THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE

I. The Printing Press

Theologians faced Europe with the knowledge that the watchwords which they thundered would reach literate people wherever books and pamphlets could penetrate. Very shortly after it began, the Reformation became a mass movement, involving all classes down to the scarcely literate. This was the result of printing.

All discussion of printing, as though it were an entirely novel thing, refers strictly to the invention of movable metal type. Between 1440 and 1450, John Gutenberg perfected the idea in Mainz. Of course, as with most inventions, the ingredients were available: there was paper; artist's oil paint could be easily modified for a suitable ink; imprints were used in the textile trade, and even separate letter stamps were used in foundries to identify metal wares. Books already were being printed by the use of wooden blocks; and block books continued to compete with type-formed books for a period; indeed, for work that required no revisions, block prints were better. Movable type vastly increased the range and flexibility of production, and cheapened its cost.

Within two decades, printers had carried their skills from Mainz to every corner of Europe. Latin was the original style though by 1465 Greek was in use, then vernacular types were cut, and even such difficult technical problems as geometry diagrams and music were being mastered.

Before 1470 a Frenchman, Nicholas Jensen, developed a readable, clean, well-spaced type called Roman, and he cut a clear Gothic and a splendid Greek font. To this day his letter designs are standards of beauty and balance in printing. The famous printer, Aldus Mantius, turned to Jensen's types when he set up his Aldine Press in Venice in 1490. From this press there followed the first editions of the classics to appear in handy pocket size. Formerly they had been unwieldy folios. His are the forerunners of modern paperbacks. Aldus also developed an italic type that completed the trio of common styles, Roman, Gothic, and Italic. The Aldine press was but one of a hundred printing offices in Venice at the time.

What did they publish? The Italians welcomed editions of the classics, while the Germans' output was more heavily religious. Overall, religious topics accounted for more than half of the works published before 1500. The Church Fathers, St. Thomas and other scholastic works, edifying religious tracts, editions of canon law and, above all, the Bible were most sought after. The Vulgate Bible went through 133 editions in the fifteenth century, and it entered numerous vernacular printings in German, French, and Italian. There were fewer publications in Bohemian, Spanish, and Dutch, and none in English until the next century. Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ proved to be a best seller, and Savonarola's sermons were most popular.

Public taste was old fashioned. In science, books of alchemy and witchcraft and recipes for miraculous herbal cures vied with Galen in medicine and Ptolemy in astronomy. Numerous medieval commentaries on Aristotle appeared alongside Pliny's Natural History and similar encyclopedic works from antiquity.

To their credit, presses in the early decades managed to issue a vast backlog of writing, dating back to Aesop's Fables and beyond. Contemporary work formed a slender proportion of the whole, and the fact that few authors were published in their own time suggests that the reading public was as busy devouring the past as keeping up with the present.

II. Christopher Columbus [illustration on right]

One contemporary, however, did receive instant publication. A Letter of Christopher Columbus Concerning the Newly Discovered Islands was published as a leaflet in Barcelona in 1493. Within a year, twelve editions appeared from Rome to Antwerp with translations and further editions to follow. Enthralling tales of travel and of the marvels of other worlds from men like Marco Polo enjoyed considerable vogue. Columbus' tale was not altogether free of falsehood, but it did more than cater to a taste prepared in advance. His journey established that Europe would extend its influence over the globe, would embroil the world in its continental struggles, and would dispense its technology, religion, and values to far-flung regions. At one bound, Columbus had reopened the frontiers of Europe.

For all his vision, Columbus' dreams turned to dust. The unwavering faith he had placed in Toscanelli's calculations for the western route to China supported his feat, only to disappoint him in the end. He was a Genoise who had sailed in the Portuguese service and had mastered every advance then current in Mediterranean navigation - the compass, the astrolabe, the latest charts, and the stern-post rudder. Fired with a desire to do what others had guessed at, he nursed the idea of sailing into the unknown for years before he finally gained support from Spain. His contract guaranteed him 10 percent of the returns from his discoveries.

After ten weeks at sea, in October 1492, he landed in the Bahamas and was convinced that he had discovered islands just off the coast of Cathay. On his return he enjoyed a brief summer of glory. He was feted by the populace and the government named him Admiral of the Ocean and Viceroy of the Islands.

But, of course, Toscanelli's calculations had been wrong, and Columbus had traveled only halfway to his goal. All his later voyages (1494-1504) bore out this bitter truth. The islands yielded little gold, and a colony that he had planted in Haiti gave so much trouble that his reputation as an administrator was destroyed. He was sent back from his third voyage in chains, to be released at home, but to be stripped of his titles. His contract was broken, so he spent his last days near poverty. He hoped that his rights would be renewed and, dreaming beyond the grave, disposed of vast sums in his will.

