Let there be Light – Michel de Montaigne

 

There are memories, and there are childhood memories. Was it in Cologne? I believe to remember a narrow second-hand-bookshop along the boulevard between Neumarkt and Rudolfplatz: I perused the real cheap books on a rickety stand in front of the window display. I won’t call it an antiquarian – there was absolutely nothing posh about this graveyard for old books. Wedged in between creased pocket books there was something with faded gold on a frayed leatherback, very slim. Small sized books cast a spell on me, this one was almost too slim to be noticed – I stretched out my hand and there it was: The Itinerary of Monsieur de Montaigne, a very thin octavo volume. I opened the book and immediately my eye fell on the name of a town in upper Bavaria I used to know only too well. I grew up there.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533 – 1592) was born on a Château, but his father drew up an idiosyncratic plan of education that banished the boy after birth to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of his life in the company of a peasant family, “in order to,” according to the testimony of Montaigne’s older brother, “draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people who need our help.” After these meager years among the botched and lowly, Montaigne was brought back to the Château and to a private tuition that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than books. A musician constantly accompanied Montaigne and his tutor, playing a tune any time the boy became bored or tired. When he wasn't in the mood for music, he could do whatever he wished: play games, sleep, be alone – the tutor made it a point that the boy wouldn't feel his education as a chore. In 1539, Montaigne was sent to study at a prestigious boarding school in Bordeaux under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, and mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year. Afterwards he studied law in Toulouse. From 1561 to 1563 he was a courtier at the court of King Charles IX. He was awarded the highest honor of the French nobility, the collar of the order of St. Michael. He was 24 and the appointed counselor of the Parliament in Bordeaux, when in 1557 the flower of European aristocracy met to do battle in the fields of Saint-Quentin. On both sides, everybody of name or notoriety was present on this day – Emanuel Philibert, Prince of Piedmont, better known by his title of Duke of Savoy, the Prince of Orange, Aerschot, Berlaymont, Meghen, Brederode, the teenage Condé and many young officers who would later become famous in the wars of the Spanish Netherlands and France. The life and soul of the Habsburg’s army was the Count of Egmont. His leadership and personal valor won the day, a moment of glory before a steep fall. Soon his imperial master would repay his services with betrayal and execution. It was the beginning and high point of the nefarious regime of King Phillip II.

The one man conspicuous for his absence on this day, because he was campaigning in Italy, was Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba (1507 – 1582). He was the Pol Pot of his period, boasting that even in a time of profound peace his governorship over the Spanish Netherlands had cost the lives of 18,000 innocent people. On the battlefield he was perhaps the most consummate strategist and tactician of the era. After his fall from favor he was banished to his estates yet recalled to take command in the war against Portugal in 1582, all this time remaining snapped in iron.

Europe in those days was badly lacking in civil engineering; the sanitation was a stinking shambles, the all-pervasive reek of horse manure didn’t politely stop at the doorstep and instead followed you all the way to the bedroom. Born into the rank air and breathing it for all their life, most people never seemed to notice. Buying meat at the market was an affair of waving away a cloud of flies before the shank became even visible, and nobody had yet told the farmers which end of the potato plant was the edible one. In Germany, between writing libel against the Catholic Church – “the Babylonian whore” – and throwing inkwells at the devil, Martin Luther, obsessed about breaking wind and a good bowl movement, even in his conversations over a meal. The man was an oaf, but at the tables of the highborn as well, they discussed with gusto the power of a well-cracked fart. In Catalonia it still is said to be the most popular topic at lunch. “Inter faeces et urinam nasimur” is the mode to enter this world since times immemorial. No changes here! I should know; I had the stuff on me when I helped giving birth in a taxi. Infant mortality was still very high in the 16th and 17th century, but it would be unfair to accuse the parents of neglect. On the contrary, a new concept of childhood began to emerge and inaugurated the age of the nuclear family. Montaigne is an example! Children no longer shared their parents’ bed and enjoyed – or rather loved to hate – a prolonged period of schooling. For the first time in a thousand years, the little ones on early recall were again laid to rest in a marked grave.

This was the era of the ruffle – a disc of cardboard with a hole in the middle for the neck and layers of plaited linen or starched laces stitched to it; a sorry sight if caught in a rain. Clothing and shoes was handmade and expensive, therefore mended and reused as often as possible. For the first time shoemakers paid attention to the fact that people had left and right feet. It made good shoes even more expensive. When nobody was looking the well-shod squire on the way to church, instead of wearing them, was carrying the precious pair in his hand to protect it from creasing and wear.

