Bible and Sword (15 page)

There was about as much chance of enforcing this act as of enforcing Prohibition. Not that the population as a whole became Bible readers over night. But enough convinced Protestants, or Lutherans as they were called then, made free and individual access to the Scriptures a basic article of faith to nullify Henry’s attempt at suppression. Especially during the Catholic reaction under Mary, in whose reign the Bible was torn out of the churches and proscribed, it acquired the extra life that always attaches to words that tyrants have endeavored to stifle. As the “good Doctor Taylor” went to the stake he called to the people who had been his parishioners: “Good people! I have taught you nothing but God’s holy word and those lessons that I have taken out of God’s blessed book, the Holy Bible; and I am come hither this day to seal it with my blood.” In that flaming year, 1555, sixty-seven Protestants were publicly burned in Mary’s vain attempt to enforce the resubmission to Rome. Some, like Rowland Taylor, died in unswerving loyalty to their principles, some like Cranmer recanting previous recantations, but all through the manner of their death were to live on as heroes and martyrs. Bishop Latimer’s last words at the stake signalized Mary’s failure: “We shall this day, by God’s grace, light in England such a candle as I trust shall never be put out.”

Then in the reign of Elizabeth everything was turned upside down again, the reforms were restored, and the Bible put back in the churches. A new version was commanded, but its editors were cautioned to follow the Great Bible and “not to recede from it but where it varyeth manifestly from the Greek or Hebrew original.” Thus their version carried forward for another generation the continuity of Tyndale’s translation. Known as the Bishop’s Bible, this Elizabethan edition held the field until the reign of King James. By that time the rise of the Puritan sects that favored
a Calvinist version called the Geneva Bible brought about a situation in which the official Bible read in the churches did not agree with the Bible read privately in many homes. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 a new version was petitioned; and so was set in motion the immense task, shared by fifty-four scholars, that was to result in the King James version.

Almost a century had passed since Tyndale began his work, and in that time much new research into ancient texts and many new grammars, dictionaries, and treatises had resulted from the advance in Greek and Hebrew scholarship. Among the revisers were Edward Lively, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge; Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster, who knew Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and some ten other languages; William Bedwell, fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, the greatest Arabic scholar of Europe; and at least nine others who were then or afterwards professors of Hebrew or Greek at Oxford or Cambridge. The revisers were grouped in six companies of nine each, two sitting at Oxford, two at Cambridge, and two in London. For their guidance was laid down a set of thirteen rules that shows the workmanlike approach of these seventeenth-century divines and scholars. Each company was given a number of books to work on, and each man was to work by himself on a designated number of chapters. Then all were “to meet together, confer what they have done and agree for their Parts what shall stand.” Next the several companies were to exchange their finished books “to be considered seriously and judiciously for His Majesty is very careful on this point.” If any point was in disagreement afterwards, then the revisers were to write each other their doubts, “note the Place and withal send the Reasons to which if they consent not, the Difference to be compounded at the General Meeting which is to be of the chief Persons of each Company at the end of the Work.” Further elucidation might be asked of any learned person outside the group. Every bishop was instructed
to send news of the project to any scholar of ancient tongues that he might know of, encouraging him to send in helpful observations to the “companies.”

In their preface to the finished work as it appeared in 1611 the “workemen,” as the revisers styled themselves, state simply that they tried “to make a good translation better, or out of many good ones, one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath bene our indeavor, that our marke.” They did not disdain, they said, “to revise that which we had done, or to bring back to the anvill that which we had hammered.” Nor did they bind themselves to a rigorous precision in using exactly the same English word every time for the same original word of the text, “for is the kingdom of God become words or syllables?” Their freedom of language preserved the work of their predecessors; in fact, the first of their thirteen rules sealed the style set by Tyndale by explicitly ordering that the Bishops’ Bible was “to be followed and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.” How basically honest was the attempt to get as close as possible to the original meaning set down in ages past in Palestine, how astonishingly free of doctrinal partisanship, is evident from the instructions to the revisers. Names of prophets, for example, and all other proper names were “to be retained as nigh as may be, accordingly as they were vulgarly used.” Angled interpretations were prohibited by Rule 6: “No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew and Greek words.” Finally in the preface the revisers acknowledged their constant effort to steer clear both of the “scrupulosities of the Puritans” and the “obscurities of the Papists” and firmly stood by their purpose that “the Scripture may speake like it selfe, as in the language of Canaan, that it may be understood of the very vulgar.” This they accomplished, and this was their glory, for their Bible became not only understood by every one from the “very vulgar” to the most educated, but known, remembered, and loved.

