A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [3]
As each such concatenation came into focus, I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start—an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting. The period became a kind of kaleidoscope for me; every time I shook it, I saw a new picture. Of course, the images I saw, and describe in this work, cannot presume to universal validity. Another writer, peering into another kaleidoscope, would glimpse different views. In fact, that was precisely the experience of Henry Osborn Taylor. Finishing his two-volume work The Mediaeval Mind in January 1911, the pietistic Taylor was suffused with admiration for the medieval churches, the pageantry of the age, its romance, its “spiritual passion,” and, above all, its interpretation of “Christ’s Gospel.” He explained candidly: “The present work is not occupied with the brutalities of mediaeval life, nor with all the lower grades of ignorance and superstition abounding in the Middle Ages. … Consequently I have not such things very actively in mind when speaking of the mediaeval genius. That phrase, and the like, in this book, will signify the more informed and constructive spirit of the mediaeval time.”
No matter how hard I shake my kaleidoscope, I cannot see what he saw. One reason is that my approach is more catholic than his. I share his conviction that “a realization of the power and import of the Christian Faith is needed for an understanding of the thoughts and feelings moving the men and women of the Middle Ages, and for a just appreciation of their aspirations and ideals,” but I do not see how that can be achieved without a careful study of brutality, ignorance, and delusions in the Middle Ages, not just among the laity, but also at the highest Christian altars. Christianity survived despite medieval Christians, not because of them. Fail to grasp that, and you will never understand their millennium.
Only after one has contemplated the age in its entirety do its larger patterns emerge. Often these are surprising. For me the most startling, and the culmination of my work, was a reappraisal of the extraordinary Magellan, whose biography I had left in New England. I had foolishly thought that the times in which he lived would put him in context. Instead, I realized, Magellan was essential to a comprehension of his times—both a key to the period and, in many ways, its apotheosis. How I reached that conclusion is the story of this book.
W.M.
Middletown, Connecticut
December 1991
I
THE MEDIEVAL MIND
THE DENSEST of the medieval centuries—the six hundred years between, roughly, A.D. 400 and A.D. 1000—are still widely known as the Dark Ages. Modern historians have abandoned that phrase, one of them writes, “because of the unacceptable value judgment it implies.” Yet there are no survivors to be offended. Nor is the term necessarily pejorative. Very little is clear about that dim era. Intellectual life had vanished from Europe. Even Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman emperor and the greatest of all medieval rulers, was illiterate. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, which lasted some seven centuries after Charlemagne, literacy was scorned; when a cardinal corrected the Latin of the emperor Sigismund, Charlemagne’s forty-seventh