Civilizations: A Novel by Laurent Binet

Author:Laurent Binet [Binet, Laurent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374600815
Google: UDgtEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2021-09-13T23:00:00+00:00

37. Elizabeth

The Seville Edict swept like a hurricane throughout all of Europe (as their world was called before it became the Fifth Quarter).

In Spain, it was logical and reasonable that the Moriscos and conversos should be the first to salute the new law, because they were its most immediate beneficiaries. Atahualpa knew that the edict made them loyal to him, though he was vigilant not to take this loyalty for granted, for he knew people and their changing moods.

In Germany, in France, in England (as the preceding documents show), even in Switzerland, wherever Lutheranism was a growing influence, wherever its followers were persecuted, wherever they fought to replace their old religion with a new, rejuvenated one (albeit fairly close to the old one in truth, recognising the same gods but wishing to pay tribute to them in different ways), the Seville Edict was greeted as a glimmer of hope in the darkness. If the dream of a world without the Inquisition was taking shape in Spain, perhaps everything could become, if not possible, then at least imaginable, including peace and harmony.

Unable to approve of it, Luther said nothing about the religion of the Sun.

The king of France, fresh from his first indulgence, did not wish to make peace with these insolent Lutherans; in fact, he felt more inclined to burn them alive.

But others, weary of massacres, called for laws similar to the Seville Edict.

Awful tales were told of men quartered alive, roasted, and eaten, in the manner of the Chirihuanas, a tribe who revolted the Quitonians. A letter from Marguerite of Navarre reported that in France, a Lutheran had his heart ripped out and devoured by a crowd of crazed Catholics, and the account of this crime, which the queen herself described as ‘execrable butchery’, circulated in the Alcazar, making the Incas shudder. To them, these vile acts were the consequence of an incomprehensible belief: during the rites that they carried out in their temples, the Levantines were invited by their priest to eat a small white wafer and to drink a mouthful of the black drink. But, with a contortion of the imagination that Quitonians found almost inconceivable, the upholders of the old religion believed that this was actually the blood (because the black drink looked red in the light) and the body of their god, which they thereby drank and ate.

Those of the newer religion did not want to believe this, yet they seemed to commit just as many crimes. They, too, burned men alive.

The son of the Sun did not cease to be amazed that such disputes, caused by frankly incredible beliefs, could degenerate into mortal conflicts, sometimes even within families or ayllus.

In Germany, particularly, these divisions raged, and their echoes reached as far as Seville.

A princess who had converted to Lutheranism had left her husband, the Catholic Margrave of Brandenburg, and taken refuge with her uncle, the Landgrave of Thuringia, whom she urged to promulgate the same religious liberty that was now commonplace in Europe. She

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