1492: The Year Our World Began (21 page)

Even at Byzantium’s last gasp, in 1452, when the Russian church reluctantly transgressed its tradition of deference to the see of Constantinople—defying the Byzantine rapprochement with the Latin communion by electing a patriarch of its own—Vasily II felt obliged to apologize to the emperor: “We beseech your sacred majesty not to blame us for not writing to your Sovereignty beforehand. We did this from dire necessity, not from pride or arrogance.”
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When the imperial city fell, Russia felt bereft. What did God mean by allowing it to happen? How did he want the Orthodox faithful to respond? One obvious answer be
gan to gain acceptance in Muscovy: responsibility for safeguarding Orthodoxy must move from Constantinople to Moscow.

Ivan staked a claim to a Byzantine inheritance when he married a Byzantine princess. Surprisingly, perhaps, the idea was the pope’s. In 1469, when the marriage was first mooted, Ivan was a twenty-nine year-old widower. Zoe—or Sophia, as Russians called her—was a twenty-four year-old spinster, plump but pretty, who was, as her tutor reminded her, “a pauper,” but who embodied the prestige of the Byzantine imperial dynasty and legacy. She was the niece of the last Byzantine emperor. She lived in Rome, as the ward and guest of the pope, a fugitive from the Turkish conquest. Pope Paul II offered Ivan Sophia’s hand. This shows that Rome was relatively well informed about Russia. The pope knew that Ivan would find a Byzantine pedigree hard to resist. He hoped that Sophia would make Ivan an ally in a new crusade against the Ottomans and would provide the Russians with a shining example of conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism. But for Sophia the long journey to Russia was a spiritual homecoming that reunited her with the church of her ancestors. As she traveled across country, through Pskov and Novgorod to Moscow, she worshipped with reverence wherever she went. She did not jib at rebaptism in the Orthodox rite, before her marriage in 1472, or at the orders Ivan gave her entourage forbidding them to display their crucifixes in public.

In the 1470s—hesitantly and unsystematically at first—Ivan began to call himself “Czar” of all Russia, in allusion to the title of “Caesar” that Roman emperors had affected.
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Previously, the monarch of Constantinople and the khan of the Golden Horde were the only rulers Muscovites had flattered with so resounding a title. In the next decade Ivan’s escalating pretensions became obvious during his sporadic negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire. When Frederick III offered to elevate Ivan from the rank of Grand Prince and invest him as a king, Ivan replied disdainfully.

When Nikolaus Poppel offered to arrange for Ivan’s daughter to marry Frederick’s nephew, the margrave of Baden, Ivan’s response was equally peremptory. “It is not fitting,” read the instructions he gave to his own ambassador. The lineage of the rulers of Muscovy was more ancient than that of the Habsburgs. “How could such a great sovereign hand over his daughter to that margrave?”
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When, in answer to the prophets who foresaw the imminent end of the world, Patriarch Zosima of Moscow recalculated the calendar in 1493, he took the opportunity to reinvent “the pious and Christian-loving Ivan” as “the new Czar Constantine,” in allusion to the first Christian emperor, who founded Constantinople. Moscow, he continued, was “the new city of Constantinople, that is to say, The New Rome.” Soon after, a false genealogy circulated in Muscovy, tracing the dynasty back to a mythical brother of Augustus, first emperor of Rome. In a work addressed to either Ivan III or his son, a pious monk, Filofei by name, in the frontier-state of Pskov proclaimed Moscow “the Third Rome” after Rome itself and Constantinople. The first had fallen through heresy. The Turks

Filofei called Orthodoxy “synodal” to distinguish it from Catholicism, which exalted the pope above other bishops.

In endorsing the notion of the third Rome, Ivan appropriated what seems originally to have been a propaganda line spun in Novgorod to exalt that city’s bishop as a rival to Moscow’s. In 1484, the clergy of Novgorod elected a bishop whom Ivan rejected, and claimed that Novgorod had received a white cowl from Rome at the behest of Constantine, the first Roman emperor, as a sign that “in the third Rome, which will be Russia, the Grace of the Holy Spirit will be revealed.”
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Toward the end of his reign Ivan adopted a new seal: a double-headed eagle, which, whether he copied it from the Byzantines or from the Holy Roman Empire, was an unmistakably imperial motif.

