A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [51]
Malory has been spared; Niccolò Machiavelli has been slandered. Machiavelli was a principled Florentine and a gifted observer of contemporary Italy; his concise Il principe reveals profound insight into human nature and an acute grasp of political reality in the scene he saw. Nevertheless, because of that very book, he has been the victim of a double injustice. Though he was only analyzing his age, later generations have not only interpreted the work as cynical, unscrupulous, and immoral; they have turned his very name to a pejorative. In fact, he was a passionate, devout Christian who was appalled by the morality of his age. In an introspective self-portrait he wrote:
Io rido, e rider mio non passa dentro;
Io ardo, e I’arsion mia non par di fore.
I laugh, and my laughter is not within me;
I burn, and the burning is not seen outside.
Among the other memorable works of the time were Sebastian Brandt’s Das Narrenschiff; Peter Dorland van Diest’s Elckerlijk; Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia; Rabelais’s Pantagruel; Castiglione’s Il cortegiano; Sir Thomas More’s Utopia; Philippe de Commines’s Mémoires; William Dunbar’s Dance of the Sevin Deidly Sinnes; Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina; Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, his penetrating Dell’arte della guerra, and his superb comedy, La Mandragola; the plays of John Skelton; the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey; and all the works of Desiderius Erasmus, who left his native Holland to roam Europe’s centers of learning and turn out a stream of books, including Enchiridion militis Christiani, and Adagia, his collection of proverbs.
Scholars—most of whom were theologians—continued to be fluent in classical tongues, but in the new intellectual climate that was inadequate. Publishers could no longer assume that their customers would be fluent in Latin. In past centuries, when each country had been a closed society, an author who preferred to write in the vernacular was unknown to those unfamiliar with it. No more; provincialism had been succeeded by an awareness of
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
Europe as a comity of nations, and readers were curious about the work of foreign writers—so much so that translations became profitable. In England, for example, Brandt’s book appeared as The Ship of Fools, Van Diest’s as Everyman, Castiglione’s as The Courtier, and Machiavelli’s comedy as The Mandrake. In 1503 Thomas à Kempis’s De imitatione Christi came off London presses as The Imitation of Christ. Erasmus’s Institutio principis Christiani became available as The Education of a Christian Prince, and Hartmann Schedel’s illustrated world history was published simultaneously in Latin and German.
Learned men became linguists. Ambrogio Calepino brought out Cornucopiae, the first polyglot dictionary, and the Collegium Trilingue was founded in Louvain. This was followed by publication, at the University of Alcalá, of a Bible in four tongues: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic. To be sure, none of them was widely understood in western Europe, but at least the Scriptures could, fifteen centuries after the crucifixion, be read in the language of Christ himself.
THE DAYS WHEN the Church’s critics could be silenced by intimidating naive peasants, or by putting the torch to defiant apostates, were ending. There were too many of them; they were too resourceful, intelligent, well organized, and powerfully connected, and they were far more strongly entrenched than, say, the infidel host the crusaders had attacked. Their strongholds were Europe’s crowded, quarrelsome, thriving, and above all independent new universities.
Before the Renaissance,