A Little History of the World (35 page)

Peter the Great made the first move. He attacked Sweden which, following the victories of Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War, had become the mightiest state in northern Europe. Sweden’s ruler in Peter’s time may not have had the piety or the perspicacity of Gustavus Adolphus, but he was one of the most extraordinary adventurers the world has ever known. The young King Charles XII came to power in 1697. He might have leapt straight out of the pages of the popular adventure books that left me spellbound as a boy in Vienna. His exploits can hardly be believed. He was as foolhardy as he was brave – and that’s saying something! He and his army fought Peter the Great and defeated an army five times as strong as his own. Then he conquered Poland and pushed straight on into Russia without bothering to wait for another Swedish army, which was on its way to assist him. On he went, deeper and deeper into Russia, always at the head of his troops, wading through rivers and trudging through swamps, without ever meeting any resistance from the Russian army. Autumn came, and then winter – the bitter, biting-cold Russian winter – and still Charles XII had had no chance to prove his courage against the enemy. Only when his men were half-dead with hunger, cold and exhaustion did the Russians finally appear and inflict a massive defeat on them. This was in 1709. Forced to flee, Charles made for Turkey. And there he remained for five years, vainly trying to persuade the Turks to go to war with Russia. Eventually, in 1714, news reached him from Sweden that his subjects had had enough of their king’s adventures in Turkey. The nobility were about to elect a new ruler.

Disguised as a German officer and with only one attendant, Charles crossed the Turkish frontier without delay and, riding as fast as he could by day and sleeping in mail coaches by night, raced back to Stralsund in north Germany – in those days part of Sweden – in a mad sixteen-day journey that involved all sorts of perilous adventures as they passed through enemy territory. Roused from his bed, the governor of the fortress could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw his king standing before him, for like everyone else he thought he was somewhere in Turkey. The town was delighted with Charles XII’s dramatic appearance, but Charles simply fell into bed and slept for a very long time. His feet were so swollen from his long ride that his boots had to be cut off him. But there was no more talk of electing a new king. Charles hadn’t been back in Sweden long before he embarked on a new military adventure. He made enemies of England, Germany, Norway and Denmark. Norway was first on his list. He died while besieging a Norwegian fortress in 1718, shot, some say, by someone on his own side because the country simply would not tolerate any more wars.

With this enemy out of the way Peter the Great, who now called himself Emperor of All the Russias, was able to increase his empire’s might, expanding in all directions: into Europe, into Turkey, into Persia and into the countries of Asia.

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If you could talk to a gentleman from the time of the Turkish siege, there would be many things about him that would surprise you. The way he spoke and the many Latin and French words he used. His elaborate and convoluted turns of phrase and habit of slipping in Latin quotations that neither you nor I could place, and his grand and solemn bows. You would, I think, suspect that beneath that venerable wig was someone with a large appetite for good food and fine wines. And – if you will forgive me for mentioning it – you could hardly fail to notice that beneath the fancy lace, the embroidery and the silk, this prinked, perfumed and powdered gentleman stank, because he hardly ever washed.

But nothing could prepare you for the shock you would have if he were to begin to air his views. All children should be thrashed. Young girls (no more than children) should be married
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and to men they barely know). A peasant’s lot is to toil and not complain. Beggars and tramps should be whipped and put in chains in the marketplace for everyone to mock. Thieves should be hanged and murderers publicly chopped into pieces. Witches and the other harmful sorcerers that infest the country should be burnt. People of different beliefs should be persecuted, treated as outcasts or thrown into dark dungeons. A comet seen recently in the sky must mean bad times ahead. As protection against the coming plague, which has already claimed many victims in Venice, it would be sensible to wear a red armband. And finally, a Mr So-and-so – an English friend – has an excellent and well-established business selling negroes from Africa to America as slaves: a brainwave of that most worthy gentleman since, as we all know, American Indian convicts don’t take well to manual labour.

