1/17/12 - Just realized I forgot to rate this.
I love everything I've read by the Goldstones and this is starting out as no exception. They begin with a fascinating account of Gutenberg's invention (his patron Johann Fust attempted to take all the credit for it) of movable type. He did more than just that though, inventing the ink and a new press, as well. I was struck by the fact that he presented some of his first printed books at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1640. I had the good fortune to attend this fair several years ago and it's a librarian's wet dream. 9000 publishers (and that year attendance was down because I attended in October of 2001). I had no idea the fair had such an illustrious and long history.
Anyway, the 16th century was a battle between Charles V, Francois of France and Henry VIII, and control of ideas was vital. Gutenburg threatened to upset the applecart. But the real enabler was the printer Aldus Manutius who invented the octavo, making books portable, which, in turn spread ideas (coupled with the rise of humanism) around Europe. He worked with Erasmus to produce popular translations of many classic works, another seditious behavior.
Michael Servetus, a child prodigy, grew up in northern Spain, surrounded by an unusual heterodoxy, the political battles between France, England and Spain, the mixture of Muslim and Jewish cultures, and religious minorities battling for recognition. He learned Hebrew, a language usually forbidden at the time in order to prevent the Old Testament from being read in the original. (It wasn't until 1531 under Francis I in France that Hebrew was permitted to be taught openly in universities.)
For a thousand years, the Catholic Church had prohibited general reading and distribution of the Bible wanting no stray interpretations to be promoted. Finally the Complutensian Polyglot Bible was approved by the Vatican in 1522. It placed the entire Bible side by side in Hebrew, Greek and Latin Vulgate. Unusually, Servetus (he had changed his name from Miguel Serveto partially because of prejudice against the Spanish) could read all of them. Additionally, he could read Arabic and so he read the Koran as well. He was seventeen years old. He decided that only a return to "classic biblical scholarship could save religion."
Servetus was so horrified by the pomp and waste of Pope Clement's (he had been captured following the sack of Rome in 1527 when Charles V's troops mutinied and went nuts) coronation of Charles that he left his service and moved to Basel, then a hotbed of the Protestant Reformation under Johannes Oecolampadius (aka Hausschein or Hussgen.) Servetus had come to the conclusion, after reading the original Biblical texts, that Arius had been correct (see When Jesus Became God The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome) and that no intermediary was needed between man and God.
By this time, Protestantism, like all revolutionary movements, had become reactionary and was more interested in accommodation with Rome than removing its underpinnings. Realizing he was risking Protestant wrath, Servetus fled to Strasbourg where he found a publisher for De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity.) The book had a major flaw: "Servetus was SO smart that it never seemed to occur to him that his arguments would be more effective if he didn't imply that anyone holding an opposing view was an idiot." Despite this -- or perhaps because of it -- and heretical views being all the rage, the book sold very well but it placed Servetus squarely in the sights of the Inquisition. Servetus, much like Salman Rushdie, had underestimated the zeal of his opponents.
It was Calvin who used the Inquisition to bring down Servetus. Furious with the publication of Christianisimi Restitutio and Servetus's intemperate remarks regarding some of Calvin's writings, Calvin brought down his and the Roman Church's wrath upon Michael head, resulting in, well, you'll see. The book itself, hero of the story, contained some extraordinary medical discoveries. It was Servetus who proposed the workings of the circulatory system, oxygenation of the blood, and the different functions of veins and arteries, discoveries credited to researchers much later.
The intolerance and fear for ideas not one's own led not long after to the St. Bartholemew's massacre resulting in the slaughter of 3000 Protestants in Paris, a number that proportionally today might be in the tens of thousands. It's a wonder the human race survived the internecine battle between Catholics and Protestants.
quote regarding the Thirty Years War which followed: In the Thirty Years' War every hatred, ambition, and fear that had been unleashed by the spread of knowledge erupted in an orgy of sustained horror. Although central Europe, mostly Germany, was the battleground, there was not a country in Europe that did not contribute combatants and victims. From 1618 to 1648, Catholic fought Calvinist, Calvinist fought Lutheran, Hapsburg fought Bourbon, nationalist fought imperialist. The wreckage was unthinkable. Cities were revisited again and again by a succession of marauding armies that killed, burned, raped, stole every bit of food in sight, then ruined the fields so that nothing further could be grown. In the Netherlands they had eaten rats and leather to survive; in Germany they ate each other. No statistic is more chilling than this: there were 21 million people living in Germany in 1618 at the start of the war; by 1648, the war's end, only 13 million were left. The plague was not so efficient.