He rebuilt Moscow to clothe it in grandeur befitting its new imperial status and, perhaps, to array it for the apocalypse expected in 1492. The new palace chapel of the archbishop of Moscow was dedicated to Our Lady’s Robe—a holy relic that had protected Constantinople many times before the failure of 1453. There could be no clearer symbol that Moscow had taken over Constantinople’s former sanctity. Other buildings contributed to the general embellishment of what was still a modest-looking city, built mainly of wood. The Kremlin acquired formidable brick walls. Agostino Fioravanti—one of Ivan’s imported Italian engineers—made the Cathedral of the Assumption rise over the city in gleaming stone in celebration of the conquest of Novgorod. In the 1480s the Cathedral of the Assumption followed to provide a space for the czar to worship in, while the archbishop’s palace acquired a sumptuous new chapel. Other Italian technicians built a new audience chamber for Ivan, the Palace of Facets.

By taking his wife from Rome and architects from Italy, Ivan tugged the Renaissance eastward. He set a trend that reached Hungary in 1476, when King Mathias Corvinus married an Italian princess, abandoned the gothic plans for his new palace, and remodeled it on Italian lines in imitation of one of the most famous architectural texts of antiquity: the younger Pliny’s description of his country villa. One of the Italian humanists the
king employed was explicit about the building’s inspiration. “When you read,” he told Mathias, “that the Romans created gigantic works that proved their magnificence, you do not permit, invincible prince, that their buildings should surpass yours,…but you revive once again the architecture of the ancients.”
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The king also compiled a much envied classical library. Over the next couple of generations, Renaissance taste would dominate the courts of Poland and Lithuania. Revulsion from Catholicism made Russia a tough environment for Latin culture of any sort, but Ivan showed at least that the cultural frontier was permeable.

Ivan turned Russia into the uncontainable, imperial state that has played a major role in global politics ever since. In his reign, the extent of territory nominally subject to Moscow grew from fifteen thousand to six hundred thousand square kilometers. He annexed Novgorod and wrenched at the frontiers of Kazan and Lithuania. His priorities lay in the West. He defined Russia’s championship of Orthodoxy. He drew a new frontier with Catholic Europe, but, while excluding Catholicism, he opened Russia to cultural influences from the West. He discarded the Mongol yoke and reversed the direction of imperialism in Eurasia. From his time on, the pastoralists of the central Asian steppes would usually be victims of Russian imperialism rather than empire makers at Russian expense. In all these respects the influence of his achievements has endured and helped shape the world in which we live, in which Russia seems to teeter on the edge of the West, never utterly alien but maddeningly inassimilable. But the most striking effect of his reign on the subsequent history of the world has usually gone unremarked: the opening of Russia’s way east, toward what contemporaries called “The Land of Darkness”—Arctic Russia and Siberia, which, of all the colonial territories European imperialists conquered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is the only land where empire endures today.

Here, to the northeast, Ivan’s armies ventured into little-known territory, along a route explored by missionaries in the previous century,
following the river Vym toward the Pechora. The object of this thrust into the Land of Darkness was the effort to control the supply of boreal furs—squirrel and sable—for which there was enormous demand in China, central Asia, and Europe. Sable was black gold, and fur was to the Russian empire what silver was to Spain’s and spices to Portugal’s. In 1465, 1472, and 1483, Ivan sent expeditions beyond the reach of Novgorod’s empire, to Perm and the Ob, with the aim of imposing tribute in furs on the tribespeople who lived there. The biggest invasion was that of 1499, when the city of Pustozersk was founded at the mouth of the Pechora. Four thousand men crossed the Pechora on sleds in winter and made for the Ob, returning with a thousand prisoners and many pelts. Ivan’s ambassador in Milan claimed that his master received a thousand ducats’ worth of fur in annual tribute. The region remained occluded by myth. When Sigmund von Herberstein served as the Holy Roman Emperor’s envoy to Moscow in 1517, he picked up some of the stories of monstrously distended giants, men without tongues, “living dead,” fish with men’s faces, and “the Golden Old Woman of the Ob.” Nonetheless, by comparison with the previous state of knowledge, Russian acquaintance with the boreal north and with Siberia was transformed by the new contacts.

