The Reformation by Will Durant
For I see nothing in tomorrow’s world, Grievously sad and all disorderly, Comprising every evil in its deeds. Today the time of tribulation comes.
* The year has changed his mantle cold
Of wind, of rain, of bitter air;
And he goes clad in cloth of gold,
Of laughing sun and season fair;
No bird or beast of wood or wold
But doth with cry or song declare,
The year lays down his mantle cold.57
* O God! how good it is to see her,
Gracious one, so good and fair!
For all choice virtues that are in her
Each will offer praises rare.
Who then can weary of her beauty,
Fresh each day beyond compare?
O God! how good it is to see her,
Gracious one, so good and fair!
† Salute for me all the company
Where now you meet in comradery,
And say how gladly I would be
One of their band if it could be;
Age holds me in captivity,
In time long past Youth joyously
Governed my life; gone now is he.
Lover was I, ne’er more must be;
In Paris led a life so free.
Good-by, good times I ne’er shall see!...
Salute for me all the company.
* Reproduced in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
* Tell me where, in what land of shade,
Bides fair Flora of Rome, and where
Are Thaïs and Archipiade,
Cousins-german of beauty rare,
And Echo, more than mortal fair,
That, when one calls by river-flow,
Or marish, answers out of the air?
But what is become of last year’s snow? 27
* Cf. Shakespeare’s caricature of Jack Cade: “There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny.... I will make it a felony to drink small beer; all the realm shall be in common.... And here... I charge and command that of the city’s cost the pissing conduit run nothing but claret wine.... Henceforth all things shall be in common.”—2 Henry VI, iv, 2,6.
* In this volume Netherlands and Lowlands will be used in their original sense as approximately embracing both modern Belgium and Holland.
* Also known as Les heures de Turin. Some of these miniatures were destroyed in the fire of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Turin in 1904; but photographic reproductions of these remain, and several originals survive in Turin’s Museo Civ$$$.
* The Adoration of the Lamb has survived many restorations and vicissitudes. It was retouched in 1550, 1663, 1825, 1829, 1859, 1936, 1951. The major portions were removed by the French Revolutionary Army to Paris in 1794, and were returned in 1816. The wings (without Adam and Eve) were sold to an art dealer (1816), were bought by the Berlin Museum (1821), and were restored to Ghent by the Treaty of Versailles (1919). In the second World War the polyptych was removed to France for protection; in 1942 it was taken by the Germans; in 1944 it was hidden in Austrian salt mines; in 1946 it was restored to its chapel in the church of St. Bavon by the Army of the United States.10
* Uncertainly attributed to him are five paintings: an Annunciation (New York); The Three Maries at the Sepulcher (Vierhouten, van Beuningen Collection); a small Madonna in Frankfurt; and two wings of an altarpiece (New York), representing the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment with almost Boschian diablerie.
* Also known as the “Mazarin Bible,” because it was discovered about 1760 in the library left by that cardinal. Forty-six copies survive. The Morgan Library of New York in 1953 paid $75,000 to a Swiss monastery for a “Constance Missal” which it believes was printed by Gutenberg before the Bible, probably in 1452.
* The French, confusing the Bohemian exiles with Gypsies who in the fifteenth century were entering Western Europe, supposedly from Bohemia, made Bohème their word for Gypsy. The name Gypsy is a corruption of Egyptian, and reflects the claim of the tribe to have come from “Little Egypt.” Burton traces them to India.17 In Byzantine lands they took the name Rom—i.e., (eastern) Roman; in the Balkans and Central Europe they were called by variants of Atzigan (Czigany, Zigeuner, Zingari), a word of uncertain origin. In European records they first appear in the early fourteenth century as wandering groups of craftsmen, musicians, dancers, fortunetellers, and—in general belief—thieves. By 1414 they reached Germany, by 1422 Italy, by 1427 France, by 1500 England. Usually they accepted baptism, but they took religion and the Commandments lightly, and soon ran afoul of the Inquisition. They were expelled from Spain (1499), the Holy Roman Empire (1500, 1548), and France (1561). Aside from the gay varicolored dress and ornaments of their more prosperous women, their contribution to civilization lay in dancing and music—whose alternations of sadness and exuberance have inspired some major composers.
* The unit of Castilian currency in the fifteenth century was the copper maravedi; 18.7 of these equaled an Aragonese sueldo; 34 made a silver real; 374 made a gold escudo or ducat. The fluctuations of currencies make it especially hazardous to suggest modern equivalents for these coins. But as the wage of a day laborer in fifteenth-century Spain was some six maravedis per day, we shall hardly exaggerate if we equate the maravedi with $.067 in the United States currency of 1954, the sueldo with $1.20, the real with $2.28, and the escudo with S25.00.21
* “The Catholic Sovereigns”—a title conferred upon Ferdinand and Isabella by Pope Alexander VI in 1404.
