Peering into the 15th century, era of princes and Fortune

THE contemporary reader of history uses convenient dates to mark the great shift in the European world from what we call the late medieval period to the beginning of the Renaissance.

Columbus reached America in 1492, the year in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella conquered Grenada and ended Moorish -- Islamic -- power in Spain and expelled the Jews. In 1485, Henry Tudor defeated England’s King Richard III at Bosworth Field and founded the Tudor dynasty as Henry VII.

But those dates, and others from half a millennium ago, do not begin to convey the remoteness of that world from the one in which we live. Medieval Christianity still dominated Western Europe. Superstition -- call it folk wisdom, if you like -- governed daily life. Marvels appeared in the skies; miracles, on Earth. Rumor abounded.

It is a time more usefully conveyed to us in the form of novels, perhaps, than in straight history. Mexican novelist Homero Aridjis tried his skillful hand in the novel “1492,” about the Iberian peninsula.

Now, Ann Wroe, a senior editor at the Economist and author of “Pontius Pilate,” has attempted in fiction to bring to contemporary eyes a coherent and believable picture of life in England and northern Europe in the same period. In “The Perfect Prince: The Mystery of Perkin Warbeck and His Quest for the Throne of England,” she has been, on the whole, quite successful.

Young Warbeck claimed he was really Richard Plantagenet, the younger of the “Princes of the Tower,” sons of King Edward IV who are believed to have been strangled on the order of their uncle, Richard III, although it was never proved. Three times, Warbeck -- with the backing of King James IV of Scotland and other European rulers -- tried to invade England and overthrow Henry VII; three times he failed and was captured, and eventually hanged.

This perfect prince, dressed in princely clothes and with a sweet, reserved air thought to be appropriate to princes, is a historical figure. It was generally agreed at the time that he was not who he claimed to be, but rather the son of a Flemish boatman, as he apparently confessed. Wroe concludes that one can never know Warbeck’s true identity, but she uses his story to peer with precise and elegant prose into the atmosphere and customs of the time. We can scarcely recognize either.

Time of day did not much matter; time was counted by the canonical hour -- none, terce and so forth. It was not the day of the week that counted; it was which saint’s day.

Order was all: “Everything in nature was laid out,” Wroe writes. “The concentric circles of the universe moved as God had planned them. In the beautiful machine of the world all things were arranged in threes, the perfect number. North Pole, Centre, South Pole; Europe, Asia, Africa; past, present, future; line, surface, body; beginning, middle, end. Inside the three lay the power of four, as in air, water, earth and fire; the humors phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric and melancholic; childhood, green youth, maturity, crabbed age; spring, summer, autumn, winter. There also was the mystical seven: planets, sciences, sacraments, deadly sins, stairs in Purgatory by which the penitent stumbled to heaven.

“The pattern did not vary. None of the tricks and devices of Fortune affected in the least the movement of God’s grand design. Within that design, all things had their fixed limit and their natural course.”

Men nonetheless tried to win Fortune’s favor: in love, in war. Such were the exertions of Warbeck as he sought without success to claim the throne that was -- or wasn’t -- his.

Reading “The Perfect Prince” is like studying an illustration from a Book of Hours or another bit of medieval, miniature art. It is beautifully strange, like the picture of a lady in careful medieval dress riding a pure white horse before a meticulous castle set in the bend of a blue flowing river, all so distant -- and to our modern eyes, mysterious.

Wroe attempts, persuasively, if not to dispel the mystery, then at least to bring its distant charms closer and more sharply within our gaze.