After Tamerlane (15 page)

What was the significance of this change in the ‘mandate of heaven', and of Japan's reunification after 1590? Together they cut short the experiment in ‘openness' that was tried out in East Asia after 1550. In the later sixteenth century, the combination of Japanese commercial and maritime expansion, the opening of China and the trickle of European trade had stimulated the movement of people, goods and ideas.
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Chinese and Japanese moved into South East Asia; Europeans arrived in Japan and China. In China, new overseas markets for porcelain and silk encouraged urban growth. The inflow of Japanese and American silver in payment monetized the economy and its revenue system – an important gain in a country without precious metals.
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Japan, with its large population of maybe 12 million (three times that of contemporary Britain), its maritime sector and its reserve of bullion, may have been the vital agent in this opening-up. It was in the trading ports of south-western Japan that Christianity established a foothold when the Jesuits arrived after 1580. They skilfully exploited Christianity's appeal as a social adhesive in the age of disorder.
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But Hideyoshi's supremacy, followed by the systematic repression of
daimyo
autonomy by Ieyasu (1524 – 1616), the first Tokugawa shogun, spelled the gradual end of Japan's ‘Christian century' and the brief era of openness in overseas trade. Christianity was blamed for
daimyo
resistance, in Kyushu especially (where there was a major rebellion in 1638 – 9). Many Christians were killed, and Christianity was banned altogether in 1640. Ieyasu had tried to control foreign trade. His successors preferred to exclude Europeans completely. The Spanish were expelled in 1624. The English traders had already left. The Portuguese were confined to the island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour, and then forced to leave in 1639. Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad after 1635. Chinese merchants and artisans continued to come: Nagasaki had its ‘Chinatown'. China's cultural influence remained extremely strong. But against the rest of the world the seclusion policy (
sakoku
) was all but complete.

It ran in parallel with the systematic reassertion of Confucian ideology by the new Tokugawa regime, now based in Edo (modern Tokyo). Tokugawa rule maintained the outward forms of feudalism in the
daimyo
domains, but modified the substance. Feudal lordship was weakened by the grant of village autonomy and by transforming the samurai from a local warrior class into something more like a salaried service gentry paid (in rice) to administer the domains. To help legitimize this new dispensation, the early Tokugawa sponsored Confucian ideologues and educators. They preached the Confucian message of a four-class hierarchy (officials, peasants, artisans and merchants), and the need to pursue social and natural harmony in a well-ordered society.
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In Ch'ing China it was a similar story. Dynastic change meant not the end of Confucianism, but its deliberate entrenchment as the official ideology of the new Manchu regime. Manchu rulers were less instinctively hostile than their Ming predecessors to foreign commercial contact. But they were deeply mistrustful of its political meaning in the coastal region south of the Yangtze, which was geographically remote, hard to control, and the refuge of Ming loyalists who were only slowly defeated.
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But the most significant achievement of the Manchu dynasty was to reverse the ultimately disastrous introversion of Ming frontier policy. Manchu adeptness in steppe diplomacy helped to turn Inner Mongolia into a buffer zone, and to drive China's imperial power deep into Inner Asia. The northern
inland threat to China's stability was efficiently neutralized. With a once-disruptive Japan now safety withdrawn into neo-Confucian seclusion, and Confucianism firmly in command in Korea and Vietnam, the Manchu accession heralded a remarkable restoration of the East Asian world order. European influence, based in faraway Java, was confined to its keyholes. Early Dutch interest in direct trade and diplomacy succumbed to the mood of mutual indifference: by 1690 the Dutch East India Company had stopped sending ships to China.
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Meanwhile, imperial China reached the apogee of its power.

Comparing Europe with other parts of Eurasia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries requires (for European readers) a certain mental adjustment. Our knowledge of Europe is so much more detailed that it is easy to see it as a cultural and political anthill that contrasts with the ‘torpor' of ‘oriental' societies. The existence of so many separate jurisdictions, with their own rulers, armies, laws and fiscal systems, all competing to survive, adds to the impression of a busy, energetic civilization. But we should not mistake all this activity (and the mass of paper it produced) for evidence that the European states had discovered the means to assert their predominance in the world at large.

