City Air Makes Men Free

The peasant carpenters continue to work in the adjoining room.  Huge Clovis with his Niederdeutsch dialect, mousey Ergot, and sharp Fedor with the ruined face, a scar, a mass of too-white flesh, covering the entirety of the left side.  Last night, as they leaned on the other side of the wall against which my cot is abutted, Clovis said softly, “Today I become a free man.  My son will not be a serf.”

A cheese so strong that I could smell it through the cracks in the wall must have been unwrapped, as Clovis continued.  “My family and village were tenants of a certain noble for as long as memory holds.  We always paid our rents and gave our lord everything he required.

“But with each generation, the nobles grow more foolish.  They waste their fortunes on clothing and the new spices.  They quarrel among themselves and ruin the land by attacking one another’s villages.  My house was burned three times in four years, the crops destroyed every time.  Once they burned the barn with my ox in it.  As the nobles grow poorer, they take more from us.  They change the laws and take away our ancient rights to hunt, to fish, to gather firewood on the common lands.  They make us work more and more days.”

Fedor amazed me when he said, “It’s this new Roman law.  Our ancient rights came from the old German law.  It made a difference among serfs, tenants, freers.  The Romans had only slaves.  Their law had only slaves.  Now we are all slaves.”

I shifted on my cot.  We scholars believed that the rewriting of the law codes along Roman lines was an admirable return to simplicity and justice.

“When my lord invoked the new law,” Clovis said, “I had to work two days a week for him, and I had to work extra boon days during the busy harvests.  That was bad enough.  But the mistress!  Ach, she galled me!  I had to gather snails for her, stand guard to shoo the wild hogs away from her garden, keep the frogs quiet in the pond on cloudy afternoons while she slept.  My days spent in such foolishness, I worked my own crops by the light of the moon.  Dark nights, my son carried a torch before the plow.”

Ergot seemed to be eating apples, for I heard the bite, though at this time of year, they would be wintered over, shriveled and moldy.  “How’d you get away?” he squeaked.

“My lord took his men to war.  So, we fled in the night.  Many days I spent between the shafts of the handcart, saying to my wife and son:  Faster.  Faster.”

Ergot must also have been eating the apple cores, for he spat the seeds.  “Pist.  Did they look for you?”

“I know not.  Perhaps in the nearer cities, but I avoided those.  I made for Freiburg, over a hundred miles away.  Once I was within the city walls, the lord had a year and a day to reclaim me.  But there’s been no rumor of his appearing.  True is the saying: City air makes men free.” 

Now I smelled dried fish as Fedor said, “May it please the saints.  For I shall never go back.”

I assumed Ergot referred to the scar when he said, “Did a noble do that?”

“I spoke too directly to my lord.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said nothing.  But I gave him the Spanish finger.”

Ergot’s squeal was piercing.  “Why?”

“Because he had claimed the right of first night with my wife.  I did not think he should claim also my daughter.”

Clovis spoke now.  “So he called for the tongs.  Odd how it healed back so raised and smooth.  The tongs usually leave a hole.”

“It’s the burning,” said Fedor.  “You can never predict how a burn will grow back.”

The other two men murmured agreement.  Then Fedor said, “He took this little finger because I ate a few berries when he ordered me to pick them.” 

“It’s good you fled,” said Clovis.  “Before he got the rest of you.”  After a pause, he added, “How long since you fled?”

“All Soul’s Day.” 

“Six months,” Clovis said.  “Half the required time.”

But Fedor just said, “Ergot!  Are you eating only apples?  You’ll beshit yourself.”

Tonight, at the Hog’s Snout, I asked Fabri, with his jurist degrees, if this common saying about city air were truly law.  He nodded over his tankard.  “It is.  It’s been in effect since a treaty of 1424 between the lords and the towns.  The margraves have the right to claim within a year any of their subjects who flee their jurisdictions to the freedom of the cities.”

“But does this not creat a great influx of poor?”

Fabri attacked the dumpling the alehouse mistress set before him.  “It does.  And the more that come, the more difficult it is for the lord to find the individual.  A runaway serf blends easily into the common herd.  But the city needs the labor and especially the additional men for any military musters.” 

I nodded, but I wondered which side these poor would take in a general peasant uprising.  Would they stand with the city that had offered them freedom?  Or would they be the enemy within the walls?

 

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Earthquakes and Plagues

The bodies were piled in the city streets. The death wagons came through round the clock, not just at night. In the countryside, whole villages were eradicated, never to be rebuilt. Fields grew wild for lack of farmers, manors crumbled for lack of lords.

