Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  Larger states only gradually entered the fray, foremost the kingdom of Castile, which in the fifteenth century very slowly took over the Canary Islands. Critical advances were concentrated in the final decade of that century, when Christopher Columbus, in Spain’s employ, reached the Caribbean in 1492 while Portuguese initiatives had Vasco da Gama sail around Africa to India and back to Lisbon between 1497 and 1499, and also led to the discovery of the Brazilian coast in 1500.

  In the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese rapidly expanded their footprint by taking over Kannur in Kerala in 1505 and Socotra and Muscat in 1507, defeating the navies of the Egyptian Mamluks and local Indian forces at Diu in Gujarat in 1509, taking Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511, and Makassar on Sulawesi in 1512. Backed by concurrent deployments along the African coast, these operations took place at enormous remove from the home country: Makassar lies 20,000 kilometers from Lisbon by the most direct sea route, and more in practice.

  The most ambitious venture of all was managed by a seasoned Portuguese commander, Ferdinand Magellan, who in Spanish employ crossed the Atlantic, discovered straits at the southern tip of South America, and crossed the entire Pacific Ocean. The whole voyage took one week shy of three years from 1519 to 1522 and covered some 60,000 kilometers, including a stretch of 99 days without landfall between Chile and Guam. From 1525 to 1527, another mission proceeded from Spain to the Moluccas. The Spanish conquest of central Mexico led to another expedition from there to the Moluccas in 1527–1528, a mere eight years after Hernán Cortés had first set foot there.

  Incumbents

  Phoenicians, Greeks, Norse, and Polynesians had set a trend: the European pioneers in Italy and the Iberian peninsula were also predominantly modestly sized polities, as were their main rivals, the Netherlands and England. Conversely, France, by far the most populous unified state in Europe at the time, kept punching well below its demographic weight. But so did all large imperial entities, and the more so the more powerful they were. Even if it might not have been Necho II of Egypt who funded the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa but Dareios I of Persia, and even if the latter’s son Xerxes I really forced someone to attempt the same voyage counterclockwise, none of this led to any further ventures that we know of.29

  The still more durable and powerful Roman empire, which disposed of resources that were orders of magnitude larger than those of Phoenician or Greek city-states, did not rouse itself even to such sporadic missions. Insofar as any expeditions took place at all, they were undertaken for military reconnaissance purposes and narrowly limited in scope. In the north, Roman vessels operating along the Danish coast may or may not have entered the Baltic Sea around the beginning of the Common Era when the empire sought to subdue parts of Germany. A circumnavigation of Britain in the 80s CE lacked follow-up. In the mid-Atlantic, it reportedly fell to a local client king, Iuba II of Mauretania, to claim the Canary Islands, which has not yielded evidence of Roman presence beyond some trade goods.

  In the 60s CE, a one-off land/river expedition led by two imperial guard officers to find the sources of the Nile probably progressed as far as the Sudd marshes in what is now South Sudan but does not seem to have produced any tangible results. Rome’s Indian Ocean trade operated by following established routes, south to Mozambique and east to the Gulf of Bengal. Whereas Greek scholars had pondered the challenges of an Atlantic crossing, Roman imperial rhetoric preferred to emphasize the supposed impermeability and evil nature of the high seas.30

  Later large empires such as the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates are not known to have been any more deeply engaged in exploratory projects, nor are the large South Asian empires. And while the general scarcity of information about the Maurya or Gupta, for instance, cannot be taken as evidence of absence, the lack of Mughal initiatives is not in doubt.31

  In keeping with my overall approach, I move on to China, which represents a particularly striking case of imperial indifference to overseas exploration and the development of overseas assets. These attributes are cast into high relief by what might be considered an apparent exception, the Ming naval expeditions of the early fifteenth century.

