As Protestantism never obtained any hold in Spain, the Inquisition had

comparatively little trouble on that account. During the sixteenth

century a total number of 1995 persons were punished as Protestants of

whom 1640 were foreigners and only 355 were Spaniards. Even these

figures exaggerate the hold that the Reformation had in Spain, for any

error remotely resembling the tenets of Wittenberg immediately classed

its maintainer as Lutheran. The first case known was found in Majorca

in 1523, but it was not until 1559 {416} that any considerable number

suffered for this faith. In that year 24 Lutherans were burnt at

Rodrigo and Seville, 32 in 1562, and 19 Calvinists in 1569.

The dread of the Spanish Inquisition was such that only in those

dependencies early and completely subdued could it be introduced.

Established in Sicily in 1487 its temporal jurisdiction was suspended

during the years 1535-46, when it was revived by the fear of

Protestantism. Even during its dark quarter, however, it was able to

punish heretics. In an _auto_ celebrated at Palermo, [Sidenote: May

30, 1541] of the twenty-two culprits three were Lutherans and nineteen

Jews. The capitulation of Naples in 1503 expressly excluded the

Spanish Inquisition, nor could it be established in Milan. The

Portuguese Inquisition was set up in 1536.

[Sidenote: New World]

The New World was capable of offering less resistance. Nevertheless,

for many years the inquisitorial powers were vested in the bishops sent

over to Mexico and Peru, and when the Inquisition was established in

both countries in 1570 it probably meant no increase of severity. The

natives were exempt from its jurisdiction and it found little

combustible material save in captured Protestant Europeans. A Fleming

was burned at Lima in 1548, and at the first _auto_ held at Mexico in

1574 thirty-six Lutherans were punished, all English captives, two by

burning and the rest by scourging or the galleys.

[Sidenote: Roman Inquisition]

The same need of repelling Protestantism that had helped to give a new

lease of life to the Spanish Inquisition called into being her sister

the Roman Inquisition. By the bull _Licet ab initio_, [Sidenote: July

21, 1542] Paul IV reconstituted the Holy Office at Rome, directing and

empowering it to smite all who persisted in condemned opinions lest

others should be seduced by their example, not only in the papal states

but in all the nations of Christendom. It was authorized to pronounce

{417} sentence on culprits and to invoke the aid of the secular arm to

punish them with prison, confiscation of goods and death. Its

authority was directed particularly against persons of high estate,

even against heretical princes whose subjects were loosed from their

obligation of obedience and whose neighbors were invited to take away

their heritage.

[Sidenote: Procedure]

The procedure of the Holy Office at Rome was characterized by the

Augustinian Cardinal Seripando as at first lenient, but later, he

continues, "when the superhuman rigor of Caraffa [one of the first

Inquisitors General] held sway, the Inquisition acquired such a

reputation that from no other judgment-seat on earth were more horrible

and fearful sentences to be expected." Besides the attention it paid

to Protestants it instituted very severe processes against Judaizing

Christians and took cognizance also of seduction, of pimping, of

sodomy, and of infringment of the ecclesiastical rules for fasting.

[Sidenote: Italy]

The Roman Inquisition was introduced into Milan by Michael Ghislieri,

afterwards pope, and flourished mightily under the protecting care of

Borromeo, cardinal archbishop of the city. It was established by

Charles V, notwithstanding opposition, in Naples. [Sidenote: 1547]

Venice also fought against its introduction but nevertheless finally

permitted it. [Sidenote: 1544] During the sixteenth century in that

city there were no less than 803 processes for Lutheranism, 5 for

Calvinism, 35 against Anabaptists, 43 for Judaism and 199 for sorcery.

In countries outside of Italy the Roman Inquisition did not take root.

Bishop Magrath endeavored in 1567 to give Ireland the benefit of the

institution, but naturally the English Government allowed no such thing.

[Sidenote: Censorship of the press]

A method of suppressing given opinions and propagating others probably

far more effective than the {418} mauling of men's bodies is the

guidance of their minds through direction of their reading and

instruction. Naturally, before the invention of printing, and in an

illiterate society, the censorship of books would have slight

importance. Plato was perhaps the first to propose that the reading of

immoral and impious books be forbidden, but I am not aware that his

suggestion was acted upon either in the states of Greece or in pagan

Rome. Examples of the rejection of certain books by the early church

are not wanting. Paul induced the Ephesian sorcerers to burn their

books; certain fathers of the church advised against the reading of

heathen authors; [Sidenote: c. 496] Pope Gelasius made a decree on the

books received and those not received by the church, and Manichaean

books were publicly burnt.

[Sidenote: Fourth century]

The invention of printing brought to the attention of the church the

danger of allowing her children to choose their own reading matter.

[Sidenote: Printing] The first to animadvert upon it was Berthold,

Archbishop of Mayence, the city of Gutenberg. On the 22d of March,

1485, he promulgated a decree to the effect that, whereas the divine

art of printing had been abused for the sake of lucre and whereas by

this means even Christ's books, missals and other works on religion,

were thumbed by the vulgar, and whereas the German idiom was too poor

to express such mysteries, and common persons too ignorant to

understand them, therefore every work translated into German must be

approved by the doctors of the university of Mayence before being

published.

[Sidenote: June 1, 1501]

The example of the prelate was soon followed by popes and councils.

Alexander VI forbade as a detestable evil the printing of books

injurious to the Catholic faith, and made all archbishops official

censors for their dioceses. This was enforced by a decree of the Fifth

Lateran Council setting forth that {419} although printing has brought

much advantage to the church [Sidenote: May 4, 1515] it has also

disseminated errors and pernicious dogmas contrary to the Christian

religion. The decree forbids the printing of any book in any city or

diocese of Christendom without license from the local bishop or other

ecclesiastical authority.

This sweeping edict was supplemented by others directed against certain

books or authors, but for a whole generation the church left the

censorship chiefly to the discretion of the several national

governments. This was the policy followed also by the Protestants,

both at this time and later. [Sidenote: Protestant censorship]

Neither Luther, nor any other reformer for a long time attempted to

draw up regular indices of prohibited books. Examples of something

approaching this may be found in the later history of Protestantism,

but they are so unimportant as to be negligible.

[Sidenote: National censorship, 1502]

The national governments, however, laid great stress on licensing. The

first law in Spain was followed by an ever increasing strictness under

the inquisitor who drew up several indices of prohibited books,

completely independent of the official Roman lists. The German Diets

and the French kings were careful to give their subjects the benefit of

their selection of reading matter. In England, too, lists of

prohibited books were drawn up under all the Tudors. Mary restricted

the right to print to licensed members of the Stationers' Company;

Elizabeth put the matter in the hands of Star Chamber. [Sidenote:

1559] A special license was required by the Injunctions, and a later

law was aimed at "seditious, schismatic or libellous books and other

fantastic writings." [Sidenote: 1588]

[Sidenote: Catalogues of dangerous books]

The idea of a complete catalogue of heretical and dangerous writings

under ecclesiastical censure took its rise in the Netherlands. After

the works of various authors had been severally prohibited in distinct

{420} proclamations, the University of Louvain, at the emperor's

command, drew up a fairly extensive list in 1546 and again, somewhat

enlarged, in 1550. It mentions a number of Bibles in Greek, Latin and

the vernaculars, the works of Luther, Carlstadt, Osiander, Ochino,

Bullinger, Calvin, Oecolampadius, Jonas, Calvin, Melanchthon, Zwingli,

Huss and John Pupper of Goch, a Dutch author of the fifteenth century

revived by the Protestants. It is remarkable that the works of Erasmus

are not included in this list. Furthermore it is stated that certain

approved works, even when edited or translated by heretics, might be

allowed to students. Among the various scientific works condemned are

an _Anatomy_ printed at Marburg by Eucharius Harzhorn, H. C. Agrippa's

_De vanitate scientiarum_, and Sebastian Münster's _Cosmographia

universalis_, a geography printed in 1544. The Koran is prohibited,

and also a work called "Het paradijs van Venus," this latter presumably

as indecent. Finally, all books printed since 1525 without name of

author, printer, time, and place, are prohibited.

[Sidenote: Roman Index]

Partly in imitation of this work of Louvain, partly in consequence of

the foundation of the Inquisition, the Roman Index of Prohibited Books

was promulgated. Though the bull founding the Roman Inquisition said

nothing about books, their censure was included in practice. Under the

influence of the Holy Office at Lucca a list of forbidden works was

drawn up by the Senate at Lucca, [Sidenote: 1545] including chiefly the

tracts of Italian heretics and satires on the church. The fourth

session Council of Trent [Sidenote: April 8, 1546] prohibited the

printing of all anonymous books whatever and of all others on religion

until licensed. A further indication of increasing severity may be

found in a bull issued by Julius III [Sidenote: 1550] who complained

that authors licensed to read heretical {421} books for the purpose of

refuting them were more likely to be seduced by them, and who therefore

revoked all licenses given up to that time.

[Sidenote: September, 1557]

When the Roman Inquisition issued a long list of volumes to be burnt

publicly, including works of Erasmus, Machiavelli and Poggio, this

might be considered the first Roman Index of Prohibited Books; but the

first document to bear that name was issued by Paul IV. [Sidenote:

1559] It divided writings into three classes: (1) Authors who had

erred _ex professo_ and whose whole works were forbidden; (2) Authors

who had erred occasionally and some of whose books only were mentioned;

(3) Anonymous books. In addition to these classes 61 printers were

named, all works published by whom were banned. The Index strove to be

as complete as possible. Its chief though not its only source was the

catalogue of Louvain. Many editions and versions of the Bible were

listed and the printing of any translation without permission of the

Inquisition was prohibited. Particular attention was paid to Erasmus,

who was not only put in the first class by name but was signalized as

having "all his commentaries, notes, annotations, dialogues, epistles,

refutations, translations, books and writings" forbidden.

[Sidenote: Tridentine censorship, February 26, 1562]

The Council of Trent again took up the matter, passing a decree to the

effect that inasmuch as heresy had not been cured by the censorship

this should be made much stricter, and appointing a commission in

order, as, regardless of the parable,[1] it was phrased, to separate

the tares from the wheat. The persons appointed for this delicate work

comprised four archbishops, nine bishops, two generals of orders and

some "minor theologians." After much sweat they brought forth a report

on most of the doubtful authors though {422} the most difficult of all,

Erasmus, they relinquished to the theological faculties of Louvain and

Paris for expurgation.

[Sidenote: 1564]

The results of their labors were published by Paul IV under the name of

the Tridentine Index. It was more sweeping, and at the same time more

discriminating than the former Index. Erasmus was changed to the

second class, only a portion of his works being now condemned. Among

the non-ecclesiastical authors banned were Machiavelli, Guicciardini

and Boccaccio. It is noteworthy that the _Decameron_ was expurgated

not chiefly for its indecency but for its satire of ecclesiastics.

Thus, a tale of the seduction of an abbess is rendered acceptable by

changing the abbess into a countess; the story of how a priest led a

woman astray by impersonating the angel Gabriel is merely changed by

making the priest a layman masquerading as a fairy king.

The principles upon which the prohibition of books rested were set

forth in ten rules. The most interesting are the following: (1) Books

printed before 1515 condemned by popes or council; (2) Versions of the

Bible; (3) books of heretics; (4) obscene books; (5) works on

witchcraft and necromancy.

In order to keep the Index up to date continual revision was necessary.

To insure this Pius V appointed a special Congregation of the Index,

which has lasted until the present day. From his time to ours more

than forty Indices have been issued. Those of the sixteenth century

were concerned mainly with Protestant books, those of later centuries

chiefly deal, for the purposes of internal discipline, with books

written by Catholics. One of the functions of the Congregation was to

expurgate books, taking out the offensive passages. A separate _Index

expurgatorius_, pointing out the passages to be deleted or corrected

was {423} published, and this name has sometimes incorrectly been

applied to the Index of prohibited books.

[Sidenote: Effect of the censorship]

The effect of the censorship of the press has been variously estimated.

The Index was early dubbed _sica destricta in omnes scriptores_ and

Sarpi called it "the finest secret ever discovered for applying

religion to the purpose of making men idiotic." Milton thundered

against the censorship in England as "the greatest discouragement and

affront that can be offered to learning and learned men." The evil of

the system of Rome was, in his opinion, double, for, as he wrote in his

immortal _Areopagitica_, "The Council of Trent and the Spanish

Inquisition engendering together brought forth and perfected those

catalogues and expurging indexes that rake through the entrails of many

an old good author with a violation worse than any that could be

offered to his tomb." When we remember that the greatest works of

literature, such as the _Divine Comedy_, were tampered with, and that,

in the Spanish Expurgatorial Index of 1640 the list of passages to be

deleted or to be altered in Erasmus's works takes 59 double-columned,

closely printed folio pages, we can easily see the point of Milton's

indignant protest. But, to his mind, it was still worse to subject a

book to the examination of unfit men before it could secure its

_imprimatur_. Not without reason has liberty of the press been made

one of the cornerstones of the temple of freedom.

