This Protestant spirit spread quickly through northern and central Europe from princes to peasants, based on the fundamentals – the Word of the Bible. The more personal religiosity of Protestantism encouraged a new independent spirit in business, art and daily life. Protestant nations – much of Germany, then the Low Countries, Britain and Scandinavia – became more literate than Catholic ones. Literacy changed the psychology (even the formation of the brain), but also surely increased self-confidence and knowledge, just as it increased self-discipline, self-motivation, analytical thinking and sociability, contributing to what later made northern Europe so successful. Protestantism was not the only factor in this European spirit of ‘hard work, patience and diligence’, but it was, as Joseph Henrich writes, ‘a booster shot … both a consequence and a cause of people’s changing psychology’.
Hoping to ignore Luther, Leo scoffed at this ‘monkish squabble’. He now received an amazing gift from India: a white elephant named Hanno who in his size and joviality almost seemed a metaphor for Leo himself. ‘In my brutish breast,’ Leo wrote in elephantine voice, ‘they perceived human feelings.’ Kept in a bespoke elephant house between St Peter’s and the Lateran, Hanno was sketched by Raphael, and when the Pope wished to mock a pretentious poet he arranged for him to ride Hanno to the Capitol with blaring trumpets until the pachyderm, alarmed by the noise, refused to go further. But Hanno’s foolish keepers mistakenly poisoned him with a gold-laced laxative. On his death, Raphael designed the memorial (‘That which Nature has stolen away, Raphael of Urbino with his art has restored’), Leo penned the epitaph to his ‘mighty beast’, while Aretino wrote a pornographic
Mighty elephant which the King Manuel
Having conquered the Orient
Sent as captive to Pope Leo X.
This ‘conqueror’ was Manuel I, the Portuguese king who masterminded a messianic world conquest from Brazil and Kongo to India and Indonesia by the aggressive crusading sailors of his tiny kingdom.
MANUEL’S EASTERN MARAUDERS: DA GAMA AND ALBUQUERQUE
As a young prince in 1493, when summoned by his cousin João II, Manuel feared the king would gut him like his brother. Instead he was appointed heir. His luck in surviving João’s purge added to his belief in his destiny as a Latin King David who would retake Jerusalem, raze Mecca and destroy Islam. Aged twenty-six when he succeeded, with a round face and long, apish arms, he was influenced by his cousins Ferdinand and Isabella, and married their eldest daughter; when she died in childbirth, he wed her sister.* But the eldest Spanish infanta had refused to marry him unless he expelled all Portuguese Jews.
Manuel had protected Portuguese Jews, who owned a fifth of the country’s movable wealth, their numbers boosted by refugees from Isabella’s Expulsion, but Spain and God were more important. In October 1497, he forced a mass conversion of Jews.
The wealthiest Jewish family in Portugal had pretended to convert: the malagueta-pepper merchant Francisco Mendes married the heiress Beatriz de Luna, who became known as Gracia Mendes, in a Catholic ceremony in Lisbon cathedral. But when expelled they returned to their Judaism and escaped to the Netherlands – the start of a journey that culminated in them becoming Ottoman potentates and Jewish royalty. But for now even being a New Christian was dangerous. In 1506, Dominican friars led a pogrom that burned several thousand Jews and New Christians alive in a bonfire in Lisbon’s main square.
Manuel spent the money from the Jews on four ships, packed with cannon and led by a
