souls with the glorious contemplation of the splendors of Brahma, the wise, the good and the merciful. Siddhartha, who had often observed these solitary wanderers who were seeking the truth far away from the turmoil of the cities and the villages, decided to follow their example. He cut his hair, he took his pearls and his rubies and sent them back to his family with a message of farewell, which the ever-faithful Chana carried. Without a single follower, the young prince then moved into the wilderness. Soon the fame of his holy conduct spread among the mountains. Five young men came to him and asked that they might be allowed to listen to his words of wisdom. He agreed to be their master if they would follow him. They consented and he took them into the hills and for six years he taught them all he knew amidst the lonely peaks of the Vindya Mountains. But at the end of this period of study, he felt that he was still far from perfection. The world that he had left continued to tempt him. He now asked that his pupils leave him and then he fasted for 49 days and nights sitting upon the roots of an old tree. At last he received his reward. In dusk of the 50th evening, Brahma revealed himself to his faithful servant. From that moment on, Siddhartha was called Buddha and he was revered as the enlightened one who had come to save men from their unhappy mortal fate. The last 45 years of his life, Buddha spent within the valley of the Ganges River teaching a simple lesson of submission and meekness unto all men. In the year 488 before our era, he died full of years and beloved by millions of people. He had not preached his doctrines for the benefit of a single class. Even the lowest pariah might call himself his disciple. Here you see a picture of people going through the desert with the trees and it's titled Buddha Goes Into the Mountains. This, however, did not please the nobles and the priests and the merchants who did their best to destroy a creed which recognized the equality of all living creatures and offered men the hope of a second life, a reincarnation, under happier circumstances. As soon as they could, they encouraged the people of India to return to the ancient doctrines of the Brahmin creed with its fasting and its tortures of the sinful body. But Buddhism could not be destroyed. Slowly the disciples of the enlightened one wandered across the valleys of the Himalayas and moved into China. They crossed the Yellow Sea and preached the wisdom of their master unto the people of Japan and they faithfully obeyed the will of their great master who had forbidden them to use force. Today, more people recognize Buddha as their teacher than ever before and their number surpasses that of the combined followers of Christ and Muhammad. As for Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese, his story is a simple one. He was born in the year 550 BC. He led a quiet, dignified and uneventful life at a time when China was without a strong central government. And when the Chinese people were at the mercy of bandits and robber barons who went from city to city, pillaging and stealing and murdering and turning the busy planes of northern and central China into a wilderness of starving people. Confucius, who loved his people, tried to save them. He did not have much faith in the use of violence. He was a very peaceful person. He did not think that he could make people over by giving them a lot of new laws. He knew that the only possible salvation would come from a change of heart. And he set out upon the seemingly hopeless task of changing the character of his millions of fellow men who inhabited the wide plains of Eastern Asia. The Chinese had never been much interested in religion as we understand that word. They believed in devils and spooks as most primitive people do. But they had no prophets and recognized no revealed truth. Confucius is almost the only one among the great moral leaders who did not see visions, who did not proclaim himself as the messenger of a divine power, who did not at some time or another claim that he was inspired by voices from above. He was just a very sensible and kindly man, rather given to lonely wanderings and melancholy tunes upon his faithful flute. He asked for no recognition. He did not demand that anyone should follow him or worship him. He reminds us of the ancient Greek philosophers, especially those of the Stoic school, men who believed in right living and righteous thinking without the hope of a reward, but simply for the peace of the soul that comes with a good conscience. Confucius was a very tolerant man. He went out of his way to visit Laosé, the other great Chinese leader, and the founder of a philosophic system called Daoism, which was merely an early Chinese version of the golden rule. Confucius bore no hatred to anyone. He taught the virtue of supreme self-possession. A person of real worth, according to the teachings of Confucius, did not allow himself to be ruffled by anger and suffered whatever fate brought him with the resignation of those sages who understand that everything which happens in one way or another is meant for the best. Here you see a panel of different pictures showing the great moral leaders through time. First is Moses in 1300 BC, the leader of the Jews. Next in 1000 BC is Zaratustra, the leader of the Aryan peoples. Next in 600 BC shows Buddha, the enlightened one of the Indian people. 