65 pages • 2 hours read
E.H. GombrichA Little History of the World
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 26-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary: “A New Age”
Gombrich introduces the Renaissance by asking the reader to consider how it feels to change over time. One can look back and see that things were quite different than they are now, but we can rarely sense change in the moment: “[...] at the time you hadn’t noticed that you were changing. Well, the history of the world is just the same” (163). Around 1420, the people of Italian cities, particularly Florence, found themselves holding a very different system of values and taste than the people of the Middle Ages before them. Though they were ruled by the German emperor, they largely ignored his wishes and lived independently. Living as a servant to God was no longer the most important aim; the goal was now to be independent, intelligent, and skilled. They discovered works of antiquity and, with them, discovered a new approach to art and beauty. People learned Latin and Greek and studied the art and philosophy of Athens and Rome. They had circled back to the past, and were experiencing a kind of cultural rebirth, or “renaissance” in French (165). The Roman ruins that covered Italy were revered and replicated in new architecture. Artists wanted to determine not only how things looked, but why, and to understand them completely.
At this time, there was a wealthy Florentine family named Medici. They funded the works of many of the greatest artists and scholars of the Renaissance, and when a Medici became Pope, the greatest artists came to Rome. The cultural rebirth then spread to Germany, France, and England. In 1450, a new, far more efficient kind of printing press was invented. This process made books and reading more accessible and, in turn, aided in the spread of texts from antiquity. Gunpowder was discovered by Europeans and was utilized in cannons and heavy guns. This shift eventually rendered knights virtually obsolete as the heavy armor they needed to wear to withstand gunfire was too cumbersome to properly move in. Gombrich closes his chapter on this new age by discussing the reign of the German emperor Maximilian, who was known as the Last Knight, around 1500.
Chapter 27 Summary: “A New World”
Gombrich now admits that what he has been calling the history of the world has been entirely incomplete: “We haven’t bothered with what lies to the west of old Europe, beyond Britain. No one bothered with it” (172). This perspective changed, he says, because of the Chinese invention of the compass, which made its way to Europe during the Crusades via the Arabs. A Genoan man named Christopher Columbus was convinced that if the world was round, one could travel far enough west that one would end up in the East. This journey by sea would be far easier and faster than by foot, and so he believed that one could reach the rich lands of the Indies in days, not months. After he spent years seeking funding from the nobility of Europe, the Spanish monarchs gifted him ships, and he and his crew set sail in 1492. After traveling for months with no sign of land, they reached what Columbus believed to be the Indies but was actually an island off of the coast of America. He claimed the land for the Spanish crown and always maintained that what he had found was the Indies. In reality, he had discovered the Americas, and here, Gombrich says, the modern era began.
While those first Spanish ships had discovered only islands, the inhabitants had pointed them further west, to the mainland. The early Spanish explorers, called conquistadors, were interested in claiming land and riches for themselves and their sovereign, and very little else. One conquistador, Hernando Cortez, led his army into Mexico City and discovered that it was a thriving society with marketplaces, courts, and infrastructure on par with Europe. He and his fellow Spaniards killed the king, Montezuma, and destroyed the entire city. Gombrich concludes his story of the conquistadors with an admonishment: “This chapter in the history of mankind is so appalling and so shameful to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it” (179). Nevertheless, the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch grew rich on the gold they took from the New World.
Chapter 28 Summary: “A New Faith”
Gombrich returns to the changes in Europe of the 15th century, when popes became more concerned with splendor than piety. Priests and monks, in their desire to please the pope, began collecting money by charging for forgiveness of sins. These were called “indulgences” and were a kind of certificate of forgiveness (180). In 1517, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther was so incensed by this practice that he nailed a list of 95 theses, or discussion points, to the door of his church in protest. He believed that the only salvation for man was God’s mercy and that the only true source of God’s mercy was the Bible itself.
Luther was not the first man to have these ideas, but the changes over the previous century had left a path for his teachings to spread much more successfully. With the printing press, Luther’s writings were distributed throughout Germany. When he was excommunicated, he and his followers left the church entirely. The German princes favored Luther, as less power in the church meant more power for them. They joined Luther’s movement, called the Reformation.
In 1519, Charles V became the new Emperor. As the grandson of the Spanish queen, he also inherited Spain, the Americas, Belgium, and Holland. Charles, an ally of the pope, attempted to imprison Luther, but Luther’s allies prevented it. He even wrote a German translation of the Bible, creating one German language in the process. Meanwhile, his fellow Protestants had fragmented. Elsewhere in Europe, similar ideas were being preached by people like Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva, but these similar-thinking groups could not get along with each other.
In England, King Henry VIII left the Catholic Church and formed the Church of England to divorce his wife. Emperor Charles V spent his life trying to control and unite his vast empire, and it only grew more difficult. He passed the German and Austrian thrones on to his brother, Ferdinand, and gave Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip. In 1556, he withdrew to a Spanish monastery, where, Gombrich claims, it is said he spent his time maintaining the clocks.
Chapters 26-28 Analysis
In the chapters “A New Age,” “A New World,” and “A New Faith,” Gombrich introduces some of the most important shifts that occurred in human history: the Italian Renaissance, the age of exploration, and the Reformation. Each changed the lives not just of those in power, but also of everyday people, and altered the way they thought about the world. The Renaissance changed the way that people approached their world, and they began to engage with philosophy, nature, and beauty in the same way that the Greeks had long before. Though Gombrich laments throughout the book the fact that signs of changing times are far clearer in retrospect, he says that the masterpieces of art and technology of the Renaissance are a testament to the advent of renewed culture: “[...] the paintings and buildings of the great Italian artists, are in fact the ‘heralds’ who cried: ‘Attention please! A new age has begun!’” (170).
In “A New World,” which summarizes the advent of global exploration and colonization, Gombrich is less admiring of the figures who pioneered this new world. He condemns the violence and hypocrisy of the European explorers who killed and robbed native populations in the name of Christendom and suggests that the superior morality and diplomacy of those native populations is what allowed the wicked explorers to deceive and destroy them: “As if paralysed by their disrespect and insolence, Montezuma didn’t lift a finger against the white intruders” (178). This is one of many chapters in which Gombrich does not attempt to justify the actions of history’s victors (178).
Like the shifts that occurred in “A New Age” and “A New World,” the fracturing of the Catholic Church that Gombrich describes in “A New Faith” is not the consequence of a single action or figure, but a confluence of factors that seemed to reach a fever pitch. Martin Luther is the main figure Gombrich features in the advent of Protestantism, but the political and cultural divide that inflamed the rupture in the Church extended far beyond his influence, and the chapter ends with the reign of Charles V, an emperor who could not hold the fissure together.
Gombrich concludes with a story about how Charles supposedly spent his retirement and uses it as a metaphor to foreshadow the far-reaching consequences of this “New Faith:”
When he didn’t succeed, he is reported to have said: ‘How did I ever presume to try to unite all the peoples of my empire when I cannot, even once, persuade a few clocks to chime together.’ He died lonely and embittered. And as for the clocks of his former empire, whenever they struck the hour, their chimes were further and further apart (186).
