Author: chad

The Kingdom of Kongo establishes a rare partnership with an up-and-coming European power, Portugal, to the point that the King of Kongo and his family embrace Christianity and take Portuguese royal names. However, this partnership will also be ground zero for one of the greatest atrocities in human history.

Sources:

Almeida, Marcos Abreu Lelitão de. “Speaking of Slavery: Slaving Strategies and Moral Imaginations in the Lower Congo” (Doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University, September 2020).

Bosma, Ulbe. The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Harvard University Press, 2023).

Etherington, Norman. “Christian Missions in Africa”, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions, ed. Elias Kifon Bongba (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Garretson, Peter P. “A Note on Relations Between Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Aragon in the Fifteenth Century.” Rassegna di studi etiopici 37 (1993): 37-44.

Gondola, Ch. Didier. The History of Congo (Greenwood Press, 2002).

Hanno. “Gorilla Warfare.” Lapham’s Quarterly, Last accessed: 3/12/2026. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/animals/gorilla-warfare 

Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

MacGaffey, Wyatt. “Economic and Social Dimensions of Kongo Slavery (Zaire)”, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, eds. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (University of Wisconsin Press, 1977).

Russell-Wood, A.R. The Portuguese Empire, 1415-1808: A World on the Move (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Thornton, John. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

___________. Afonso I,  Mvemba a Nzinga, King of Kongo: His Life and Correspondence, trans. Luis Madureira (Hackett Publishing Co., 2023). 

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Transcript

As soon as his secretary finished scratching the letter he dictated out on parchment, the king waved him away, ignoring his protests that there were still other matters to address. The king was weary in both body and mind. The letter would be headed over the sea to his fellow monarch, the man he called brother. As much as he could within the smothering limits of diplomatic language, he pleaded for help. But by now he was under no illusions that his pleas would be answered with anything but sweet, empty words.

He groaned as he relaxed himself onto his couch, the pain in his back making itself known as he did so. He was so young when the pale men from beyond the great river first came, sweating and stinking under their heavy clothes and metal helmets and breastplates. Their priests, dressed in plain black, spoke to him of the Great Creator that both their peoples worshipped and how He had come to their lands dressed in human flesh, to suffer as men suffered, and the king believed. And he still believed, even as these people who called themselves “Christians” schemed with their merchants and forced his people to follow foreign priests who would not even deign to speak their language. These men of God mocked their people’s customs and a few even slept with the wives of great nobles. These self-described men of God had even known of a conspiracy to kill him and said nothing.

Then there were the rumors. A man of the royal family, distantly related but the king himself had been there to celebrate the birth of his first child, had disappeared, his wife saying he had been ambushed and taken to the sea. A village near the coast was found a smoldering ruin, its people nowhere to be seen. And people in the royal court were telling each other stories of a woman who fled from an island just over the sea, of people being worked to death just to grow a plant that was as sweet as honey.

All he could do was make himself forget, and pray that God would give his successors more wisdom than he had.

This is Turning Modern.

A forgotten milestone in the history of European colonialism, one that actually took place almost a decade before the voyages of Christopher Columbus, was the first contact between Europeans and the Kingdom of Kongo in Central Africa. Up to that point, West and Central Africa might as well have been across an ocean from Europe. On land, you had around one thousand miles of the Sahara Desert. By sea, a strong, one-way current in the Atlantic Ocean made it seemingly impossible to sail back north by a certain point, effectively preventing Europeans from safely sailing further south than the Moroccan coast and stopping West Africans from reaching North Africa and Europe. Europeans who tried to make the journey down the West African coast either had to make it home by land or were never heard from again. It was this all-powerful current that also reportedly doomed all but one of the 200 ships that, according to legend, the Mali Empire of West Africa sent to explore the Atlantic.

Yet there was one ancient account of someone from the Mediterranean who made the Atlantic voyage and lived to tell the tale, suggesting it was in fact possible. An account left by the Carthiginian explorer Hanno claims that he made it possibly as far as Mount Cameroon, although historians still argue over whether or not he actually made it that far south or if the account was entirely or partially fabricated. Still, at least the story of Hanno’s voyages gives us this one intriguing and rather violent passage that capped off what sounds like an otherwise peaceful adventure:

Sailing along by the fiery torrents for three days, we came to a bay called Horn of the South. In the recess of this bay there was an island with a lake in which there was another island, full of savage men.

