At heart he liked republics, governments like that of ancient Rome before the emperors. In other words, he favored rule by men whom the well-off and well educated chose. But, as he once explained, he had witnessed Italy overrun by one French king, plundered by another, torn apart by Spain, and humiliated by Swiss pikemen. A republican government, he concluded, was not the answer for Italy. Only a hard-hitting despot could unite and save it, and Machiavelli described this man. He would be as cruel as Cesare Borgia, and would lie like Cesare’s father, Pope Alexander VI. (No one, Machiavelli wrote, “pledged his word more solemnly, or kept it less” than the pope.) And like King Ferdinand of Spain, Machiavelli’s prince would talk “of nothing but peace and honor,” but do the things he had to.
Machiavelli wasn’t just a cynic. He believed that a good prince, once safely in power, could bring about a good society. But idealism is not what endures of Machiavelli. What he taught his fellow Europeans is that an able ruler focuses not on good ends but on harsh means. When Machiavelli died in 1527, the Italian wars were near the end, and it was clear that Italy was not to have his kind of prince. Half of Italy was soon to fall to Spain, and the rest would stay divided and count for little.
What a shame that Machiavelli, the hard-boiled Italian, never had the opportunity to talk with Thomas More, the high-minded Englishman! Both of them saw very well the strengths and flaws of Europe’s infant nations. More’s career was far more brilliant than Machiavelli’s. While More was still a boy, a chancellor of England rightly predicted that he would “prove a notable and rare man.” By his early twenties he was already a thriving lawyer, and at twenty-six he had a seat in Parliament. Here he argued so effectively against a bill proposed by Henry VII that the ruler fined and jailed More’s father, to teach the son to watch his words.
After Henry died, young Henry VIII appointed More a councillor and ambassador to France, and later he made him his lord chancellor. The chancellor and king were friends, but More was wise regarding royal friendships. Once he told his son-in-law: “I believe he [Henry] doth as singularly favor me as any subject within this realm. Howbeit,…if my head would win him a castle in France it should not fail to go.”
Three years after Machiavelli wrote The Prince, More produced a little book he named Utopia. Apparently he wrote it mainly to amuse himself and certain friends. As the book begins, More tells about a conversation he supposedly had had with a weather-beaten traveler. This man, a Portuguese, tells him that he once had visited an island named Utopia. (Utopia is a Greek word meaning “nowhere.”) The extraordinary people of this place had done away with all the ills that troubled Europe.
One such problem was the foolishness of kings, who dreamed of military glory and whose advisers were all yes-men. The traveler asks More to imagine a king of France who is determined to seize Italy and also expand his northern borders. Suppose, he says, someone told the king that he would only wreck his kingdom with these wars, and he should “concentrate on the kingdom that his ancestors handed down to him, and make it as beautiful and prosperous as he can…love his own subjects and deserve their love…live among them and govern them kindly, and…give up all ideas of territorial expansion, because he has more than enough to deal with already.”3 Of course the king would not appreciate advice like this; it might be wiser not to offer it.
3Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (London: 1988), p. 59.
Utopia, the traveler tells More, had no kings. Instead, an elected mayor and elected councillors made the big decisions. And the Utopians rarely went to war. They hated war and considered it sub-human, “although human beings are more addicted to it than any of the lower animals.” Utopians would fight only to defend themselves or to help the victims of a tyrant. If they absolutely had to wage a war, they paid their neighbors, the Venalians (that is, venal), to do their fighting for them. (More had in mind the Swiss, whose soldiers often fought for pay for other countries.) Utopian councillors spent their time on the essentials: water, sanitation, health care, and education.
The Utopians practiced communism. Everything was owned in common; everybody wore the same kind of clothes; and everyone exchanged houses every ten years. No landlords and moneylenders lived off the labor of others. Everybody shared the chores, but prisoners (the few there were) did the hard and dirty work. No Utopian was so silly as to wear jewelry, and they might use gold to make their chamber pots. They had no lawyers, since (wrote More, himself a lawyer), “they consider them a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.” Men and women who wished to marry were shown to each other naked, so that both would know what they were getting.