On every Lent the priest reminded his congregation of the sacred duty to inform on suspected heretics. Should you refuse to comply you were denied absolution, even if the suspected person was a relative, your parent, child, husband or wife. If summoned to the inquisitor, he would not tell you what it is all about. Instead the first question was held in general terms, if you “had ever seen or heard anything which was, or appeared, contrary to the Catholic faith, or the rights of the Inquisition.” From his personal experience, says the chronicler, he often saw “witnesses who were ignorant of the cause for their citation, recollecting circumstances entirely foreign to the subject, but the examination continued as if this was exactly the object of their subpoena. Such accidental deposition then served as a new denunciation” (Llorente, Juan Antonio, 1756 – 1823). Should such interview lead to an arrest, council was permitted, the defendant could choose from a list of approved attorneys, but the defendant's nominal advocate was barred from all communication with you, was not even told your name. He had no powers to procure evidence and as his only source of information was a paraphrased transcript of the interrogation without any specifics about you and your circumstances.

This left the advocate with either pleading in general terms his anonymous client’s innocence, or ask the tribunal’s clemency – a mockery of legal forms, aggravating the evident lawlessness of the proceedings. With no accountability to anyone, a bench of clerics arrested on suspicion, ordered torture till confession, and punished by fire. If you kept protesting your innocence, the interrogator would first show you the instruments of torture and if you still insisted break your resistance with the rack, the rope and the pulley.

Torture took place at midnight, in the light of torches. Splinters of wood were driven underneath the fingernails and the metatarsals crushed in iron contraptions, the notorious "Spanish boots." The period during which torture might be inflicted could only be terminated by a confession. Even King Philip II of Spain, not one of the squeamish by any account, attempted to curb the use of torture, strictly prohibiting the repeated use on the same charge. The inquisitors sidestepped the decree on a technicality, pretending that the procedure was merely suspended, not terminated. Confession was followed by execution.

The auto-da-fé was a solemn spectacle. They dressed you in a yellow robe without sleeves, embroidered all over with black figures of demons and leaving the lower body uncovered. A large conical paper miter was placed upon your head, with a picture on it of a man surrounded by flames. They would prey open your mouth and arrest your tongue with a wooden clamp. If the convicted was a priest, he was stripped of the canonicals and his hands, lips and shaven head scraped with a shard of glass: it was supposed to remove the oil of consecration. Then, with school children taking the lead, you and your fellow convicts were marched in procession to the scaffold. The magistrates, the nobility, the dignitaries of the Church took position on the rear. The whole street was reverberating with the chant of the 51st psalm. At the scaffold the inquisitor formally delivered you into the hands of the executioner with the ironic request “to deal with you tenderly, and without bloodletting or injury.” If you renounced in this last extremity and kissed the crucifix – but how are you supposed to do that with this clamp arresting your mouth – they mercifully strangled you before throwing you on the flames as a "sweet savor to the Lord" (Exodus 29: 18; Ezekiel 20: 41).

Such was the Inquisition, a "heavenly remedy, a guardian angel of Paradise, a lions' den in which Daniel and other just men could sustain no injury, but in which perverse sinners were torn to pieces" (Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, 1559 – 1623, Felipe II Rey de España, 1619).

To ferret out the "perverse sinner," was not at all difficult: "The inquisition well administered is a laudable institution,” says the historian, “and not less necessary than all the other offices of spirituality and temporality belonging both to the bishops and to the commissioners of the Roman see." Under the entries for June 1549 we read in the register of public expenses: "To Mr. Jacques Barra, executioner, for torturing twice Jean de Lannoy, ten sous. To the same, for executing by fire said Lannoy, sixty sous. To the same for throwing Lannoy’s cinders into the river, eight sous." Men, women, and children were burned and their "cinders" thrown away for not kneeling to a wafer, or for thoughts to which they had never given utterance, but which on inquiry they were too honest to deny. Even the cemeteries offered no refuge.