* Juan Antonio Llorente, a Spanish priest, was general secretary of the Inquisition from 1789 to 1801. In 1809 he was commissioned by Joseph Bonaparte to examine the archives of the Inquisition and write its history. He left Spain with the retreating French, and published his history of the Inquisition in Paris in 1817.
* Covering 125,000 square feet. St. Peter’s covers 230,000; the Mosque of Córdoba 160,000.
* Complutum (fruitful) was the old Latin name of Alcalá.
* The tale of “Buridan’s ass” is not found in his extant works, but is a tradition of respectable age; it may have occurred in one of his lectures. Jean had argued that the will, on fronting alternatives, is compelled to choose whichever the intellect judges the more advantageous. Consequently, some wit concluded, a hungry ass placed at equal distances from two equally attractive bales of hay would have no reason for preferring either, and—other food lacking—would starve to death.
* Cf. The Renaissance , pp. 534–7.
* All these private contributions were later repaid by the government. Santander was summoned before the Inquisition July 17, 1491, on charges unknown; he was “reconciled,” but apparently relapsed into heresy or Judaism, for all his property was confiscated; Ferdinand, however, restored it to his children.8
* This settlement, the “Fuggerei,” still exists. It charges forty-two pfennigs (eighty-six cents) per family per year.
* For other dubious interpretations cf. Panofsky, Dürer, I, 156–71.
* Out animal ancestors seem to have been vegetarians when they could not get lice; but our human ancestors were apparently hunters, and therefore meat-eaters, for 50,000 years before the discovery of agriculture. Dietetic arguments from history are treacherous.
* An expectancy was a promise of appointment to a benefice in anticipation of the incumbent’s death or removal. The postponement of appointments was often due to the rule that between the death of one bishop and the selection of his successor the revenues of the see went to the Roman Curia.
* In 1485 the domains of the house of Wettin were divided into two regions. The smaller but richer part, containing Leipzig and Dresden, was given to the younger son, Duke Albert, and became known as Ducal or Albertine Saxony. The larger but less populous portion, including Wittenberg and Weimar, was assigned to the elder brother, the Imperial Elector Ernest, and came to be known as Electoral or Ernestine Saxony. This division proved of some moment in the Reformation.
* We cannot fully authenticate the famous
* Or, as we should now say, man is born with instincts fitted for the hunting stage but requiring persistent restraint in civilization.
† Cf. the Beatitudes, Matt. 5 : 3-10
* It has been replaced in Lutheran practice by collective confession of sinfulness, followed by a general absolution.
* A branch of the Anabaptists migrated (1719) from Germany to Pennsylvania, and settled in or near Germantown, Philadelphia; these “Dunkers” now number some 200,000. In 1874 many Anabaptists of Moravian descent left Russia and settled in South Dakota and Alberta. In eastern Pennsylvania the “Amish” Mennonites-named from a seventeenth-century leader, Jakob Amen-still officially reject razors, buttons, railroads, automobiles, motion pictures, newspapers, even tractors, but their farms are among the tidiest and most prosperous in America. The world total of Mennonites in 1949 was 400,000.70
* Recess is the accepted mistranslation of Abschied, which, like the better rendering, decision, meant a cutting off—a concluding decree to govern conduct between the adjournment and reconvening of a conference.
* The principle is named after the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus (1524–83), but cannot, be found explicitly in his works.
* Calvin, by charging them with moral laxity, gave the word libertine its new connotation.
* In 1903 a monument was raised to Servetus at Champel. First on the list of contributors to the cost was the Consistory of the Reformed Church of Geneva.72
* Almost certainly legendary is the story of the lawyer who, when his wife, La Belle Ferronière (The Pretty Ironmonger), was conscripted to the royal bed, deliberately infected himself and gave her syphilis that she might give it to the king.2
* The duel had existed in the Middle Ages as an appeal, under royal or judicial sanction and control, to the judgment of God. In the sixteenth century it became a private and individual defense of slighted honor; it developed its own strict laws outside the laws of the state; and it shared in some measure in developing the rules of gentlemanly courtesy and discreet restraint. It was not legally permitted in France after 1547, but public opinion continued to sanction it. In England it fell into disuse under Elizabeth; trial by combat, however, remained legal there till 1817.
* There is no truth in the story, spread by Hugo in Le rot s’amuse, that Diane bought the pardon by giving herself to the King.67
* But Erasmus’ ecclesiastical friends, Dean Colet, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, and Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, were generous and devoted friends of learning.
* Depreciation of the currency now exempts governments from such honest burglary.