500 BC next is Confucius, the wise old man of the Chinese. In 400 BC, the great Greek philosophers are shown with their columns. In AD 30, Jesus Christ is shown, and then in AD 622, Muhammad, the prophet of the Arabian desert. At first he had only a few students. Gradually the number increased. Before his death in the year 478 BC, several of the kings and the princes of China confessed themselves as disciples. When Christ was born in Bethlehem, the philosophy of Confucius had already become a part of the mental makeup of most Chinaman. It has continued to influence their lives ever since. Not, however, in its pure original form. Most religions change as time goes on. Christ preached humility and meekness and absence from worldly ambitions. But 15 centuries after Golgotha, the head of the Christian church was spending millions upon the erection of a building that bore little relation to the lonely stable of Bethlehem. Lao Tse taught the golden rule, and in less than three centuries the ignorant masses had made him into a real and very cruel God, and had buried his wise commandments under a rubbish heap of superstition, which made the lives of the average Chinese one long series of frights and fears and horrors. Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honoring their father and their mother. They soon began to be more interested in the memory of their departed parents than in the happiness of their children and their grandchildren. Deliberately they turned their backs upon the future and tried to peer into the vast darkness of the past. The worship of the ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather than disturb a cemetery situated upon the sunny and fertile side of a mountain, they would plant their rice and wheat upon the barren rocks of the other slope where nothing could possibly grow, and they preferred hunger and famine to the desecration of the ancestral grave. At the same time, the wise words of Confucius never quite lost their hold upon the increasing millions of Eastern Asia. Confucianism, with its profound sayings and shrewd observations, added a touch of common sense philosophy to the soul of every Chinaman and influenced his entire life, whether he was a simple laundryman in a steaming basement or the ruler of vast provinces who dwelt behind the high walls of a secluded palace. In the 16th century, the enthusiastic but rather uncivilized Christians of the Western world came face to face with the older creeds of the East. The early Spaniards and Portuguese looked upon the peaceful statues of Buddha and contemplated the venerable pictures of Confucius and did not in the least know what to make of those worthy prophets with their faraway smile. They came to the easy conclusion that these strange divinities were just plain devils who represented something idolatrous and heretical and did not deserve the respect of the true sons of the church. Whenever the spirit of Buddha or Confucius seemed to interfere with the trade and spices and silks, the Europeans attacked the evil influence with bullets and grape-shot. That system had certain very definite disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant heritage of ill-will which promises little good for the immediate future. End of chapter 42, recorded by Michelle Crandall, Fremont, California, May 2009. Chapter 43 of The Story of Mankind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Story of Mankind by Hendrik von Mohn. Chapter 43, The Reformation. The progress of the human race is best compared to a gigantic pendulum which forever swings forward and backward. The religious indifference and the artistic and literary enthusiasm of the Renaissance were followed by the artistic and literary indifference and the religious enthusiasm of the Reformation. Of course, you have heard of the Reformation. You think of a small but courageous group of pilgrims who crossed the ocean to have freedom of religious worship. Vaguely in the course of time, and more especially in our Protestant countries, the Reformation has come to stand for the idea of liberty of thought. Martin Luther is represented as the leader of the vanguard of progress. But when history is something more than a series of flattering speeches addressed to our own glorious ancestors, when to use the words of the German historian Aranka, we try to discover what actually happened than much of the past is seen in a very different light. Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely bad. Few things are either black or white. It is the duty of the honest chronicler to give a true account of all the good and bad sides of every historical event. It is very difficult to do this because we all have our personal likes and dislikes, but we ought to try and be as fair as we can be and must not allow our prejudices to influence us too much. Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very Protestant center of a very Protestant country. I never saw any Catholics until I was about 12 years old. Then I felt very uncomfortable when I met them. I was a little bit afraid. I knew the story of the many thousand people who had been burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish Inquisition when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real to me. It seemed to have happened only the day before. It might occur again. There might be another St. Bartholomew's night and poor little me would be slaughtered in my nightly and my body would be thrown out of the window as had happened to the noble admiral De Colini. Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Catholic country. I found the people much pleasanter and much more tolerant and quite as intelligent as my former countrymen. To my great surprise I began to discover that there was a Catholic side to the Reformation quite as much as a Protestant. Of course the good people of the 16th and 17th centuries who actually lived through the Reformation did not see things that way. They were always right and their enemy was always wrong. It was a question of hang or be hanged and both sides preferred to do the hanging which was no more than human and for which they deserve no blame. When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500 an easy date to remember and the year in which the Emperor Charles V was born this is what we see. The feudal disorder of the Middle Ages has given way before the order of a number of highly centralized kingdoms. The most powerful of all sovereigns is the great Charles then a baby in a cradle. He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maximilian of Hubsburg the last of the medieval knights and of his wife Mary the daughter of Charles the Bold the ambitious Burgundian Duke who had made successful war upon France but had been killed by the independent Swiss peasants. The child Charles therefore has fallen heir to the greater part of the map to all the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins and aunts in Germany in Austria, in Holland, in Belgium, in Italy and in Spain together with all their colonies in Asia, Africa and America. By a strange irony of fate he has been born in Ghent in that same castle of the Counts of Flanders which the Germans used as a prison during their recent occupation of Belgium and although a Spanish king and a German Emperor he receives the training of a Fleming. As his father is dead, poisoned so people say but this is never proved and his mother has lost her mind she is travelling through her domains with the coffin containing the body of her departed husband. The child is left to the strict discipline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced to rule Germans and Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races Charles grows up a Fleming a faithful son of the Catholic Church but quite averse to religious intolerance. He is rather lazy both as a boy and as a man but fate condemns him to rule the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervor. Forever he is speeding from Madrid to Innsbruck and from Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is always at war. At the age of 55 we see him turn his back upon the human race in utter disgust at so much hate and so much stupidity. Three years later he dies a very tired and disappointed man. So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the church the second great power in the world? The church has changed greatly since the early days of the Middle Ages when it started out to conquer the heathen and show them the advantages of a pious and righteous life. In the first place the church has grown too rich. The Pope is no longer the shepherd of a flock of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace and surrounds himself with artists and musicians and famous literary men. His churches and chapels are covered with new pictures in which the saints look more like Greek gods than is strictly necessary. He divides his time unevenly between affairs of state and art. The affairs of state take 10% of his time. The other 90% goes to an active interest in Roman statues, recently discovered Greek vases, plans for a new summer home, the rehearsal of a new play. The archbishops and the cardinals follow the example of their Pope. The bishops try to imitate the archbishops. The village priests, however, have remained faithful to their duties. They keep themselves aloof from the wicked world and the heathenish love of beauty and pleasure. They stay away from the monasteries where the monks seem to have forgotten their ancient vows of simplicity and poverty and live as happily as they dare without causing too much of a public scandal. Finally there are the common people. They are much better off than they have ever been before. They are more prosperous. They live in better houses. Their children go to better schools. Their cities are more beautiful than before. Their firearms have made them the equal of their old enemies, the robber barons, who for centuries have levied such heavy taxes upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the Reformation. Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe and then you will understand how the revival of learning and art was bound to be followed by a revival of religious interests. The Renaissance began in Italy. From there it spread to France. It was not quite successful in Spain where 500 years of warfare with the Moors had made the people very narrow-minded and very fanatical in all religious matters. The circle had grown wider and wider but once the Alps had been crossed the Renaissance had suffered a change. The people of Northern Europe, living in a very different climate, had an outlook upon life which contrasted strangely with that of their southern neighbors. The Italians lived out in the open under a sunny sky. It was easy for them to laugh and to sing and to be happy. The Germans, the Dutch, the English, the Swedes spent most of their time indoors listening to the rain beating on the closed windows of their comfortable little houses. They did not laugh quite so much. They took everything more seriously. They were forever conscious of their immortal souls and they did not like to be funny about matters which they considered holy and sacred. The humanistic part of the Renaissance, the books, the studies of ancient authors, the grammar and the textbooks interested them greatly but the general return to the old pagan civilization of Greece and Rome, which was one of the chief results of the Renaissance in Italy, filled their hearts with horror. But the papacy and the College of Cardinals was almost entirely composed of Italians and they had turned the church into a pleasant club where people discussed art and music and the theater but rarely mentioned religion. Hence the split between the serious north and the more civilized but easygoing and indifferent