Various writers have labored to demonstrate the blighting effect that

the censorship was supposed to have on literature. But it is

surprising how few examples they can bring. Lea, who ought to know the

Spanish field exhaustively, can only point to a few professors of

theology who were persecuted and silenced for expressing unconventional

views on biblical criticism. He conjectures that others must have

{424} remained mute through fear. But, as the golden age of Spanish

literature came after the law made the printing of unlicensed books

punishable by death, [Sidenote: 1558] it is hard to see wherein

literature can have suffered. The Roman Inquisition did not prevent

the appearance of Galileo's work, though it made him recant afterwards.

The strict English law that playwrights should not "meddle with matters

of divinity or state" made Shakespeare careful not to express his

religious and political views, but it is hard to see in what way it

hampered his genius.

And yet the influence of the various press laws was incalculably great

and was just what it was intended to be. It affected science less than

one would think, and literature hardly at all, but it moulded the

opinions of the masses like putty in their rulers' hands. That the

rank and file of Spaniards and Italians remained Catholic, and the vast

majority of Britons Protestant, was due more to the bondage of the

press than to any other one cause. Originality was discouraged, the

people to some degree unfitted for the free debate that is at the

bottom of self-government, the hope of tolerance blighted, and the path

opened that led to religious wars.

[1] Matthew xiii, 28-30.

{425}

CHAPTER IX

THE IBERIAN PENINSULA AND THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE

SECTION 1. SPAIN

[Sidenote: Reformation, Renaissance and Exploration]

If, through the prism of history, we analyse the white light of

sixteenth-century civilization into its component parts, three colors

particularly emerge: the azure "light of the Gospel" as the Reformers

fondly called it in Germany, the golden beam of the Renaissance in

Italy, and the blood-red flame of exploration and conquest irradiating

the Iberian peninsula. Which of the three contributed most to modern

culture it is hard to decide. Each of the movements started

separately, gradually spreading until it came into contact, and thus

into competition and final blending with the other movements. It was

the middle lands, France, England and the Netherlands that, feeling the

impulses from all sides, evolved the sanest and strongest synthesis.

While Germany almost committed suicide with the sword of the spirit,

while Italy sank into a voluptuous torpor of decadent art, while Spain

reeled under the load of unearned Western wealth, France, England

and Holland, taking a little from each of their neighbors, and not

too much from any, became strong, well-balanced, brilliant states.

But if eventually Germany, Italy and Spain all suffered from

over-specialization, for the moment the stimulus of new ideas and new

possibilities gave to each a sort of leadership in its own sphere.

While Germany and Italy were busy winning the realms of the spirit and

of the mind, Spain very nearly conquered the empire of the land and of

the sea.

{426} [Sidenote: Ferdinand, 1479-1516 and Isabella, 1474-1504]

The foundation of her national greatness, like that of the greatness of

so many other powers, was laid in the union of the various states into

which she was at one time divided. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon

and Isabella of Castile was followed by a series of measures that put

Spain into the leading position in Europe, expelled the alien racial

and religious elements of her population, and secured to her a vast

colonial empire. The conquest of Granada from the Moors, the

acquisition of Cerdagne and Roussillon from the French, and the

annexation of Naples, doubled the dominions of the Lions and Castles,

and started the proud land on the road to empire. It is true that

eventually Spain exhausted herself by trying to do more than even her

young powers could accomplish, but for a while she retained the

hegemony of Christendom. The same year that saw the discovery of

America [Sidenote: 1492] and the occupation of the Alhambra, was also

marked by the expulsion or forced conversion of the Jews, of whom

165,000 left the kingdom, 50,000 were baptized, and 20,000 perished in

race riots. The statesmanship of Ferdinand showed itself in a more

favorable light in the measures taken to reduce the nobles, feudal

anarchs as they were, to fear of the law. To take their place in the

government of the country he developed a new bureaucracy, which also,

to some extent, usurped the powers of the Cortes of Aragon and of the

Cortes of Castile. [Sidenote: Francis Ximénez de Cisneros, 1436-1517]

In the meantime a notable reform of the church, in morals and in

learning if not in doctrine, was carried through by the great Cardinal

Ximénez.

[Sidenote: Charles V, 1516-1556]

When Charles, the grandson of the Catholic Kings, succeeded Ferdinand

he was already, through his father, the Archduke Philip, the lord of

Burgundy and of the Netherlands, and the heir of Austria. His election

as emperor made him, at the age of nineteen, the {427} greatest prince

of Christendom. To his gigantic task he brought all the redeeming

qualities of dullness, for his mediocrity and moderation served his

peoples and his dynasty better than brilliant gifts and boundless

ambition would have done. "Never," he is reported to have said in

1556, "did I aspire to universal monarchy, although it seemed well

within my power to attain it." Though the long war with France turned

ever, until the very last, in his favor, he never pressed his advantage

to the point of crushing his enemy to earth. But in Germany and Italy,

no less than in Spain and the Netherlands, he finally attained

something more than hegemony and something less than absolute power.

[Sidenote: Revolt of the Communes]

Though Spain benefited by his world power and became the capital state

of his far flung empire, "Charles of Ghent," as he was called, did not

at first find Spaniards docile subjects. Within a very few years of

his accession a great revolt, or rather two great synchronous revolts,

one in Castile and one in Aragon, flared up. The grievances in Castile

were partly economic, the _servicio_ (a tax) and the removal of money

from the realm, and partly national as against a strange king and his

foreign officers. Not only the regent, Adrian of Utrecht, but many

important officials were northerners, and when Charles left Spain to be

crowned emperor, [Sidenote: 1520] the national pride could no longer

bear the humiliation of playing a subordinate part. The revolt of the

Castilian Communes began with the gentry and spread from them to the

lower classes. Even the grandees joined forces with the rebels, though

more from fear than from sympathy. The various revolting communes

formed a central council, the Santa Junta, and put forth a program

re-asserting the rights of the Cortes to redress grievances. Meeting

for a time with no resistance, the rebellion disintegrated {428}

through the operation of its own centrifugal forces, disunion and lack

of leadership. So at length when the government, supplied with a small

force of German mercenaries, struck on the field of Villalar, the

rebels suffered a severe defeat. [Sidenote: April, 1521] A few cities

held out longer, Toledo last of all; but one by one they yielded,

partly to force, partly to the wise policy of concession and redress

followed by the government.

In our own time Barcelona and the east coast of Spain has been the

hotbed of revolutionary democracy and radical socialism. Even so, the

rising in Aragon known as the Hermandad (Brotherhood) [Sidenote: The

Hermandad] contemporary with that in Castile, not only began earlier

and lasted longer, but was of a far more radical stamp. Here were no

nobles airing their slights at the hands of a foreign king, but here

the trade-gilds rose in the name of equality against monarch and nobles

alike. Two special causes fanned the fury of the populace to a white

heat. The first was the decline of the Mediterranean trade due to the

rise of the Atlantic commerce; the other was the racial element.

Valencia was largely inhabited by Moors, the most industrious, sober

and thrifty, and consequently the most profitable of Spanish laborers.

The race hatred so deeply rooted in human nature added to the ferocity

of the class conflict. Both sides were ruined by the war which,

beginning in 1519, dragged along for several years until the

proletariat was completely crushed.

[The Cortes]

The armed triumph of the government hardly damaged popular liberties as

embodied in the constitution of the Cortes of Castile. When Charles

became king this body was not, like other parliaments, ordinarily a

representative assembly of the three estates, but consisted merely of

deputies of eighteen Castilian cities. Only on special occasions, such

as a coronation, were nobles and clergy summoned to participate. Its

great {429} power was that of granting taxes, though somehow it never

succeeded, as did the English House of Commons, in making the redress

of grievances conditional upon a subsidy. But yet the power amounted

to something and it was one that neither Charles nor Philip commonly

ventured to violate. Under both of them meetings of the Cortes were

frequent.

Though never directly attacked, the powers of the Cortes declined

through the growth of vast interests outside their competence. The

direction of foreign policy, so absorbing under Charles, and the charge

of the enormous and growing commercial interests, was confided not to

the representatives of the people, but to the Royal Council of Castile,

an appointative body of nine lawyers, three nobles, and one bishop.

Though not absolutely, yet relatively, the functions of the Cortes

diminished until they amounted to no more than those of a provincial

council.

What reconciled the people to the concentration of new powers in the

hands of an irresponsible council was the apparently dazzling success

of Spanish policy throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century.

No banner was served like that of the Lions and Castles; no troops in

the world could stand against her famous regiments; no generals were

equal to Cortez and Alva; no statesmen abler than Parma, no admirals,

until the Armada, more daring than Magellan[1] and Don John, no

champions of the church against heretic and infidel like Loyola and

Xavier.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Empire]

That such an empire as the world had not seen since Rome should within

a single life-time rise to its zenith and, within a much shorter time,

decline to the verge of ruin, is one of the melodramas of history.

Perhaps, in reality, Spain was never quite so great as she looked, nor

was her fall quite so complete as it seemed. But {430} the phenomena,

such as they are, sufficiently call for explanation.

First of all one is struck by the fortuitous, one might almost say,

unnatural, character of the Hapsburg empire. While the union of

Castile and Aragon, bringing together neighboring peoples and filling a

political need, was the source of real strength, the subsequent

accretions of Italian and Burgundian territories rather detracted from

than added to the effective power of the Spanish state. Philip would

have been far stronger had his father separated from his crown not only

Austria and the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, but the Netherlands as

well. The revolt of the Dutch Republic was in itself almost enough to

ruin Spain. Nor can it be said that the Italian states, won by the

sword of Ferdinand or of Charles, were valuable accessions to Spanish

power.

[Sidenote: Colonies]

Quite different in its nature was the colonial empire, but in this it

resembled the other windfalls to the house of Hapsburg in that it was

an almost accidental, unsought-for acquisition. The Genoese sailor who

went to the various courts of Europe begging for a few ships in which

to break the watery path to Asia, had in his beggar's wallet all the

kingdoms of a new world and the glory of them. For a few years Spain

drank until she was drunken of conquest and the gold of America. That

the draught acted momentarily as a stimulant, clearing her brain and

nerving her arm to deeds of valor, but that she suffered in the end

from the riotous debauch, cannot be doubted. She soon learned that all

that glittered was not wealth, and that industries surfeited with metal

and starved of raw materials must perish. The unearned coin proved to

be fairy gold in her coffers, turning to brown leaves and dust when she

wanted to use it. It became a drug in her markets; it could not

lawfully be exported, and no {431} amount of it would purchase much

honest labor from an indolent population fed on fantasies of wealth.

The modern King Midas, on whose dominions the sun never set, was cursed

with a singular and to him inexplicable need of everything that money

was supposed to buy. His armies mutinied, his ships rotted, and never

could his increasing income catch up with the far more rapidly

increasing expenses of his budget.

The poverty of the people was in large part the fault of the government

which pursued a fiscal policy ideally calculated to strike at the very

sources of wealth. While, under the oppression of an ignorant

paternalism, unhappy Spain suffered from inanition, she was tended by a

physician who tried to cure her malady by phlebotomy. There have been

worse men than Philip II, [Sidenote: Philip II, 1556-98] but there have

been hardly any who have caused more blood to flow from the veins of

their own people. His life is proof that a well-meaning bigot can do

more harm than the most abandoned debauchee. "I would rather lose all

my kingdoms," he averred, "than allow freedom of religion." And again,

to a man condemned by the Inquisition for heresy, "If my own son were

as perverse as you, I myself would carry the faggot to burn him."

Consistently, laboriously, undeterred by any suffering or any horror,

he pursued his aim. He was not afraid of hard work, scribbling reams

of minute directions daily to his officers. His stubborn calm was

imperturbable; he took his pleasures--women, _autos-da-fe_ and

victories--sadly, and he suffered such chagrins as the death of four

wives, having a monstrosity for a son, and the loss of the Armada and

of the Netherlands, without turning a hair.

Spain's foreign policy came to be more and more polarized by the rise

of English sea-power. Even under Charles, when France had been the

chief enemy, {432} [Sidenote: Spain vs. England] the Hapsburgs saw the

desirability of winning England as a strategic point for their

universal empire. This policy was pursued by alternating alliance with

hostility. For six years of his boyhood Charles had been betrothed to

Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, to whom he sent a ring inscribed,

"Mary hath chosen the better part which shall not be taken away from

her." His own precious person, however, was taken from her to be

bestowed on Isabella of Portugal, by whom he begot Philip. When this

son succeeded him, notwithstanding the little unpleasantness of Henry

VIII's divorce, he advised him to turn again to an English marriage,

and Philip soon became the husband of Queen Mary. After her death

without issue, he vainly wooed her sister, until he was gradually

forced by her Protestant buccaneers into an undesired war.