In the age of discovery, when Europe was bursting its boundaries in every direction, the Elizabethan navigators and merchant adventurers were in the vanguard. These “stirrers abroad and searchers of the remote parts of the world,” boasts Hakluyt, “have excelled all the nations and people of the earth.”

“For which the kings of this land before her Majesty,” he continues, “had theyre banners ever seene in the Caspian Sea? Which of them hath ever dealt with the Emperor of Persia as her Majesty hath done, and obtained for her merchants large and loving privileges? Who ever saw before this regiment an English Ligier in the stately porch of the Grand Signor of Constantinople? Who ever found English consuls and agents at Tripolis in Syria, at Aleppo, at Babylon, at Balsara …? What English shippes did heeretofore ever anker in the mighty river of the Plate … land upon the Luzones in despight of the enemy … trafficke with the princes of the Moluccas … and last of all return home most richly laden with the commodities of China as the subjects of this now flourishing monarchy have done?”

The return home “richly laden” was the chief factor in Elizabethan expansion. The impetus that drove the explorers was trade; their goal was the merchandise of the East. Palestine for the time being was forgotten in its character
as Holy Land and became but a trading post, a way station in the commerce opened with the Ottoman Empire. Crusaders fired with zeal to split the heads of Turks gave way to gift-laden ambassadors who sued the Turk for trading privileges with soft words and promises. In the course of the commercial and diplomatic relations established between England and the Sultan’s empire at this time the foundations were laid for England’s future strategic involvement in the Middle East.

The Crown went into partnership with the merchants and navigators, subsidizing their expeditions and collecting handsome profits on their return. Above all, out of this activity England reaped a navy. As trade expanded, more and more ships were built to carry it and more and more crews trained to sail them.

Meanwhile another instrument of empire, the chartered company, grew up along with the navy. Formed by groups of merchant adventurers, the companies were granted monopoly rights to trading privileges in particular areas in return for an annual tribute to the Crown. The first to be chartered was the Muscovy Company in 1554, and the second was the Levant Company chartered in 1581 to trade in the dominions of the “Grand Senior,” the Sultan of Turkey.

Palestine lay within those dominions, but it was a Palestine that had been for a generation neglected, unvisited, and all but forgotten by Englishmen. From Torkyngton, the last of the pilgrims in 1517, to Anthony Jenkinson, the first of the merchant adventurers in 1553, there are no records of English travel in Palestine. That gap of roughly a generation saw the overthrow of the Catholic Church in England and the establishment of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem. These two events were responsible for a new era in England’s relations with Palestine. In 1453 the new and more terrible Turks captured Constantinople, which has remained theirs from that day to this. By 1540, at the height of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turks
ruled in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cairo, in Budapest and Belgrade, in Rhodes and Algiers. They straddled all roads to Palestine by land or sea. A Christian traveler was regarded by them as legitimate prey, to be captured as a slave or killed as an infidel whose death assured the perpetrator a place in Paradise.

Not only had the risks of the journey to the Holy Land vastly increased, but also the compelling motive had disappeared. Salvation, according to Protestant theory, was to be won by the soul’s journey, not by the body’s. “The best pilgrimage,” wrote Samuel Purchas, “is the peaceable way of a good conscience to that Jerusalem which is above.” Wherever the Reformation took hold, pilgrimages ceased, at least for the time being. Along with the sale of indulgences and pardons they were condemned by the Protestants as the most objectionable of the forms and ceremonies of the Catholic Church — forms whose public performance was substituted for private morality. In that day Protestantism still meant protest, reformation still meant reform; and the most urgent reform was replacing the mechanical means through which Rome bestowed grace with the effort toward an inner virtue. To undertake the physical journey to some pilgrim shrine only endangered the soul’s journey, as Purchas said, and he added the awful warning that “to ascribe sanctity to a place is Jewish.”