There were women too, in even greater number. They had hairy bodies, and the interpreters called them gorillas [apparently a local term meaning hairy people]. When we pursued them we were unable to take any of the men—for they all escaped by climbing the steep places and defending themselves with stones—but we took three of the women, who bit and scratched their leaders and would not follow us. So we killed them and flayed them, and brought their skins to Carthage. For we did not voyage farther, provisions failing us.

Pliny the Elder claims that the skins were placed in the temple of the goddess Tanit but were lost when Carthage was burned down by Rome. Again, some classicists and historians are skeptical of the account, but if anyone knew how to make the perilous journey down the coast of West Africa and get back, it would have been a Carthaginian.  

This all changed thanks to an accident. A Genoese merchant who was involved with the grain trade between northern Europe and the Mediterranean was blown off course to the Canary Islands, which had been forgotten since antiquity when they were known as the Isles of the Blessed. The merchant discovered that the islands were plentiful with orchil, a lichen used to make blue dye. Unfortunately for the people already living on the Canary Islands, this chance discovery almost immediately made the Canary Islands a hotspot for conquest and settlement. After decades of fierce resistance most of the natives were wiped out, and the age of European colonization made its bloody debut.

As more Europeans made the voyage to the Canary Islands, they began to learn more about the currents and countercurrents that ran around the islands and into the Atlantic, leading to the further discoveries of uninhabited islands further out in the Atlantic, Madeira and the Azores. By 1434 sailors worked out that if you went out to sea and then to the Atlantic islands at the right point, you could catch a current that would take you back to mainland Europe.

This discovery just so happened to almost coincide with an apocalyptic event that happened on the other side of Europe. In 1453, the Byzantine Empire, which had been on life support for at least a century, finally perished when its capital of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire. This was not only a huge symbolic victory for the Ottomans, who could now claim that they had seized the mantle of the Roman Empire, but it also meant that they practically controlled the trade routes of spices and silk coming into Europe from Asia. But what if Europeans could reach Asia another way, by finding an uncharted route around Africa?

Adventurers like the Portuguese prince Henrique the Navigator dreamed of discovering either this new Asian trade route or the source of all the gold that for centuries had made its way from West Africa to the Mediterranean or even discovering the mysterious kingdom of Prester John, the legendary Christian king who could help finally turn the tide against the seemingly invincible Ottoman Empire.

Now because a lot of the men leading these voyages were the younger sons of the nobility, who stood to inherit no land and since joining the Church didn’t appeal to them, they instead decided to dedicate their life to fighting and looting. So the first thing the Portuguese tended to do when they came across coastal villages in lands no European had seen in over a thousand years if ever was raid them. They must have thought that these people don’t even wear real armor, so we might as well, right? Unfortunately, what the Africans did have were arrows dipped in extremely effective and fast-acting poisons. So many of the early clashes between the Portuguese and natives ended in death and disaster for the Portuguese, so much so the Portuguese monarchy made the wise policy decision of discouraging raids and sending official explorers and representatives to approach the natives peacefully.

Reading about this while doing research did make me wonder if the Aztecs weren’t caught so off-guard by Hernan Cortes and his crew and Cortes wasn’t nearly as lucky as he was, if the history of American-European relations might have gone very differently, but that’s a whole other story.

One of these explorers working on behalf of the crown was the mariner Diogo Cão. He was explicitly sent to find Prester John and iron out an anti-Muslim alliance with him. By this point it was widely believed that Prester John’s kingdom and Ethiopia were one in the same, but it was also thought that the African continent’s southernmost point was somewhere around Benin and that it would be possible to easily sail around Africa to Ethiopia. Cão must have thought he found a way to reach Ethiopia after all when instead he came across the Congo River, which would have been the largest and deepest river Cão and his men had ever seen. Instead of a convenient express waterway to Ethiopia, though, Cão found people who told him that they were in the territory of another large kingdom, Kongo.

In an example of what counted for benevolent diplomatic relations in those days, Cão accused the Kongolese of harming or detaining the scouts he sent ahead and kidnapped four high-ranking locals to send back to Portugal. But they were given the best possible treatment under the circumstances and returned to Kongo with tales of a far-off country where the people lived in strange but astonishing houses of stone.

Like Cão let’s get acquainted with the Kingdom of Kongo. Once its territory was comprised of three separate kingdoms, but through the usual series of conquests and marriage alliances they became consolidated into one entity by the fourteenth century. When he finally saw it, Cão compared the size of the kingdom’s capital Mbanza Congo to the Portuguese city of Evora. At the time, Kongo’s iron and steel and textile industries also rivaled anything in Europe. Kongo was certainly much less urbanized than much of Europe, but based on tax and baptism records, the historian John Thornton argues that Kongo and Portugal had similar rates of children surviving into adulthood and roughly the same levels of agricultural development. 

