Author: Will Durant
Category: Nonfiction
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Son of a Louvain blacksmith, Massys was received into the painters’ guild of St. Luke at Antwerp in 1491, aged twenty-five. St. Luke, however, would hardly have approved The Feast of Herod, where Herodias prods with a carving knife the severed head of the Baptist, nor The Entombment of Christ, where Joseph of Arimathea plucks blood clots from the hair of the bloodless corpse. Having married twice and buried seven children, Massys had some steel in his fiber, some acid in his oils. So he catches a courtesan in the act of cozening an old moneylender out of his coin; and in a gentler mood he shows a banker counting his gold while his wife looks on in mingled appreciation and jealousy. Yet Massys’ Madonnas are more human than Memling’s; one (in Berlin) kisses and fondles her Child as any mother would; and the bright blue, purple, and red of her garments accentuate her beauty When it came to portraiture Massys could penetrate behind the face to the character more successfully than Memling, as in the remarkable Study for a Portrait in the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. It was to Massys that Peter Gillis turned when (1517) he wished to send to Thomas More faithful similitudes of Erasmus and himself. Quentin did well with Gillis, but his Erasmus had the ill luck to be followed by Holbein’s. When Dürer (1520) and Holbein (1526) came to Antwerp it was to Massys that they paid their highest respects as the dean of Flemish art.
Meanwhile, however, there had appeared in Brabant the most original and absurd artist in Flemish history. Here and there in Massys—as in the leering mob in Christ Shown to the People (Madrid), or the ugly faces in an Adoration of the Magi (New York)—were such gnarled and brutal heads as Leonardo drew in the satirical byplay of his pen. Hieronymus Bosch made a successful business of such grotesqueries. Born, and spending most of his life, in Bois-le-Duc (in northern Brabant, now southern Holland), he came to be known by its Flemish name, ‘s Hertogenbosch, finally Bosch. For a time he painted the usual religious themes, and in some, like the Adoration of the Magi in Madrid, he verged on normality. But his sense of the ridiculous came to dominate his imagination and his art. Perhaps in chilhood he had been frightened by medieval tales of imps and ghosts, of demons starting from behind any rock or sprouting from a tree; now he would caricature those hobgoblins in curative satire, and laugh them out of mind. He resented with an artist’s sensitivity the botches of humanity—the bizarre or ugly or deformed—and depicted them with a macabre mixture of wrath and glee. Even in idyllic scenes like The Nativity (Cologne) he gave the foreground to the nose of a cow; in The Adoration of the Magi (New York) peasants peek through windows and archways at the Virgin and her Child. Yet in this last picture he painted with consummate draftsmanship a majestic St. Peter and a Negro king whose stately dignity puts the other figures in the shade. But as Bosch proceeded with the story of Christ he darkened the pictures with bestial faces, ferocious eyes, enormous noses, grimly protruding and voracious lips. Passing to the legends of the saints, he portrayed a surprisingly tender St. John the Evangelist in an unusual landscape of islands and sea; but in a corner he placed a contemplative devil—with a monkish cowl, rat’s tail, and entomological legs—patiently waiting to inherit the earth. In The Temptation of St. Anthony he surrounded the desperate anchorite with gay courtesans and weird imaginings—a dwarf with legs rooted in his shoulders, a bird with the legs of a goat, a jug with the legs of a cow, a rat bestridden by a witch, a minstrel capped with a horse’s skull. Bosch took the grotesques from the Gothic cathedrals, and made a world of them.
He was anything but a realist. Now and then he drew a scene from life, as in The Prodigal’s Son, but there too he exaggerated the ugliness, the poverty, and the fear. His Hay Ride is no merrymaking in the month of May, but a bitter illustration of “all flesh is grass.”19 Atop the load all is ideal: a youth plays music for a girl who sings; behind them two lovers kiss, and an angel kneels; above them Christ hovers in the clouds. But on the ground a murderer stabs his fallen enemy, a procuress invites a lass to prostitution, a quack sells panaceas, a fat priest receives offerings from nuns, the cart wheels crush some careless celebrants. At the right a company of devils, aided by apes, drag the damned into hell. Philip II, King of Spain and gloom, hung this piece in his Escorial. Near it he placed a companion piece, The Pleasures of the World. Around a pool, in which naked men and women bathe, rides a procession of nudes on animals partly zoological, partly phantasmagorical; spikes and thorns enter the picture from every side; in the foreground two nudes clasp each other in a waltz, while a huge bird gazes on them in philosophical amusement. One shutter shows the creation of Eve as the source of all evil; another displays the tortures and contortions of the damned. It is a marvel of composition, of clever drawing, of diseased imagination—veritable Bosch.
