Out of the Flames Read online

  Also by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone:

  Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World

  Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore

  Warmly Inscribed: The New England Forger

  and Other Book Tales

  Also by Lawrence Goldstone:

  Rights

  Off-Line

  Also by Nancy Goldstone:

  Trading Up: Surviving Success as a

  Woman Trader on Wall Street

  Bad Business

  Mommy and the Murder

  Mommy and the Money

  For Emily

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART I Servetus (1511–1553)

  PART II Servetus and Calvin

  PART III The Trail

  Epilogue

  Bibliographic Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  If, then, dead books may be committed to the flames,

  how much more live books, that is to say, men?

  Matthieu Ory,

  Inquisitor of Heretical Pravity

  for the Realm of France,

  Paris, 1544

  PROLOGUE

  SHORTLY AFTER NOON on a cold and rainy late October day in 1553, a procession began at the town hall of Geneva, in western Switzerland, on the border with France. At its head were the local dignitaries—magistrates in their robes and hats, members of the town council, clergymen in their gowns, and the lieutenant-criminel, the chief of police. Immediately behind them rode a wave of officers on horseback and a guard of mounted archers. Next came the citizens of the city, first the well-to-do burghers, then the tradespeople and artisans, and, finally, a mob of the city's lower classes. Their destination was a hillside at Champel, about a mile outside the city's walls.

  In the midst of these fair-skinned Swiss, one man stood out, a prisoner. He was in his forties, dark, almost Moorish, dirty and weak, with a long, unkempt beard and ragged clothing. He was surrounded by a crowd of pastors exhorting him to confess his sins. An aging churchman walked next to him, whispering in his ear. The prisoner prayed silently in reply.

  The prisoner's shabby appearance belied his status as one of Europe's leading physicians and preeminent thinkers. His name was Michael Servetus, and his crime was publishing a book that redefined Christianity in a more tolerant and inclusive way. Although this book contained, almost as an afterthought, a great scientific discovery—one which a century later would propel medicine into the modern age—on that October afternoon in 1553, no one in Geneva knew or cared.

  Michael Servetus had risked life and position to publish this book. After running afoul of the Inquisition with an earlier version twenty years before, he had gone underground and, like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, had risen again under an assumed identity to become a respected citizen of France. Noblemen traveled great distances to consult with “Dr. Villeneuve.” But Michael Servetus was unwilling to live out his life without being true to his beliefs and his principles, so he wrote his book and had it printed and distributed.

  Shortly after its publication, he had been arrested by the inquisitors of France and sentenced to death. On the eve of his execution, he had managed a daring escape and had eluded capture for months. He was on his way to Italy, where he would be safe, but chose instead to stop in Geneva. There, his dark skin betrayed him. He was recognized while praying in church and arrested.

  Before his supporters could rally to his defense, Michael Servetus was thrown into a dark, airless, vermin-infested cell, where he was kept for seventy-five days, denied a change of clothes, bedding, and often food and water. His access to the outside world was limited to forced participation in a gaudy show trial, where he was to go head to head with his accuser, perhaps the greatest mind of the Reformation. He defended himself brilliantly, but the quality of his arguments never mattered. Servetus's fate had been sealed from the moment he was recognized. He was found guilty of the charges brought by a council and prosecutor hand picked by his archrival and sworn enemy, Jean Chauvin, an obscure failed humanist who had reinvented himself as the reformer John Calvin and risen to be virtual dictator of the great city.

  On October 26, 1553, Michael Servetus was condemned “to be led to Champel and burned there alive on the next day together with his books.”

  Torture and cruelty were no strangers to sixteenth-century justice. There was a strict hierarchy of punishment, from relatively painless to gruesomely agonizing, depending on the severity of the crime. Slanderers had their tongues cut out, thieves were impaled. The penalty for murder—beheading—was considered relatively charitable.

  But of all the punishments, the very worst was to be burned alive, and so this horror was reserved for the most terrible crime there was— heresy. Heretics were especially loathed because they put not only their own souls in mortal jeopardy, but also those of the otherwise innocent people infected by their teachings.

  Hollywood has often used burnings as a special effect. The victim is led to a stake atop an immense pile of wood and trussed with ropes. Torches are brought; the pile of wood is set ablaze and huge flames immediately leap up, surrounding the body. The victim screams as the bonfire erupts and the flames leap higher and higher, burning furiously. The camera pans upward as the smoke rises into the sky, and it is understood that all is over, that the victim is past suffering.

  Only Hollywood has gotten it wrong. It was never over quickly. The whole point of burning at the stake was to subject the condemned to prolonged, horrible, unendurable pain. That was the type of pain that awaited Michael Servetus—and he knew it.

  When Servetus was led to the hill at Champel, the stake and pyre were made of fresh wood, green wood, newly cut branches with the leaves still attached. They sat him on a log and chained him to a post. His neck was bound with thick rope. On his head they put a crown made of straw, doused in sulphur. Chained to his side was what was thought to be the last available copy of his book, the rest having all been zealously hunted down and destroyed. The ideas were to be burnt along with the man. There was no escape.

