Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The debate continued into the twentieth century. Soviet historians continued the anti-Viking line. To accept it, they argued, would imply that Slavs needed the help of foreigners to create an independent state, clearly an untenable position. To bolster their arguments they pointed to a Syrian Christian history from AD 555, which talks about the ‘Hros’ living in the area south of Kiev, surely the ancestors of Slavic Rus. In fact it seems probable that Hros was not the name of a tribe at all but was a corruption of the Greek word ‘heros’ meaning just what it suggests, ‘heroes’.

  Today the role of the Vikings is generally acknowledged, but not universally so. One of the most interesting theories about the origin of the Russians was put forward by Omeljan Pritsak, the Harvard Professor of Ukrainian History, in the 1970s. For him the Rus originate not in Scandinavia or the Caucasus but in the small town of Rodez in south-central France. Pritsak starts his story in the middle of the eighth century, with Arabs controlling the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean and the Spanish peninsula. Muslims and Christians faced each other across the Mediterranean in uneasy peace. The problem both sides faced was that peace meant no booty, above all the booty that economic life depended upon: slaves. Neither side was supposed to enslave its co-religionists, and so they needed an external source. This they found in the vast lands between the Elbe and Syr Darya rivers, which became ‘Sclavia’, the land of the ‘sclavas’, slaves or slavs. Slave hunting was highly organised. Factories for the production of eunuchs were located in Verdun in the west and Khwarizan in the east. By the end of the ninth century two international networks controlled the slave trade: the Jewish Radhaniya based in Marseilles, and another group based in the city that today is known as Rodez, called in Middle French ‘Rusi’. Thus the origin of their name: the Rus.

  At first the Radhaniya had the advantage. Being Jews they could travel through the warring Muslim and Christian forces to the Khazar slave markets on the Caspian Sea. Such was their power that the Khazar rulers converted to Judaism; the first Jewish state of the modern era was established in southern Russia. The Muslims and Khazars stood between the merchants of Rusi and the slaving routes along the Volga and Don. But there was an alternative way to reach the Volga, north through the Gulf of Finland and down the Neva. To use this route the Rus needed allies. Just as the Radhaniya allied with the warlike Khazars the Rus allied with the Vikings, thus the appearance of Rurik.

  Whatever the true story of the origins of Kievan Rus, the final irony is that very little of it took place in what is now Russia. The westward expansion of the Slavs came up against the forces of Roman Christianity in the form of the Teutonic Knights, a crusader military order that had lost interest in Jerusalem when it realised that the Baltic lands were much easier prey. The knights held the Baltic coastline as far east as today’s Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The border between the knights and the Rus went right through the middle of these now independent states. Kiev itself is now the capital of an independent Ukraine and much of the original Rus is now Ukraine or Belarus. Of modern Russia only the western edge fell within Rurik’s legacy. It’s as if the Boston Tea Party had taken place in Mexico.

  Like the first Americans, the first Russians were hemmed in and, if they wanted their nation to grow, would have to fight their way out. The Americans faced the British to the north and occasionally effective powers to the south. The Russians faced Teutonic knights to the west and occasionally effective powers to the south. For both, the route to expansion involved taking on the nomadic tribes that stood between them and the Pacific. Success in this endeavour depended on numbers, organisation and above all technology, in particular the technology of death.

  The Americans burst out of their initial settlements because they were much better at killing their foes than their foes were at killing them. The gun is mightier than the bow, and it was the tribesmen who were virtually exterminated. In the case of the Russians it was nearly the other way round; before they could expand they first had to face the threat of near extermination. The nomads they faced had the superior technology, and ironically that technology was the bow.

