CHAPTER 1

NEW WORLDS FOR OLDInnovation on Sea and Land

Winter completes an ageWith its thorough levelling;Heaven's tourbillions of rageAbolish the watchman's towerAnd delete the cedar grove.As winter completes an age,The eyes huddle like cattle, doubtSeeps into the pores and powerEbbs from the heavy signet ring;The prophet's lantern is outAnd gone the boundary stone,Cold the heart and cold the stove,Ice condenses on the bone:Winter completes an age.

Thus the perspicacious W. H. Auden in For the Time Being. Like seasons, ages are seldom so precise as to end abruptly,while allowing another age to commence. Few events of European history have been as final as the Black Death in bringing toan end one age (which we might call the Innocently Playful Medieval) and bringing into view another (which we might call theColder Late Medieval–Early Renaissance). But even at this interstice, old forms and old mental states hang on, while newforms and new mental states peek uncertainly into view. Locality often determines how boldly or timidly the new will come tosupplant the old; and localities can find their integrity, even their ancient right to existence, open to question. ("This village hasalways been crown territory." "But which crown, England's or France's?" "Which religion, Christian or Muslim?" "Oh, andwhere, pray, is the boundary stone, the definitive separation between Us and Them?")

At such a crossroads, it is difficult if not impossible to see much farther than one's nose: the watchman's tower is down and theprophet's lantern out. Those who occupy traditional seats of power—those who use signet rings—may begin to find theirperches less stable and secure, more open to question. The ordinary bloke, the commoner attempting to make his way in theworld, is all too likely to experience a new if vague sense of unease, of doubt seeping into his pores like unhealthy air. It is nota time of dancing and embracing but of stepping back and taking stock. Yet life goes on: men travel and make deals, as theyhave always done; monarchs make decisions, as they have always done, with far-reaching and often unpredictableconsequences.

1492: COLUMBUS DISCOVERS AMERICA

One such man was Christopher Columbus, born of undistinguished forebears near Genoa, long a shadowy petitioner atvarious European courts, now arrived at Córdoba to the new headquarters of Spanish royalty, the Alcázar, former strongholdof Muhammad XII, whom Spaniards called Boabdil; and two such monarchs were their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand andIsabella of Spain. The year was a fateful one, 1492. To it, historians, looking backwards, have assigned the final expiration ofthe Middle Ages and the (as yet unheralded) birth of a new age.

Many Americans will recall having suffered through a school pageant or two meant to dramatize the monumental encounterbetween the Genoese ship captain and the Spanish royal couple. And since such dramatizations invariably contain almost asmuch misinformation as they do historical fact, it is worth revisiting the great moment with a colder eye.

The ship captain was probably born in 1451 at or very near Genoa, the son of a weaver who also sold cheeses on the streetsof Genoa, then of Savona, his son helping out at both locations ("Parmigiano! Mozzarella! Gorgonzola!!"). The boy would havebeen called Christoffa Corombo in his native Ligurian, later Cristóbal Colón by Spaniards. Since documents of any importancewere written in Latin, his Latinized name, Christophorus Columbus, which appears in his own hand as well as in other recordsof the period, was easily Englished as Christopher Columbus. Though there have been numerous attempts to renderColumbus as Jewish, or even Muslim, and to trace his origins to a European country other than Italy, there is no evidence tosupport such theories, but there is good evidence to support his birth as an Italian Catholic.

Genoa and Savona, ports on the Italian Riviera north of Corsica, offered adventurous boys many opportunities for seafaringapprenticeships. Columbus claimed to have first ventured to sea at the age of ten, and there is little reason to doubt him;surely by his late teens he was almost an old salt, and by his early twenties he had already docked as far away as the westcoast of Africa, Chios in the Greek Aegean, Bristol on Britain's west coast, Galway at the edge of the Atlantic, and probablyIceland. He also began to act as agent for a consortium of Genoese merchants, who traded far and wide. One of his voyagestook him to Lisbon, where a brother, Bartolomeo, worked as a cartographer. In their collaboration we may glimpse the origin ofColumbus's great endeavor.

Thanks to the enormous expansion in world trade that had been booming for more than two centuries, Europeans of meanshad come to take for granted certain substances that did not originate in Europe, especially the spices, opiates, and silks offaraway Asia. No one (who was anyone) could any longer imagine doing without these things. But the fall of GreekConstantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 had created a profound and permanent alteration in international affairs. It was ofcourse still possible to extract the expected goodies from the Far East, but getting them past the Turks required both morecunning and more gold—and sometimes more blood—than had been previously required, considerably raising the price of thebeloved commodities by the time they came to market. (Imagine if Americans could no longer afford chocolate, salt, orcocaine, or if most of the Wal-Marts closed down.) If Europeans could not dislodge the Turks—which they could not—whatwere they to do? At times, it seemed as if all the best practical minds of Europe were engaged in figuring out how to solve theproblem. But think as much as they might, no one could come up with a solution. Except Columbus.

