There is an imagined old guard of historians who worship Edward Gibbon, speak to each other in Latin quotations, and ceaselessly debate the careers of dead white men. Presumably, such a group once exercised a great deal of influence over academic history, perhaps as recently as the early 20th century. In truth, the “great men” have long fallen out of favor on university campuses, having been superseded first by the study of structural factors (class, geography, technology, etc.) and later by the introduction of various identity-based subfields. The recent death of Donald Kagan, the famed Yale classics professor and historian of the Peloponnesian War, is a case in point. Kagan’s eminently watchable freshman seminar on ancient Greece is available for free online, peppered with hoplite battles, musings on the nature of citizenship, and lively digressions into the lives and careers of notable generals and statesmen. Much of the course’s charm is derived from its anachronistic qualities. Not many professors teach like this in 2021.
Yet the great men live on, haunting airport bookstores, History Channel specials, and middling Netflix adaptations. Amateur generals re-fight old battles on YouTube while right-wing Twitter users pass around snippets of memorable historical biographies like samizdat. Narrative and biographical history persist outside the classroom because we’re human, and humans like good stories. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, a new book from Patrick Wyman, suggests a compromise approach. Wyman’s book is an accessible synthesis of historical storytelling and big-picture analysis of the social, economic, and technological forces that transformed Europe from backwater to global fulcrum.
Wyman is an academically trained historian who made his reputation as a podcaster, first with The Fall of Rome and now with Tides of History, a listenable but granular exploration of various topics, from early humans to the Reformation. It’s the sort of thing you can put on while cooking dinner, but Wyman often prompts you to turn down the stove and rewind a few seconds to catch a detailed explanation of ancient DNA and what it tells us about prehistoric migrations or the intricacies of late-medieval banking.
The podcast’s influence on the book should be obvious to regular listeners. Most of Wyman’s episodes open with a historical vignette to introduce the topic at hand. The book replicates this approach, beginning each chapter with a glimpse at life in early modern Europe through the eyes of certain memorable or consequential figures.
Some of these figures, such as Christopher Columbus or Martin Luther, will already be familiar to most readers. Others, such as the one-armed German mercenary Gotz von Berlichingen or the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, are fairly obscure. All are representative of landmark changes within European society, from the development of gunpowder warfare to the increasing sophistication of state finance. At its best, Wyman’s book smuggles big-picture analysis of structural and environmental changes into easy-to-read biographical sketches. The challenges of early modern state-building, for example, are much more digestible when explained through the career of Queen Isabella of Castile, Columbus’s royal patron and the final victor of the Spanish Reconquista.
So, why did a backward collection of principalities, statelets, and kingdoms begin to overtake the rest of the world circa 1500? Wyman is too careful to identify one overriding factor, but he does explore a number of related developments that led to what historians call the “Great Divergence,” when European states began to overtake the rest of the world in military, economic, and technological power. The military revolution and the increasing sophistication of gunpowder warfare are part of the story, although the Ottoman Turks were at least as adept as their Western counterparts at harnessing new technology on the battlefield. The printing press and the growth of a vibrant, continentwide intellectual culture played a role. The rise of early modern states such as France, Great Britain, and Spain, with their expanded capacity to make war, finance exploration, and stimulate economic growth, also mattered. So, too, did Europe’s political and cultural fragmentation, which encouraged state competition and the rapid adoption of new ideas.
Wyman is interested in one overlooked innovation in particular: the rise of sophisticated financial instruments, which paid for everything from movable type to ocean-faring galleons to cannon foundries. Impoverished, out-of-the-way Europe was always in an unfavorable bargaining position vis-a-vis the spice and silk merchants of Central Asia and the Middle East. A late-medieval bullion shortage exacerbated the problem. To raise money, cash-hungry Europeans turned to debt. Innovative financial practices underwrote almost every new development during the early modern era, from the hiring of mercenary companies to the expansion of the administrative state to novel mining techniques that extracted deep veins of copper and silver ore from the mountains of Slovakia.
Indeed, Wyman’s book is a worthy nonfiction companion to Hilary Mantel’s widely acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy, which follows the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell at the court of King Henry VIII, another early-modern state builder. Cromwell becomes Henry’s go-to fixer in part because of his facility at raising money, a vital skill for any 16th-century ruler who hoped to consolidate power, raise armies, and maintain a lavish court.
Mantel’s Cromwell and early modern Europe have more in common than the development of high finance. The humbly born Cromwell surpasses courtiers and barons in part because he is hungry, a blacksmith’s son who is never allowed to forget his common origins. Early modern Europeans were hungry, too. They were denied easy access to silks, spices, and precious metals. Their continent was riven by ceaseless warfare. Their cities were hovels compared to the great urban centers of India or China. This environment created men (and not a few women) who were grasping, acquisitive, and ruthless. One of Wyman’s most provocative points is that the Ottoman Empire’s relative success bred complacency, while Europe’s weakness spurred innovation that would eventually lead to its political and economic dominance.
Older historians may have been fixated on a narrow cast of statesmen, soldiers, and politicians, but one thing they did grasp was the role of contingency in human affairs. Luck, personality, and skill are sometimes as decisive as broader political, economic, and social forces. Wyman, to his credit, allows space for chance in his account of early modern Europe. The Reformation might have gone the way of the Lollards, the Cathars, and other forgotten Christian heresies if not for Martin Luther’s unique combination of stubbornness, intelligence, and skill at exploiting the printed word. If rains hadn’t lashed the Ottoman baggage train in the summer of 1529, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent might have brought up his heavy guns and battered Vienna into submission. History is often shaped by a combination of structural changes, human error, and random chance.
An understanding of the role contingency plays in human affairs should also instill an appreciation for our distant ancestors’ human qualities. The Verge is quite good at introducing modern readers to a turbulent historical epoch through several key figures, but a focus on their most avaricious and brutal deeds risks reducing them to one-dimensional villains. Occasionally, something more human can be glimpsed through the cannon smoke. The teenage courtship of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, founders of modern Spain, the camaraderie of a small but growing community of Venetian scholars and humanists, the chivalric exchange between Suleiman and the commander of a defeated Christian garrison (“I am really distressed to have thrown that man out of his palace,” the sultan is said to have remarked after ejecting the grand master of the knights hospitaller from Rhodes) — all of these are useful reminders that historical figures great and small are not too distant from ourselves.
Of course, Suleiman was also fond of impaling captured prisoners. Future generations will no doubt marvel at our factory farms, our poverty, and whatever else is fated to offend their sensibilities. When reading Wyman’s account of a pivotal but tumultuous moment in European history, the epigraph of The Mirror & the Light, the final installment of Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, is worth bearing in mind: “Brother men, you who live after us, Do not harden your hearts against us.”
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