Notwithstanding all that he could do to lose fortune's favors, she

continued for many years to smile on her darling Hapsburg. After a

naval disaster inflicted by the Turks on the Spaniard off the coast of

Tripoli, the defeated power recovered and revenged herself in the great

naval victory of Lepanto, in October 1571. The lustre added to the

Lions and Castles by this important success was far outshone by the

acquisition of Portugal and all her colonies, in 1581. Though not the

nearest heir, Philip was the strongest, and by bribery and menaces won

the homage of the Portuguese nobles after the death of the aged king

Henry on January 31, 1580. For sixty years Spain held the lesser

country and, what was more important to her, the colonies in the East

Indies and in Africa. So vast an empire had not yet been heard of, or

imagined possible, in the history of the world. No wonder that its

shimmer dazzled the eyes not only of contemporaries, but of posterity.

According to Macaulay, {433} Philip's power was equal to that of

Napoleon, and its ruin is the most instructive lesson in history of how

not to govern.

How hollow was this semblance of might was demonstrated by the first

stalwart peoples that dared to test it, first by the Dutch and then by

England. The story of the Armada has already been told. Its

preparation marked the height of Philip's effort and the height of his

incompetence. Its annihilation was a cruel blow to his pride. But in

Spain, barring a temporary financial panic, things went much the same

after 1588 as before it. The full bloom of Spanish culture, gorgeous

with Velasquez and fragrant with Cervantes and Calderon, followed hard

upon the defeat of the Armada.

[Sidenote: War with the Moors]

The fact is that Spain suffered much more from internal disorders than

from foreign levy. The chief occasion of her troubles was the presence

among her people of a large body of Moors, hated both for their race

and for their religion. With the capitulation of Granada, the

enjoyment of Mohammedanism was guaranteed to the Moors, but this

tolerance only lasted for six years, when a decree went out that all

must be baptized or must emigrate from Andalusia. In Aragon, however,

always independent of Castile, they continued to enjoy religious

freedom. Charles at his coronation took a solemn oath to respect the

faith of Islam in these lands, but soon afterwards, frightened by the

rise of heresy in Germany, he applied to Clement to absolve him from

his oath. This sanction of bad faith, at first creditably withheld,

[Sidenote: 1524] was finally granted and was promptly followed by a

general order for expulsion or conversion. Throughout the whole of

Spain the poor Moriscos now began to be systematically pillaged and

persecuted by whoever chose to do it. All manner of taxes, tithes,

servitudes and fines {434} were demanded of them. The last straw that

broke the endurance of a people tried by every manner of tyranny and

extortion, was an edict ordering all Moors to learn Castilian within

three years, after which the use of Arabic was to be forbidden,

prohibiting all Moorish customs and costumes, and strictly enjoining

attendance at church.

As the Moors had been previously disarmed and as they had no military

discipline, rebellion seemed a counsel of despair, but it ensued. The

populace rose in helpless fury, and for three years defied the might of

the Spanish empire. But the result could not be doubtful. A naked

peasantry could not withstand the disciplined battalions that had

proved their valor on every field from Mexico to the Levant and from

Saxony to Algiers. It was not a war but a massacre and pillage. The

whole of Andalusia, the most flourishing province in Spain, beautiful

with its snowy mountains, fertile with its tilled valleys, and sweet

with the peaceful toil of human habitation, was swept by a universal

storm of carnage and of flame. The young men either perished in

fighting against fearful odds, or were slaughtered after yielding as

prisoners. Those who sought to fly to Africa found the avenues of

escape blocked by the pitiless Toledo blades. The aged were hunted

down like wild beasts; the women and young children were sold into

slavery, to toil under the lash or to share the hated bed of the

conqueror. The massacre cost Spain 60,000 lives and three million

ducats, not to speak of the harm that it did to her spirit.

[1] A Portuguese in Spanish service.

SECTION 2. EXPLORATION

[Sidenote: Division of the New World between Spain and Portugal]

When Columbus returned with glowing accounts of the "India" he had

found, the value of his work was at once appreciated. Forthwith began

that struggle for colonial power which has absorbed so much of the

{435} energies of the European nations. In view of the Portuguese

discoveries in Africa, it was felt necessary to mark out the "spheres

of influence" of the two powers at once, and, with an instinctive

appeal to the one authority claiming to be international, the Spanish

government immediately applied to Pope Alexander VI for confirmation in

the new-found territories. Acting on the suggestion of Columbus that

the line of Spanish influence be drawn one hundred leagues west of any

of the Cape Verde Islands or of the Azores, the pope, with magnificent

self-assurance, issued a bull, _Inter caetera divinae_, [Sidenote: May

4, 1493] of his own mere liberality and in virtue of the authority of

Peter, conferring on Castile forever "all dominions, camps, posts, and

villages, with all the rights and jurisdictions pertaining to them,"

west of the parallel, and leaving to Portugal all that fell to the east

of it. Portugal promptly protested that the line was too far east, and

by the treaty of Tordesillas; [Sidenote: 1494] it was moved to 370

leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, thus falling between the 48th

and 49th parallel of longitude. The intention was doubtless to confer

on Spain all land immediately west of the Atlantic, but, as a matter of

fact, South America thrusts so far to the eastward, that a portion of

her territory, later claimed as Brazil, fell to the lot of Portugal.

[Sidenote: Spanish adventurers]

Spain lost no time in exploiting her new dominions, during the next

century hundreds of ships carried tens thousands of adventurers to seek

their fortune in the west. For it was not as colonists that most of

them went, but in a spirit compounded of that of the crusader, the

knight-errant, and the pirate. If there is anything in the paradox

that artists have created natural beauty, it is a truer one to say that

the Spanish romances created the Spanish colonial empire. The men who

sailed on the great adventure had feasted {436} on tales of paladins

and hippogrifs, of enchanted palaces and fountains of youth, and

miraculously fair women to be rescued and then claimed by knights.

They read in books of travel purporting to tell the sober truth of

satyrs and of purple unicorns and of men who spread their feet over

their heads for umbrellas and of others whose heads grew between their

shoulders. No wonder that when they went to a strange country they

found the River of Life in the Orinoco, colonies of Amazons in the

jungle, and El Dorado, the land of gold, in the riches of Mexico and

Peru! It is a testimony to the imaginative mood of Europe, as well as

to the power of the pen, that the whole continent came to be called,

not after its discoverer, but after the man who wrote the best

romances--mostly fictions--about his travels in it.

[Sidenote: Exploitation of natives]

In the Greater Antilles, where Spain made her first colonies, her rule

showed at its worst. The soft native race, the Caribs, almost

completely disappeared within half a century. The best modern

authority estimates that whereas the native population of Española

(Haiti) was between 200,000 and 300,000 in 1493, by 1548 hardly 5000

Indians were left. In part the extinction of the natives was due to

new diseases and to the vices of civilization, but far more to the

heartless exploitation of them by the conquerors. Bartholomew de las

Casas, the first priest to come to this unfortunate island, tells

stories of Spanish cruelty that would be incredible were they not so

well supported. With his own eyes he saw 3000 inoffensive Indians

slaughtered at a single time; of another batch of 300 he observed that

within a few months more than half perished at hard labor. Again, he

saw 6000 Indian children condemned to work in the mines, of whom few or

none long survived. In vain a bull of Paul III declared the Indians

capable of becoming {437} Christians and forbade their enslavement. In

vain the Spanish government tried to mitigate at least some of the

hardships of the natives' lot, [Sidenote: 1537] ordering that they

should be well fed and paid. The temptation to exploit them was too

strong; and when they perished the Spaniards supplied their place by

importing negroes from Africa, a people of tougher fibre.

Spanish exploration, followed by sparse settlement, soon opened up the

greater part of the Americas south of the latitude of the present city

of San Francisco. Of many expeditions into the trackless wilderness,

only a few were financially repaying; the majority were a drain on the

resources of the mother country. In every place where the Spaniard set

foot the native quailed and, after at most one desperate struggle, went

down, never again to loose the conqueror's grip from his throat or to

move the conqueror's knee from his chest. Even the bravest were as

helpless as children before warriors armed with thunder and riding upon

unknown monsters.

But in no place, save in the islands, did the native races wholly

disappear as they did in the English settlements. The Spaniards came

not like the Puritans, as artisans and tillers of the soil intent on

founding new homes, but as military conquerors, requiring a race of

helots to toil for them. For a period anarchy reigned; the captains

not only plundered the Indians but fought one another fiercely for more

room--more room in the endless wilderness! Eventually, however,

conditions became more stable; Spain imposed her effective control, her

language, religion and institutions on a vast region, doing for South

America what Rome had once done for her.

The lover of adventure will find rich reward in tracing the discovery

of the Mississippi by De Soto, of Florida by Ponce de Leon, and of the

whole course of {438} the Amazon by Orellana who sailed down it from

Peru, or in reading of Balboa, "when with eagle eyes he stared at the

Pacific." A resolute man could hardly set out exploring without

stumbling upon some mighty river, some vast continent, or some

unmeasured ocean. But among all these fairly-tales [Transcriber's

note: fairy-tales?] there are some that are so marvellous that they

would be thought too extravagant by the most daring writers of romance.

That one captain with four hundred men, and another with two hundred,

should each march against an extensive and populous empire, cut down

their armies at odds of a hundred to one, put their kings to the sword

and their temples to the torch, and after it all reap a harvest of gold

and precious stones such as for quantity had never been heard of

before--all this meets us not in the tales of Ariosto or of Dumas, but

in the pages of authentic history.

[Conquest of Mexico]

In the tableland of Mexico dwelt the Aztecs, the most civilized and

warlike of North American aborigines. Their polity was that of a

Spartan military despotism, their religion the most grewsome known to

man. Before their temples were piled pyramids of human skulls; the

deities were placated by human sacrifice, and at times, according to

the deicidal and theophagous rites common to many primitive

superstitions, themselves sacrificed in effigy or in the person of a

beautiful captive and their flesh eaten in sacramental cannibalism.

Though the civilization of the Aztecs, derived from the earlier and

perhaps more advanced Mayans, was scarcely so high as that of the

ancient Egyptians, they had cultivated the arts sufficiently to work

the mines of gold and silver and to hammer the precious metals into

elaborate and massive ornaments.

When rumors of their wealth reached Cuba it seemed at last as if the

dream of El Dorado had come true. Hernando Cortez, a cultured,

resolute, brave and {439} politic leader, gathered a force of four

hundred white men, with a small outfit of artillery and cavalry, and,

on Good Friday, 1519, landed at the place now called Vera Cruz and

marched on the capital. The race of warriors who delighted in nothing

but slaughter, was stupefied, partly by an old prophecy of the coming

of a god to subdue the land, partly by the strange and terrible arms of

the invaders. Moreover their neighbors and subjects were ready to rise

against them and become allies of the Spaniards. In a few months of

crowded battle and massacre they lay broken and helpless at the feet of

the audacious conqueror, who promptly sent to Spain a glowing account

of his new empire and a tribute of gold and silver. Albert Dürer in

August, 1520, saw at Brussels the "things brought the king from the new

golden land," and describes them in his diary as including "a whole

golden sun, a fathom in breadth, and a whole silver moon of the same

size, and two rooms full of the same sort of armour, and also all kinds

of weapons, accoutrements and bows, wonderful shields . . . altogether

valued at a hundred thousand guidon. And all my life," he adds, "I

have never seen anything that so rejoiced my heart as did these things."

[Conquest of Peru]

If an artist, familiar with kings and courts and the greatest marts of

Europe could write thus, what wonder that the imagination of the world

took fire? The golden sun and the silver moon were, to all men who saw

them, like Helen's breasts, the sun and moon of heart's desire, to lure

them over the western waves. Twelve years after Cortez, came Pizarro

who, with a still smaller force conquered an even wealthier and more

civilized empire. The Incas, unlike the Mexicans, were a mild race,

living in a sort of theocratic socialism, in which the emperor, as god,

exercised absolute power over his subjects and in return cared {440}

for at least their common wants. The Spaniards outdid themselves in

acts of treachery and blood. In vain the emperor, Atahualpa, after

voluntarily placing himself in the hands of Pizarro, filled the room

used as his prison nine feet high with gold as ransom; when he could

give no more he was tried on the preposterous charges of treason to

Charles V and of heresy, and suffered death at the stake. Pizarro

coolly pocketed the till then undreamed of sum of 4,500,000 ducats,[1]

worth in our standards more than one hundred million dollars.

[Sidenote: Circumnavigation of the globe, 1519-22]

But the crowning act of the age of discovery was the circumnavigation

of the globe. The leader of the great enterprise that put the seal of

man's dominion on the earth, was Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese in

Spanish service. With a fleet of five vessels, only one of which put a

ring around the world, and with a crew of about 275 men of whom only 18

returned successful, he sailed from Europe. [Sidenote: September 20,

1519] Coasting down the east of South America, [October 21, 1519]

exploring the inlets and rivers, he entered the straits that bear his

name and covered their 360 miles in thirty-eight days. After following

the coast up some distance north, he struck across the Pacific, the

breadth of which he much underestimated. For ninety-eight days he was

driven by the east trade-wind without once sighting land save two

desert islands, while his crew endured extremities of hunger, thirst

and scurvy. At last he came to the islands he called, after the

thievish propensities of their inhabitants, the Ladrones, making his

first landing at Guam. Spending but three days here to refit and

provision, he sailed again on March 9, [Sidenote: 1521] and a week

later discovered the islands known, since 1542, as the Philippines.