Can it be that even in the dawn of modernity there were millions of simple and impressionable Christians who had nightmares like these? Was Bosch one such? Hardly, for in a portrait of him in the library at Arras he is shown in old age, in full vigor of mind and sharpness of eye; he is a man of the world who has survived his satirical rage, and can look upon life with the humor of one who will soon be out of the mess. He could not have painted these ghoulish fancies so skillfully if they had still possessed him. He stood above them, not so much amused as angry that humanity had ever harbored them. That his contemporaries enjoyed his productions as pictorial pranks rather than as theological terrors appears from the wide market found by prints made from engravings of his works. A generation later Pieter Brueghel would exorcise these devils, and transform these hobgoblins into a healthy and jolly multitude; and four centuries later neurotic artists would reflect the neuroses of their time by painting sarcastic fantasies redolent of Hieronymus Bosch.
A more conventional figure closed this chapter in Flemish painting. Born in Maubeuge, and thence also named Mabuse, Jan Gossaert came to Antwerp in 1503, probably after learning his art from David in Bruges. In 1507 he was invited to the court of Duke Philip of Burgundy—one of Philip the Good’s erotic by-products. Jan accompanied the Duke to Italy, and returned with some finesse added to his brush, and a flair for nudes and pagan mythologies; his Adam and Eve made the unclothed body attractive for the first time in Flemish art. Mary with the Child and Angels and St. Luke Drawing the Madonna echoed Italy in their fat cherubs and Renaissance architectural backgrounds, and The Agony in the Garden may have owed to Italy its brilliant representation of moonlight. But Gossaert’s forte was portraiture. No Fleming since Jan van Eyck had turned out such a searching character study as the Jan Carondelet in the Louvre; here the artist concentrated on face and hands, and revealed the moneyed ancestry, the stoic administrator, the mind made somber by the burdens of authority. Massys had brought to an end that first line of Flemish painting which had reached nobility in the Van Eycks; Gossaert imported from Italy those novelties of technique, elegances of ornament, graces of line, subtleties of chiaroscuro and portraiture, that would in the sixteenth century (barring Brueghel) turn Flemish painting from its native skill and genius, and leave it in suspended excellence until its culmination under Rubens and Van Dyck.
Charles the Bold left no son, but he had betrothed his daughter Mary to Maximilian of Austria in the hope that the Hapsburgs would protect Burgundy from France. When Louis XI nevertheless appropriated the duchy, Mary fled to Ghent. There, as the price of being accepted as their constitutional sovereign by Flanders, Brabant, Hainaut, and Holland, she signed the Groote Privilegie (February 1477), which pledged her to enter into no marriage, levy no taxes, declare no war, without the consent of the “Estates” or assemblies of the signatory provinces. By this and later charters, including the Joyeuse Entrie, as Brabant termed its own grant of local liberty, the Netherlands began a century-long struggle for independence. But Mary’s marriage to Maximilian (August 1477) brought the powerful Hapsburgs into the Lowlands. When Mary died (1482) Maximilian became regent. When Maximilian was elected emperor (1494) he transmitted the regency to his son Philip. When Philip died (1506) his sister, Margaret of Austria, was appointed governor-general by the Emperor
. When Philip’s son, the future Charles V, then fifteen, was declared of age (1515), the Netherlands became part of a vast Hapsburg empire under one of the crattiest and most ambitious rulers in history. Thereby would hang a tale.
CHAPTER VII
Middle Europe
1300–1460
I. LAND AND LABOR
SINCE man lives by permission of physical geography, it is his fate to be divided by mountains, rivers, and seas into groups that develop, in semi-isolation, their diverging languages and creeds, their climatically conditioned features, customs, and dress. Driven by insecurity to suspect the strange, he dislikes and condemns the alien, outlandish looks and ways of other groups than his own. All those fascinating varieties of terrain—mountains and valleys, fiords and straits, gulfs and streams—that make Europe a panorama of diverse delight, have broken the population of a minor continent into a score of peoples cherishing their differences, and self-imprisoned in their heritage of hate. There is a charm in this mosaic of originalities, and one would deprecate a world of people confined in identical myths and pantaloons. And yet, above and beneath these dissimilarities of costume, custom, faith, and speech, nature and man’s needs have forced upon him an economic uniformity and interdependence that become more visible and compelling as invention and knowledge topple barriers away. From Norway to Sicily, from Russia to Spain, the unprejudiced surveying eye sees men not so much as diversely dressed and phrased, but as engaged in like pursuits molding like characters: tilling and mining the earth, weaving garments, building homes, altars, and schools, rearing the young, trading surpluses, and forging social order as man’s strongest organ of defense and survival. For a moment we shall contemplate Middle Europe as such a unity.