Something of the feel of this new adventure is detectable in the testament Ivan left at his death. The laws of succession of Muscovy were vague. That is why Ivan’s father had fought long wars against his cousins. Ivan imprisoned two of his own brothers. In an attempt to preempt rebellions, every ruler of Muscovy left a testament, bequeathing his lands and revenues to his heirs. Ivan’s conquests made his testament especially long, brimming with the names of exotic communities and distant frontiers. After pages devoted to the many communities gained from Lithuania, and among lists of the appurtenances and possessions of the independent Russian principalities Muscovy had absorbed, with the territories Ivan confiscated from his brothers, the document turns to the eastern borderlands and the strange, vast empire acquired with
the conquest of Novgorod. The Mordvins appear—pagan forest dwellers, speakers of a Finnic tongue, who occupied the slopes of the Urals and the strategic frontier along the northern border of Kazan. The lands of their neighbors the Udmurts are listed, which Ivan seized in 1489. The “Vyatka land” is mentioned—but not its once indomitable people. These herdsmen of the northern plains had tried to remain independent by shifting allegiance between the Russians and the Mongols. When Ivan lost patience with them, he invaded with overwhelming force, put their leaders to death, carried off thousands of Vyatkans into captivity, and resettled their territory with reliable Russians. Novgorod’s territories are painstakingly enumerated, with eighteen places dignified as cities, and the five provinces into which the territory was divided, stretching north to the White Sea and, beyond Novgorod’s colonial lands, the valley of the northern Dvina, and the savage tributaries known as the Forest Lop and the Wild Lop. Pskov is bestowed, even though it remained a sovereign city-state, allied with Ivan but outside his empire.

And from the pages of Ivan’s testament, the sources and rewards of his success gleam. After bestowing sealed coffers of treasure to various heirs, and the residue of his treasury to his successor, Ivan listed the small change of empire:

and similar hordes in the care of other officials and in provincial palaces, “my treasure and my treasures, wherever they shall be.”
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The year 1492 was the decisive one for the reign, not only because the world failed to end but also because a new world began for Russia when Casimir IV died. His sons divided his inheritance. The only power capable of challenging Muscovy in the vast imperial arena between Europe and Asia dissolved. The frontier between Orthodoxy and Catholicism wavered a great deal in future centuries, but it never strayed far from the lines laid down in the treaties Ivan and his son made with Casimir’s heir. Muscovy became Russia—recognizably the state that occupies the region today. Russia was able to turn east toward the Land of Darkness and begin to convert the great forests and tundra into an empire that has remained Russia’s ever since.

Columbus and the Transatlantic Link

October 12: Columbus lands in the New World.

T
he story is incredible but irresistible. As Ferdinand and Isabella rode into Granada, only one of the followers who thronged their camp was unable to enjoy the triumph. After years of striving for the monarchs’ patronage, Christopher Columbus had just learned that a committee of experts had rejected his proposal for an attempted crossing of the western ocean. He turned his back on the celebrations and rode off disconsolately, knowing that his suit had finally failed.

After a day on the road, a royal messenger overtook him and demanded his immediate return to the royal tent outside the fallen city. A change of heart had come suddenly, like all the best miracles. Columbus made the first leg of his transatlantic journey on the back of a mule, bound for Granada.

It sounds like a romanticized version of the real story. But history has all the best stories, which fiction can never excel. What really
happened to Columbus is far more interesting than any of the heroic myths his life has generated.

Columbus’s proposal was unoriginal. Several attempts were made during the fifteenth century to explore Atlantic space, but most doomed themselves to failure by setting out in the belt of westerly winds, presumably because explorers were anxious for a guaranteed route of return. You can still follow the tiny gains in the slowly unfolding record on rare maps and stray documents. In 1427, an otherwise unknown voyage by a Portuguese pilot called Diogo de Silves was recorded on a map: Silves established for the first time the approximate relationship of the islands of the Azores to one another. Between 1452, when the westernmost islands of the Azores were discovered, and 1487, when the Fleming Ferdinand van Olmen was commissioned to seek, like Columbus, “islands and mainlands” in the ocean, at least eight Portuguese commissions survive for voyages into the recesses of the Atlantic. None, however, is known to have made any further progress. They departed from the Azores, where the westerlies beat them back to base. In 1492 in Nuremberg, Martin Behaim’s friends and supporters were advocating the same point of departure for their own dreamed-of Atlantic crossing, which never materialized.

Not only was an Atlantic crossing impracticable, to judge from these precedents; until very recently, it had also seemed unlikely to be profitable. Until the 1480s, exploitation of the Atlantic yielded few returns, outside Madeira, which became a major contributor of taxation to the Portuguese crown thanks to sugar planting in the mid–fifteenth century. Explorers’ hope of establishing direct contact with the sources of West African gold proved illusory, though access to gold at relatively low prices improved as a result of increased trade with native kingdoms. This trade produced other salable articles for European markets—especially, from 1440, increasing numbers of slaves, whom Portuguese desperadoes also obtained by raiding. But even for these, markets were
limited, because great slave-staffed plantations of the sort later familiar in parts of the Americas hardly existed in Europe, where slaves’ roles were still largely in domestic service. The Canary Islands, meanwhile, attracted a good deal of investment because they produced large amounts of natural dyestuffs and seemed potentially exploitable for sugar: but their inhabitants fiercely resisted European encroachments, and the conquest was long and costly.