  The arrival of the Mongols could have written Kiev and its people out of history. The Rus, however, survived. Almost simultaneously on the other side of the world another mighty city simply disappeared from all but the most specialised of history books. Cahokia was in its own way just as imposing as Kiev. Estimates of historical populations are always difficult but Cahokia at the time perhaps had 20,000 inhabitants, making it smaller than Kiev but larger than London. The United Nations has designated Cahokia’s remains as a World Heritage Site, but in fact there is little physical trace of Cahokia today and virtually no memory of it in the people who occupy the lands it once ruled. Russians may argue about the validity of tracing their history to Rurik, but most Americans are happy to trace their history no further than Columbus. Cahokia, dominating an empire from its position on the Mississippi opposite today’s St Louis, might as well have existed on the moon.

  CHAPTER 2

  AMERIGO’S LAND

  Russia’s early history has become clouded as its Slavic population quite naturally emphasises its own contribution and lets fall into historical oblivion the contributions of others. History is a process of simplifying the past. From the millions of daily events only the essential few are remembered by the next generation, and of those far fewer are handed down any further. A name here and an event there passes on to become ‘history’.

  The process happens as much in America as Russia. One or two names – Christopher Columbus, Pocahontas – are remembered; one or two stories of heroism are recorded. The unpalatable fades away. The basic truth that the early settlers took what was not theirs is neither affirmed nor denied, it is simply ignored. The ideology it implied is never expressed.

  Most nations take their histories back as far as possible. King Arthur is part of British history, even though countless invasions have wiped out most of the gene pool, language and culture of Arthurian Britain. America is almost unique in claiming no such historical continuities. The people who lived in America in King Arthur’s time are not part of what made modern America. Other nations recognise that their institutions and values have changed radically over the centuries of their history, but America’s values are often assumed to have arrived with the first white settlers and remained constant ever since. Like the chivalrous knights of King Arthur, the Pilgrim Fathers continue to provide a standard to live up to: the difference is that most people accept that the Round Table is a fairy tale.

  Spanish Exploration and Conquest

  Sir Walter Scott, Leon Trotsky, Albert Einstein, Thomas Malthus, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie and Henry Ford have one thing in common – they have all contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica; although Henry Ford almost certainly paid someone else to write his piece on mass production. Before the advent of the internet the Encyclopaedia had a well-deserved reputation for packaging scholarship and academic excellence in bite-sized pieces. Founded in Edinburgh in 1768, it became, despite its name, quintessentially American, ownership having passed across the Atlantic in 1901. For thirty years the Encyclopaedia was the personal fiefdom of US senator William Benton, whose life, it was once said, demonstrated that ‘in America there still isn’t much that money can’t buy’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells Americans all they need to know about the world.

  As befits one of the most important cities in the medieval world Cahokia has a reasonable length entry in the twelve volume Micropaedia. Oddly, though, the entry starts in 1699, three centuries after the magnificent native city had been deserted, and describes the city as having been founded by French missionaries from Quebec. It goes on to discuss its capture by the United States on 4 July 1778, and such key events as the establishment of the Parks College of Aeronautical Technology, before concluding with a single sentence mentioning that to the north-east is ‘the location of a large prehistoric Indian city’.

  Only in America could pyrami
ds constructed nearly four thousand years after the pyramids of Egypt and a city that flourished a thousand years after the glories of Rome be described as ‘prehistoric’. In America history starts with Columbus; before him there was no America.

  In one sense it is true that before Columbus and his contemporaries there was no America. The word America itself was a neologism invented by a German cartographer who, when he changed his mind and tried to invent a new name, discovered that it was too late; the term was already established.

  The New World was discovered by a man who was born as Christoforo Colombo in Italy, who died as Cristóbal Colón in Spain and is known in the English-speaking world by the anglicised form of his forename and the latinised form of his surname. Christopher Columbus was a seasoned traveller long before he reached the New World. He sailed to Ireland and Iceland with the Portuguese navy and traded along the coast of west Africa. But the event that launched him west was one of those turning points in world history that, like the battle of Châlons, inevitably prompts the question of what might have been. Before Columbus Christianity was the religion of one obscure corner of the globe, a not particularly attractive fringe of the Eurasian landmass sandwiched between the civilisations of the east and the Atlantic Ocean. Islam and the religions of Asia had far more adherents, and in many ways seemed to possess far greater dynamism. A betting man would not have wagered on Christianity becoming the first global religion.