{441} In an expedition against a savage chief the great leader met his

death on April 27, 1521. As other sailors and as he, too, had

previously been as far to the east as he now found himself, he had

practically completed the circumnavigation of the globe. The most

splendid triumph of the age of discovery coincided almost to a day with

the time that Luther was achieving the most glorious deed of the

Reformation at Worms.

[Sidenote: September 1522]

Magellan's ship, the Vittoria, proceeded under Sebastian del Cano, and

finally, with thirty-one men, of whom only eighteen had started out in

her, came back to Portugal. The men who had burst asunder one of the

bonds of the older world, were, nevertheless, deeply troubled by a

strange, medieval scruple. Having mysteriously lost a day by following

the sun in his westward course, they did penance for having celebrated

the fasts and feasts of the church on the wrong dates.

[Sidenote: Portuguese Exploration]

While Spain was extending her dominions westward, little Portugal was

building up an even greater empire in both hemispheres. In the

fifteenth century, this hardy people, confined to their coast and

without possibility of expanding inwards, had seen that their future

lay upon the water. To the possessor of sea power the ocean makes of

every land bordering on it a frontier, vulnerable to them and

impervious to the enemy. The first ventures of the Portuguese were

naturally in the lands near by, the North African coast and the islands

known as the Madeiras and the Azores. Feeling their way southward

along the African coast they reached the Cape of Good Hope but did not

at once go much further. [Sidenote: 1486 or 1488] This path to India

was not broken until eleven years later, when Vasco da Gama, after a

voyage of great daring [Sidenote: 1497-8]--he was ninety-three days at

sea on a course of 4500 miles from the Cape Verde Islands to South

Africa--reached Calicut on May 20, 1498. This city, now sunken in the

sea, was {442} then the most flourishing port on the Malabar Coast,

exploited entirely by Mohammedan traders. Spices had long been the

staple of Venetian trade with the Orient, and when he returned with

rich cargo of them the immediate effect upon Europe was greater than

that of the voyage of Columbus. Trade seeks to follow the line of

least resistance, and the establishment of a water way between Europe

and the East was like connecting two electrically charged bodies in a

Leyden jar by a copper wire. The current was no longer forced through

a poor medium, but ran easily through the better conductor. With more

rapidity than one would think possible in that age, the commercial

consequences of the discovery were appreciated. The trade of the

Levant died away, and the center of gravity was transferred from the

Mediterranean to the Atlantic. While Venice decayed Lisbon rose with

mushroom speed to the position of the great emporium of European

ocean-borne trade, until she in her turn was supplanted by Antwerp.

Da Gama was soon imitated by others. [Sidenote: 1500] Cabral made

commercial settlements at Calicut and the neighboring town of Cochin,

and came home with unheard-of riches in spice, pearls and gems.

[Sidenote: 1503] Da Gama returned and bombarded Calicut, and Francis

d'Almeida was made Governor of India [Sidenote: 1505] and tried to

consolidate the Portuguese power there on the correct principle that

who was lord of the sea was lord of the peninsula. The rough methods

of the Portuguese and their competition with the Arab traders made war

inevitable between the two rivals. To the other causes of enmity that

of religion was added, for, like the Spaniards, the Portuguese tried to

combine the characters of merchants and missionaries, of pirates and

crusaders. When the first of Da Gama's sailors to land at Calicut was

asked what he sought, his laconic answer, "Christians {443} and

spices," had in it as much of truth as of epigrammatic neatness.

[Sidenote: Portuguese cruelty to Indians]

Had the Portuguese but treated the Hindoos humanely they would have

found in them allies against the Mohammedan traders, but all of them,

not excepting their greatest statesman, Alphonso d'Albuquerque, pursued

a policy of frightfulness. When Da Gama met an Arab ship, after

sacking it, he blew it up with gunpowder and left it to sink in flames

while the women on board held up their babies with piteous cries to

touch the heart of this knight of Christ and of mammon. Without the

least compunction Albuquerque tells in his commentaries how he burned

the Indian villages, put part of their inhabitants to death and ordered

the noses and ears of the survivors cut off.

[Sidenote: Trade]

Nevertheless, the Portuguese got what they wanted, the wealthy trade of

the East. Albuquerque, failing to storm Calicut, seized Goa farther

north and made it the chief emporium. But they soon felt the need of

stations farther east, for, as long as the Arabs held Malacca, where

spices were cheaper, the intruders did not have the monopoly they

desired. Accordingly Albuquerque seized this city on the Malay

Straits, [Sidenote: 1511] which, though now it has sunk into

insignificance, was then the Singapore or Hong-Kong of the Far East.

Sumatra, Java and the northern coast of Australia were explored, the

Moluccas were bought from Spain for 350,000 ducats, and even Japan and

China were reached by the daring traders. In the meantime posts were

established along the whole western and eastern coasts of Africa and in

Madagascar. But wherever they went the Portuguese sought commercial

advantage not permanent settlement. Aptly compared by a Chinese

observer to fishes who died if taken from the sea, they founded an

empire of vast length out of incredible thinness.

{444} [Sidenote: Brazil]

The one exception to this rule, and an important one, was Brazil. The

least showy of the colonies and the one that brought in the least quick

profit eventually became a second and a greater Portugal, outstripping

the mother country in population and dividing South America almost

equally with the Spanish. In many ways the settlement of this colony

resembled that of North America by the English more than it did the

violent and superficial conquests of Spain. Settlers came to it less

as adventurers than as home-seekers and some of them fled from

religious persecution. The great source of wealth, the sugar-cane, was

introduced from Madeira in 1548 and in the following year the mother

country sent a royal governor and some troops.

[Sidenote: Decadence of Portugal]

But even more than Spain Portugal overtaxed her strength in her grasp

for sudden riches. The cup that her mariners took from the gorgeous

Eastern enchantress had a subtle, transforming drug mingled with its

spices, whereby they were metamorphosed, if not into animals, at least

into orientals, or Africans. While Lisbon grew by leaps and bounds the

country-side was denuded, and the landowners, to fill the places of the

peasants who had become sailors, imported quantities of negro slaves.

Thus not only the Portuguese abroad, but those at home, undeterred by

racial antipathy, adulterated their blood with that of the dark

peoples. Add to this that the trade, immensely lucrative as it seemed,

was an enormous drain on the population of the little state; and the

causes of Portugal's decline, almost as sudden as its rise, are in

large part explained. So rapid was it, indeed, that it was noticed not

only by foreign travellers but by the natives. Camoens, though he

dedicated his life to composing an epic in honor of Vasco da Gama,

lamented his country's decay in these terms:

{445}

O pride of empire! O vain covetise

Of that vain glory that we men call fame . . .

What punishment and what just penalties

Thou dost inflict on those thou dost inflame . . .

Thou dost depopulate our ancient state

Till dissipation brings debility.

Nor were artificial causes wanting to make the colonies expensive and

the home treasury insolvent. The governors as royal favorites regarded

their appointments as easy roads to quick wealth, and they plundered

not only the inhabitants but their royal master. The inefficient and

extravagant management of trade, which was a government monopoly,

furnished a lamentable example of the effects of public ownership. And

when possible the church interfered to add the burden of bigotry to

that of corruption. An amusing example of this occurred when a

supposed tooth of Buddha was brought to Goa, to redeem which the Rajah

of Pegu offered a sum equal to half a million dollars. While the

government was inclined to sell, the archbishop forbade the acceptance

of such tainted money and ordered the relic destroyed.

[Sidenote: 1521-80]

Within Portugal itself other factors aided the decline. From the

accession of John III to the amalgamation with Spain sixty years later,

the Cortes was rarely summoned. The expulsion of many Jews in 1497,

the massacre and subsequent exile of the New Christians or Marranos,

[Sidenote: 1506-7] most of whom went to Holland, commenced an era of

destructive bigotry completed by the Inquisition. [Sidenote: The

Inquisition established, 1536] Strict censorship of the press and the

education of the people by the Jesuits each added their bit to the

forces of spiritual decadence.

For the fury of religious zeal ill supplied the exhausted powers of a

state fainting with loss of blood and from the intoxication of

corruption. Gradually her grasp relaxed on North Africa until only

three {446} small posts in Morocco were left her, those of Ceuta,

Arzila and Tangier. A last frantic effort to recover them and to

punish the infidel, undertaken by the young King Sebastian, ended in

disaster and in his death in 1578. After a short reign of two years by

his uncle Henry, who as a cardinal had no legitimate heirs, Portugal

feebly yielded to her strongest suitor, Philip II, [Sidenote:

1580-1640] and for sixty years remained a captive of Spain.

[Sidenote: Other nations explore]

Other nations eagerly crowded in to seize the trident that was falling

from the hands of the Iberian peoples. There were James Cartier of

France, and Sebastian Cabot and Sir Martin Frobisher and Sir Francis

Drake of England, and others. They explored the coast of North America

and sought a Northwest Passage to Asia. Drake, after a voyage of two

years and a half, [Sidenote: 1577-80] duplicated the feat of Magellan,

though he took quite a different course, following the American western

coast up to the Golden Gate. He, too, returned "very richly fraught

with gold, silver, silk and precious stones," the best incentive to

further endeavor. But no colonies of permanence and consequence were

as yet planted by the northern nations. Until the seventeenth century

their voyages were either actuated by commercial motives or were purely

adventurous. The age did not lack daring explorers by land as well as

by sea. Lewis di Varthema rivalled his countryman Marco Polo by an

extensive journey in the first decade of the century. Like Burckhardt

and Burton in the nineteenth century he visited Mecca and Medina as a

Mohammedan pilgrim, and also journeyed to Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo and

Damascus and then to the distant lands of India and the Malay peninsula.

[Sidenote: Russia]

It may seem strange to speak of Russia in connection with the age of

discovery, and yet it was precisely in the light of a new and strange

land that our English ancestors regarded it. Cabot's voyage to the

{447} White Sea in the middle of the century was every whit as new an

adventure as was the voyage to India. Richard Chancellor and others

followed him and established a regular trade with Muscovy, [Sidenote:

1553] and through it and the Caspian with Asia. The rest of Europe,

west of Poland and the Turks, hardly heard of Russia or felt its impact

more than they now do of the Tartars of the Steppes.

But it was just at this time that Russia was taking the first strides

on the road to become a great power. How broadly operative were some

of the influences at work in Europe lies patent in the singular

parallel that her development offers to that of her more civilized

contemporaries. Just as despotism, consolidation, and conquest were

the order of the day elsewhere, so they were in the eastern plains of

Europe. Basil III [Sidenote: Basil III, 1505-33] struck down the

rights of cities, nobles and princes to bring the whole country under

his own autocracy. Ivan the Terrible, [Sidenote: Ivan IV, 1533-84]

called Czar of all the Russias, added to this policy one of extensive

territorial aggrandizement. Having humbled the Tartars he acquired

much land to the south and east, and then turned his attention to the

west, where, however, Poland barred his way to the Baltic. Just as in

its subsequent history, so then, one of the great needs of Russia was

for a good port. Another of her needs was for better technical

processes. Anticipating Peter the Great, Ivan endeavored to get German

workmen to initiate good methods, but he failed to accomplish much,

partly because Charles V forbade his subjects to go to add strength to

a rival state.

[Sidenote: Europe vs. Asia]

While Europe found most of the other continents as soft as butter to

her trenchant blade, she met her match in Asia. The theory of

Herodotus that the course of history is marked by alternate movements

east and west has been strikingly confirmed by {449} subsequent events.

In a secular grapple the two continents have heaved back and forth,

neither being able to conquer the other completely. If the empires of

Macedon and Rome carried the line of victory far to the orient, they

were avenged by the successive inroads of the Huns, the Saracens, the

Mongols and the Turks. If for the last four centuries the line has

again been pushed steadily back, until Europe dominates Asia, it is far

from certain that this condition will be permanent.

In spiritual matters Europe owes a balance of indebtedness to Asia, and

by far the greater part of it to the Semites. The Phoenician alphabet

and Arabian numerals are capital borrowed and yielding how enormous a

usufruct! Above all, Asiatic religions--albeit the greatest of them

was the child of Hellas as well as of Judaea--have conquered the whole

world save a few savage tribes. Ever since the cry of "There is no God

but Allah and Mahomet is his prophet" had aroused the Arabian nomads

from their age-long slumber, it was as a religious warfare that the

contest of the continents revealed itself. After the scimitar had

swept the Greek Empire out of Asia Minor and had cut Spain from

Christendom, the crusades and the rise of the Spanish kingdoms had

gradually beaten it back. But while the Saracen was being slowly but

surely driven from the western peninsula, the banner of the Crescent in

the east was seized by a race with a genius for war inversely

proportional to its other gifts. [Sidenote: The Turks] The Turks, who

have never added to the arts of peace anything more important than the

fabrication of luxurious carpets and the invention of a sensuous bath,

were able to found cannon and to drill battalions that drove the armies

of nobler races before them. From the sack of Constantinople in 1453

to the siege of Vienna in 1529 and even to some extent long after that,

the {449} majestic and terrible advance of the janizaries threatened

the whole fabric of Europe.

