Map Project

5

Discovery of the world

Since our ancestors first trod the earth or from the time a baby is born, we humans hunger for knowledge of the world. As one evolutionary geneticist put it, “No other mammal moves around like we do. . . . There’s a kind of madness to it.”1 Mere survival or a desire for better living conditions has driven most of our seeking, but pure curiosity is never absent. Among the first to marvel at the lands beyond their borders were the ancient Greeks. Herodotus (fifth- century B.C.) was the first person to write systematically about the known world of his day, often from first-hand experience.2 His voyages took him to Egypt, Libya, the Middle East, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Black Sea region, the Caucasus, the Balkans, throughout Greece, and perhaps to India (see Map 5.1). His Histories (inquiries) comment on peoples in all these regions and their history, customs, achievements, ways of life, beliefs, and political and social arrangements; on geographical features; on local flora and fauna; and on natural phenomena. Many travelers followed in his footsteps over the centuries. Few could fill his shoes. Among the modern peoples who rose to the challenge of knowing their world, none could compare with the Europeans. Their drive to survey, examine, comprehend, encompass, fathom, and ultimately dominate every corner of the globe was unparalleled in human history and constituted a transformation of man’s relationship to geographic space.

Migrations

Like all of the earth’s continents, Europe was peopled by wanderers who originally came from Africa. At the end of the last Ice Age, around 10000 B.C., Europe’s population probably did not exceed 100,000. The Neolithic Revolution (stone tools, pottery, weaving, metal-working, and agriculture) of the 5th millennium B.C., combined with immigration from the Middle East, caused the population to surge to 2 million by 3000 B.C.3 In this period, early Europeans erected thousands of huge stone monuments in Iberia, France, the British Isles, and Scandinavia. Some rose before the pyramids of Egypt. Many of the stones weighed several tons and were transported from great distances, testifying to highly efficient social organization. The builders left no written records, however, so it is impossible to know for

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certain the purpose of the monuments. Migrants from the east, as well as from Iberia, continued to settle in Europe, albeit slowly.4

Since all the “indigenous” agriculturalists of Europe had to move every few years in search of fertile soil, it would have been difficult for any one group to distinguish in-migration from simple migration within the continent. Not all Europeans at this stage worked the land; many were still hunters and gatherers. Most of the newcomers, who wandered into Europe between 3000 and 1000 B.C., spoke Indo-European languages.

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MAP 5.1 The world according to Herodotus: Representing his travels throughout North Africa and Eurasia.

Among the most important early immigrants were the Celts. Spread across the continent, from the British Isles to Anatolia (today’s Turkey) and from the Carpathian Mountains to Portugal, they were technologically sophisticated, employing wheels, plows, and battle-axes.5 Slavs settled in the east, and Germanic peoples in the north. Others were drawn into the fertile and geographically diverse southeast edge of the continent, today’s Greece and vicinity. There the Minoan civilization, centered on Crete, flourished for over a thousand years after 2700 B.C.6 Probably around the start of the second millennium, the earliest Greeks adopted their future homeland, establishing the warlike Mycenaean civilization by the 1600s B.C.7 Even earlier, the pugnacious Hittites diffused through Thessaly and then crossed into Anatolia.8 A former Hittite dependency may have been the Greeks’ foe in the semilegendary siege of Troy.

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Smaller migrations of mostly Indo-European peoples continued for centuries. Pivotal was the fifth-century A.D. “Barbarian Invasion,” when waves of raiders pressed

against the frontiers of the Roman Empire and helped precipitate its collapse.9 Aside from the most famous tribes—the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410 and the Huns, whose chieftain Attila (406–53) forged an empire stretching from Central Asia to Europe—the intruders included Ostrogoths, Vandals, Lombards, Alemanni, Burgundians, Bulgars, Alans, Frisians, Saxons, and Franks. Most were Germanic, but some were of Iranian, Turkic, and Slavic origin, and all had mingled with various linguistic and ethnic groups. The fall of Rome enabled hundreds of thousands to flood into Europe, contributing to its peculiar cultural dynamism.10

Internal colonization

The Germanic leaven may also account for the internal colonization of Europe after the fall of the Carolingian Empire in the 800s. The most significant colonizers were the Vikings, discussed in Chapter 4, who established colonies in many peripheral areas, and the Franks, who dominated Europe’s heartland. In fact, by the eleventh century the term “Franks” came to mean Latin Christians in general, particularly those engaged in colonizing and settling new lands.11

The Franks had originally settled in the region of modern-day Belgium in the 200s A.D. The most prominent early Frankish clan were the Salians. Allies of Rome, they helped throw back an assault by Attila’s Huns in 451. Some of them migrated into Gaul (today’s France). Of these, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, Clovis (r. 481–511), conquered or pushed back several neighboring tribes, including the Burgundians, Thuringians, Alemanni, and Visigoths. More warlord than king, he established his capital at Paris, converted to Catholicism (from Paganism), and forged an immense rulership stretching from southern Gaul to northern Germany.12 Upon his decease, the Merovingian lands dispersed among his successors and were re-gathered and re-dispersed several times before the rise of the Carolingians. Though Charlemagne’s empire soon collapsed, the Franks persisted in colonizing Europe.

In the vanguard rode aristocratic Frankish knights, seeking territory, fiefs, glory, retinues, titles, and crowns. They were by all accounts—those of their apologists and of their enemies— the fiercest, most bloodthirsty warriors yet witnessed within the Mediterranean or European region. Relentlessly savage, tireless in battle, brave in the face of hopeless odds, the grimmest of adversaries—such an image they propagated in chronicles, histories, stories, and song.13

The most successful warriors usually came of prolific families. They also drew sustaining wealth from Europe’s rich heartland. Yet boasting a successful and illustrious lineage was insufficient. Only by pledging one’s loyalty to a greater lord, in exchange for fiefs or a share in the spoils of conquest, and by gaining the fealty of lesser knights on similar but inverted terms, could any one lord hope to advance in the expansionist drama. Skill, craftiness, daring, and ruthlessness all played important roles, but so too did blind luck. Accidental death in battle, premature illness from contagion, missteps by one’s lord, or infertility in the bedchamber could

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easily dash the upward trajectory of an aristocratic house. Only success in battle and in marriage politics could ensure its continuation. No knight would for long follow his lord without a steady flow of land and loot.

Along with valor and fierceness, the Franks possessed a technological superiority in the face of nearly all their enemies. The crossbow, the heavy cavalry charge, and sophisticated siegecraft were especially formidable against the relatively backward Baltic peoples, though even their Muslim foes could marvel at several dozen heavily armored mounted knights racing with lances extended against a defensive line. And wherever the Franks pushed their frontiers outward, they systematically built castles as both defensive and offensive bases.14

The most successful Frankish houses crowned their expansionist endeavors quite literally with crowns. If the expected prize of conquest was fiefs, the one most hoped for was a royal domain. Among the thrones in dispute were the many new kingdoms that emerged after the millennium in Castile, Portugal, Bohemia, and Sicily. No warrior elites could best the Franks. In 1350, Latin Christendom boasted 15 royal titles borne by 10 ancestral families. Only three —those of Sweden, Denmark, and Poland—did not descend from the Franks.15

All the ventures of the Frankish raiders exhibited both predatory and constructive elements. Though many were invited as fighters, military experts, and lords of unsettled lands—for example, to Scotland, Pomerania, and Denmark—most seized new territory by force of arms. Yet as they sallied forth on quests of valor, both pious and purely secular, they endowed religious houses and founded towns, both back home and in new lands. They imposed the ways and means of feudal society, including the fief as a reward for military service and homage as a sign of fealty to a lord.16 They dotted the landscape with networks of estates, constructed mills, built castles, produced documentary records, expanded commercial relations and coinage, spread Latin Christianity with its distinctive liturgy and rites, and facilitated the establishment of ecclesiastical institutions.