Commerce, not salvation, was the new lure of the East. Where once the pilgrims disembarked, bales of English woolens now rolled onto the quays. Spices and silks, wines and oils, carpets and jewels were brought back in exchange. Caravans from Arabia passed through Palestine, were bartered in the market places and transshipped at the ports to the waiting vessels of European merchants. The land of Palestine itself contributed little to the new commerce. Under the Turkish despotism the devastation of the land that had followed the various Arab, Seljuk, Christian, and Tartar invasions and battles went on apace.
Terraced vineyards crumbled away, hillsides eroded, cisterns and aqueducts choked up with silt. The land that had supported the gardens and palaces of Solomon, and all the “crowded, busy world” of Biblical times, was but a backwater of the Ottoman empire. Even its ports, Jaffa and Acre, though still busy, were secondary to Scanderoon, port of Aleppo, on the one hand and to Alexandria and Algiers on the other.

But the future fate of Palestine was involved in the development of the Levant trade as a whole. When England first entered the “Turkie trade” in the reign of Elizabeth the foundations of her future empire in India and the Middle East were being laid, however unwittingly. The merchants of the Levant Company opened the Middle East to England’s commerce. Pushing ever eastward, the same group twenty years later founded the East India Company, whose role in the development of the British Empire is well known. In this instance, a reversal of the usual order, the flag followed trade. The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers. It was they who first put England into official diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire. The religious attachment to Palestine that had played so great a role hitherto and would do so again—this was for the moment absent. It is a striking fact that in all the correspondence of the Queen and her ministers with the “Turkie” merchants regarding negotiations with the Sultan, appointment of ambassadors, terms of the company’s charter, there is, except for a casual reference in passing, no mention whatever of the land for which so many generations of crusaders had fought and died, the goal of a thousand years of pilgrimages.

Before the reign of Elizabeth the “Turkie trade” was largely monopolized by the Italian city republics, whose practiced fleets knew every wind and tide, every cove and
port of the Mediterranean. Although Hakluyt lists several sporadic voyages by “divers tall ships of London to Tripolis and Barutti in Syria” in the early sixteenth century, the English made no concerted effort to break the Italian shipping monopoly until the balance of power in the Mediterranean was changed by the battle of Lepanto in 1571. When the battle was joined the combined forces of the Spanish Hapsburgs, the papal states, and the Italian cities under the command of the dashing Don John of Austria, brother of the Spanish king, numbered 270 galleys and 80,000 men. At the end of that terrible day, wrote Knolles, Elizabethan historian of the Turks, “the sea was stained with blood and covered with Bodies, Weapons and fragments of broken Gallies.” The Turks’ fleet was destroyed, their sea power in the Mediterranean smashed. They lost 220 ships, 25,000 men killed, 50,000 taken prisoner, and 12,000 Christian galley slaves released by the victors. “Never,” claims the historian Lafuente, “had the Mediterranean witnessed on her bosom nor shall the world again see a conflict so obstinate, a butchery so terrible, men so valiant and so enraged.” The victory aroused glittering visions of reviving the throne of Constantine and sweeping the Turk clean out of Europe and the Levant, back into the Scythian wilds whence he had come.

Don John saw himself an emperor in Byzantium. But the Turk, despite his defeat, remained a danger to Europe for over a century, until turned back at the doors of Vienna in 1683, and, even after that, a great power for over two centuries more. Still the toppling of the Turkish fleet in the Bay of Lepanto cleared the way through the Mediterranean. When news of the victory reached London, Holinshed reports, “There were bonfires made through the citie with banquetting and great rejoycing as good cause there was for a victory of so great importance to the whole state of the Christian commonwealth.”