1492: The Year Our World Began (38 page)

At the western end of the Indian Ocean, for instance, the Ottomans were confined or limited by their geographical position. The Egypt of the Mamluks, similarly, exchanged embassies with Gujarat, exercised something like a protectorate over the port of Jiddah, and fomented trade with India via the Red Sea; but, because of that sea’s hostility to navigation, Egypt was ill placed to guard the ocean against infidel intruders. Abyssinia ceased to expand after the death of the negus Zara-Ya’cob in 1468; after defeat at the hands of Muslim neighbors in Adel in 1494, hopes of revival dispersed; survival became the aim. Persia was in protracted crisis, from which the region would emerge only in the new century, when the boy-prophet Ismail reunited it. Arab commerce ranged the Indian Ocean from southern Africa to the China Seas, without relying on force of arms for protection or promotion. In southern Arabia, yearning for a maritime empire would arise later, perhaps in imitation of the Portuguese, but there were no signs of it yet.

In the central Indian Ocean, meanwhile, no Indian state had interest or energy to spare for long-range expansion. Vijayanagar maintained trading relations all over maritime Asia but did not maintain fleets. The city that housed the court underwent lavish urban remodeling under Narasimba in the 1490s, but the state had ceased to expand, and Narasimba’s dynasty was doomed. The Delhi of Sikandar Lodi, meanwhile, sustaining traditionally landward priorities, acquired a new province in Bihar, but the sultan bequeathed to his heirs an overstretched state that tumbled easily to invaders from Afghanistan a generation later. Gujarat had a huge merchant marine, but no long-range political ambitions. Its naval power was designed to protect its trade, not force it
on others. There were of course plenty of pirates. Early in the 1490s, for instance, from a nest on the western coast of the Deccan, Bahadur Khan Gilani terrorized shipping and, for a time, seized control of important ports, including Dabhol, Goa, and Mahimn, near present Bombay.
²
But no state in the region felt the temptation either to explore new routes or to initiate maritime imperialism.

Farther east, China, as we have seen, had withdrawn from active naval policy and never resumed it. In Japan in 1493, the shogun was under siege in Kyoto as warlords divided the empire between them. Southeast Asia was between empires: the aggressive phase of the history of Majapahit was in the past; Thai and Burmese imperialism were still underdeveloped and, in any case, never took on maritime ambitions. There had been maritime empires in the region’s past: Srivijaya in the seventh century, the Java of the Sailendra dynasty in the eighth, the Chola in the eleventh, and King Hayan Wuruk’s Majapahit in the fourteenth all tried to enforce monopolies on chosen routes. But at the time Europeans burst into the Indian Ocean around the Cape of Good Hope, no indigenous community felt the need or urge to explore further, and nothing like the kind of maritime imperialism practiced by Portugal, and later by the Dutch, existed in the region.

Europe’s conquest of the Atlantic, in short, coincided with the arrest of exploring and imperial initiatives elsewhere. This did not mean that the world was instantly transformed, or that the balance of wealth and power would shift quickly to what we now call the West. On the contrary, the process ahead was long, painful, and interrupted by many reversals. Yet that process had begun. And the Atlantic-rim communities that had launched it—especially those of Spain and Portugal—retained their momentum and continued their dominance in exploration for most of the next three centuries. The opening of a viable route to and fro between Europe and productive regions of the Americas ensured that the global balance of resources would tilt, in the long run, in favor of the West. The balance of the global distribution of power and wealth would change. In preparing that change, or making it possible, 1492 was a decisive year.

In 1492, with extraordinary suddenness after scores—perhaps hundreds—of millions of years of divergent evolution, global ecological exchange became possible: the way life-forms could now overleap oceans, for the first time since the break-up of Pangaea, did more to mold the modern environment than any other event before industrialization. Events of 1492 assured the future of Christianity and Islam as uniquely widespread world religions, and helped to fix their approximate limits.