[Sidenote: Selim I, 1512-20]

Under Sultan Selim I the Turkish arms were turned to the east and

south. Persia, Kurdistan, Syria and Egypt were crushed, while the

title of Caliph, and with it the spiritual leadership of the Mahommetan

world, was wrested from the last of the Abassid dynasty. But it was

under his successor, Suleiman the Magnificent, [Sidenote: Suleiman

1520-6] that the banner of the prophet, "fanned by conquest's crimson

wing," was borne to the heart of Europe. Belgrade and Rhodes were

captured, Hungary completely overrun, and Vienna besieged. The naval

exploits of Khair-ed-din, called Barbarossa, carried the terror of the

Turkish arms into the whole Mediterranean, subdued Algiers and defeated

the Christian fleets under Andrew Doria.

On the death of Suleiman the Crescent Moon had attained the zenith of

its glory. The vast empire was not badly administered; some

authorities hold that justice was better served under the Sultan than

under any contemporary Christian king. A hierarchy of officials,

administrative, ecclesiastical, secretarial and military, held office

directly under the Sultan, being wisely granted by him sufficient

liberty to allow initiative, and yet kept under control direct enough

to prevent the secession of distant provinces.

The international position of the infidel power was an anomalous one.

Almost every pope tried to revive the crusading spirit against the

arch-enemy of Christ, and the greatest epic poet of the sixteenth

century chose for his subject the Delivery of Jerusalem in a holy war.

On the other hand the Most Christian King found no difficulty in making

alliances with the Sublime Porte, and the same course was advocated,

though not adopted, by some of the Protestant states of Germany.

Finally, that champion of the church, Philip {450} II, for the first

time in the history of his country, [Sidenote: 1580] made a peace with

the infidel Sultan recognizing his right to exist in the society of

nations.

The sixteenth century, which in so much else marked a transition from

medieval to modern times, in this also saw the turning-point of events,

inasmuch as the tide drawn by the Half Moon to its flood about 1529,

from that time onwards has steadily, if very slowly, ebbed.

[1] Allowing $2.40 to a ducat this would be $10,800,000 intrinsically

at a time when money had ten times the purchasing power that it has

today.

{451}

CHAPTER X

SOCIAL CONDITIONS

SECTION 1. POPULATION

[Sidenote: Unity of civilized world]

Political history is that of the state; economic and intellectual

history that of a different group. In modern times this group includes

all civilized nations. Even in political history there are many

striking parallels, but in social development and in culture the recent

evolution of civilized peoples has been nearly identical. This

fundamental unity of the nations has grown stronger with the centuries

on account of improving methods of transport and communication.

Formally it might seem that in the Middle Ages the white nations were

more closely bound together than they are now. They had one church, a

nearly identical jurisprudence, one great literature and one language

for the educated classes; they even inherited from Rome the ideal of a

single world-state. But if the growth of national pride, the division

of the church and the rise of modern languages and literatures have

been centrifugal forces, they have been outweighed by the advent of new

influences tending to bind all peoples together. The place of a single

church is taken by a common point of view, the scientific; the place of

Latin as a medium of learning has been taken by English, French, and

German, each one more widely known to those to whom it is not native

now than ever was Latin in the earlier centuries. The fruits of

discovery are common to all nations, who now live under similar

conditions, reading the same books and (under different names) the same

newspapers, doing the same {452} business and enjoying the same

luxuries in the same manner. Even in matters of government we are

visibly approaching the perhaps distant but apparently certain goal of

a single world-state.

[Sidenote: Changes in population]

In estimating the economic and cultural conditions of the sixteenth

century it is therefore desirable to treat Western Europe as a whole.

One of the marked differences between all countries then and now is in

population. No simple law has been discovered as to the causes of the

fluctuations in the numbers of the people within a given territory.

This varies with the wealth of the territory, but not in direct ratio

to it; for it can be shown that the wealth of Europe in the last four

hundred years has increased vastly more than its population. Nor can

it be discovered to vary directly in proportion to the combined amount

and distribution of wealth, for in sixteenth-century England while the

number of the people was increasing wealth was being concentrated in

fewer hands almost as fast as it was being created. It is obvious that

sanitation and transportation have a good deal to do with the

population of certain areas. The largest cities of our own times could

not have existed in the Middle Ages, for they could not have been

provisioned, nor have been kept endurably healthy without elaborate

aqueducts and drains.

Other more obscure factors enter in to complicate the problems of

population. Some nations, like Spain in the sixteenth and Ireland in

the nineteenth century, have lost immensely through emigration. The

cause of this was doubtless not that the nation in question was growing

absolutely poorer, but that the increase of wealth or in accessibility

to richer lands made it relatively poorer. It is obvious again that

great visitations like pestilence or war diminish population directly,

though the effect of such factors is usually {453} temporary. How much

voluntary sterility operates is problematical. Aegidius Albertinus,

writing in 1602, attributed the growth in population of Protestant

countries since the Reformation to the abolition of sacerdotal

celibacy, and this has also been mentioned as a cause by a recent

writer. Probably the last named forces have a very slight influence;

the primary one being, as Malthus stated, the increase of means of

subsistence.

As censuses were almost unknown to sixteenth-century Europe outside of

a few Italian cities, the student is forced to rely for his data on

various other calculations, in some cases tolerably reliable, in others

deplorably deficient. The best of these are the enumerations of

hearths made for purposes of taxation in several countries. Other

counts were sometimes made for fiscal or military, and occasionally for

religious, purposes. Estimates by contemporary observers supplement

our knowledge, which may be taken as at least approximately correct.

[Sidenote: England and Wales]

The religious census of 1603 gave the number of communicants in England

and Wales as 2,275,000, to which must be added 8475 recusants. Adding

50 per cent. for non-communicants, we arrive at the figure of

3,425,000, which is doubtless too low. Another calculation based on a

record of births and deaths yields the figure 4,812,000 for the year

1600. The average, 4,100,000, is probably nearly correct, of which

about a tenth in Wales. England had grown considerably during the

century, this increase being especially remarkable in the large towns.

Whereas, in 1534, 150,000 quarters of wheat were consumed in London

annually, the figure for 1605 is 500,000. The population in the same

time had probably increased from 60,000 to 225,000. No figures worth

anything can be given for Ireland, and for Scotland it is only safe to

say {454} that in 1500 the population was about 500,000 and in 1600

about 700,000.

[Sidenote: The Netherlands]

Enumerations of hearths and of communicants give good bases for

reckoning the population of the Netherlands. Holland, the largest of

the Northern provinces, had about 200,000 people in 1514; Brabant the

greatest of the Southern, in 1526 had 500,000. The population of the

largest town, Antwerp, in 1526 was 88,000, in 1550 about 110,000. At

the same time it is remarkable that in 1521 Ghent impressed Dürer as

the greatest city he had seen in the Low Countries. For the whole

territory of the Netherlands, including Holland and Belgium, and a

little more on the borders, the population was in 1560 about 3,000,000.

This is the same figure as that given for 1567 by Lewis Guicciardini.

Later in the century the country suffered by war and emigration.

[Sidenote: Germany]

The lack of a unified government, and the great diversity of

conditions, makes the population of Germany more difficult to estimate.

Brandenburg, having in 1535 an area of 10,000 square miles, and a

population between 300,000 and 400,000, has been aptly compared for

size and numbers to the present state of Vermont. Bavaria had in 1554

a population of 434,000; in 1596 of 468,000. Würzburg had in 1538 only

12,000; Hamburg in 1521 12,000 and in 1594 19,000. Danzig had in 1550

about 21,000. The largest city in central Germany, if not in the whole

country--as a chronicler stated in 1572--was Erfurt, with a population

of 32,000 in 1505. It was the center of the rising Saxon industries,

mining and dying, and of commerce. Lübeck, Cologne, Nuremberg and

Augsburg equalled or perhaps surpassed it in size, and certainly in

wealth. The total population of German Switzerland was over 200,000.

The whole German-speaking population of Central Europe amounted to

perhaps twenty millions {455} in 1600, though it had been reckoned by

the imperial government in 1500 as twelve millions.

[Sidenote: France]

The number of Frenchmen did not greatly increase in France in the 16th

century. Though the borders of the state were extended, she suffered

terribly by religious wars, and somewhat by emigration. Not only did

many Huguenots flee from her to Switzerland, the Netherlands and

England, but economic reasons led to large movements from the south and

perhaps from the north. To fill up the gap caused by emigration from

Spain a considerable number of French peasants moved to that land; and

it is also possible that the same class of people sought new homes in

Burgundy and Savoy to escape the pressure of taxes and dues. Various

estimates concur in giving France a population of 15,000,000 to

16,000,000. The Paris of Henry II was by far the largest city in the

world, numbering perhaps 300,000; but when Henry IV besieged it it had

been reduced by war to 220,000. After that it waxed mightily again.

[Sidenote: Italy]

Italy, leader in many ways, was the first to take accurate statistics

of population, births and deaths. These begin by the middle of the

fifteenth century, but are rare until the middle of the sixteenth, when

they become frequent. Notwithstanding war and pestilence the numbers

of inhabitants seemed to grow steadily, the apparent result in the

statistics being perhaps in part due to the increasing rigor of the

census. Herewith follow specimens of the extant figures: The city of

Brescia had 65,000 in 1505, and 43,000 in 1548. During the same

period, however, the people in her whole territory of 2200 square miles

had increased from 303,000 to 342,000. The city of Verona had 27,000

in 1473 and 52,000 in 1548; her land of 1200 square miles had in the

first named year 99,000, in the last 159,000. The kingdom of Sicily

grew from 600,000 in 1501 to {456} 800,000 in 1548, and 1,180,000 in

1615. The kingdom of Naples, without the capital, had about 1,270,000

people in 1501; 2,110,000 in 1545; the total including the capital

amounted in 1600 to 3,000,000. The republic of Venice increased from

1,650,000 in 1550 to 1,850,000 in 1620. Florence with her territory

had 586,000 in 1551 and 649,000 in 1622. In the year 1600 Milan with

Lombardy had 1,350,000 inhabitants; Savoy in Italy 800,000; continental

Genoa 500,000; Parma, Piacenza and Modena together 500,000; Sardinia

300,000; Corsica 150,000; Malta 41,000; Lucca 110,000. The population

of Rome fluctuated violently. In 1521 it is supposed to have been

about 55,000, but was reduced by the sack to 32,000. After this it

rapidly recovered, reaching 45,000 under Paul IV (1558), and 100,000

under Sixtus V (1590). The total population of the States of the

Church when the first census was taken in 1656 was 1,880,000.

[Sidenote: Spain]

The final impression one gets after reading the extremely divergent

estimates of the population of Spain is that it increased during the

first half of the century and decreased during the latter half. The

highest figure for the increase of population during the reign of

Charles V is the untrustworthy one of Habler, who believes the number

of inhabitants to have doubled. This belief is founded on the

conviction that the wealth of the kingdom doubled in that time. But

though population tends to increase with wealth, it certainly does not

increase in the same proportion as wealth, so that, considering this

fact and also that the increase in wealth as shown by the doubling of

income from royal domains was in part merely apparent, due to the

falling value of money, we may dismiss Habler's figure as too high.

And yet there is good evidence for the belief that there was a

considerable increment. The cities especially gained with the new

stimulus to {457} commerce and industry. In 1525 Toledo employed

10,000 workers in silk, who had increased fivefold by 1550.

Unfortunately for accuracy these figures are merely contemporary

guesses, but they certainly indicate a large growth in the population

of Toledo, and similar figures are given for Seville, Burgos and other

manufacturing and trading centers. From such estimates, however,

combined with the censuses of hearths, peculiarly unsatisfactory in

Spain as they excluded the privileged classes and were, as their

violent fluctuations show, carelessly made, we may arrive at the

conclusion that in 1557 the population of Spain was barely 9,000,000.

More difficult, if possible, is it to measure the amount of the decline

in the latter half of the century. [Sidenote: Decline] It was widely

noticed and commented on by contemporaries, who attributed it in part

to the increase in sheep-farming (as in England) and in part to

emigration to America. There were doubtless other more important and

more obscure causes, namely the increasing rivalry in both commerce and

industry of the north of Europe and the consequent decay of Spain's

means of livelihood. The emigration amounted on the average to perhaps

4000 per annum throughout the century. The total Spanish population of

America was reckoned by Velasco in 1574 at 30,500 households, or

152,500 souls. This would, however, imply a much larger emigration,

probably double the last number, to account for the many Spaniards lost

by the perils of the sea or in the depths of the wilderness. It is

known, for example, that whereas the Spanish population of Venezuela

was reckoned at 200 households at least 2000 Spaniards had gone to

settle there. An emigration of 300,000 before 1574, or say 400,000 for

the whole century, would have left a considerable gap at home. Add to

this the industrial decline by which {458} Altamira reckons that the

cities of the center and north, which suffered most, lost from one-half

to one-third of their total population, and it is evident that a very

considerable shrinkage took place. The census of 1594 reported a

population of 8,200,000.

