american-holocaust

188 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTtion criticism of the Church was emerging among Renaissance humanistssuch as Lorenzo Valla, who proved that the Donation of Constantine-aneighth-century document that granted great temporal powers to the papacy-wasa forgery, and who, in the mid-fifteenth century, attacked bothmonasticism and chastity as ideals.The papacy itself, meanwhile, recently had suffered through forty yearsof the so-called Great Schism, during which time there were two and eventhree rival claimants as Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. After theschism was ended at the Council of Constance in 1418, for the rest of thecentury the papacy's behavior and enduring legacy continued to be one ofenormous extravagance and moral corruption. As many of the late MiddleAges' "most pious minds" long had feared, observes the great historian ofthe Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea, "Christianity was practically a failure.. . . The Church, instead of elevating man, had been dragged down to hislevel." 120 This, of course, only further fanned the hot embers of reformationwhich would burst into flame during the first decades of the centuryto follow.On the level of everyday life, we saw in an earlier chapter the atrociousconditions under which most of the peoples of Europe were forced to liveas the late Middle Ages crept forward. It was only a hundred years beforeColumbus's mid-fifteenth-century birth that the Black Death had shatteredEuropean society along with enormous masses of its population. Withinshort order millions had died-about one out of every three people acrossthe entirety of Europe was killed by the pandemic-and recovery wasachieved only with excruciating slowness. "Those few discreet folk whoremained alive," recalled the Florentine historian Matteo Villani, "expectedmany things":They believed that those whom God's grace had saved from death, havingbeheld the destruction of their neighbours . . . would become better conditioned,humble, virtuous and Catholic; that they would guard themselvesfrom iniquity and sin and would be full of love and charity towards oneanother. But no sooner had the plague ceased than we saw the contrary .. . . [People] gave themselves up to a more shameful and disordered lifethan they had led before. . . . Men thought that, by reason of the fewnessof mankind, there should be abundance of all produce of the land; yet, onthe contrary, by reason of men's ingratitude, everything came to unwontedscarcity and remained long thus; nay, in certain countries . . . there weregrievous and unwonted famines. Again, men dreamed of wealth and abundancein garments . . . yet, in fact, things turned out widely different, formost commodities were more costly, by twice or more, titan before tlte plague.And the price of labour and the work of all trades and crafts, rose in disorderlyfashion beyond the double. Lawsuits and disputes and quarrels andriots rose elsewhere among citizens in every land. 121