Though the Indian Ocean is no longer an Islamic lake, Islam has clung tenaciously to most of the rim. Islam cannot, by nature, be as flexible as Christianity. It is consciously and explicitly a way of life rather than of faith; except in marriage discipline, its code is stricter, more exclusive, more demanding on converts than Christianity. It requires adherents to know enough Arabic to recite the Quran. Its dietary regime is unfamiliar to most cultures. Aspects of today’s emerging global culture are particularly inhospitable: liberal capitalism, consumerism, individualism, permissiveness, and feminism have all made more or less easy accommodations in Christendom; Islam seems full of antibodies that struggle to reject them. It may have reached the limits of its adaptability. Buddhism, the third great global religion, has so far achieved only a modest degree of diffusion, but it has established thoroughly flexible credentials, subsisting alongside Shinto in Japan and contributing to the eclecticism of most Chinese religion. It has never captured whole societies outside East, central, and Southeast Asia, but it now demonstrates the power to do so, making converts in the West and even reclaiming parts of India from Hinduism. Hinduism, meanwhile, despite a thousand years of quiescence with no proselytizing vocation, also appears to be able now to make significant numbers of converts in the West and perhaps has the potential to become a fourth world religion.

As well as events that refashioned the world, we have glimpsed others that represent vivid snapshots of changes under way: the ascent of mysticism and personal religion; the transformation of magic into science; the spread and increasing complexity of webs of commerce and cultural exchange; the increase of productivity and—still very patchily
until the eighteenth century—of population in most of the world; the retreat of nomads, pastoralists, and foragers; the growing authority and might of states at the expense of other traditional wielders of power, such as aristocracies and clerical establishments; the realism with which artists and mapmakers beheld the world; the sense of a “small world” every bit of which is accessible to all the rest.

So in a way, the prophets in Christendom who predicted that the world would end in 1492 were right. The apocalypse was postponed, but the events of the year ended the world with which people of the time were familiar and launched a new look for the planet, more “modern,” if you like—more familiar, that is, to us than it would have been to people in the Middle Ages or antiquity. The world the prophets knew vanished, and a new world, the world we are in, began to take shape.

Chapter 1: “This World Is Small”

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History of the Popes
, vol. 5 (St. Louis, B. Herder, 1898), 371.

2. F. Fernández-Armesto,
So You Think Yoúre Human?
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 111.

3. Mark 13:12–26; Matt. 24; Luke 21.

4. Rev. 15:17.

5. Bachiller Palma,
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12. E. G. Ravenstein,
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13. Ravenstein,
Martin Behaim, His Life and His Globe
, 39.

14. D. L. Molinari, “La empresa colombina y el descubrimiento,” in R. Levee, ed.,
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15. Quran 2:189.

16. G. L. Burr,
The Witch Persecutions
(Philadelpia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1902), 7–10; M. Summers,
The Geography of Witchcraft
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Chapter 2: “To Constitute Spain to the Service of God”

1. A. de Santa Cruz,
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ó
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2. J. Goñi Gaztambide, “La Santa Sede y la reconquista de Granada,” in
Hispania Sacra
, vol. 4 (1951), 28–34.

3. L. Suárez Fernández and J. de Mata Carriazo Arroquia,
Historia de España,
vol. 17, pt. 1 (Madrid: Editorial Espasa Calpe, 1969), 409–52.

4. “Historia de los hechos de Don Rodrigo Ponce de León, marqués de Cádiz,” in
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, vol. 116 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1893), 143–317, at p. 198.

5.
El tumbo de los Reyes Católicos del Concejo de Sevilla
, ed. R. Carande and J. de Mata Carriazo Arroquia, 5 vols, (Seville: Universidad Hispalense, 1968), vol. 3, 193; L. Suárez Fernández and J. de Mata Carriazo Arroquia,
Historia de España
, vol. 17, 433.

6. D. de Valera, Epistle XXXIV, in M. Penna, ed.,
Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV,
vol. 1 (Madrid: Atlas, 1959), 31.

7. M. A. Ladero Quesada,
Las guerra de Granada en el siglo XV
(Madrid: Ariel, 2002), 49.

8. Suárez and Mata,
Historia de España
, vol. 17, 888.

9. F. Fernández-Armesto,
Ferdinand and Isabella
(London: Weidenfeld, 1974), 89.

10.
The Diary of John Burchard,
ed. A. H. Mathew, 2 vols. (London: Francis Griffiths, 1910), 1:317–19.

11. Fernández-Armesto,
Ferdinand and Isabella
, 95.

12. L. P. Harvey,
The Muslims in Spain, 1500–1614
(Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2005), 33.

13. Harvey,
Muslims in Spain,
47.

14. D. de Valera, “Doctrinal de Príncipes,” in M. Penna, ed.,
Prosistas,
173.

15. See B. F. Weissberger,
Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power
(Minneapolois: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004), 135.

