100 Documents That Changed the World Page 6
The cover of Las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
Gregorian Calendar (Inter Gravissimas)
(1582)
After detecting an error in the existing civil calendar from Julius Caesar’s time, the Pope issues a document of enormous practical and political significance. But his order has no power beyond the Catholic Church and the Papal States – so how and when will others respond?
Since becoming Pope Gregory XIII in 1572, Ugo Boncampagni (1502–85) had sought to reform the Catholic Church according to the recommendations of the Council of Trent that had been spurred by the Protestant Reformation. His most far-reaching action was the attempt to correct mistakes of the calendar that Caesar had introduced in 46 BC.
Although the Julian calendar had proved far superior to the lunar calendar, astronomers had since determined that it turned out to be slow by one day every 128 years because its calculation of 365.25 days to a year was 11 minutes, 10 seconds too great. This posed theological problems for the Church, in part because the scheduling of the crucial holiday of Easter was based on the vernal equinox and the moon’s phases. Gregory’s counsellors wanted him to suppress 10 days, in order to adjust Easter’s timing and prevent other problems. He ended up relying on two leading astronomers, Aloysius Lilius and Christopher Clavius, to advise him in the calculations.
On 24 February 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a bull ‘to restore’ the calendar so that seasonal events critical for the calculation of Easter dates would be back in their ‘proper places’.
The document precisely explained in Latin what needed to be done and why. The number of leap years was reduced and the date of Easter was to be set according to a new method – ‘To the greater glory of God.’ Of greatest practical concern was the fact that in order to make the adjustment, 4 October 1582 was to be followed by 15 October 1582.
Although the pope’s text ordered Church officials to carry out his plan, his language was careful to merely ask, exhort or recommend such changes to the civil authorities, who after all were not beholden to papal control. In fact, the rulers of several non-Catholic countries initially refused to adopt the provisions. The British Parliament did not accept them until 1750 and they only took effect in England and its colonies in 1752.
Many English subjects didn’t like hearing that the government was going to remove 11 days from the calendar. But the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin endorsed the idea, saying, ‘It is pleasant for an old man to be able to go to bed on September 2, and not have to get up until September 14.’
Christopher Clavius (1538–1612), the mathematician and astronomer who helped modify the proposal for the Gregorian calendar after the death of its primary author Aloysius Lilius (1510–76).
The original papal bull is kept in the Vatican archives. The Latin title Inter Gravissimas is an abbreviation of the opening line of the document, which translates as ‘Among our gravest concerns’.
The engraved title page of the King James Bible was the first bible in the English language to include an illustration of the Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
King James Bible
(1611)
Although the revision derives from a ruler’s largely political considerations, and the translation is produced by committee, the King James Bible is a literary masterpiece as well as one of the most influential documents ever created – a triumph of language.
Shortly after taking England’s throne following the death of Queen Elizabeth, King James I (1566–1625) met at Hampton Court Palace with Church of England representatives and Puritan leaders regarding certain thorny matters of church doctrine.
The Scotsman struck some observers as vulgar and impatient, with a tongue that was ‘too big for his mouth’. But James was also a clever politician, and he floated the notion of making a new translation of the Bible to replace the existing English-language version of 1568, believing that this might serve to bring together different Protestant factions and help him to achieve other political objectives. The idea was well received.
James ordered a new translation from the Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin, calling for a committee of 47 elite and approved scholars from Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster to carry out the task. Their diligent work would require shading certain meanings here and there to suit the King’s purpose, making the process as much a revision as a translation. It was also perfectly timed to take advantage of new advancements in printing and English colonization and hegemony.
Each working group used as its base an identical unbound copy of the Bishops’ Bible, 1602 edition, which had been specially printed for them to duly record their committee’s precise revisions in the margins, which would later be copied into the other committee’s copy, one by one, according to a strictly uniform procedure. Issues of grammar, spelling and biblical meaning all had to be minutely scrutinized, which was in itself a monumental undertaking.
Two partial transcripts by John Bois (1560–1643), lead secretary of the committee, have survived. Dating from 1608, they were discovered in 1964, along with a bound set of marked-up corrections to one of the 40 bibles used. They are held at Oxford University.
Work on the new translation took place during a literary Renaissance in England when authors such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Sir Francis Bacon were producing some of their finest works. The committee’s final version of the King James Bible rivals these greats in its masterful language.
After its approval, the book was first issued by the King’s printer, Robert Barker, in 1611 as a complete folio Bible. Measuring 40 centimetres high, the loose-leaf version was sold for 10 shillings and the bound version cost 12 shillings.
Known as the King James Bible or the Authorized Version, the work exerted a profound influence on English language, culture and politics.