[Sidenote: Portugal]

The same tendency to depopulation was noticed to a much greater degree

by contemporary observers of Portugal. Unfortunately, no even

approximately accurate figures can be given. Two million is almost

certainly too large for 1600.

[Sidenote: General table]

The following statistical table will enable the reader to form some

estimate of the movements of population. Admitting that the margin of

error is fairly large in some of the earlier estimates, it is believed

that they are sufficiently near the truth to be of real service.

_Country 1500 1600_

England and Wales . . . . . . . . 3,000,000 4,100,000

Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500,000 700,000

The Netherlands (Holland and

Belgium) (1550) . . . . . . . . 3,000,000

Germany (including Austria, German

Switzerland, Franche Comté and

Savoy north of the Alps, but

excluding Hungary, the Netherlands,

East and West Prussia) . . . . . 12,000,000 20,000,000

France (1550) . . . . . . . . . . 16,000,000

Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000,000 13,000,000

Spain (1557 and 1594) . . . . . . 9,000,000[1] 8,200,000

Poland with East and West Prussia 3,000,000

Denmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600,000

Sweden, Norway and Finland . . . . 1,400,000

[1] For a higher estimate--ten to twelve millions in 1500--see note in

bibliography.

SECTION 2. WEALTH AND PRICES

[Sidenote: Gigantic increase in wealth since 16th century]

If the number of Europe's inhabitants has increased fourfold since

Luther's time, the amount of her wealth has increased in a vastly

greater ratio. The difference {459} between the twentieth and the

sixteenth centuries is greater than anyone would at first blush believe

possible. Moreover it is a difference that is, during times of peace,

continually increasing. During the century from the close of the

Napoleonic to the opening of the Great War, the wealth of the white

races probably doubled every twenty-five years. The new factors that

made this possible were the exploited resources of America, and the

steam-engine. Prior to 1815 the increase of the world's wealth was

much slower, but if it doubled once a century,--as would seem not

improbable--we should have to allow that the world of 1914 was one

hundred and twenty-eight times as rich as it was in 1514.

[Sidenote: Change from poverty to affluence emphasized]

Of course such a statement cannot pretend to anything like exactitude;

the mathematical figure is a mere figure of speech; it is intended only

to emphasize the fact that one of the most momentous changes during the

last four centuries has been that from poverty to affluence. That the

statement, surprising as it may seem, is no exaggeration, may be borne

out by a few comparisons.

[Sidenote: War a test of a nation's financial strength]

One of the tests of a nation's financial strength is that of war.

Francis I in time of war mustered at most an army of 100,000, and he

reached this figure, or perhaps slightly exceeded it, only once during

his reign, in the years 1536-7. This is only half the number of

soldiers, proportionately to the population, that France maintained in

time of peace at the opening of the twentieth century. And for more

than four years, at a time when war was infinitely more expensive than

it was when Pavia was fought, France kept in the field about an even

five millions of men, more than an eighth of her population instead of

about one one-hundred-and-fiftieth. Similar figures could be given for

Germany and England. It is true that the power of {460} modern states

is multiplied by their greater facilities for borrowing, but with all

allowances the contrast suggests an enormous difference of wealth.

[Sidenote: Labor power of the world]

Take, as a standard of comparison, the labor power of the world. In

1918 the United States alone produced 685,000,000 tons of coal. Each

ton burned gives almost as much power as is expended by two laborers

working for a whole year. Thus the United States from its coal only

had command of the equivalent of the labor of 1,370,000,000 men, or

more than thrice the adult male labor power of the whole world; more

than fifty times the whole labor power of sixteenth-century Europe.

This does not take account of the fact that labor is far more

productive now than then, even without steam. The comparison is

instructive because the population of the United States in 1910 was

about equal to that of the whole of Europe in 1600.

The same impression would be given by a comparison of the production of

any other standard product. More gold was produced in the year 1915

than the whole stock of gold in the world in 1550, perhaps in 1600.

More wheat is produced annually in Minnesota than the granaries of the

cities of the world would hold four centuries ago.

[Sidenote: Poverty of the Middle Ages]

In fact, there was hardly wealth at all in the Middle Ages, only

degrees of poverty, and the sixteenth century first began to see the

accumulation of fortunes worthy of the name. In 1909 there were 1100

persons in France with an income of more than $40,000 per annum; among

them were 150 with an income of more than $200,000. In England in 1916

seventy-nine persons paid income taxes on estates of more than

$125,000,000. On the other hand the richest man in France, Jacques

Coeur, whose fortune was proverbial like that of Rockefeller today, had

in 1503 a capital of only {461} $5,400,000. The total wealth of the

house of Fugger about 1550 has been estimated at $32,000,000, though

the capital of their bank was never anything like that. The contrast

was greatest among the very richest class, but it was sufficiently

striking in the middle classes. Such a condition as comfort hardly

existed.

The same impression will be given to the student of public finance. As

more will be said in another paragraph on the revenues of the principal

states, only one example need be given here for the sake of contrast.

The total revenue of Francis I was $256,000 per annum, that of Henry II

even less, $228,000. The revenue of France in 1905 was $750,000,000.

Henry VIII often had more difficulty in raising a loan of L50,000 than

the English government had recently in borrowing six billions.

[Sidenote: Value of money]

It is impossible to say which is the harder task, to compare the total

wealth of the world at two given periods, or to compare the value of

money at different times. Even the mechanical difficulties in the

comparison of prices are enormous. When we read that wheat at

Wittenberg sold at one gulden the scheffel, it is necessary to

determine in the first place how much a gulden and how much a scheffel

represented in terms of dollars and bushels. When we discover that

there were half a dozen different guldens, and half a dozen separate

measures known as scheffels, varying from province to province and from

time to time, and varying widely, it is evident that great caution is

necessary in ascertaining exactly which gulden and exactly which

scheffel is meant.

When coin and measure have been reduced to known quantities, there

remains the problem of fixing the quality. Cloth is quoted in the

sixteenth century as of standard sizes and grades, but neither of these

important factors is accurately known to any modern {462} economist.

One would think that in quoting prices of animals an invariable

standard would be secured. Quite the contrary. So much has the breed

of cattle improved that a fat ox now weighs two or three times what a

good ox weighed four centuries ago. Horses are larger, stronger and

faster; hens lay many more eggs, cows give much more milk now than

formerly. Shoes, clothes, lumber, candles, are not of the same quality

in different centuries, and of course there is an ever increasing list

of new articles in which no comparison can be made.

[Sidenote: Fluctuation in coinage]

Nevertheless, some allowance can be made for all factors involved, as

far as they are mechanical; some comparisons can be given that bear a

sufficiently close relation to exactitude to form the basis from which

certain valid deductions can be drawn. Now first as to the intrinsic

value, in amounts of gold and silver in the several coins. The vast

fluctuation in the value of the English shilling, due to the successive

debasements and final restitution of the coinage, is thus expressed:

_Year Troy grains Year Troy grains_

1461 . . . . . . 133 1551 . . . . . . 20

1527 . . . . . . 118 1552 . . . . . . 88

1543 . . . . . . 100 1560 . . . . . . 89

1545 . . . . . . 60 1601 . . . . . . 86

1546 . . . . . . 40 1919 . . . . . . 87.27

A similar depreciation, more gradual but never rectified, is seen in

the value of French money. The standard of reckoning was the livre

tournois, which varied intrinsically in value of the silver put into it

as follows:

Years Intrinsic value of silver

1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 cents

1512-40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 cents

1541-60 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 cents

1561-72 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 cents

{463}

1573-79 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 cents

1580-1600 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 cents

[Sidenote: Value of Spanish coins]

The standard Spanish gold coin after 1497 was the ducat, which had

3.485 grammes of gold (value in our money $2.40). This was divided

into 375 maravedis, which therefore had a value of about two-thirds of

a cent each. A Castilian marc of gold had 230 grammes or a value of

about $16. After 1537 a handsome silver coin, known as the peso fuerte

or "piece of eight" because each contained eight reals, was minted in

America. Its value was about $1.06 of our money, it being the

predecessor of our dollar.

The great difficulty with the coinage of Germany and Italy is not so

much in its fluctuation as in the number of mints. The name gulden

[Sidenote: Gulden a general term] was given to almost any coin,

originally, as its etymology signifies, a gold piece, but later also to

a silver piece. Among gold guldens there was the Rhenish gulden

intrinsically worth $1.34; the Philip's gulden in the Netherlands of 96

cents and the Carolus gulden coined after 1520 and worth $1.14. But

the coin commonly used in reckoning was the silver gulden, worth

intrinsically 56 cents. This was divided into 20 groschen. Other

coins quite ordinarily met with in the literature of the times are

pounds (7.5 cents), pfennigs (various values), stivers, crowns, nobles,

angels ($2), and Hungarians ducats ($1.75). Since 1518 the chief

silver coin was the thaler, at first considered the equal of a silver

gulden. The law of 1559, however, made them two different coins,

restoring the thaler to what had probably been its former value of 72

cents, and leaving the imperial gulden in law, what it had commonly

become in fact, a lesser amount of silver.

The coinage of Italy was dominated by the gold gulden or florin of

Florence and the ducat of Venice, {464} each worth not far from $2.25

of our money. Both these coins, partly on account of their beauty,

partly because of the simple honesty with which they were kept at the

nominal standard, attained just fame throughout the Middle Ages and

thereafter, and became widely used in other lands.

[Sidenote: Wheat]

The standard of value determined, it is now possible to compare the

prices of some staple articles. First in importance comes wheat, which

fluctuated enormously within short periods at the same place and in

terms of the same amounts of silver. From Luther's letters we learn

that wheat sold at Wittenberg for one gulden a scheffel in 1539 and for

three groschen a scheffel in 1542, the latter price being considered

"so cheap as never before," the former reached in a time almost of

famine and calling for intervention on the part of the government.

However we interpret these figures (and I believe them to mean that

wheat sold at from twelve cents to eighty cents a bushel) they

certainly indicate a tremendous instability in prices, due to the poor

communications and backward methods of agriculture, making years of

plenty alternate with years of hunger. In the case of Wittenberg, the

lower level was nearer the normal, for in 1527 wheat was there sold at

twenty cents a bushel. In other parts of Germany it was dearer; at

Strassburg from 1526-50 it averaged 30 cents a bushel; from 1551-75 it

went up to an average of 58 cents, and from 1576-1600 the average again

rose to 80 cents a bushel.

Prices also rose in England throughout the century even in terms of

silver. Of course part of the rise in the middle years was due to the

debasement of the coinage. Reduced to bushels and dollars, the

following table shows the tendency of prices:

1530 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 cents a bushel

1537 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 cents

{465}

1544 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 cents

1546 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 cents

1547 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 cents

1548 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 cents

1549 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 cents

1550 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 cents

1572 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 cents

1595 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.14

Wheat in France averaged 23 cents a bushel prior to 1540, after which

it rose markedly in price, touching $1.50 in 1600, under exceptional

conditions. In order to compare with prices nowadays we must remember

that $1 a bushel was a remarkably good price before the late war,

during which it was fixed at $2.20 by the American government. Barley

in England rose from 6 cents a bushel in 1530 to 10 cents in 1547 and

33 cents in 1549. It was in 1913 70 cents a bushel. Oats rose from 5

cents a bushel in England in 1530 to 18 cents in 1549; in 1913 38 cents.

[Sidenote: Animals]

Animals sold much lower in the sixteenth century than they do now,

though it must be remembered that they are worth more after several

centuries of careful breeding. Horses then sold at $2.50 in England

and at $4 to $11 in France; the average price in 1913 was $244 for

working animals. Cows were worth $2 in England in 1530; from $4 to

$6.40 in France; oxen apparently came considerably higher, averaging in

England $10 a head in 1547 and in France from $9 to $16 a yoke. At

present they are sold by weight, averaging in 1913 9 cents per lb., or

$90 for one weighing a thousand pounds. Beef then cost about 2/3 of a

cent a pound instead of 40 cents as in 1914. A sheep was sold in 1585

at $1.60, a large swine at $5, and pigs at 26 cents apiece. Pork cost

2 cents a pound; hens sold in England at 12 cents a piece and geese and

ducks for the same; at Wittenberg geese fetched only 6 cents in 1527.

Eggs might have been bought at 2 cents a dozen.

{466} [Sidenote: Groceries]

Wholesale prices of groceries, taken mostly from an English table drawn

up about 1580, were as follows: Oil was $140 the ton, or 55 cents a

gallon; train-oil was just half that price; Newfoundland fish cost then

$2.50 the quintal dry, as against $7.81 in 1913. Gascon wines (claret)

varied according to quality, from 16 cents to 24 cents a quart. Salt

fetched $7.50 a ton, which is very close to the price that it was in

1913 ($1.02 per bbl. of 280 lbs.). Soap was $13 the hundredweight.

