Europe: A History (104 page)
The presence of a fifth continent in the antipodes was not suspected for another century. In 1605 a Spanish ship out of Peru and a Dutch ship out of Java both sailed to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The main outlines of the great
Zuidland
or ‘Southland’ (Australia and New Zealand) were charted by the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman (1603–59) in 1642–3.
The Portuguese were quickest to exploit the commercial opportunities of the new lands. They claimed Brazil in 1500, Mauritius in 1505, Sumatra in 1509, Malacca and the ‘Spice Islands’ (Indonesia) in 1511. To protect their trade, they established a chain of fortified stations stretching from Goa in India to Macao in China. The Spaniards, in contrast, did not hesitate to apply their military might. Lured by the dream of El Dorado the
conquistadores
, who had so recently subdued Iberia, now turned their energies to the conquest of America. They settled Cuba in 1511 and used it as a base for further campaigns. In 1519–20 Hernando Cortez (1485–1547) seized the Aztec empire in Mexico in a sea of blood. In the 1520s and 1530s permanent settlements were established in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and New Granada (Colombia and Venezuela). From 1532 Francisco Pizarro (c.1476–1541) seized the empire of the Incas in Peru.
SYPHILUS
F
OR
many years it had no official name. Italians, Germans, Poles, and English all called it ‘the French disease’. The French called it ‘the Neapolitan disease’. The Neapolitans called it ‘the Spanish disease’. The Portuguese called it ‘the Castilian disease’ and the Turks ‘the Christian disease’. The Spanish doctor who was one of the first to treat it, Dr Ruy Diaz de Isla, called it ‘the Serpent of Hispaniola’.
1
Syphilis supposedly made its European debut in Barcelona in 1493. Diaz de Isla later claimed to have treated the master of the
Niña
, Vicente Pinzón; and it was assumed to have crossed the Atlantic with Columbus’s crew. At all events, whether carried by sailors or slaves, or both, it reached Naples in 1494 in time to welcome the invading French army. When the French king’s mercenaries dispersed in the following year, they took it with them to almost every European country. In 1495 the Emperor Maximilian issued a decree against ‘the Evil Pox’, taken to be God’s punishment for blasphemy. In 1496 the city of Geneva tried to clean out its syphilitic brothels. In 1497, in distant Edinburgh, a statute ordered sufferers to the island of Inchkeith on pain of branding. Of Charles Vlll’s campaign in Italy, Voltaire would later write: ‘France did not lose all she had won. She kept the pox.’
2
For reasons that are unclear, the spirochete microbe,
Treponema pallidum
, which causes syphilis, assumed a specially virulent form when it reached Europe. It bored into the human genitals, exploiting the scabrous fissures that were common in the unwashed crotches of the day, forming highly contagious chancres. Within weeks it covered the body in suppurating pustules, attacked the central nervous system, and destroyed all hair. It killed within months, painfully. Physicians chose to apply mercury to the pustules, unwittingly poisoning their patients. Over six or seven decades, the spirochete created its own resistance and calmed down. Henceforth, it would be the cause of a common three-stage venereal disease that left its deformed and sterile hosts a longer span. By then, amongst millions, its victims had included Pope Julius II, Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII, and Ivan the Terrible. It was not tamed until the advent of penicillin. The impact of syphilis was necessarily far-reaching. It has been linked to the sexual puritanism which took hold on all classes short of the aristocracy; to the banishment of hitherto popular, and licentious, bathhouses; to the institution of hand-shaking in place of public kissing; and, from 1570 onwards, to the growing fashion for wigs.
In 1530 the Italian poet, Girolamo Fracastoro, composed a poem about a shepherd struck down by the French disease. In due course, this was used by learned men to give the disease its learned name. The shepherd’s name was Syphilus.
3
European colonization in North America began in 1536 with the founding of Montreal in Canada by the Breton sailor Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) and in 1565 of St Augustine in Florida by Pedro Menéndez. Menéndez had just destroyed a nearby Huguenot settlement (in the future South Carolina), where he hanged America’s first religious exiles ‘as Lutherans’. Three years later the Huguenots’ compatriot, Dominique de Gourgues, arrived on the same spot and hanged the Spanish garrison ‘as robbers and murderers’. Western civilization was on the move.