The inquisitors rifled the graves for the remains of dead heretics. The corpses were exhumed, mutilated and burned. This was not merely an act of senseless vandalism. Invariably a convict forfeited his property to the Inquisition, a strong incentive to establish “guilt” in every conceivable way. Although passed posthumously, such sentence opened access to the deceased’s property for confiscation. So, when after months of incarceration and without communication to the world outside, your only hope seemed to repent, whatever you were asked to repent, and beg for “reconciliation,” the stipulations for your release still included the loss of your possessions. “Reconciliation” was the beginning of an unrelenting life sentence.

On the next three Sundays you were ordered to strip bare for a beating with rods from the gate of the city to the doors of your church. You were not to eat meat for the rest of your life, keep three Lents a year, and abstain from fish, oil, and wine for three days in the week. Your only dress was a religious garb with small crosses embroidered on each side of the chest. You were to attend mass on every day and vespers on Sundays and festivals, recite service twice a day and pray the pater noster seven times in the morning, ten times at sunset, and twenty times at midnight. Your own children and the children of your siblings were prohibited from holding office in the Privy Council and courts of justice. The Nazis emulated this practice under the term “sippenhaft.”

An astute despot like Emperor Charles V (1500 – 1558) was quick to appreciate the Inquisition as a means to secure the regime’s grip on his extended possessions. The imperial edict from April 26, 1550, instructed the presidents, judges, and bailiffs to render all possible assistance to “the inquisitors and their staff in their holy and pious inquisition,” and to arrest and detain every person suspected of heresy, “notwithstanding of privileges or charters to the contrary.” Should suspicion fall on a man of the cloth, the inquisitor was to deal with him summarily "without noise or form in the process.” These instructions were renewed and confirmed by King Philip II, on November 28, 1555, and their implementation caused the secession of the Netherlands.

The Habsburgs are still a pretty exclusive club of aristocrats. In recent times they acted as brokers on the backstage in the formation of a united Europe, but back in the 16th century their family was a model for the Cosa Nostra, imposing their protection racket virtually on every European principality. First cousin marriages kept it all in the family with the inevitable toll of mental instability and hereditary deformities. It was not beyond such “aristocrat” of the bluest blood and a pedigree longer than my arm to put out a contract on his opponents. King Phillip II was stupid enough to leave a paper trail connecting him with the assassinations of Floris of Montigny, Prince William of Orange (1533 – 1584) – the George Washington of the Dutch – and four attempts on Queen Elizabeth of England. In his dying days the old mobster planned the murder of his own right-hand man in the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma; a man astute in his duties and of unwavering loyalty to Phillip.

No surprise then that Montaigne, while living in a neighborhood of Huguenots, and despite of many and animated conversations with clerics of the so-called Reformation, never considered to renounce his Catholicism. Lacking the zeal of a martyr, he witnessed the auto-da-fés and the killing of “heretics” in the streets. The new order of the Jesuits spearheaded the ideological counter offensive against Protestantism. This was the age of Ignatius of Loyola (1491 – 1556) and of Theresa of Avila (1515 – 1582). Montaigne was 42 and had already retired from public life, when Queen Marguerite of Valois instigated the infamous plot for the massacre on Bartholomew’s Eve. On August 23, 1572, three thousand French Huguenots were killed in Paris alone, and ten thousand in the rest of the country. The French king in person discharged his hunting rifle into the crowds under his window. King Phillip II warmly applauded the pious deed, yet this did not prevent him from sending assassins after the next claimant to the French throne. Phillip had his own plans for the succession, even asked the pope for a dispensation to marry his own daughter from his third wife, Elizabeth of Valois, because her dowry included a title to the French throne. Spanish troops laid siege to Paris, the first and largest city in Europe with 200,000 citizens according to the census of 1590. On the meat markets the starving population traded the shanks of infants and slain beggars. Yet to Phillip’s disgust it took Rome’s legate, Cardinal Gaetano, only half an hour of animated conversation to make a Catholic out of the Calvinist King Henry IV, followed by a full “pardon” of the pope. Himself a model of profligacy, Henry was perceived and popular as a leader of the earnest and the true. Hailed as the representative of national liberty and human rights against regal and sacerdotal absolutism, King Henry IV was in fact a remorseless despot by nature and education, and a believer in no rights of the people save in their privilege to be ruled by himself. In this he was the companion of the vain and temperamental “Good Queen Bess” of England, who hated the love of popular freedom in her own nation more than the Spanish enemy. False as water in every relation in which human beings can stand to each other, Henry IV found his most sincere admirer in the Turkish Sultan. Yet he was also a soldier, a wit, a consummate politician, and above all he was a real man. He is now known mostly for his bon mot that “every Frenchman should have a chicken in his pot.”

