1616
1616
The World in Motion
1616
The World in Motion
Thomas Christensen
COUNTERPOINT
BERKELEY
Title page frontispiece (pp. 2–3): Arrival of a Portuguese Ship, early seventeenth century (detail). Japan. Folding screen, one of a pair; ink, colors, and gold on paper, 333 × 173 cm (overall). Asian Art Museum, The Avery Brundage Collection, B60D77+.
See p. 68 for more of the screen.
Hardcover edition endsheets: Four Large Cities of the World (top) and Map of the World (bottom), 1610–1620. Japan. Pair of eight-panel screens; ink color, and gold on paper, each 478 × 159 cm. Kobe City Museum.
These two large screens, conceived as a set, incorporate new geographical information brought to Japan by Portuguese and Dutch visitors; at the same time they reveal a greater knowledge of Japan (shown at an exaggerated size) and East Asia than was available to Europeans. As a result they represent some of the most sophisticated geographical knowledge of the early seventeenth century.
Two of the six circular insets show a solar and a lunar eclipse, reflecting the importance of astronomical observation during the period (see “Witch Hunters and Truth Seekers,” p. 187). The other insets show the arctic and antarctic poles, and globes centered on Japan and Brazil, which were considered antipodes. Four major cities of the Mediterranean region are depicted: Lisbon, home to the Portuguese sailors who traveled east to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope; Seville, home to the Spanish who traveled west to America and on from there to Asia; Rome, center of the Catholic religion; and Istanbul, representing the realm of Islam.
In captions dimensions are rounded to the nearest centimeter. Width is given before height.
Archaic spelling is sometimes retained in period quotations to give the flavor of the time.
Copyright © by Thomas Christensen 2012
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available
ISBN: 978-1-61902-046-7
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Book design by the author
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Permission credits appear on p. 379, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Motion and transformation take place in both quality and quantity — in the very substance of things.
— Mulla Sadra (ca. 1571–1641), Persian philosopher
I will direct my mind to the human breast, and to the heart itself, and see how it is driven by perpetual motion for as long as life remains; for life ends when the motion is taken away, damaged, or hindered. It is natural therefore for man to move from place to place, from region to region, until he can see into himself, above himself, and around himself.
— Michael Maier (1569–1622), German physician, alchemist, author
This book is for Carol, Claire, Ellen, Verle, and Anne
Karna, one of the Kauravas, Slays the Pandavas’ Nephew Ghatotkacha with a Weapon Given to Him by Indra, the King of the Gods, from a Manuscript of the Razmnama (detail), 1616–1617. India, perhaps Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh state. Ink, opaque watercolors and gold on paper, 23 × 33 cm. Asian Art Museum, Gift of the Connoisseurs’ Council with additional funding from Fred M. and Nancy Livingston Levin, the Shenson Foundation, in memory of A. Jess Shenson, 2003.6.
The Razmnama is a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, one of the great Hindu epics.
Contents
Preface
Prologue
The Golden Age Restored
1 Silk and Silver
A Global Economy
2 Shakespeare’s Sisters
Emerging Roles for Women
3 Creative Imitation
Tradition and Innovation in the Visual Arts
4 Witch Hunters and Truth Seekers
Science, Signs, and Secret Knowledge
5 World in Motion
E Pur Si Muove
Epilogue
Christmas, His Masque
Timeline
Globes
Source Notes
Selected Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
Don Quixote Driven Mad by Reading, by Gustave Doré. Illustration for Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, 1863. Hachette and Co., Paris. Engraving.
Preface
One morning in September 2009 I woke up in my bedroom in the San Francisco Bay Area with the date 1616 in my head and the resolution to research and write about that year already formed. It was a strange resolve in many ways, not just because it seemed to come from nowhere. My academic training had been in literary modernism and postmodernism, and my professional work had centered around trade book publishing, literary translation, and the design and production of museum art catalogues. Nevertheless, from that day on I researched that year with a single-mindedness that bordered on obsession.
Some years — 1066, 1492, 1776, 1945 — are so associated with momentous events that they are emblazoned in everyone’s consciousness. The year 1616, despite such notable developments as those this book chronicles, is, for the most part, not one of these. This seems to me a good thing. Cathartic events can so dominate an era that they make it difficult to see the deeper forces that drive long-term change. In 1616, on the other hand, it is possible to make out intimations of modernity in developing globalism, militarism, imperialism, diasporism, colonialism, capitalism, rationalism, bureaucratization, urbanization, individualism, and so on.
I was vague on historical developments during this period in many parts of the world, but I knew one thing about the year from the outset. On April 23, 1616, two literary giants, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, accomplished the feat of dying on the same date but different days. Mainly for the reason of their shared date of death, the United Nations named April 23 the international Day of the Book.