  It could be argued that the most ‘civilised’ part of Europe at the start of the fifteenth century was southern Spain, the only significant non-Christian part of the continent. The Moors had created an empire that fostered intellectual enquiry, artistic near-perfection and unparalleled tolerance. The most creative and productive Jewish community in the contemporary world lived alongside mosques and palaces of a quality unsurpassed in the history of Islamic art, indeed in the history of any art.

  The Moors surpassed their Christian neighbours in all the arts but one: warfare. In 1492 Granada, their last stronghold in Europe, fell to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who had waged what might today be called a jihad against them. The elegant beauty of palace and mosque was replaced by the heavy angularity of fort and cathedral, Islamic tolerance gave way to the Inquisition and the search for new realms in science and philosophy became voyages of discovery in a far more literal sense.

  One of the minor mysteries of history is what Christopher Columbus was doing at the siege of Granada. But present he was, and being there clearly stood him in good stead in his search for sponsors for his voyage west. He was able to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella that their desire to attack Islam around the globe could be helped by an expedition westwards to the spice islands, China and on to India, the back door to the Islamic world.

  On 12 October 1492 he landed on an island in the Bahamas, and eventually returned to report that he had reached the Indies. Legend has it that Columbus first learnt of the existence of a new world from Norse sagas heard on his trip to Iceland. Scholars are still arguing about whether Columbus ever travelled that far north, but if he did there could be some truth in the story. The Viking settlements in North America disappeared within a generation or two but the homeland of those early pioneers, the Norse settlements in Greenland, continued right up until the end of the fifteenth century, the very time that Columbus was supposedly visiting the Norse Icelanders.

  Every schoolboy knows that Columbus proved the sceptics wrong by demonstrating that the world was round. The Church taught that the world was flat, and in a famous meeting Church leaders accused Columbus of heresy for daring to suggest otherwise. Unfortunately for schoolboys the Church did not teach that the world was flat and the confrontation with Columbus never took place; the whole story was an invention of the American journalist Washington Irving, who in 1828 wrote what purported to be a biography of the legendary explorer. Nevertheless Irving’s fictional version of Columbus’s intellectual achievement remains embedded in popular mythology. His was a noble triumph of scientific enquiry over brute ignorance, but in fact the ignorance was all on the part of Columbus. The ancient Greeks had long since proved that the world was round and no educated person seriously argued otherwise. Indeed the Greeks had correctly calculated that Asia was well over 10,000 miles west of the then known world, far too far for any sensible mariner to attempt without starving to death before he was halfway there. The great contribution of Columbus was to do the sums again and get them wrong. He estimated that the Indies were barely 3,000 miles away, just about within reach. They were not, but fortunately for him the West Indies were.

  After landing in the Bahamas in 1492 Columbus turned south and arrived in the Caribbean, where one of his three ships was wrecked. Columbus left the crew of thirty-nine behind on the island of Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) to start the first European settlement in the New World since the Vikings. When he returned a year later he discovered that the Taino natives had killed all the settlers. He responded by killing hundreds of natives and sending 550 back to Spain to be sold as slaves, the first New World exports. To Columbus’s dismay the slaves were not a commercial success; all those who did not die on the voyage did so soon after arriving in ‘civilisation’, falling prey to the sicknesses of the Old World. The fate of the Taino was to be the forerunner of the fate awaiting all the native people of North America. When Columbus arrived in Hispaniola there were at a conservative estimate 300,000 Taino. Sixty years later there were less than five hundred.

  Between 1492 and 1504 Columbus made four voyages to the New World, and in 1499 landed on the mainland. That date is important; Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America is named, may have got there first. (As so often even the association of Amerigo and America is disputed; Rodney Broome in his work Amerike claims that America is named after the Welshman Richard ap Meryke.)