Even the continents whose Isthmus he discovered were named after another explorer, Amerigo Vespucci who sailed in 1497 and 1499. Amerigo claimed Brazil for Portugal and Cabot, a Venetian, explored Nova Scotia for England. By 1497 it was beyond doubt that new continents had been discovered. Although Columbus came close to seeing the ocean that separated him from China, it was not until 1531 that Balboa gazed upon it from a peak near the gulf of Darien.

To this date Spain's spectacular explorations had brought her scant reward, whereas little Portugal, whose feats were less impressive, was already reaping the harvest of overseas trade.

Portugal's methods contrasted sharply with those of Columbus. Columbus had ventured a breath-taking leap of imagination while the Portuguese sailors traversed the known over and over again before venturing any further. The courageous sailing into the sunset was not for them. They hugged the coast, feeling their way hesitantly and empirically.

Despite persistent encouragement from the third son of the King, Prince Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese sailors were, for a decade, too fearful to venture farther south than Cape Bojador (northwest Africa); and, although Henry set up a school of navigation and equipped it with the latest charts and instruments, by the time of his death (1460) his proteges had not passed Sierra Leonea - a mere 1000 miles - in 50 years. At least the lure of trade had begun to encourage others. In 1488, Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope because of the prospect it gave for reaching India. At this point, if the Crown had been less preoccupied with finding the coastal route to the East, Columbus may have been kept in Portuguese employ, and Portugal may have owned the world. As it was, the reward waited until 1497 when Vasco da Gama reached India.

Not without difficulty the Portuguese elbowed the Arab traders from their sphere of influence. Then they threw out a far-flung line of trading post from Calicut, through Malacca to Macao, near Canton, in China itself. By 1520, the Genoese and Venetians, whose ties were with the Arabs, had been undercut, and the price of spices began to drop in spite of a general inflation. From this time the Mediterranean declined as the centerboard of commerce, and did not revive until the Suez Canal was cut in 1869. With the spice market saturated, slaves proved to be a more reliable staple. But since this was a trade whose bulk did not pass through Lisbon, Portugal never became a great commercial center.

Neither did Spain. Sizeable treasure arrived after 1502; it rose steadily after Cortes began his conquest of Montezuma's Aztec empire in Mexico in 1519. That same year Magellan left Seville, to die in an imbroglio in the Phillipines, but one of his three ships reached home three years later - the first ship ever to circumnavigate the world.

Spain had little industry and lacked the wares to export in return for the goods that the new world showered on her. Cadiz the principal port, was in a poor geographical position to feed the distant European hinterlands, and the city was under severe restrictions from the crown. The crown decreed who could trade there and on what terms. Thus, financiers operated through agents in Cadiz, while they themselves enjoyed the freedom of Antwerp in the Netherlands.

Antwerp had long been famous for its fairs and its freedom. It had splendid access to the sea and to the interior, and deliberately cultivated its open and unrestricted market. Indeed, for the benefit of traders, in 1537 the city built the Bourse which became the model for those exchanges at Amsterdam and London which would later succeed her in eminence. In the early sixteenth century, Antwerp was the hub of European commerce and the most cosmopolitan city in the world.

III. European Commerce

European commerce accelerated on the gold and silver that began to reach Spain from Mexico. After Pizarro's conquest of the Incas in the 1530s more silver came from Peru. As fast as ingots came, Charles V spent them to supply his armies and to meet his creditors' high interest rates. Through the bankers it filtered down to the lowest levels, fomenting inflation as it went. Prices rose, credit became more abundant, and interest rates slowly fell. The Low Countries gradually replaced northern Italy as the commercial leader of Europe, but Italy still flourished. And, though less trade plied the route to Venice, Germany did not become a backwater overnight. Indeed, with the increased supply of bullion, German capitalists came into their own: Welsens, Haugs, Hochstetters, Imhofs and, greatest of them all, the Fuggers. The Fuggers never shifted their headquarters from Augsburg, though they drew their biggest profits from their Antwerp branch.

Reformation Germany, like all Europe, was beset by rising prices and also by an increase in the number of high bourgeoisie who were blamed for the spiral. Agricultural classes, from knights to peasants, found that the returns from their produce lagged behind the inflated prices of urban goods, and some ill-feeling was inevitable.

The dramatic upsurge of the sixteenth century had begun when gold dust began to reach Europe from Portuguese trading stations along the African coast and in the Congo basin. Slaves, ivory, ostrich plumes, parrots, and sugar filled their caravels, yet the exotic trade can be grossly exaggerated.

What mattered was the larger flow of staples; the exchange of the three main foodstuffs - cereals, fish, and wine - for industrial tools and textiles. Textiles were specialized. Italy still excelled in fine silks and satins, Germany in fustians, France and the Low Countries in linen, tapestries and carpets, and England in wool and woolen cloth. Spain depended too heavily on raw wool production. The Baltic countries traded lumber and salted fish, Venice boasted delicate glassware, France and the Rhineland fine wines. Amsterdam led in shipbuilding. Eastern Europe and Sicily were the granaries that supplied the cereal-deficient areas of the Netherlands, northern Italy, Spain, and Portugal. At this time, rye was more important than wheat. All in all, Europe, on the eve of the Reformation, was more prosperous than it had ever been before.