16. H. de Pulgar, “Crónica de los Reyes de Castilla Don Fernando e Doña Isabel,” in C. Rosell, ed.,
Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla
, vol. 3 (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1878), 255–57.

17. E. Pardo Canalís,
Iconografía del rey católico
(Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1951).

18. Translation of the Latin version in A. Alvar Ezquerra,
Isabel la católica, una reina vencedora, una mujer derrotada
(Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2002), 316.

19. D. Clemencía,
Elogio de la Reina Católica Doña Isabel
(Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1820), 355–57.

20. P. K. Liss,
Isabel the Queen
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 24.

21. F. de Pulgar,
Letras,
ed. J. Domínguez Bordona (Madrid: Editorial Espasa Calpe, 1949), 151.

Chapter 3: “I Can See the Horsemen”

1. N. Davis,
Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus
(London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 145–47.

2. H. A. R. Gibb and C. Beckingham, eds.,
The Travels of Ibn Battuta,
vol. 4 (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society, 2001), 317–23.

3. Gibb and Beckingham,
The Travels of Ibn Battuta,
323.

4. J. Matas i Tort and E. Pognon, eds.,
L’atlas català
(Barcelona: Diàfora, 1975), 4.

5. Gibb and Beckingham,
The Travels of Ibn Battuta,
335.

6. Leo Africanus,
The History and Description of Africa,
ed. R. Brown, 3 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1896), 3:827.

7. N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, eds.,
Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History
(Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), 82.

8. Levtzion and Hopkins,
Early Arabic Sources,
76–85, 107–12.

9. Levtzion and Hopkins,
Early Arabic Sources,
119.

10. T. Insoll,
The Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003).

11. Leo Africanus,
History,
3:824.

12. Leo Africanus,
History,
3:825.

13. Leo Africanus,
History,
1:156.

14. L. Kaba,
Sonni Ali-Ber
(Paris: ABC, 1977), 77.

15. Kaba,
Sonni Ali-Ber,
79.

16. E. N. Saad,
Social History of Timbuktu
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 42.

17. S. M. Cissoko,
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(Dakar: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1975), 55.

18. Cissoko,
Tomboctou,
57.

19. Saad,
Social History of Timbuktu,
45.

20. I. B. Kake, and G. Comte,
Askia Mohamed
(Paris: ABC, 1976), 58.

21. Kake and Comte,
Askia Mohamed,
60.

22. Kake and Comte,
Askia Mohamed,
68.

23. Leo Africanus,
History,
3:833–34.

24. F. Fernández-Armesto,
Before Columbus
(London: Folio Society, 1986), 194.

25. Fernández-Armesto,
Before Columbus,
195.

26. J. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,”
Journal of African History
25:2 (1984), 147–67.

27. S. Axelson,
Culture and Confrontation in Lower Congo
(Stockholm: Gummesson, 1970), 66.

28. A. Brásio,
Monumenta missionaria africana
, vol. 1 (Lisbon: Agença Geral do Ultramar, 1952), 266–73.

29. Brásio,
Monumenta,
294–323, 470–87.

30. F. Alvares,
The Prester John of the Indies,
ed. C. Beckingham and G. Huntingford (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society, 1961), 303–4, 320–21.

Chapter 4: “No Sight More Pitiable”

1. A. Bernáldez,
Historia de los Reyes Católicos
(Madrid: Atlas, 1953), 617–53.

2. A. Bernáldez,
Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos
, ed. M. Gómez Moreno and J. de Mata Carriazo (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1962), 96–101.

3. F. Fita, “El martirio del santo niño,”
Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia
11 (1887): 12–13.

4. Libro de Alborayque, quoted in J. Pérez,
History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007), 69.

5. Y. Baer,
History of the Jews in Christian Spain,
2 vols. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1966), 2:527.

6. Perez,
History of a Tragedy,
79.

7. Perez,
History of a Tragedy,
90.

8. R. Conde y Delgado de Molina,
La expulsión de los judíos de la Corona de Aragón: Documentos para su estudio
(Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1991), 95–96.