As for how the Portuguese viewed the Kongolese, it does seem like their perceptions ranged from seeing the Kongolese as a noble people to whom poverty was unknown to strange barbarians who needed to be educated in the proper ways of civilization. But skin color wasn’t a factor, not yet. It would take an entire separate podcast to delve into how modern racism evolved, and it’s a topic we’re definitely going to be coming back to. But to give you an idea of how much skin color was not part of the equation, at around this time the king of the Spanish kingdom of Aragon was seriously considering a double marriage with the imperial family of Ethiopia, with his sister marrying the emperor and the heir to the Aragonese throne would marry a woman from the imperial family. The negotiations aren’t very well documented and they came to nothing in the end, but it still seems like any modern idea of race wasn’t an issue. Nor does it seem to have been a problem when Cao was warmly welcomed by the royal court at Mbanza Congo and managed to establish normal diplomatic relations between his lord King João of Portugal and King Nzinga Nkuwu. Soon enough, men from the Kongolese nobility were sent to Portugal to serve as ambassadors and cultural observers of a sort, and the King of Kongo agreed to allow Portuguese merchants and missionaries in his country. Back in Portugal there was soon a new fad for the lavish textiles and elaborately carved ivory statuettes of Kongo while the Kongolese requested that the King of Portugal send experts who could teach them two things: how to grow wheat and make bread, and how to build houses made of stone. 

Of course, it helped that the king seemed eager to embrace the Christian faith, either out of genuine devotion or because the Portuguese were willing to help him put down a rebellious vassal. This is where our story gets a bit buried under lots of half-remembered oral traditions, distorted legends, religious propaganda, and scholarly speculation. It’s still hotly debated how much the Kongolese at the time of European contact understood Christianity and what exactly their conversion meant. It doesn’t help that the pre-colonial religion of Kongo isn’t well understood. We just know from early missionary reports that the Kongolese worshipped a large number of regional gods and ancestral spirits. Some missionaries were even dismayed to meet Kongolese people who didn’t believe in anything divine or supernatural at all.

It’s thought that there was a widely recognized supreme deity Nzambi Mpungu who was seen as the creator of the world and the god of the sky. This would have been easy enough to fit with the Christian God. There was also a widespread belief that many regions were protected by the powerful spirit of the first ancestor who lived in that region, an idea that missionaries thought they could relate to the Christian veneration of the saints. John Thornton suggests that it was likely many Kongolese sincerely accepted Christianity, but many still continued worshipping their gods and ancestral spirits. If so, it would have been similar to many other cases throughout history where Christianity was made to fit into a new culture it encountered.

In any case, Nzinga Nkuwu took on Christianity with gusto. Most of the royal family were baptized and given the names of the Portuguese royals, with the king himself becoming João, his wife taking the Portuguese queen’s name of Leonor, and their son adopting the name of João’s son and heir, Afonso. All of the high nobility of the kingdom were then ordered to undertake a mass baptism. Later in a letter written to the king of Portugal, Afonso would claim that around the outdoor spot where the baptisms were taking place they had to build high walls topped with thorny bushes to keep people from escaping, suggesting that maybe not everyone was on board.

Curiously, maybe not even the renamed king João of Kongo was that committed. In one of the many letters he wrote to the Portuguese kings, Afonso would later mention that his father renounced Christianity in the last years of his life, but he does not elaborate. Maybe he had second thoughts or the whole thing was just political theater after all. Even then, it doesn’t seem King João tried to slow down the flood of missionaries and priests into his country before his death in 1509. As soon as his father died, Afonso was warned by his mother and told to come to the capital immediately, giving him a strong position when his brother Mpanzu challenged his claim to the throne. John Thornton is skeptical of Afonso’s claim in his letters that Mpanzu had refused baptism and made himself the champion of the country’s religious traditionalists, thinking it was just a way for Afonso to get the Portuguese to support him in his eventually triumphant campaign against Mpanzu, who either died in battle or was executed on the battlefield. But it certainly wouldn’t be the first time in history the popularity of a brand new religion caused a civil war.

