1492: The Year Our World Began
Read 1492: The Year Our World Began Online
Authors: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
The Year the World Began
1
“This World Is Small”:
Prophecy and Reality in 1492
2
“To Constitute Spain to the Service of God”:
The Extinction of Islam in Western Europe
3
“I Can See the Horsemen”:
The Strivings of Islam in Africa
4
“No Sight More Pitiable”:
The Mediterranean World and the Redistribution of the Sephardim
5
“Is God Angry with Us?”:
Culture and Conflict in Italy
6
Toward “the Land of Darkness”:
Russia and the Eastern Marches of Christendom
7
“That Sea of Blood”:
Columbus and the Transatlantic Link
8
“Among the Singing Willows”:
China, Japan, and Korea
9
“The Seas of Milk and Butter”:
The Indian Ocean Rim
10
“The Fourth World”:
Indigenous Societies in the Atlantic and the Americas
Epilogue:
The World We’re In
June 17: Martin Behaim is at work making a globe of
the world in Nuremberg.
I
n 1491, a prophet appeared in Rome in rags, flourishing, as his greatest possession, a wooden cross. People thronged large squares to hear him announce that tears and tribulations would be their lot throughout the coming year. An “Angelic Pope” would then emerge and save the Church by abandoning worldly power for the power of prayer.
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The prediction could not have been more wrong. There was a papal election in 1492, but it produced one of the most corrupt popes ever to have disgraced his see. Worldly power continued to mock spiritual priorities—though a ferocious conflict between the two began in the same year. The Church did not enter a new age but continued to invite and disappoint hopes of reform. The events the prophet failed to foresee were, in any case, far more momentous than those he predicted. The year 1492 did not just transform Christendom, but also refashioned the world.
Late fifteenth-century humanists thought Nuremberg as “significant as Athens or Rome.” Illustrators of the “world-overview,” published there in 1493 “at rich citizens’ expense,” concurred.
Hartmann Schedel,
Weltchronik
[
The “Nuremberg Chronicle”
] (Nuremberg, 1493), engraving by Michael Wohlgemut and Wilhelm Pleydonwurff.
Until then, the world was divided among sundered cultures and divergent ecosystems. Divergence began perhaps about 150 million years ago, with the fracture of Pangaea—the planet’s single great landmass that poked above the surface of the oceans. The continents formed, and continental drift began. Continents and islands got ever farther apart. In each place, evolution followed a distinctive course. Every continent had its peculiar repertoire of plants and animals. Life-forms grew apart, even more spectacularly than the differences that grew between peoples, whose cultural variety multiplied, and whose appearance and behavior diverged so much that when they began to reestablish contact, they at first had difficulty recognizing each other as belonging to the same species or sharing the same moral community.
With extraordinary suddenness, in 1492 this long-standing pattern went into reverse. The aeons-old history of divergence virtually came to an end, and a new, convergent era of the history of the planet began.
The world stumbled over the brink of an ecological revolution, and ever since, ecological exchanges have wiped out the most marked effects of 150 million years of evolutionary divergence. Today, the same life-forms occur, the same crops grow, the same species thrive, the same creatures collaborate and compete, and the same microorganisms live off them in similar climatic zones all over the planet.
Meanwhile, between formerly sundered peoples, renewed contacts have threaded the world together to the point where almost everyone on earth fits into a single web of contact, communication, contagion, and cultural exchange. Transoceanic migrations have swapped and swiveled human populations across the globe, while ecological exchange has transplanted other life-forms. Our own mutual divergence lasted for most of the previous one hundred thousand years, when our ancestors began to leave their East African homeland. As they adapted to new environments in newly colonized parts of the planet, they lost touch with each other, and lost even the capacity to recognize each other as fellow members of a single species, linked by common humanity. The cultures they created grew more and more unlike each other. Languages, religions, customs, and lifeways proliferated, and although a long period of overlapping divergence and contact preceded 1492, only then did a renewal of worldwide links become possible.
For seaborne routes of contact depend on the winds and currents, and until Columbus exposed the wind system of the Atlantic, the winds of the world were like a code that no one could crack. The northeast trades, which Columbus used to cross the Atlantic, lead almost to where the Brazil Current sweeps shipping southward into the path of the westerlies of the South Atlantic and on around the entire globe. Once navigators had detected the pattern, the exploration of the oceans was an irreversible process—though of course slow and long and interrupted by many frustrations. The process is now almost over. “Uncontacted” people—refugees, perhaps, from cultural convergence—still turn up from time to time in the depths of Amazonia, but now the process of reconvergence seems almost complete. We live in “one world.”
We acknowledge all peoples as part of a single, worldwide moral community. The Dominican friar, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), who was, in effect, Columbus’s literary executor, perceived the unity of humankind as a result of his experiences with indigenous people in a Caribbean island that Columbus colonized. “All the peoples of the world,” Las Casas wrote, in what has become one of the world’s most celebrated tautologies, “are human,” with common rights and freedoms.
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Because so much of the world we inhabit began then, 1492 seems an obvious—and amazingly neglected—choice, for a historian, of a single year of global history. Its commonest associations are with Columbus’s discovery of a route to America—a world-changing event if ever there was one. It put the Old World in touch with the New and united formerly sundered civilizations in conflict, commerce, contagion, and cultural exchange. It made genuinely global history—a real “world system”—possible, in which events everywhere resonate together in an interconnected world, and in which the effects of thoughts and transactions cross oceans like the stirrings aroused by the flap of a butterfly’s wings. It initiated European long-range imperialism, which went on to recarve the world. It brought the Americas into the world of the West, multiplying the resources of Western civilization and making possible the eventual eclipse of long-hegemonic empires and economies in Asia.