south was growing wider and wider all the time and nobody seemed to be aware of the danger that threatened the church. There were a few minor reasons which will explain why the Reformation took place in Germany rather than in Sweden or England. The Germans bore an ancient grudge against Rome. The endless quarrels between emperor and pope had caused much mutual bitterness. In the other European countries where the government rested in the hands of a strong king, the ruler had often been able to protect his subjects against the greed of the priests. In Germany where a shadowy emperor ruled turbulent crowd of little princelings, the good burgers were more directly at the mercy of their bishops and prelates. These dignitaries were trying to collect large sums of money for the benefit of those enormous churches which were a hobby of the popes of the Renaissance. The Germans felt that they were being mulked and quite naturally they did not like it. And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germany was the home of the printing press. In northern Europe books were cheap and the Bible was no longer a mysterious manuscript owned and explained by the priest. It was a household book of many families where Latin was understood by the father and by the children. Whole families began to read it which was against the law of the church. They discovered that the priests were telling them many things which according to the original text of the holy scriptures were somewhat different. This caused doubt. People began to ask questions and questions when they cannot be answered often cause a great deal of trouble. The attack began when the humanists of the north opened fire upon the monks. In their heart of hearts they still had too much respect and reverence for the pope to direct their sallies against his most holy person. But the lazy ignorant monks living behind the sheltering walls of their rich monasteries offered rare sport. The leader in this warfare curiously enough was a very faithful son of the church. Gerard Gerardzon, or Desiderius Erasmus as he is usually called, was a poor boy born in Rotterdam in Holland and educated at the same Latin school of Deventer from which Thomas A. Kempis had graduated. He had become a priest and for a time he had lived in a monastery. He had traveled a great deal and knew whereof he wrote. When he began his career as a public pamphleteer he would have been called an editorial writer in our day. The world was greatly amused at an anonymous series of letters which had just appeared under the title of, Letters of Obscure Men. In these letters the general stupidity and arrogance of the monks of the late middle ages was exposed in a strange German Latin doggerel which reminds one of our modern limericks. Erasmus himself was a very learned and serious scholar who knew both Latin and Greek and gave us the first reliable version of the New Testament which he translated into Latin together with a corrected edition of the original Greek text. But he believed with Horace, the Roman poet, that nothing prevents us from stating the truth with a smile upon our lips. In the year 1500 while visiting Sir Thomas More in England he took a few weeks off and wrote a funny little book called The Praise of Folly in which he attacked the monks and their credulous followers with that most dangerous of all weapons, humor. The booklet was the best seller of the 16th century. It was translated into almost every language and it made people pay attention to those other books of Erasmus in which he advocated reform of the many abuses of the church and appealed to his fellow humanists to help him in his task of bringing about a great rebirth of the Christian faith. But nothing came of these excellent plans. Erasmus was too responsible and too tolerant to please most of the enemies of the church. They were waiting for a leader of a more robust nature. He came and his name was Martin Luther. Luther was a North German peasant with a first class brain and possessed of great personal courage. He was a university man, a master of arts of the University of Erfurt. Afterwards he joined a Dominican monastery. Then he became a college professor at the Theological School of Wittenberg and began to explain the scriptures to the indifferent plowboys of his Saxon home. He had a lot of spare time and this he used to study the original texts of the old and new testaments. Soon he began to see the great difference which existed between the words of Christ and those that were preached by the popes and the bishops. In the year 1511 he visited Rome on official business. Alexander VI of the family of Borgia who had enriched himself for the benefit of his son and daughter was dead. But his successor Julius II, a man of irreproachable personal character was spending most of his time fighting and building and did not impress this serious-minded German theologian with his piety. Luther returned to Wittenberg, a much disappointed man but worse was to follow. The gigantic church of St. Peter, which Pope Julius had wished upon his innocent successors, although only half begun, was already in need of repair. Alexander VI had spent every penny of the papal treasury. Leo X, who succeeded Julius in the year 1513, was on the verge of bankruptcy. He reverted to an old method of raising ready cash. He began to sell indulgences. An indulgence was a piece of parchment which in return for a certain sum of money promised a sinner a decrease of the time which he would have to spend in purgatory. It was a perfectly correct thing according to the creed of the late Middle Ages. Since the church had the power to forgive the sins of those who truly repented before they died, the church also had the right to shorten, through