A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

horribly that thirty-six of them died within a day or two. The new pope in Avignon issued a bull
ordering the arrest of all Templars in all lands, and for three years Templars were tortured and tried.
It was a nauseating farce, and Philip had not gained by it a fraction of the wealth he had expected.
But it had to be carried through. In 1312, the pope admitted that there was not enough evidence to
prove heresy; nevertheless, he dissolved the order. The tragedy came to an end in March 1314.
Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Templars, who had been in prison for seven years, was
exposed in front of Notre Dame to make a public confession. To everyone’s dismay, he declared
that his only offence was to lie under torture; he insisted that the order was pure and that the
charges were false. Nevertheless, at sunset, on the Ile de Palais in the Seine, he was slowly roasted
to death over a fire. The story went around that the last words of the dying man had been a
summons to the pope and the king to meet him in front of God’s throne one year hence, for
judgement. Oddly enough, both the pope and the king died within that year.
And so, after the long halt of the Middle Ages, like a train waiting for hours in a country station,
history began to rumble forward again. Now that the temporal power of the popes was broken, and
thee new universities - Oxford (founded 1264), Bologna, Paris, Naples - were beginning to revive
the learning of the ancients, the world seemed set for exciting changes. A university was not
necessarily a conglomeration of professors, each teaching his own subject; it might, like the
University of Paris, spring up around one man - the controversial theologian Peter Abelard - as the
Academy of Athens had sprung up around Socrates; what mattered was that it was vitally interested
in ideas. For the first time since the ancient Greeks, people were thinking again. Oddly enough, the
legal system of Justinian became the subject of enthusiastic study. But this was because men no
longer took it for granted that the Church was the one and only authority on matters of right and
wrong; they wanted to discuss the whole concept of justice.
Since the west, unlike the east, had largely escaped the scourge of the Mongols, there might seem
to be every reason for optimism about the future of Europe. In fact, to the average peasant, things
had never looked worse. All the trade and commerce that had been stimulated by the crusades had
brought prosperity, and prosperity brought a steep rise in the population. It is now a drearily
familiar story, although no one gave it much serious thought until the Reverend Thomas Malthus
turned his mind to the problem in the last years of the eighteenth century. Prosperity means that
more children come into the world, and that of those, more survive into adulthood. New land has to
be cultivated to feed them. By the time the Polos set out for Cathay, Europe was already becoming
uncomfortably overcrowded. Methods of agriculture had improved, but not enough to produce
anything like abundance. In most years, everybody got by. But as soon as there was a bad harvest,
people starved and died. In 1315, the year after the death of Philip the Fair, there was a disastrous
harvest all over Europe. The lack of sun not only meant that corn stayed unripe; it also meant a lack
of salt - which was produced by evaporation of sea water - and this in turn meant that meat could
not be stored for the winter. (This particular problem eventually led the Portuguese to sail around
the world in search of spices, and pepper and nutmeg became the most valuable commodities in the
world; but that time had not yet arrived.) There was mass starvation; people ate dogs, cats, rats, bird
dung, even other human beings. It was a problem that no one seemed to be able to understand; the
world was full of new prosperity, and people were dying by the thousand.
The earth itself seemed to be going through a period of convulsions. In 1281, a typhoon had
wrecked Kubla Khan’s fleet off Japan. In 1293, thirty thousand Japanese were killed when a
seismic wave hit the coast. In 1302 Vesuvius erupted, and in 1329, Etna. And England, in the midst