The Dutch and the English were relative latecomers to colonization, but in the late sixteenth century they both began to reap its benefits. Having founded Batavia in Java in 1597, the Dutch set out to wrest the East Indies from the Portuguese. The English colony of Virginia, discovered in 1598, received its first successful settlement at Jamestown in 1607. ‘The
Mayflower
, carrying 120 puritan ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ and their families, landed in their Plymouth Colony on 11 (21) December 1620. The Massachusetts Bay Colony followed ten years later. Although religious refugees from England, they did not prove tolerant. The colony of Rhode Island (1636) was founded by dissenters expelled from Massachusetts. By that time the existence of a worldwide network of European colonies, and their seaborne lines of communication, was an established fact.
The international sea trade multiplied by leaps and bounds. To the west, the transatlantic route was long dominated by Spain. By 1600, 200 ships a year entered Seville from the New World. In the peak decade of 1591–1600,19 million grams of gold and nearly 3 billion grams of silver came with them. The southerly route via the Cape of Good Hope was worked first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch, who also provided the main commercial link between the North Sea and the Mediterranean. To the east, the Dutch also pioneered a huge trade in Baltic grain. The growing demand for food in West European cities was met by the growing capacity of the Polish producers to supply. This Baltic grain trade reached its peak in 1618, when 118,000
lasts
or ‘boatloads’ left Danzig for Amsterdam. The English trade in cloth to the Low Countries had reached record levels somewhat earlier, in 1550. English adventurers launched a Muscovy Company (1565), a Levant Company (1581), and the East India Company (1600).
The nexus of all these activities was located in the Low Countries. Antwerp, which was the main entrepôt of both the Spanish and the English trade, reigned supreme until the crash of 1557–60; thereafter the focus moved to Amsterdam. The year 1602, which saw the foundation both of the Dutch East India Company and of the world’s first stock exchange in Amsterdam, can be taken to mark a new era in commercial history,
[INFANTA]
As overseas trade expanded, Europe received a wide range of new staple foods, as well as exotic ‘colonial’ products including pepper, coffee, cocoa, sugar, and tobacco. Europe’s diet, cuisine, and palate were never the same again. The haricot bean, which was first recorded in France in 1542, the tomato, which spread far and wide via Italy in the same period, and the capsicum pepper, which was grown throughout the Balkans, were all American in origin.
INFANTA
I
N
1572 Martin de Voos painted a family portrait for Antoon Anselme, an I Antwerp magistrate. He portrayed the husband and wife seated at a table, one holding their son and the other their daughter. The picture is surmounted by a scrolled inscription which announces that the master of the house was born on 9 February 1536, his wife, Johanna Hooftmans, on 16 December 1545, their son, Aegidius, on 21 August 1565, and their daughter, Johanna, on 26 September 1566. It illustrates the emergence of the modern concept of the family made up of distinct individuals, both children and adults.
1
In 1579 Sanchez Coello painted a portrait of the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain, aged thirteen. She was the complete little lady, resplendent in jewelled headdress, curled hair, high ruff, formal gown, and ringed fingers. The tradition would last in the Spanish court until the 1650s, and the famous series by Velazquez of another Infanta, Margharita of Austria, daughter of Philip IV. Once again, the exquisite seven- or eight-year old is shown as a lady in miniature, dressed in corset and crinoline, and topped by the ringlets of a lady’s coiffure. Children were still thought of as persons of lesser stature, not fully grown, but not qualitatively different from their parents.
2
(See Plate 51.)
In earlier times, neither the nuclear family nor the age of childhood had been recognized as distinct entities. All generations lived together in large households. Children passed straight from swaddling clothes into adult dress. They participated in all the household’s games and activities. In all but the richest classes, they had little or no schooling; if they were taught at all, they were taught together. They were usually put out to work as domestics or apprentices at the age of seven or eight. They died in such numbers that everyone had the greatest incentive for them to grow up fast. Families existed, but they ‘existed in silence’. Childhood, too, existed; but it was granted no special status, and it was ended as soon as possible.