I, Capito, have been in several plague cities, but no pestilence so ravaging as the atra mors, the Black Death, one century and fifty years ago.  But every year, the Plague visits, though the zone of mortality shifts.  Last year, Strasbourg, this year Freiburg, next year, perhaps, Konstanz.  Every family, like a bruised apple, contains a dark, wasted spot of grief.  There is no one who has not lost someone.

How swiftly the destruction falls on us!  We rise in the morning with plans for the day.  By night, the buboes having appeared upon us, we know we shall likely die after days of agony, perhaps three, perhaps five, or even before the day is through.  Until that death, all matter which our bodies exude gives a terrible stench as if, though still living, we decompose.

We are baffled, terrified, and helpless.

So why not take the advice of Job’s wife: curse God and die?  Why not, like a desert mystic, retire to a cave in a wadi and renounce all human endeavor as useless?  Why set pen to paper, paint to canvas, or tool to invention?  One may not live to finish book or painting or device, if tomorrow he is as destined to putrefied flesh as an animal.

And yet, it is impossible to deny the nobility of man, the great stretch of his dreams, the great scope of his vision.  What is man that you remember him?  You have made him a little lower than angels.  You have crowned him with glory and honor.

Only man writes or paints or invents.  Only man seeks truth.  Only man considers who he is.  Surely, this is the spark of Divinity, that part of man that exceeds and transcends any death, no matter how swift or agonized or degrading. 

Perhaps we shall all die from plague or earthquakes, war or flood.  Perhaps the race of man will be snuffed out.   Perhaps the earth shall break apart in fountains of fire.

Or perhaps, half a millennium hence, a future man in an unfathomable age will look upon our sixteenth century and say: see with what vitality and genius they built, with what vision they painted, with what depth they thought.  They changed everything in the little day that they had.

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Johann Froben • Nicolaus Copernicus • Al-Birjandi • Jacopo Tintoretto • Jacques Cartier • Properzia de Rossi • Thomas More • Jane Lumley • Bernal Diaz del Castillo • Miguel de Cervantes • Isabella Whitney • Leonardo da Vinci • Thomas Linacre • Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf • Marko Marulić • Levina Teerlinc • Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon • Michelangelo Buonarroti • Katharina Zell • Abraham Ortelius • Lavinia Fontana • Sofonisba Anguissola • Estevanico • Edward Wotton • Baltissare Castiglione • Johann Amerbach • Domenikos Theotokopoulos • Hans Holbein • Pieve di Cadore • Vasco Nunez de Balboa • Tycho Brahe • Hieronymus Bock • Diana Scultori Ghisi • Niccolò Machiavelli • Giovanni da Verrazzano • François Rabelais • Juan Ponce de Leon • Martin Luther • Arthur Brooke • Pieter Brueghel • Christopher Columbus • John Foxe • Raphael • John Lyly • Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca • Lucas Cranach • Joan Perez de Lazarraga• Amerigo Vespucci • Martin Waldseemüller • Jost Amman • Conrad Grebel • Gaspara Stampa • William Shakespeare • Catherine Vasa • Desiderius Erasmus • Francis Bacon • Teresa of Avila • Giuseppe Arcimboldo • Edmund Spenser • Johann Fabri • Hans Sebald Beham • Pedro Alvares Cabral • Cvijeta Zuzoric • Thomas Nashe • Ferdinand Magellan • Mary Sidney • Hwang Jin-i • Frederick III • Christopher Marlowe • Ulrich Zwingli • Aldus Manutius • Katerina Lemmel • Sebastian Cabot • Hernando de Soto • Anne Askew • Menno Simons • Philip Sidney • Barbara Longhi • Michael Sattler • Jost Fritz • Bartolomeu Dias • Wu Cheng’en • Marguerite de Navarre • Parmigianino • George Peele • Anna Bülow • Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo • John Knox • Anna Bijns • Vincente Pinzon • Bathalzar Hubmaier • Robert Estienne • Philip Stubbes • Richard Hakluyt • Luis Vaz de Camões • Francisco Vasquez de Coronado  • Jane Anger • Gaspar Corte Real• Vasco da Gama • Wolfgang Capito • Esther Inglis • Juan de Yepes • Johann Eck • Jodocus Badius • Abul Qasim ibn Mohammed al-Ghassani • William Clowes • Giorgio Vasari • Peter Henlein • Gerardus Mercator . . .

