A Short History of the World

by Christopher Lascelles

  While the printing press made the Renaissance, its invention also happened to coincide with a period of relative peace in Europe. The Hundred Years War between France and England had ended in 1453 – coincidentally the same year as the fall of Constantinople – and the conflict between Muslims and Christians in present-day Spain59 had ended in favour of the Christians. Trade and agriculture, so long disrupted, first by the Barbarian invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries and then by the hostility between Christianity and Islam, flourished again and a feudalistic European society was slowly replaced by a society driven by trade.

  The Italians, and the Florentines and Venetians in particular, took advantage of their location between East and West to accumulate huge wealth. A life of business and politics became as respected as a life in the Church. Many classical ideas, which had flown eastward with the fall of Rome a thousand years earlier, returned to Europe and led to a revival in the intellectual and artistic appreciation of Greco-Roman culture. Non-religious themes were no longer frowned upon and rich patrons bankrolled architecture and buildings, the likes of which no one had seen since Roman times. Great families such as the Medici became renowned as great patrons of the arts, for which the Renaissance is so famous; Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are just two of the brightest stars in a constellation of artists that benefited from them and other rich patrons during this time. Tremendous advances were also made in the fields of mathematics, medicine, engineering, and architecture.

  The Spice Trade

  Europeans had been trading with the East for centuries, generally through Arab and Indian intermediaries, selling bulk goods such as timber, glassware, soap, paper, copper and salt in return for silk, incense and spices. Silk was a luxury compared to the coarse clothes of the time, incense was used to hide the smells of a society unaccustomed to hygiene, and spices (cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and black pepper) were used to make food taste better, to preserve it and to hide the smell of spoiling meat; low food supply and a lack of grain to feed animals through the winter months meant that animals were routinely slaughtered in autumn; with no ice available, the use of pepper was one way in which meat could be preserved.

  Cloves were specifically prized by Europeans for medicinal purposes, with some doctors even suggesting that nutmeg could protect against the plague. As a result, at one point nutmeg was worth more than its weight in gold and caused people to risk their lives to import it. Pepper grew predominantly in India, with nutmeg and cloves only growing in one place on earth: on a few small islands called the Moluccas (in present-day Indonesia), north-west of present-day New Guinea. These islands became known as the Spice Islands, and the efforts of European nations to find a westerly route to them would fundamentally affect the future of the world.

  The Age of Exploration (1450-1600)

  The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 acted as a key driver for European exploration. Overland routes into Persia, Central Asia and China were lengthy, dangerous and already expensive thanks to all the middlemen involved. They were now taxed even further.

  Long since addicted to silk and spices, and jealous of the riches of Venice and other Italian cities that had benefited from this trade, the Portuguese sought to develop a sea route to the East around the continent of Africa. In this way they looked both to bypass the Ottoman taxes and to undercut the Italian trade.

  The other impetus to exploration came from Africa itself. The Portuguese needed gold to pay for their imports from the East, but the main European access to gold came from Africa via the trans-Sahara caravan routes. Several African kingdoms, such as Ghana, had grown fabulously wealthy on the back of this trade and the Portuguese wanted to establish sea routes down the coast of Africa in order to obtain the gold at its source.

  Working their way down the African coast, they rapidly proved that such small expeditions could be successful and profitable. The son of the king of Portugal, Prince Henry (aka the Navigator), dreamt of an ocean route to the Spice Islands and became a famous patron of the maritime sciences. In addition to funding voyages of discovery, he established a school of seamanship in southern Portugal where mapmakers, geographers, astronomers and navigators could discuss and improve upon the latest maritime technology.

  One of the developments that stemmed from this initiative was that of the construction of the caravel, a new type of ship that could travel faster and carry larger cargoes. Thanks to the design of its sails, it was able to sail closer to the wind, meaning that it became much easier to sail in a straighter line as opposed to the constant zigzagging required to catch the wind. This saved huge amounts of time and the new design came to play a major part in the voyages of discovery of the 15th century; indeed two of the three boats used by Christopher Columbus were caravels.

  Prince Henry died in 1460 but his son, King João, continued the patronage and in 1486 sent Bartolemeu Dias to lead an expedition around the southern end of Africa. Amongst other orders, Dias was to try to make contact with the legendary Christian African king, Prester John, and request his help in overcoming Muslim dominance of the Indian Ocean trade. Prester John was never found, of course, as he never existed, but Dias returned to Lisbon 16 months later having successfully completed the first part of his mission. Dias named the tip of Africa ‘Cabo das Tormentas’, or ‘the Cape of Storms’, in memory of the storms he had experienced. The name was changed – allegedly by the king – to Cabo da Boa Esperança, or the ‘Cape of Good Hope’, as he was hopeful, but not sure, that Dias had found a way to the East.

  By rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Dias proved that the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were not landlocked, as many European geographers of the time thought, and showed that a sea route to India might indeed be feasible. This was big news, and greatly encouraged those who looked for a sea route to the East. However, before a further voyage could take place, some momentous news came from the court of the king and queen of Spain: an Italian sailor they had sponsored had allegedly found a route to the Orient by sailing west across the Atlantic. We now know that he had discovered the Americas.