As the Franks extended their territory, bishoprics followed. Starting in 948, for example, Otto I encouraged the establishment of several along the northern and eastern frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire in newly conquered Slav lands. By the turn of the millennium, a Polish church with its own archbishopric, as well as several Hungarian and Bohemian bishoprics, ensured that all three peoples would look west to Rome for spiritual and cultural leadership. Similar scenarios unfolded in the Scandinavian lands, the Baltic region, the British Isles, Spain, Sicily, southern Italy, the Balkans, the Crimea, and even parts of the Near East. By the year 1200, Latin Christendom boasted some 800 bishoprics, the largest concentration in Italy and southern France—some dating to Roman times, but many recently founded all along the borderlands of the Carolingian core.17

The expansion of the Latin Church throughout Europe was sometimes imposed through force of arms, especially in the face of militant resistance by pagan Slavs or Muslims. Yet the millennium, as discussed in Chapter 3, was a time of fervent lay devotion, enthusiastic ecclesiastical renewal, the proliferation of new churches and monasteries, the rebuilding and renovation of existing ones, undulating movements of popular and elite piety, and apocalyptic episodes of mystical awakening.18 Religious ardor of immigrants and colonizers surely stirred

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the hearts of natives in all the border regions of Europe and stimulated spiritual growth and conversion.

Lordly colonizers encouraged peasants, artisans, traders, and clergy to follow them and put down roots. Most were agricultural workers drawn to wild regions by promises of land grants and favorable economic and legal conditions.19 In exchange for a commitment to settle relatively permanently and to clear and improve the land, most migrants received freedom from servile labor obligations, status as hereditary leaseholders, and a reduction or even a temporary waiver of normally required rent payments and tithes during the first years of relocation. Lords of every stature, including kings, granted such concessions to attract settlers to newly conquered lands. Entire rural settlements received charters endowing them with the status of “free villages,” a status similar to that of towns receiving charters of liberty (see Chapter 2). This was a great boon to the migrants, because lords in Europe and elsewhere typically insisted on their supremacy and their subjects’ complete inferiority. Devolving even relatively modest power to migrating peasants proved a wise policy from the perspective of European development. The immigrant agricultural workers, aggressive and resourceful, spread the use of efficient agricultural and industrial methods, including the heavy plow, the three-field crop rotation, water and windmills, and the cultivation of cash crops.20

The lords gained enormously from the peasants’ transformation of forests, prairies, and even swamps into valuable agricultural land. The Frankish aristocrats themselves focused more and more on the profitability of all their ventures. They began keeping financial records, commissioning surveys of their estates, and reading technical manuals on estate management.21 The seeds or even the foundations of a commercialized agricultural economy were steadily being laid.

It is impossible to know with any accuracy the number of settlers who migrated from Latin Christendom’s heartland to unsettled core areas and its periphery, though one scholar estimates that the number of German settlers alone who crossed the Elbe-Saale line in the twelfth century was around 200,000.22 If so, then probably several million established new lives in outlying regions.

The colonists and settlers imagined and represented themselves as bringing culture and civilization to barbarous hinterlands even though most people in these places had lived for centuries according to established customs. The same discrepancy existed at the level of larger settlements, many of which long predated the Western incursions into Europe’s frontier areas. Danzig (Gdansk), for example, had thrived for centuries as an economic center before its official founding in 997.23 By this point, dense trade routes and flourishing commercial relations characterized the southern Baltic shoreline.

When Frankish and other princes conferred charters of liberty on the larger towns (or even rural settlements) and implanted legal systems in them, they increased their prestige, raised the status of all the inhabitants, and created a magnet for further migration. As Lord of Ireland, installed by his father King Henry II of England, Prince John granted a charter to Dublin in 1192 conferring on its citizens impressive privileges. These included immunity from certain lawsuits, exemption from various fines and road tolls, the right to form guilds and to institute

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commercial monopolies, and the right freely to dispose of all the space within the city limits.24 In a word, Prince John, like dozens of other lords throughout Europe, voluntarily limited his own power to interfere in the lives and activities of his subjects. A constitutional transformation was clearly underway.

Many rural settlements in Europe’s peripheral zones also received urban charters, and thereby privileges and immunities, in the first centuries after the millennium. Such charters were often intended to attract settlers to frontier areas and to build up bulwarks against reconquest by those peoples recently expelled or defeated, for example, Muslims in Spain or Baltic pagans in Eastern Europe.

Charters of liberties and legal systems tended to follow established patterns and to mirror existing norms of various “mother cities.” Thus, the legal traditions of Magdeburg and Lübeck, which derived ultimately from original mother cities further west, served as the model for hundreds of chartered settlements throughout Eastern Europe.25 These towns then sometimes reproduced their own “daughter cities” further still. Thus, for example, Halle, a dependency of Magdeburg in Saxony, became the model for numerous towns in Silesia to the east. Some mother cities kept up a legal superintendence over their widely dispersed daughter cities. In nearly every case, there began to emerge a commercial mentality that prized explicit rules, contractual relations, financial incentives, rights, exchange, and mutual profit. Peasants as well as lords shared in this new worldview and way of life.

Theirs was not, however, a purely rationalistic, practical, lucre-oriented mindset. As discussed above, these centuries also witnessed intensified religious fervor and spiritual renewal. Millions of ordinary people went on pilgrimages, took part in mass penitential movements, fell into a wide variety of “heresies,” and swelled the ranks of monastic orders, the Cistercians and the mendicants especially.

The new religious orders spread widely across Europe and deeply into its periphery, aiding to spread Western customs, values, institutions, rites, and technology. Chains of Cistercian monasteries stretched from France in nearly every direction—“from Portugal to Sweden, from Ireland to Estonia, and from Scotland to Sicily,” in the words of one scholar.26 Technological masters in the fields of agriculture, mechanics, and metallurgy, the Cistercians diffused their expertise across the continent.27 The mendicant orders also played a key role in internal colonization. Their administrative sophistication, absolute mobility, high education level, and ability to function in any context made them nimble culture-bearers. Within a century of their founding in the early 1200s, the Franciscans alone had set up over 1,400 chapters.28

Europeans across the continent were on the move, founding urban centers and increasing population density decade by decade. It can be said that the geographical area covered by Latin Christendom doubled between 950 and 1350.29 The Norman French colonized Ireland and other Celtic regions. Frenchmen wandered across the Pyrenees. Spaniards settled or resettled lands seized from the Muslims in southern Iberia. Germans spread throughout Eastern Europe and the Baltic region. Everywhere ethnic and linguistic clashes occurred. In most places the colonizers had their way, imposing their language and customs, establishing their dominance. Hostility and even disgust smoldered and flared up on both sides. Grudges set in.

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Just as often, colonizers and natives learned and borrowed from each other, resented but also admired each other.

Increasingly, administrative and ecclesiastical advancement in the literate, rationalistic, and knowledge-oriented European world required higher education. Thus, more and more scions of aristocratic families in Europe’s periphery joined in the “academic pilgrimage,” attending the few existing universities in the heartland, such as those in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford.30 There they acquired similar habits of mind, linguistic expertise, legal training, philosophical approaches, and experiences. Returning home, they helped Westernize and colonize their native lands.

In all such colonization of peripheral and backwater regions of Europe, public and private interests and actors consistently took part. This movement was propelled as much from the grass roots as from the halls of power, both secular and ecclesiastical. Influence and authority were articulated through hundreds of offices, institutions, confraternities, and associations at every level of society. Europe was beginning to prove itself more capable of coordinating extensive and intensive activity within a politically and religiously fragmented context than was any other civilization. No endeavor demonstrated this trend better than the military campaigns by which Western Christians hoped to defend the things most precious to them— church and faith.

The Crusades

Compared with the greatest geopolitical and economic powers at the millennium, especially China and the Islamic world, Europe was an almost insignificant developing region. Yet it was impressively dynamic, gradually more outward looking, and eager to explore and assimilate foreign customs, ideas, technologies, and even values.31 The Crusades marked a turning point in Europe’s relationship with the wider world (see Map 5.2).32 Aside from territory gained (at least temporarily) and trade routes opened in the Middle East, Iberia, and the Baltic region, Europe benefited from the capture of precious cultural treasures, for example, in the looting of Constantinople in 1204.33 The crusaders learned to organize giant logistical undertakings involving thousands of men and animals transported thousands of miles over land and water and to coordinate these activities among men of diverse mother tongues and native cultures.34 Even so, the greatest legacies of the Crusades were probably cultural and psychological. Encountering the brilliant urban civilizations of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds stimulated the Occidentals’ desires for exotic wares and commodities, challenged their self-perceptions, stretched their imaginations, and spurred their interest in other cultures.

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MAP 5.2 Though they ultimately ended in failure, the Crusades marked a turning point in Europe’s relationship with the wider world.