What gives Utopia its bite is not the answers More supplies but doubts he raises. Unlike Machiavelli, he wasn’t dazzled by the new monarchs. He knew the Henries, father and son, too well for that. He knew the dangers that arose from having too much power in one man’s hands, and he knew that countries ought to focus not on war but on matters that matter.
More himself became a victim of a king. In 1535 Henry VIII, who was then taking over the Catholic Church in England, ordered that his subjects take an oath recognizing Henry’s second marriage. More refused to take the oath. Doing so, he said, would mean agreeing not only that Henry (not the pope) was head of the Church, but also that the state was the be-all and end-all of our lives. When he would not do as Henry had commanded, he was tried for treason, convicted, and beheaded. His head was impaled on a spike on London Bridge.
Machiavelli had described the often brutal nations that were taking shape, and he hoped that Italy would be one of them. In contrast, More had warned of dangers that the crystallizing nations raised. Quite predictably, Europeans continued on the path The Prince had charted, and few of them ever dreamed about a high road to Utopia. It was the tough and grasping Machiavellians — the merchants, the monarchs, and the military — who were about to explore and exploit the world and seize as much of it as they could.
Chapter 9
We find each other.
UNTIL FIVE HUNDRED YEARS ago human beings weren’t spread throughout the world, like jam on bread. Not at all. We lived in scattered clusters, like the hives of bees a farmer sets along the border of a field. These human clusters mostly lay in one broad band that ran from Europe and North Africa through the Middle East, and on to India and Indonesia, and then China and Japan. Smaller clusters lay along the American highlands, from Mexico to Chile. The rest of the earth held only scatterings of gatherers and part-time farmers.
Europeans, North Africans, and western Asians knew of one another, and to some extent had traded with and sometimes fought each other. Thanks to travelers like Marco Polo, Europeans dimly knew about the Chinese, at the other end of Eurasia. But in general contacts between the human clusters were few or none at all. Often peoples of one continent had never heard, never even dreamed of, other continents and the people living on them.
Now, all of this would change. We humans would discover one another. Europeans, for the most part, would do the finding, and do it fairly quickly. They started at about the time when other Europeans started printing books and making war with cannons, and they finished about three centuries later.
The Age of Discovery
The first voyages of Columbus and da Gama, and Magellan’s voyage around the earth.
IT WAS SMALL and backward Portugal that led the way. The man who launched this country’s effort was the vigorous Prince Henry, a younger son of King John I. At age nineteen, Henry played a part in Portugal’s conquest of Ceuta, a Muslim town in Africa, not far from the Strait of Gibraltar. The Portuguese found quantities of gold there, and this was most alluring. For a long time Europeans had heard about the wealth in gold of kings in northwest Africa. Now Henry learned that caravans of North Africans often trekked far south across the Sahara Desert to the Senegal River, and bartered for gold with the men who dug and panned it.
Intrigued, the prince decided to explore the northwest coast of Africa, where few if any Europeans had set
foot. He had his reasons. Desire for gold was one, of course, and perhaps he would discover new exotic goods for Portuguese to trade in. Possibly he’d even find the realm of Prester John, a legendary Christian king. For ages Europeans had fantasized about this rich and fiercely anti-Muslim king, who was thought to govern somewhere in Africa or Asia. If Henry found King John, or John’s descendants, he or they might join the European struggle with the Muslims.
In 1419 Henry left his father’s court at Lisbon and moved to Cape St. Vincent, the rocky southwest tip of Portugal and, for that matter, of Europe. Here he gathered men to help him carry out the search he had in mind. They were men of both theory and practice, and included geographers, astronomers, sea captains, navigators, compass makers, and shipbuilders. They came from all the European coastal countries, and were later joined by tribesmen from Africa’s west coast.