* “Howbeit, there be swine that receive no learning but to defile it; and there be dogs that rend all good learning with their teeth.... . To such dogs men may not only preach, but must with whips and bats beat them well and keep them from tearing of good learning with their teeth .... till they lie still and hearken what is said unto them. And by such means be both swine kept from doing harm, and dogs fall sometimes so well to learning, that .... they learn to dance after their master’s pipe, such an effectual thing is punishment, whereas bare teaching will not suffice. And who be now more properly such dogs than be those heretics that bark against the blessed sacraments? .... And who be more properly such hogs than these heretics of our days, of such a filthy kind as never came before, which in such wise defile all holy vowed chastity .... into an unclean shameful liberty of friars to wed nuns.” 51
* In 1500 the Pale was confined to half the counties of Dublin, Meath, and Louth, and a portion of Kildare
* A London jail so named from its proximity to the Fleet Stream, an estuary (now covered) of the Thames.
* The chief source for the Marian persecution is John Foxe’s Rerum in ecclesia gestarum commentarii (1559), translated into English as Acts and Monuments (1563), and familiarly known as The Book of Martyrs. This vivid description of the trials and deaths of the Protestants became, next to the Bible, a cherished household possession among the Puritans; and though the Jesuit Father Parsons published (1603) five volumes assailing its accuracy, it had a powerful influence in forming the mood of Oliver Cromwell’s England. Many Protestant churchmen have criticized it for exaggeration, misquotation, prejudice, and carelessness with details; 55 a Catholic historian compares it, in reliability, with medieval legends of the saints, but concludes that, though many details are dubious, “no one doubts that these events did so happen.” 56
* “By idolatry,” Knox wrote in 1560, “we understand the Mass, invocation of saints, adoration of images, and the keeping and retaining of the same, and all honoring of God not contained in His Holy Word.” 35
* Strieltsi from strielati, to fire; Cossack (Russian Kazak) probably from Turki quzzag, adventurer.
* This, however, is from Timur’s Memoirs (v, 1), supposedly dictated by him in last years, but of doubtful authenticity.
* Not tin 1930 was the city officially renamed Istanbul.
* Agricola rejected as useless the divining rod or “forked twig” then often employed to detect metals under the soil. Our Geiger counters incline us to look with lenience upon these hopeful rods.
* Pius X (1903) and Pius XII (1955) felt it necessary to repeat these instructions.
* Book five was published in 1562, nine years after Rabelais’ death. Probably the first fifteen chapters were left by Rabelais;31 the remaining thirty-two are of doubtful authenticity.
* A prose translation seems better than an awkward forcing of rhymes and idioms into alien forms: “When you shall be very old, seated at evening beside the fire, chatting and sewing by candlelight, you will recite my poems, and marveling will say, ‘Ronsard blazoned my name when I was fair.’ Then no one of your helpers, though half lulled to sleep by the murmur of their looms, but, hearing these words, will rouse themselves at the sound of my name, blessing your fate to have such deathless praise. I shall be then beneath the earth, a phantom without bones; I shall be taking my repose beneath the shade of myrtle trees. You, an old woman bent before your hearth, will then regret my love and your proud disdain. Live now, believe me, wait not for tomorrow; gather the roses of life that bloom today!”
* Alexander Barclay made a similar adaptation of Brant in The Shyp of Folys (1509), adding some Scottish darts of his own.
* “Little Lazarus,” referring to the beggar of that name in Luke 16; then “little beggar”; then a boy leading a blind beggar.
* For islamic science, cf. Chapter XXX; for Jewish science, Chapter XXXII; for Italian science, Chapter XIX of The Renaissance.
* A canon is a clergyman on the staff of a cathedral. He need not be a priest. No clear evidence exists that Copernicus rose from minor orders to the priesthood before his later years. In 1537 he was recommended for a bishopric, which would indicate that he was then a priest.29
† An epicycle is a circle whose center is borne on the circumference of a larger circle. An eccentric is a circle not having the same center as another circle contained in some measure within it.
* Current astronomy supposes nine planets and periods of revolution: Mercury (88 days), Venus (225), earth (365.26), Mars (687), Jupiter (11.86 years), Saturn (26.46 years), Uranus (84.02 years), Neptune (164.79 years), and Pluto (248 years).
* Spanish piety celebrates in a solemn holy day, each August 27, the memory of this transfixing vision.
* Note that Luther went through the same fears of hell, the same penitential austerities, the same release through faith in the redeeming sacrifice of Christ, that motived the career of Ignatius.
* “Before the Lutheran revolt,” says one of the Church’s most powerful and erudite critics, “there was much liberty of thought and speech allowed throughout Catholic
Will Durant, The Reformation