Afonso’s letters seem to reflect a sincere faith, declaring in one letter that “our former religion is all fantasy and empty air.” One story that still gets told in modern-day Congo is that he saw his mother wearing a pagan idol around her neck. He became so furious with holy anger that he ordered her to be buried alive. Given that Afonso’s mother paid out of her own pocket to support missionaries and to help construct a church and there’s no indication she passed away anywhere other than in her bed, the tale doesn’t pass under any scrutiny. Even so, maybe it has a crumb of truth, revealing that Afonso was a sincere and devout convert.

As I mentioned we have many of the letters he wrote to King João II of Portugal, then his cousin and successor Manuel I, and finally King João III. João II’s son, Afonso’s namesake, was killed when he fell and was dragged behind his horse. Despite Afonso’s zeal, the letters betray a growing disillusionment. But to really understand this disillusionment, we need just one more interlude to see how Congo’s fate was intertwined with a sweet but sinister substance that would be the cause of the destruction of millions of lives over the centuries: sugar.

I won’t go into the details of how sugarcane gets turned into sugar, except to say it’s a very torturous process. The crop requires a lot of land and water and refining it into sugar takes a great deal of backbreaking labor and wood to burn. On top of it all, sugarcane thrives only in climates that are hot year-round. When the cultivation of sugar cane spread from India to the Middle East, sugar plantations were established in Mesopotamia with work forces that in no small part used enslaved labor from around the Mediterranean and East Africa. However, after thousands of East African slaves launched an especially deadly revolt at sugar plantations on the Euphrates River in the ninth century, other sugar plantations started to avoid enslaved labor. When sugar became a major cash crop in medieval Egypt, for example, the farms there ran entirely on free labor. After the Crusades had the odd side effect of introducing sugar to Europe, the Republic of Venice opened up sugar plantations on the island of Cyprus and used some slaves, although soon enough they found that trying to grow a crop that causes a massive amount of deforestation as a matter of course and hogs a lot of land that could be used to grow, well, actual food on a relatively small island…it just wasn’t a sustainable long-term plan. Would-be sugar farmers in Sicily and southern Spain and Portugal ran into similar logistical problems, not the least of which was that the work wasn’t exactly appealing to free peasants and sharecroppers.

At first the island of São Tomé near the mouth of the Kongo River was just used by the Portuguese as a base to monitor and impose duties on the trade coming out of Kongo. But then somebody realized that the island’s tropical climate was ideal for growing sugar cane and wood and land would be plentiful. At first, they tried to get peasants from Portugal to work the farms there, but few were willing, and anyway none of them adapted well to the tropical heat and diseases. Well then, they probably thought, we’re already exporting slaves out of West Africa, so why not use them? They’re used to the heat, have an immunity to the diseases, and since it’s an island we won’t have to worry about escapees, so…

Of course, slavery had existed in Central Africa since time immemorial. But slavery wasn’t the same in every society, even within these regions in Africa. In Kongo and neighboring countries, slavery was, in the words of historian Wyatt McGaffey, more about social dependency than labor. Slaves were prisoners of war or given up as tribute. They would be given to a particular family and assimilated into the new culture they now found themselves in. While they were still considered to be of an inferior social rank, they could make their own money and work their own businesses and they even had a chance of one day becoming a leader of whatever family they were placed in. Slavery functioned as a way to place new blood in a dying lineage or to place fertile women and skilled workers in a newly established town or in underpopulated areas. It’s probably telling that one of the words and terms for slave in Kongo was also the word for “child.”

I don’t want to soften this. These people were still being violently stripped away from their homes and their own families and spouses and pressured to acclimate to an unfamiliar culture. And they could still be traded or sold by their new families. Also there was in some areas apparently a chance they might be sacrificed to commemorate the death of a great leader, so there’s that. But for those who for whatever reason want to insist slavery is basically the same everywhere, you need to honestly ask yourself if you’d rather be enslaved under the system I just described or have to spend every waking moment of your life toiling away in the tropical heat at the sugar cane fields.

Since trading slaves had already long been part of the Kongo economy, the Portuguese quickly became involved. At first African slaves were sent to Portugal as typical farm and household laborers. As sugar production took off in São Tomé and the newly discovered Caribbean and Brazil, though, the demand for slaves skyrocketed. As early as 1516, 2,000 slaves a year were coming out of Kongo. The trade grew so rapidly that King Manuel became concerned he wasn’t getting his cut and he tightened government control over Kongolese trade, establishing government outposts around the African coast. This only drove more of the slave traders and other merchants further south to modern-day Angola. It was a territory the kings of Kongo long claimed sovereignty over, but there were a number of kingdoms there, with one in particular growing strong and rich on the slave trade and beginning to challenge Kongolese authority.