Pepper and sugar cost nearly the same, about $70 the hundredweight, or

far higher than they were in 1919, when each cost $11 the

hundredweight. Spices also cost more in the sixteenth century than

they do now, and rose throughout the century. By 1580 the wholesale

price per hundredweight was $224 for cloves, the same for nutmegs, $150

for cinnamon, $300 for mace. Ginger was $90 the hundredweight, and

candles 6.6 cents the lb. as against 7.25 cents now.

[Sidenote: Drygoods]

Drygoods varied immensely in cost. Raw wool sold in England in 1510

for 4 cents per lb., as against 26 cents just four hundred years later.

Fine cloth sold at $65 "the piece," the length and breadth of which it

is unfortunately impossible to determine accurately. Different grades

came in different sizes, averaging a yard in width, but from 18 yards

to 47 yards in length, the finer coming in longer rolls. Sorting

cloths were $45 the piece. Linen cost 20 cents a yard in 1580; Mary,

Queen of Scots, five years later paid $6.50 the yard for purple velvet

and 28 cents the yard for buckram to line the same. The coarse clothes

of the poor were cheaper, a workman's suit in France costing $1.80 in

1600, a child's whole wardrobe $3.40, and a soldier's uniform $4.20.

The prices of the poorest women's dresses ranged from $3 to $6 each.

In 1520 Albert Dürer paid in the Netherlands 17 cents for one pair of

shoes, 33 cents for another and 20 cents for a {467} pair of woman's

gloves. A pair of spectacles cost him 22 cents, a pair of gloves for

himself 38 cents.

[Sidenote: Metals]

Metals were dearer in the sixteenth century than they are now. Iron

cost $60 a ton in 1580 against $22 a ton in 1913. Lead fetched $42 the

ton and tin $15 the cwt. The ratio of gold to silver was about 1 to

11. The only fuel much used was wood, which was fairly cheap but of

course not nearly as efficient as our coal.

[Sidenote: Interest]

Interest, as the price of money, varied then as it does now in inverse

ratio to the security offered by the debtor, and on the whole within

much the same range that it does now. The best security was believed

to be that of the German Free Cities, governed as they were by the

commercial class that appreciated the virtue of prompt and honest

payment. Accordingly, we find that they had no trouble in borrowing at

5 per cent., their bonds taking the form of perpetual annuities, like

the English consols. So eagerly were these investments sought that

they were apportioned on petition as special favors to the creditors.

The cities of Paris and London also enjoyed high credit. The national

governments had to pay far higher, owing to their poverty and

dishonesty. Francis I borrowed at 10 per cent.; Charles V paid higher

in the market of Antwerp, the extreme instance being that of 50 per

cent. per annum. In 1550 he regularly paid 20 per cent., a ruinous

rate that foreshadowed his bankruptcy and was partly caused by its

forecast. Until the recent war we were accustomed to think of the

great nations borrowing at 2-4 per cent., but during the war the rate

immensely rose. Anglo-French bonds, backed by the joint and several

credit of the two nations, sold on the New York Stock Exchange in 1918

at a price that would yield the investor more than 12 per cent., and

City of Paris bonds at a rate of more than 16 per cent.

{468} Commercial paper, or loans advanced by banks to merchants on good

security, of course varied. The lowest was reached at Genoa where from

time to time merchants secured accommodation at 3 per cent. The

average in Germany was 6 per cent. and this was made the legal rate by

Brandenburg in 1565. But usurers, able to take advantage of the

necessities of poor debtors, habitually exacted more, as they do now,

and loans on small mortgages or on pawned articles often ran at 30 per

cent. On the whole, the rate of interest fell slightly during the

century.

[Sidenote: Real estate]

The price of real estate is more difficult to compare than almost

anything, owing to the individual circumstances of each purchase. Land

in France sold at rates ranging from $8 to $240 the acre. Luther

bought a little farm in the country for $340, and a piece of property

in Wittenberg for $500. After his death, in 1564, the house he lived

in, a large and handsome building formerly the Augustinian Cloister,

fetched $2072. The house can be seen today[1] and would certainly, one

would think, now bring fifteen times as much.

[Sidenote: Books]

Books were comparatively cheap. The Greek Testament sold for 48 cents,

a Latin Testament for half that amount, a Latin folio Bible published

in 1532 for $4, Luther's first New Testament at 84 cents. One might

get a copy of the Pandects for $1.60, of Vergil for 10 cents, a Greek

grammar for 8 cents, Demosthenes and Aeschines in one volume at 20

cents, one of Luther's more important tracts for 30 cents and the

condemnation of him by the universities in a small pamphlet at 6 cents.

One of the things that has gone down most in price since that day is

postage. Dürer while in the Netherlands paid a messenger 17 cents to

deliver a {469} letter (or several letters?), presumably sent to his

home in Nuremberg.

[Sidenote: Wages]

In accordance with the general rule that wages follow the trend of

prices sluggishly, whether upwards or downwards, there is less change

to be observed in them throughout the sixteenth century than there is

in the prices of commodities. Subject to government regulation, the

remuneration of all kinds of labor remained nearly stationary while the

cost of living was rising. Startling is the difference in the rewards

of the various classes, that of the manual laborers being cruelly low,

that of professional men somewhat less in proportion to the cost of

living than it is today, and that of government officers being very

high. No one except court officials got a salary over $5000 a year,

and some of them got much more. In 1553 a French chamberlain was paid

$51,000 per annum.

A French navvy received 8 cents a day in 1550, a carpenter as much as

26 cents. A male domestic was given $7 to $12 a year in addition to

his keep and a woman $5 to $6. As the number of working days in

Catholic countries was only about 250 a year, workmen made from $65 to

as low as $20. If anything, labor was worse paid in Germany than it

was in France. Agricultural labor in England was paid in two scales,

one for summer and one for winter. It varied from 3 cents to 7 cents a

day, the smaller sum being paid only to men who were also boarded. In

summer freemasons and master carpenters got from 8 cents to 11 cents

for a terribly long day, in winter 6 cents to 9 cents for a shorter

day. The following scale was fixed by law in England in 1563: A hired

farmer was to have $10 a year and $2 for livery; a common farm hand was

allowed $8.25 and $1.25 extra for livery; a "mean servant" $6 and $1.25

respectively, a man child {470} $4 and $1; a chief woman cook $5 and

$1.60, a mean or simple woman $3 and $1; a woman child $2.50 and $1.

All were of course boarded and lodged.

The pay of French soldiers under Francis I was for privates $28 a year

in time of war; this fell to $1 a year in time of peace; for captains

$33 a month in time of peace and $66 in time of war. Captains in the

English navy received $36 a month; common seamen $1.25 a month for

wages and the same allowance for food.

[Sidenote: Pay of clergymen]

The church fared little better than the army. In Scotland, a poor

country but one in which the clergy were respected, by the law of 1562,

a parson if a single man was given $26 a year, if a married man a

maximum of $78 a year; probably a parsonage was added. Doubtless many

Protestant ministers eked out their subsistence by fees, as the

Catholic priests certainly did. Dürer gave 44 cents to a friar who

confessed his wife. Every baptism, marriage and burial was taxed a

certain amount. In France one could hire a priest to say a mass at

from 60 cents to $7 in 1500, and at from 30 to 40 cents in 1600. At

this price it has remained since, a striking instance of religious

conservatism working to the detriment of the priest, for the same money

represents much less in real wages now than it did then.

[Sidenote: Physicians]

Fees for physicians ranged from 33 to 44 cents a visit in Germany about

1520. Treatment and medicine were far higher. At Antwerp Dürer paid

$2.20 for a small quantity of medicine for his wife. Fees were

sometimes given for a whole course of attendance. In England we hear

of such "cures" paid for at from $3.30 to $5. Very little, if any,

advice was given free to the poor. The physicians for the French king

received a salary of $200 a year and other favors. William Butts,

physician to Henry VIII, had $500 per {471} annum, in addition to a

knighthood; and his salary was increased to over $600 for attending the

Duke of Richmond.

[Sidenote: Teachers]

Teachers in the lower schools were regarded as lackeys and paid

accordingly. Nicholas Udal, head master of Eton, received $50 per

annum and various small allowances. University professors were treated

more liberally. Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg got a maximum of

$224 per annum, which was about the same as the stipend of leading

professors in other German universities and at Oxford and Cambridge.

The teacher also got a small honorarium from each student. When Paul

III restored the Sapienza at Rome he paid a minimum of $17 per annum to

some friars who taught theology and who were cared for by their order,

but he gave high salaries to the professors of rhetoric and medicine.

Ordinarily these received $476 a year, but one professor of the

classics reached the highwater-mark with nearly $800.

[Sidenote: Royalties]

The rewards of literary men were more consistently small in the

sixteenth century than they are now, owing to the absence of effective

copyright. An author usually received a small sum from the printer to

whom he first offered his manuscript, but his subsequent royalties, if

any, depended solely on the goodwill of the publisher. A Wittenberg

printer offered Luther $224 per annum for his manuscripts, but the

Reformer declined it, wishing to make his books as cheap as possible.

In 1512 Erasmus got $8.40 from Badius the Parisian printer for a new

edition of his _Adages_. In fact, the rewards of letters, such as they

were, were indirect, in the form of pensions, gifts and benefices from

the great. Erasmus got so many of these favors that he lived more than

comfortably. Luther died almost a rich man, so many _honoraria_ did he

collect from noble admirers. Rabelais was given a benefice, though

{472} he only lived two years afterwards to enjoy its fruits. Henry

VIII gave $500 to Thomas Murner for writing against Luther. But the

lot of the average writer was hard. Fulsome flattery was the most

lucrative production of the muse.

[Sidenote: Artists]

Artists fared better. Dürer sold one picture for $375 and another for

$200, not counting the "tip" which his wife asked and received on each

occasion from the patron. Probably his woodcuts brought him more from

the printers than any single painting, and when he died he left the

then respectable sum of $32,000. He had been offered a pension of $300

per annum and a house at Antwerp by that city if he would settle there,

but he preferred to return to Nuremberg, where he was pensioned $600 a

year by the emperor. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo both received

$129 a month for work done for a prince, and the latter was given a

pension of $5200 a year by Paul III. Raphael in 1520 left an estate of

$140,000.

[Sidenote: Value of money]

If a comparison of the value of money is made, the final impression

that one gets is that an ounce of gold was in 1563, let us say,

expected to do about ten times as much work as the same weight of

precious metal performed in 1913.[2] If a few articles were then

actually dearer, they were comparatively unimportant and were balanced

by other articles even more than ten times as cheap. But a dollar will

buy so many articles now which did not exist in former ages that a

plausible case can be made out for the paradox that money is now worth

more than it ever was before. If an ounce of gold would in Luther's

time exchange for a much larger quantity of simple necessaries than it

will purchase now, on the other hand a man with an income of $5000 a

year is far better off than a man with the {473} same income, or indeed

with any income, was then.

[Sidenote: Trend of prices]

Notwithstanding the great difficulties of making out any fair index

number representing the cost of living and applicable to long periods,

owing to the fact that articles vary from time to time, as when candles

are replaced by gas and gas by electricity, yet the general trend of

prices can be pretty plainly ascertained. Generally speaking,

prices--measured in weight of gold and not in coin--sank slowly from

1390 till 1520 under the influence of better technical methods of

production and possibly of the draining of gold and silver to the

Orient. From 1520 till 1560 prices rose quite slowly on account of the

increased production of gold and silver and its more rapid circulation

by means of better banking. From 1560 to 1600 prices rose with

enormous rapidity, partly because of the destruction of wealth and

increase in the cost of production following in the wake of the French

and Dutch wars of religion, and still more, perhaps, on account of the

torrent of American silver suddenly poured into the lap of Europe.

Taking the century as a whole, we find that wheat rose the most, as

much as 150 per cent. in England, 200 per cent. in France and 300 per

cent. in Germany. Other articles rose less, and in some cases remained

stationary, or sank in price. Money wages rose slowly, far less than

the cost of living.

[Sidenote: Increase in volume of precious metals]

Apart from special circumstances affecting the production of particular

classes of goods, the main cause of the general trend of prices upwards

was probably the increase in the volume of the precious metals. Just

how great this was, it is impossible to determine, and yet a

calculation can be made, yielding figures near enough the actual to be

of service. From the middle of the fifteenth century there had been a

considerable increase in the production of silver from German, Bohemian

and Hungarian mines. Although this {474} increase was much more than

is usually allowed for--equalling, in the opinion of one scholar, the

produce of American mines until nearly the middle of the sixteenth

century--it was only enough to meet the expanding demands of commerce.