  Christopher Columbus (AD 1451–1506)

  Christopher Columbus had been born in the seaport of Genoa in Italy but moved to Portugal in his twenties, where he helped his brother with his map-making business. Engrossed by the adventures of Marco Polo, it was here that he began to develop the idea that not only could he reach the Far East by sailing west, but also that this journey could be even shorter than the overland trade route.

  The courts of Portugal, France and England all refused to sponsor his trip. The rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Dias may have eliminated the need for a western route in the eyes of Portugal, while England and France were simply not forthcoming with help. After much effort to raise the sponsorship he needed, he was introduced to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of a newly united Spain. Both were busy with the expensive task of trying to win the Iberian peninsula back from the Moors at the end of a long struggle termed the ‘Reconquista’, or ‘re-conquest’. Columbus informed them that a westerly route would allow Spain entry into the lucrative spice trade, hitherto monopolised by the Italians, and bring great riches.

  Sensing victory over the Moors and eventually realising the size of the opportunity presented by Columbus, Ferdinand and Isabella provided him with resources with which to carry out the voyage. And so, in August 1492, Columbus set sail from Spain with three ships and a crew of 90. Massively underestimating the size of the globe, due partially to map makers having exaggerated the size of Asia following the publication of Marco Polo’s writings, it took two whole months before land was sighted. The first land to be seen was one of the islands now known as the Bahamas. Columbus called it San Salvador in recognition of a safe crossing and called the natives Indians, believing he had reached the Indies. Further complicating matters, he believed Cuba was Japan, or possibly even China.

  Returning to Spain with small traces of gold, a few Indians and some parrots to prove that he had found land, Col
umbus was paid handsomely and appointed Admiral of the Seas and Viceroy and Governor of the Indies – titles he had requested upon his departure. News of the discovery spread rapidly thanks to the printing press, and contributed greatly to the Renaissance spirit of questioning long-held assumptions about the world.

  Columbus returned three more times to America. During the second voyage between 1493 and 1496, a settlement was founded, with Columbus serving as its governor. It became Santo-Domingo, capital of the present-day Dominican Republic. Yet his skills as an administrator were lacking to the extent that, when he returned there on his third trip in 1498, he needed to ask Spain for assistance in governing the settlement. Instead of sending help they sent a new governor who promptly arrested Columbus, along with his two brothers, and sent him back to Spain in chains. When he was finally released, Queen Isabella agreed to fund his fourth voyage.

  When Columbus died in 1506, he still believed that he had reached Asia. What’s more, although he landed on the South American mainland on his fourth voyage, he never actually set foot on the North American mainland; instead, this honour went to Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), an Italian working under the patronage of King Henry VII of England, in 1497. Even Caboto initially believed the land was Asia.

  It was an Italian named Amerigo Vespucci, working for Spain and Portugal during voyages undertaken between 1499 and 1502, who established that Columbus had reached a new continent and it was the feminised Latin version of his name60 that was subsequently written on a new map of the world in 1507. Only then did the first recognisable modern image of the planet begin to emerge; up until this point, people were still relying on knowledge from the ancient Greeks for their understanding of geography.

  Why was it the Westerners who sought a path to the East in the age of exploration, rather than the Easterners who sought a path to the West? One of the answers with regard to the Chinese was that their ministers distrusted change after centuries of war against foreign invaders. Moreover, Easterners had comparatively little incentive to go either east or west; the West had few innovations of interest and little to offer aside from less-advanced minor kingdoms, while the seemingly empty Pacific was hardly enticing with so much trade already existing in the Indian Ocean. They missed their opportunity.

  The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)

  The discoveries of Columbus came as momentous news not only to the Spanish but also to the Portuguese, who until this point had had no rival in maritime exploration. They immediately became concerned that Spain would challenge Portugal to future territorial claims and, as a result, refused to recognise the Spanish claim to the new lands. The corrupt Spanish Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, offered to mediate. In 1493 he issued a decree establishing an imaginary line through the mid-Atlantic to the west of the coast of north-west Africa, and to the east of the new lands that Columbus had claimed for Spain. Any newly discovered lands to the east would belong to Portugal and those to the west to Spain. Following further exploration, the Portuguese grew dissatisfied with the agreement, partially because they claimed that their ships needed to travel further into the Atlantic in order to pick up favourable winds to take them south and east. As a result, in June 1494, in the sleepy Spanish town of Tordesillas, the line was renegotiated and re-established another 1300 km to the west.

  The Treaty divided the world between the two greatest sea powers of the time. Spain gained most of the Americas, with the exception of the easternmost part of Brazil, which was allocated to Portugal after it was discovered in 1500 by the Portuguese sailor, Pedro Cabral; this is the reason why Portuguese is spoken in Brazil as opposed to Spanish elsewhere on the Southern American continent. Portugal retained control of the possible sea route to India. The Treaty was ignored by the northern European powers; who was the Pope, they asked, to allocate land to specific countries? Nevertheless, in effect, the treaty gave Spain a new empire that was to have momentous consequences for the unfolding history of Europe and the Americas.