Then the prince sent out explorers. Year after year they sailed due south to Africa’s northwest coast, then inched their way south along the shoreline, each explorer venturing farther than the last. For a while Cape Bojador, which juts from south Morocco, blocked them because tradition held that just below it lurked great danger — the seas were said to boil, the air to be too hot for life. Fifteen of Henry’s expeditions set out to round the cape but lost their nerve. Finally, a captain doubled it, and found clear skies and placid water.
Henry’s captains went on making small advances. They sailed along the coastline of the desert, seeing only nomads, and below the desert they followed the coasts of bush lands. Later, other captains sailed past steamy jungles, glimpsing now the villages of blacks. When they anchored off the shore, they bartered with the Africans for gold. They also asked for news of Prester John but, not surprisingly, they didn’t find him. For Henry’s pleasure, captains brought him back not only gold and maps but ostrich eggs, dried and salted elephant (which Henry managed to chew and swallow), and a dozen Africans to be stared at by the Portuguese, and touched, and then returned to their homes. Soon the Portuguese began to trade in human beings; they started by bringing two hundred Africans to Europe to be sold as slaves.
Henry died in 1460 after sending expeditions south for more than forty years. By the time he died his ships had reached the point just above the equator where Africa’s coastline bends and runs due east a thousand miles.
The king of Portugal granted a businessman, Fernaõ Gomes, a monopoly of African trading on condition that he also send his ships exploring past the point that Henry’s captains had already reached. Gomes’s captains sailed eastward along the “Grain” (or Pepper) Coast, the “Ivory” Coast, the “Gold” Coast, and the “Slave” Coast. When they reached the corner where the coastline bends and once again runs south they turned to starboard and explored southward almost to the mouth of the Congo River. They brought home slaves, ivory, pepper, ebony, and gold.
In the 1480s, Portugal’s King John II took charge of the explorations, but he changed their goal. Africa was very well, said John, but what he really wanted was to find a water route to “the Indies.” Wealthy Europeans loved the precious goods that came from south and eastern Asia, the far-off region Europeans knew of vaguely as “the Indies.” The wealthy paid a lot for rubies, emeralds, silks, and perfumes, and for spices such as pepper, cloves, and cinnamon. These costly goods had always traveled west on land and water routes through Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.
As John knew well, this business in imported goods made money for Italians and others but not for Portuguese. The shape of much of Africa was still unknown, but John believed that ships could sail around it, and in this way reach the Indies. If they found this ocean route, then, given its location at Europe’s southwest corner, Portugal would be ideally placed to use it. So John’s explorers stopped their cautious, step-by-step advances and started moving in giant strides down the southwest coast of Africa.
In 1487, Bartolomeu Dias was told to pass the farthest point yet reached and, if it could be done, to sail around the tip of Africa. When his ships had sailed well down the coast of Africa, a tempest blew them even farther south than the continent. After he had sailed back up to Africa, Dias discovered that the coastline now was bending north and east! Clearly he had sailed around the bottom of the continent. He wanted to continue, but his men had had enough, so he turned around and started home. This time he saw the cape that he had earlier sailed around without seeing it, and he named it Cape of Storms. Later, King John renamed it Cape of Good Hope “for the promise it gave of finding India, so desired and for so many years sought after.”
And now, on to India. To lead an expedition, John’s successor, Manuel the Lucky, chose a Portuguese aristocrat. Vasco da Gama was an expert seaman and tough enough for any venture. (On one occasion he would chop off the hands, ears, and noses of Muslim traders and fishermen and send them to the hostile king of Calicut, advising him to cook them as a curry.) He sailed from Portugal in 1497 with four ships that had been designed expressly for sailing in the South Atlantic’s stormy waters. He sailed around the cape and up the eastern coast. (See the map on page 148.) He was now in the Indian Ocean, where European ships had probably never been. When he reached the coast of what today is Kenya, the sultan of a seaside town permitted him to hire a pilot, and this man guided da Gama eastward to the Indian port of Calicut. (Arabs had been trading on this route for a thousand years.)