IV. Population Growth

Europe was rapidly becoming more densely populated than ever before. Demograhic histories testify that the sixteenth century saw a recovery of population from well below pre-Plague levels to well above them. The change from death surpluses to birth surpluses seems to have happened around the middle of the fifteenth century. Couples married younger and families grew larger. By the early sixteenth century, populations were still below pre-Plague figures, but in the remainder of the century a population revolution of staggering proportions was underway. In one of the best documented principalities of Germany the increase in population between 1500 and 1604 was 84 percent. Other areas appear to have had even greater increases. Detailed studies of parish registers in England suggest a similar drastic trend. French figures are the same.

All over Europe along upward wave had begun, which was not to subside until the middle of the seventeenth century. It would rise again in the eighteenth century. Why the baby boom should have started nobody quite knows, nor is it known why it stopped suddenly after our period. Why should thousands or millions of couples choose to enlarge or, later, to restrict the size of their families at roughly the same time?

Although the relationship between culture, polities, and population growth (or decline) will long be debated, the relationship between growth within families and commercial expansion was a little better charted.

On the one hand, population growth expands markets, it increases mobility - surplus children would move to other villages or towns; and on the other hand, population growth makes the distress of bad harvests, famines, other disturbances, and deliberate depopulations more acute. That is, population growth encourages commercial growth but renders social problems more urgent and pressing. Maintenance of tillage, control of the poor, punishment of vagabonds, trading, manufacturing, and wage regulation become a matter of grave concern to governments. By the same token, social problems become a matter of unavoidable concern for reformers.

Population growth, it seems, has also an impact on rates of literacy. It was not the church schools nor the new secular foundations that carried the burden of mass education. Numerically, their influence was slight. In the countryside and in the villages, it was mothers of families who passed on literacy to their children. Reading and writing were family skills. At a certain point in the growth of a family a mother must have become too busy to teach all of her children. Except in London it seems that the less densely populated areas in the north and south of England remained at high levels of literacy, and the more densely populated Midlands and East-Anglia fell by comparison. Of course, it was only in a "conjugal" family unit (husband and wife only) that the burden of teaching falls on the mother. Throughout our period the percentage of "multigenerational" family units was low. This is a characteristic of the West - families set up separate economic units. In the East, married couples and their children normally lived with one set of parents or the other. It is an important social difference between East and West, but precisely where the line should be drawn in Europe is not quite clear.

Nor, indeed, is it clear what inferences can safely be drawn from the pioneer work that has been done on literacy. The evidence is too flimsy to bear much weight. But perhaps an area of lowering literacy would be inclined to welcome Protestantism: it was a religion of the Word, with more oral instruction from the pulpits than Catholicism offered. And Protestantism was also an educational force since children were intensively catechized. With Protestantism using the press and the pulpit, it is probably fair to assume that Europe's burgeoning population was becoming better informed on matters of general knowledge than previously.

V. Europe Deeply Divided

If Europeans were more knowledgeable, Europe was more deeply divided than previously. If it had not been for the power struggles between Catholic Valois and Catholic Hapsburg the Reformation would have been nipped in the bud. Charles V earnestly desired it, but Francis III placed his political ambitions so far above religious principle that he encouraged the Protestant cantons of Switzerland and the Lutheran princes of Germany in order to embrace the Emperor. He even allied himself with the infidel Turks.

By accident of inheritance, Charles V lands encircled France and threatened to dominate the whole of the continent. He claimed Burgundy, from Mary of Burgundy, he inherited Spain and its overseas Empire and Sicily and Naples from Ferdinand and Isabella. He inherited the Hapsburg lands from Maximilian. It was far too much for one man to handle, and Charles chose to sacrifice the greatness of Spain for the will-o'-the-wisp prestige of the Empire. His own sense of justice defeated him, for he was pitted against a cunning and faithless opponent. After each victory his moderate demands were met, only to be flouted at the first opportunity. When Francis was captured in 1525 during an attempt to take the Imperial fief of Milan Francis agreed to waive his claim and pledged his good faith on the Gospels. But, as soon as he reached France, he cried "No. I am King, I am King once more." He continued to press his claim for Milan until mutual war-weariness brought the protracted and fitful war to a halt in the Treaty of Cambresis in 1559.

Meanwhile the defeat that Charles had inflicted on the Lutheran princes in the Schmalkaldic League in 1547 had passed by unconsolidated. The Protestant cause revived with sufficient energy to force Charles to commit the settlement of religious matters into the hands of an Imperial Diet. Predictably, the Diet's solution, called the Peace of Augsburg, was an anti-Imperial peace which gave each territorial prince the absolute right to decree the religion of his own state. So the Reformation survived with an enormous strengthening of the power of the princes. Emperor Charles, who only wanted Imperial and religious unity, was forced to play midwife to intensified German particularism and religious disunity.