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July 2006
Parish History Episode 63 New Worlds
When Robert Kent was inducted in 1500 as Rector of Houghton-le-Spring, he was probably the only man in the parish to have the benefit of a university education. He, more probably then any other persons in Houghton, appreciated the changes occurring in the World: changes so fundamental that, among many other innovations, a whole New World had been revealed to Christian eyes, just about doubling the known surface of the Globe.
In 1492 a Spanish expedition, led by Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator, had sailed due West from Spain, in the hope of discovering Asia and the Far East, it being correctly believed that the Portuguese, who had been creeping on year by year round the coasts of Africa, were on the verge of completing their task, and opening up a new route for commerce between Europe and India, a route which did not have to pass through, and pay toll to, the Turkish Empire, which then controlled all the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean, and seemed to block the direct route to India.
Columbus sailed on and on, towards the setting sun. Some three thousand miles West of Spain, he at last reached land. Believing it to be Asia, the Spaniards called its inhabitants “Indians”, but in the course of the next twenty or thirty years, it became apparent that what Columbus had discovered was a whole new continent, and that another ocean, wider even than the Atlantic, lay between this New World and the real Asia.
By that time, however, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama had, in 1497, reached the real India, by sailing round Africa. He returned to Lisbon with a fleet of ships laden with spices and other valuables. Spanish ships were, by then, returning to Cadiz, laden with gold and silver and other precious metals.
One result of these Great Discoveries was that Western Man, whether dwelling South or North of the Pyrenees, became a lot more confident of his own capabilities. The enterprise, courage and resolution of those Spanish and Portuguese seamen had achieved all this, it might seem, without resource to the schooling of the priests or the logic of the philosophers (though prayers and books were by no means neglected in their enterprises). What they had achieved in navigation, others might achieve, by their own efforts, in other fields, and so began the first steps towards a scientific and rational view of the world, a view which was increasingly to differentiate European thought from the wisdom of other cultures.
It might be thought that Spain would have been at the forefront of such developments. But, for Spain, 1492 was not only the year in which the continent which we call America was discovered. It was also the year when the Emirate of Granada, the last Moorish foot·hold in Spain, fell to the Christians. And also it was the year that the Spanish Crown decided to rid the land of all those who did not accept the authority of the Church, who did not believe as the Church taught. That year, all Jews were ordered to leave Spain, or to be baptised. Ten years later, the same fate befell the Moors.
Some Moors departed for North Africa, but most accepted baptism, and remained in Spain, and the same was also true of the Jews. The population of Spain came now to include hundreds of thousands of “New Christians”, persons of Moslem or Jewish origin or descent, and there were many who doubted the sincerity of these peoples’ conversions. To police the situation, and to punish back-sliding, the Inquisition was given extensive powers, and the inquisitors began a process of investigating the opinions of all those citizens whose piety was deemed insufficient or mis-directed, questioning them by torture, and executing those who were found not to be true followers of Christ.
The result was that, just as the rest of Christendom was extending its mental reach in order to comprehend new discoveries, whether in geography or in science, the Spanish nation, which had made so many of these discoveries, had isolated itself from much of the benefits of the New Learning, through giving over control of the nation’s conscience to a college of dogma-bound zealots, who were so concerned to make sure that no false opinions were held that it became money supply took place. Those living closest to the land, such as the farmers and hinds of Houghton, possibly suffered least, but those living at the end of the chain of production, such as kings, soon found themselves in difficulties, and unable to pay for the wars they indulged in. They soon came to look with envy on what they saw as the wealth of the Church, and felt that it was their duty to make use of this wealth for the good of all, for instance for paying their soldiers. These soldiers were soon to find employment. The Italy of this time, the centre of the movement known as the dangerous to hold almost any opinion on any matters close to theology, philosophy or science.
Some might have thought that Spain gained in Wealth ample compensation for what it failed to grasp in Wisdom. It seemed that every wind from the Indies brought back to the shores of Spain galleons laden with treasure. But these galleons brought, not wealth, as men at first fondly imagined, but economic problems. The influx of gold and silver into Spain, and thence, as the Spaniards bought commodities from abroad, into the rest of Europe, meant that it was possible to mint many more coins, and, this being done, a great inflation of the money supply took place. Those living closest to the land, such as the farmers and hinds of Houghton, possibly suffered least, but those living at the end of the chain of production, such as kings, soon found themselves in difficulties, and unable to pay for the wars they indulged in. They soon came to look with envy on what they saw as the wealth of the Church, and felt that it was their duty to make use of this wealth for the good of all, for instance for paying their soldiers.
