Free A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester

moment, when they were observing High Mass in the Florentine cathedral.
The signal for the killers was the bell marking the elevation of the host. Giuliano fell at the altar, mortally wounded, but
Lorenzo was not called magnificent for nothing. Drawing his long sword, he escaped into the sacristy and barricaded himself
there until help arrived.
    If the pope’s attack says much about the era, so does Lorenzo’s vengeance. On his instructions some of the Pazzi gang were
hanged from balconies of the Palace of the Signoria while the rest were emasculated, dragged through the streets, hacked to
death, and flung into the Arno. By medieval standards Lorenzo’s revenge had not been excessive, though that cannot be said
of Denmark’s King Christian II, who invaded Sweden early in 1520. In January, Sten Sture, Sweden’s leader, was killed in action.
Heavy fighting continued throughout the year, however, and it was autumn before Sture’s widow, Dame Christina Gyllenstjerna,
surrendered. Christian had promised her a general amnesty, but a king’s word wasn’t worth much then. He immediately broke
his, and in spectacular fashion. First two Swedish bishops were beheaded in Stockholm’s public square at midnight, November
8, while eighty of their parishioners, who had been summoned to witness the execution, were butchered where they stood. The
Danish king then disinterred Sten Sture’s remains. After ten months in the grave they were scarcely recognizable. Rotting,
crawling with maggots, emitting a nauseous stench, the corpse was nevertheless burned. Next Sture’s small son was flung —
alive—into the flames. Then Dame Christina, who had been forced to watch all this, was sentenced to live out her days as
a common prostitute.

    W HAT WAS the world like—and to them it was the
only
world, round which the sun orbited each day—when ruled by such men? Imagination alone can reconstruct it. If a modern European
could be transported back five centuries through a kind of time warp, and suspended high above earth in one of those balloons
which fascinated Jules Verne, he would scarcely recognize his own continent. Where, he would wonder, looking down, are all
the people? Westward from Russia to the Atlantic, Europe was covered by the same trackless forest primeval the Romans had
confronted fifteen hundred years earlier, when, according to Tacitus’s
De Germania
, Julius Caesar interviewed men who had spent two months walking from Poland to Gaul without once glimpsing sunlight. One
reason the lands east of the Rhine and north of the Danube had proved unconquerable to legions commanded by Caesar and over
seventy other Roman consuls was that, unlike the other territories he subdued, they lacked roads.
    But there
were
people there in A.D . 1500. Beneath the deciduous canopy, most of them toiling from sunup to sundown, dwelt nearly 73 million people, and although
that was less than a tenth of the continent’s modern population, there were enough Europeans to establish patterns and precedents
still viable today. Twenty million of them lived in what was known as the Holy Roman Empire—which, in the hoary classroom
witticism, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. It was in fact central Europe: Germany and her bordering territories. * There were 15 million souls in France, Europe’s most populous country. Thirteen million lived in Italy, where the population was densest, 8 million in Spain, and a mere 4.5 million—the number of Philadelphians
in 1990—in England and Wales.

    A voyager into the past would search in vain for the sprawling urban complexes which have dominated the continent since the
Industrial Revolution transformed it some two hundred years ago. In 1500 the three largest cities in Europe were Paris, Naples,
and Venice, with about 150,000 each. The only other communities with more than 100,000 inhabitants were situated by the sea,
rivers, or trading centers: Seville, Genoa, and Milan, each