Shakespeare, seven years the younger, went first, on Tuesday. Miguel de Cervantes, despite a life of hardship, held on another week and a half, until Saturday. This was possible because Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar proposed in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. Britain, however, recoiling at any whiff of papism, did not adopt the new calendar until 1752, and it lagged, in 1616, ten days behind. Although Shakespeare’s death date is traditionally given as April 23, according to the new calendar he would have died on May 3.
At that time there was as little agreement about when the year began as about what day it was. In many parts of Europe it had been traditional to consider a date such as Annunciation Day — the day nine months before Christmas when it was revealed to Mary that she would bear a child — as the beginning of the year; standardizing on January 1 was a newfangled notion based on an ancient tradition, the Roman consular year. The European states adopted the new date for the new year each in its time: Venice in 1522, Spain in 1556, France in 1564, Scotland in 1600, Russia in 1700, and so on. The January 1, 1616, masque that is the focus of the following section of this book would have been thought of by Londoners of its time as falling in the eleventh month of 1615.
Matters become even more confounding when considering non-Western cultures. Some, like the Persians, who thought of the period we call 1616 as made up of parts of the years 994 and 995, celebrated the new year around the spring equinox. Others related the new year not just to the solar cycle but also to the phases of the moon: lunar new years were celebrated in East Asia, the Himalayas, and many parts of Southeast Asia. Some calendars reflected ancient histories: in China the year was 4252–4253; in the Maya long count it was
probably 4730; in the Hebrew reckoning — in which the new year began in the fall — it was 5376–5377.
All of which makes the study of a single calendar year an arbitrary and confused construct. It is not always certain which system a recorded date belongs to — historical documents give the impression that William III of England set sail from the Netherlands on November 11 and arrived in England on November 5. In some cases, more than one system was used at any given time: for many years both “old style” (stilo vetere) and “new style” (stilo novo) dates were in use in England. In East Asia, a year might be designated by a reign date or identified only by its associated zodiac animal, so that a reference to an event in the year of the dragon might point to 1616, or 1628, or some other year.
The reader will see that I move forward and backward from 1616 freely in telling my story, which is ultimately that of the interconnectivity of the early modern world rather than a single year’s events. But the year 1616 serves as a base that helps to keep those travels grounded.
Even a single year provides much more material than can be managed in a book of this size, and so I have had to be selective: instead of surveying all of the visual arts I have mostly concentrated on painting, instead of considering all of the sciences I have mostly focused on astronomy, and so on. Even within those limits I could only provide a variety of angles from which to view some aspects of the early seventeenth century: following the overview of the prologue, the first essay deals mainly with the new maritime globalism, especially the pan-Pacific trade in silver and silk; the second discusses emerging roles for women; the third considers some developments in visual arts, in particular the counterbalance between ancient models and new directions; the fourth explores the tension between developing scientific attitudes and magical beliefs; and the fifth offers an overview of the movement of peoples — the world in motion.
World Map, probably 1616, by Nicolaas Geelkercken, reproduced by Daniel Angelocrator.
Nicolaas Geelkercken was a draftsman, engraver, publisher, and surveyor who was working in Amsterdam in 1616 when he probably made the original of this map of the world as it was then known. The newly independent Dutch Republic was intensely interested in overseas trade. Geelkerken’s original map has been lost, and this version was produced by Daniel Angelocrator, a Calvinist minister of Germany, who may have contributed the unusual projection by which each hemisphere is separated into four rounded equilateral triangular quadrants, each with a point at the pole and two on the equator.
As seen at upper left, Geelkerken had the impression that North America extended nearly to Japan. In fact the Pacific crossing was the longest and most difficult journey in the history of sailing. Yet the survival of the Spanish colony in Manila depended upon it, and massive amounts of American silver and Chinese silks were transported between Manila and Acapulco. This exchange was a major component of the global economy in 1616.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, some historians started to think of themselves as social scientists. Over the course of the twentieth century this meant that many historians concentrated on accumulating and analyzing data and constructing detailed and reasoned arguments based on the results. Certainly there is a need for such work, and it is welcome. But the origins of history lie in storytelling, and historians should not be afraid to make use of the arsenal of narrative effects available to literary writers, such as plot, story, character, metaphor and rhetoric, humor, and poetry. In the broadest sense, all history writing is narrative: it should not be thought of as the objective revelation of absolute truths. Historians, in effect, are always inventing the past, which changes as each generation views it in a new way, by reference to a new present.
Through it all “my” year spoke to me pretty clearly. Not for an instant did I lose interest as I retraced its 365-day cycle of day and night, yin and yang, clarity and obscurity. I hope that in the book that follows the reader will find some fraction of the enthusiasm that I felt in reliving the year 1616.
Penthesilea, 1609, by Inigo Jones. Design for a masque.
