The New Penguin History of the World (101 page)

Once these innovations were absorbed, the design of ships which resulted was to remain essentially unchanged (though refined) until the coming of steam propulsion. Though he would have found them small and cramped, Columbus’s ships would have been perfectly comprehensible machines to a nineteenth-century clipper captain. Since they carried guns – though tiny ones by comparison with what was to come – they would equally have been comprehensible to Nelson.

By 1500 some crucial navigational developments had also taken place. The Vikings had first shown how to sail an oceanic course. They had better ships and navigational skill than anything previously available in the West. Using the Pole Star and the sun, whose height above the horizon in northern
latitudes at midday had been computed in tables by a tenth-century Irish astronomer, they had crossed the Atlantic by running along a line of latitude. Then, with the thirteenth century, there is evidence of two great innovations. At that time the compass came to be commonly used in the Mediterranean (it already existed in China, but, though it seems likely, it is not known if or how it was transmitted from Asia to the West), and in 1270 there appears the first reference to a chart, one used in a ship engaged on a crusading venture. The next two centuries gave birth to modern geography and exploration. Spurred by the thought of commercial prizes, by missionary zeal and diplomatic possibilities, some princes began to subsidize research. In the fifteenth century they came to employ their own cartographers and hydrographers. Foremost among these princes was the brother of the King of Portugal, Henry, ‘the Navigator’ as English-speaking scholars were later to call him (unsuitably, for he never navigated anything).

The Portuguese had a long Atlantic coast. They were land-locked by Spain, and increasingly barred from the Mediterranean trade by the experienced and armed force with which the Italians guarded it. Almost inevitably, it seems, they were bound to push out into the Atlantic. They had already started to familiarize themselves with northern waters when Prince Henry began to equip and launch a series of maritime expeditions. His initiative was decisive. From a mixture of motives, he turned his countrymen southwards. Gold and pepper, it was known, were to be found in the Sahara; perhaps the Portuguese could discover where. Perhaps, too, there was a possibility of finding an ally here to take the Turk in the flank, the legendary Prester John. Certainly there were converts, glory and land to be won for the Cross. Henry, for all that he did so much to launch Europe on the great expansion which transformed the globe and created one world, was a medieval man to the soles of his boots. He cautiously sought papal authority and approval for his expeditions. He had gone crusading in North Africa, taking with him a fragment of the True Cross and had taken part in the Portuguese capture of Centa in 1415 which ended the Islamic stranglehold on west Mediterranean sea lanes. He dominates the beginning of the age of discovery, whose heart was systematic, government-subsidized research. Yet its spirit was rooted in the world of chivalry and crusade which had shaped Henry’s thinking. He is an outstanding example of a man who wrought much more than he knew.

The Portuguese pushed steadily south. They began by hugging the African coast, but some of the bolder among them reached the Madeiras and began to settle there already in the 1420s. In 1434 one of their captains passed Cape Bojador, an important psychological obstacle whose
overcoming was Henry’s first great triumph; ten years later they rounded Cape Verde and established themselves in the Azores. By then they had perfected the
caravel
, a ship which used new rigging to tackle head winds and contrary currents on the home voyage by going right out into the Atlantic and sailing a long semicircular course home. In 1445 they reached Senegal. Their first fort was built soon after. Henry died in 1460, but by then his countrymen were ready to continue further south. In 1473 they crossed the Equator and in 1487 they were at the Cape of Good Hope. Ahead lay the Indian Ocean; Arabs had long traded across it and pilots were available. Beyond it lay even richer sources of spices. In 1498 Vasco da Gama dropped anchor at last in Indian waters.

By that time, another sailor, the Genoese Columbus, had crossed the Atlantic to look for Asia, confident in the light of Ptolemaic geography that he would soon come to it. He failed. Instead he discovered the Americas for the Catholic monarchs of Spain. In the name of the ‘West Indies’ the modern map commemorates his continuing belief that he had accomplished the discovery of islands off Asia by his astonishing venture, so different from the cautious, though brave, progress of the Portuguese towards the East around Africa. Unlike them, but unwittingly, he had in fact discovered an entire continent, though even on the much better-equipped second voyage which he made in 1493 he explored only its islands. The Portuguese had reached a known continent by a new route. Soon (though to his dying day Columbus refused to admit it, even after two more voyages and arrival on the mainland) it began to be realized that what he had discovered might not be Asia after all. In 1494 the historic name ‘New World’ was first applied to what had been found in the western hemisphere. (Not until 1726, though, was it to be realized that Asia and America were not joined together in the region of the Bering Straits.)

