Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

All this time the Nuremburg master Martin Behaim was making globes for the Portuguese king, while the Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro was drawing maps for the Spanish king. After the return of Magellan’s expedition, the Tordesillas meridian was extended on the other side of Behaim’s globe; it became the new ‘Zaragoza antimeridian’. It turned out that the Molucca archipelago remained with Portugal. But Diogo Ribeiro continued to work for the Spanish king. At the Zaragoza peace talks, he slightly amended his map so that the Moluccas passed to Spain. 9 The skills of these experts, who were hardly paid for their work, would decide the fate of unbelievable treasures. Both Ribeiro’s map and Behaim’s globe feature in Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors ; together with a Turkish carpet, a book of Lutheran hymns and a bronze astrolabe, they form the background to a world in conflict. In the foreground two imposing ambassadors from the new superpowers – France and England – are discussing this new carving up of the world. On the floor lies a spectacular skull.

Luther

Mines could collapse, flood, explode or give off poisonous gases; it was impossible to rescue the victims of such disasters. Even a soldier on the battlefield could count on more help from those who had sent him out there. The years of working in the mines inculcated a spirit of rationality, an ability to calculate risks and common-sense solidarity. An ordinary miner earned a third more than a peasant, which meant that his wife didn’t have to work in the fields but took care of the house and children. The miners were the first workers to defend their group rights. Their guilds in the Alps were unusually powerful; by the end of the fifteenth century they were already influencing pay rates, supporting the widows of miners and negotiating the length of holidays. More than once, miners’ guilds called strikes, and sometimes their leaders were arrested.

Success in mining promised career progress or even the prospect of starting your own business. The father of Martin Luther was a Saxon miner who became a furnace foreman and, towards the end of his life, the owner of a copper mine. 10 Martin grew up in the little town of Mansfeld, among mines, furnaces, chopped-down forests and smoke-blackened fields. Since the thirteenth century silver had been mined there, but by the time of Luther’s father it was a copper-smelting town, responsible for up to a quarter of all European production. The bankers of the southern princely states invested in Mansfeld, and Fugger also took an interest. There were about a hundred smelting furnaces in the town, and they were run by masters – this was a respected and well-paid job. Hans Luther ran seven furnaces with 200 workers. The miners were mostly migrants and foreigners, many of them from Bohemia. They were able to stand up for their own interests and wrote collective petitions that are still in the archives. In 1511 the Mansfeld miners formed a professional fraternity.

Copper gave excellent rents to the local landowners; during Luther’s time, three of them built castles round Mansfeld. But they were always in conflict: subterranean property rights were difficult to demarcate. After work the miners drank; alcohol relaxed tension and the town was full of taverns and brothels. Many miners had serious diseases of the lungs, stomach and skin. But Martin Luther preserved a fondness for Mansfeld and a sympathy for its problems. Thanks to his father’s income, he was able to study at university and become first a lawyer and then a monk. Giving his blessing to the investors and even the money-lenders, Luther wrote pamphlets against Fugger, the monopolist who had got rich at the expense of the miners’ toil. The miners, Luther’s local admirers, went on strike and occupied the mines. But Fugger was a harsh manager, and it was thought that his men killed some of the protesters. He insisted on having Luther arrested and handed over to the ecclesiastical court. Fugger’s money was behind the imperial Diet of Worms, which found Luther guilty of heresy. After this event, the emperor Charles V handed over control of all book printing in the empire to Fugger. By the end of his life Martin Luther’s father was in debt and had sold his business. His sons inherited land and houses but the creditors kept the mines. The number of working mines and furnaces decreased in Mansfeld; people were leaving the town, and new conflicts broke out among the mine-owners. In January 1546, Luther set off to settle a dispute between the five dukes of Mansfeld; discontented with their falling income, they had personally taken up the management of the mines. Luther persuaded Count Albrecht, one of his supporters, to make peace with his brothers so that they would hand over the management of the mines to an expert. Albrecht failed, and Luther decided that he must take on the task himself. He travelled to the neighbouring city of Eisleben, met the dukes and the miners, and listened to their grievances; it was while occupied with these matters that he died. Martin Luther shook the world with the Reformation but he died while mediating in a mining conflict.