  Following rebellions that led to the overthrow of Mongol rule, by the 1360s the new Ming dynasty had restored the political unity of core China. The revived empire drew on enormous resources: a census in 1403 registered 9.7 million households with 66.6 million residents, and that was bound to be an undercount. The state owned one-seventh of the 57.1 million hectares of cultivated land assessed in 1393. According to a contemporary report, “The empire’s grain taxes totaled more than thirty million piculs [c. 1.9 million tons], and taxed in silk and paper money exceeded twenty million. At that time, the empire within the four corners was rich and prosperous, and the government enjoyed abundant and surplus revenues.” And on top of taxes and income from state-owned resources, the authorities were also able to mobilize labor the old-fashioned way: 300,000 workers were said to have been drafted to connect the Grand Canal to Beijing, and over 200,000 were put to work on a huge imperial palace complex centered on the Forbidden City in Beijing.32

  Given this abundance, the Ming empire could well afford the seven massive naval expeditions that it launched between 1405 and 1433 under the command of the eunuch Zheng He. If the sources are to be believed, no fewer than 2,149 oceangoing ships were built between 1403 and 1419. Although the tradition envisions flat-bottomed, shallow-draft ships that were 450 feet long and displaced 20,000 tons, ships of 200–250 feet seem more in line with engineering constraints and documented crew numbers. According to the most realistic estimates, some 40–60 very large “treasure ships” and maybe 200 smaller vessels staffed by close to 30,000 men participated in each of these ventures.33

  Without exception, these fleets followed well-established sea routes south to Indonesia and west into the Indian Ocean. The first one, from 1405 to 1407, intervened in civil strife on Java and Palembang and sailed as far as Sri Lanka. The second, from 1408 to 1411, focused on the Gulf of Bengal, and a much smaller concurrent third mission advanced a little farther, to the Persian Gulf and Aden, and on the way defeated and captured a potentate in Sri Lanka. The fourth, from 1412 to 1415, set up a temporary base in Malacca and visited Bengal, the Maldives, Aden, and Somalia, and engaged forces on Sumatra. The fifth, from 1417 to 1419, proceeded to Hormuz and the east coast of Africa, as did the next one, from 1421 to 1422, which also visited the Red Sea coast close to Mecca. A final outing, from 1431 to 1433, once again stuck to several of these familiar destinations.34

  Although the total expenditure lavished on these ventures is impossible to specify, it was bound to be substantial. By one estimate, the cost of the total number of treasure ships built for these operations—about 150—would have equaled about 10–30 percent of a year’s total public revenue, a figure to which we need to add outlays for smaller ships and operations. Yet even at, say, three times the upper end of this estimate averaged over the life of the initiative, annual expenses would not have exceeded a few percent of total state income: not trivial but affordable.35

  What was trivial was the yield of these expeditions: a flood of exotica to delight the imperial court—pearls and ivory and rare animals such as okapi, zebras, rhinoceroses, elephants, giraffes, and lions—and the arrival of numerous diplomatic missions from foreign parts that these naval visits inspired. The fleets’ few military interventions in Indonesia and Sri Lanka did not lead to a permanent Chinese presence or any substantive gains.36

  These operations ended almost as suddenly as they had commenced. All but one of them were compressed into just eighteen years of the reign of the Yongle emperor, the third Ming ruler. The program was suspended in 1421 while the sixth mission was still under way, and formally terminated three years later by his short-lived successor. Even though this decision was reversed by the fifth Ming emperor, only one more expedition took place.

  Implicit condemnation followed. In 1436, merely three years after the end of that final operation, the court turned down
requests for more craftsmen to build ships and even banned the construction of oceangoing vessels. Not long after, the blueprints and sundry documentation relating to these voyages were ordered destroyed by a powerful official: rival traditions differ only on the date (either in the 1450s or the 1470s–1480s) and the identity of the instigator of this event.37

  Why were these missions, which were unique in China’s history, undertaken at all, and why did they end the way they did? The answers to these questions are closely connected, rooted in the dynamics of hegemonic empire that handed ostensibly unfettered power to monopolistic rulers but at the same time militated against engagement overseas.