Pope Urban II preached crusade throughout 1095, most forcefully in November at Clermont in France. He had in mind a just cause: the defense of the Eastern Church, which had been withstanding withering assaults by Islamic fighters, and the recovery of Christianity’s most holy places, especially Jerusalem, from Muslim captivity. For centuries, pilgrims had sojourned to the city of Christ’s Passion.35 Reports of their mistreatment by the conquering Muslims strengthened the pope’s resolve. He promised remission of sins to every person who “took up the cross” but only “out of pure devotion and not for the purpose of gaining honor or money.”36 The response to this and other summons was great. As many as 100,000 marched toward Jerusalem. While many sought adventure or glory, the overtly confessed aim of all was the “business of Jesus Christ.”37 The decision could not have been taken lightly, since those

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departing expected to be gone for at least a year. They generally sold all they had, gathered up as much money as possible, and bid farewell to everyone back home.

A prelude to the First Crusade began in early 1096 when thousands of poor men, women, and children marched eastward without awaiting the main crusader army. Led by a charismatic preacher, Peter the Hermit, and some knights without renown, they divided into three or four principal hosts and made their way to Constantinople—massacring Jews along the way.38 Against the advice of Emperor Alexius, they ventured onward. Most died at the hands of superior Turkish forces. One is surprised not at their fate but that they should have marched idealistically across nearly 2,000 miles of unknown and often hostile territory. In a world dominated by political hierarchy, warlords, clear lines of authority, and in a few places centralized government, masses of ordinary people simply never coalesced into relatively orderly legions with clear purposes and relatively strong cohesiveness. Here is proof of the Europeans’ unusual independence of mind, capacity for corporate action, and lust to experience the new.

The real First Crusade began in early 1097, when a proper army of over 60,000 men, including at least 6,000 knights, departed in three main groups from the mostly Frankish parts of Europe. Each group also comprised many poor, sick, and infirm. No king joined the enterprise. With logistical support and supplies from Emperor Alexius in exchange for pledges to return to him recovered Byzantine lands, the crusaders set off from Constantinople in spring 1097. Luckily for them, the Muslim rulers of the Middle East were weakened by power struggles. Even so, it took all their strength, discipline, and cooperation to fight for more than 2 years along the southern coast of Turkey and down the eastern Mediterranean shore. They captured Antioch (June 1098) and Jerusalem (July 1099), along with many other towns and fortresses in between. The crusaders established four “states” in the region, including the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was a stunning success. Many crusaders now returned home; others remained to settle. Still more citadels fell to them, including Acre (1104), Beirut (1110), and Tyre (1124).39

Europeans exulted. God, they were sure, had blessed their endeavors. When Jerusalem was returned to Christian control, Western Europe experienced such a powerful wave of piety that conflicts and wars ceased for a time and yet more people took vows to lead a godly life.40 Religious and secular writers in Europe blamed the Muslims’ military defeats on alleged religious infidelity and atrocities against Christians (conveniently forgetting all the atrocities by Christians against Muslims).41

The papacy authorized the creation of several military religious orders (the Templars, the Hospitallers, and others) to assist with the crusading effort. Some grew rich and powerful.42 Popes promised remission of sins to fighters for Christ in Spain, Germany, the Baltic region, and against Albigensian heretics in southern France.43 Numerous European kings, beginning with King Sigurd of Norway in 1110, led crusades to the eastern Mediterranean, to Egypt, and to North Africa. A few crusades involved unexpected conquests, including the Second (Lisbon in 1147) and the Fourth (Constantinople, in 1204). One saint, Francis of Assisi, even ventured unarmed into the court of the Egyptian Sultan Malik al-Kamil in 1219, at the height of the Fifth

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Crusade, hoping to convert him to Christianity. He failed, but so did the crusade.44 Indeed, after the First Crusade, success in the Middle East eluded the Europeans and their

enthusiasm waned. Ultimately, the only crusades crowned with success were the reconquest in Spain45 and—not technically a crusade—the colonization of northeastern Europe by Germans.46 In the Middle East, Islamic forces gradually swept away the crusaders and their states, recapturing Jerusalem temporarily and then definitively in 1244. The fall of Acre in 1291 spelled the end of the Latin territories.47 The bright papal vision of establishing Jerusalem as the holy capital of a theocracy never materialized, and indeed the papacy’s prestige gradually fell, as the Crusades failed or were patently exploited for political or even economic ends.

Yet contact with Islamic civilization, whose accomplishments far exceeded those of Latin Christendom, was powerful and lasting. In all, millions of people expanded their mental horizons, explored new lands, discovered for themselves the falsity of anti-Muslim prejudices,48 savored novel cultural offerings, discovered exotic social and economic patterns, and befriended or even married very alien individuals indeed.49

World travelers

For centuries, Europeans had ventured beyond the bounds of their heartland, most eagerly to visit the Christian sacred places. Around 400 A.D., for example, the Frankish nun Egeria traveled to the Holy Land and left a lengthy account of her journey.50 Some traveled seeking adventure, for example, the Anglo-Saxon monk St Willibald (700?–787?) who spent 7 years traveling to all the major holy places in the Near East.51 Dozens more narratives were set down in subsequent centuries, in an uninterrupted line of pilgrimage.52 From around 1350, these accounts grew more secular, more focused on the customs of the inhabitants of the Holy Land and the observations of the pilgrims. Presumably many Europeans were gaining a more humanistic disposition.

Some European travelers sought learned texts and scholars. Gerbert of Aurillac (ca. 945– 1003), a mathematician, inventor, scholar, teacher, and later pope (Sylvester II), spent several years in Spain studying Arabic works of mathematics and science translated into Latin.53 He was probably the first scholar to introduce Hindu-Arabic numbers, the astrolabe, and the abacus to Europe. Constantine the African (ca. 1020–85), who was born in Carthage, traveled throughout the Middle East and even India. He converted to Christianity, became a Benedictine monk, and settled in Italy where he prolifically translated scientific, especially medical, works. A half-century later, Adelard of Bath lived among Muslims in Sicily, the Near East, and Andalusia, apparently even pretending to be Muslim in order to gain access to texts and scholars.54 By 1122, he returned to England and translated philosophical, mathematical, and scientific works from Arabic, including Euclid’s Elements, and published his own philosophical writings.55 The rest of the century witnessed dozens of Europeans making

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secular pilgrimages to the Muslim world, learning Arabic, and translating hundreds of scholarly and scientific works.

Islamic scholars had avidly translated and studied the scholarly works of Greeks, Persians, and Indians. Yet few visited Europe or carefully studied the growing output of scholarship in Latin.56 At the millennium, the Europeans may well have had precious few treasures of culture or learning to offer.57 Century by century, however, they acquired and produced a vast fund of them; still non-Christians did not come.58

Muslims sojourned extensively, usually on Hajj, and wrote many travel narratives.59 Abu Said, who hailed from Siraf on the Persian Gulf, penned one in 915 A.D.60 Ibn Jubayr, a native of Valencia, traveled three times to the eastern Mediterranean region, including to lands seized by the crusaders, and left a narrative of his first journey (1182–85).61 Probably the most well- traveled man before the modern age was Ibn Battuta, a Berber from Tangier.62 Between 1325 and 1345, he wandered throughout the Muslim world in Africa and Asia and wrote a lengthy account of his voyages. Of Christian countries, he visited only Bulgaria, which was soon to be conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Surprising is the relative lack of interest in travel narratives among Muslim readers, at least compared to the thirst for the genre in Europe. It seems strange, too, that Islamic voyagers steered clear of Christian, especially Latin Europe.

The Islamist Bernard Lewis points out that Muslims would have faced persecution in medieval Europe, as did Jews, and that the absence of mosques, bathhouses, and established Muslim communities would have impeded free travel within Christendom.63 Yet one assumes that people intent on exploring exotic and innovative societies could have overcome these obstacles. Another scholar points out that Muslims played a key commercial role throughout the eastern two-thirds of Eurasia, with large numbers of expatriates in the major Chinese cities.64 Even so, it seems that passionate curiosity about the wider world gradually became a peculiarly European phenomenon.