its intercession with the saints, the time during which the soul must be purified in the shadowy realms of purgatory. It was unfortunate that these indulgences must be sold for money but they offered an easy form of revenue and besides, those who were too poor to pay received theirs for nothing. Now it happened in the year 1517 that the exclusive territory for the sale of indulgences in Saxony was given to a Dominican monk by the name of Johann Tetzel. Brother Johann was a hustling salesman. To tell the truth, he was a little too eager. His business methods outraged the pious people of a little duchy and Luther, who was an honest fellow, got so angry that he did a rash thing. On the 31st of October of the year 1517 he went to the court church and upon the doors thereof he posted a sheet of paper with 95 statements or theses attacking the sale of indulgences. These statements had been written in Latin. Luther had no intention of starting a riot. He was not a revolutionist. He objected to the institution of the indulgences and he wanted his fellow professors to know what he thought about them. But this was still a private affair of the clerical and professorial world and there was no appeal to the prejudices of the community of laymen. Unfortunately at that moment when the whole world had begun to take an interest in the religious affairs of the day it was utterly impossible to discuss anything without at once creating a serious mental disturbance. In less than two months all Europe was discussing the 95 theses of the Saxon monk. Everyone must take sides. Every obscure little theologian must print his own opinion. The papal authorities began to be alarmed. They ordered the Wittenberg professor to proceed to Rome and give an account of his action. Luther wisely remembered what had happened to Huss. He stayed in Germany and he was punished with excommunication. Luther burned the papal bull in the presence of an admiring multitude and from that moment peace between himself and the pope was no longer possible. Without any desire on his part Luther had become the leader of a vast army of discontented Christians. German patriots like Ulrich von Hutten rushed to his defense. The students of Wittenberg and Arfort and Leipzig offered to defend him should the authorities try to imprison him. The elector of Saxony reassured the eager young men. No harm would befall Luther as long as he stayed on Saxon ground. All this happened in the year 1520. Charles V was twenty years old and as the ruler of half the world was forced to remain on pleasant terms with the pope. He sent out calls for a diet or a general assembly in the good city of Worms on the Rhine and commanded Luther to be present and give an account of his extraordinary behavior. Luther, who was now the national hero of the Germans, went. He refused to take back a single word of what he had ever written or said. His conscience was controlled only by the word of God. He would live and die for his conscience. The diet of Worms, after due deliberation, declared Luther an outlaw before God and man and forbade all Germans to give him shelter or food or drink or to read a single word of the books which the dastardly heretic had written. But the great reformer was in no danger. By the majority of the Germans of the North the edict was denounced as a most unjust and outrageous document. For greater safety Luther was hidden in the Wartburg, a castle belonging to the elector of Saxony and there he defied all papal authority by translating the entire Bible into the German language that all the people might read and know the word of God for themselves. By this time the Reformation was no longer a spiritual and religious affair. Those who hated the beauty of the modern church building used this period of unrest to attack and destroy what they did not like because they did not understand it. Impoverished knights tried to make up for past losses by grabbing the territory which belonged to the monasteries. Discontented princes made use of the absence of the emperor to increase their own power. The starving peasants, following the leadership of half-crazy agitators, made the best of the opportunity and attacked the castles of their masters and plundered and murdered and burned with the zeal of the old crusaders. A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the empire. Some princes became Protestants as the protesting adherents of Luther were called and persecuted their Catholic subjects. Others remained Catholic and hanged their Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of the year 1526 tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance by ordering that the subjects should all be of the same religious denomination as their princes. This turned Germany into a checkerboard of a thousand hostile little duchies and principalities and created a situation which prevented the normal political growth for hundreds of years. In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put to rest in the same church where, twenty-nine years before, he had proclaimed his famous objections to the sale of indulgences. In less than thirty years the indifferent, joking and laughing world of the Renaissance had been transformed into the arguing, quarreling, backbiting, debating society of the Reformation. The universal spiritual empire of the Popes came to a sudden end and the whole of Western Europe was turned into a battlefield where Protestants and Catholics killed each other for the greater glory of certain theological doctrines which are as incomprehensible to the present generation as the mysterious inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans. End of Chapter 43 Read by Kara Schallenberg on March 5th, 2009 in San Diego, California.