By opening the Americas to Christian evangelization and European migration, the events of 1492 radically redrafted the map of world religions and shifted the distribution and balance of world civilizations. Christendom, formerly dwarfed by Islam, began to climb to rough parity, with periods of numerical and territorial superiority. Until 1492, it seemed unthinkable that the West—a few lands at the poor end of Eurasia—could rival China or India. Columbus’s anxiety to find ways to reach those places was a tribute to their magnetism and the sense of the inferiority Europeans felt when they imagined them or read about them. But when Westerners got privileged access to an underexploited New World, the prospects altered. Initiative—the power of some groups of
people to change others—had formerly been concentrated in Asia. Now it was accessible to interlopers from elsewhere. In the same year, unrelated events on the eastern edge of Christendom, where prophecy was even more heated about the imminent end of the world, elevated a new power, Russia, to the status of a great empire and a potential hegemon.
Columbus has so dominated books about 1492—they have either been about him or focused on him—that the world around Columbus, which makes the effects of his voyage intelligible, has remained invisible to readers. The worlds Columbus connected; the civilizations he sought and failed to find; the places he never thought about, in recesses of Africa and Russia; the cultures in the Americas that he was unable even to imagine—all these were areas of dynamic change in 1492. Some of the changes were effective; that is, they launched transformations that have continued ever since, and have helped shape the world we inhabit today. Others were representative of longer-term changes of which our world is the result.
This book is an attempt to bring them all together by surveying them in a single conspectus, rather as a world traveler might have done on a grand tour of the world, if such a thing were possible, in 1492—zigzagging around the densely populated band of productive civilizations that stretched around the globe, from the eastern edges of Asia across the Indian Ocean to East Africa and what we now think of as the Middle East, and across the Eurasian landmass to Russia and the Mediterranean world. From there, by way of the Atlantic, the civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andean region were about to become accessible. Only an imaginary traveler could have girdled the whole world at the time. But real travelers pieced world-encompassing routes together, and as far as possible, readers will accompany them, starting in the next chapter, in Granada in January 1492. We shall cross the Sahara from Granada to Gao in West Africa with a Muslim adventurer, and visit the kingdom of Kongo with Portuguese explorers, before returning to explore the Mediterranean with Jewish refugees from expulsion in Spain, pausing in Rome and Florence to witness the Renaissance with pil
grims, preachers, and itinerant scholars. We shall traverse the Atlantic with Columbus, and the Indian Ocean with another Italian merchant. Further stops on our selective tour of the world embrace the eastern frontier of Christendom and the worlds Columbus sought in China and almost grasped in America.
The motive I have in mind, as I make the journey in my imagination, is to see the world before it ends. In 1492, and as the year approached, expectations of destruction and renewal gripped prophets and pundits in Europe. The seer of Rome, whose name went unrecorded, was one of many who plied their trade in Europe at the time, ministering to sensation-hungry congregations. The world is always full of pessimists, woe-struck by a sense of decline, and optimists grasping for a golden future. There were plenty of both in the late fifteenth century. But in 1492, at least in western Europe, optimists dominated. Two kinds of optimism were rife: one—broadly speaking—religious in inspiration, the other secular.
In the West, religious optimism had accumulated since the twelfth century in circles influenced by the prophecies of the mystical Sicilian abbot Joachim of Fiore. He had devised a new method of divination based on a fanciful interpretation of the Bible. He pressed passages from all over scripture into service, but two texts were especially powerful and appealing: the prophecy that the writers of the Gospels put into Christ’s mouth, among his last messages to his disciples, and the vision of the end of the world with which the Bible closes. There was strong, scary stuff here. Christ foresaw wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, famines, “the beginning of sorrows…. The brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death…. Ye shall see the abomination of desolation…. For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, neither shall be.” The consolation was that after the sun and moon are quenched, and the stars fall, “then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.”
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The visionary of the book of Revelation added more terrors: hail and fire mingled with blood, the seas turned to blood or wormwood, plagues of giant locusts, scorpions as big as horses, and the earth covered with fire and darkness from “vials full of the wrath of God.”
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Prophets who contemplated these disasters could do so, however, with a certain grim cheerfulness. Schadenfreude was part of it: the tribulations would be permanent only for evildoers. Part of it was relish for disasters as “signs” and portents of the purging of the world.
Dürer’s engravings of the Apocalypse were outstanding examples of a common theme of the art of the 1490s: the end of the world.
Albrecht Dürer,
Apocalipsis cum figuris
(Nuremberg, A. Dürer, 1498).
Anyone who has ever argued with a fundamentalist in our own times will know that you can read any message you like into scripture, but people are so eager for guidance from holy writ that their critical faculties often seem to go into suspension when they read it or receive other people’s readings of it. In the texts he selected, Joachim of Fiore detected a providential scheme for the past and future of the cosmos, in
three ages. After the Age of the Father, in which God was only partially revealed, the incarnation had launched the Age of the Son. A cosmic battle between Christ and Antichrist, good and evil, would inaugurate the Age of the Spirit, which would precede the end of the world, the fusion of earth and heaven, the reimmersion of time in eternity. Readers of Joachim scrutinized the world for the signs he predicted. The “Angelic Pope” would purify the Church and restore the blessings of the time of the apostles. A “Last Emperor” would conquer Jerusalem, unite the world, and champion Christ against the forces of evil. A burst of evangelization would spread Christianity to parts of the world previous efforts could not reach.