In Scandinavia man’s prime task was to conquer the cold, in Holland the sea, in Germany the forests, in Austria the mountains; agriculture, the ground of life, hung its fate on these victories. By 1300 the rotation of crops had become general in Europe, multiplying the yield of the soil. But from 1347 to 1381 half the population of Central Europe was wiped out by the Black Death; and the mortality of men arrested the fertility of the earth. In one year Strasbourg lost 14,000 souls, Cracow 20,000, Breslau 30,000.1 For a century the Harz mines remained without miners.2 With simple animal patience men resumed the ancient labors, digging and turning the earth. Sweden and Germany intensified their extraction of iron and copper; coal was mined at Aachen and Dortmund, tin in Saxony, lead in the Harz, silver in Sweden and the Tyrol, gold in Carinthia and Transylvania.
The flow of metals fed a growing industry, which fed a spreading trade. Germany, leader in mining, naturally led in metallurgy. The blast furnace appeared there in the fourteenth century; with the hydraulic hammer and the rolling mill it transformed the working of metals. Nuremberg became an ironmongers’ capital, famous for its cannon and its bells. The industry and commerce of Nuremberg, Augsburg, Mainz, Speyer, and Cologne made them almost independent city-states. The Rhine, Main, Lech, and Danube gave the South German towns first place in the overland traffic with Italy and the East. Great commercial and financial firms, with far-flung outlets and agencies, rose along these routes, surpassing, in the fifteenth century, the reach and power of the Hanseatic League. The League was still strong in the fourteenth century, dominating trade in the North and Baltic seas; but in 1397 the Scandinavian countries united to break this monopoly, and soon thereafter the English and Dutch began to carry their own goods. Even the herring conspired against the Hanse; about 1417 they decided to spawn in the North Sea rather than the Baltic; Lübeck, a pillar of the League, lost the herring trade and declined; Amsterdam won it and flourished.
Underneath this evolving economy class war seethed—between country and city, lords and serfs, nobles and businessmen, merchant guilds and craft guilds, capitalists and proletarians, clergy and laity, Church and state. In Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland serfdom was going or gone, but elsewhere in Middle Europe it was taking on new life. In Denmark, Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Brandenburg, where peasants had earned their freedom by clearing the wilderness, serfdom was restored in the fifteenth century by a martial aristocracy; we may judge the harshness of these Junkers from a proverb of the Brandenburg peasants, which wished long life to the lord’s horses, lest he should take to riding his serfs.3 In the Baltic lands the barons and the Teutonic knights, at first content to enserf the conquered Slav inhabitants, were induced, by the labor shortages that followed the Black Death and the Polish war of 1409, to impress into bondage any “idlers who roam on the road or in the towns”;4 and treaties were made with neighboring governments for the extradition of fugitive serfs.
The mercantile bourgeoisie, favored by the emperors as a foil to the barons, ruled the municipalities so definitely that in many cases the city hall and the merchants’ guildhall were one. Craft guilds were reduced to subjection, submitted to municipal regulation of wages, and were prohibited from united action;5 here, as in England and France, proud craftsmen were turned into defenseless prolétaires. Now and then the workers tried revolt. In 1348 the artisans of Nuremberg captured the municipal council and ruled the city for a year, but the Emperor’s soldiers restored the patrician merchants to power.6 In Prussia an ordinance of 1358 condemned any striker to have an ear cut off.7 Peasant rebellions flared up in Denmark (1340, 1441), Saxony, Silesia, Brandenburg, and the Rhineland (1432), in Norway and Sweden (1434); but they were too laxly organized to achieve more than a passing cathartic violence. Revolutionary ideas circulated through cities and villages. In 1438 an anonymous radical wrote a pamphlet expounding an imaginary “Kaiser Sigismund’s Reformation” on socialistic principles.8 The stage was slowly prepared for the Peasants’ War of 1525.