  The Yongle emperor had come to power by waging three years of war against his own nephew, the grandson and chosen successor of the dynasty’s founder. This younger rival met an unseemly end—or so the official version goes—as his palace was set on fire upon the fall of the capital city of Nanjing in 1402. These events stood out as a glaring exception to China’s generally more orderly power transitions within dynastic lineages, and left the usurper with plenty to prove.38

  The new ruler’s strategy of choice to bolster his standing was to embark on an ambitious program of military aggression and diplomatic activity backed by force. One of these goals was to expand the foreign tribute system by corralling as many foreign powers as possible into its network of ceremonial interactions. From the beginning of his reign, agents were dispatched to acquire pearls, crystals, and incense as “tribute.” Dozens of states sent trade missions to China. In 1405 the government set up three maritime trade superintendencies to promote state-controlled tribute trade, in which Chinese goods (or “gifts”) such as porcelain, silk, and precious metals were exchanged for foreign materials or “tribute.”

  Some seventy-five known eunuch missions were tasked with increasing China’s influence beyond its frontiers. Much of this outreach took place by land: Korea, Mongolia, and Champa in Southeast Asia were the principal destinations alongside Tibet, Nepal, and Turfan. Efforts were made to impress the Buddhist and Muslim polities of Central Asia: China initiated an annual exchange with Herat in Afghanistan, Samarkand was courted, and emissaries traveled as far as Isfahan in Iran. Occasional missions also targeted Cambodia and Siam, as well as Japan and the Ryukyu Islands.39

  The treasure fleets were thus merely the flashiest and most extravagant element of a much broader initiative to establish diplomatic relations and advertise China’s—and its ruler’s—unmatched greatness. For what it is worth, the official history of the Ming dynasty considers this the principal purpose of these missions: the emperor’s desire to “display his soldiers in strange lands in order to make manifest the wealth and power of the Middle Kingdom.” While insights into his actual motivation are beyond our reach, it does matter that later historians accepted this as a plausible explanation—and indeed there is nothing in the record to suggest any substantive alternative or complementary reasons. For modern scholars, a usurper’s quest for glory remains the most plausible rationale.40

  This was decidedly not an attempt at exploration: the routes traveled were all well known, and had been for hundreds or even thousands of years. The fleets simply followed the established cycle of monsoon winds. The heft of the larger ships made them all but useless for exploration or naval combat. The creation of effective naval hegemony in the Indian Ocean basin would have been well within China’s capacities at the time, but there is no indication that this was ever intended: there was no follow-up, and no permanent bases were established. The contrast with the Portuguese less than a century later could hardly be more striking: operating at a much larger distance from home and with vastly smaller resources, within just a few years they managed to traverse much of the same area with a handful of ships and set up strongholds from which they controlled trade, challenged rivals, and entered productive alliances with local rulers.41

  Insofar as we can determine, the Ming ventures did not generate any material benefits at all. Chinese traders had already gained a dominant position by the time of the Mongol conquests, displacing Arab shipping. There is nothing to support the notion that the expeditions were designed to shore up their influence. If protection of trade had been an objective, it would be puzzling that China failed to take steps to secure its own coasts against pirates and instead spent lavishly on long-distance voyages. Inland waterways, restored and expanded after prior disruptions, rendered coastal traffic less important, at least from the state’s perspective.42

  The overall purpose was political. Just as the naval expeditions were part of a wider array of missions, these missions were themselves part of an activist program that appears to have been similarly unprofitable and poorly thought out. Thus, early in his reign, the Yongle emperor intervened in and formally annexed Annam (Vietnam). This unleashed determined local resistance that would drag on for the remainder of his reign, finally compelling withdrawal three years after his death.

