The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Other poets learned quickly. Francesco Petrarch, the son of a lawyer, also made literary use of unconsummated love – for a woman he called Laura, whom he saw in a church in Avignon when he was twenty-three – and became the most popular poet in Europe. Out of his personal life he created a new kind of poetry – direct, intimate, full of images of nature. His significance in European history is that lie was the first ‘romantic’. As a child he preferred books to real life – at one point his father threw them all on the fire – and when his father died he gave up his law studies to devote himself to literature and archaeology. It was Petrarch who made Italy aware of the great monuments of its past. He lived in his imagination, and taught other people to live in theirs. And the hunger for what he had to offer was so great that the whole population of a town often came out to meet him on his travels.

Equally interesting is his own confession of the cause of his lifelong melancholy. In a work called My Secret, he admits that his deepest dissatisfaction is with the feebleness of his will-power, which prevents him from achieving the kind of noble life he can imagine. The poet who has been called ‘the first Renaissance man’ had identified our basic human problem: our inability to control the movements of consciousness.

His younger contemporary Boccaccio also turned his back on a business career to write poetry, and wrote naturally in the ‘personal’ manner. He has been called the first writer – since he did nothing but write, and became famous solely for his writing (even Petrarch was a canon of the Church). But his major contribution to the new freedom of expression was his collection of bawdy tales, The Decameron, which celebrated love and sexuality with a frankness that had not been known since Catullus. It is unlikely that Boccaccio would have felt free to write The Decameron if the pope had been in Rome instead of Avignon; as it was, he kept the book a secret from his friend Petrarch. But legend has it that he presented a copy to the British ambassador, Geoffrey Chaucer. In due course, Chaucer had no hesitation in placing himself in the centre of The Canterbury Tales.

Boccaccio lived in Florence – a city whose importance in the history of the Renaissance is out of all proportion to its size. Its wealthy merchants hired great artists – Giotto, Masaccio, Ghiberti, Uccello, Brunelleschi, Donatello – and turned it into the most beautiful city in Europe. It was also the scene of one of the earliest experiments in a kind of socialism. In 1378, the chief justice, Salvestro de Medici, set out to curb the power of the merchants, and the lower paid wool-workers rebelled and demanded higher wages. They were successful, but the result was an immediate disastrous increase in unemployment. The guilds might be ruthless, but they kept the cash flowing in. The new government soon collapsed. But later, when Florence again felt the need for leadership with a democratic flavour, they recalled that a Medici had helped them against the rich and turned to the head of the family, Cosimo de Medici. The Medicis would be the masters of Florence for most of the fifteenth century -the city’s golden age.

As Florence expanded, and Rome again became the city of the popes, the rest of the Mediterranean was aware of the rise of a more sinister force: the Turks. They had been crushed by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, but after Hulagu was chased out of north Africa by the Mamelukes, they resumed their slow expansion. In 1290, the Ottoman dynasty was founded by Osman I. In 1331, Nicaea was taken by the Turks; seven years later, Nicomedia. In 1365, Adrianople – in Thrace – fell and was made the Turkish capital. Now the Turks were established on the western side of Constantinople, and it could only be a matter of time before the capital of eastern Christendom fell. In fact, they besieged Constantinople between 1391 and 1398, and finally withdrew after exacting an enormous tribute. A crusade was called against them in 1396, led by Sigismund of Hungary; an army of twenty thousand Christian knights tried to press forward too quickly and was totally defeated.

At this point, Europe was provided with one more breathing space by yet another incursion of the Mongols. Their leader was another descendant of Genghis Khan – on the female side – called Timur Lenk, Timur the Lame – better known in the west as Tamurlane, the hero of an immensely popular Elizabethan play by Christopher Marlowe. He spent nineteen years (from 1362 to 1380) making himself master of Transoxania, fighting invading nomads; then he spent another seven years conquering Iran. But Tamurlane, while undoubtedly a great general, seems to have been slightly insane. He was a mad, obsessive killer who felt that a conqueror’s chief business was to commit murder on a massive scale. His violence was pointlessly sadistic: when he conquered Sabzawar in 1383 he had two thousand prisoners built into a living mound, then bricked in. Later the same year, he had five thousand captives beheaded at Zirih and their heads made into an enormous pyramid. In 1386 he had all his prisoners at Luri hurled over a cliff. In Delhi he massacred a hundred thousand prisoners. This extraordinary madman invaded Anatolia in 1400, took the garrison of Sivas and had its four thousand Christian defenders buried alive. He stands out in world history as the most spectacular sadist of all time. Yet in the pageant of world history, he is very much a sideshow. If he had been another Genghis Khan, he would have consolidated his home base and then spread very slowly to the north, into Russia, the land of the Kipchak nomads. This was the country that was then awaiting unification and a strong ruler. If he had done this – as Arnold Toynbee has pointed out – Moscow might now be ruled from Samarkand instead of vice versa.

But Tamurlane seemed to lack even a grain of political good sense. Russia was a bare land of empty steppes. He felt that a conqueror’s business was to besiege wealthy cities and decapitate all the inhabitants, and Persia and India were more suitable for this purpose than Russia. In 1395, he even went into Russia on a punitive expedition against Toqatmysh nomads and came within a few days march of the squalid little wooden town called Moscow; but he failed to recognise the prize that lay within his grasp – Russia was still struggling against the Tartars – and turned back towards Samarkand, then to India. His own soldiers objected to attacking their Turkish kinsmen in northern India; but for Tamurlane, it was the only thing worth doing and his will prevailed. In 1405 he set out on an expedition against China, but fortunately died on the way. He was, in a sense, a kind of dinosaur, the last of the old Assyrian-style conquerors who thought in terms of mass-murder and torture. Inevitably, his empire collapsed within half a century of his death.

In 1402, Tamurlane had brought the Ottoman Empire to the point of dissolution; but in the following year he retired, and the Turks were able to return to the business of capturing Constantinople. It took them until 1453, and then it was done with the aid of incredibly powerful guns. One cannon fired a ball weighing a quarter of a ton; when it was tested, the cannonball went for almost a mile and buried itself six feet in the ground. The Turks burst into the city on 29 May 1453; the emperor was killed, and the Christian population was dragged off into slavery.

In fact, the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II proved to be an error of gigantic proportions. It had been the gateway to the east, the great international crossroads where cultures and merchants intermingled. As soon as Mahomet became its master he recognised the danger of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and tried to persuade the Greeks to stay on. It was too late; the life had drained out of the city of Constantine.

It was still not the end of Turkish ambition. They were masters of Greece; they dreamed of becoming masters of Italy. When Cosimo de Medici was in Venice – in exile from Florence – the Venetians had only just concluded a peace with the Turks after sixteen years of war; they paid for it by handing over some of their trading stations. Half a century later, the war broke out again, and Venice was forced to hand over more trading stations and pay an immense annual tribute to be allowed to trade in the Black Sea. In 1480, the Turks invaded Italy and took Otranto, and in the following year they besieged the knights of St John in Rhodes – fortunately, Mahomet II died and the siege was called off.