The ‘discovery of childhood’ was a process which took shape between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It can be traced in the dress and iconography of the times, in the invention of toys, games, and pastimes specifically for children, in changing morals and manners; above all, in a radical new approach to education.
Medieval children had largely learned by living, eating, and sleeping with their elders, all of whose activities they observed at first hand. They were not isolated or protected from the adult world. Only boys from higher society attended school, and they did so in all-purpose, all-age groups. One of the earliest instances of a school being divided into classes was recorded at St Paul’s School in London in 1519. With age-grouping, and
the extension of schooling, came a great increase in imposed discipline. Christian morality, codes of conduct, and humiliating punishments were imposed from above. Schoolboys were the first to be introduced to a prolonged and graduated progression towards adulthood. Girls, sometimes married as early as thirteen, were much more likely to miss out.
Childhood implies innocence. Yet immodesty in children, and in relationships with them, had long been taken as natural. The boyhood conduct of Louis XIII (b. 1601) was observed in every detail by the court physician, Dr Héroard. The Dauphin was not reprimanded for groping his governess in bed, for instance, nor for showing off his first erections, which went up and down ‘like a drawbridge’. Married at fourteen, he was placed in the nuptial bed by his mother, to whom he returned ‘after about an hour and performing twice’, ‘with his cock all red’.
3
The ‘ages of Man’, as summarized by the soliloquy in
As You Like It
, clearly constituted a well-formed scheme by Shakespeare’s time. But every century has made its contribution to generational concepts. If childhood was discovered in early modern Europe, adolescence was discovered by the Romantics, after Goethe’s Werther, and ‘senior citizens’ by the post-industrial era.
Europe’s intercourse with America, heretofore a largely hermetic ecological zone, led to a vast Exchange of people, diseases, plants, and animals. This ‘Columbian Exchange’ worked decidedly in Europe’s favour. European colonists braved hardship and deprivation, and in some places faced hostile ‘Indians’. But their losses were minuscule compared to the genocidal casualties which they and their firearms inflicted. They brought some benefits, but with them depopulation and despoliation on a grand scale. Europe received syphilis; but its ravages were not to be compared to the pandemics of smallpox, pleurisy, and typhus which literally decimated the native Americans. The Europeans re-introduced horses; in return they received two foods of capital importance, potatoes and maize, as well as the turkey, the most substantial and nutritious of domestic poultry. Potatoes were adopted in Ireland at an early date, and moved steadily across northern Europe, becoming the staple of Germany, Poland, and Russia. Maize, which was variously known as ‘American corn’ and ‘American fallow’, enriched exhausted soil and greatly facilitated both crop rotation and livestock farming. It was well established in the Po valley in the sixteenth century. It was inhibited from crossing the Alps until climatic conditions improved some hundred years later, but its long-term impact was enormous. There is good reason to count American additions to the food supply as one of the major factors underlying the dramatic growth of Europe’s population at the end of the early modern period.
23
[SYPHILUS]
Descriptions of the arrival of Europeans in America have recently undergone fundamental revision. They have been ‘decolumbianized’. What was once ‘the discovery’ is now called an ‘encounter’ or a ‘meeting of cultures’.
24
It would be better to be honest and call it a conquest. Columbus, too, has been downgraded. The primacy of his voyages has been handed to Vikings or Irishmen, or even to a Welshman in a coracle. His landing on San Salvador (Watling Island) has been relocated to Samana Cay in the Bahamas.
25
The ‘peerless navigator’ is now said to have been a ruthless and rapacious ‘colonialist pirate’, alternatively a quixotic Jew sailing in search of the lost tribes of Israel.
26
He is even said to have heard about the other continent from American women already in Europe.
27
The sources for Columbus’s activities are meagre, the myths abundant.
28
The real discoverers of America are those who went in the steps of the
conquistadores
, often friars like Bernardino de Sahagún, ‘the world’s first-anthropologist’, and who tried to understand what was happening.
29
Intercourse with America had a profound impact on European culture. A gulf began to open between those countries which had ready access to the New World and those which did not. ‘Philosophy is born of the merchant. Science is born of commerce. Henceforth, Europe is almost cut into two. The West is preoccupied with the sea. The East is preoccupied with itself.’
30
