A Criminal History of Mankind (54 page)

Absurdly enough Columbus was quite unaware that he had discovered a new land; he thought he had landed in Asia. It was an Italian scholar named Pietro Martire who made a calculation based on the size of the earth (which Eratosthenes had worked out) and realised that Columbus had found an unknown continent - which he christened the New World. Another explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who crossed the Atlantic soon after Columbus, gave his name to the new continent: America. On a map of 1507, ‘America’ was shown as a curiously shaped island about a quarter the size of Africa.

Many of these early explorers lost their lives. John Cabot, who explored the coast of north America, vanished with his whole fleet somewhere in the Atlantic; Ponce de Leon, who discovered Florida, was killed by an Indian arrow; Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who crossed Panama and saw the Pacific, survived hostile Indians to be executed by a governor sent out from Spain; Juan Dia de Solis was killed by hostile natives after discovering the River Plate; and Fernando Magellan, who is credited with the first circumnavigation of the globe, never actually completed the two-year voyage (1519-21); he tried to convert the natives of the Philippines to Christianity by pointing guns at them and was killed.

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.

The notion of a pope and an archbishop being involved in a murder plot strikes us as startling: in the fifteenth century it was almost commonplace. The pope was, in effect, the Roman emperor, the Caesar. With enormous revenues flowing in from all over the civilised world, he built palaces, employed great artists, hired armies, poisoned rivals, fathered bastards and gave away important Church appointments to members of his family. Italy was full of rival cities that tried to gobble up all the small towns in their area; the popes made sure that Rome did her share of the gobbling. This is partly what had caused the present coolness between the pope and Lorenzo de’ Medici. They both wanted a little town called Imola, which happened to be under the protection of the duke of Milan; the duke had promised it to Lorenzo. Then the pope bribed the duke with an advantageous marriage between his own nephew and the duke’s bastard daughter; so Imola became part of the Papal States. Lorenzo took it philosophically - he was that kind of a man. But he got his own back when the Archbishop of Florence died and the pope wanted to appoint one of his favourites, Francesco Salviati. Lorenzo blocked the appointment and gave it to his own brother-in-law; Salviati had to be contented with a second best - Pisa.

The Medicis were, of course, the leading family of bankers in Florence, although their chief rivals were the Pazzis. The Pazzis were popular with the common people of Florence, but not quite as popular as the Medicis, who were naturally friendly and democratic. When the pope was trying to raise the cash to buy Imola, Lorenzo de’ Medici asked the Pazzis not to lend him any money. He thought he could trust their loyalty. Instead, Francesco de’ Pazzi went straight to the pope and told him what Lorenzo had suggested. As a result, the pope got his money, and the papal bank account was transferred from the house of Medici to that of Pazzi.

Lorenzo now made the mistake that almost cost him his life. He was young and impulsive, and irritated by Francesco’s treachery. A rich man called Giovanni Borromeo was on his death bed; he had no sons, but his daughter was married to a Pazzi. Lorenzo quickly passed a law that said male heirs should be preferred over females; the result was that his own nephews inherited Borromeo’s fortune. And it was at this point that the pope and his nephews (the Riario family, who also hated the Medicis) and Archbishop Salviati and Francesco de’ Pazzi entered into a conspiracy to remove the Medici brothers and make the Pazzis the rulers of Florence. The pope, in fact, announced that he would not countenance bloodshed; but he knew as well as anyone that the Medicis could not be removed without bloodshed.

The head of the Pazzi family, Jacopo, was brought into the plot; he disliked it, but agreed anyway. Another member, Renato de’ Pazzi, thought it would be easier to destroy the Medicis by ruining them financially and opposed the risks of assassination. He was overruled. The duke of Milan had recently been murdered by three noblemen as he entered the cathedral; they did it with such smooth efficiency that no one realised for a few minutes that the duke had been killed - everyone thought he had fainted. Killing the two Medici brothers would be slightly more complicated, since it had to be done at more or less the same time; but at least the Medicis walked about unarmed and without bodyguards.

A condottiere - a professional killer - named Montesecco was hired to carry out the assassination, and he was introduced to Lorenzo de Medici so that he would know his man on the day. Lorenzo was charming and courteous, and Montesecco began to have twinges of conscience about the murder. But it was too late for a change of plan. Two armies of mercenaries were due to arrive outside the gates of Florence on the morning after the killings, and when that happened the cat would be out of the bag anyway.

The plot was simple. A boy named Raffaello Sansoni, one of the Riario family, was staying with the Pazzis for a few days on his way to take up an appointment as the governor of Perugia; he also happened to be a cardinal and a brilliant student at the university of Pisa. Lorenzo was sure to ask the boy to dinner - together with the Pazzis. Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano would be stabbed as they rose from the table.

The invitation went according to plan; when Lorenzo heard that the brilliant boy was in Florence, he invited him to dinner on the evening of Saturday 25 April 1478. But at this point, a hitch arose. Giuliano had hurt his knee, and had to stay in bed. The assassinations had to be postponed. If Giuliano was in bed, it seemed unlikely that he would come to his brother’s house the next day. But he might just possibly be persuaded to attend mass in the great cathedral, the Duomo.

And now Montesecco’s conscience got the better of him; he had no objection to stabbing a man at dinner, but it was another thing to do it as he knelt at Mass. The archbishop assured him that it was perfectly legal and moral, and that the pope would give him absolution, but Montesecco still refused. The plotters had to turn to the two priests of the Duomo, Antonio Maffei and Stefano de Bagnone, who felt there could be no possible religious objection to killing someone on their own premises.