What he suggested made little sense. He proposed to sail around the world, heading west into the Ocean Sea (as it was thencalled) till he hit the Island of Cipangu (Japan, as identified in the writings of Marco Polo) or perhaps, if he was especiallylucky, the fabulous coast of Cathay (China) itself. Maps of the period, inaccurate about many things, nonetheless show boththe principal island of Japan (misshapen and lacking most of its fellow islands) and the coast of a strangely squeezed China.There are even attempts to sketch in the archipelagos of Malaysia and Indonesia.

The diameter of the spherical Earth had been calculated accurately by the Greek Eratosthenes in the second century BC, andhis calculation was still widely known in the time of Columbus. Though no European foresaw what lay in wait for Columbus,since all thought mistakenly that the Ocean Sea, empty of land, was much larger than it was, almost all who could read andhad looked into the subject understood that Columbus was seriously underestimating the overall size of the Earth.

Columbus, basing his calculations on inaccurate assumptions, theorized that the east coast of Asia could be reached by aEuropean ship within a few weeks of its leaving port. The actual circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers,whereas Columbus assumed it to be closer to 25,000 kilometers. Compounding his mistake was his misreading—in a Latin -translation—of a renowned ninth-century Persian astronomer, Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani, known to theWest as Alfraganus. The Persian's correct measurements were given in Arabic miles, which Columbus assumed to be thesame as Roman miles. In actuality, Roman miles are about 25 percent shorter than Arabic ones. Had the Ocean not held theAmericas and the vast sea been empty of land between Europe and Asia, Columbus and his crew, heading west, would haveperished in the deep and never been heard from again. This had indeed been the fate of several earlier (and well-known)attempts.

Columbus's good luck lay not in his miserably wrongheaded calculations about distance but in his accurate knowledge of theNorth Atlantic trade winds, which flow in a great clockwise circle. How he came by this information we can't be sure. It mayhave been the result of his own observations on his previous voyages, only some of which we know about. In any case, it wasinformation not widely understood at the time, even if in our own day it is common knowledge to transatlantic airlinepassengers. As a result of his awareness of the trade-winds pattern, he was able to keep them at his back, plotting a southerlyoutgoing course and a northerly homecoming one, both of which enabled him to travel much more quickly than others hadbeen able to do. In this way, Columbus and his crew were saved from contrary winds, becalmings, and death by dehydrationon the high seas.

Columbus was a man of high color—reddish hair and ruddy cheeks enclosing a long, handsome face, surmounting a towering,tautly muscular body—and of highly colored personality. People seem either to have been instantly attracted to him or to havetaken an instant dislike. He gestured grandly and spoke engagingly and loudly with the confidence of the true aristocrat, whichhe was not but was determined to become. He always presented himself as a nobleman, alluding vaguely to his familial lineand crest, the son certainly not of Italy but of Genoa, la Superba (the Proud One), city of cities, link between Europe and thegreat globe. Despite his poor resources, he managed to dress well, cutting a fine figure at the European courts he visited. Nodoubt his admission to the presence of several monarchs in succession was made possible by the convincing show he made.His fair coloring and cool eye (gray or green in different reports) bespoke his northern European genetic origins and assuredhis welcome by monarchs who were all engaged in marriage games to render their legitimate stock more blond and blue-eyed.

But after he had made his impressive presentation, his proposal would be turned over to the scholars of the court, the peoplewho had read all the books Columbus cited and many more, which he had failed to mention. Inevitably, the scholars wouldreturn to their monarch with the same conclusion: Columbus was a crackpot, not an investment opportunity. But, as we knowonly too well from recent dramas in our financial sector, sooner or later someone somewhere will make the investment. In theevent, that someone was Isabella la Católica, reigning Queen of Spain.

Before this, Columbus had conducted a long dalliance with King John II of Portugal, whom he nearly succeeded in convincing.He sought out financial power brokers in both Genoa and Venice but came up short. He sent his brother Bartolomeo to HenryVII of England with the astounding proposal. Henry, father to Henry VIII and founder of the Tudor dynasty, whose claim to thethrone was quite shaky, said he would think about it. He thought and thought but had nothing more to say (at least not till itwas too late). Meanwhile, Columbus found himself at the Spanish court, spending nearly six seemingly sterile years in theattempt to lure the monarchs into financing his scheme.