I opened up this episode with a bit of artistic license. The truth is we don’t know if King Afonso fully understood what happened to the slaves who ended up in São Tomé, and at any rate Afonso clearly didn’t want to be muscled out of the profits from the slave trade either. Still, I think one can detect in the letters a genuine alarm at how far the trade was going and the devastation it was causing, with his people being abducted in slave raids and parents selling their own children to slavers out of desperation caused by poverty, poverty that the slave trade itself was helping to spread. In one letter, Afonso cries out, “Sire, this corruption and depravity has reached such a level that our homeland is becoming completely depopulated.” In another, oft-cited letter, Afonso pleaded, “Many of our countrymen capture and sell many of our free people to satisfy their immense greed for the goods that your subjects bring from your kingdom. They often abduct noblemen and their children as well as relatives of ours and sell them to the white men in our kingdoms. As soon as the white men buy these captives, they brand them with hot irons, and our guards find them when they are about to be shipped out. The white men claim they purchased them but cannot say from whom.” It finally got to a point where Afonso threatened to cut off all trade with Portugal. Whether he was dissuaded from this course of action or he reconsidered because he thought that Kongo had gotten too dependent on the trade from Portugal, Afonso stepped back from that particular precipice, but he did create a commission comprised of Kongolese officials and one member of the Portuguese merchant community to judge cases of illegal enslavement, all in order to combat the plague of kidnappings. It’s unknown if this attempt was at all successful.

Afonso had other reasons to feel embittered by the men from the north. According to his letters, Portuguese merchants were ignoring Kongolese laws and the priests sent from Portugal were hopelessly corrupt. In Afonso’s own words to the Portuguese king, “My lord and brother, the present time is more mean-spirited than times past, for the very same people who administer the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are the ones who chase away the truth, and are enticed by the world, by greed, by the devil, and the temptations of the flesh. They forsake the promise they have made of their own free will to raise the host at the altar and preach the doctrine and teach the word of eternal life that is the word of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Afonso tried dealing with the problem by encouraging the ordainment of more homegrown priests, sending his own son Henrique to be educated and ordained as a priest in Rome by Pope Leo X himself. Afonso’s hope for Henrique was that he would become the first archbishop of a Kongolese church answerable only to the Pope himself. However, under Portuguese diplomatic pressure, the Pope just gave Henrique the title of Bishop of Utica, an ancient but totally empty church title since Utica happened to be in Tunisia, a Muslim country. Throughout Afonso’s reign, the souls of the Kongolese would stay in the hands of Portuguese priests and bishops.

While the king and his court were hearing Easter Mass in 1540, seven or eight Portuguese men fired their muskets at Afonso. Appropriately enough for the first fully Christian king of Kongo, Afonso was miraculously unscathed, although the shots still killed a bystander and wounded several courtiers. The reasons behind such a dramatic assassination attempt are unknown and it’s difficult to tease out the facts from the flurry of letters between Afonso, the King of Portugal, and various Portuguese notables in Congo denying involvement or accusing others over it. Most likely, the Portuguese were conspiring with some of Afonso’s various sons and grandsons who were scheming to be the next on the throne. If someone from Afonso’s own family did sign off on the assassination attempt, they were jumping the musket since just three years later, Afonso was dead at the age of 85.

The kings that followed Afonso would continue to take Portuguese names, even as the slave trade that the Portuguese stoked robbed the kingdom of its people and condemned them to Hell while sapping the kingdom’s own vitality. The reign of Afonso I would prove in hindsight to be the kingdom’s apogee. The Kingdom of Kongo would still survive, though, until 1914, when Kongo’s former benefactors the Portuguese had what was left of the kingdom merged with their colony of Angola with a stroke of a pen and unceremoniously deposed the last king, who to the very end bore the distinguished Portuguese royal name of Manuel III.

A genius prodigy sets out to change the world by resolving all philosophical and religious disputes with one book, his own 900 Theses, and a debate in Rome between Europe’s brightest intellectual lights. And he will leave his mark on history, just not in the way he wants…

Sources Cited:

Hanegraaf, Wouter J. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Bradatan, Costica. Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of Philosophers (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Chatto & Windus, 1965).

Mirandola, Pico della. Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486), ed. and trans. S.A. Farmer, 2nd edition (Arizona State University, 2003).