These soldiers were soon to find employment. The Italy of this time, the centre of the movement known as the Renaissance - the Rebirth of Learning - and the financial and industrial powerhouse of Europe, was about to be disrupted by a series of wars. King Charles VIII of France believed that he had a claim to the Throne of Naples, then ruled by princes of the House of Aragon (in Spain), and thus under Spanish influence, and in 1494 King Charles attempted to march right down the length of Italy in order to make good his claim.
His army seized Florence, the wealthiest of the merchant republics of Italy, on the way South, but had to fight hard against the armies of the Pope of Rome (Alexander VI, a Spaniard whose personal name, Rodrigo Borgia, has become notorious as an example of the worldliness and corruption of the Renaissance Papacy) and of the King of Naples, and then the Spanish Crown despatched armies to Italy to oppose the French.
The French were soon in difficulties, and then they lost control of Florence to a Dominican friar, a preacher called Savonarola, who denounced the corruption of the Church of his day, and persuaded the people of Florence to surrender thousands of works of art and decoration, which went into “a Bonfire of the Vanities”. When the Pope rebuked him, Savonarola denounced the moral short-comings of the Borgia pope, who of course excommunicated the selfrighteous friar, and then, after a party of sinful men had succeeded in capturing Florence from Savonarola’s supporters, the excommunicate friar was condemned as a heretic, and burnt at the stake.
Savonarola’s brief control of Florence, the wealthiest city in Christendom, had made news all over Europe, and many learnèd and pious Christians were now beginning to feel alarm: at the corruption at Rome; at the unsuccessful revolution in Florence, and the grisly end of Savonarola; and at the increased powers of the Inquisition, particularly in Spain, which seemed to be in danger of smothering all debate and all piety.
And on top of that, everybody except subsistence farmers was feeling poorer and more insecure, as the influx of gold from the Indies sent prices soaring.
If all these factors were denting Western Man’s new-found selfconfidence, a yet nastier shock came from the spread of diseases in the wake of the Spanish voyages which had opened up contacts between the Old World and the New. While the Spaniards unintentionally exported smallpox and measles to the American Indians, which killed them in their millions, they equally unintentionally imported syphilis into Europe.
This new disease fell upon the gay, irresponsible, optimistic world of the Renaissance like a Judgment from Heaven. It spread with frightening sudden·ness throughout society, in much the same way as AIDS has spread during the last quarter century or so.
Syphilis first attracted attention when it became virulent in 1494, in the camps of the Spanish army, which had landed in Italy to oppose the French (perhaps some of the soldiers there had sailed with Columbus two years earlier). From the weakened Spanish army, it spread first to the Italian civil population, and then, impartially, to the French armies opposing the Spaniards. In the following year, when a truce was called, and many regiments were disbanded, returning veterans brought it back to their home countries, and thence it spread further afield, entering England in 1497. Large numbers of those afflicted died, while those who recovered generally found themselves weakened and scarred for life.
As with AIDS, it was realised from the first that abstinence before marriage and faithfulness within marriage were the only sure ways of avoiding infection. Of course, soldiers and sailors did not live by these rules, and so their behaviour spread it all over the known world, and moralists regularly denounced their sinful lives. But public opinion also came to query the life-style of the clergy. Although they took vows of celibacy, it was wellknown that many priests were lax in their observation of that obligation: indeed, with an example like Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI, 1492-1503) in the Vatican, it was not surprising to find that some parish priests sat easily to their obligations. However, though the behaviour of the clergy can hardly have been anything like so flagrant as that of soldiers in camp or sailors in port, there seems to have been an increasing tendency to blame the clergy for the spread of syphilis.
The disease spread of course to the rich and powerful and learnèd, as well as to simple soldiers and parish priests. Pope Julius II (1503-1513), King Henry VIII (1509-1547) and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the hero of next month’s article, were all reputed to have died of syphilis.
None of this led inevitably to what we call the Reformation. But the popes and the parish priests were blamed for the horrors that now overtook society. Of course, their behaviour was irrelevant to the real causes of the Reformation. In Russia and the East, priests were married, but that did not make them Protestants. Kings needed cash, but they did not have to take it from the Church. And if they did so, that in itself did not compel them to reform the doctrines of the Church.
But, rightly or wrongly, that was how it was to be.
Dick Toy