Ferdinand and Isabella were not naïfs. Hereditary monarchs and crafty sovereigns, they had created Spain by the ploy of theirmarriage, uniting Ferdinand's Aragon with Isabella's much larger Castile and then pushing the Iberian Peninsula's oneremaining Islamic kingdom into the sea. This last they had accomplished only in March 1492 after years of war and had cometo occupy the Alcázar but minutes (as it were) before Columbus appeared once more to present his final and most eloquentplea. Political to their fingertips, the Catholic Monarchs allowed not a whisper of disagreement to squeeze between them. Theirmotto, "Tanto monta, monta tanto," means something like "Each is the same as the other." So don't try any special pleadingwith one of us.

Columbus's task was therefore a tricky one, but it seems from the scanty evidence that it was the queen, a woman of exquisitecomposure and silky speech, whose blue eyes and long gold tresses betrayed her high Castilian and Lancastrian origins, whowas especially receptive to Columbus's charm. Though the dark, jowly Ferdinand, whose stubbly beard was incapable of aclose shave, would one day boast that he was "the principal cause why those islands were discovered," it was Isabella whoactually found the way forward for Spain to finance Columbus's expedition. Columbus had already raised about half theneeded cash from his Genoese contacts; and Spain, at the end of a long and draining military campaign, was out of cash. SoIsabella donated her jewels (or at least some of them), knowing full well that her act of public generosity would necessarilydrive all the nobles of Castile (and perhaps even of Aragon and of Ferdinand's other territories) to follow suit in their effort toshow themselves at least as generous.

The year 1492 was a busy one for the Catholic Monarchs. Besides their conquest of the Moorish Kingdom of Granada, theyhad begun to take considerable interest in the religious observances of their subjects. Like Doctor Johnson in the stagecoach,they felt that false doctrines should be checked and that those who dared espouse such doctrines should be punished by thecivil power in union with the church of the realm. Venturing a bit further than Johnson might have done, they issued—withindays of their having situated themselves in the Alhambra—the Alhambra Decree, expelling all unconverted Jews from Spain.

As we have already seen in the case of the Black Death, communities of Jews made convenient scapegoats in difficult times.But by this point, Jews had lived among European Christians for the better part of a millennium and a half—often uneasily,sometimes (as in papal Rome) appreciated for their special skills, sometimes targeted for elimination. In general, insofar asChristians thought about them at all, Jews tended to be considered flawed or partial Christians, believers in the Old Testamentbut not the New, people who—inexplicably—failed to see that Jesus was the fulfillment of all their prophecies. They were notuniversally hated, as were the Muslims (called Moors or, more ominously, Saracens), those who had cooked up a new -religion—really, a heresy—and stolen the Holy Places from their rightful owners, the Christians. The fast friendship Boccacciodescribes between the two Parisian merchants, one Christian, the other Jewish, is a bit harder to imagine occurring between aChristian and a Muslim (at least in a Christian country).

Selectively admired or merely tolerated, Jews were an expected part of the European social scene. The expulsion from Spain,however, was not their first. On several prior occasions, Jews had been ordered to move en masse from a European country.In 1182 the teenage King Philip II Augustus of France, whose treasury was empty, had seized all Jewish property and forgivenall debts owed to Jews, provided only the debtors pay to the king 20 percent of what they owed. (Sixteen years later, Philip,feeling the adverse effects on French commerce of the departure of the Jews, would allow them to return.) In 1290, Edward Ibanished all Jews from his kingdom of England, a ban that remained in effect into the 1600s. In 1306, King Philip IV the Fair(who was not) expelled the Jews of France once again. Though readmitted in 1315, they were expelled once more in 1322,readmitted in 1359, and re-expelled in 1394. If the Spanish expulsion seems particularly harsh on account of the hugenumbers involved and the efficiency with which results were pursued, it only signaled more execrable banishments to come:by the end of the Second World War, Ireland would stand out as the only European nation that had never expelled (and/orattempted to eliminate) its Jews nor subjected them to pogroms nor confined them to ghettos.

Parenthetically, we must lay at Spain's door what was almost certainly the earliest of these European persecutions (and acharacteristically Spanish one): the offer, laid out by the primatial archbishop of Toledo in 694, that all Spanish Jews choosebetween baptism and perpetual enslavement. Nor should we forget that in 1391 the newly crowned Spanish king, Henry III,encouraged the massacres of Jews in Seville, Córdoba, Toledo, and other cities of his realm.