And you would hear these opinions not only from the mouth of some coarse or uncouth fellow, but from the most intelligent and pious people in all walks of life and from all nations. Only after 1700 did things gradually change. The widespread and terrible suffering that Europeans endured during the wretched wars of religion had made some people wonder if it was really right to judge someone by his or her religious belief. Was it not more important to be a good and honest human being? Would it not be better if people got on with one another regardless of any differences of opinion or belief that they might have? Better if they respected one another and tolerated each other’s convictions? This was the first and most important idea that the people who thought about such things now voiced: the principle of tolerance. Only in matters of religion could there be differences of opinion. No rational person disputes the fact that two plus two makes four. Therefore reason – or sound common sense, as they also termed it – is what can and should unite all men. In the realm of reason you can use arguments to convince others of the rightness of your opinions, whereas another’s religious beliefs, being beyond rational argument, should be respected and tolerated.

And so reason was the second most important thing to these people. Clear and reasoned thinking about mankind and nature was rediscovered in the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans and in those of the Florentines during the time of the Renaissance. But, more than anywhere else, it was to be found in the works of men like Galileo, who had boldly set out to investigate the magic of nature’s mathematical formulas. Differences of belief played no part in these things: there was only experiment and proof. Reason alone could explain the appearance of nature and the workings of the universe. Reason, which is given in equal measure to all mankind the world over.

Now if reason is given to all, it must follow that all people are of equal worth, and as you remember, that was just what Christianity had taught: that all men are equal before God. But those who preached tolerance and reason took this argument one step further: they didn’t only teach that all people were essentially equal; they demanded that they be treated equally as well. That every human being, as God’s creature, endowed by Him with reason, had rights that no one might or should deny him. The right to choose his own calling and to choose how he lived: and the freedom to act or not to act as his reason and his conscience dictated. Children, too, should not be taught with the cane but with reason, so that they might come to understand the difference between right and wrong. And criminals were human beings too – no doubt, they had done wrong, but they could still be helped to mend their ways. It was dreadful, they argued, to brand a man’s cheek or forehead with a red-hot iron for one wrongdoing, leaving a mark he would bear for the rest of his life so that all might say ‘That man is a criminal’. There was something, they said, which forbade a person to be publicly humiliated. It was called human dignity.

All these ideas, which from 1700 onwards were debated first in England and later in France, came to be called the Enlightenment, because the people who held them wanted to combat the darkness of superstition with the pure light of reason.

Many people today think that the Enlightenment only taught what was obvious, and that people in those days had a rather simple view of the great mysteries of nature and the world. This is true. But you must realise that what seems obvious to us wasn’t in the least so then, and that it took a great deal of courage, self-sacrifice and perseverance for people to keep on repeating them so that they seem obvious to us today. And of course you must also realise that reason cannot, and never will, give us the key to all mysteries, although it has often put us on the right track.

In the two hundred years that followed the Enlightenment, more mysteries of nature were studied and explained than in the preceding two thousand years. But what you must never forget is the importance for our own lives of tolerance, reason and humanity – the three fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. Because of them we no longer take someone suspected of having committed a crime and torture them inhumanly on the rack until, half out of their wits, they confess to anything we want. Reason has taught us that there’s no such thing as witchcraft, so no more witches are burnt at the stake. (The last time a woman was convicted of witchcraft in England was in 1712.) Diseases are no longer fought by superstitious means, but mainly through cleanliness and the scientific investigation of their causes. We don’t have slaves or peasant serfs any more. All citizens are subject to the same laws and women have the same rights as men. All this we owe to the brave citizens and writers who dared stand up for these ideas. And it was daring. They may have lacked understanding and behaved unjustly in their struggle with ancient and long-held traditions, but they fought a long and hard battle to win tolerance, reason and humanity.

The battle would have taken much longer, and involved far greater sacrifices, if some of Europe’s rulers hadn’t fought in the front line for the ideas of the Enlightenment. One of the first to do so was Frederick the Great, king of Prussia.

As you know, the title of emperor, passed down through several generations of Habsburgs, was by this time not much more than a venerable title. The Habsburgs’ only real power was over Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, whereas in Germany power was in the hands of numerous princes who ruled over Bavaria, Saxony and many other big and small states. The Protestant lands in the north were among those which had paid the least attention to the Catholic emperor in Vienna since the Thirty Years War, and the most powerful of these princedoms was Prussia. Since the reign of its great sovereign Frederick William I, who ruled from 1640 to 1688, Prussia had taken more and more land from Sweden, until finally, in 1701, its princes had declared themselves kings. Prussia was a severe warrior state, whose nobility knew no greater honour than to serve as officers in the distinguished army of their king.