The two enterprising Atlantic nations tried to come to understandings about their respective interests in a world of widening horizons. The first European treaty about trade outside European waters had been made by Portugal and Spain in 1479, when the Gulf of Guinea was reserved to the Portuguese; now they went on to delimit spheres of influence. The pope made a temporary award, based on a division of the world between them along a line a hundred leagues west of the Azores, but this was overtaken by the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which gave to Portugal all the lands east of a line of longitude running 370 leagues west of Cape Verde and to Spain all those lands west of it. In 1500 a Portuguese squadron on the way to the Indian Ocean ran out into the Atlantic to avoid adverse winds and to its surprise struck land which lay east of the treaty line and was not Africa. It was Brazil. Henceforth Portugal had an Atlantic as well as
an Asian destiny. Though the main Portuguese effort still lay to the east, an Italian in Portuguese service, Amerigo Vespucci, soon afterwards ran far enough to the south to show that not merely islands but a whole new continent lay between Europe and Asia by a western route. Before long it was named after him – America – the name of the southern continent later being extended to the northern, too.

In 1522, thirty years after Columbus’s landfall in the Bahamas, a ship in the Spanish service completed the first voyage around the world. The commander under whom it sailed was Magellan, a Portuguese; he got as far as the Philippines, where he was killed, having discovered and sailed through the straits named after him. Eighteen of his original shipmates survived to reach Spain again. With this voyage and its demonstration that all the great oceans were interconnected, the prologue to the European age can be considered over. Just about a century of discovery and exploration had changed the shape of the world and the course of history. From this time the nations with access to the Atlantic would have opportunities denied to the land-locked powers of central Europe and the Mediterranean. In the first place this meant Spain and Portugal, but they would be joined and surpassed by France, Holland and, above all, England, a collection of harbours incomparably placed at the centre of the newly enlarged hemisphere, all of them easily accessible from their shallow hinterland, and within easy striking distance of all the great European sea routes of the next two hundred years.

The enterprise behind these changes had only been possible because of a growing substratum of maritime skill and geographical knowledge. The new and characteristic figure of this movement was the professional explorer and navigator. Many of the earliest among them were, like Columbus himself, Italian. New knowledge, too, underlay not only the conception of these voyages and their successful technical performance, but also allowed Europeans to see their relationship with the world in a new way. To sum the matter up, Jerusalem ceased to be centre of the world; the maps men began to draw, for all their crudity, are maps which show the basic structure of the real globe.

In 1400 a Florentine had brought back from Constantinople a copy of Ptolemy’s
Geography
. The view of the world it contained had been virtually forgotten for a thousand years. In the second century
AD
Ptolemy’s world already included the Canaries, Iceland and Ceylon, all of which found a place on his maps, along with the misapprehension that the Indian ocean was totally enclosed by land. Translation of his text, misleading as it was, and the multiplication of copies first in manuscript and then in print (there were six editions between 1477, when it was first printed, and 1500) were
a great stimulus to better map-making. The Atlas – a collection of engraved and printed maps bound in a book – was invented in the sixteenth century; more men than ever could now buy or consult a picture of their world. With better projections, navigation was simpler, too. Here the great figure was a Dutchman, Gerhard Kremer, who is remembered as Mercator. He was the first man to print on a map the word ‘America’ and he invented the projection which is still today the most familiar – a map of the world devised as if it were an unrolled cylinder, with Europe at its centre. This solved the problem of providing a flat surface on which to read direction and courses without distortion, even if it posed problems in the calculation of distances. The Greeks of the fourth century
BC
had known the world was a globe and the making of terrestrial and celestial globes was another important branch of the geographical revolution (Mercator made his first globe in 1541).