A great number of Europeans traveled to the east, and the accounts they penned enjoyed great popularity back home. From 1247 to 1253 alone, four Europeans journeyed to the court of the Great Khan in Mongolia, and two, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (ca. 1180–1252) and Willem van Rubroeck (ca. 1220–93), left detailed travel accounts without overly fanciful embellishment.65 Most famously, in 1271 Marco Polo journeyed with his father and brother to the court of Kublai Khan in present-day Beijing with a papal mission to report in particular on the state of Christianity in East Asia. They remained for two decades, engaging in commerce and fulfilling official duties for the Khan. In his book later dictated in prison, Polo accurately reported on people, places, flora, and fauna.66 It enjoyed great popular success and survives in some 150 different manuscripts.67 This and other such travel accounts helped Italians and other Europeans in the thirteenth century to gain a broadly cosmopolitan understanding of the known world.68 Educated men and women were henceforth at least dimly aware of all the great civilizations, both contemporary and historical.

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Global traders

International trade had flourished since ancient times across Eurasia.69 India and China had traded relatively intensively with the Roman Empire, but cycles of trade can be traced back even further in time.70 Commerce along the famed Silk Road linking China and western Eurasia flowed more or less continuously.71 From a thousand years ago, Chinese traders settled profitably throughout Southeast Asia, while Muslims exercised a hegemonic commercial role from East Africa to China.72 In other words, when the Europeans began to enter the Eurasian universe of trade, it had been thriving for many centuries.

The Italians, in particular, were drawn to explore the world in the interest of commerce. Venetian merchants had served as intermediaries between the Muslim and Byzantine East and the Latin West beginning at the latest in the 700s. By the ninth century, their main items of commerce were fish, salt, and slaves mostly transported to the Muslim world. The sale of slaves was condemned by emperor and pope, as was the sale of wood, given its strategic importance. The Venetian merchants ignored such prohibitions: they were traders first and foremost. Slaves and wood were sold to Muslims for gold and silver with which to buy luxury goods from Constantinople.73

By the second half of the eleventh century, sea-borne merchants from Venice, Pisa, and Genoa were landing all along the eastern and southern Mediterranean coast, buying and selling goods, establishing trading colonies, and plundering vulnerable settlements.74 They played decisive roles in the Crusades, supplying maritime transport, logistical assistance, and commercial expertise in exchange for trading concessions in the crusader states.75 All three Italian merchant powers negotiated commercial access throughout the Mediterranean, irrespective of the religious faith of established powers, Latin, Greek, or Muslim. They competed fiercely among themselves, Venice gaining from the sack and conquest of Constantinople in 1204,76 Genoa from Byzantium’s reconquest of Constantinople in 1261. The Genoese went on to set up trading posts and colonies on the southern and eastern Black Sea coast.77

The Italians built and sailed the biggest and best ships in the Mediterranean. In the twelfth and thirteen centuries, their “round ships” usually bore two (sometimes three) lateen (triangular) sails, sported two decks, and displaced around 200 tons fully loaded.78 By the mid-thirteenth century, the Venetians and Genoans each possessed a couple of ships rated at 500 deadweight tons. These were huge ships for Europe, given that the Santa Maria was rated at 100 and the Mayflower at 180 tons. The typical warships of the time were bireme galleys. Very long but narrow, they were powered by 12 to 18 sets of oars on each side of the ship.79

A “nautical revolution” of the late 1200s transformed shipping and maritime commerce in the Mediterranean.80 For centuries, mariners determined position by reference to the stars. Because of unpredictable weather, including frequent winter winds, fog, clouds, and rain, most ships remained docked for half the year, from October to April. Gradually seafarers devised more reliable navigational methods. First, they plotted distances and directions between all the

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ports of the Mediterranean into “port books.” By 1250, the data were integrated into a single book for the entire sea. Drawing on all this information, in 1270 someone in Pisa drafted a marine chart with grid lines measuring about three feet across. Called a “portolan chart,” it depicted all the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean Sea accurately and to scale.81

Around the same time, mariners figured out how to fix a magnetized needle so it could pivot freely as dictated by the Earth’s magnetic field. Chinese inventors had devised the first compass over two centuries before and had used the device to aid in navigation from the early 1100s. Whether the Europeans made their discovery independently or by diffusion from China, the instrument was a key element in “dead reckoning” navigation (as opposed to “live reckoning” by the stars).82 Another important element was the traverse table, which permitted calculating change in longitude. When one tossed a log attached to a rope into the water to give an approximate sense of the ship’s speed, it became possible to determine roughly one’s position at any time of day or night and any season of the year.83 These breakthroughs enabled ships to double their effective utility and perhaps doubled their economic output.

Ship design and naval architecture also underwent major changes.84 In the decades around 1300, ships grew larger, stouter, and nimbler. Triremes (with three rowers on each side instead of two) began to replace biremes. By the 1350s, some galleys sported as many as 200 oars.85 Being wider, they could carry far more cargo, though still less than round ships. The bigger crew could also help fight off pirates, a perennial trouble. The trireme’s main advantage was keeping to a schedule, since it did not depend solely on wind power. Italian round ships from the early 1300s often added one or two square sails and an extra deck in imitation of northern European cogs. Taller construction created an advantage for archers who could dominate the enemy from above. Square sails required fewer men to adjust for shifts in the wind than did triangular sails. Saving labor meant saving money and increasing profit.

The governments of Venice and Genoa, being dominated by merchants, actively promoted commerce by founding state-sponsored shipyards (e.g. the Arsenal in Venice), organizing convoys, creating war fleets to open up trade in hostile waters, systematically selecting the best shipping routes, establishing shipping schedules, and encouraging the use of bigger, more efficient vessels.86

Genoese vessels sailed through the straits of Gibraltar, into the rough and dangerous waters of the Atlantic, and up to Iberian and northern European ports as early as 1277. In subsequent decades, they established regular trade routes. A few decades later, the Venetians followed suit.87 European shipping lanes stretched from the Sea of Azov, through the entire Mediterranean, along the North Atlantic coast, and the length of the Baltic Sea. They even bore the majority of Muslim pilgrims from Spain and northwest Africa to Egypt. Italian sailors dominated all these passages for several reasons. They were excellent businessmen with the best financial infrastructure, instruments, and methods. They deployed advanced European military technology. The northern coasts of the Mediterranean enjoyed more favorable currents and wind patterns than those on the southern littoral. Most of the Mediterranean islands, being closer to its northern coast, fell more readily to European, especially Italian, colonizers.88 The Genoese, in particular, were ruthless merchants. They were also daring mariners. In spring

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1291, the Genoans Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi sailed out into the Atlantic Ocean, apparently seeking a passage to India. They were never seen again.89

For a couple centuries prior, vibrant commercial networks had united China, the Indian Ocean, Persia, the Middle East, and North Africa into the first global trading system.90 Europe was now slowly connecting to this larger outside commercial world through Egypt and the Middle East. The prizes included spices—pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves— medicines, porcelain, sugar, and silks. Despite demographic catastrophe following the Mongol conquests of the 1200s (China’s population plunged from 115 million in 1200 to 85 million in 1300),91 the Pax Mongolica created favorable conditions for East–West trade.92

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MAP 5.3 In 1405–33, the Chinese-Muslim eunuch, Zheng He, sailed seven fleets of ships throughout Asian waters to display China’s grandeur.

The collapse of the Mongol Empire after the Black Death struck Eurasia (1340s) disrupted international trade and caused further demographic calamity. The population of Europe plummeted from 80 million in 1330 to 60 million in 1400, and demographic loss on the steppe must have been great, though even approximate figures are unavailable. The fall of the Mongols witnessed rebellions and possibly outbreaks of the plague, driving China’s population down from 85 to 75 million (1340–80).93 In the midst of these troubles, a Muslim carrying forward Genghis Khan’s legacy ripped through half of Asia, bringing destruction to India, the Middle East, and Persia. Tamerlane (1336–1405) forged an empire centered on Samarkand and stretching from northern India to the Black Sea.94 His empire did not outlast him, but the bitter memory of thousands slaughtered in its making surely did.

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A profound contraction in economic activity affected Eurasia. The trade routes of Central Asia, in particular, languished. New powers emerged from the wreckage. The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), seeking to return China to its ancient traditions, reestablished the civil service exam, set up military garrisons throughout the country to maintain political control, and weakened the social position of commercial elites. On land, the Chinese military attacked Burma and conquered Vietnam (1407).95 From 1405 to 1433, seven fleets of hundreds of enormous “treasure ships” sailed throughout the Indian Ocean under the command of the Muslim eunuch Zheng He, calling in all major ports along the African and Asian coasts (see Map 5.3).96 Their purpose was to prove the greatness and might of China, to establish diplomatic contacts, to take control of foreign commerce from private traders and pirates, and to extend the emperor’s tribute system. After Zheng’s death in 1433, the expeditions ended, the ships were destroyed, and decrees forbade sailing beyond China’s coastal waters.97 High politics and fear of Mongol incursions turned China’s rulers inward.