____________. “Oration on the Dignity of Man”, trans. Cosma Rohilla Shaizi. Cosma’s Home Page, 21 November 1994. Last accessed 2/23/2025. 

Slattery, Luke. “A Renaissance Murder Mystery.” The New Yorker (20 July 2015).Last accessed 2/25/2025.

Stethern, Paul. Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City (Pegasus Books, 2015).

Transcript

In the winter of 1486, a wealthy 24-year-old man arrived in Rome. He brought with him most of his library of books and manuscripts, which encompassed the languages of Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew as well as thousands of years of history and accumulated knowledge. Also he had freshly printed copies of the book he wrote himself, with the title 900 Theses or, to use another possible English translation, 900 Conclusions. He had copies sent to universities across Italy, to some of the most well-known scholars and theologians of western Europe, and to the distinguished circle of academics in Florence sponsored by the powerful Medici family. The book included an announcement, inviting each recipient to come to Rome for a debate and promising to pay for any travel expenses himself.

The young man audaciously claimed that the 900 Theses contained every single controversial or unclear point ever raised by the great thinkers of the world since the days of the ancient Egyptians. Using these theses as the topic, he wanted, quite literally, the debate to end all debates. He truly believed that all religious conflicts and philosophical disagreements could be resolved right there in Rome with the result that the grand truth behind all doctrines would be revealed. The high hopes he had was symbolized in the date he chose for the first day of the debates: January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, when the three wise men or magi visited the infant Jesus. Such debates were standard exercises for universities and were even often held in public, but usually it was just one thesis being discussed. To debate 900 at once was completely unheard of.

Still, he was very certain that this debate would not just change minds, it was going to change the world.

This is Turning Modern.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was a son of northern Italian nobility.  His family ruled a small but independent fiefdom or technically two neighboring fiefdoms, the county of Concordia and the lordship of Mirandola. They weren’t among the power players of Italy, but they were quite rich as well as related by blood or marriage to the major dynastic houses of northern Italy, the Gonzagas of Mantua, the Sforzas of Milan, and the Estes of Ferrara. As the third son of Count Gianfrancesco Pico, Giovanni Pico’s career options were limited like any other younger son of the northern Italian aristocracy. Basically, he could choose between becoming a condottieri, a mercenary captain, or a bishop or cardinal in the Church. Probably noticing that Pico as a child was remarkably intelligent, his mother Giulia Boiardo already had him singled out for a career in the Church.

For reasons that aren’t completely clear, Mirandola seems to have decided to take a risky third option: to become a full-time intellectual and writer. He abandoned studying canon law at the University of Bologna, probably not coincidently not long after his mother died, and transferred to the University of Ferrara where he took up philosophy. Within a couple of years he would move again to continue his studies at the University of Padua, whose faculty were famous for their studies of the philosopher Aristotle. It wasn’t long before Pico became known for his precocious intellect, astonishing memory, and aptitude for languages. On top of being fluent in Latin and ancient Greek, Mirandola also learned Hebrew and Arabic. Later he would become famous as one of only a handful of scholars in all of Europe who could read Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, in the Syriac alphabet or Chaldean as it was commonly known at the time. Pico took up even more esoteric interests. Under the tutelage of the rabbi and philosopher Yohanan Alemanno, Mirandola learned about Kaballah, the school of Jewish mysticism. From Kaballah he took an overall interest in the occult and magic, believing that it was one avenue for understanding the divine, and the ancient Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism, which Westerners also associated with the esoteric and magic. After a trip to Florence, he became involved with the circle of intellectuals patroned by the banker and Florence’s unofficial leader, Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’ Medici, taking on as a mentor Marsilio Ficino, who had translated the works of Plato into Latin and made them accessible to western Europe for the first time since antiquity.

For all that, Pico didn’t neglect his looks. He wore his brown hair long and dressed in the latest fashions, accenting his already handsome appearance. Nor did he forego a love life. The historian Paul Stethern suspects he might have been the lover of the poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano. If true, then Pico must have been in modern terms bisexual, because he also got involved in a love scandal that might have cut short his academic career. At some point Pico met and fell in love with Margherita, a woman from the city of Arezzo, then under the control of Florence. She had been forced by her family to marry a local tax official, Giuliano Mariotto de’ Medici, a distant relative of Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’ Medici.  She offered to wait for Pico just outside Arezzo. He arrived on horseback leading a group of twenty armed retainers and took Margherita with him. The city militia took off in pursuit and caught up with them, leading to a clash that cost fifteen lives on both sides. In the chaos, Pico, his secretary, and Margherita escaped into the nearby hills, but they were caught at the village of Marciano and arrested. Margherita was a willing participant who must have convinced Pico to rescue her from an odious marriage like one of the chivalric heroes of medieval romances. Nonetheless, Pico was charged with abduction. Laws in that rather less feminist time usually made no distinction between a woman eloping or just running off with a man and her being kidnapped. Lorenzo de’ Medici stepped in, sending Margherita back to her husband and having Pico freed from imprisonment. To try to mitigate the embarrassment to his family and to Pico in addition to the strained relationships with the leaders of Arezzo, Lorenzo put the word out that the whole fiasco was somehow the fault of Pico’s secretary. Throwing an underling under a bus is a timeless tradition.