  In the West, a race of exploration began as soon as Columbus returned from his first voyage, with the Portuguese increasingly focused on establishing a maritime route to the East. Vasco da Gama was appointed to lead an expedition to complete the voyage to India that Dias had begun ten years earlier.

  With the help of Arab navigators whom he picked up on the east coast of Africa, da Gama landed at Calicut on the Indian coast in 1498. Despite an extremely difficult and lengthy return journey in which over half his crew died from scurvy, hunger and disease, he managed to bring back some spices, causing huge excitement in Lisbon. By the time he returned, he had been away for more than two years and had travelled through more than 24,000 miles of open seas. Da Gama was famous; he had discovered a sea route to India. Perhaps Spain would not be such a threat after all?

  Shortly after da Gama’s return, a second voyage involving more ships and over 1,000 men was dispatched, this time under the leadership of Pedro Cabral. Dias also took part in this journey, but perished in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, which he had been the first to round. Cabral’s journey was to see the beginning of the brutality that marked the violent European takeover of the Spice Islands. Unsettled by the thought of the loss of their trade to Europeans, some Muslim traders opened fire, killing a number of Cabral’s men. In response to this, Cabral took bloody revenge, killing several hundred Muslim traders. Da Gama, who followed with another expedition the following year, did not act any nobler, robbing and murdering wherever and whenever he deemed it necessary. This caused da Gama – and by association the Portuguese – to be deeply hated by the people of the East Indies. Little did they know that the Dutch, whom they would welcome with open arms a few years later, would be equally, if not more, brutal.

  Da Gama’s remarkable accomplishment of discovering the long sought-after sea-route to India had a huge effect in the short term by changing the balance of power in Europe. In the West, Venice and northern Italy lost their monopoly on trade with the Orient, which caused their slow stagnation. The Italians sponsored their own sea-going expeditions but evidently with little success. In the East, the overland trade routes of the Arabs and Turks declined in importance, which aided the slow but inexorable decline of the Ottoman Empire.

  The Spanish, however, did not just sit still. A young Charles I of Spain sponsored a westward expedition by Ferdinand Magellan, having been convinced by him that, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Spice Islands were the property of Spain, not Portugal. By 1507 it had become clear that America was not Asia and that the Indies lay on the other side of the continent through un-navigated waters. Numerous expeditions had been sent in the early 16th century to find a way through but they had all been unsuccessful; if Magellan found a way through, Spain would become rich. As such, an expedition under his leadership was sponsored by Charles I and set sail in 1519.

  After a tempestuous voyage down the east coast of South America, a passage of water was spotted in October 1520 that led to the calm waters of another ocean. Magellan named the new ocean ‘Mar Pacifico’ as it was so peaceful compared to the Atlantic. He then set sail to find the Spice Islands, but just as Columbus had underestimated the size of the Atlantic Ocean, so Magellan underestimated the size of the Pacific, which is twice the size of the Atlantic. Not for another 14 weeks did they reach present-day Guam, a small island in the Pacific from where they sailed on to the Philippines. It was here, that after all he had gone through, Magellan was killed after having become involved in a battle between local chieftains.

  One ship from the fleet,61 captained by Juan Sebastian del Cano, did manage to reach Spain in September 1522, having completed the first ever circumnavigation of the globe. Barely one-tenth of the men who had embarked on the trip returned, but return they did, with 26 tonnes of cloves that paid for the entire expedition. Del Cano achieved fame for the first circumnavigation of the world, but since Magellan had visited south-east Asia on a previous expedition, he gets the credit today for being the first man to go all the way around the world,
albeit in two separate voyages. An epic tale of endurance, and one of the greatest adventures in the history of navigation, the voyage showed the true scale of our planet for the first time, and proved that it was possible to sail around the world.

  The Spanish immediately claimed the Spice Islands, a claim which was fiercely contested by the Portuguese who paid the Spanish a huge quantity of gold to relinquish their claim after an amendment was made to the Treaty of Tordesillas. Portugal’s domination of trade in the Indian Ocean was confirmed and, as consolation, Spain was given the rights to trade in the Philippines. The two countries dominated trade in the area until other European powers were able to develop their navies and merchant fleets a hundred or so years later.

  Around this time, two things happened in Europe that were to have huge and lasting consequences for the history of Europe and, by association, for the world: first, in 1517, the German monk, Martin Luther, shocked by what he had seen on a journey to Rome, wrote a number of criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church that launched one of the biggest revolutions in European history. Second, in 1519, the deeply Catholic Charles I of Spain inherited the Habsburg lands and became Charles V, emperor of the largest western empire since Roman times.

  The European Reformation (1517-1598)

  Luther was not the first man to challenge the teachings of the Church. Preachers such as John Wycliffe of England and Jan Hus of Bohemia had already stated that people had the right to read the Bible and to interpret it for themselves. They had been persecuted by the Church as a result. The Church had done itself no favours during the previous centuries, regularly demanding money from its flock and growing rich and lazy on the proceeds, so when the general population in Europe became more urbanised and educated, they began to resent the demands of the clergy.