A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [113]
Now Magellan moves from vessel to vessel, counting first the stores needed to feed the 265 members of his crews—quantities of rice, beans, flour, garlic, onions, raisins, pipes and butts of wine (nearly 700 of them), anchovies (200 barrels), honey (5,402 pounds), and pickled pork (nearly three tons); then the thousands of nets, harpoons, and fishhooks which will be needed to supplement diets; next, astrolabes, hourglasses, and compasses for navigation; iron and stone shot for his cannon, and thousands of lances, spikes, shields, helmets, and breastplates, should they land on hostile shores, as is likely; forty loads of lumber, pitch, tar, beeswax, and oakum, hawsers, and anchors are insurance against shipwrecks; mirrors, bells, scissors, bracelets, gaily colored kerchiefs, and brightly tinted glassware are intended to befriend natives in the East. … The inventory goes on and on. It seems endless, but the admiral’s interest never flags.
IN ROME MICHELANGELO, having completed Moses and the Sistine Chapel, is dedicating a sonnet to his lifelong idol, Dante. The paint is still drying on Sebastiano del Piombo’s Christopher Columbus. Titian has just finished The Assumption, Raphael a portrait of Leo X with his sacred College of Cardinals, and Dürer a miniature of Jakob Fugger, the German merchant prince, intimate of popes and sovereigns. Earth is fresh on the graves of Leonardo da Vinci, dead at sixty-seven in a French castle near Amboise; the emperor Maximilian I, who died in his sixtieth year at Wiener Neustadt; Johann Tetzel, the indulgence hawker, gone at fifty-four in Leipzig; and the once lovely Lucrezia Borgia, who succumbed in northern Italy at the age of thirty-nine. Lucrezia’s last years were devoted to piety and the education of her son Giovanni, whose father, Pope Alexander VI, was also his grandfather.
Jakob Fugger is not dead, but he is approaching the end, making more money every day. His colossal fortune is estimated at 2,032,652 guilders. In England Lord Chancellor Wolsey has just moved into Hampton Court palace. Among the works now popular with literate Europeans are More’s Utopia, Alexander Barclay’s The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, and Machiavelli’s Il principe. Erasmus is enjoying his third popular success, Colloquia familiaria. Inspired by his renown, satire and morality plays are fashionable in the theater. Among the stage triumphs are Peter Dorland van Diest’s Everyman, John Skelton’s Magnificence, and Gil Vicente’s Auto da Glória.
Among the least-read works of the time are Copernicus’s Little Commentary and the Borgia pope’s bulls apportioning the New World between Spain and Portugal. Spain and France are arming heavily, preparing for a new war over Italian spoils. All crowned heads are ignoring the growing signs of a far greater conflict, the religious revolution, although nearly two years have passed since Luther posted his theses on the door of the Wittenberg church. Now he is drafting An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, calling on the German nobility to rise against Rome.
HOW MUCH Magellan is aware of all this is unknown. Probably very little. He has never been much interested in public affairs, and even if he were, following them closely would be impossible for him. For example, he will be at sea, beyond anyone’s reach, when Luther takes his stand at Worms. Thus he will die ignorant of Christendom’s coming schism, a tragedy for devout Catholics like him; he would have readily sacrificed his life defending the Church. Most of the rest of the contemporaneous tumult in Europe would seem irrelevant to him, although he would be wrong. All these events form a mosaic, and his expedition will become part of it. History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects, and is affected by, everything else. This is never clear in the present. Only time can sort out events. It is then, in perspective, that