II. THE ORGANIZATION OF ORDER
Order is the mother of civilization and liberty; chaos is the midwife of dictatorship; therefore history may now and then say a good word for kings. Their medieval function was to free the individual in rising measure from local domination, and to centralize in one authority the power to legislate, judge, punish, mint, and make war. The feudal baron mourned the loss of local autonomy, but the simple citizen thought it good that there should be, in his country, one master, one coinage, one law. Men rarely hoped, in those half-illiterate days, that even kings might disappear, and leave no master but the laws and blunders that men had freely made.
Scandinavia had some remarkable monarchs in the fourteenth century. Magnus II of Sweden organized the conflicting laws of his kingdom into a homogeneous national code (1347). In Denmark Eric IV disciplined the barons and strengthened the central power; Christopher II weakened it; Waldemar IV restored it, and made his country one of the major forces in European politics. But the supreme figure in the Scandinavian dynasties of this age was Waldemar Y daughter Margaret. Married at ten (1363) to Haakon VI of Norway, who was the son of Magnus II of Sweden, she seemed destined by blood and marriage to unite the kindred thrones. When her father died (1375) she hurried to Copenhagen with her five-year-old son Olaf, and persuaded the baronial and ecclesiastical electors to accept him as king and herself as regent. When her husband died (1380) Olaf inherited the crown of Norway; but as he was still only ten, Margaret, now twenty-seven, there too acted as regent. Her prudence, tact, and courage astonished her contemporaries, who were accustomed to male incompetence or violence; and the feudal lords of Denmark and Norway, after dominating many kings, proudly supported this wise and beneficent queen. When Olaf came of age (1385) her diplomacy won for him the succession to the Swedish throne. Two years later he died, and her patient, far-seeing plans for the unification of Scandinavia seemed frustrated by his death. But the royal council of Denmark, seeing no male heir available who could match “Margrete” in ability to maintain order and peace, overrode Scandinavian laws against a woman ruler, and elected her Regent of the Realm (1387). Proceeding to Oslo, she was chosen Regent of Norway for life (1388), and a year later the Swedish nobles, having deposed an unsatisfactory king, made her their queen. She prevailed upon all thr
ee kingdoms to recognize her grandnephew Eric as heir to their thrones. In 1397 she summoned the three councils of state to Kalmar in Sweden; there Sweden, Norway, and Denmark were declared to be forever united, all to be under one ruler, but each to keep its own customs and laws. Eric was crowned king, but as he was only fifteen, Margaret continued to act as regent till her death (1412). No other European ruler of the age had so extensive a realm, or so successful a reign.
Her grandnephew did not inherit her wisdom. Eric allowed the Union to become in effect a Danish Empire, with a council at Copenhagen ruling the three states. In this empire Norway declined, losing the literary leadership that she had held from the tenth to the thirteenth century. In 1434 Engelbrekt Engelbreksson led a revolt of Sweden against the Danish hegemony; he gathered at Arboga (1435) a national diet of nobles, bishops, yeomen, and burghers; and this broad-based assembly became, through a continuity of 500 years, the Swedish Riksdag of today. Engelbreksson and Kark Knutsen were chosen regents. A year later the hero of the revolution was assassinated, and Knutsen ruled Sweden as regent, then intermittently as king, till his death (1470).
Meanwhile Christian I (1448–81) began the Oldenburg dynasty that governed Denmark till 1863 and Norway till 1814. Iceland came under Danish rule during Margaret’s regency (1381). The high point of the island’s history and literature had passed, but it continued to give chaotic Europe an unheeded lesson in competent and orderly government.
The strongest democracy in the world at this time was in Switzerland. In the history of that invincible country the heroes are the cantons. First were the German-speaking “forest cantons” of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, which in 1291 united in a Confederation for mutual defense. After the historic victory of the Swiss peasants over the Hapsburg army at Morgarten (1315) the Confederation, while formally acknowledging the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire, maintained a virtual independence. New cantons were added: Lucerne (1332), Zurich (1351), Glarus and Zug (1352), Bern (1353); and the name Schwyz was in 1352 extended to the whole. Encouraged to autonomy by geographical barriers, and accepting French, German, or Italian speech and ways according to the slope of its valleys and the course of its streams, each canton made its own laws, through assemblies chosen by the vote of the citizens. The extent of the franchise varied from canton to canton and from time to time, but all cantons pledged themselves to a united foreign policy and to the arbitration of their disputes by a federal diet. Though the cantons sometimes fought one another, nevertheless, the constitution of the Confederation became and remains an inspiring example of federalism—the union of self-governing regions under freely accepted common agencies and laws.