Two other significant powers emerged in this period. The Ottoman Empire, founded in 1299 by Osman I (1258–1326), expanded from a slender arc of lands verging the Sea of Marmara in the mid-1300s to engulf most of Anatolia and half the Balkans a century later (see Map 4.3 above).98 This dynamic state drew heavily on European military technology and threatened Europe on both land and sea for two more centuries, but concentrated on ruling a big empire and never displayed a profound curiosity about the wider world. To the south arose another warrior state, Mamluk Egypt.99 After the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, a succession of Mamluk warlords controlled most of the territory from Syria to Egypt and therefore most of the trade passing between Europe and Asia for more than two centuries.

Seafarers and explorers

In 1450, vast regions of the globe remained unexplored for inhabitants of the Old World, including three continents and two oceans. Three civilizations had the capacity to open up the oceanic frontiers. One seized the moment. For centuries, Islamic merchants had dominated the lucrative Indian Ocean trade. Minarets and prayers to Allah rose across North and East Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, much of South Asia, and parts of East Asia, right down into Indonesia. This was the most widely flung civilization the world had ever known. Yet the highly skillful Muslim mariners never ventured into the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. The most inventive people, until then, the Chinese, could obviously have sailed to every corner of the globe had they willed it. Still, the Chinese neither crossed nor explored the Pacific Ocean. It seems that the deeply rooted Confucian ethos stifled interest in fully applying inventions and hindered close associations between scholars and artisans.100

Europeans in the Age of Exploration were animated not only by a lust for the spices and treasures of the East but also by an abiding desire to know the world. This contrasted markedly with Chinese attitudes.101 Europeans had known of unusual animals since the Middle Ages,

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though they typically interpreted them in relation to beliefs about themselves or about fantastic legends and stories. And many scholars sought to avoid idle curiosity, following the teaching of St Augustine.102 By the Renaissance, however, Europeans had acquired an insatiable thirst for novelty. Strange fauna topped the list. Middle Eastern sultans kept vast zoological gardens and from time to time bestowed exotic specimens on European rulers. The collections in Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century were especially impressive. In 1486, the Mamluk sultan of Egypt presented to Lorenzo the Magnificent a giraffe as a goodwill offering. The beast wandered the streets freely to public delight and acclaim. Poets sang its praises; artists painted its portrait, one inserting its image in a depiction of the Magi.

The way a gift-giraffe was received in early Ming China could scarcely have been more different. In 1414, the king of Bengal sent one to the Chinese Emperor. Ordinary people exulted, but the Confucian elites expressed neither surprise nor curiosity. Having consulted learned scrolls, they identified the odd beast as a unicorn, “the foremost of the 360 creatures living on land.”103 Its appearance was interpreted, in conjunction with other favorable signs, as an especially good omen attesting to the benevolence of the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–24). The giraffe, situated within a known semiotic matrix, pointed to the central symbol of Chinese self- identification. It led nowhere outside China. Everything, it seems, had its place; nothing induced wonder or bewilderment. For the Florentines, in their naiveté, the giraffe betokened worlds to discover and explore. Certainly, European mariners, including such Florentines as Amerigo Vespucci, were soon to embark upon world-transforming journeys.

Key mental shifts made them possible. Ever since Pythagoras, Western thinkers had imagined the Earth as spherical. Yet they had disagreed whether insuperable obstacles divided its inhabitable parts. As early as 1267, however, Roger Bacon claimed that only a narrow stretch of ocean separated Iberia from India. A French theologian and cardinal, Pierre d’Ailly, reiterated this theory in Imago mundi (1410). Equally, if not more, important in transforming the Renaissance worldview was Ptolemy’s Geographia. Translated from Greek into Latin in 1406 and diffused widely from 1475, it described the Earth as mathematically proportional.104 Ptolemy’s imposition of grid lines enabled geographers to determine precisely any location and to conceptualize the world as homogeneous and continuous. Within two decades, European cartographers began to construct globes. In the final decades of the fifteenth century, the boldest mariners had begun to view the oceans less as impediments than as highways. Some discussed projects of circumnavigation.105

Improved naval construction from the late 1300s made such projects feasible. Iberian shipwrights fused elements of Mediterranean and Atlantic shipbuilding technology to produce the ancestor of fully rigged sailing ships. The first European oceangoing vessels were carracks (also called “naus”).106 They boasted three (later four) masts rigged with square sails fore and lateens aft. Strong and stout, they could withstand rough seas and carry sufficient provisions for long voyages. Caravels, with two or three masts and lateen sails aft and jib sails attached to a bowsprit, like schooners, were nimbler and better able to navigate in shallow waters. Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish seafarers used both types of ship as they sailed down the African coast and into the Atlantic Ocean in the second half of the 1400s. Navigational

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technology, close familiarity with trade winds and currents, and the astonishing bravery of their skippers enabled small flotillas of ships to sail literally into the unknown. Cannon fixed aboard ships meant they had little to fear from most human foes.

The first recorded instance of firearms installed on ships was an English vessel in 1337. Burgundy had deployed armed vessels during the Lombard Wars in the 1420s and 1430s.107 By mid-century, some war galleys began to sport forward-mounted guns, though crossbow fire, ramming and boarding the enemy ship, and diversionary tactics like ripping its sails with grappling hooks remained the standard methods of fighting in the Mediterranean.108 Carracks and caravels, being fitted with side-mounted guns, could engage the enemy from a distance, thus neutralizing those methods. As the cannon mounted on European sailing ships grew bigger, by around 1500, they were installed on sliding carriages to absorb the recoil. Mounting the guns lower on the hull, made possible by watertight, retractable lids covering the gun ports, also increased stability.109 By the 1520s, most European (and Ottoman) oceangoing ships were nearly unconquerable floating fortresses.110

Superior technology did not always drive successful exploration but was sometimes its result as mariners demanded innovations and improvements in ship building to meet specific challenges they encountered at sea. The new designs often gave those who adopted them a decisive edge against rivals who failed to keep pace. A curious fact about European states and entrepreneurs is that they feverishly copied each other’s ship-building technology in every manner possible, including by theft and capture.

The first global seafaring power was tiny Portugal.111 With a population of only 1 million, isolated from most of Europe, bordered by its historic enemy, Spain, yet with a lengthy Atlantic coastline, Portugal sent most of the greatest mariners of the fifteenth century into the open sea. They sailed for glory, seeking profits, hoping to encounter long-lost Christian settlements, and in a very few instances, at least in the early years, sought to convert native peoples. Portuguese sailors were the first to sail down the West African coast, around the Cape of Good Hope, and to reach India by ship from Europe. They explored the Malay and Indonesian archipelagoes, sighted Australia, and traded with China and Japan. They “discovered” Brazil. Their ventures opened vast uncharted maritime expanses, yielded astonishing fortunes, and won an empire on three continents.

The main goal of the Portuguese mariners was to find a passage to India in order to cut out the Arab and Turkish middlemen who controlled the existing trade routes. Aristocrats dominated Europe, but merchants enjoyed more prestige and influence than in other major cultures. Benedetto Cotrugli (1416–69), a diplomat and merchant who served at the court of Naples for 15 years and first codified the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, gave voice to a widespread sentiment in Europe when he wrote that merchants were viewed as model citizens and the greatest promoters of the common good.112 Merchants often viewed their work as entirely compatible with serving God. Indeed, company books often opened with a prayer for success in business and the health and safety of its workers.113 It was surely a powerful stimulus to dare to believe that the Lord sanctioned one’s ventures, as the majority of Europe’s seafarers apparently did.