King Phillip II ruled over the most extensive empire ever known to men. According to the principle that vast tracts of the earth's surface, with all the people inhabiting them, were transferable from one man or woman to another by marriage, inheritance, or gift, a heterogeneous collection of kingdoms, principalities, provinces, and wildernesses had been consolidated into an artificial union. The kingdoms of Spain, the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, the two kingdoms of Sicily, the duchy of Milan, fortresses and districts in Tuscany, the kingdom of Barbary, the coast of Guinea, an indefinite and unmeasured expanse of territory in Africa, as many of the outposts and cities along the coast of the Indian subcontinent as the Mogul emperor Akbar the Great (1542 – 1605) would permit to occupy, the straits and the great archipelagoes in Asia, the territories in Peru, Brazil, Mexico and the Antilles – all this vast expanse of the habitable globe was the private real estate of Philip II. By the most whimsical of political arrangements the Papua, the peasant from Calabria, the merchant from Amsterdam, the Aztec, the Moor of Barbary, the Castilian grandee, the roving Comanche, the aborigine from Guinea and the Indian Brahmin became fellow-citizens of the same commonwealth, although most of them remained oblivious of the fact. Between these domains on dry land not an inch of water was traversed that was not the domain of Philip. From Borneo to California the great ocean was as much the king's property as the fishponds at the Escorial with their carp and perch.

For the first time Europeans traded with China without an intermediary. Macao became the emporium for the exchange of Spanish silver from the West Indies against silk and porcelain. Until 1911, the Mexican silver dollar became the new standard of Chinese currency. The friar Gaspar da Cruz published a book on China in 1585, describing her geography, provinces, ruling classes, bureaucracy, shipping, architecture, farming, crafts and trade, clothing, religion, education, and justice. The book initiated in Europe a fad for fine china bone and painted screens with bamboo and pagodas on it. “The list of rarities traded, I could never finish, nor have sufficient paper to write it down," said the governor of Manila, Antonio de Morga (1559 – 1636). The Italian Jesuit Mateo Ricci (1552 – 1610) was the first European allowed to enter into the Forbidden City.

One should therefore expect enormous revenues drawn from all these possessions and privileges, which included royal grants to carry slaves to the Americas and the "crozada" and "cuarta," – petty money paid to the crown by individuals for the liberty of abstaining from the Church fasts. The balance sheet in the king’s own handwriting – mixing personal and state expenses, petty items and great loans – says otherwise.

Adding up many millions due to the Fuggers and to other bankers in Flanders, Seville, and in Italy, plus the royal household expenditure, the pay due to his guards, the salaries of ambassadors and councilors, the subsidies for patisans of the Habsburgs abroad and the costs to keep his armies in the field, the royal bureaucrat arrived at a total demand upon his purse of ten million nine hundred and ninety thousand ducats annually. To meet this expenditure he painfully enumerated the funds upon which he could reckon for the next year. Since his ordinary rents and taxes had all been deeply pledged, he could only scrounge together some 200,000 ducats, the West Indian revenues and the yield of the mines included. "Thus, there are nine millions, less three thousand ducats, deficient," Phillip concluded (making a mistake in his figures in his own favor of 665,000 ducats), "which I may look for in the sky, or try to raise by inventions already exhausted." The possessor of Peru and Mexico would reckon on "nothing worth mentioning" from his mines; the man who owned all America and half of Europe was barely able to raise a million ducats a year from his estates. Statesmen of the period estimated King Phillip’s expenditure during his entire rule at a staggering total of 700,000,000 ducats, of which very little revenue in ready money was obtained from Milan or Naples, or from any of the outlying European possessions of the crown. Phillip’s chief source of income was a tariff upon both imports and exports and the “excusado,” the right to select from the possessions of the Church a single benefice and to appropriate its fruit – a levy commuted generally for an annual cash advance. Besides these regular sources of income, His Majesty sent monks about the country under no special license, to collect alms from rich and poor while the whole of his regular revenue was pledged to pay the interest on his debts. Thus the master of the greatest empire on earth had at times no income at his disposal except of the “alma,” which he solicited from the poorest of his subjects.