9. P. León Tello,
Los judíos de ávila
(ávila: Institución Gran Duque de Alba, 1963), 91–92; L. Suárez Fernández,
Documentos acerca de la expulsión de los judíos
(Valladolid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1964), 391–95.

10. Perez,
History of a Tragedy,
86.

11. Fernández-Armesto,
Before Columbus,
201.

12. Bernáldez,
Memorias,
113.

13. Leo Africanus,
History,
2:419.

14. Leo Africanus,
History,
2:424, 443, 447–48.

15. Abraham ben Solomon, quoted in D. Raphael, ed.,
The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles
(North Hollywood: Carmi House Press, 1992), 175.

16. Leo Africanus,
History,
2:453, 461.

17. Leo Africanus,
History,
2:477.

18. Raphael,
Expulsion 1492 Chronicles,
87.

19. Davis,
Trickster Tales,
137.

20. V. J. Cornell, “Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco: Portuguese Dukkala and the Sadid Sus, 1450–1557,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies
22, no. 4 (November 1990): 379–418.

21. Quoted in Davis,
Trickster Tales,
32.

22. Raphael,
Expulsion 1492 Chronicles,
23, 115.

23. H. Beinart,
The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
(Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 279.

24. Bernáldez,
Memorias,
113.

25. Konstantin Mihailovc,
Memoirs of a Janissary,
quoted in H. W. Lowry,
The Nature of the Early Ottoman State
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 47.

26. G. Necipoğlu,
Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
(New York: Architectural History Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 8.

27. S. Shaw,
The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic
(London: Macmillan, 1991), 30, 32.

28. Lowry,
Early Ottoman State,
48.

29. Shaw,
Jews of the Ottoman Empire,
33.

Chapter 5: “Is God Angry with Us?”

1. E. Armstrong,
Lorenzo de’ Medici
(London and New York: Putnam, 1897), 308–9.

2. Armstrong,
Lorenzo de’ Medici,
314.

3. J. Burchard,
At the Court of the Borgia,
ed. G. Parker (London: Folio Society, 1963), 412.

4. Lorenzo de’ Medici,
Lettere,
vol. 6, ed. M. Mallett (Florence: Barbèra, 1990), 100.

5. L. Martines,
April Blood
(Oxford; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 214–20.

6. Martines,
April Blood,
221–23.

7. E. B. Fryde, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Finances and Their Influence on His Patronage of Art,” in
Humanism and Renaissance Historiography
(London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 145–57.

8.
Lorenzo de Medici: Selected Poems and Prose,
ed. J. Thiem et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1991), 67 (translation modified).

9. L. Polizzotto, “Lorenzo il Magnifico, Savonarola and Medicean Dynasticism,” in B. Toscani, ed.,
Lorenzo de’ Medici: New Perspectives
(New York: Peter Lang Publishing Group, 1993), 331–55.

10. F. W. Kent,
Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence
(Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004), esp. 91; J. Beck, “Lorenzo il Magnifico
and His Cultural Possessions,” in Toscani, ed.,
Lorenzo,
138.

11. L. Martines,
Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Italy
(London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 2006), 12–14 (translation modified).

12. D. Beebe et al., eds.,
Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: Religion and Politics,
1490–1498 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2006), 27.

13. Beebe et al.,
Writings of Girolamo Savonarola,
72.

14. Beebe et al.,
Writings of Girolamo Savonarola,
68–69.

15. Beebe et al.,
Writings of Girolamo Savonarola,
73.

16. G. Savonarola, “Prediche ai Fiorentini,” in. C. Varese, ed.
La letteratura italiana
, vol. 14 (Milan: Garzanti, 1955): 90.

17. S. Meltzoff,
Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola: Theology and Painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano
(Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1987), 53.

18. Beebe et al.,
Writings of Girolamo Savonarola,
72.

19. Burchard,
Court of the Borgia,
1:372–73.

20. Y. Labande-Mailfert,
Charles VIII: Le vouloir et la destinée
(Paris: Fayard, 1986), 27–28.

21. J. d’Arras,
Mélusine,
ed. C. Brunet (Paris: Brunet, 1854), 121.