Quite the contrary. The most dynamic elements in Europe's early modern culture promised not so much a great transformation as a syndrome of destructive instability. The intellectual revolt against late medieval scholasticism and the ‘rediscovery' of a much larger body of classical literature formed the main ingredients of ‘Renaissance humanism'. The history, politics and rhetoric of republican Rome had a particular appeal for the urban, bureaucratic and class-conscious milieux of northern Italy and Flanders.
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But they also promoted a new conception of the secular state that undermined the claims of clerical privilege. They shaped a religious and intellectual climate in which the doctrines and institutions of the Catholic Church could be attacked far more systematically than by isolated heretics or social rebels. The astonishing success of the Protestant Reformation rested upon its rapid rise to intellectual respectability, its appeal to secular
rulers (like the Elector of Saxony, whose protection was crucial to Luther's influence) and its association with the defence of urban or princely autonomy against the engrossing demands of dynasts and empire-builders.

In fact religious dissent could easily be seen as posing a devastating threat to social, political and moral order at a time when population growth and price inflation were sharpening social conflict. Alarm at its spread prompted the papal programme of church reform enacted at the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563, and the urgency with which Elizabeth I constructed the Anglican
via media
in England. But there was no let-up in the savage ideological warfare between Catholics and Protestants after 1560, vented in the French wars of religion and the revolt of Dutch Protestants against their Catholic Habsburg ruler. If Renaissance humanism had created a new social type – the self-conscious, competitive, calculating individualists imagined by Jacob Burckhardt
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– and transformed the state from a conglomerate of custom into a ‘work of art',
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the Reformation had injected a spirit of rebellion, intolerance and dogmatism which threatened to make the jostling polities of the Occident ungovernable.

Perhaps for this reason, the most attractive political idea of the age was dynasticism. The dynast was an ideal lawgiver, enjoying legitimacy through descent (by contrast with self-made despots) and commanding unstinting loyalty from his subjects. When fused with new notions of secular bureaucracy, and of the monarch as the glamorous patron of learning and the arts, dynastic rule was a powerful instrument for mobilizing social resources and imposing political order. In practice, European conditions sharply reduced dynasticism's potential. Local power still lay largely with aristocratic grandees and their networks of clientage. Their ambitions and rivalries were often more potent than royal decrees. They could evoke local patriotism and its attachment to custom against the centralizing schemes of the dynasts and call on the support of religious dissenters (or conservative resistance to a reformist regime). The grandest dynastic project of all, Charles V's plan for a universal empire uniting the Habsburg lands in Germany, Spain and the Low Countries under a single ruler, his son Philip, was wrecked by an alliance of German princes and Protestant reformers.

Dynasticism was also an unsettling force in a continent honeycombed with different jurisdictions. Dynastic prospects and policy turned on the accidents of birth and death, an endless source of claims and disputes. Dynastic ‘logic' disregarded local autonomy or cultural identity. It ignored the balance of power. It provoked the bitter rivalry epitomized in the Valois – Habsburg wars in the first half of the sixteenth century. It also ruled out any united action against Ottoman imperialism in South East Europe or the Mediterranean. They would rather make peace with the Turks, declared the German princes in 1551, than accept the future Philip II as their ruler.
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Horror at the infidel did not preclude a Franco-Turkish entente against the Habsburgs in 1536. Nor did it persuade Philip II to give up his struggle against the rebellious Dutch and concentrate Spanish power against the Turks in the Mediterranean after 1580.
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Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old. The huge increase in his income of American silver after 1580 allowed Philip II to pay for his wars of dynastic hegemony – though even this windfall did not save him from bankruptcy in 1596.
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Thus much of the intellectual and political energy of sixteenth-century Europe was consumed by the religious and dynastic warfare that racked the continent until the peace of exhaustion at the end of the century. Set against this background, it is easy to see why European expansion was a meagre threat to the Islamic empires or the great states in East Asia. European thought and scholarship seemed mainly absorbed by the pyrotechnics of theological argument. Scientific inquiry had yet to break free from the belief in witchcraft and astrological prediction to which most educated people subscribed. The great exception to this general rule of political and intellectual introversion was the spectacular growth of a maritime subculture.