In the 1480s, however, the situation changed. The sugar trade of Madeira boomed, carried by sixty or seventy ships in a single year. Meanwhile, in 1484, sugar refining began in the Canary Islands. In 1482, thanks to the new port at São Jorge da Mina, on West Africa’s underbelly, large amounts of gold now began to reach European hands. In the same decade, Portuguese contact with the kingdom of Kongo began; voyages toward and around the southernmost tip of Africa encountered unremittingly adverse currents, but they also showed that there were westerly winds in the far South Atlantic, which might at last lead to the Indian Ocean. For the same decade, the port records of Bristol in England show an increasing throughput of North Atlantic commodities, including salt fish, walrus ivory, and products of whaling. English and Flemish merchants in Bristol and the Azores became alert to the investment opportunities. By the end of the decade it was obvious that Atlantic investment could yield dividends. Now it became easier to raise money for new enterprises, chiefly among Italian bankers in Lisbon and Seville.

But if the business climate was increasingly favorable to a new assault on the problems of Atlantic navigation, it was hard to find the right man for the job. Only a foolhardy or greenhorn explorer could make headway in Atlantic navigation. To get much beyond the Azores, you had to take a risk no previous adventurer had been willing to face: you had to sail with the wind at your back.

One of the extraordinary facts about the history of maritime exploration is that most of it has been done against the wind. To modern sailors it seems so strange as to be counterintuitive, but it made perfect
sense for most of the past—simply because explorers of the unknown needed to be sure of their route home. An adverse wind on the outer journey promised a passage home. To break the mold and sail outward with the wind, an explorer would need to be very ignorant or very desperate.

Christopher Columbus was both. He was a Genoese weaver’s son with a large, clamorous, and exigent family. The Catalan, French, Galician, Greek, Ibizan, Jewish, Majorcan, Polish, Scottish, and other increasingly silly Columbuses concocted by historical fantasists are agenda-driven creations, usually inspired by a desire to arrogate a supposed or confected hero to the cause of a particular nation or historic community—or, more often than not, to some immigrant group striving to establish a special place of esteem in the United States. The evidence of Columbus’s origins in Genoa is overwhelming: almost no other figure of his class or designation has left so clear a paper trail in the archives. The modesty of his background makes his life intelligible. For what motivated him to become an explorer was a desire to escape from the world of restricted social opportunity in which he was born.

Only three routes of upward mobility were available to socially ambitious upstarts such as Columbus: war, the Church, and the sea. Columbus probably contemplated all three: he wanted a clerical career for one of his brothers, and fancied himself as “a captain of cavaliers and conquests.” But seafaring was a natural choice, especially for a boy from a maritime community as single-minded as that of Genoa. Opportunities for employment and profit abounded.

Columbus’s reading helped to put plans for seaborne adventure in his mind. The geographical books his biographers usually dwell on played little or no part. Columbus hardly began reading geography until he was middle-aged, and most evidence of his perusal of geographical texts dates from after he had begun exploring. Instead, as a young man and during the formative years of his vocation as an explorer, he read the fifteenth-century equivalent of pulp fiction: seaborne knightly romances and some of the more sensational saints’ lives. The saints’ lives
included the old tale of St. Brendan the Navigator, who set out in his curragh from Ireland and found the earthly paradise, and the legend of St. Eustace, who suffered nobly while searching the seas for his sundered family. The typical chivalric story line started with a hero down on his luck—which was just how Columbus depicted himself in the self-indulgent pleas for sympathy that streamed from his pen. Usually the hero was the victim of some unfair derogation—a royal foundling or a noble scion stripped of his birthright. Columbus’s frequent fantasies about noble ancestors whom he imagined for himself and his absurd claim that “I am not the first admiral of my line”
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recall the tradition.