Nevertheless his resources were great. All Italy was at his fingertips, with the single exception of the Republic of Venice. Thus his armies were supplied from the best possible sources. The Italians were esteemed as the best soldiers for siege operations, for assault and light skirmishing. The German heavy troopers and harquebusiers were the most effective force to assist the squares of Spanish infantry in the open field. Year after year, for more than a generation, Philip used Sicilian and Neapolitan pike men and the cavalry of Milan to fight his battles. There was a profusion of silk, corn, wine, and oil; Naples and Sicily provided in great plenty the best materials for shipbuilding. The whole of Europe was embroiled in a life and death struggle with the Ottoman Empire and the galleys and the galley slaves furnished by Phillip’s subject realms supported the incessant wars.

The Turks had invented inoculating and dressed the wounds of their soldiers with slices of moldy bread, the first known instance of administering penicillin; yet the Europeans had the bigger guns. On October 7, 1571 it came to a showdown at the Greek island of Lepanto, the last engagement of two fleets entirely composed of galleys. The man who should become the innovator of the modern novel, the 24-year-old Miguel de Cervantes served as an ensign on board of the “Marquesa.” In the melee he received three gunshot wounds, two in his chest, and his left hand was maimed for life. After the battle the commander Don Juan de Austria made the rounds inspecting the wounded and shook Cervantes by his remaining hand. The glory of this moment became Cervantes’ pride for the rest of his life.

Yet Spain, despite of the imperial splendor, was not an opulent country; physical labor was esteemed dishonorable. The nobles frittered away their income in carousing, gambling and pompous exhibitions of equipage, furniture, and dress, while the law of primogeniture reduced the basis of Spanish nobility to altogether 49 titled families. Nearly every great estate was an entail, passed from eldest son to eldest son until the lack of a male heir endowed a daughter with the possession. Her marriage then transferred the estate to the house of her husband. Another immense portion of the national wealth, one third of the whole annual income of Spain and Portugal, belonged to the Church. Yet only the masses of the entirely uneducated, half fed, half clothed and unemployed, together with a still lower stratum of the "accursed," of the Africans and the natives in the American mines, was left to provide for the public revenue. The great nobles and priests were exempt from taxation.

In this murk of ignorance, religious fanaticism and thumbscrews, the Essays of Montaigne shine as a beacon of humanitarian sensibility. When Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was reading the Essays, he acknowledged with gritted teeth the brilliance, but not without accusing the author of covert atheism – or at least of an infidel’s libertarianism – the mere suggestion of which could have moved the Christian ayatollah’s at the Sorbonne to turn Montaigne’s life into a living hell. Thankfully Montaigne was already dead before it could come to this. At the age of 33, he married Françoise de la Cassaigne; she bore him six daughters, of which only one survived childhood. Montaigne began his career as a writer with the translation of the Theologia Naturalis by the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond. In 1595 Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for declaring the Bible the only source of revealed truth. In 1571 Montaigne inherited his estate, the Château de Montaigne and retired from public life to the tower of the Château, his so-called "citadel", where he passed his days as a recluse and assembled in his library a collection of some 1,500 books. He set himself a program: “An. Christi 1571 aet. 38, pridie cal. mart., die suo natali, Mich. Montanus, servitii aulici et munerum publicorum jamdudum pertaesus, dum se integer in doctarum virginum recessit sinus, ubi quietus et omnium securus (quan)tillum in tandem superabit decursi multa jam plus parte spatii: si modo fata sinunt exigat istas sedes et dulces latebras, avitasque, libertati suae, tranquillitatique, et otio consecravit. – In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.” He began working on his Essays. Initially his model was Seneca’s Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, but gradually Montaigne developed a voice of his own. His book earned him immediate fame and popularity with the libertines in the French aristocracy; John Florio (1553 – 1625) produced the first translation into English. William Shakespeare used it in Hamlet and The Tempest.

After publishing the first edition of his book in September 4, 1580, on the height of Phillip’s scheming and campaigning in France, Montaigne took a prolonged sabbatical until November 30, in the next year. The idea was to visit upper Germany and Tyrol, then cross the Alps through Switzerland, and travel the North of Italy towards Rome. There he expected to have an interview with the pope – nothing special really. For hard cash everybody got an audience with the Holy Father.

