FATHER LIAM SAYS: One of the things that very many of us (but
not me!) do very often is ‘text’. The
word of course has to do with writing and just recently I discovered why. In a recent book – ‘A History of the World’ –
Andrew Marr reveals all. When explaining
how Luther’s teachings spread so fast he refers to the invention of the
printing press. Johannes Gutenberg had
refined a process that the Chinese and Koreans had long used and produced a
printing revolution in Germany in the years before and after the birth of
Martin Luther. Gutenberg borrowed money
to start his business, bought paper from Italy, experimented with metal alloys
and ink mixtures and hired about twenty craft workers. He intended to produce a printed Bible and
wanted it to look as if it were hand written.
His planned first run of one hundred and eighty Bibles of one thousand,
two hundred and eighty two pages each was a huge gamble and in 1454 he had to
raise money from all across Europe. His
Bible took six months for the casting of the metal type and two years to set
and print. Then it was hand coloured and
illustrated to make it look ‘real’. The
effect was similar to the handwriting of the time which looked like woven black
and white cloth or textile – hence our word ‘text.’ The whole process took about three years, as
long as it took a scribe to write out a Bible by hand – but Gutenberg produced
one hundred and eighty with countless copies to follow.
The
Bibles, in Latin, were admired across Germany, the Low Countries, Italy and
Spain. The presses were used to print
other works, school books, calendars and documents of all kinds. Germany was soon awash with print. Some of the pamphlets were medical and
scientific. Many were forms on Indulgences
with only the date and signature to be filled in by hand. Luther’s views on Indulgences were widely
printed and distributed. But Luther
produced many pamphlets – perhaps at fortnightly intervals - and his followers
wrote many more.
For
his own safety, his Ruler Friedrich kept Luther in Wartburg Castle. There, disguised with a beard and a false
name, he began translating the Bible into sharp, popular German. He produced a New Testament quickly and then
over several years, the complete Bible.
Many of the phrases he used remain in modern German. Luther said he wanted ‘to make Moses so
German that nobody would suspect he was a Jew.’
His translation of the Bible has been called ‘the central document of
the evolution of the German language.’ The
Bible was soon on sale at the already famous Leipzig book fair, priced at
roughly the cost of a calf, or two weeks wages for a schoolteacher. By the time of Luther’s death in 1546 half a
million of his translation of the Bible were in circulation.
The
degree of anger and hostility that were aroused at the time of the Reformation
– and that has lasted in some places, all too often near at hand – is quite
depressing. How can we explain the
unwillingness to sit down and discuss the differences and difficulties that
arose? Some are of the opinion that the
inability to communicate – and the Church is not very good at it even today –
had something to do with the fact that Christendom felt particularly threatened
at that time, not only by internal forces but external ones as well. The Ottoman Empire controlled more of the
Mediterranean Coastline than did the Christian – and the Christian powers were
continually at odds with one another.
But Christians were really frightened.
The fear of ‘the Turk’ or ‘the Moor’ haunted the imagination of
Christian children when they were scolded at bedtime. The threat of the Ottomans was not limited to
the capture of Mediterranean islands and the defeat of Christian fleets. Christian lands and walled towns lived in
fear. Travelling by sea or just living
by the sea became perilous. Some of the
raids were spectacular. In 1544 Muslim
ships attacked the Bay of Naples and seized seven thousand men, women and
children. Later they took six thousand
from the ‘toe’ of Italy. In Corsica and
Sardinia and around much of Italy, seaside villages were deserted and rebuilt
further inland. In one short period
between 1609 and 1616, four hundred and sixty six English and Scottish ships –
of varying sizes – were seized by Algerian pirates. Similar losses were suffered by Dutch, French,
German and Spanish shipping. Those
seized were taken as slaves of the Muslim rulers of North Africa.
As
Christian villagers retreated from the shoreline and the European ships became
more cautious, the raiders became more daring.
They turned up in the Thames estuary again and again and seized
fishermen from Essex and Kent. They
raided Iceland, burning the church on the Island of Heimaey and taking over
three hundred people. Three hundred and
thirty seven people were taken from the village of Baltimore in West Cork. The high point of the Muslim coastal slave
taking was between 1530 and 1640 but it continued until the 1780’s. It is reckoned that overall one and a quarter
million Christians were enslaved. Many
would die of plague or ill-treatment in Africa.
Some were rescued or bought out by wealthy families. These events have been largely written out of
our history books, reflecting perhaps the later and far greater – perhaps ten
times greater – Atlantic slave trade.
But it also reflects a degree of sheer embarrassment. But for Europeans of Luther’s time and
afterwards these raids on the coasts and seizure of people into slavery caused
much fear and insecurity.
The
more spectacular attacks came from the Eastern edge of Europe. After Constantinople was taken there was a
devastating slaughter of Serbs by Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo in
1389. But there was huge resistance and
it was decades before the Ottomans took Bosnia and Serbia. One of the great losers in all this was the
Jagiellon Dynasty that brought such glory and culture to Lithuania-Poland. Lithuania was – before 1400 – the biggest
single nation in Europe. Hungary was
later added to Lithuania-Poland, making the Jagiella Dynasty singularly
powerful but they fell before the might of the Ottomans. But in the middle of Europe stood the Holy
Roman Emperor – less tolerant of religious difference than Muslim authority
was.