Local merchants greeted the exotic strangers with the words “May the Devil take you! What brought you here?” To which the Europeans answered: “We came in search of Christians [Prester John] and spices.” The king of Calicut, reclining underneath a gilded canopy and spitting betel juice into a gold spittoon, also asked why they had come. He was insulted that da Gama hadn’t brought him costly gifts, rather than some strings of coral, lumps of sugar, two barrels of rancid butter, and the common cloth the Portuguese were used to trading with in Africa. The local merchants scorned da Gama’s trading goods and didn’t want to barter for them. Only with much trouble did da Gama buy some cinnamon and ginger, and then he left for home.
The two-year expedition almost seemed a failure. Not only were the cargoes he came home with small, but da Gama had lost two of his four ships. His men had wrecked one on the outward voyage, and they burned the other on the homeward one. (Scurvy, a disease resulting from a lack of fruits and vegetables, had killed so many sailors that da Gama couldn’t man the ship.) Of 170 men who had sailed to India, 55 returned. But so valuable were spices that his cargoes (the cinnamon and ginger) sold for sixty times the expedition’s cost.
Knowing how to sail to India was not enough. The next task for the Portuguese was to conquer land in Africa and Asia. They didn’t want to conquer kingdoms, which would have been too big a task. What they needed were some far-flung bits of land along the route. Some of these must be in Africa, so ships could stop and load supplies, and the others had to be in Asia, in the “Indies,” and would serve as ports to trade in and naval bases for preventing trade by other countries.
Planting bases on the sparsely peopled coast of Africa proved fairly easy, but doing it in Asia was another matter. Here they had to fight. A grizzled Portuguese soldier, Afonso de Albuquerque, sailed there with a fleet. His ships were armed with cannons, and they blew the Arabs from the seas.
Albuquerque conquered Goa, off the Indian west coast, and made this island Portugal’s headquarters. To the west of India he captured Muscat and Hormuz, a town and island that together controlled the entrance to the Persian Gulf. By holding them, the Portuguese could block one major sea-land-sea trade route to Europe. Albuquerque failed, however, when he tried to conquer Aden, at the Red Sea’s southern entrance. As a result, the Portuguese would never fully block other countries’ merchants from sailing up the Red Sea toward the Mediterranean. On the other side of India, to the east, Albuquerque took Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula. From here the Portuguese controlled a strait through which ships had to sail to reach the spice islands in eastern Indonesia, or to go on to China and Japa
n.
Despite its mighty efforts, Portugal reaped rewards for only half a century. Then its fortunes faded. The little country lacked resources, and its people numbered fewer than a million. They simply couldn’t build and man sufficient ships to do the two essential tasks: to journey back and forth to Asia, and to fight off ships of other lands. Later, other countries muscled in and used the route to Asia that the Portuguese had found. The little country’s moment in the sun was past.
But we must say this about the Portuguese: they played a major role in charting the earth and linking its human clusters. Their poet Luís Vaz de Camões would write admiringly about his countrymen, “If there had been more world, they would have found it.”
IN 1476 A redheaded young Italian was a crewman in a convoy sailing up the coast of Portugal. He was the son of a weaver and had been a pirate several years before. His name was Cristoforo Colombo, and he later called himself Cristóbal Colón, but the world remembers him by his name in Latin, Columbus. When the convoy was just off Portugal, his ship took fire. Columbus leaped into the ocean and seized an oar floating near him. Using it to hold himself up, he kicked his way to shore close to the place from which Prince Henry had run his explorations. Local people dried and fed him, and helped him join his younger brother, Bartolomeo, who was then in Lisbon.
The Human Story Page 16