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The first great European patron of the maritime arts was a brother of the King of Portugal, Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460).114 In a chivalric test in 1415, Henry led an assault on Ceuta, a port and commercial center on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Henry immediately realized the great wealth in gold, pepper, and slaves to be had from controlling trans-Sahara commerce. He thus hired the best cartographers and outfitted scores of ships for exploration. The contrast was stark with the Chinese rulers who not only did not support Chinese overseas traders and voyagers but also considered them traitors.115

The first Portuguese discovery, made by accident in 1419, was the Madeira archipelago, 450 miles off the coast of Morocco. Portuguese settlers began to establish themselves on the main islands, Madeira and Porto Santo, almost immediately. In 1427, Henry’s mariners discovered the Azores, 900 miles due west of Lisbon; in 1434, sailed past Cape Bojador, a place of doom for many ships because of treacherous winds and currents; in 1444, landed on the coast of Senegal; and in 1456, reached the Cape Verde Islands, 200 miles out in the Atlantic.116 Meanwhile, dozens of mercantile expeditions, mostly private, had followed in the explorers’ wake, bringing back gold and slaves. Slave trading in Lisbon and sugar plantations on the island of Madeira were yielding enormous profits by the 1450s.117 Muslims continued to dominate the East African human trafficking, but henceforth Europeans monopolized that infernal commerce on the West African coast. The wealth and glory to be had from maritime exploration drew hundreds more explorers and thousands more merchants southward along the African coastline. By 1488, Bartolomeu Diaz reached the southern tip of Africa, proving that ships from Europe could reach the East (see Map 5.4).

The next decade witnessed two of the greatest human achievements of all time. Both might have been credited to Portugal, had King João II not declined (twice) to fund the venture of the Genoese Christopher Columbus. João II’s experts all assured him that the transoceanic distance to India far exceeded Columbus’s estimate of 2,400 miles. They were right, of course: Columbus ended up sailing over 4,000 miles to the Bahamas alone where he and his crew first landed in the New World. The rest of the story—three subsequent voyages involving the discovery of the main Caribbean islands and the coast of Central America—is well known. Suffice it to say that dozens more mariners followed in his wake to explore, map out, exploit, and settle all the lands of the New World (see Map 5.4).

The discoveries of Vasco da Gama (1469?–1524), though far less celebrated than those of Columbus, were in the short term more consequential.118 In midsummer 1497, he set sail with 170 men aboard four ships: two square-masted naus, one caravel with lateen sails, and a larger store ship. They hugged the African coast until Sierra Leone and then steered southwest into the open sea in order to avoid adverse coastal winds and currents and to catch the South Atlantic westerlies. After three months and 6,000 miles sailing far from land, they arrived at the southern African coast. Gama and his crew then rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed up the East African coast. They pretended to be Muslims, tried negotiation with local rulers, fired hellish cannon volleys when threatened, resorted to piracy occasionally, won an ally in Malindi further up the coast, and hired an Indian pilot. This skilled navigator guided the ships across the Arabian Sea to Calicut on India’s Malabar coast, where they dropped anchor.

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MAP 5.4 Voyages by explorers opened up new trade routes and worlds to Europeans.

Calicut, the region’s commercial center, boasted merchants of every known religion from Africa and all of Asia. Muslims were the dominant traders, as they were throughout the Indian Ocean. They naturally did not welcome the European intruders and worked behind the scenes to sour relations between them and the ruling Hindu authorities. The poverty of Gama’s goodwill presents simply made matters worse. His little flotilla had to fight its way out of port and up the coast of India. Unfavorable winds slowed their progress home, and only a fraction of the original sailors made it back to Portugal alive. Nevertheless, King Manuel showered Gama with favors and honors. Portugal had won a place in history that few countries ever achieve.

Entrenched commercial interests resisted the Europeans’ entry into the lucrative Indian Ocean trade. The Portuguese returned better prepared. In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral and

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crew departed aboard 13 ships heavily laden with precious goods for trading and massive firepower for defense. After being blown off course, thus discovering Brazil, and losing half his ships, Cabral arrived in Calicut. His reception was disastrous (over 50 of his men were massacred), though in Cochin, further down the coast, he found an ally and obtained large cargos of spices, porcelain, and cotton cloth. Despite the lost ships, the voyage returned a 100 percent profit. The excitement of his countrymen was palpable and infectious. A gold-rush mentality gripped thousands of potential seafaring merchants.

Conquerors

Dozens more expeditions comprising hundreds of ships soon departed eastward, each one heavily armed and often commanded by fearless adventurers. Within 15 years, the Portuguese had seized control of the Indian Ocean.119 The Indians, Muslims, and Chinese had mastered science and technology at least as well as the Europeans, yet their merchants could not withstand the onslaught, like so many gas molecules expanding into an unconfined space. They systematically harassed and captured Muslim ships, drove out Muslim merchants, blockaded harbors, and seized Muslim ports. In some cases, they slaughtered everyone on board Muslim ships—men, women, and children. Time and again the Portuguese, though vastly outnumbered, outmaneuvered and devastated their targets with overwhelming cannonades. In early 1509, for example, Francisco de Almeida’s fleet of 18 ships completely destroyed a fleet five times as big off the Gujarati port of Diu. As they advanced, the Portuguese established forts, warehouses, and settlements.120

The greatest Portuguese naval strategist—the greatest in world history until then—was Alfonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), a brilliant and learned nobleman.121 Before anyone else, he grasped that sea power depended not only on force of arms and fighting capacity but just as much on the control of strategic bases and on the deployment of vigorous merchant shipping fleets. During his 6 years as “viceroy of India,” starting in 1509, he worked tirelessly to establish strongholds at all choke points on maritime routes and along all important shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean. The hub of the Portuguese empire was Goa, on the west coast of India, which he captured in 1510. His successful amphibious assault on Malacca the following year gave Portugal control of the extraordinarily important Strait of Malacca, the principal shipping lane linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In 1515, Albuquerque established a Portuguese base on Hormuz Island at the mouth of the Persian Gulf by the strategically valuable Strait of Hormuz. These and other ports and forts gave Portugal at the time of his death in 1516 almost full control of commercial shipping in the Indian Ocean. Rarely in world history had so few men accomplished so much.

How can one explain the triumph of tiny Portugal—and by extension of each of the seafaring states of Europe—in the face of often much larger enemies, in unfamiliar environments, thousands of miles from home, and usually spectacularly outnumbered in the field?122 Europe’s balanced political fragmentation fostered intense military competition and the development of

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the most powerful war machines the world had ever seen. Also, the purpose of fighting and conquering for most peoples of the world was to seize people in order to enslave them. The Europeans did not reject slavery in practice, except in Europe itself, but their main objective everywhere was expanding their trading relations and acquiring territory. They therefore tended to fight with more indiscriminate violence than most of their adversaries. Finally, the opportunities for personal enrichment through overseas expansion, conquest, international trade, and colonization were so fabulous that they probably filled European merchant-warriors with prodigious confidence and drove them to extreme feats of boldness.

Over the next few decades, Portuguese merchants established bases in the Maluku (Spice) Islands just west of New Guinea, received the unprecedented permission to set up a trading post in China (Macau), became middlemen in the Sino-Japanese trade, and conquered the coastal regions of Ceylon. Still, their network of trading bases did not translate into military control throughout the region. In fact, the Portuguese colonists faced opposition from both indigenous peoples and rival Europeans. Chief among them were the Spanish.

In 1493 and 1494, Pope Alexander VI had divided the western hemisphere, right down the middle of the Atlantic, into Spanish and Portuguese colonial regions (see Map 5.4).123 Cabral’s discovery of Brazil placed it on Portugal’s side of the ledger. Another Portuguese mariner, Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521), on his path-breaking voyage around the world in 1522, discovered and claimed the Philippines on behalf of his sponsor, the Spanish crown. Henceforth, all the continents were known to be linked by oceans, humankind acquired a fully global perspective, and every corner of the earth beckoned for exploration. As the Spanish empire rose to stunning heights, Portugal’s entered into decline while remaining one of the biggest in history. In the late 1500s, Portugal was forced into a union with Spain under Philip II.124

In the New World, the Spanish forged an immense empire. The only relatively sophisticated civilizations in the western hemisphere, those of the Aztecs and Incas, were far behind Europe technologically. They had invented neither the wheel nor a system of writing, though the script of the once great Mayan civilization remained in use in isolated places.125 Iron was unknown to them. The only large domesticated animals in the pre-Columbian Americas were Andean camelids (llamas and alpacas). Everywhere else, humans were the only beasts of burden.