In many chivalric romances popular at the time, the hero’s escape route into the world of acceptance was by way of seaborne derring-do, in the course of which he would sail to exotic lands, find an island or a remote realm, battle for it against giants and monsters and pagans, and become its ruler. The usual fade-out featured the hero marrying a princess. Cervantes satirized the tradition in
Don Quixote
when he made Sancho Panza ask the Don to make him “governor of some island, with, if possible, a little bit of the sky above it.”
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Real lives sometimes reflected this kind of art. Earlier in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese prince the infante Dom Henrique, whom we inappropriately call Henry the Navigator, even though he never made more than a couple of short trips by sea, was a reader of chivalric and astrological literature—a combination fatal to a rational self-perception. He was a cadet of his dynasty but longed to be a king, and he assembled, at a cost he could ill afford, an entourage of lowlifes and desperadoes, whom he called his “knights and squires.” They sustained their way of life mainly by piracy, at first, and increasingly by slave raiding along the African coast, where they called their adversaries “wild men of the woods”—the savage, hairy creatures who typically opposed knights in chivalric stories, paintings, and sculptures. They made repeated but always unsuccessful efforts to conquer a kingdom for Dom Henrique in the Canary Islands, most of which at the time remained in
the hands of pelt-clad, goat-herding aboriginals, whose way of life was tribal and whose only weapons were literally sticks and stones. Through these shabby endeavors, Dom Henrique’s followers kept up a chivalric pantomime, affecting such names from romance as Lancelot or “Tristram of the Isle,” exchanging vows, and sometimes achieving admission to the order of chivalry, the Order of Christ, of which their leader was Grand Master, appointed by the Portuguese king.

The thug who called himself Tristram of the Isle was a paladin of the island of Madeira, which had been the
mise-en-scène
of a popular chivalric love story for about a hundred years before Dom Henrique ordered his men to colonize it. There Tristram lived the romance implied by his Arthurian name, exacting oaths of vassalage from the cutthroats who came to his island. No incident better captures the tenor of his life than a curious abuse of chivalric conventions in 1452. Diogo de Barrados, a knight of Henry’s service, had been exiled to Madeira, where he served Tristram in his household like a knightly retainer, performing “honor and vassalage.” Ever since Arthur and Lancelot, lords had tended to encounter sexual trouble with their ladies and household knights. In the present case, Diogo abused his status to seduce Tristram’s daughter. The scene—laconically recounted in a royal pardon—in which Tristram chopped off the offender’s pudenda and flung him into a dungeon, takes us into a strange world of mingled chivalry and savagery.

Among Henrique’s followers, Bartolomeo Perestrello was one whose real life followed the trajectory of a chivalric novel. His grandfather was a merchant-adventurer from Piacenza, who followed the sort of advice that flowed from how-to business gurus in the Italy of his day. “Go west, young man,” the career consultants of the day advised—to the underdeveloped, burgeoning Iberian Peninsula. Once established in Portugal, the Perestrello family climbed to the court when Bartolomeo’s elder sisters clambered into the bed of the archbishop of Lisbon, who kept both of them as mistresses simultaneously. Service in Dom Henrique’s household led Bartolomeo to a seaborne career and captaincy of the uninhabited little island of Porto Santo, near Madeira, which Hen
rique colonized, partly as a base for his operations in Africa and the Canaries, and partly in the hope of developing sugar plantations. To be “governor of some island” was, perhaps, not much of a career path from the margins of social acceptability in Portugal. But it brought Bartolomeo status in his own little world and nominal membership in the nobility.

Columbus knew Bartolomeo’s story well, because he married his daughter. In the 1470s, Columbus was working as a sugar buyer for a family of Genoese merchants, shuttling between the eastern Mediterranean and the African Atlantic. When he frequented the island of Porto Santo, he picked up gleanings from the world of Dom Henrique, and he met Doña Felipa—who was probably one of the few noblewomen poor enough, marginal enough, and, by the time of their marriage, sufficiently aging to contemplate such a miserable match. At the same time, Columbus made the acquaintance of the winds and currents of the African Atlantic. He acquired enough experience of Atlantic sailing to know two key facts: there were easterly winds in the latitude of the Canaries, and westerlies to the north. The makings of a successful round trip were therefore available.

If one discounts legends spun after his death, and his own self-aggrandizing account, it becomes possible to reconstruct the process by which Columbus formulated his plan. There is no firm evidence that he had any sort of plan before 1486; only pious deference to unreliable sources makes most historians date it earlier. Nor was the plan ever very clear in his own mind. Like any good salesman, he changed it according to the proclivities of his audience. To some interlocutors, he proposed a search for new islands; to others, a quest for an “unknown continent” presumed, in some ancient literature, to lie in the far Atlantic; to others, he argued for a short route to China and the rich trades of the Orient. Historians have got themselves into a tangle trying to resolve the contradictions. Really, however, the solution to the “mystery” of Columbus’s proposed destination is simple: he kept changing it. The tenacious certainty most historians attribute to him was a myth he cre
ated and his earlier biographers enshrined. The adamantine Columbus of tradition has to be rebuilt in mercury and opal.

Indeed, what mattered to Columbus was not so much where he was going as whether, in a social sense, he would arrive. When he wrote—as we would now say—to “confirm the terms of his contract” with his patrons, he was clear about the objectives that mattered to him: