Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History

By the following year, 72 bc, the slaves were able to travel over large parts of southern Italy, carrying out raids and attracting recruits. New commanders were put into the field against them, but none was able to defeat the rebels. This persuaded the Roman authorities to take a very serious step. The two consuls for that year – Lucius Gellius Publicola and Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus – were despatched to quash the rebel forces once and for all. The consuls were the highest military and civilian authorities in the Roman Republic, elected on an annual basis by the Senate. The Romans obviously felt that Spartacus and his army represented a serious threat to the security of the state. This time the Roman army scored a quick victory. One of Spartacus’s principal lieutenants, a Gaul called Crixus (the name means ‘curly-headed’ in Latin) with 3,000 slaves under his command, became separated from the main army. He was pursued, defeated and killed by the consul Gellius on a rocky promontory near Foggia on the Adriatic coast in Apulia.

Spartacus’s attempt to be liberated expressed a hope understood by all people who wanted to be free.

Spartacus began to move north. Gellius came after him from the south while Lentulus tried to bar his way from the northern end. Spartacus defeated them both and then won another victory, this time over the commander of the Roman forces in Cisalpine Gaul, Gaius Cassius Longinus. This battle took place at Mutinae, near what is today Modena, nearly 400 miles north of the gladiator school from which Spartacus had originally escaped. The commanders of the Roman forces were recalled in disgrace, but Spartacus, instead of taking his army out of Rome and across the Alps, now turned south and began to make his way back to the area from which he had originally come. Another army, bigger than any of the others, was sent after him. Its commander was Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the wealthiest men in the whole history of Rome and a politician and general of overwhelming influence and ambition. His army was paid for out of his personal fortune and when its first attack against Spartacus failed, Crassus decided to instil discipline by using ‘decimation’. The army was divided into groups of ten and drew lots for one of them to be killed. The chosen victim was then clubbed or stoned by the nine others. In 71 BC, in far southwest Italy, Crassus succeeded in driving the rebel slaves into a position where he could finally defeat them. Spartacus was killed. Six thousand recaptured slaves were crucified along the Via Appia into Rome – a warning to others about what would happen to those who defied the authority of the Republic. Crassus was awarded with an ovation.

Spartacus almost certainly knew that he could not destroy the institution of slavery. His rebellion was not an attempt to change the system. He just wanted to be free, probably to get home to the country from which he had originally come and lead a life where he did not belong to someone else. That is why his rebellion has become an enduring symbol of freedom. Spartacus could never have won, but in his attempt to be liberated, however briefly, from the bonds of slavery he expressed a hope understood by all people who want to be free.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is probably the most famous novel about slavery ever written. It had an enormous impact when it was first published in America in 1852 because it explained the lives of slaves in human terms. Its style may now seem sentimental, but its message is still strong and clear. Reading it more than a hundred and fifty years after it was written awakens a spirit of anger and astonishment at how civilised men and women could rub along with a system of such iniquity. In one scene a trader, ferrying his slave cargo down river to the South, sells a baby to another man without the mother’s knowledge. When she finds out she is distraught. ‘The trader,’ writes Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘had overcome every humane weakness and prejudice … The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast on him might have disturbed one less practised; but he was used to it … ‘ The passage ends with the words: ‘You can get used to such things, too, my friend.’ Written 2,000 years after the Spartacus rebellion it is a sobering reminder of how slavery has endured throughout the history of mankind.

CHAPTER 2

The Burning of Jan Hus 1415

Jan Hus was a priest and teacher from Bohemia, which today forms the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 1415 the Catholic Church condemned him to be burned at the stake for his heretical views. He was one of the first Europeans to die in the struggle for liberty of thought.

When I was at school I was encouraged to view the world more widely through the debates and lectures organised by the Masaryk Society. It had been founded by a headmaster shortly after the Second World War in an effort to bring his traditional public school into the twentieth century. He named it after one of the most remarkable men in modern European history – Thomas Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia. Masaryk was born in 1850, in a small town called Hodonin about 170 miles south-east of Prague. He began his working life as a teacher and philosopher, became the leader of his country in exile during the First World War and succeeded to its presidency when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918. ‘We can judge nations, including our own, quite impartially,’ he once said. ‘We need not worship the nation to which we belong.’ This careful, rational approach to nationhood was founded on his deep love for his country and its history. He understood where his people had come from and how they had been shaped by events. They might have suffered as possessions of an empire but their desire to be free remained. It had been with them for 500 years, ever since Jan Hus had gone to his death rather than renounce his beliefs.

By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the administration of the Catholic Church in Europe had begun to enter the long, slow period of decline that would lead to the Reformation a hundred years later. To those who governed the Church the signs of decay were barely visible. The idea of any secession from its teachings was unthinkable. Christianity led from Rome had enjoyed triumphant progress ever since the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, had, in 313 ad, ordered that persecution was to cease and Christianity tolerated. Having captured the Roman Empire, Christianity spread across Europe, its influence thwarted only in the Middle East where, after the death of Mohammed in 632, Islam became the preferred religion. At the end of the eleventh century, the papacy began a series of crusades against Islam in an attempt to take back control of places it believed were central to its religious authority. Ultimately they failed. By the time Jan Hus began to explain his interpretation of the Scriptures, Christian influence was largely contained within Western Europe, blocked from further expansion by the presence of Islam in North Africa, the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea and the Balkans.

The European papacy saw itself as all-powerful.

The European papacy of the Middle Ages saw itself as all powerful. In 1208, Pope Innocent III issued an interdict against England’s King John because the King had refused to accept his nomination for Archbishop of Canterbury. For a Godfearing people, an interdict was a serious imposition. It prevented them from observing everyday religious rites associated with such things as baptisms and funerals without which they were unprotected from salvation. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued a bull entitled ‘Unam sanctum’ – a declaration of supreme Church power. It said that there was no salvation outside the Church and that those who resisted the Pope were resisting the law of God. Boniface felt the need to reassert the authority of his office because the French King, Philip IV, had begun to raid the Church for taxation and undermine the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts. The conflict between King and Pope resulted in Boniface’s capture and detention. Six years after he died, in 1303, the papacy moved from Rome to France, ending up in Avignon where it would remain for more than seventy years. Although housed in papal territory – Avignon was not part of France – the papacy inevitably fell under French influence. All the popes who took office during the period of the Avignon papacy were French.

Power Corrupts

One of the most famous aphorisms in the whole of historical writing was composed directly as a result of a discussion about the medieval papacy. In the 1880s the cleric and scholar, Mandell Creighton, later a Bishop of London, published a History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation. Creighton was lenient in his judgements of the policies and actions of the medieval Catholic Church. Describing the trial of Jan Hus, for instance, he acknowledged that Hus ‘had first deliberately asserted the rights of the individual conscience against ecclesiastical authority’, but added that it was ‘useless to criticise particular points in his trial. The Council was anxious for his submission and gave him every opportunity to make it.’ This careful, temporising approach irritated another scholar of the age, Lord Acton. In a famous letter to Creighton he told him that he could not accept the idea that popes and kings should not be judged like other men. He went on: ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.’ Acton believed that what he called ‘the inflexible integrity of the moral code’ was essential to the study of history. If debased history ‘ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of the earth, and religion itself, tend constantly to depress’.

Political instability began to undermine the papacy. The Avignon court lived well: to many people it appeared to prefer the luxurious trappings of an earthly life to the spiritual requirements of religious devotion. A splendid new palace was built, the number of wealthy officials needed to administer papal business grew and the Church became richer as it sought, not only to establish its presence in its new home, but to look after the territories and possessions it had left behind in Italy. One of the Avignon popes, Clement VI, believed that largesse increased papal prestige. ‘No one ought to retire discontented from the presence of a prince,’ he said. ‘My predecessors did not know how to be popes.’ Such comfortable grandeur might have reassured the papal hierarchy, but it worried many of its subjects. Franciscan friars compared Avignon to the captivity of the Israelites in Babylon. Matters worsened when in 1378 Pope Gregory XI decided to return to Rome. After his death, the French cardinals refused to accept his successor, the first Italian pope since the exodus to Avignon, and moved back to France where they elected an alternative pontiff, called the Antipope. For nearly forty years the Church was divided by the Western Schism. The rulers of Europe took sides, supporting either the popes elected by Rome, or those chosen by Avignon. It was against the background of this confused, highly political situation that Jan Hus began to question the behaviour of the Church.

Jan Hus was born in southern Bohemia. In 1398 he became a professor at the University of Prague where he was ordained and began to teach theology. His lectures and sermons in favour of clerical reform gathered widespread support, partly because many members of his audience were looking for release from the domination of Vienna and the German sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire. Earlier in the fourteenth century, other Bohemian priests had begun to call for change. The Czech language and the individuality of the Czech people came together to form a nationalist movement that found expression in the language of its priests. Hus was influenced by the English cleric, John Wyclif, who had begun to identify a new approach to organised religion. Both men went back to the Scriptures, arguing that the Church should not own property or pursue wealth. The observation of religion should be founded on the teachings of its Christian founders, nothing else. The Church was a body of elected members predestined to enjoy salvation: Christ, not the Pope, was their leader. Hus’s views alarmed the Church authorities. In 1411 he was excommunicated and a year later forced to go into hiding where he wrote his most famous work, De Ecclesia. ‘The opinion of no man,’ he said, ‘whatever his authority may be – and consequently the opinion of no pope – is to be held if it plainly contains falsehood or error.’

Hus’s death stands as a uniquely important event in the whole history of man’s desire to be free.

In 1414 the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund, called a council in the German city of Constance overlooking the Bodensee. His main concern was to heal the schism that had divided the Church since Gregory XI had returned to Rome from Avignon. Aware that the views of John Hus had found favour with many of his subjects in Bohemia, he invited Hus to attend the gathering in order to explain his views. He promised him safe passage and Hus, against the advice of some of his closest supporters, decided to accept. Instead of participating in the theological debate he had expected he was arrested and tried for heresy. His accusers urged him to recant but Hus refused, arguing that the charges against him were inaccurate. ‘I stand at the judgement seat of Christ, to whom I have appealed,’ he told them, ‘knowing that He will judge every man, not according to false or erroneous witness, but according to the truth and each one’s deserts.’ In July 1415 he was removed from the priesthood and burned at the stake. He died singing hymns.

Hus, caught up in the political turmoil of the schism that had divided the papacy at the end of the fourteenth century, found that those who had supported him deserted him in his hour of greatest need. In England, John Wyclif was luckier. His strongest supporter was John of Gaunt, the most powerful prince in the land who, although not always agreeing with some of Wyclif’s views, allowed him to die in peace in 1384 in the Leicestershire village of Lutterworth to which he had retired. It was not until after his death, at the Council of Constance more than thirty years later, that Wyclif’s works were condemned as heretical.

While Wyclif was allowed to die quietly, his greatest apostle, Jan Hus, was burned. However the flames of change that Hus had set alight began a movement that was to change the Roman Catholic Church forever. In Bohemia his death was met with anger and rebellion. Between 1420 and 1436, the forces of the Hussites repelled the armies of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor that were sent to subdue them. Inspired by Jan’s teachings and united by a sense of Czech nationhood, the Hussites fought successfully against the crusades launched against them by an enraged Catholic Church. The lessons that Jan Hus had taught his people did not die. He – and Wyclif too – were the forerunners of the Reformation that in the century that followed would finally destroy the universal power of the papacy and set Europe and the world on a new course.

Hus’s decision to die for his beliefs towers over the time in which it took place, a permanent reminder of man’s desire for liberty.

The death of Jan Hus stands as a uniquely important event not only in Czech history but in the whole history of man’s desire to be free. The Czech people have been some of the most oppressed in the history of Europe. Suppressed by the Habsburg monarchy of Austria-Hungary in what one writer called a ‘truceless warfare against the soul of a people’, they enjoyed a brief moment of independence under Thomas Masaryk after the First World War. This was crushed first by the Nazis and then by Stalinist Russia. In the fight for Czech freedom three men called Jan played important parts. Two of them were students who lived in the twentieth century. The first, Jan Opletal, was killed in Prague during demonstrations against the Nazi occupation of the country in 1939. The second, Jan Palach, burned himself to death thirty years later in 1969 after Russian troops destroyed the liberalising reforms of the Czech government. He died within walking distance of Prague’s memorial to the third Jan – Jan Hus. In the Middle Ages, life and liberty revolved entirely around religion. By expressing a new approach to religious observation Jan Hus defined liberty for the time in which he lived. But his decision to die for his beliefs towers over the time in which it took place, and succeeding ages, unchanged by any historical context, a permanent reminder of man’s desire for liberty.

CHAPTER 3

The American Declaration of Independence 1776

In 1776 the thirteen colonies on the continent of North America declared their independence from British rule. The reasons they gave, and the nation they created as a result, define many of the ideas of liberty in the modern world.

‘Democracy starts here.’ So proclaims the promotional material for America’s National Archives in Washington DC. The Archives, it says, tell the story of the ‘American journey to young and old, scholars and students, cynics and dreamers.’ They are held in a grand neo-classical building on Pennsylvania Avenue, designed in 1935 by the same architect who created the city’s Jefferson Memorial. Among their treasures is a 1297 copy of England’s Magna Carta, as well as the ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, freeing all slaves held in Confederate States. But pride of place goes to the so-called ‘Charters of Freedom’ kept in a splendid, echoing rotunda at the heart of the building. These are the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is a faded document barely readable to the naked eye. To discover what it says, and who signed it, one needs to look at the facsimile displayed alongside it. But people do not come to read it: they simply come to look. This piece of dilapidated parchment, just over two feet wide and nearly two and a half feet long, is one of history’s most important symbols of liberty.

The leaders of the thirteen colonies on the eastern seaboard of the American continent became the first people to give expression to modern ideas of democracy through the mismanagement and miscalculation of their imperial masters in Britain. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Britain enjoyed a system of government more open and more liberal than most other places in the world. Europe’s other great world power, France, was in the sclerotic grip of the Bourbon monarchy and the ancien régime. Louis XV, who ruled for fifty-nine years, only thirteen less than his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, before him, died in 1774 having abandoned all attempts to reform his country’s creaking administration. China was locked behind its wall of self-imposed isolation. In St Petersburg and Vienna, two powerful autocrats, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, attempted to modernise their vast lands, but never with a view to relinquishing any of their own enormous power. Catherine was the more impressive of the two. She was actually a minor German princess who deposed (and perhaps murdered) her weak-willed husband and seized the throne. In partnership with powerful Russian ministers, generally her lovers as well, she managed to get the wild country she governed to adopt some European ideas, but widespread reform eluded her. Her fellow emperor, Joseph of Austria, dismissed her as merely ‘a woman who cares only for herself, and no more for Russia than I do’.

Britain was different. Ever since Henry VIII had broken away from the Roman church at the beginning of the sixteenth century and provided, though not intentionally, a form of royal licence for reformation, the nation had been involved in a long battle for religious liberty. This happened elsewhere in Europe too, but in Britain it resulted in the civil wars of the seventeenth century and, in 1649, the execution of the King and the creation of the brief republic of Oliver Cromwell. Over time, expressions of religious and political liberty came to mean similar things. The Bill of Rights that Parliament imposed on its new king, William III, in 1689, was both a religious and political settlement. It banned Roman Catholics from the monarchy – they were ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’ – but also restricted the powers of the sovereign. Freedom from royal interference in the law, freedom of speech in Parliament, and freedom from taxation by royal prerogative were all enshrined in the English constitution, an unwritten distillation of precedent and acts of Parliament. In the years that followed, these ideas were expanded and developed by eighteenth-century philosophers and writers, creating an age of freedom of thought – an ‘enlightenment’ – that was entirely new. But if the British felt that they enjoyed liberty, it existed in a form that fell far short of democracy. The aristocracy and landowners controlled Parliament because they owned its constituencies – sometimes so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ with no one living in them – and chose the members to represent them. These were people who had grown rich as Britain expanded her empire: caution and conservatism were the weapons they used to protect their wealth.

Franklin declared that he was not just a colonist but a Briton’.

In the American colonies, English concepts of more open and more inclusive government began to find an opportunity for unfettered expansion. Self-reliance is a natural ally of democracy. The men and women who built new lives far from home developed a sense of fellowship and common identity. They viewed themselves very differently from the way they were regarded in London. But they were not revolutionaries. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, declared that he was not just a colonist but ‘a Briton’, and added: ‘I have long been of Opinion that the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire lie in America.’ In that statement can be found the seeds of the tension between the British government and its lands across the Atlantic. The colonists were loyal, but proud and independent too. They wanted to share in the growth of the British Empire on an equal footing, not as a subservient people. The British, meanwhile, grew increasingly irritated with the behaviour of the colonists who failed to act in unison, defied the King’s instructions and, most importantly of all, baulked at paying the cost of the war that had protected them from French invasion. In Quebec in 1759, General James Wolfe defeated the French in a battle that gave Britain control of the whole of North America. It was one of the most significant victories of the Seven Years’ War. The French, supported by native American Indians, had invaded areas west of British settlements planning to colonise them. George Washington, as a young major in the Virginia militia, saw action in an expedition against them.

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