Now under Lorenzo’s protection, Pico stayed in Florence where he lived under Lorenzo’s patronage and enjoyed the company of Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo the Magnificent’s  other star academics. It was there that Pico got his audacious idea. He would not only be the one to accomplish the Renaissance intellectual project to establish a synthesis between the works of Aristotle, which had been the core of medieval western Christian and Islamic thought, and the newly rediscovered philosophy of Plato; he would reconcile all schools of philosophy, religious divisions, and the occult. That was what he would accomplish with his scholarly masterpiece, the 900 Theses.

For a book destined to bring down the wrath of the papacy and create a controversy that Paul Stethern argues would alter the course of the Renaissance, the 900 Theses isn’t exactly a thrilling page-turner, unless maybe your idea of entertainment is sitting down with some medieval logic exercises. To give a tantalizing taste:

Thesis 7.39: The essence of each intelligence exists substantially in a state of relation.

Even books that were notorious and controversial in their own time aren’t always enticing reads. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way when I was nineteen and read the novel The Satanic Verses. I just naively and stupidly assumed a book with a title like that and that got the author threatened by the Ayatollah would be more riveting.

Anyway, regardless of The 900 Theses’ entertainment value, if you knew to look there was dynamite in those pages. Pico agreed with the kabbalists that Moses bestowed a secret knowledge upon humanity, passed down only by an elite and applied that and other kabbalah concepts to Christianity. Just the suggestion that a Jewish occult tradition could apply to Christianity would raise eyebrows. Likewise it was one thing for scholars to study and admire and debate over the writings of pagan, Jewish, and Islamic philosophers; it was quite another thing to suggest their ideas could be incorporated with those of superstar Christian theologians like John Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, which was what the 900 Theses did. And while Pico was careful to distinguish between the holy magic within the secret truths passed down from Moses and the evil arts of witchcraft and demon summoning, a thesis like “There is no science that assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and Cabala” was enough to make many orthodox Christians choke on their drink.

I can’t help but wonder if Pico were alive today he would be considered what we call neuroatypical. There’s just something about the way Pico thought all he had to do was gather together the best and brightest and after some weeks or months of debate they could just come up with proposals that the world would just calmly accept. It makes me think of the neuroatypical person who thinks they can just calmly explain to his aunt why the email she forwarded him about vaccines being laced with DNA-altering chemicals is wrong.  

To be fair, Pico did anticipate a little pushback, so he wrote down a speech he would give at the commencement of the grand debate he planned, remembered by historians as the Oration on the Dignity of Man. In one portion, he admits the massive ambition of his project and the fact that he is only 24 years old.

Others do not disapprove this type of exercise, but resent the fact that at my age, a mere twenty-four years, I have dared to propose a disputation concerning the most subtle mysteries of Christian theology, the most debated points of philosophy and unfamiliar branches of learning; and that I have done so here, in this most renowned of cities, before a large assembly of very learned men, in the presence of the Apostolic Senate. Still others have ceded my right so to dispute, but have not conceded that I might dispute nine hundred theses, asserting that such a project is superfluous, over-ambitious and beyond my powers. I should have acceded to these objections willingly and immediately, if the philosophy which I profess had so counseled me.

 The Oration also expressed bold ideas of its own. Pico imagines God telling Adam:

We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature.

This is a bolder statement than it might seem at a glance. According to Pico, God created humans not for a designated role, but to become something of their own making. To quote the Romanian historian Costica Bradaton’s interpretation of Pico’s Oration, “The self is not something one is entrusted with at birth and then has to carry around as long as one lives, but an ongoing process.” Such an understanding of humanity had few precedents. The ancient Romans thought every person’s character and fate was fixed at birth, the mainstream medieval Christian view had more or less been that humanity was created in the image of God and each person was obliged to discover God’s predetermined purpose for them. The idea that humanity, even each individual, is free to fashion themselves however they choose would become a rallying call of Renaissance humanism and later Enlightenment thought, even modernity itself.   

