A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

produces no art, literature, philosophy or religion worth mentioning. Rome invited its own
destruction by spreading its boundaries too far, until even the most warlike of emperors could not
maintain peace for more than a year or two at a time; Diocletian collapsed with exhaustion after
holding it together for twenty years. And we see this as a recurrent pattern of military history. Even
if a great conqueror can contain his newly-won empire, his sons or grandsons find it too much for
them - and it disintegrates.
The Church, in the absence of any counterforce, dominated the western intellect for more than a
thousand years. In that time it created an immense, static ‘order of nature’, in which thinking was
regarded with distrust and suspicion. It seemed to be like one of those immense rocking stones that
are found in remote places, where a weight of many tons is balanced on a single point; it can be
made to sway backwards and forwards, but no amount of effort seems to be able to move it from its
place. At first, it looked as if Martin Luther had done precisely that. But within a few years, the
Church was as stable as ever, calling for crusades - like the one that defeated the Turks at Lepanto
in 1571 - burning heretics, like Giordano Bruno (1600) and forcing scientists like Galileo to recant.
Besides, Protestantism was only Catholicism under another trade name; it did not burn quite as
many heretics as the Catholic Church, but it did its share. As a version of Christianity, it was
certainly no improvement on Catholicism.
The real change was due to other causes: to the broadening of the mind that came with the
crusades, to the increasing use of money, which created a new class, and to the opening of the seas
by Henry the Navigator, Dias, Columbus, Magellan, Cabot and Drake. In the sixteenth century, the
Turks continued to be the major threat in the Mediterranean - they came close to taking Vienna in
1529 - but they became slightly more amenable after their defeat at Lepanto, and the British under
Queen Elizabeth were able to form a Levant Trading Company to trade with them and the East
India Company (1600) which had to cross Turkish territory on its overland route to India. (The
Portuguese were still guarding the sea route.) Even the Church allowed itself to be swayed by this
new spirit of adventure and tolerance. Matteo Ricci, the pioneer Jesuit scholar in China, was
adopted by Chinese Confucians as one of themselves; the Jesuits made Christianity more palatable
for the Chinese by translating ‘God’ as ‘Heaven’ (T’ien). Unfortunately, the Church intervened and
ordered that Chinese converts should be taught that the Christian God is personal, and that their
ancestor worship was anti-Christian. The inevitable result was that the Christians were thrown out
of China in 1723.
But meanwhile, Europe was entering a new Athenian age. Francis Bacon, born three years before
Christopher Marlowe (1561) was the first great imaginative visionary of science. In his New
Atlantis (1627) he envisaged the first science institute, known as Salomon’s House, with
laboratories dug into the hillsides, skyscrapers half a mile high, huge marine laboratories and
strange machines; twelve of its fellows travel into foreign lands and collect reports on experiments
and inventions. Francis’s central thesis was the one that had landed Roger Bacon in prison three
centuries earlier: that science should be based on observation and on reason, not on the writings of
lazy philosophers like Aristotle who could not be bothered to test their observations. Bacon’s own
doctor, William Harvey, discovered the circulation of the blood. In France, Rene Descartes was
teaching that all knowledge should be founded on reason, and on the principle of doubting
everything until it can be proved. (But since he lived in a Catholic country, he took care not to risk
prison by doubting the dogmas of the Church.) Bacon’s secretary, Thomas Hobbes, was the first
philosopher of history; it was he who remarked that human life in the state of nature is ‘solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short’. His solution to this problem was not religion, but the social contract