by Peter Watson
Some scholars now believe that the sophistication of textiles in Mesoamerica ‘may represent as complex a system of knowledge as metallurgy in Europe’. After battle, cloth was often demanded as tribute, and cotton slings were used in war.98 Llamas and alpacas were each domesticated and served both as beasts of burden and as sources of wool. Fabric may even have been more important than ceramics as storage receptacles. ‘The finest garments were made from thread with a diameter of 1/125 of an inch, and some 125 separate shades and tints have been identified in Incan textiles. All of the major weaving techniques known in Europe in 1492 were known to the Incas–tapestry, brocade, gauze, and they also had an additional method, known as interlocking warp.’ 99
Although the New World had not domesticated many animals by 1492, a vast number of plants had been brought under control–including many unknown to Europeans at the time but which have since become familiar: maize, white and sweet potato, cacao, pumpkins, peanuts, avocado, tomato, pineapple, tobacco and chilli peppers. In the Andes there were already 3,000 different varieties of potato.100 The New World civilisations were well aware of the medicinal use of plants. For example, Aspilia was known to act like an antibiotic, and stoneseed, used by women of the Paiute tribe as a contraceptive, has since been found to inhibit gonadotrophins in mice. The tlepatli, understood in Aztec medicine to be a diuretic and as useful in gangrene treatment, has been found to contain plumbagin, an anti-bacterial agent, effective against staphylococcus.101 However, native Americans did not have the concept of chemistry, as such. For them, the medicinal power of plants was a spiritual matter.
There was no ‘art’ in the New World, not in the ‘art for art’s sake’ sense, and none of the indigenous languages had a word for art (or religion, come to that).102 This was because every carved object, say, every song or dance, had an intensely practical purpose and couldn’t be conceived without that purpose. Aztec sculptures were sometimes inscribed on the side that was never seen but that didn’t matter because they had a symbolic meaning which was more important than their appearance. There was, in other words, no aesthetics as such, only function, which gave something its meaning.103 For this reason, there was hardly any instrumental music anywhere on the continent, because, in the normal course of events, song, dance and music went together in ritual. It was only in the more developed civilisations of Mesoamerica that professionalisation of the arts occurred. And it was only here that there was a division, as there was in Europe, into the high arts and the folk arts.104 As a result, it was only in these civilisations that artists enjoyed high prestige–everywhere else all people were believed to have artistic powers to some degree. In the Inca empire certain specialisations, such as silversmiths and tapestry-weavers, were hereditary servants of the government and as such exempt from taxes.105 To make matters even more complicated, astrology–or magic–came into play. The Aztecs, for example, believed that people born under the sign of xochitl, ‘flower’, were fated to become artisans or entertainers.106 The function of the artist also overlapped with creation myths. One interesting way these myths differed in the New World is that, instead of imagining that God had created a perfect world, which it was the task of scholars, theologians and artists to understand, the New World natives believed it had been created imperfectly and that it was the job of the artist to improve the world.107 The Incas believed that the first men had been giants, fashioned from stone. But the Great Lord, Wiracoqa, was unhappy with his work and turned them back to stone–these were the giant statues the Incas worshipped. Then Wiracoqa created a second race of man, the same size as himself (‘in his own image’).108 Mayan sculptors were not allowed to have sex while carving their works, but they did sprinkle their own blood on their carvings because this was believed to make them holy: as with Renaissance man, these artists were divine. Musical instruments were also divine for the Mayans and the carvers would pray while fashioning them and rub them with alcohol so they would be ‘content, well-tuned and produce fine sound’.109 Artists did not sign their works, even in those civilisations where they were professional artists, and artists never became famous as in Europe. The only exception was poetry, where poets who belonged to the nobility might be remembered long after their death. Nezahualcoyotl was remembered as ‘the poet king’ but even here it was his status as a king that caused him to achieve fame, as much as his prowess as a poet.110
Such writing systems as existed in the New World were in decline by 1492, and it is unlikely that many of the inscriptions of the classical period (AD 100–900) could still be understood.111 Aztec and Mixtec writing was largely pictographic and scribes, in addition to being adept at carving the characters, also had to memorise the oral commentaries that accompanied the texts (oral delivery remained always the dominant form). Such codices as we possess concern the mythic past of the tribe and would have formed the central element in ritual where scribes added their commentaries. Those, of course, have been lost. The Aztecs were also among a few pre-Columbian peoples who consciously collected foreign and ancient art–in particular Olmec objects. This appears to confirm that the Aztecs at least had an interest in the past and perhaps some idea that the Olmec civilisation was the ‘mother culture’ of Mesoamerica.112