It was hardly surprising that a ‘peninsula of peninsulas' (one way of describing Europe) surrounded by numerous ‘inland seas' – the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea – should have developed a dense system of sea communications. Still less that the variety of maritime conditions, in Atlantic Europe especially, should have bred a wide range of ship types and
techniques. In its combination of accessible hinterlands, ecological variety and population density, Europe was better endowed than other maritime regions like the western Indian Ocean (linking East Africa, the Persian Gulf and western India) or the island world of South East Asia. The result was the emergence long before 1400 of a number of powerful ‘sea states': Venice, Genoa, Ragusa and Aragon in the Mediterranean; Portugal in South West Europe; Denmark, Norway, the Hanseatic League, England and eventually Holland in the north. In these sea states, maritime enterprise thrived on a profitable mix of fisheries, trade and piracy (to which traders resorted when their rivals used force to exclude them from commerce).
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It won the backing of governments, who needed the revenues that seaborne trade created. It was no coincidence that mapping and navigational aids were the principal fields in which scientific experiment was translated most rapidly into technical practice. By the 1570s Ptolemy's world map (itself ‘rediscovered' in Europe in the fifteenth century) had been replaced by the much more accurate map of Abraham Ortelius, based on the reports of European travellers and seafarers. By the end of the century a huge volume of knowledge about Asia and the Americas was in printed form, and the vogue for travel writing – sober, scientific or simply sensational – was well under way.
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By the sixteenth century it was clear enough that Europe's comparative advantage over other Eurasian civilizations lay in its precocious development of marine activity. The simultaneous growth of long-distance trade with the Americas and India was one sign of this. Another was the rise of the huge cod fishery in the North Atlantic, which already employed some 350ships (Spanish, French, Portuguese and English) by the 1570s.
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European sailors were especially adept in the use of force at sea, as an alternative to trade or as an auxiliary to it. The most striking case was Portugal's Estado da India. By the early seventeenth century Europeans were poised to assert a worldwide predominance in deep-sea trading and carrying, occupying (with much internal dispute) a profitable niche in long-distance trade. But, with the striking exception of their American conquests, there was little to show that they could move beyond the shallow coastal beachheads where this niche activity was usually carried on. Nor that the habits and ethos of such expatriate ‘sea people' commanded
any special prestige among the other Eurasian societies with whom they came into contact. Only on Russia's steppe frontier (in somewhat special conditions) had Europeans expanded successfully into the heartland of another Eurasian society. In South East Europe, by contrast, the advantage lay all the other way.

The nearest that the Europeans had come to building a world empire was the conglomerate of territories ruled over by Spain. Its span was tremendous. Spanish power reached across the Atlantic. It extended all the way from Chile to New Mexico. It stretched across the Pacific to the Philippine Islands, to where Mexican silver was being shipped after 1565 to exchange for the luxuries brought there from China. The long, lonely voyage of the Manila galleon, which set off each year between 1565 and 1815 on its six-month journey to Acapulco (on at least one voyage all the passengers and crew died of disease or starvation, while the ship sailed on like the
Marie Celeste
) was the thread that connected this remote outpost of empire.
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Yet, for all its astonishing scale, this empire remained less than the sum of its parts. It was a windfall empire, called into existence by the demand for silver in Europe and China. It was built to enforce a global monopoly over American silver (which made up over 80 per cent of the world's supply from 1494 to 1850), but it lacked the means or the will to drive European trade deeper into the markets of Asia. There was no imperial ‘grand strategy' to make Spain the centre of a world economy: indeed, such a plan would have been futile. Instead, Philip II devoted the ‘royal fifth' – the monarchy's share of the silver stream – to the struggle to uphold Spain's pre-eminence in Europe against rivals and rebels. The resources of America, and of Spain itself, were harnessed not to a vision of global predominance, but to the insatiable demands of the king's ‘messianic imperialism' – his mission to defend the Catholic faith against its Protestant foes.
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