  Columbus’s career ended in disgrace as he fell out of favour with the royal court. Even the Spanish crown found his rule over their new possessions unduly brutal, and after his third voyage he was brought back to Spain in chains. He managed one last voyage, and explored the coastline of Central America still convinced that he had reached Asia and was about to encounter the mouth of the Ganges. He died in poverty in Vallodolid, Spain, in 1506 but his voyages did not end there. Nearly forty years later his body was carried across the Atlantic to be buried alongside his son Diego in the cathedral of Santo Domingo, in fulfilment of his dying wish to be buried in the new world he had discovered. Today tourists can see the urn containing his remains, forty-one bone fragments and a bullet from a youthful wound, in the Columbus Lighthouse, an enormous pyramidal monument that dominates the city. Thousands of miles away in Seville tourists visiting the cathedral can also wonder at what are claimed to be his remains. The Spanish government insists that they brought Columbus’s remains back after the Spanish-American War drove them from the Caribbean. In death Columbus appears to have perfected the art of being in two places at once.

  Columbus was a genuinely intrepid explorer whose name today is dotted across the globe from Colombia to Colombo to British Columbia (none of which he actually visited), but the name attached to the continents of the New World belongs to someone entirely different. Amerigo Vespucci’s life may not be as mythical as Rurik’s but his relationship with what is now called America is almost as problematic. The two versions of the travels of the dead Columbus are mirrored on a larger scale in the multiple versions of the life of Vespucci.

  Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence in 1451 where, in version one, his family moved in the same circles as Michelangelo and Savanarola, and he himself went to Spain as the representative of the Medici family. He led three (and in some versions four) voyages to the New World. In 1497 he sailed along the coast of South America, two years before Columbus reached the mainland, and realised that this was not the Indies but a new continent. His scholarly letters excited admiration throughout Europe, and when the German professor of cosmography Martin Waldseemuller wanted a name for the ‘f
ourth continent’ he naturally chose that of the man who had first realised that such a continent existed. Vespucci went on to be appointed chief pilot of Spain and died burdened with honours in Seville in 1512.

  Version two describes a very different man. This Vespucci was a wheeler-dealer, a promoter and entrepreneur rather than a great explorer. The sole voyage to the Americas that historians can be certain he made was as part of an expedition led by Alonso de Hojeda, whose name has passed completely out of history. The other claimed voyages are pure imagination. He claimed to have come within 13° of the south pole and to have reached geographical co-ordinates located in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada, both somewhat improbable. His letters were appreciated more for their description of the sensual proclivities of the natives than for any scholarly value, and naming continents after Vespucci rather than Columbus is a nonsense.

  Arguing the merits of the various versions of Vespucci’s life is good sport for historians, the majority of whom probably now accept that Vespucci did make a number of voyages and was more than a simple con man. Whether he was the first to reach the American mainland, however, is still doubtful. The strongest candidate for that honour is neither Vespucci nor Columbus but yet another Italian. The Venetian John Cabot, sailing in the service of the English King Henry VII, reached the mainland on 24 June 1497. Like Columbus he was sure he had found the coast of Asia. The following year he sailed west again, confident that he would soon be landing in Japan; he was never seen again.

  Although Cabot certainly touched the soil of the New World, even he may not have been the first European since the Vikings to do so. In 1472, twenty years before Columbus, two Scandinavians named Dietrich Pining and Hans Pothorst reached the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland and may well have stepped ashore on the same coastline that Bjarni Herjolsson the travelling salesman had reached 500 years before. They were searching for a north-west route to Asia, and had they realised what they had stumbled upon, and broadcast their exploits as effectively as Vespucci, the new continent might have been named after the captain of their expedition, a Portuguese mariner named Joäo Vaz Corte Real. At a stroke Americans could have become Realists.