Out of the Flames The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World

CHAPTER ONE MICHAEL SERVETUS WAS born Miguel Serveto Conesa alias Reves on Saint Michael's Day, September 29, 1511, in the small town of Villanueva de Sijena, in the province of Huesca. Huesca is in Aragon, at the northeast corner of Spain, just east of Navarre and about fifty miles south of the border with France. The house in which he was born still stands. The Servetos were gentry of long standing. There is evidence of their having been given their title, infanzones, or nobles of the second category, as early as 1327. Miguel was the oldest of three sons. His father, Anthon, was a notary; his mother, Catalina Conesa, was also born of noble blood. The second son, Pedro, became a notary like his father; the youngest, Juan, stayed home and became a priest and was appointed rector of a nearby church. The early sixteenth century was the crossroads where the medieval world, the Renaissance, the Inquisition, the New World, and the modern world all met. Although to most Americans the preeminent figure of the period was England's King Henry VIII, for most of his reign, Henry, despite the six wives, court intrigues, and general theatrics, was an afterthought in European politics. It was Charles V, the last of the Holy Roman Emperors, who dominated the stage. The Holy Roman Empire was the superpower of its time, stretching from Spain to the Balkans, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. Charles was a Hapsburg, born into one of the great ruling dynasties of Europe in 1500. His father was Philip the Fair, king of Castile, son of the emperor Maximilian, and his mother was Juana the Mad, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Juana, unattractive and highly unstable, had fallen madly in love with a husband who couldn't stand her. When Philip took up with someone else, Juana retaliated by hacking off his mistress's hair at a public function. Philip got his revenge by locking up Juana in a tower in Spain, where she stayed for the next fifty years. Then everyone died--Isabella in 1504, Philip two years later, Ferdinand in 1516, and Maximilian three years after that. Charles inherited everything. Before he had turned twenty, he ruled virtually all of Western Europe except England, France, and Portugal. Charles was smart, ambitious, fearless, and intensely Catholic. Of the three remaining holdouts, France, under Francis I, was by far the most powerful. Six years older than Charles, Francis soon became his nemesis. The French monarch had been raised by a doting mother and sister (the bohemian Marguerite of Navarre) and was taught to be brave, romantic, and chivalrous. He was after Charles from the beginning. When he was twelve, he stole Charles's seven-year-old fiancee out from under his nose, an act that did nothing to improve relations with the future emperor. Francis understood perfectly that Charles would have liked nothing better than to add France to his empire. But holding vast amounts of territory presents problems of its own, and Charles's resources were always stretched far too thin to mount a full-scale invasion of powerful France. Francis helped maintain this tenuous balance of power by attacking Charles's forces wherever he perceived them to be weak. For years Charles and Francis tried alternately to outflank, outwit, or outfight each other. They used diplomacy, threats, love, and treachery. Each courted and threatened the pope. But while most of the world was consumed by the shifting alliances and machinations of these two Renaissance heavyweights, another force was at work, bubbling just under the surface. It was a force that was immense and inexorable, and it was made of paper. ABOUT HALF A CENTURY before, in the mid-1450s, an inventor had just finished a twenty-year struggle to perfect a new device that he was sure would make him a great fortune. The inventor was a shadowy figure--there is no surviving record of his birth, and no accurate image of him exists. He grew upGoldstone, Lawrence is the author of 'Out of the Flames The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World' with ISBN 9780767908375 and ISBN 0767908376.