A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [1]
Martin Luther. Painting by Lucas Cranach. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 138
Pope Leo X. Painting by Raphael. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 147
Emperor Charles V (Carlos I of Spain). Painting by Titian. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 155
The Reformation Monument, Geneva. Page 177
John Calvin. Painting, artist unknown. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 192
Pope Clement VII. Painting by Sebastiano del Piombo. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 196
Castel Sant’ Angelo, Rome. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 198
Lutheran satire on papal reform. Woodcut, artist unknown. Illustration courtesy of American Heritage Picture Collection, American Heritage Magazine. Page 200
King Henry VIII of England. Painting by Hans Holbein the Younger. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 205
Anne Boleyn. Engraving, artist unknown. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 210
Ferdinand Magellan. Painting, sixteenth century, artist unknown. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Page 225
Balboa claims the Pacific. Lithograph, nineteenth century. The Granger Collection, New York. Page 244
Magellan’s Armada de Molucca sails from Spain. Wood engraving, nineteenth century. The Granger Collection, New York. Page 251
The Río de la Plata. Bellin’s Atlas of 1781. Page 254
The death of Magellan. Drawing, nineteenth century. The Granger Collection, New York. Page 281
LIST OF MAPS
Europe and the Mediterranean, c. 1190
Europe in 1519
Sixteenth-Century Distances
Voyages of Discovery
The Circumnavigation
AUTHOR’S NOTE
COMPLETE AT LAST, this book is a source of pride, which is pleasant, though in this instance somewhat odd. It is, after all, a slight work, with no scholarly pretensions. All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship on the early sixteenth century. This being true, I thought it wise to submit my final manuscript to scrutiny by those steeped in the period, or in certain aspects of it. For example, Dr. Timothy Joyner, Magellan’s most recent biographer, examined the passages on Magellan. His emendations were many and were gratefully received. My greatest debt, however, is to James Boyden, an authority on the sixteenth century, who was a history professor at Yale when he began his examination of my text and had become a history professor at Tulane when he finished it. I have never known a more scrupulous review than his. His knowledge of the sixteenth century is both encyclopedic and profound. He challenged me—and rightly so—in virtually every passage of the work. Of course, that does not mean that he or anyone else with whom I consulted is in any way responsible for this volume. Indeed, Professor Boyden took exception to several of my interpretations. Obviously I, and I alone, am answerable for the result.
Another oddity of this book is that it was written, so to speak, inside out. Ordinarily a writer does not begin to put words on paper until he knows much he is going to say. Determining how to say it is the last step—the most taxing, to be sure, but one preceded by intricate preparations: conception, research, mastering material, structuring the work. Very rarely are the writing and reading experiences even remotely parallel, and almost never does a narrative unfold for the writer as it will later for those turning his pages. The fact that it happened this time makes the volume unique in my experience.
Actually, at the outset I had no intention of writing it at all. In the late summer of 1989, while toiling over another manuscript —the last volume of a biography of Winston Spencer Churchill—I fell ill. After several months in and out of hospitals, I emerged cured but feeble, too weak to cope with my vast accumulation of Churchill documents. Medical advice was to shelve that work temporarily and head south for a long convalescence. I took it.
The fact that I wasn’t strong enough for Winston did not, however, mean I could not work. H. L. Mencken once observed that writing did for him what giving milk does for a cow. So it is for