A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [2]
I actually thought that.
I HAD MISCALCULATED because I had not realized how parochial my previous work had been. Virtually everything in my seventeen earlier books had been contemporaneous. Now, moving back nearly five centuries, I was entering an entirely different world, where there were no clocks, no police, virtually no communications; a time when men believed in magic and sorcery and slew those whose superstitions were different from, and therefore an affront to, their own.
The early sixteenth century was not entirely new to me. Its major figures, their wars, the Renaissance, the religious revolution, the voyages of exploration—with all these I had the general familiarity of an educated man. I could have drawn a reasonably accurate freehand map of Europe as it was then, provided I wasn’t expected to get the borders of all the German states exactly right. But I had no sense of the spirit of the time. Its idioms fell strangely on my ear. I didn’t know enough to put myself back there—to see it, hear it, feel it, even smell it—and because I had never pondered the minutiae of that age, I had no grasp of the way the webs of action were spun out, how each event led inexorably to another, then another …
Yet I knew from experience that such chains of circumstance are always there, awaiting discovery. To cite a small, relatively recent example: In the first year of John F. Kennedy’s presidential administration, four developments appeared to be unrelated —America’s humiliation at the Bay of Pigs in April, Kennedy’s confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev in Austria six weeks later, the raising of the Berlin Wall in August, and, in December, the first commitment of American ground troops to Indochina. Yet each event had led to the next. Khrushchev saw the Cuban fiasco as evidence that the young president was weak. Therefore he bullied him in Vienna. In the mistaken belief that he had intimidated him there, he built the Wall. Kennedy answered the challenge by sending four hundred Green Berets to Southeast Asia, explaining to those around him that “we have a problem making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”
A subtler, more progressive catena may be found in nineteenth-century social history. In 1847 the old, slow, expensive flatbed press was rendered obsolete by Richard Hoe’s high-speed rotary “lightning” press, first installed by the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Incorporating lithographic and letter-press features, some of which had been patented in France, Hoe went on to design and build a web press capable of printing—on both sides of a sheet at the same time—eighteen thousand sheets an hour. Vast supplies of cheap paper were required to feed these new presses. Ingenious Germans provided the answer in the 1850s: newsprint made from wood pulp. Now a literate public awaited them. W. E. Forster’s Compulsory Education Act, passed by Parliament in 1870, was followed by similar legislation throughout western Europe and the United States. In 1858 only 5 percent of British army recruits could read and write; by the turn of the century the figure had risen to 85.4 percent. The 1880s had brought the institution of free libraries, which was followed by an explosion in journalism and the emergence of the twentieth-century mass culture which has transformed Western civilization.
Though the early 1500s offer a larger, much more chaotic canvas, perspective provides coherence there, too. The power of the Catholic Church was waning, reeling from the failure of the