It was in that spirit of inquiry and self-discovery that Pico tried to start his debate. However, from the moment he sent out copies of his magnum opus, the Church had been keeping tabs on Pico’s every move. The reigning pope, Giovanni Battista Cybo, Pope Innocent VIII, already had a particular concern over a supposed epidemic of witchcraft in Germany and over the spread of the Waldensian heresy in southern France and northwestern Italy, so he was hardly sympathetic to Pico’s intellectual ambitions. Innocent denied permission for the debate to be held in Rome and had a committee evaluate Pico’s 900 Theses. At first, Pope Innocent denounced only thirteen of the 900 Theses, but later he denounced the whole lot as heretical and as, in the words of the papal bull condemning Pico’s work, “scandalous and offensive to pious ears.” Pico fired back with a book titled the Apologia defending his work from allegations of heresy. He had it published in the Kingdom of Naples, which was just far enough from the Pope’s reach, and dedicated it to Lorenzo “the Magnificent.” Finally realizing the danger he was in, though, Pico then tried fleeing to France, only to be arrested at the urging of the Church. Loyal as always to the scholars and artists under his patronage, Lorenzo intervened and convinced the then regent of France, Anne de Bourbon, to order Pico’s release, but Pico, the man who thought he could live up to his family’s title of Count of Concordia by bridging all divisions, was still branded a heretic. Worse, the Pope had ordered copies of the 900 Theses to be confiscated and burned, giving it the dubious distinction of being the first printed book banned by the Church. The order was successful; most copies of the 900 Theses were, in fact, destroyed.

The entire experience had to have been traumatic for Pico. After he was freed and returned to Florence, he turned to a man he had befriended during his university days, a devout friar named Savonarola. Pico convinced Lorenzo the Magnificent to invite Savonarola to Florence, a fateful decision for Florence whose consequences Lorenzo could not have even guessed at. At Savonarola’s urging, Pico recanted his interest in the occult, burned the secular poems he had written in the past, gave most of his inheritance to charity, and considered becoming a monk, although one report claims that at this time he was also living with a mistress. Pico did continue writing, although only topics Savonarola would approve of, like a book denouncing astrology. Even so, while such a book easily fit with Savonarola’s puritanical views, an anti-astrology stance also happened to validate Pico’s own radical concept of free will and self-determination.

In 1492, Lorenzo the Magnificent died, leaving the reins over the Republic of Florence to his inept and dumb jock-esque son Piero. Savonarola became a thorn in the side of the regime and was destined to play a massive role in Florence’s politics after Piero and the entire Medici family were driven out of Florence. Pico did not live to see that day, however. He died after a sudden and brief illness on November 17, 1494. He was only 31 years old. Savonarola delivered his funeral oration and would admit that he feared for Pico’s salvation, but he also claimed he had a vision where the spirit of Pico assured him that his soul resided in purgatory. And despite Pico’s status as a heretic, his death was mourned across Italy and lamented even in far-away England by fellow intellectual Thomas More.

Pico’s dear friend, possible ex-lover, and another supporter of Savonarola, Poliziano, died at around the same time and suffered similar symptoms. In 2007, their remains  were exhumed and examined by scientists, who found traces of arsenic in both of their remains. It is possible that Pico had died from accidental exposure, especially because arsenic was an ingredient in medicines taken to treat syphilis. Given Pico’s love life, it was not outside the realm of possibility that he suffered from the disease. Or quite possibly the arsenic levels were just because of contaminated samples from the remains. Still, there is a distinct possibility that Pico was murdered. The most likely suspect in that case would be Piero de’ Medici, who (rightfully, it turned out) considered Savonarola a threat and would want to take out two of his most trusted advisors. Barring some miraculous discovery in the archives, we’ll never know for sure.  

Some historians today downplay Pico’s significance. Despite his radical efforts, they see him as less in line with modern notions of the individual and more in tune with the old tradition of medieval mysticism. I have to disagree. In his view of mankind as being defined by the need to fashion the self and in his attempt to find a single unifying theory that would unite different fields of knowledge, Pico refined the humanist impulse toward self-reflection and was even a harbinger of the Enlightenment belief in a universal order that can be glimpsed through reason. Perhaps the Pope too glimpsed something of the future in Pico’s writings, and that’s why his book had to burn.