Before America entered the market, there was also a considerable import

of gold from Asia and Africa. The tide of Mexican treasure began to

flood Spain about 1520, but did not reach the other countries in large

quantities until about 1560. When we consider the general impression

concerning the increase of the currency immediately following the

pillage of the Aztecs and Incas, the following statistics of the

English mint are instructive, if they are not enigmatical. During the

first fourteen years of Henry VIII (1509-23) the average amount of gold

minted in England was 24,666 troy pounds per annum, and of silver

31,225 troy pounds. But in the years 1537-40, before the great

debasement of the currency had taken place, the amount of gold coined

fell to 3,297 Troy pounds per annum, and that of silver rose only to

52,974 troy pounds. As each pound of gold was at that time worth as

much as eleven pounds of silver, this means that the actual amount of

new money put into circulation each year in the latter period was less

than a third of that minted in the earlier years. The figures also

indicate the growing cheapness of silver, stimulating its import, while

the import of gold was greatly restricted, according to Gresham's law

that cheap money drives out dear.

[Sidenote: Estimates of gold and silver products]

The spoil of Mexico and Peru has frequently been over-estimated, by

none more extravagantly than by the Conquistadores and their

contemporaries. But the estimates of modern scholars vary enormously.

Lexis believes that the total amount of gold produced by Europe and

America from 1501 to 1550 (the greater part, of course, by America)

amounted to $134,000,000. {475} F. de Laiglesio, on the other hand,

thinks that not more than $4,320,000 was mined in America before 1555.

The most careful estimate, that made by Professor Haring, arrives at

the following results, [Sidenote: Haring's estimate] the amounts being

given in pesos each worth very nearly the same as our dollar. Mexican

production:

1521-44 1345-60

Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . 5,348,900 343,670

Silver . . . . . . . . . . . 4,130,170 22,467,111

For Peru the proportions of gold and silver cannot be separated, but

the totals taken together from 1531-1560 amounted to probably

84,350,600 pesos. Other small sums came from other parts of the New

World, and the final total for production of gold _and_ silver in

America until 1560 is given at 139,720,000 pesos. This is a reduction

to 70 per cent. of the estimate of Lexis. Assuming that the same

correction must be made on all of the estimates given by Lexis we have

the following figures for the world's production of precious metals in

kilogrammes and in dollars:[3]

Gold Silver

Average per annum Average per annum

in

pesos or

dollars

of 25

in kilos in dollars kilos grammes

1493-1520 . . . 4270 3,269,000 31,570 1,262,800 1521-44

. . . 4893 3,425,000 52,010 2,080,400 1545-60 . . .

4718 3,302,600 184,730 7,389,200 1561-80 . . . 4718

3,302,600 185,430 7,417,200 1581-1600 . . . 4641

3,268,700 230,480 9,219,200

{476} Combining these figures we see that the production of gold was

pretty steady throughout the century, making a total output of about

$330,000,000. The production of silver, however, greatly increased

after 1544. From the beginning of the century to that year it amounted

to $75,285,600; from 1545 to 1600 inclusive it increased to

$450,955,200, making a total output for the century of $526,240,800.

Of course these figures only roughly approximate the truth;

nevertheless they give a correct idea of the general processes at work.

Even for the first half of the century the production of the precious

metals was far in excess of anything that had preceded, and this

output, large as it was, was nearly tripled in the last half of the

century. These figures, however, are extremely modest compared with

those of recent times, when more gold is mined in a year than was then

mined in a century. The total amount mined in 1915 was $470,000,000;

in 1917 $428,000,000; for the period 1850 to 1916 inclusive the total

amount mined was $13,678,000,000.

[1] See the photograph in my _Life and Letters of Luther_, p. 364.

[2] No valid comparison can be made for the years after 1913, for in

most nations paper currencies have ousted gold.

[3] These figures are based on those of Sommerlad in the

_Handwörter-buch der Staatswissenschaften_, s.v. "Preis," taken from

Wiebe, who based on Lexis. Figures quite similar to those of Sommerlad

are given by C. F. Bastable in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, s.v.

"Money." I have incorporated Haring's corrections.

SECTION 3. INSTITUTIONS

[Sidenote: The monarchies]

For a variety of reasons the sixteenth century was as monarchical in

mind as the twentieth century is democratic. Immemorial prescription

then had a vigor since lost, and monarchy descended from classical and

biblical antiquity when kings were hedged with a genuine divinity. The

study of Roman law, with its absolutist maxims, aided in the formation

of royalist sentiment. The court as the center of fashion attracted a

brilliant society, while the small man satisfied his cravings for

gentility by devouring the court gossip that even then clogged the

presses. It is probable that one reason why the throne became so

popular was that it was, next to the church, the best advertised {477}

article in the world. But underlying these sentimental reasons for

loyalty there was a basis of solid utility, predisposing men to support

the scepter as the one power strong enough to overawe the nobles. One

tyrant was better than many; one lion could do less harm than a pack of

wolves and hyaenas. In the greater states men felt perfectly helpless

without a king to rule the anarchical chaos into which society would

have dissolved without him. When the Spanish Communes rebelled against

Charles V they triumphed in the field, but their attempt simply

collapsed in face of their utter inability to solve the problem of

government without a royal governor. They were as helpless as bees

without a queen. Indeed, so strong was their instinct to get a royal

head that they tried to preserve themselves by kidnapping Charles's

mother, poor, mad Joanna, to fill the political vacuum that they had

made. So in the civil wars in France; notwithstanding the more

promising materials for the formation of a republic in that country,

all parties were, in fact, headed by claimants to the throne.

[Sidenote: Councils of State]

Next to the king came the Council of State, composed of princes of the

blood, cardinals, nobles and some officers and secretaries of state,

not always of noble blood but frequently, especially in the cases of

the most powerful of them, scions of the middle class. What proportion

of the executive power was wielded by the Council depended on the

personal character of the monarch. Henry VIII was always master;

Elizabeth was more guided than guiding; the Councils of the Valois and

Hapsburgs profited by the preoccupation or the stupidity of their

masters to usurp the royal power for themselves. In public opinion the

Council occupied a great place, similar to that of an English Cabinet

today. The first Anglican prayerbook {478} contains petitions for the

Council, though it did not occur to the people to pray for Parliament

until the next century.

The countries were governed no longer by the nobles as such but by

officials appointed by the crown. It is an indication of the growing

nationalization of policy that the sixteenth century saw the first

establishment of permanent diplomatic agents. The first ambassadors,

selected largely from a panel of bishops, magistrates, judges and

scholars, were expected to function not only as envoys but also as

spies. Under them was a host of secret agents expected to do underhand

work and to take the responsibility for it themselves so that, if found

out, they could be repudiated.

[Sidenote: Parliaments]

Very powerful was the national popular assembly: the Parliament, the

Diet, the States General, or the Cortes. Its functions, prescriptive

and undefined, were commonly understood to include the granting of

taxes. The assent of the body was also required, to a varying degree,

for the sanction of other laws. But the real power of the people's

representatives lay in the fact that they were the chief organ for the

expression of that public opinion which in all countries and at all

times it is unsafe for governments to disregard. Sitting in two or

more chambers to represent the several estates or sometimes--as in the

German Diet--subdivisions of these estates, the representatives were

composed of members of the privileged orders, the clergy and nobility,

and of the elected representatives of the city aristocracies. The

majority of the population, the poor, were unrepresented. That this

class had as great a stake in the commonwealth as any other, and that

they had a class consciousness capable of demanding reforms and of

taking energetic measures to secure them, is shown by a number of

rebellions of the proletariat, and yet it is not unfair to them, or

{479} disdainful, to say that on most matters they were too

uninstructed, too powerless and too mute to contribute much to that

body of sentiment called public opinion, one condition of which seems

to be that to exist it must find expression.

[Sidenote: Influence of the Estates General]

The Estates General, by whatever name they were called, supplemented in

France by provincial bodies called Parlements partaking of the nature

of high courts of justice, and in Germany by the local Diets (Landtag)

of the larger states, exercised a very real and in some cases a

decisive influence on public policy. The monarch of half the world

dared not openly defy the Cortes of Aragon or of Castile; the imperious

Tudors diligently labored to get parliamentary sanction for their

tyrannical acts, and, on the few occasions when they could not do so,

hastened to abandon as gracefully as possible their previous

intentions. In Germany the power of the Diet was not limited by the

emperor, but by the local governments, though even so it was

considerable. When a Diet, under skilful manipulation or by

unscrupulous trickery, was induced by the executive to pass an

unpopular measure, like the Edict of Worms, the law became a dead

letter. In some other instances, notably in its long campaign against

monopolies, even when it expressed the popular voice the Diet failed

because the emperor was supported by the wealthy capitalists. Only

recently it has been revealed how the Fuggers of Augsburg and their

allies endeavored to manipulate or to frustrate its work in the matter

of government regulation of industry and commerce.

[Sidenote: Public finance]

The finances of most countries were managed corruptly and unwisely.

The taxes were numerous and complicated and bore most heavily on the

poor. From ordinary taxes in most countries the privileged orders were

exempt, though they were forced to contribute {480} special sums levied

by themselves. The general property tax (taille) in France yielded

2,400,000 livres tournois in 1517 and 4,600,000 in 1543. The taxes

were farmed; that is, the right of collecting them was sold at auction,

with the natural result that they were put into the hands of

extortioners who made vast fortunes by oppressing the people. Revenues

of the royal domain, excises on salt and other articles, import and

export duties, and the sale of offices and monopolies, supplemented the

direct taxes. The system of taxation varied in each country. Thus in

Spain the 10 per cent. tax on the price of an article every time it was

sold and the royalty on precious metals--20 per cent. after

1504--proved important sources of revenue. Rome drove a lucrative

trade in spiritual wares. Everywhere, fines for transgressions of the

law figured more largely as a source of revenue than they do nowadays.

[Sidenote: Wasteful expenditures]

Expenditures were both more wasteful and more niggardly than they are

today. Though the service of the public debt was trifling compared

with modern standards, and though the administration of justice was not

expensive because of the fee system, the army and navy cost a good

deal, partly because they were composed largely of well paid

mercenaries. The personal extravagances of the court were among the

heaviest burdens borne by the people. The kings built palaces: they

wallowed in cloth of gold; they collected objects of art; they

squandered fortunes on mistresses and minions; they made constant

progresses with a retinue of thousands of servants and horses. The two

greatest states, France and Spain, both went into bankruptcy in 1557.

[Sidenote: Public order]

The great task of government, that of keeping public order, protecting

life and property and punishing the criminal, was approached by our

forbears with more gusto than success. The laws were terrible, but

they {481} were unequally executed. In England among capital crimes

were the following: murder, arson, escape from prison, hunting by night

with painted faces or visors, embezzling property worth more than 40

shillings, carrying horses or mares into Scotland, conjuring,

practising witchcraft, removing landmarks, desertion from the army,

counterfeiting or mutilating coins, cattle-lifting, house-breaking,

picking of pockets. All these were punished by hanging, but crimes of

special heinousness, such as poisoning, were visited with burning or

boiling to death. The numerous laws against treason and heresy have

already been described. Lesser punishments included flogging, pillory,

branding, the stocks, clipping ears, piercing tongues, and imprisonment

in dungeons made purposely as horrible as possible, dark, noisome dens

without furniture or conveniences, often too small for a man to stand

upright or to lie at full length.

[Sidenote: Number of executions]

With such laws it is not surprising that 72,000 men were hanged under

Henry VIII, an average of nearly 2,000 a year. The number at present,

when the population of England and Wales has swollen to tenfold of what

it was then, is negligible. Only nine men were hanged in the United

Kingdom in the years 1901-3; about 5,000 are now on the average

annually convicted of felony. If anything, the punishments were

harsher on the Continent than in Britain. The only refuge of the

criminal was the greed of his judges. At Rome it was easy and regular

to pay a price for every crime, and at other places bribery was more or

less prevalent.

[Sidenote: Cruel trial methods]

The methods of trying criminals were as cruel as their punishments. On

the Continent the presumption was held to be against the accused, and

the rack and its ghastly retinue of instruments of pain were freely

used to procure confession. Calvin's hard saying that when men felt

the pain they spoke the truth merely {482} expressed the current

delusion, for legislators and judges, their hearts hardened in part by

the example of the church, concurred in his opinion. The exceptional

protest of Montaigne deserves to be quoted for its humanity: "All that

exceeds simple death is absolute cruelty, nor can our laws expect that

he whom the fear of decapitation or hanging will not restrain should be

awed by imagining the horrors of a slow fire, burning pincers or

breaking on the wheel."

The spirit of the English law was against the use of torture, which,

however, made progress, especially in state trials, under the Tudors.

A man who refused to plead in an English court was subjected to the

_peine forte et dure_, which consisted in piling weights on his chest

until he either spoke or was crushed to death. To enforce the laws

there was a constabulary in the country, supplemented by the regular

army, and a police force in the cities. That of Paris consisted of 240

archers, among them twenty-four mounted men. The inefficiency of some

of the English officers is amusingly caricatured in the persons of

Dogberry and Verges who, when they saw a thief, concluded that he was

no honest man and the less they had to meddle or make with him the more

for their honesty.

[Sidenote: Blue laws]