Nature's Evil

The collaboration between the bellicose Maximilian and the thrifty Fugger continued for decades. In 1515 Maximilian arranged the marriages of two of his heirs, a grandson and a granddaughter, to the offspring of Vladislaus II, the king of Hungary and Bohemia. Western and Eastern Europe were to enter into a dynastic marriage, uniting two great royal lines, the Habsburgs and the Jagiellonians. A double wedding of unbelievable luxury was planned. Albrecht Dürer designed a triumphal arch for the occasion; it was exactly like a Roman arch, but made out of wood covered in paper, printed with drawings. The arch was never made, and Dürer was not paid for his three years’ work. Maximilian again put himself in debt to Fugger, against the security of mines in Hungary. Smelted from Fugger’s copper, bronze was forged into cannons and muskets; without them, the Turks would have occupied Vienna. To separate silver from copper in the process known as liquation, lead was needed. It was found near Krakow – this was globalisation in action. The silver mines in the Alps created Fugger’s wealth, and the copper mines in the Carpathians magnified it.

After Columbus’s return from America, the two most powerful empires of that period, the Spanish and the Portuguese, agreed to divide the world into two spheres of influence. To avoid coming to blows, they drew a vertical line on a map of the Atlantic, which was at that time blank. This line skirted the coast of Brazil: all future discoveries to the west of this line would belong to Castile – to the east, to Portugal. Authorised by the pope, this line became known as the Tordesillas meridian. In 1498 Vasco da Gama skirted Africa; on the island of Angediva, off the west coast of India, he met a Polish Jew who had travelled there by the Silk Road from Poznań. He took this man to Lisbon; there he was baptised and given the name Gaspar da Gama. Manuel I, the king of Portugal, later appointed Gaspar as a counsellor. He was part of the expedition that discovered Brazil, and he discussed the layout of the world with Amerigo Vespucci. The Portuguese became pioneers of the spice trade. Fugger also had his finger in this pie: in 1504 he bought from King Manuel the right to build a pepper-processing factory in Lisbon, supplying a thousand tons of copper per year in exchange. From these operations with Portuguese merchants, Fugger made a profit of almost 200 per cent per annum. His agents organised the first circumnavigation of the globe, led by Magellan in 1519. Magellan was killed by natives in the Philippines, but his crew sailed round Africa and returned to Spain. On the way they put the Moluccas – a small archipelago of islands lying between Australia, Indonesia and New Guinea – on the map. The priceless spices of Eastern trade – nutmeg and cloves – only grew there.

All this time the Nuremburg master Martin Behaim was making globes for the Portuguese king, while the Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro was drawing maps for the Spanish king. After the return of Magellan’s expedition, the Tordesillas meridian was extended on the other side of Behaim’s globe; it became the new ‘Zaragoza antimeridian’. It turned out that the Molucca archipelago remained with Portugal. But Diogo Ribeiro continued to work for the Spanish king. At the Zaragoza peace talks, he slightly amended his map so that the Moluccas passed to Spain. 9 The skills of these experts, who were hardly paid for their work, would decide the fate of unbelievable treasures. Both Ribeiro’s map and Behaim’s globe feature in Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors ; together with a Turkish carpet, a book of Lutheran hymns and a bronze astrolabe, they form the background to a world in conflict. In the foreground two imposing ambassadors from the new superpowers – France and England – are discussing this new carving up of the world. On the floor lies a spectacular skull.

Luther

Mines could collapse, flood, explode or give off poisonous gases; it was impossible to rescue the victims of such disasters. Even a soldier on the battlefield could count on more help from those who had sent him out there. The years of working in the mines inculcated a spirit of rationality, an ability to calculate risks and common-sense solidarity. An ordinary miner earned a third more than a peasant, which meant that his wife didn’t have to work in the fields but took care of the house and children. The miners were the first workers to defend their group rights. Their guilds in the Alps were unusually powerful; by the end of the fifteenth century they were already influencing pay rates, supporting the widows of miners and negotiating the length of holidays. More than once, miners’ guilds called strikes, and sometimes their leaders were arrested.