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Sons of smiths, tutors to kings

In this Century, many are asking, “What’s in a Name?”  Why do these scholars of the studia humanitatis change their names to Latin–or even Greek?  I can answer only for Capito, who began life as Köpfel, but I think my friends would agree.

The Nobility of the Calling

I estimate that there are no more than 250 to 300 scholars in all of Europe engaged in the study of the humanities.  We are far flung across England and the Continent, divided by native languages and customs, separated often by the wars of our Princes.

And yet, we are all engaged in the same noble pursuit: to find and study the manuscripts of the ancient civilizations of Rome and Greece.  We believe that if we can disseminate this knowledge, man can return to his former glory of thought and we can enjoy a citizenry which recognizes virtue and prudence and speaks and writes with eloquence. 

Ad fontes! we cry.  To the sources!  We reject a thousand years of commentary and discussion, which has muddied the meaning of the original documents.  We want to see for ourselves what Aristotle and Plato, Lucretius and Cicero said.  We reject medieval Latin, mutilated for centuries by untrained clerics, to study and revive classical Latin.  Likewise, the study of Hebrew is revealing the original truths of the Old Testament scriptures and the Kabbalah and allowing us to better understand our own religion. 

How important is the study of manuscripts to ferret out the truth!  Consider the Donation of Constantine.  Allegedly issued by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in 324 AD, this document granted Pope Sylvester I, and his successors, sovereignty over the entire Western  empire.  For a thousand years, the Popes used the Donation to defend their rights to rule as secular powers. 

But in 1440, the Italian scholar of humanities, Lorenzo Valla, published evidence that the Donation could not be genuine, one proof being that the Latin in the document could not have been written in the 4th century.  More likely, it was written shortly before it was “discovered” in the 8th century, when Pope Stephen II needed to augment his secular authority.  This is a shining example of how the study of ancient languages exhumes long-buried truth.

Of course, those who take such bold stands are often attacked by those whose life’s work and reputation are built on the old conclusions.  We who embrace this learning are a beleaguered minority, struggling to find ways to strengthen our brotherhood or sodalitas and to readily identify ourselves to one another.  And so, we correspond, we travel when we can, and we assume Latin names.  Because when we take a Latin or a Greek name, we become, in that tiny aspect, a member of the great civilizations and societies which we admire.

The Humility of the Called

We also step away from our own humble roots.  For oddly, few scholars of the humanities originate in nobility, Ulrich von Hutten being one of the rare exceptions.  Rather, many are of the merchant class and some come from peasant stock.  But those who have the ability and the determination to master the difficult ancient languages–and the corresponding grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history and moral philosophy–are members of an intellectual nobility. 

The sons of blacksmiths, we are tutors to kings.  We are sought after by universities, the Church, the Courts, the government–until recently the sole ambit of the aristocracy.  Our classical names identify us as a literary nobility, the nobilitas literaria, as surely as a coat of arms identifies the gentry of blood.

• Some of us take the name of our place of origin, like Eobanus Hessus, after Hesse, the region of his birth. 
• Others translate their names into Latin or Greek, as did Philipp Melanchthon (Philipp Schwartzerd, whose German name means “black earth”). 
• And others, feeling a desire to acknowledge the sacrifices of their ancestors, derive their name from the occupation of their father.  George Bauer (farmer) becomes Georgius Agricola, which is Latin for plowman. 

If, like Capito, Best Reader, your father is a smith, you can Latinize your name and become Fabricus, which is Latin for one who fabricates.  My friend, Johann Fabri, and I, Wolfgang Fabricus Capito, share this appellative.

Men often take new names to express their desire to become new men.  This is a common practice in religious houses, where the novice will choose the name of a favorite saint to be his own.  Likewise, we who seek truth in ancient sources wish to be new men in a new age.

Galen's 2nd-century treatise on the pulse, De Pulsibus. Greek with Latin notes--16th century.

 

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In Praise of Letters

Boniface Amerbach by Hobein

Capito has derived great joy in recent days from two sources.  One is the collected letters of the Amerbach family of Basel.  I worked some with the father, drank a little with the sons, and relied on Bruno to bring me books from the Frankfurt fair.  You shall have to give the site your email and a password, but that is a pittance for the excellent scholarship which stands behind these translations.

The other study to which I wish to direct you, Gentle Reader, is an article on the painter, Hans Holbein.  The author discusses Holbein’s relationship to the English Court.  I always felt pity for Holbein’s wife, left behind.  But one values a thing according to one’s perception.  Visit this delightful site often to live among the peaks of art.

The Artist's Family by Hans Holbein the Younger

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