When the Spanish arrived in the New World armed with guns, crossbows, and steel-edged weapons, riding horses, sailing ships, and capable of fighting in tightly disciplined formation, the natives could withstand them only with the most overwhelming of odds. Many natives, whether in rejection of their own rulers or wishing to join the winning team, became allies of the intruders. The native populations and cultures fell before the Spanish conquistadores everywhere they appeared. Yet, as Alfred Crosby has noted, “when Columbus brought the two halves of this planet together, the American Indian met for the first time his most hideous enemy: not the white man nor his black servant, but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath.”126

Cut off from the Afro-Eurasian land continuum for millennia, the Native Americans had developed no immunity against such diseases as smallpox and measles, which for them proved

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lethal. Scholars agree universally on these points but dispute vehemently two others. First, how many people inhabited the Americas in 1492? Thirty or forty years ago, relatively little controversy surrounded the answer to this question—roughly 14 million from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.127 Beginning in 1966, a few scholars advanced far higher numbers, ranging to 50 or even 100 million. Many, though not all, scholars have now joined the revisionists.128 Taking a position in this debate automatically affects how one views the post-Columbian population loss. Scholars agree that by 1600 the native population of the Americas had fallen to roughly 11.5 million. If the high point in 1492, therefore, had been 14 million, then the total human destruction was on the order of 18–20 percent—or fewer than died in Europe during the Black Death (some 30 percent).129 On the other hand, if the original population total had been 100 million, then the population destruction within a century of contact with Europeans was close to 90 percent—a veritable holocaust.

One widely respected scholar, David Stannard, in fact, has used that exact term. In American Holocaust, he draws an explicit comparison to Jews who died in transit to the death camps or in other ways unrelated to direct Nazi extermination. He thus argues that

the natives of Hispaniola and Mexico and Peru and Florida and Virginia and Massachusetts and Georgia and Colorado and California and elsewhere who died from forced labor, from introduced disease, from malnutrition, from death marches, from exposure, and from despair are as much victims of the Euro-American genocidal race war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs.130

He asserts further: “The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.”131

Was it really genocide? According to the U.N. Convention on Genocide, only the intentional destruction of a people, in whole or in part, qualifies as genocide.132 Scholars have brought to light a few cases of Europeans intentionally spreading smallpox among native peoples. There may have been other such cases, of course, though some were apparently made up.133 On a large scale, this would have constituted genocide. Other scholars have pointed to the driving of whole peoples hundreds and even thousands of miles from their homelands—like nearly 17,000 Cherokee forced to march the “Trail of Tears” in 1838, causing some 8,000 deaths.134 This was deeply callous but presumably not the intentional destruction of peoples.

Another scholar argues that European concepts of property rights and of economic efficiency were used to justify the seizure of nearly all the land on the two American continents. In the European mind, people who failed to make their land as productive as possible did not deserve to possess it. At first the American and Canadian governments resisted this push and tried to apply legal norms and to follow specific procedures, but “landhunters, grazers, and squatters” overwhelmed the system, and by the second half of the nineteenth century the governments were actively displacing the natives and distributing their land to people of European ancestry (see Chapter 14).135 Obviously, people cannot easily

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survive as a people without any land to call their own. The historian Alfred Crosby has argued persuasively that human migrants have always

carried with them their entire biota—plants, animals, and diseases—and have always wreaked havoc on the places and peoples they encountered, unless they were destroyed or subdued by them. The Europeans’ arrival in the New World with their pathogens, weeds, and small and large animals (in particular, rats and horses) was among the more catastrophic of such encounters. Together with the colonizers themselves, he writes, they “made a revolution more extreme than any seen on this planet since the extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene.”136 The extinctions in question were the destruction of most of the large mammals of the Americas soon after human migrants crossed over from Asia at the end of the last Ice Age. A similar catastrophe had befallen Australia some 40,000 years ago and Eurasia earlier still. In other words, destructively transforming their environments is what human migrants sometimes do. Crosby considers metaphorically the two waves of migrants—from Asia 11,000 years ago and from Europe after 1492—as “two waves of invaders of the same species, the first acting as the shock troops, clearing the way for the second wave, with its more complicated economies and greater numbers.137

While conquerors plundered, maimed, enslaved, and killed, a few missionaries developed new ways of seeing the native peoples. The philosophical doctrine of John Mair (1467–1550), a Scottish humanist teaching in Paris, had justified the conquerors’ actions. Drawing on Aristotle’s Politics, Mair described the native peoples as incapable of mastering their passions and therefore psychologically unfit for a life of freedom. Spanish lawyers and theologians seized upon this claim, though evidence gathered by missionaries in the field and careful study of the Aztec, the Inca, and the Mayan civilizations were beginning to undermine it.

The Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria (ca. 1492–1546), a leading Catholic theologian and philosopher, and Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), as well as the Jesuit José de Acosta (1539–1600), the latter two with years of experience as missionaries in Latin America, argued vigorously that all mankind descended from a common human ancestor created and endowed with reason by God and that the very idea of “natural slavery” of such beings made no sense. Empirical data of a wide variety of cultural levels observed among native populations led them, in particular Acosta, to posit a theory that all humans evolve through specific stages of cultural development, the highest being conversion to Christianity. The theory gained wide acceptance by Spanish officials. Further, a papal bull of 1537 denounced as heresy the idea that Native Americans were irrational and laws adopted in 1542 significantly improved their lot.138 Europe’s political diversity fostered competing ideas, which, in this case, laid the foundation for a philosophically grounded system of human rights for all persons.

Spain became the dominant naval power in the Pacific, especially after the founding of Manila in 1571.139 During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of pounds of silver flowed yearly into the gigantic Chinese economy from mines in Japan and South America (transshipped either via Manila or European cities).140 Most important was Potosí (today in southwestern Bolivia), which quickly developed into one of the

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world’s biggest cities despite its elevation of 13,420 feet.141 Merchants exchanged the bullion for a profusion of silk, spices, porcelain, and other luxury goods.

Chinese demand for silver drove global trade and European world exploration. Some scholars argue further that silver imports to China made profitable the establishment of plantations in the New World. In short, without the voracious Chinese economy, they claim, Europe would have continued to stagnate as it had throughout the Middle Ages.142 It seems just as likely that massive imports of silver helped China avoid an economic slump in the early 1500s and that a decline in silver imports in part brought down the Ming Dynasty in 1644.143 The Europeans’ discovery of the New World, their mercantile dynamism, business acumen, and extraordinary innovativeness also made possible the emergence of a world economy in the sixteenth century. Moreover, by far the biggest beneficiary of the exploitative mining of New World silver—Spain—remained relatively underdeveloped, while economic and industrial innovation surged forward in Northern Europe. China persisted as the world’s single biggest economy, but the global trading system centered on Europe (see Chapter 9).

Military and political struggles among the European states now spilled across the globe. By 1600, only Antarctica and Australia (first sighted in 1606) were unknown to them and avoided becoming their battleground. Even the seas witnessed continual fighting among these powers, as the weaker and poorer preyed on the ships of the current victor.144

The rising star, Holland, reached the East Indies in 1595 and within a few decades established strong positions in the Indonesian archipelago, Ceylon, Formosa, and on the Indian coast, driving out many European competitors. The most efficient world traders, with a government controlled by merchants, the Dutch soon dominated the commerce in precious Asian commodities. Their United East India Company, founded in 1602, was the world’s first publicly traded, limited-liability, multinational firm.145 Like a sovereign state, the company had the right to field military forces, declare war, conclude treaties, establish settlements, and construct fortresses.146 It helped Dutch commercial development that its government supported but did not interfere with the country’s private business interests, unlike the Portuguese and Spanish governments.147 The company often used brutal methods—including the massacre of natives—to seize control of the Asian spice trade. Especially important was Dutch control over the Moluccan Islands, and in particular, the ten tiny Banda Islands, the sole producers in the world of cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Naturally, Holland’s European rivals sought to break its hold on them.

England’s first ships entered the Indian Ocean in 1591, and like the Dutch they quickly took over many Portuguese trading posts.148 Major confrontation with the Dutch in the Banda Islands almost led to war, until both countries signed a treaty of economic cooperation in Asia in 1619.149 Further wars with England and with France gradually sapped the power of the Dutch Republic, but for most of the seventeenth century, its “Golden Age,” Holland dominated world trade.