The most striking thing about this progression is its cumulative and systematic nature. European expansion in the next phase of world history would be conscious and directed as it had never been before. Europeans had long wanted land and gold; the greed which lay at the heart of enterprise was not new. Nor was the religious zeal which sometimes inspired them and sometimes cloaked their springs of action even from the actors themselves. What was new was a growing confidence derived from knowledge and success. Europeans stood in 1500 at the beginning of an age in which their energy and confidence would grow seemingly without limit. The world did not come to them, they went out to it and took it.

The scale of such a break with the past was not to be seen at once. In the Mediterranean and Balkans, Europeans still felt threatened and defensive. Navigation and seamanship still had far to go – not until the eighteenth century, for example, would there be available a time-keeper accurate enough for exact sailing. But the way was opening to new relationships between Europe and the rest of the world, and between European countries themselves. Discovery would be followed by conquest and then, in due time, by the exploitation of vast new overseas resources by Europeans. A world revolution was beginning. An equilibrium, which had lasted a thousand years, was dissolving. As the next two centuries unrolled, thousands of ships would put out year after year, day after day, from Lisbon, Seville, London, Bristol, Nantes, Antwerp and many other European ports, in search of trade and profit in other continents. They would sail to Calicut, Canton, Nagasaki. In time, they would be joined by ships from places where Europeans had established themselves overseas – from Boston and Philadelphia, Batavia and Macao. And during all that time, not one Arab dhow was to find its way to Europe; it was 1848 before a Chinese junk
was brought to the Thames. Only in 1867 would a Japanese vessel cross the Pacific to San Francisco, long after the great sea-lanes had been established by Europeans.

THE EUROPEAN MIND

In 1500 Europe is clearly recognizable as the centre of a new civilization; before long that civilization was to spread to other lands, too. Its heart was still religion. The institutional implications of this have already been touched upon; the Church was a great force of social regulation and government, whatever vicissitudes its central institution had suffered. But it was also the custodian of culture and the teacher of all men, the vehicle and vessel of civilization itself.

Since the thirteenth century the burden of recording, teaching and study so long borne by the monks had been shared by friars and, more important still, by a new institution, in which friars sometimes played a big part, the universities. Bologna, Paris and Oxford were the first of them; by 1400 there were fifty-three more. They were new devices both for concentrating and directing intellectual activity and for education. One result was the revivifying of the training of the clergy. Already in the middle of the fourteenth century half the English bishops were graduates. But this was not the only reason why universities had been set up. The Emperor Frederick II founded the University of Naples to supply administrators for his south Italian kingdom; and when in 1264 Walter de Merton, an English bishop and royal servant, founded the first college at Oxford, among his purposes was that of providing future servants for the crown.

The universities’ importance for the future of Europe, though, was greater than this, though it could not have been foreseen and proved in one respect incalculable. Their existence assured that when laymen came to be educated in substantial numbers, they too would long be formed by an institution under the control of the Church and suffused with religion. Furthermore, universities would be a great uniting, cosmopolitan cultural force. Their lectures were given in Latin, the language of the Church and the lingua franca of educated men. Its former pre-eminence is still commemorated in the vestigial Latin of university ceremonies and the names of degrees.

Law, medicine, theology and philosophy all benefited from the new institution. Philosophy had all but disappeared into theology in the early medieval period. Only one important figure stands out, John Scotus Erigena, an Irish thinker and scholar of the ninth century. Then, as direct
translation from Greek to Latin began in the twelfth century, European scholars could read for themselves works of classical philosophy. The texts became available from Islamic sources. As the works of Aristotle and Hippocrates were turned into Latin they were at first regarded with suspicion. This persisted until well into the thirteenth century, but gradually a search for reconciliation between the classical and Christian accounts of the world got under way and it became clear, above all because of the work of two Dominicans, Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas, that reconciliation and synthesis were indeed possible. So it came about that the classical heritage was recaptured and rechristened in western Europe. Instead of providing a contrasting and critical approach to the theocentric culture of Christendom it was incorporated into it. The classical world began to be seen as the forerunner of the Christian. For centuries man would turn for authority in matters intellectual to religion or to the classics. Of the latter it was Aristotle who enjoyed unique prestige. If it could not make him a saint, the Church at least treated him as a kind of prophet.