the verge (patrick wyman)

The book sets out to tell the story of a pivotal forty year period in European history through the stories of seven separate characters, all of them players to one extent or another. The period in question is 1490 to 1530, a period which, the author theorises, saw the beginning of the transformation of Western Europe from a provincial backwater to the dominant force in world politics for centuries to come. Some aspects of what is recounted are better known than others. Two of the seven chapters are dedicated to Columbus and Isabella, the discoverer of the New World and the queen who oversaw the final defeat of Muslim Europe, when she drove the Moors out of their last redoubt in Southern Spain. The book takes on the rise of the printing press, new technologies of war, Martin Luther and the expansion of the Ottoman empire. Most of the chapters are pithy, all of them setting out to verify the author’s thesis that it was the rise of capital and its capacity for expansive and remunerative investment that drove the changes the book describes. As such, the key chapter might be the one titled Jakob Fugger and Banking, wherein Wyman describes how one banker helped to bankroll so many of the endeavours, military and exploratory and even cultural, that were occurring at the time. I was quietly delighted to see the Fugger family make an appearance in Quixote (“My friend, tell your mistress that her troubles grieve my heart and I should like to be a Fucar (Fugger) so that I could solve them”, ch 23). In the same chapter Merlin is also cited, and perhaps nothing more sums up the shift from medievalism to modernity that was taking place from one end of Europe to another. Having said which, it feels at times as though Wyman’s thesis, and its vindication of capitalism, raises as many questions as it provides answers. In the final chapter which deals with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, the peasants’ revolt is named as a key element which lead to the failure of Charles’ reign, without in any way broaching what provoked these revolts, in much the same way as Luther’s success is put down in large part to the commercial benefits of printing his texts, without any real analysis of why the contents of those texts had such an impact. The Verge is a highly effective and thought provoking book, but I have to confess that I bought it hoping for more of a hint of how the anonymous man or woman’s life was similarly transformed in this time, how changed the lives of the groundlings in the Globe might have been from those of their grandparents, but the book's focus is steadfastly on history's players, rather than history's followers.