This rare leather-bound edition of the Bible belonged to King James’s own son, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. It is held at Washington National Cathedral Rare Book Library.
Mayflower Compact
(1620)
Before venturing ashore into an unsettled and lawless land in America, a majority of passengers aboard the Mayflower form a compact that binds the signers into a ‘Civil Body Politic’ that will enact ‘just and equal Laws . . . for the general good of the Colony’ – an agreement to live together under the rule of law.
The Mayflower’s stormy 3,000-mile crossing of the Atlantic had not been easy. To make matters worse, upon reaching the North American coast in late autumn the captain realized they were at Cape Cod, not near the mouth of the Hudson River as stipulated by their charter. Rather than risking more dangerous time at sea, he decided they would have to land there instead.
The change of plan posed many problems. The 102 persons aboard were divided over what to do next. There were 41 English Pilgrims – families of Calvinist religious dissenters calling themselves ‘Saints’ – who had fled Europe to escape persecution. The rest (whom the Pilgrims called ‘Strangers’) included English merchants, craftsmen, skilled workers and indentured servants, and four young orphans.
Some of the Strangers now argued that, once they set foot on the land, they would no longer be subject to any law, since both maritime rules and the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company no longer applied there. Hence, upon leaving the ship they would not be under anyone’s legal authority. Servants, for example, could legally become free, and there were many other implications. The prospects were terrifying.
The Pilgrim leaders, realizing that they urgently needed to create some alternate government authority, convinced nearly all of the adult males aboard (Pilgrims and Strangers alike) to form a written agreement among themselves. Basing their document on a social compact idea found in some separatist church covenants, the Pilgrims set forth that this agreement would form a ‘civil body politic’ to establish ‘just and equal laws… for the general good of the Colony’, by which all of the signers would be bound.
Forty-on
e adult males crammed into the ship’s cabin to sign the document. Their agreement, which historians named the Mayflower Compact, amounted to one of the first and best-known expressions of self-government in American history. Shortly before forming their new colony, the signers elected a governor, and when that governor died, another governor was selected to succeed him and procedures were established for subsequent elections, thereby ensuring continuity. Born of necessity, the Mayflower Compact represented both the idea of the rule of law and some basic principles of democracy.
Although the original manuscript of the compact has been lost, versions of the text and a list of the signers were later printed in several early histories. The most famous transcript, written by Mayflower passenger William Bradford, is contained in a collection of his journals entitled Of Plimoth Plantation. Based on his handwritten accounts, the book was not published until 1856. Bradford’s manuscripts are held in a vault at the Massachusetts State Library.
William Bradford’s journal contains the only transcript of the Mayflower Compact written by a passenger of the famous ship. Below is a late 19th-century painting of the Mayflower signatories.
Martin Droeshout’s portrait of Shakespeare is believed to be the most accurate likeness. Shakespeare’s friend and contemporary Ben Jonson writes on the facing page that the engraver had ‘a strife with Nature, to out-doo the life.’
Shakespeare’s First Folio
(1623)
Seven years after his death, two of William Shakespeare’s closest stage friends strive to preserve his amazing legacy. The resulting collection of his masterful plays will go on to become what one appraiser will call the ‘most documented book in the world’, without which the playwright’s work may have sunk into obscurity.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) may have been the greatest writer in the history of the English language, but that reputation never would have come about without the effort of his two fellow actors and closest friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, who laboured for years ‘onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare, my humble offer of his playes.’
Heminges and Condell spent years gathering and editing 36 of the late writer’s plays (but not the sonnets or poems). Before that point, only half of the dramatic works had been published, and those that had were issued in a small format and rife with errors. Some versions didn’t even credit Shakespeare as the playwright. As managers in Shakespeare’s company, however, Heminges and Condell had access to his surviving handwritten scripts and prompt-books. At last, they wrote, readers would have the great dramatist’s plays as they were actually performed, ‘where before, you were abused with diverse, stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors...’
So in 1621 his friends began to supervise a fine printing that was done by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies first appeared in 1623. Scholars called it the First Folio, in reference to its original appearance and its large page size.
Given that Shakespeare’s original play manuscripts do not survive, the pair’s scrupulously prepared version of his comedies, histories and tragedies remain the closest thing to Shakespeare’s original words for the stage. Without the Folio the world would not have Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. The book’s portrait of Shakespeare (engraved by Martin Droeshout) on the title page may have also been the most authentic likeness extant, so his face was preserved as well.
The book’s original price was £1 for an unbound copy and £2 or £3 for a bound version, a substantial amount in those days.
About 30 per cent of the approximately 800 copies printed are known to have survived. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, Meisei University in Japan and the British Library all have multiple copies. Considered one of the world’s most valuable printed books, a copy sold at auction in 2001 for $6.16 million, when Stephen Massey the book appraiser called it ‘the most documented book in the world’.