His arrival in Germany was on a rather unpromising note. “We were badly lodged at the ‘Eagle’ and received from the landlord a sample of the barbaric German unruliness and pride over the quarrel of one of our footmen with our guide from Basel. And because the thing came even before the judges, the provost of the place – an Italian gentlemen who has settled and married here – answered when asked whether the servants would be believed in their testimony on our behalf, that yes they would be believed, provided they were discharged; but that immediately afterward they could be taken back into service. This was a remarkable piece of subtlety” (Itinerary, trans. Donald M. Frame). About the men in this region Montaigne observed that “it is hard to distinguish the nobles, for their velvet bonnets are worn by just everybody, and everyone wears a sword at his side.” It was considered polite to walk on the left of your company, since walking on a man’s right hand could have inhibited his freedom to reach for his sidearm. It didn’t take long for Montaigne to recognize in the local breed a vainglorious and choleric lot; many struck him as hard drinkers, which must be seen within the period’s circumstances. Despite the first appearances of tea and coffee as a luxurious treat, drinking alcoholic beverages remained a necessity, the only way to escape the diarrhea lurking in every well of fresh water. A sober man’s daily quantity was four bottles of wine or beer. Even children drank from the second, less potent brew of the beer – hence the term “small beer.”

Montaigne, of course, would not have been a Frenchman had he not taken note of the food. In Spain and large tracts of France, the peasant’s daily fare was lentils and beans and, if you could afford it, mutton on Sunday. People of Moorish descent had macaroons for desert. At present Germany is not exactly known for culinary delights, but in 1580 “the courses at their tables are changed frequently. Here and often since, after the cloth was removed, they served new courses with the wine, little cakes – “canaules,” as the Gascons call them – then ginger bread and a soft white bread cut into slices but still holding together; between the slices and also on top of the crust they toss a lot of spices and salt.” He even had a bite from a farm laborer’s sandwich: “the village people serve their laborers for breakfast flat slices of a sticky cake in which there is fennel, topped with tiny bits of bacon and cloves of garlic.” At the tables of the better inns the main courses were accompanied with soups of quinces and baked apples sliced in, and broths “into which everyone fishes together, for there is no individual serving.” Which reminds me of an anecdote about the king’s bread – but I won’t go there. In fact this Frenchman admitted that the “cuisines of the French nobility hardly seemed comparable,” which does make sense; after all this was still the period when the Italian chef of Queen Jeanne d'Albret of Navarra taught the French how to cook proper meals. The culinary traditions of France are comparably recent – they barely antedate the French revolution, when the cooks of the beheaded aristocrats were out of employ and went to Paris to open a restaurant. Yet in the 16th century the only chef worth mentioning in France, was the chef at the royal court and Montaigne regretted that he had not brought along his own cook, so that the man could pick up recipes and replicate the dishes for the table back home.

There was fish in abundance, but the Germans appreciated it only as a side to the meat. “They disdain trout and eat only the roe; they have lots of game, woodcocks, young hares, which they dress in a manner very different from ours, but at least as good. They mix stewed plums and pear and apple tarts with the meat course Their fruit for desert is only pears and apples – which are very good – nuts, and cheese. Together with the meat they bring out a tray of silver or pewter with four compartments, in which they put various sorts of powdered spices; and they mix caraway which is tangy and hot with their bread; and their bread is mostly made with fennel.”

Montaigne was not the breakfast type but sometimes he couldn’t resist accepting a slice of bread, fresh from the oven, together with a bunch of grapes from the vineyards, to be eaten on horseback. He had to be careful, he was plagued with gall bladder stones, which time and again caused him excruciating pain in an era when the man to be avoided like the plague was the surgeon. Most, if not all practitioners of medicine in the 16th century were certified quacks diagnosing you from a sniff of your feces. Dentistry was the art of levering out a molar without breaking the patient’s jaw and you went to the barber for the treatment. Only in the Andes the surgeons of the Inca actually cleaned the cavities – with a glowing needle – and did gold and silver fillings, even administered anesthesia. Advances lost to the rest of the world with the fall of the Inca Empire.

In the nights Montaigne missed his mattress but he appreciated the German featherbed. As a French he had never slept under a duvet before. The expenses for all these amenities did put a frown on the face of his bookkeeper. The good news was, you were told the price for every item upfront and there was some real value for your money: “The first thing we noticed at our arrival was a strange arrangement, and one that shows the general cleanliness: the steps of our inn’s staircase were all covered with linen, on which we had to walk, so as not to dirty the steps, which they had just washed and scoured, as they do every Saturday. We have never noticed any cobwebs or mud in their inns. They often hang pewter plates against the wall, beside the beds, linen, and curtains, so that people may not dirty their wall with spitting.” However there was one particular disappointment, an important issue for a Frenchman, or should I rather say, for “a man?”

