A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

was done solely for the greater glory of God, and we are suitably impressed. But everyone in the
small community knew exactly who the craftsman was, and would be happy to mention his name to
any visitor who happened to enquire. What they were not much concerned about was a visitor in a
hundred years time, for ‘posterity’ was a concept that did not really exist. These people lived in the
present; they knew practically nothing about yesterday. (Herodotus was not even translated into
Latin until 1452.) Their apparent humility was simply another outcome of the waxworks mentality.
And it was at this point - say, around 1150 - that people began to whisper that the return of King
Arthur was about to take place or that the pope had received a letter from an emperor called John
the Priest, who could make himself invisible, and who possessed a magic mirror that could show
him distant places - he might even be looking at them at this very moment, informed by spirits that
he was being talked about... And the result must have been a frisson that was only partly
superstitious terror; for the idea brought an intimation that interesting changes were in the air, like
the first smell of spring. What no one could guess was that the changes, when they came, would be
brought by hordes of trained killers who would leave behind deserted cities and headless corpses.
It was undoubtedly fortunate for Europe that Genghis Khan’s forces never reached farther than
Poland. China and Russia were ravaged by the Mongols, eastern Europe by the Turks, then the
Mongols. The Arabs - one of the most promising civilisations in the western world - were also
devastated by Turks and Mongols. (Their own caliphs had a desire for wealth and display that was
just as ruinous.) They had been the inventors of banking; but since Islam forbade usury, this was
taken over by Christians and Jews. (And, as Christians began to look with increasing disfavour on
usury, more and more by the Jews.) But after the Vikings had settled down, northern Europe was
enviably stable. When the Mongols opened up the roads from Germany to China, it was the
merchants and explorers of Europe who reaped the benefit. And the lure was romance as much as
commerce - as late as 1488, Bartolomeu Dias set out to look for Prester John, and ended by
discovering that it was possible to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.
The Church, as usual, remained blissfully unaware of these tremendous changes until too late. We
can see, in retrospect, that ever since it became a political power, the Church had suffered from an
exaggerated idea of its own importance. Instead of quietly trying to suffuse the people with its own
ideas, like all the other great religions, it wanted to rule and give orders - that episode when St
Ambrose had bullied the emperor Theodosius into public repentance for having seven thousand
people killed in the circus had made every pope dream of humiliating earthly kings. The papacy’s
two most spectacular successes were when Gregory VII excommunicated Henry IV of Germany
and made him wait in the snow for three days to beg forgiveness, and when Innocent III - the
greatest medieval pope - placed all England under interdict in 1209 and finally bullied King John -
under threat of a crusade against him - to hand over England as a papal fief. (But all the pope’s
objections to Magna Carta later failed to destroy it.) The execution of the boy Conradin, the last of
the Staufer emperors, in 1268, seemed to prove that the Church could win any battle in the end. (It
must have given the pope additional satisfaction that it took place in the square at Naples, where
Frederick II, the ‘wonder of the world’, had founded a university to try to undermine the power of
medieval superstition.)
In the year the Polos were making their way back from Cathay, a new pope was elected. Boniface
VIII was a big, florid extrovert who was vain about his good looks and enjoyed drinking in low
company; he preferred the dress of an emperor to papal vestments because he found it more
becoming. Boniface enjoyed giving orders, and in 1290, before he was pope, told the assembled