  The fire was lit. Green wood does not burn easily, does not roar up. It smokes and sputters, burning unevenly and slowly. And so Michael Servetus's life was not extinguished quickly in a blazing wall of fire. Rather, he was slowly roasted, agonizingly conscious the entire time, the fire creeping upward inch by inch. The flames licked at him, the sulphur dripped into his eyes, not for minutes but for a full half hour. “Poor me, who cannot finish my life in this fire,” the spectators heard him moan. At last, he screamed a final prayer to God, and then his ashes commingled with those of his book.

  “WHAT IS A BOOK? Paper, cardboard, vellum, calfskin, glue, ink? The embodiment of our ideas, the corporeal representation of our souls?

  This is the story of one book—Michael Servetus's book—an old book, a rare book, a book that contained the mystery of a great scientific discovery. But unlike other old, rare books, this book was attacked almost from the moment of its publication, viciously and systematically, with the goal of total eradication, by forces of overwhelming power.

  And yet, somehow, with no commensurate organized defense operating on its behalf, three copies survived.

  PART I

  Servetus

  (1511–1553)

  CHAPTER ONE

  MICHAEL SERVETUS WAS born Miguel Serveto Conesa alias Revés on Saint Michael's Day, September 29, 1511, in the small town of Villanueva de Sijena, in the province of Huesca. Huesca is in Aragon, at the northeast corner of Spain, just east of Navarre and about fifty miles south of the border with France. The house in which he was born still stands.

  The Servetos were gentry of long standing. There is evi
dence of their having been given their title, infanzones, or nobles of the second category, as early as 1327. Miguel was the oldest of three sons. His father, Anthon, was a notary; his mother, Catalina Conesa, was also born of noble blood. The second son, Pedro, became a notary like his father; the youngest, Juan, stayed home and became a priest and was appointed rector of a nearby church.

  The early sixteenth century was the crossroads where the medieval world, the Renaissance, the Inquisition, the New World, and the modern world all met. Although to most Americans the preeminent figure of the period was England's King Henry VIII, for most of his reign, Henry, despite the six wives, court intrigues, and general theatrics, was an afterthought in European politics. It was Charles V, the last of the Holy Roman Emperors, who dominated the stage. The Holy Roman Empire was the superpower of its time, stretching from Spain to the Balkans, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.

  Charles was a Hapsburg, born into one of the great ruling dynasties of Europe in 1500. His father was Philip the Fair, king of Castile, son of the emperor Maximilian, and his mother was Juana the Mad, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Juana, unattractive and highly unstable, had fallen madly in love with a husband who couldn't stand her. When Philip took up with someone else, Juana retaliated by hacking off his mistress's hair at a public function. Philip got his revenge by locking up Juana in a tower in Spain, where she stayed for the next fifty years.

  Then everyone died—Isabella in 1504, Philip two years later, Ferdinand in 1516, and Maximilian three years after that. Charles inherited everything. Before he had turned twenty, he ruled virtually all of Western Europe except England, France, and Portugal. Charles was smart, ambitious, fearless, and intensely Catholic.

  Of the three remaining holdouts, France, under Francis I, was by far the most powerful. Six years older than Charles, Francis soon became his nemesis. The French monarch had been raised by a doting mother and sister (the bohemian Marguerite of Navarre) and was taught to be brave, romantic, and chivalrous. He was after Charles from the beginning. When he was twelve, he stole Charles's seven-year-old fiancée out from under his nose, an act that did nothing to improve relations with the future emperor.

  Francis understood perfectly that Charles would have liked nothing better than to add France to his empire. But holding vast amounts of territory presents problems of its own, and Charles's resources were always stretched far too thin to mount a full-scale invasion of powerful France. Francis helped maintain this tenuous balance of power by attacking Charles's forces wherever he perceived them to be weak.

  For years Charles and Francis tried alternately to outflank, outwit, or outfight each other. They used diplomacy, threats, love, and treachery. Each courted and threatened the pope. But while most of the world was consumed by the shifting alliances and machinations of these two Renaissance heavyweights, another force was at work, bubbling just under the surface. It was a force that was immense and inexorable, and it was made of paper.

  ABOUT HALF A CENTURY before, in the mid-1450s, an inventor had just finished a twenty-year struggle to perfect a new device that he was sure would make him a great fortune. The inventor was a shadowy figure—there is no surviving record of his birth, and no accurate image of him exists. He grew up in Mainz, about twenty-five miles west of Frankfurt in the Rhine River Valley. He seems to have been born of good family, but after some unrecorded transgression as a young man, he was forced to move to Strasbourg, about ioo miles to the south.

  He seems, from the sketchy accounts that remain, to have been a disagreeable person. He worked in total secrecy—not even his next-door neighbors knew what he was up to. He borrowed heavily, putting off one creditor after another with vague promises of a vast return on investment. In fact, much of what we know about him has been gleaned from surviving court records of the many times he was sued by his partners, or unpaid bills from tax assessors or people to whom he owed money. Toward the end of this twenty-year quest, he seems to have become increasingly desperate, obsessed that someone would steal his idea or that others engaged in similar experiments would perfect the device before he did.