Although Shakespeare’s work has undergone continual new translations to make it more understandable to contemporary audiences, this would not have been possible without the First Folio.
Galileo’s Dialogue
(1632)
In presenting the theory that the Sun, not the Earth, is the centre of the universe, the greatest scientist of his day tries to dramatize his argument as a witty dialogue poking fun at Church dogma. But Galileo ends up being brought before the Roman Inquisition.
By 1632 the great Tuscan astronomer, mathematician and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was already famous for his telescope design and his amazing planetary discoveries. Yet his support for Copernicus’s almost century-old theory of a heliocentric universe (with the Sun, not the Earth, as the centre of the solar system) didn’t square with rigid Church doctrine, so he held off writing down his conclusions until he thought it was safe to do so. Following the election of his most powerful admirer, Maffeo Cardinal Barberini, as Pope Urban VIII, Galileo assumed he would not be persecuted for expressing his scientific view, particularly if he couched his case in humour.
Writing in his native Tuscan dialect rather than Latin, Galileo penned a 500-page book in the form of a witty and irreverent dialogue between three fictional characters, who engage in a four-day-long rational discussion about the Earth’s motion, the organization of the heavenly bodies, and the ebb and flow of the sea. The conversation takes place in Venice, where the action of the tides is a major concern. Salviati, the ‘Academician’, expresses Galileo’s own views; Sagredo is a wealthy layman in search of the truth who is initially neutral on such questions until he becomes convinced by reason; and Simplicio is a conservative follower of Ptolemy and Aristotle, who stubbornly adheres to Church dogma. Ptolemy’s view of the universe, which remained unchallenged until Copernicus published his theories in 1543, placed Earth, not the Sun, at the centre of the universe.
Told in common language that is both poetic and didactic, the amusing encounter is laced with barbed remarks about narrow-minded and irrational thinkers. The final part of the dialogue, about the tides, especially offended the Catholic hierarchy because it refuted Church doctrine and put the Pope’s words in a fool’s mouth, thereby subjecting the pontiff to ridicule.
When Pope Urban was informed that Galileo had written such a work that was contrary to Church teachings, he became enraged and ordered the 70-year-old professor hauled before the Holy Office to face possible torture. Following a lengthy trial in Rome, Galileo was found in ‘grave suspicion of heresy’ and forced to publicly recant; his writings and teachings were banned and he was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. Although the book was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, unauthorized copies of his explosive Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) became a bestseller on the black market and went on to become regarded as one of the most earth-shaking books in Western thought.
Humiliated and discredited by the Church, Galileo went blind and died in 1642. Copies of his trial proceedings and recantation are in the Vatican’s collection; copies of the first published edition of the book are owned by several major libraries.
Galileo’s diagram of the Copernican system shows the Sun at the centre of the universe. The difference between this diagram and Copernicus’s heliocentric model of 1543 is that this drawing includes the four moons of Jupiter, which Galileo discovered in 1610.
Execution Warrant of Charles I
(1649)
The most dramatic document in Britain’s Parliamentary Archives appears tinged with blood, which is fitting given that it is that lawmaking body’s execution warrant for Charles I’s beheading in the wake of the bloody English Civil War. Ten of the warrant’s signatories would later be executed as revenge.
The English Civil War claime
d as many as 200,000 lives. After Oliver Cromwell’s victory, Puritans claimed that King Charles I had carried out ‘a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation’ and ‘levied and maintained a civil war in the land.’ The Rump Parliament put him on trial for high treason and his son went into exile. Amid the chaos, a group of the commissioners condemned the king to death, though the death warrant had already been drawn up, with blanks provided for the time and place of the execution. In the end, 59 of the 67 commissioners who had pronounced judgement signed the warrant. Many would live to regret it.
On the bitterly cold afternoon of 30 January 1649, the doomed king bent down over the chopping block, behaving with such strength and dignity that the crowd groaned when his head toppled away from the executioner’s axe.
Following the regicide, 11 more years of fighting ensued until the rebel government fell, whereupon the slain king’s son, Charles II, set about using Parliament’s death warrant as a guide for exacting his revenge. The document consists of a piece of parchment measuring 43 x 20 centimetres, containing wax seals and handwriting in iron gall ink. Although parts appeared damaged, the writing – namely, its 59 signatures – were sufficiently legible to guide the king’s agents.
Three of the main conspirators, including Oliver Cromwell, were already dead, so their bodies were exhumed and hanged in their shrouds, with the heads later displayed on spikes. Ten others who had fled were tracked down, convicted of treason, then hung, drawn and quartered. Another was murdered. Nineteen others were imprisoned for life.