The global watershed: 1500?
Christian and Fernandez-Armesto are not alone in identifying accelerating change as the dominant characteristic of the Modern era and in suggesting that the dramatic changes around 1500 are best understood as the culmination of several centuries of global changes.[156] The size and splendors of Asian empires are not the only reason for moving the narrative earlier.
World historians have also commonly emphasized several other contexts more closely connected with the Iberian voyages, as do some European historians.[157] One such context is the dependence of the Iberian voyages on borrowings from the East. Not only was the printing press that diffused knowledge of the voyages and discoveries originally a Chinese invention, but the numerals used to record locations at sea were also based on those developed by Indian mathematicians that had spread west through the Arabian world. More fundamentally, the Iberian ships navigated with magnetic compasses (first developed in China) and used the astrolabe (an Arab or Greek invention) to determine their locations at sea. Lateen sails were probably copied from those on Arab ships. Even the infectious diseases inadvertently introduced to the Americas with such devastating consequences had a historical precedent with the similarly calamitous epidemic known as the Black Death that spread rapidly along trade routes from South Asia to Western Europe.Though dramatically important, the Iberian voyages were not unique. In the Atlantic, Vikings and perhaps Irish had made earlier crossings to North America.[158] It has also become common for world historians to preface the Iberian voyages of exploration with the once forgotten Ming voyages across the Indian Ocean in the first third of the 1400s under Admiral Zheng He. The Chinese fleets were much larger than those of Columbus and da Gama, as were the largest vessels in them.
The Ming vessels followed Indian Ocean routes that southern Asians had been sailing since antiquity, and the spread of Islamic trading turned the western half of that ocean into an Arabian Sea. In the 1300s, the Moroccan Muslim Ibn Battuta had undertaken arduous journeys throughout the Muslim world, traveling with merchant caravans and on merchant ships. It may well be, as scholars have argued, that his accounts of travel to China are so lacking in detail as to cast doubt on his claim to have gone so far, but he did cross the Sahara and described the empire of Mali, visited Mecca and the Swahili Coast, and crossed to India. Ottoman explorers continued this tradition.[159] Two large fleets that the Sultan of Mali reportedly sent out across the Atlantic in the 1400s may not have reached the Americas, but several delegations of Ethiopian Christians are known to have visited Mediterranean Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in search of Christian allies. Tales of these visitors helped feed the legend of Prester John and inspired Prince Henry the Navigator to seek out Christian allies beyond the lands of Islam.[160]Besides emphasizing that the Iberian voyages relied on borrowed technologies and historical precedents, world historians also pay much more attention to the lure of Eastern riches in motivating the Iberian maritime expansion than do some Eurocentric and Americentric accounts. They emphasize that, while Columbus' voyages across the Atlantic led to the unexpected discovery of the Americas, they failed in their intention to find a new route to the East, whereas Vasco da Gama's successful voyage to India in 1497-8 was the culmination of nearly a century of Portuguese efforts. Globally minded historians are also aware that the resulting new maritime trade with Asia and sub-Saharan Africa was more valuable for Europeans during the next two and a half centuries than the trade with the Americas.
There is no need to belabor the point of Asian riches.
When Asia Was the World (2008) is the trenchant title historian Stewart Gordon uses for his studies of Asian commercial and cultural supremacy in the period between 500 and 1500 ce. Most recently Philippe Beaujard has made a similar point in greater depth in his study of the Indian Ocean.[161] Gordon and Beaujard do not use Marco Polo as a source, but the Venetian's account of the great size and wealth of the markets and cities of thirteenth-century China leaves no doubt of Asia's advanced position, even if his European contemporaries found Polo's descriptions hard to believe. For example, Polo says the markets surrounding Kublai Khan's capital city were so enormous that 20,000 prostitutes made their livings servicing the foreign merchants who passed through them. He describes the city of Hangzhou in southeast China as “noble and magnificent,” a city whose grandeur and beauty were superior to all others.[162] Polo knew the city well, but perhaps his most telling detail is his description of Hangzhou's many canals, which he notes were traversed by 12,000 bridges. At that time Polo's none-too-shabby hometown, Venice, had only one bridge over the Grand Canal, a wooden structure near the Rialto market, much more modest than the magnificent stone bridge that would replace it in the sixteenth century. The traders of Venice and Genoa were also aware of the tantalizing wealth of the markets of South and Southeast Asia through their contacts with their Muslim counterparts who plied them. It is revealing that upon reaching Calicut in 1498, the Portuguese were rudely greeted in Castilian by a visiting Muslim trader. The Iberian mariners deserve enormous credit for their search for a new route to the East, but their goal was to gain better access to a giant economy far older than the 1400s.Portugal's pioneering explorations down the African coast and into the Indian Ocean were also rooted in a much older religious conflict: the centuries-old struggle between Christians and Muslims.