What did the Indians themselves make of the invasion? Some of the Indian nations had sacred books. The best-known of these was the Popul Vuh, a Quiché text that has been described as the equivalent of the Old Testament or the Sanskrit Vedas. Equally interesting, if less known and more apposite to our purpose, is the Annals of the Cakchiquels. This latter nation, like the Quichés, had a system of dual monarchy, a king and vice-king drawn from two royal lineages and known as Ahpo Zotzil and Ahpo Xahil. After the Spanish conquest, survivors of the Xahil family wrote down Cakchiquel history and then added to it, in a form of journal, into the seventeenth century. This account is surprisingly balanced. It describes a holocaust but also praises Spaniards who tried to help the Indians. Among the events described are an outbreak of plague in 1604, when the writer dies and another picks up his pen, an exchange of ambassadors, and genealogies. Similar documents were created by the Mayans, the Books of Chilam Balam, written in the Mayan language but using Spanish letters. These books were deliberately obscure, full of puns and riddles, so that outsiders could not understand them. They were also added to until the nineteenth century: every Mayan town had its own copy and they were expanded locally. The Books of Chilam Balam viewed the invasion as a battle of calendars, or chronologies. The Spanish had brought with them their own brand of time–rather crude to the Mayan way of thinking–and tried to impose it on the indigenous people. So for the Mayans this was the chief battle of ideas, the way the rival religious systems were conceived–as a contest over time.113
We should briefly consider what the pre-Columbians lacked. The main absence, undoubtedly, was the wheel. This was also the most surprising, in view of the fact that ball games were played everywhere in the Americas and had religious significance. Draft animals were also conspicuous by their absence, as was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, though the llama was domesticated. Also absent were large sailing vessels, and this may have had something to do with the vast oceans that surrounded the Americas. But it did mean that, alongside the lack of the wheel, native Americans remained more localised, and were much less travelled, than Europeans. Other ideas or inventions missing from pre-Columbian societies were coined money, ethical monotheism, the idea of the experiment and, in general, writing. There were no kilns–and therefore no glazed pottery, and no stringed instruments. Several of these missing elements–draft animals, large sailing vessels, writing, coined money–would all have limited economic development, in particular trade and the accumulation of surpluses. We have already seen that what surpluses were produced were as often as not dissipated in elaborate rituals for the dead and this difference in economic development, together with the lack of ethical monotheism and the absence of experimentation, are perhaps the three most important ways in which the Old W
orld and the New differed.
In the realm of ideas, the discovery of America may have had an effect on the Catholic Counter-Reformation going on at much the same time, in that it robbed the Catholics of some of their most energetic and talented evangelists. By the same token, the Roman church had little say in what went on in America (which was largely ignored in the Council of Trent) and, as John Elliott says, one effect of this was to enhance the authority of the Spanish Crown, ‘both among its own subjects and in its relations with the church’. More than one historian, from contemporary writers to those of our own day, have speculated on whether the ‘enterprise of the Indies’ siphoned off the more radical population, increasing authoritarianism and conservatism among those who remained.
The discoveries in America certainly had an economic impact, which in turn produced a revolution in ideas. Between 1521 and 1544, for example, the mines in the Habsburg territories produced four times as much silver as the whole of America. But between 1545 and the late 1550s these figures were reversed, and resulted in a decisive shift in economic power in those years, with the centre of economic gravity moving away from Germany and the Netherlands to the Iberian peninsula.114 John Elliott says that, in the last half of the sixteenth century, ‘it is…legitimate to speak of an Atlantic economy’.115 The political impact meant that Spain was on the rise, but so was Europe overall as against her traditional enemy–Islam. (It was only now that the Muslim world began to show any curiosity about the historical reasons for the rise of Spanish power.116)
The rise of Spain, and the reasons for it, naturally attracted attention elsewhere, and it is true to say that from this moment dates the realisation that sea power would be of the greatest importance in the politics of the future, that Spain’s power could be checked by interrupting the gold and silver on its way to Europe and that, in a world divided by religion–Protestant and Catholic–the New World was the next battleground. In a sense, global politics began then.117
The developing battle for America exacerbated the growing nationalism of the sixteenth century and ‘Black Legends’ grew up, in regard to the Spanish in particular and their alleged atrocities (on one estimate they had massacred 20 million Indians).118 But in any case, more and more Spaniards came to doubt the value of the Indies, and there emerged in Spain what has been called an ‘anti-bullionist sentiment’, which was suspicious of the moral consequences of sudden riches. The rival view was that true riches lay in trade, agriculture and industry, where wealth was truly earned and productively used.119
But the scramble for America did lead in time to the rudiments of international law. The continent itself was just too large for one country to control all of it, and the Spanish rejection of papal authority in the opening-up of the New World had a knock-on effect on attitudes to authority in general. Many people, as we have seen, thought that the Indians were entirely capable of governing themselves and that their freedom and autonomy should be respected. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Alfonso de Castro argued that the oceans could not be the preserve of any one nation, and with this as background Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist and statesman, developed his theoretical structure for the conduct of international relations. The New World thus became part of Europe’s emerging structure of states and the agreements between them. It is fair to say that the conquest of America hastened and perhaps crystallised the awareness of the links between resources, geography, population and trade patterns as a guide to international power.
Earl J. Hamilton, in a famous essay, ‘American treasure and the rise of capitalism’, examined various factors that might have accounted for the phenomenon–the rise of nation states, war, the rise of Protestantism–and concluded that the discovery of America, and in particular of American silver, was the prime driving force behind European capital formation. ‘No other period in history has witnessed so great a proportional increase in the production of the precious metals as occurred in the wake of the Mexican and Peruvian conquests.’120 This is, in effect, a final element in the rise of Europe, consolidating earlier changes discussed in Chapter 15. The argument was built on and expanded by the Texan historian Walter Prescott Webb, who argued in The Great Frontier (1953) that the discovery of America ‘decisively altered the ratio between the three factors of population, land and capital in such a way as to create boom conditions’.121 In 1500 the population density of Europe was, he said, roughly speaking twenty-seven people per square mile. The discovery of America opened up an additional twenty million square miles which wasn’t finally filled until around 1900. Webb concluded therefore that the years 1500–1900 were unique in history, ‘the period in which the Great Frontier of America shapes and transforms Western civilisation’. As Europe moved once more to cities, the opening up of the frontier provided an opposing dynamic.122
In the Middle Ages a measure of stability had been achieved between the coinages of Christendom and the Islamic world, one producing silver, the other gold. But the discovery of America upset this balance: between 1500 and 1650 approximately 180 tons of gold were sent to Europe and 16,000 tons of silver. This produced a revolution in prices, which began in Spain and then spread, encouraging capital formation for those who were part of the new enterprise but pushing up prices fivefold in the sixteenth century, sparking inflation, social unrest and social change. Here too there were grounds for worry about the ‘morally harmful effects of wealth’.123 Garcilaso de la Vega was just one who was not convinced by the influx of precious metals. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, he wrote that ‘this flood of riches has done more harm than good, since wealth commonly produced vice rather than virtue, inclining its possessors to pride, ambition, gluttony and voluptuousness…[My] conclusion is that the riches of the New World, properly understood, have not increased the volume of useful things necessary for human life, such as food and clothing, but have made them scarcer and rendered men effeminate in their power of understanding and in their bodies, dress, and customs, and that they lived more happily and were more feared by the rest of the world with what they had formerly.’124 Earl Hamilton flatly disagreed, arguing that capitalism was consolidated by the lag between the rise in prices and the rise in wages. This is not a debate that is anywhere near settled–the issue is complex and there are holes in most of the theories, but there can be little doubt that the opening-up of America contained great opportunities for vast fortunes to be made and that social inequalities in wealth sharpened markedly in Europe at this time.
A final factor was population. The catastrophic decline in the Indian population, partly because of Spanish cruelty, partly because of imported disease, affected the labour supply, while some 200,000 Spaniards may have emigrated to America during the sixteenth century. It seems likely that they were above average in intelligence, ability and energy, so that they may well have produced a deleterious effect on the genetic quality of the population left in Spain (but then again monies would have been remitted home by a good proportion of these emigrants).
The impact of the discovery of America on Europe, and the rest of the world, has still not been fully assessed and perhaps it never can be, because it was so profound, far-reaching and, as Montaigne put it, ‘topsyturvying’. But it would not be long before the sensible words of Garcilaso took over: ‘There is only one world,’ he wrote, ‘and although we speak of the Old World and the New, this is because the latter was lately discovered by us, and not because there are two.’125
22
History Heads North: the Intellectual Impact of Protestantism
To Chapter 22 Notes and References
‘Peter and Paul had lived in penury, but the popes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lived like Roman emperors.’ In 1502, according to a parliamentary estimate, the Catholic Church owned 75 per cent of all the money in France.1 In Germany, twenty years later, the Diet of Nuremberg calculated that the church there owned 50 per cent of the wealth in Germany. Such massive riches brought certain ‘privileges’. In England, priests ro
utinely propositioned women entering the confessional box: absolution was offered in exchange for sex.2 William Manchester quotes a statistic that, in Norfolk, Ripton and Lambeth in England, 23 per cent of the men indicted for sex crimes against women were clerics, who comprised less than 2 per cent of the population. The abbot of St Albans was accused of ‘simony, usury, embezzlement and living publicly and continuously with harlots and mistresses within the precincts of the monastery.’ The most widespread corrupt practice was the sale of indulgences. There was a special office of quaestiarii, or pardoners, who had the pope’s authority to issue indulgences. As early as 1450, Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford University, remarked that ‘sinners say nowadays: “I care not how many evils I do in God’s sight, for I can easily get plenary remission of all guilt and penalty by an absolution and indulgence granted me by the pope, whose written grant I have bought for four or six pence”.’ He was exaggerating–other accounts tell of indulgences being sold for ‘two pence, sometimes for a draught of wine or beer…or even for the hire of a harlot or for carnal love’. John Colet, dean of St Paul’s in the early sixteenth century, was not the only one to complain that the behaviour of the quaestiarii, and the hierarchy behind them, had deformed the church, so that it was now no more than a ‘money machine’.3
