The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Most of the rest of this story of the opening of America is a saga of trickery, bad faith and cruelty. In 1519, the governor of Hispaniola sent Hernando Cortez to explore inland. By a curious coincidence, Cortez landed on the coast of Central America at a spot where the Indians expected certain mysterious ‘white gods’ to return. The legend said that fair-skinned men had landed in the remote past, brought a knowledge of science and engineering, and gone away promising to return. The natives of Mexico – called Aztecs – mistook the Spanish for the benevolent white gods. Cortez had an additional advantage: the natives had never seen horses, and they thought that the horse and rider were one entitity. So the Spaniards, with less than five hundred men, were able to advance to the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. The king, Montezuma, received them with courtesy and treated them well. When they saw rooms filled with gold treasures, they decided to seize them for Spain. The king was taken and held captive; Cortez, in effect, became king. But while he was away from the capital, the people rose up in revolt, killed Montezuma and drove out the Spaniards; Cortez had to retake the city with heavy artillery. There was a bloodbath and widespread destruction; then Cortez set out to systematically destroy the power of the Aztecs all over Mexico. Within three years of his landing, the Aztec Empire had been destroyed.

The conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro followed much the same pattern. Like Magellan, Pizarro was financed by the emperor Charles V. In 1532, with a mere hundred and eighty men and twenty-seven horses, he marched south from Panama. The Incas, led by their king Atahualpa, came to meet him with an army. Pizarro invited the king to a friendly conference, and the king arrived – unarmed – with a large retinue of noblemen. At a signal, they were attacked by the Spaniards, who killed hundreds. The Indians agreed to ransom Atahualpa with a roomful of gold, and the Spaniards watched it being carried in – more than five million pounds worth. Then the king was strangled. The catastrophe seemed to have paralysed the will of the Incas, and they made no real resistance when the Spaniards occupied their capital, Cuzco. The Inca Empire was destroyed as easily as that of the Aztecs. But the Spaniards quarrelled amongst themselves about the spoils, and Pizarro was eventually murdered by plotters.

In the ninety-nine years between the time Henry the Navigator’s caravel braved the Boiling Sea and the day Pizarro’s men murdered Atahualpa, the world had changed more than in any preceding century. For these were far more than voyages of geographical discovery. They were man’s discovery of his own capabilities. The Church could still curb intellectual speculation and convince man that he was a sinner who ought to wait patiently until it should please God to remove him from this wicked world. The spirit of independence was, according to the Church, the spirit of Lucifer; it had caused the downfall of Adam, and on the intellectual level, men were still willing to be convinced. But these voyages of discovery were a practical lesson in the virtue of courage and independence, and there was nothing the Church could do to disguise their message. Columbus and Magellan taught men that they should have no fear sailing into unknown seas of the mind. In 1517, two years before Magellan’s voyage, Martin Luther proclaimed the new spirit of independence when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg.

There was another form of revolution that the Church was helpless to suppress: invention. Luther’s revolt would have remained confined to Wittenberg if it had not been for a quiet revolution that had taken place in the German town of Mainz. In the 1430s, a silversmith named Johann Ganzfleisch – John Gooseflesh, better known to posterity by his mother’s family name of Gutenberg – experimented with a scheme for manufacturing cheap bibles. The monks of the Middle Ages knew how to carve letters out of wood or soft metal and use them for printing initial letters on manuscripts. Gutenberg was working on a method of casting letters in a brass mould. The main problem was that the mould had to be broken to get each letter out, so it was wasted. He invented a mould in three parts, held together by a spring so that it could be taken apart undamaged. In the 1440s, he went on to use movable type to print the Bible. It should have made him a rich man; but one of his partners became impatient for the return of his investment and ruined the inventor. Gutenberg died blind and forgotten in 1468.

But printing was the invention that Europe had been waiting for; the proof is that within a mere twenty-three years there were presses in a hundred and ten towns. By the time Luther nailed his theses to the church door, all the Greek and Roman classics were available in cheap translations. The Church tried hard to prevent the reading of the Bible – on the grounds that people were close to salvation when they were ignorant – but that battle had already been lost.

The printing revolution would have been impossible without another revolution: the making of cheap paper. In the Middle Ages, monks copied out their manuscripts on parchment or vellum, the skins of animals. The Arabs brought papermaking from China (where a form of printing had already been invented), and also invented the horizontal loom, in which the threads could be separated by merely pressing a foot pedal. When people began to wear linen instead of wool, old linen was suddenly in plentiful supply. The result was a good and cheap paper: the paper that helped to bestow fame on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio by bringing a hand-copied book within the means of everybody who could read.

In terms of its impact on the European mind, the most influential of these early printed books was not the Bible or Dante but a compilation of old tales of chivalry called the Morte d’Arthur. Until the mid-1920s, very little was known about its author, Sir Thomas Malory, except that he had been born about 1400 in Warwickshire and been a member of parliament. Then an American scholar, browsing through an old bundle of manuscripts in the public record office, came upon the startling information that Malory had been virtually a one-man crime wave, and had spent the latter part of his life in prison – where he had written the famous book. After fighting in the French wars under the Earl of Warwick, Malory had apparently found life in rural Warwickshire too tame and had become the leader of a gang of brigands. In 1451, they broke down the doors of an abbey at Coombe and made off with money and valuables. The records showed that Malory had broken into the house of one Hugh Smyth, and ‘feloniously raped Joan, wife of the said Hugh’; a few months later he went back and raped her again. Several accounts of his extorting money ‘by threats and oppression’ make it clear that he could be regarded as a predecessor of some of the gangsters we shall later consider in the chapter on the Mafia. He was also, according to the records, a cattle rustler and horse thief.

Back in Newgate prison in 1463 – for the third or fourth time – he whiled away the hours compiling the Morte d”Arthur, possibly with the aid of the nearby library of Grey Friars. That he was still in prison when he finished it seems to be proved by the words in the final chapter praying God to ‘send me good deliverance’.

The handwritten manuscript might well have found its way on to some library shelf and been forgotten. (In fact, such a manuscript – its beginning and end pages missing – was found in the library of Winchester school in 1934.) But fortunately, in 1485 – fourteen years after Malory’s death – it fell into the hands of the English printer William Caxton. He launched it on the world, and it instantly became almost as popular as the Bible. The rapist and cattle rustler had achieved a belated immortality. But, more important, the Morte d’Arthur carried the ideals of knightly chivalry to the far corners of Europe. The great explorers gave man a taste for romance and adventure; it was Malory who carried it into every literate household.

For the Church, this liberation of the human imagination would eventually prove more dangerous than any number of heretics and infidels. But that day had not yet arrived.

THE CHURCH OVER-TRIUMPHANT

In the week before Easter 1478, a group of would-be assassins arrived in Florence: their intended victims were two of the Medici family: Lorenzo – already called the Magnificent – and his younger brother Giuliano. The plotters included the Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, and two leading bankers of Florence, Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Baroncelli. And in Rome, providing moral support for the plot, was the pope, Sixtus IV.