  The inventor was Johann Gutenberg, and the invention was the process by which a book could be printed from movable type.

  Although popular history often credits Gutenberg with single-handedly creating a new world of books and reading, he was merely responding to a demand that was already strong and growing fast. This was a venture much more entrepreneurial than scientific. When Gutenberg first began to tinker about with his printing apparatus in the 1430s, Europe was in the midst of a great post-plague commercial boom, with people becoming more mobile and worldlier than ever before. Literacy had been on the rise for decades, and new universities had begun to spring up in a number of major cities in Europe. Collecting books and establishing private libraries was now a popular pastime among the wealthy, and there were even glimmers of a thirst for reading material that was devoted to neither theology nor the better-known classics.

  Europe in 1520. France is virtually surrounded by territories of Charles V.

  To meet this growing demand, publishers in the 1430s and 1440s had no alternative but to scramble about and try to produce as many books as possible using traditional methods. By far the most common of these was the use of scribes to create each copy of a book individually. More demand meant hiring more scribes—one publisher, Ves-pasiano da Bisticci, employed fifty at a time. But even this was not enough. New trainees were needed, but productive crafts like leather working, weaving, and metalsmithing paid much better than printing. Older scribes were having great difficulty inducing younger men to enter the profession.

  Competition to draw from this limited labor pool grew intense, and the power of the scribes grew accordingly. In Paris, home of the most important university in Europe, there were so many of these Bob Cratchits hunched over their desks, copying one scholarly text after another, that they began to organize themselves into guilds.

  The scribe system had other painfully obvious drawbacks. First and foremost, a book produced by a scribe was essentially a one-of-a-kind work of art. All calligraphers were hardly created equal, so the work of the more talented scribes was much more in demand, particularly among the aristocracy, than that of inferior artisans. In any case, a book copied by a scribe was a laborious effort, and necessarily limited by how many pages one man—no matter how adept—could produce in a day. Then there was the question of editing and correcting a product created without control or supervision. Error correction was tedious, requiring at a minimum the redrafting of an entire page. It clearly wouldn't do to have lines drawn through the text with little arrows pointing from additions in the margins to the correct spot on a page. As pressure to produce a greater volume of books increased, errors became more and more common—just how common depended upon the diligence or greed of the publisher—and neither buyer nor seller could really be sure that what was in a book, no matter how beautifully rendered, was an accurate reproduction of any given author's work.

  Some publishers tried to get around the scribe problem by employing block printing. Block printing involved cutting away part of a wooden block's surface, leaving any desired text or illustration in relief. Ink was applied to the raised portions of the block, which was then pressed against the material being printed. Block printing, which began in Asia, had been used on textiles since about the fifth or sixth century and was being used to print books in China by the ninth. The Mongols used the technique for creating paper money in the thirteenth century. Block printing appeared around the same time in Italy. By the fourteenth century, German printers were using block printing for the text of illuminated manuscripts.

  While the advantage of block printing was the ability to produce multiple copies from a single master, there were plenty of shortcomings here too. Creating the master copy was every bit as laborious as employing scribes, if not more so. Carving a block for each page of a four-hundred-page manuscript could take a sufficient amount of work to render all
but the most timeless texts out of date. It was an approach that was only justified for texts for which the projected printing runs were quite large. And although the carvers could certainly choose hardwoods, such as oak or maple, wood is still porous, susceptible to wear, and difficult to clean, thus making it unwieldy to produce a large number of copies from a single block. Then, of course, there was the storage problem—what did you do with the blocks after you were done with them? Firewood was often the option of choice.

  The inadequacies of both scribes and wood blocks in dealing with the burgeoning demand for printed material were as obvious to fifteenth-century entrepreneurs as the burgeoning demand for motor cars was to Henry Ford. Whoever came up with a better, more efficient, more cost-effective method of producing books was going to make lots and lots of money.

  With the stakes this high, Gutenberg was not the only person drawn into the enterprise. All over Europe, inventors raced to come up with an idea that would work. In fact, to this day there are some who insist that there were crude versions of printing from movable type before Gutenberg's momentous achievement in 1455. Other scholars believe that some of these earlier versions were actually Gutenberg's own less sophisticated prototypes.

  Since Gutenberg chose to be so secretive, there is no real record of his thought process or of the interim successes and failures he experienced in his two decades of work. It seems, however, that his first step was to create the type itself. This isn't surprising, since Gutenberg was familiar with goldsmithing, and metalsmiths had for some time used punches to deboss their work with an identifying mark. It obviously didn't take long for Gutenberg to realize that these punches could be made as easily in the shape of letters as anything else. Since 1440 is now generally accepted as the year in which he perfected typography, fifteen of the twenty years must have been devoted to figuring out how to make the type uniform. There was also the problem of utilizing the type in a practical and efficient manner.