The Masque of Queens, commissioned by Queen Anne, was the first Jonsonian masque to integrate all the elements that would make up a classical court masque. It contains the first fully developed antimasque, in which a coterie of witches is presented as foils to the queens.
For the part of Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, played by Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford, Inigo Jones designed a plumed helmet, sword, nearly transparent corselet, and deep pink skirts. Lady Bedford was the second most influential patroness of the arts in Jacobean England after Queen Anne herself. Her power and that of other women at the court was the target of a sarcastic verse by her cousin Sir John Harington:
These entertayne great princes; these have lerned
The tongues, toyes, tricks of Room, of Spain, of Fraunce
These can Currentos and Lavoltas dance,
And though they foot yt false tis nere discerned,
The vertues of these dames are so transcendent,
Themselves ar learnd, and their Heroyk sperit
Can make disgrace an honor, sinn a merit.
All penns, all praysers ar on them dependent.
Prologue: The Golden Age Restored
On the first day of January in 1616, King James I of England and his wife of twenty-seven years, Anne of Denmark, gathered with their court in their London palace of Whitehall for a performance of a masque entitled The Golden Age Restored. The masque — a sort of combination pageant, drama, ballet, and ballroom dance — had been written by Ben Jonson, the top playwright of the day now that Will Shakespeare, who was in failing health, was losing touch. The veteran actor had not appeared on stage since 1603, when he had performed in one of Jonson’s plays. Recently his Measure for Measure and Macbeth both had to be sent to a young script doctor named Thomas Middleton to be punched up for modern audiences.
These days audiences wanted a spectacle, not, as Jonson said, actors waving rusty swords across a bare stage. The elaborate stage machinery, sets, and costumery for the masque had been devised by Inigo Jones, who had also designed the expansive Queen’s House at Greenwich, which would begin construction this same year. Some said that Jones’s stagecraft was more important to the success of the masques than were Jonson’s words. To Jonson’s annoyance, Jones was one of those who said so. While Jonson insisted that the masques were “the mirrors of man’s life,” Jones said they were “nothing else but pictures with Light and Motion.”
Jones’s architectural projects interested the king, who had long thought London in need of an upgrade; his cousin Elizabeth, her mind on other matters, had neglected this aspect of her rule, just as (to his good fortune) she had failed to provide an heir. But the theater was not the king’s main love, and he had several times been observed napping during performances. Anne, on the other hand, loved all kinds of dance and display. It was she who was the great patron of the arts. Jones had begun his career in her employ on the recommendation of her brother, King Christian IV of Denmark; Jonson’s first important patron was the first lady of her entourage; and the queen was responsible for advancing the careers of many other writers, artists, and performers.
James preferred arguing fine points of governance and religion with the learned elite, and he was fond of sharing his wisdom with his subjects, sometimes through speeches and other times in writing. His most popular publication was entitled Daemonologie, which delved eruditely into such matters as spirits and ghosts, as well as magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. Witches and ghosts were causing serious trouble not just in Britain but throughout the world in the early seventeenth century. In the hamlet of Spa in the Netherlands more than a dozen witches were being investigated at this very moment, while in Leonberg, in the triply misnamed Holy Roman Empire, action was being initiated against another suspected witch, Katharina Kepler, mother of the astronomer Johannes Kepler. Garroting and burning were common punishments for witchcraft. Aware of the king’s interest in this subject, t
he script doctor Middleton had expanded a mention of witches in the play that, in order to flatter the Scottish king, Shakespeare had set in Scotland.
Kepler, Galileo, and others sought to replace magical thinking with empirical observation and rational argumentation. But Galileo argued the point a little too strenuously, and in 1616 he would be taken to task by Pope Paul V for overstepping his bounds.
Differences of taste were not the only strain between the monarchs. Their relations had never been easy. James had described marriage as “the greatest earthly felicitie or miserie, that can come to a man.” The king and queen led separate lives. Anne had never fully forgiven him for taking their son Henry from her when he was a young child and forbidding her to see him for fear that she would infect him with her Catholic tendencies — issues of religion were inflaming passions around the world, and the seventeenth century has been called “the age of religious wars.” Anne had fought hard to regain custody of her son, but James had formally commanded the boy’s wards not to release him to anyone, not even to his mother, without permission from the king’s own mouth.
Moreover, despite rumors of affairs with ladies of the court, James was known to have “inward” tendencies — to be more fond of his male companions than of the company of women. On public occasions he sometimes amused himself by grabbing his courtiers’ codpieces. His “favorite,” or chief advisor, for the past decade had been Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, a young man who quickly rose to fame and fortune, only to fall equally precipitously. Somerset had been best known for his good looks and his access to the king until the previous October, when during trials of members of his circle the accusation came out that he had been involved in the poisoning of one of his intimates. This had resulted in the most serious scandal of James’s reign.