Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  Mid-fifteenth-century Europe was a world where money counted. Christians were not supposed to trade with “infidels,” but permission to do so was usually secured by the payment of indulgences to Rome, a small tax that many merchants were prepared to pay. Mehmet’s gigantic cannon, which had demolished part of Constantinople’s triple walls, had been provided by a Hungarian engineer called Urban—Hungary was by then one of Europe’s main exporters of iron and copper. Urban had originally offered it to Constantine, but in the end Mehmet was prepared to pay four times as much.

  Even the Genoese Christian trading outpost of Pera, on the other side of the Golden Horn—and directly under the trajectory of the cannon fire from the Turkish side—was so determined to carry on the business of business that they insisted on their own neutrality. When one cannon ball accidentally sank a Genoese ship moored there, the merchants had protested to the sultan that they were nonaligned in his territorial dispute with Constantine. The pleas of Pope Nicholas V, the most energetic campaigner for a “crusade” to rescue the easternmost Christian city, had been heard with some skepticism because he still owed large sums to Venetian bankers for the last expedition in 1444. Far from joining in a new crusade, Venetian ambassadors settled down to negotiate a peace treaty and customs deal with Mehmet within months of the fall of Constantinople, to make sure the loss of the Christian city was no impediment to business.

  The Ottoman advance was all very well, but far more important to the bickering and divided kingdoms of western Europe, and especially the city states of Italy, was trade. The trading system had recovered its momentum after the Black Death a century earlier, though labor was still in short supply and vast acres of agricultural land had simply reverted to forest. The big-name trading companies and bankers of Europe—Fugger of Germany, Medici of Florence—had their representatives all over the known world, in Trebizond, Cyprus, Crete, Valencia, Damascus, Beirut, and Tunis as well as London, Amsterdam, and even Novgorod. This progress was fueled by new bills of exchange in different currencies, the transmission of money by letter to foreign ports, and the underwriting of cargoes, all tracked by new systems of double entry bookkeeping to keep track of debits and credits, and by the increasing availability of loan money.

  Like trading with the enemy, charging interest on loans was technically condemned by the church. In practice, as long as the lender was sharing some of the risk, this was no longer considered usury. And in any case, the popes were among the most indebted of all Europe’s rulers. When Pope Paul II died in 1471, he owed so much that his successor had to appoint a team of cardinals to pay off the money by selling Paul’s personal collection of precious gems and paintings. This susceptibility to borrowing was why, in a period of staggering wealth, powerful bankers like Jacob Fugger—probably the wealthiest man in Europe—could corner a monopoly of silver production in central Europe, earning a 50 percent commission on every silver florin minted there, simply by the manipulation of loans to impoverished princes.*

  Money has a dramatic equalizing power when it is unleashed in force. It drives out the privileges of church and aristocracy alike. The great line-ages of northern Europe watched in horror as the Italians gave dukedoms to bankers and wealthy merchants, and then did exactly the same themselves. Money also levels class and spirituality to one measure alone: price. This was, after all, a generation so obsessed with measurement that they believed everything from love to morality could be reduced to numbers and put on a scale. Before the invention of the thermometer, temperature and wealth both looked to be tantalizingly possible candidates for scientific scrutiny.

  Jakob Fugger by Albrecht Dürer

  Money brought other issues to the surface as well. The first concerns about environmental destruction now began to emerge. Herring had almost disappeared from the Mediterranean thanks to overfishing, and the first forestry protection laws would be passed in England within three decades in an attempt to slow deforestation and soil erosion. The monasteries—which managed the education system and relief for Europe’s poor—were the object of deep cynicism, regarded as havens for lechers, tricksters, and loafers. The greatest institution of the medieval world, the papacy, was creaking under the weight of bribery, corruption, nepotism, vanity, and teenage cardinals, while at the same time struggling to overcome the discord that remained after the schism that caused the popes to leave Rome for Avignon until 1415. In reaction to this corruption of formal religion, there were mystics emerging all over Europe, like Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, and great mass preachers like Savonarola.*

  So it was both the best of times and the worst of times, a period of great urban wealth and great rural poverty, and of enormous power and miserable corruption in the great institutions. It was an era of swaggering optimism in the Renaissance view of man, but of pessimistic itinerant preachers obsessed by the death and apocalypse. “When you perceive the miserable corruption of the whole of Christendom, of all praiseworthy customs, rules and laws, the wretchedness of all classes, the many pestilences, the changes in this epoch and all the strange happenings,” wrote Joseph Grünpeck, official historian to the Holy Roman emperor Frederick III, “you know that the end of the world is near.”

  But most people did not share such apocalyptic fears. Those who worked in the fields watched the changing seasons as they always had. The urban elite comforted themselves by shopping. Consumption—not work, and certainly not spirituality—was now the most highly regarded civilized virtue. “I think I have given myself more honor, and my soul more satisfaction,” wrote the magnificently wealthy Florentine Giovanni Rucellai, “by having spent money than by having earned it.”

  Magnificence was a virtue. It demonstrated greatness when a merchant or banker could invest in an urban palace, or surround himself with the most beautiful works of art that money could buy. The Italian Renaissance was building up to its crescendo—Donatello was sixty-seven, Giovanni Bellini was twenty-three, and Leonardo da Vinci was a one-year-old, living in a farmhouse on the slopes of Monte Albano with his mother and a man nicknamed the Brawler.

  The Quentin Matsys portrait of Desiderius Erasmus, the great humanist of the age, showed him with a fur-lined purse around his neck like a merchant. Even those who were not actually merchants found that dressing like one was a sign of confidence and sophistication. The immensely wealthy Philip the Good of Burgundy, who preferred to dress in plain black velvet, threw a party the year after the fall of Constantinople, and served a pie so big that it is said to have contained twenty-eight French musicians with their instruments, playing as enthusiastically as they could from inside it.

  There was also a great deal to buy. Nearly every town with a sense of pride had its own clock. Most did not yet have traditional clock faces, but they rang the hours that let ordinary people know when to get up, go to work, or go to bed. The Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti made a list of everything he had to do each day as soon as he got up, and then assigned times to them. No previous generation had done such a thing.

  The contemporary chronicler Giovanni Tortelli wrote a list of all the inventions that were changing his world in 1450. They included clocks, compasses, pipe organs, sugar, and maritime charts. He might also have added eyeglasses. There was so much to buy for the newly rich: glass from Venice, ivory objects from Paris, carpets from India, beeswax candles from Russia and Bohemia, and silks from China. “Men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their possessions,” said the Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. It also appeared that they could forget the loss of Byzantium a good deal quicker than the loss of their trade routes.

  Tortelli also could have included spices from the East. The nutmeg, pepper, paprika, cinnamon that kept food saleable longer—a vital element of trade—and also provided key ingredients in medicines and paints, while not new, were pouring into Europe at an unprecedented rate. With Constantinople in Muslim hands, the virtual closure of the routes eastward to the Silk Road and the Far East meant that the next generat
ion would find themselves puzzled about these spices and how to reinvent the exotic trade that had made some of their parents extremely rich.

  For the urban elite, this was a glittering new world, filled with exotic flavors, colors, and chivalry. Chivalry in the streaming banners and jewel-encrusted weaponry that were on show in the public tournaments and jousts, though—like the expensively decorated armor on sale in the cities—these were designed more for social and sartorial success than for war.* In fact, chivalry was gloriously antique, and this was an age that was fascinated by antiques. Andrea Mantegna was excavating Roman ruins and lovingly recording the inscriptions he found. Leonardo Bruni was translating Plato and Aristotle and explaining that history was divided into three ages: the classical period, the “Middle Ages,” and their own wonderful new age when anything was possible.

  But if chivalry looked backward to the Middle Ages, color was overwhelmingly modern. You could see it in the clothes of the wealthy in the cities. New dyes were creating ever brighter reds, indigos, and blues. You could see it in the paintings: ultramarine, made from ground lapis lazuli only available in Afghanistan, was used for the deep blues of the Virgin Mary’s dress. Saffron yellow came from the autumn crocus grown in the mountains of Asia Minor. Brazilwood for brown was brought all the way from Java and Ceylon, via twelve or more intermediaries—the merchants who sold them to the artists in Florence or Siena or Venice usually had no details of the precise supply chain beyond the importer they bought from in Alexandria or Acre.

  The new colors seeped down through the trade routes and into people’s minds. But in 1453 one hue that really gripped people came from the parasitic kermes insect from some species of oak trees around the Mediterranean. Used to dye cloth scarlet and costing twenty or thirty times more than the madder used for ordinary reds, the color came from female lice collected in May and June before their eggs were laid, killed, and dried in the sun. Scarlet so thrilled people that there was a whole range of shades available: violet scarlets, green scarlets, white scarlets, and the very fashionable dark blue scarlets. There was even the rare black scarlet. The Querci family became so proficient at dying fabric scarlet that they were given a pension for life from the government in Florence.

  But all this wealth, and the trading system that supported it, was under increasing strain. The new regime in Constantinople was threatening the existence of the western trading posts. Despite its studied neutrality, the Genoese colony of Pera was the first to go. Fewer traders were prepared to make the unpredictable journey past Constantinople to the Black Sea and, one by one, the inhabitants of Genoa’s colonies there lost contact with their trading companies or just gave up and came home. Then there was the inexorable Ottoman advance. In 1456 they were in the Aegean islands: Lesbos, Lemnos, Focea, and the others. Churches were turned into mosques and children were taken into slavery. By the 1460s, they were in Bosnia and threatening the Venetian cities on the Dalmatian coast. Soon they were in Albania, just across the Adriatic from Venice. The spice trade was stalled; even the traditional transport of sugar and olive oil was delayed by complicated permissions and heavy duties. The Islamic world watched the divisions between the rulers of Europe, and between the jealous cities of Italy, and waited for western Europe to destroy itself.

  I

  “In Genoa, the word libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves.”

  JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  On July 9, 1453, a ship from the Genoese island of Chios—near the Turkish coast—arrived in Genoa, with the devastating news of the collapse of Constantinople. People hurried down to the dockside. Not since the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 had news of such a military setback for western Europe landed there, particularly one that had such implications for the city’s livelihood. The ship carried a letter from Angelo Lomellino, the chief executive of Pera, that described the full horror—not of the slaughter or the destruction, but that “the certificates of the trading companies are henceforth worthless.” Though the merchants moved quickly to ingratiate themselves with the new regime—Michelangelo would even be commissioned by the sultan to build a bridge, though he never did—the long-term effects on trade soon became apparent, and did more than anything else to shift the eyes of Europe toward the Atlantic and the West.

  The way through to the Silk Road for the merchants of London, Paris, Florence, and Venice was now uncertain, and nowhere was this more obvious than in Genoa, with its massive harbor, its black-and-white marble towers nestling under the mountains, and its tightly packed population of fifty thousand. Visitors to this salt-caked center of hard-headed commerce at the time described it as the “door to the world”—from the Latin ianua—partly because the luxurious produce of the whole earth seemed to arrive there, and partly because arriving into a city squeezed between the mountains and the sea seemed like the very entrance hall to the wealth of the whole of Italy.

  The city was more vulnerable than most because of the investment it had made for centuries in an eastern empire. The Black Sea was known as “Genoa’s Lake,” and it was accessible only through the Dardanelles now under the control of the sultan. Genoese confederations had developed permanent trading posts at Kilia at the mouth of the Danube, at Ilice at the mouth of the Dnieper, and at Akerman (the modern city of Odessa). Genoese merchants brought shiploads of grain from around the Crimea—Genoa did not have a hinterland where they could grow their own—and they also bought slaves. Unlike the other European cities, Genoa believed that slavery was a legitimate business and invested heavily in the trade that brought young men, women, and children from the Black Sea and sold them to buyers in Muslim Spain or Egypt. Unlike Venice, who paid their galley rowers, Genoa manned their war galleys with slaves—the same way they solved labor shortage problems in their sugar plantations on the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic.

  The center of this slave trade, Kaffa on the Black Sea coast, fell to the Ottomans in 1475. In the years that followed the demise of Constantinople, the rise in piracy—Christian piracy preying on Muslim trade and vice versa—made the whole business of business a great deal more insecure. Genoese merchants shifted their attention to Muslim Spain, and soon cities like Seville had enormous Genoese quarters. There, however, they faced growing competition from other trading cities around Europe with the same problems.

  In fact, like Constantinople itself, Genoa had been suffering financially in the years before 1453. Genoa’s own currency was in crisis in the late 1440s; this was solved in 1447 by the Bank of St. George, with a new gold coinage that replaced all the others. Gold was the rock that preserved the Genoese—the wealthy do better in an economy based on gold, while the poor do badly. For more than a century, Europe had also suffered from the inflation that accompanied the debasement of coinage. For those born in Genoa, the gold money provided a semimagical stability.

  When the news about the fall of Constantinople arrived in Genoa, John Cabot was a four-year-old boy living in the narrow streets on the steep slopes above the harbor. There are problems for anyone writing about Cabot because the documentation about his life is so fragmentary, though a great deal has come to light in Venetian archives in recent years. So it is hardly surprising that there are doubts about exactly where he was born. Most contemporary documents describe him as Venetian, which was his adopted nationality by the time he was an adult. There are even some rumors that he was English, but that has never been proven. The letters from Spanish spies in England reporting on his discoveries later described him as “Genoese like Columbus,” and actually there is little doubt that he was. His son Sebastian was also described as the “son of a Genoese.” There is a tradition that John was actually born in the mountain village of Castiglione Chiavarese, about thirty miles down the coast toward La Spezia. Here, near the castle and Benedictine abbey—deep in wine and olive country—a ruined house is still known as the birthplace of “Giovanni Caboto.”

  Genoa as pictured in Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicles

>   John’s father, Guilo (in Italian) or Egidius (in Latin) Cabot, and his family were seafarers—caboto means coastal seaman in the Genoese dialect. And although they invested heavily and apparently successfully in the spice trade, they seem to have been small-scale traders in and around Genoa when John was born. There are hints that the family may have been involved in the salt trade when they lived in Venice, and—since this was also a Genoese specialty—this would put them on the front line of the Genoese rivalry with Venice on the other side of the Italian peninsula.

  Venice prided itself on its salt monopoly in the Adriatic, which had been the basis for the original prosperity of the city in the tenth century. Venetian barges took salt up the river Po and into Lombardy; and their raiders ventured out at night to destroy any salt pans they did not control. But at the same time, the Genoese were challenging the Venetian salt empire, refusing to buy salt from them and challenging their markets by supplying salt from the Languedoc, Spain, Sardinia, and Ibiza.* Guilo was entrepreneurial, but his efforts to climb the lower rungs of trading from Genoa were constantly upset by the unstable politics of the city and the need to back one or other faction, only to find yourself on the wrong side of the other.