Since world historians often underestimate the importance of this connection, it is worth exploring at length. One need only think of the red Crusader crosses emblazoned on the sails of Vasco da Gama's fleet that sailed for India in 1497 to realize how much the Portuguese saw that venture as a continuation of centuries of bitter conflict with the expanding Islamic world. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, begun in 711, had not been undone easily. The struggle to wrest back control of Iberia gradually merged with the idea of a larger Holy War against Islam during the eleventh century. From this perspective the traditional First Crusade (1096-9) to liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims was the second front of the ongoing struggle for Christian Iberia, as papal leaders recognized in asking the knights involved in the reconquista not to be lured away to the liberation of the Holy Land.[163]The successful conquest of Palestine by the First Crusade was temporary. Writing a century later, Archbishop William of Tyre pointed to a key change that had taken place in the region since then: “In former times almost every city had its own ruler... they were not dependent on one another; they were rarely actuated by the same motives, but, in fact, very often by those directly opposite.” Unfortunately for the Latin Christians, their conquest of the Holy Land had spurred Muslim unity, so that, when William wrote from Tyre, “all the kingdoms adjacent to us have been brought under the power of one man [Saladin]... they do the will of one man, and at his command alone, however reluctantly, they are ready, as a unit, to take up arms for our injury.”[164]
The city of Tyre remained in Christian hands until it was incorporated into Egypt's Mamluk Sultanate in 1291, but that was not the end of the conflict between expanding Islamic and Christian forces. Tyre and a great many other places were then incorporated into the resurgent Ottoman empire, which in 1453 seized the city of Constantinople, the last remnant of the Christian Byzantine empire.
In a letter the next year, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini assessed the political divisions in Europe in terms reminiscent of William of Tyre's assessment of Middle Eastern fragmentation at the time of the First Crusade: “Christendom has no head whom all will obey - neither the pope nor the emperor receives his due,” lamented the man who would soon become Pope Pius II. “Every city has its own king, and there are as many princes as there are households.”[165] As it turned out, a series of narrow Christian victories over the next two centuries proved wrong Piccolomini's fears that European Christians could not withstand the Ottoman onslaught, although that outcome does not diminish the significance of the centuries- long struggle between Christians and Muslims.The fifteenth-century voyages of the Portuguese cannot be properly understood apart from the Latin Christian struggle against Muslim expansion, a point emphasized by papal encyclicals of the 1450s. As Henry the Navigator's biographer explained, the young prince's participation in the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415 had been an extension of the crusades that had pushed into Muslim North Africa following Portugal's successful reconquest. Writing well before the prince's death, Gomes de Azurara enumerated Henry's motives for exploring south along the Atlantic coast of Africa, listing intellectual curiosity first, followed by reasons having to do with religion: finding Christian trading partners beyond the Muslim- controlled lands, learning the extent of Muslim power, making alliances with other Christians against them, and spreading the Christian faith. Is this a pious gloss on the prince's life? Perhaps a bit, since Azurara fails to mention the quest for gold from below the Sahara that was traded to Ceuta and other North African ports. Even if Azurara understates the importance of secular motives, Henry's actions and those of later Portuguese are incomprehensible without also giving great credence to the enduring crusading motives that lay behind Prince Henry's navigation efforts.[166]
A broader historical context may make European expansion seem less exceptional, but does a less Eurocentric perspective diminish the significance of these voyages? Opinions may differ, but this writer is inclined to think a comparative context actually enhances them.
The key persons may have been motivated by a mixture of bellicose feudalism, religious fanaticism, and treasure seeking, but they got results. Europeans deserve no criticism for making use of technologies developed elsewhere; they deserve high praise for making better use of them. Not only did little Portugal sponsor exceptionally long voyages through uncharted waters with far fewer resources than the Ming, but the new connections to the East were also sustained and enhanced over time, as those of Zheng He were not. Although many of the connections to sub-Saharan Africa and Asia were built upon older Muslim connections, Europeans introduced new economic forces of lasting impact.The discovery of the Americas invites fewer comparisons, although some have claimed that, besides the Vikings, Ming ships and Mali canoes also reached the Americas before Columbus.[167] Again, the salient point seems to be that only Columbus' voyages led to sustained and expanding contacts sufficient to change the course of history. Those changes produced different results for different people, falling heaviest on the native inhabitants of the Americas. Hardships were also substantial for enslaved Africans, indentured European immigrants, and even free immigrants relocated far from their homes. Even so, the historic importance of the Iberian voyages for Europeans and for the course of world history is beyond dispute.
The monumental convergences in the Atlantic are not only obvious in hindsight but were also apparent to contemporary observers. In 1588, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Our world of late has discovered another, no less large, fully peopled, yielding in all things, and mightier in strength than ours.” Yet, in phrases that echo those uttered about present-day globalization, the essayist worried that, however good the outcome of the encounter had been for Europeans, the outcome for the indigenous peoples of the Americas had been unfortunate: “I fear that by our contagion we shall directly have furthered his decline and hastened his ruin, and that we shall too dearly have sold him our opinions, our new fangles and our arts.”[168] Yet, for all their genuine importance, the extraordinary discovery of a “new” world and the eventual rise of powerful new nations there should not be allowed to exaggerate the periodization of history. Like the new ties between Europe and the East, the new connections to the Americas came out of a much larger process with deep roots in earlier centuries.