“We did not see even one beautiful woman.” Montaigne didn’t exaggerate. This was the period of Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer and the incomparable Hans Holbein, exceptional painters who had eyes to see, but none of their erotic paintings is even remotely stimulating.

Before he turned southwards to Italy, Montaigne visited Augsburg. Today Augsburg is just a dot on the Bavarian map. In 1580 it was home to the Fuggers, then arguably the wealthiest dynasty of bankers on the planet, wealthier even than the Medici. The fortunes of the Fuggers had sprung from a monopoly on the local salt trade, and their bank was able to bail out the Spanish King Phillip II from bankruptcy, not once, not twice, but three times in return for profitable franchises in the West Indies. Then, on the 20th of November, 1596, King Phillip II came to the realization that “the whole of his regular revenue was pledged to pay the interest on the crown’s debt” (John Lothrop Motley) and the king defrauded the entire business world, revoking all the assignments, mortgages, and other deeds by which the royal domains, revenues, taxes, and other property had been pledged to merchants, bankers, companies and private individuals. By then the bankers in Amsterdam charged Phillip II with 33% of interest a day on the advance of ready cash. All the gold and silver of the Americas could not satisfy the demands. So the Court of Spain formally requisitioned all collaterals, taking them back into the crown’s possession and renounced all obligations. It was the Black Friday of the 16th century. The effect was catastrophic. 2,5 millions of bills of exchange came back on the same day – all protested. The chief merchants and bankers of Europe suspended all payments. Their creditors declared insolvency. At the Frankfort fair there were more failures in a single day than there had ever been in all the years since Frankfort existed. In Genoa alone, the administrator confiscated a million florins of interest. On the exchange in Antwerp there was a general cry of desperation, in every office, in every palace, in every cottage people looked at each other with pale faces. Such a tremendous repudiation of national debt was unheard of. There had been fraudulent schemes and debasements of currency before, but never on such a scale. It caused the downfall even of the mighty Fuggers, yet it didn’t wipe them out entirely. The ‘Fürst Fugger Privatbank KG’ is still run by the same family, offering to Augsburg’s local elite their services as an investment bank, and in their vault they still keep the receipt for 1,000 kg of ingots advanced to the crown of Spain – it was the first of several. In the end the man who had been the cause of their fall got what he deserved; plagued with excruciating gout, Phillip II died a slow death in his bed: the maggots literally ate him alive.

Montaigne entered Augsburg, when the Fuggers were still on their peak and the city was the financial capital of the world. Compared to the splendors of Florence and Venice a rather unassuming capital but not without its amenities. The Fugger’s palace was roofed with copper, something seen elsewhere only on churches. There was a hippodrome with daily spectacles, summerhouses with fishponds, water organs and water clocks and a zoological garden. For the first and only time in his life Montaigne saw a pair of ostriches, the female apparently busy with laying many eggs. A wooden aqueduct fed water into the wells, even delivered directly to a hand pump in the home. Montaigne was duly impressed. “One of this family, dying a few years ago, left two solid millions of French crowns to his heirs,” which one must add, amounted to half of the remaining income of the Spanish crown.

Monsieur Montaigne would have preferred to remain anonymous, but his servants blew the cover and the magistrate gave Montaigne the VIP treatment. Supper invitations, free supply of victuals, an invitation to a wedding. It wiped the frown off the accountant’s face. From one of these invitations, Montaigne gives us the earliest description of a forerunner of the waltz. “The man kisses his hand to the lady; the lady receives him without kissing hers, and then, putting his hand under her armpit, she embraces him, cheek to cheek and puts his right hand on her shoulder.” This dance was called the ‘allemande.’ Montaigne finally bid his farewells and went on the road again. He arrived in Rome in 1581 and had his audience with the pope.

During his stay in Italy he received news that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he served his term until 1585 and was a moderating influence in the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. He continued to extend, revise, and oversee the publication of the Essays. Montaigne died, at the age of 59 on his Château and was buried nearby. His heart is preserved in the parish church of Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne.

I have a wish: to visit Monsieur Montaigne’s tower before I die, stand by the window and look down into his garden – hopefully in September, when the pears turn yellow.

© – 3/29/2009 – by michael sympson, 6,500 words, all rights reserved