  More serious conflicts were initiated with the Mongols to the north. A strategy of containment was centered on Beijing, which remained the capital despite plans to return to Nanjing, and on a chain of major frontier fortresses plus 6,000 kilometers of Great Wall. In addition, the emperor embraced a more offensive approach. Between 1410 and 1424, he led in person five major campaigns into the steppe, and died during the last of these. Notwithstanding some successes, the Chinese forces suffered heavy casualties and expenditure, the mobile Mongols evaded defeat, and nothing of lasting significance emerged from these operations. Mongol pressure persisted: in 1449 they even managed to capture the sitting emperor and held him prisoner for years.43

  These calamities highlight the fact that just as before and after, the true challenge to the empire lay at its northern frontier. Everything else was of secondary importance and hardly justified massive outlays on the scale required to launch the treasure fleets. Scholar-officials duly criticized these ventures as expensive and pointless. Their criticism reflected rivalries at the imperial court: eunuchs had promoted the maritime expeditions while Confucian officials opposed them. Implementation and the subsequent backlash were thus rooted not only in the ruler’s desires and the limits of his power but also in political dynamics at the center. The two officials who are variously credited with destroying the documentation regarding the voyages, war ministers Yu Qian and Liu Daxia, both belonged to the anti-eunuch faction. A century later Congjian Yan’s Shuyu Zhouzilu had the latter denounce the expeditions as having “wasted tens of myriads of money and grain … what benefit was it to the state? This was merely an action of bad government of which ministers should severely disapprove.”44

  The Yongle emperor’s aggression against the Mongols and his commitment to the drawn-out and failing intervention in Annam raised similar concerns. The announcement of a third Mongolian campaign in 1421 had already triggered protests by the most senior officials. This prompted the ruler to imprison some of his outspoken ministers but also to suspend further overseas voyages: if one of his costly prestige projects had to be dropped, it was not going to be the fight against China’s northern opponents.45

  The swift policy reversal after his demise in 1424 was thus scarcely surprising. There were not going to be any more preemptive wars in the steppe, Annam was abandoned, and diplomatic engagement with Central Asian potentates was sharply curtailed. The fading-out of the naval expeditions was part of a larger process of retrenchment.46

  In no small measure, this was a rational response to the empire’s challenges: maintenance of domestic control and containment of the Mongols. Of all the ventures undertaken by the Yongle emperor, the naval missions were the ones least likely to contribute to these vital objectives, and consequently also the ones most resoundingly disavowed.

  However, the retreat from overseas engagement went further than fiscal calculus alone dictated. By the end of the fifteenth century, it had become a capital offense to build ships with more than two masts. As already noted in chapter 10, in 1525 coastal authorities were charged wi
th destroying all oceangoing ships, and by 1551 travel in multimasted ships was criminalized. These decrees emanated out of an ongoing struggle between court eunuchs and the officials who had pushed for the abolition of the treasure fleets. Eunuchs were involved in foreign trade and backed merchants whom the government, guided by a blend of factional rivalries and neo-Confucian doctrines, sought to suppress. Shutting down shipyards—and destroying pertinent records—was merely one facet of this age-old struggle, albeit one that caused critical nautical and engineering skills to be lost.47

  As China’s government became more inward- and northward-looking, its interest in maritime commerce faded. Malacca developed into a hub of trade for Muslim sailors who took over routes until they were in turn challenged and partly displaced by the Portuguese. The latter moved swiftly along the same network of connections that had been used by the treasure fleets. Vasco da Gama visited several of the same ports from Somalia to India where the Chinese navy had anchored ninety years earlier. In 1557 the Portuguese set up a post in Macao that they retained for the next 442 years.48

  What accounts for this divergent experience? The Ming empire did not need to extend its reach to prosper, and while it was free to choose to do so, other concerns were more much pressing: I return to this aspect in the next section. Policymaking was monopolized by a single imperial court. If that court, under a particular ruler in cooperation with a particular faction, decided to launch huge fleets, enormous resources were mobilized to make this happen. But when the same court, under a different ruler and a different group of courtiers, decided to revise this decision, that was all it took to snuff out the entire program.