Thwarted in Indonesia, the English oriented their trading efforts toward India and America. They negotiated outposts and settlements along the Indian coastline beginning in 1612 but did

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not establish any formal administrative control beyond these small confines until well into the 1700s. In the early 1600s, English merchants with government backing established several profitable colonies on Caribbean Islands devoted to the production of sugar and dependent on enslaved African labor. Colonies in North America and fur-trading operations in what would become Canada also increased the wealth of enterprising Englishmen, if not always the home country itself. A series of wars, fought largely over colonial possessions and the control of overseas trade, pitted England against Spain, then Holland, and finally France. The English emerged victorious from each conflict, gaining huge territorial advantages especially from the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) in North America, the Caribbean, and India.150 The French conquest of Holland in 1795 allowed the British to seize valuable Dutch colonies, including Malacca, Padang (Sumatra), and the Cape Colony. By this point, Great Britain was the world’s preeminent colonial power, as it would remain for well over a century.151 Its mariners also continued world exploration, for example James Cook (1728–79), the first European to encounter Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, to circumnavigate New Zealand, and to cross the Antarctic Circle.

Among the concessions granted by Spain as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) was the asiento, or the right to import slaves to Spanish America. English merchant-shippers played a key role in the slave trade, transporting as many as 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, or one-third of the total, until Parliament abolished the practice in 1807.152

For centuries, Muslim conquerors and traders had captured or sold millions of slaves from western, Saharan, and eastern Africa.153 They were set to work in domestic service, agriculture, and mineral extraction, as well as in higher callings like the military and civil service in Muslim lands, and in the non-Muslim kingdoms of Uganda, Benin, and Dahomey. Slaves were woven into the fabric of these societies.154

European merchants, whose own societies prohibited the institution of slavery, created a unique, highly innovative, extraordinarily profitable, but also radically dehumanizing slave- driving system.155 The main use of slave labor was on plantations devoted to the cultivation and processing of sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Sugar was the first valuable American commodity. Columbus introduced sugarcane to the New World on his second voyage.156 Sugar mills sprouted up by the dozen throughout the Caribbean basin within a few decades. As the native populations declined, slaves were imported from Africa.157 Beginning on islands in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, the plantation system reached its apogee of utility and barbarity in the Caribbean. Of the 10 or so million Africans who survived the Atlantic crossing to the New World from 1500 to 1900, roughly 4 million ended up in the Caribbean and four more million in Brazil and Guiana. Poor conditions for enslaved laborers in the Caribbean region led to exceptionally high levels of mortality.158

The scholarly debate about whether capital accumulated from the Caribbean slave-based plantation system made possible the Industrial Revolution can be left aside until Chapter 11. For now, suffice it to say that Europeans opened up sea passages across all the oceans, created

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a truly global economy, developed relatively efficient means of extracting fabulous wealth from previously impoverished lands, and introduced a few new, and astonishingly popular, products and commodities to the wider world, including tobacco, coffee, and cocoa (see Chapter 9).

These new products were part of the so-called Columbian Exchange of plants and animals between the New and Old Worlds.159 Often overlooked in discussions of this issue, however, are the immense contributions going from Europe to the Americas. Of course, New World products enormously enhanced nutrition in Europe and beyond. It suffices to mention potatoes, corn, beans, peppers, peanuts, tomatoes, cashews, pineapples, squash, and turkeys. The potato in particular, which can grow well in poor soils and provides the highest caloric output per acre of any staple, as well as several vitamins and minerals necessary for human health, slowly became a mainstay of the European diet and in the short term probably added to Europe’s advantages vis-à-vis Asia.160 Rubber, which is native to South America, proved an invaluable industrial product.

The range of natural additions flowing in the other direction was far greater. One can start with domestic livestock, including cattle, horses, swine, chickens, goats, and sheep. Then there were the world’s two most valuable insects, whose handiwork man harvests, the bee and the silkworm. The list of comestible plants is at least twice as long as the American contribution. It included all the staple grains aside from corn; almonds and walnuts; apples, bananas, peaches, pears, and citrus fruits; beets, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, and peas; and coffee and tea. Of plants yielding industrial products, one can name flax and hemp. (Though cotton is native to both hemispheres, sophisticated cotton textile production developed first in India.)161

The astonishing aspect of this story is how one small and recently backward region of the world—Europe—brought all these products, peoples, countries, and continents together, bound them into one worldwide marketplace, one interconnected network of port cities—Quebec, New Orleans, Halifax, Boston, New York, Williamsburg, Savannah, Charleston, Kingston, Havana, Lima, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Batavia, and Manila, among many others—all dominated by the West.162

Other civilizations of the world, especially China, Korea, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and Mughal and Maratha India, possessed the material resources, entrepreneurial energy, technological attainments, and military prowess to have explored the globe first or at least to challenge the Europeans on the high seas. Yet none, aside from the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean, ever attempted.163 The Ottoman Empire remained a powerful force in the eastern Mediterranean until the late 1600s.164 The other great Eurasian civilizations, apparently content to cultivate their own territory and immediate environs, never ventured into the broader oceanic realms and gradually declined technologically and militarily. Meanwhile, the major European maritime powers went from strength to strength.

By the late 1600s, France, England, and Holland all funded large, well-equipped navies. France’s Royal Academy of Science, founded in 1666, was intended in large part to promote naval progress through the consolidation of advances in cartography, chemistry, and engineering. By 1690, Louis XIV’s navy boasted 100,000 sailors and 9,000 cannon. Early in

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the next century, 14 two-decker British ships carried 74 guns apiece, part of the biggest, most effective, most efficiently funded, and best equipped and staffed navy in the world.165 Following the Seven Years’ War, Britain and China were the two greatest powers of the age— one outward reaching, the other inward looking. Whereas the Chinese Empire constituted a single, grand, and ancient realm, however, Britain was only one of a half-dozen dynamic and expansive European powers. By 1775, the Europeans—if one includes Russia, which conquered most of Siberia between 1581 and 1661—controlled one-third of the earth’s land surface and dominated all its oceans.166 *** One key feature of Western civilization by this period was the sociability of Europeans at all social levels. They simply exchanged ideas, traveled, shared inspirations, conversed widely, worked together, and forged collaborative bonds and institutions far more than peoples in other cultures. Francisco Pizarro, who overthrew the Inca Empire, had consulted with Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, before his second expedition to Peru. Cortés later advised Charles V in his campaign against Algiers in 1541. Magellan had fought under Albuquerque in the siege of Malacca—before discovering and claiming the Philippines for Spain. Cooperation, consultation, coordination, and comparing methods thus alternated with competition, but all such cases inspired and spread the fruits of innovation.167

The culture of cooperation and competition infused every social and political element of European society. Scholars and sailors, merchants and mercenaries, travelers and tradesmen all moved relatively easily from state to state, pursuing monetary gain, searching for masters to teach them the mysteries of their craft, fleeing religious persecution, or pursuing enticements from enterprising statesmen. Nearly every people of Europe contributed to the general advancement of knowledge, learning, science, and invention. The Dutch dominated cartography and lens crafting, the Portuguese spearheaded open-sea navigation, and the Italians were the premier early bankers and financial innovators. The greatest contribution of the Germans, surely, was printing. No other single breakthrough so radically transformed the world of learning and information—as well as of practice and action. The mass production of maps, geographical atlases, and travel accounts, for example, helped transform the European urge to travel into the Age of Discovery. Printing in fact brought on advances in nearly every sphere of life in the Western world.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION What legal rights did charters of liberty give to towns? What impact did the Crusades have on Europe? How did early travelers from Islamic countries differ from those from Europe? How did the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire impact the Eurasian economy? Why did slavery develop in European colonies?

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Explain what is meant by the sociability of Europeans in the early modern period.

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Chapter 6  Chronology

3000 B.C.: Scribes first begin to use symbols to represent sounds (cuneiform)

~1500: Proto-Caananite alphabetic writing emerges

1000: Papyrus usage spreads throughout eastern Mediterranean

1031 A.D.: University of Córdoba library destroyed, along with its 400,000 volumes

1100: Paper introduced to Europe through Sicily and Spain

1300: Woodblock printing spreads across Europe

1400: Paper succeeds as dominant writing material in Europe

1450s: Johannes Gutenberg invents printing press and prints Bible

1460: First vernacular version of Bible printed in German

1481: Vatican library houses 4,500 titles, many of them extremely rare codices

1501: 260 towns in 17 countries hold 1,120 print shops

1530: Technical writing becomes common

1537: King Francis I decrees royal library should receive copy of every book printed in France

1539: New World’s first book produced in Mexico City

1550–59: First compilation of several travel stories printed in Italy

Early seventeenth century:

Royal Library of France rivals earlier Alexandria and Córdoba

1729: Early printing press in Muslim world opened but does not last

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