The Deeper Story
The story of the religious, political and military conflicts that filled the sixteenth century was in one sense superficial, since its source lay in a more basic and deeper story that went on behind the scenes and the striking landscapes of history: the daily, constant struggle of mankind with the earth, the elements, poverty and death. What could the decrees of popes, the storms of Protestant anger, the foolish rivalries of superstition that led to murder, and the strutting, throne-sitting, gout and syphilis of kings and emperors mean against humanity's hard and stubborn effort to win food, shelter, clothing, health, a wife and children, in short the securing of individual life?
Throughout this period the villages of European countries had to keep watch night and day against wolves and wild boars and other dangers to their flocks and houses. In that agricultural age man was in some ways still in the hunting stage, so that people had either to kill or be killed. Thousands of kinds of insects, forest beasts and birds of the air fought the peasant to snatch the fruit of his year's labor, while mysterious diseases killed his herds by the group. At any time one feared that flooding rains would wash away the fields, great inundations drown and destroy everything, or drought last so long that it withered all life on earth. Hunger and famine always lurked near, and the fear of fire was never far from mind.
The Peasant's Life
Illness came at all hours while the physician was out of reach. About once every ten years plague broke out and carried off many family members, dear to their kin and needed for work in the field. Of every five children born in a family, two died in childhood and one before puberty. In every generation at least one son was handed to the recruiting officer to enter military service, and armies burned villages and trampled fields. Of the harvest left after all these damages, a tenth or somewhat more went to the landlord and a tenth to the church.
Had it not been for the joy of children, the evening games, the consolation of singing and the merriment of the tavern, and a half-doubtful, half-devout hope for the more generous world beyond death, peasant life would have been too hard for body and soul. In this way food was produced to feed the lords of castles, the kings of courts, the priests in pulpits, the merchants and craftsmen of the towns, and also the physicians, artists, poets, scholars and philosophers, and last and least of all the slaves of the soil themselves. Civilization has always been a parasite on the man with the spade.
New Crops, New Fertilizer
Progress in agricultural science changed the age. With small fields turned into large estates, farm output rose greatly. The new class of merchants and capitalists who owned the large estates, by spreading the greed for profit into the sleepy life of the countryside, both increased production and added to the general poverty. Bold merchants brought into Europe a new fertilizer, rich in phosphate and nitrogen, made from the droppings of birds living on the coast of Peru. Many plants native to Asia and America were tamed and made to grow in Europe, among them the potato, the magnolia, the agave of Mexico, pepper, the dahlia and the oleander. Tobacco reached Spain from Mexico in 1558, and a year later Jean Nicot, French ambassador at Lisbon, sent some of its seeds to Catherine de Medici as a gift; and history, in reward for that service, gave his name to the poison.
As the population grew, fishing expanded, but the Reformation, by allowing meat on Fridays, dealt a hard but brief blow to the trade in fish. With the rise of the capitalist system mining developed rapidly. In 1549 Newcastle was exporting coal. The Fugger family, by introducing new organization, raising output and perfecting the methods of refining ore, multiplied the yield of their mines several times.
Agricola and the German Mine
Georg Agricola takes us to watch one of the German mines of the sixteenth century:
The main kinds of workers are miners, shovelers, windlass workers, carriers, sorters, washers and smelters. The twenty-four hours of the day and night are divided into three shifts of seven hours, and the three extra hours between shifts are spent in the leaving of one gang and the arrival of the next. The first shift begins at four in the morning and lasts until eleven; the second begins at twelve and ends at seven in the evening. These two are the morning and afternoon shifts; the third is the night shift, from eight at night to three in the morning. The mayor does not permit the night shift to be imposed on workers unless necessity requires, and in that case the workers stay awake by lamplight and, so as not to fall asleep from weariness or the late hour, lighten their long and hard labor with group singing, well practiced and pleasant. In some towns a miner is not allowed to work two shifts in a row, for it often happens that from exhaustion he falls asleep in the shaft. But in other towns miners are allowed to, so that they may support their families, especially when food prices rise. The workers take Saturdays off and go shopping for their needs. They also usually stop work on Sundays and annual feast days and spend the time in religious duties; yet if necessity arises the worker does not rest, for sometimes a flood of water or a cave-in forces extra work, and in such cases work on a holy day is not counted against religion. Besides, all of this class are strong workers who have been hardened from birth.
In 1527 Agricola was appointed town physician of Joachimsthal, and after some time in that mining town he became a noted mineralogist. With full energy and enthusiasm he then studied history, the principles of mining and the techniques of metal refining, and after twenty years of research finished his book De Re Metallica (1550). It counts as one of the classics of its kind and is hardly less important and authoritative than the masterpieces of Copernicus and Vesalius, composed in the same decade. In it he described tools, machines and mining and refining methods in detail and, for greater clarity, employed artists to show everything in pictures. Agricola first proved that bismuth and antimony are truly metallic elements, identified about twenty new minerals, and was the first to hold that mineral veins in rock beds were formed by the deposits left by flowing underground water.
Machines, Clocks and Ships
Mining, metalworking and weaving advanced greatly in technique in that age. The first railways were laid by miners under the carts carrying ore. In 1533 Johann Jurgen fitted the spinning wheel with a treadle so that it turned by foot instead of by hand, and by freeing the craftsman's hand doubled his output. The clock improved in accuracy of timekeeping while gradually growing smaller, and it became the custom to decorate clocks in various ways with engraving, chasing, enameling and jewels. Henry VIII had a small clock that had to be wound only once a week. Even so, the most accurate clock of the time gained or lost up to fifteen minutes a day.
Means of communication and transport limped along behind the progress of trade and industry. In the sixteenth century the postal system gradually grew, until delivering private letters also became customary. The commercial revolution advanced shipbuilding: ship bottoms were made thinner and deeper, adding to speed and steadiness, and the number of masts was raised from one to three and the sails to five and six.
Francis I and Henry VIII vied with each other not only in war, love and dress but in building large and numerous ships, a sign of their pride and power. In the early sixteenth century ships on the Mediterranean, in fair weather, made sixteen kilometers an hour, but the heavier ships built for crossing the Atlantic, in the best conditions, covered no more than two hundred and ten kilometers a day. On land the fastest travel was by the post courier, who rode up to 140 kilometers a day on horseback; even so, it usually took ten or eleven days for important news to get from Venice to Paris or Madrid.
Land travel was mostly on horseback, and for that reason the entrance of every house had a thick iron ring to which the horse's rein was tied. Coaches were multiplying, but roads were still unpaved dirt, and wheeled vehicles moved over them with difficulty, so that each coach needed six to eight horses to pull it through the unavoidable mud. These coaches covered no more than thirty-five kilometers a day. Sedan chairs carried on servants' shoulders were still used by wealthy ladies, but ordinary people all over Europe traveled on foot.