A Short History of the World (11 page)

At this point in time the Ottoman Sultan ruled over all of Muslim Asia, claiming all lands to the Euphrates River in the east and superiority over all other Islamic rulers.
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Constantinople became the new imperial capital and gradually acquired the name of Istanbul.
 

In the west, the war continued on both land and sea. Serbia capitulated shortly after the fall of Constantinople and most of the Balkans followed thereafter. The Ottomans then took over the southernmost part of Greece, defeated Venice, and landed on the heel of Italy. It was only the death of Mehmed II in 1481 that stopped the Ottoman troops from invading Europe any further, the troops having been ordered home to help the new Sultan defeat his brother in a leadership battle. Yet again, Europe was saved at the last minute.
 

Ming China (AD 1368–1644)

As the Ottomans grew in power in the Middle East, China missed its opportunity to become the major global power. The Chinese had never accepted their Mongolian Yuan overlords and their treatment under them had led to growing discontent; the people had been taxed heavily to pay for expensive projects, including the building of roads, and many military campaigns undertaken by the Yuan, which ultimately failed. Widespread crop failure in the north and the resulting famine in the 1340s only served to break the back of an already fragile system.
 

Hungry and homeless, the peasants united and rebelled. In the 1360s, one such peasant, a former Buddhist monk called Zhu Yuanzhang, was successful in extending his power throughout the Yangtze Valley. He seized Beijing in 1368, forced the Mongols to withdraw to Mongolia, took the title Hongwu, and declared himself the founder of a new Chinese dynasty: the Ming Dynasty.
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The new dynasty was initially open to the world and encouraged trade. Under the reign of the second Ming emperor, the Chinese even embarked on a series of major naval expeditions. Between 1405 and 1433, many decades before Columbus or Magellan, several expeditions under the leadership of Admiral ZhengHe set sail on journeys of geographical exploration and diplomacy around the Indian Ocean, going as far as Africa.
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These expeditions are said to have included up to 28,000 men on ships up to 300 feet long.
 

The potential of China at this time seemed almost limitless; had it continued to look outwards, it may well have been the Chinese who discovered America, not the Europeans.
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Unfortunately for China, however, this was not to be. With the Mongols expelled, Confucian ministers gained power at the court of the Emperor. Confucians were hostile to commerce and –
 
understandably, following the recent Mongol occupation – to all things foreign. They also had an unhealthy veneration for the past. ‘
Preserving the glories of the past seemed more important in China than addressing the kind of questions that global expansion was forcing onto Westerners’ attention.
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There was plenty to keep the Chinese occupied at home, particularly finding the resources to repel continuous and aggressive raids on their borders by the Mongols. Developing into a great maritime trading power was simply not one of their objectives.
 

Under the influence of Confucian ministers, the government ended its sponsorship of naval expeditions, dismantled shipyards, and forbade the construction of multi-masted ships. In the 1470s ZhengHe’s records were destroyed and by 1525 it was an offence to build any ocean-going vessel.
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So ended the great age of Chinese exploration and the development of world maritime trade was left to the Europeans, who were just beginning to embark on their voyages of discovery.
 

Without doubt this had significant detrimental impact on the subsequent development of the country. Up until this time, China had been one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, inventing paper, gunpowder, porcelain and the magnetic compass amongst other things. However, the strength of its emperors meant that a decision by one person could – and did – halt innovation, and the country’s strong veneration for the past eventually began to act as a disadvantage in a world where innovation and invention gave countries a competitive edge. Families tended ‘
to preserve what was ancient and hallowed at the expense of what was new but potentially disruptive’.
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Nor did China’s relative isolation from other countries encourage it to look outwards. Perhaps no greater example of this exists than the construction of the Great Wall of China, which was built to keep foreigners out.

Europe, on the other hand, was a collection of small and competing states with multiple cultures and languages and this unsuspectingly served as an advantage to its inventors and explorers; if one party failed to sponsor them, they could always turn to another. Either way, it was in a country’s best interests to keep up with the latest technologies in order to keep the balance of power. As a result, European inventors were encouraged rather than discouraged.

‘In the end it was precisely the instability which Europeans had been trying unsuccessfully to evade for so long which had turned out to be their greatest strength. Their wars, their incessant internal struggles, their religious quarrels, all these had been the unfortunate, but necessary condition, of the intellectual growth which had led them, unlike their Asiatic neighbours, to develop the metaphysical and inquiring attitudes towards nature which, in turn, had given them the power to transform and control the worlds in which they lived.’
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The Retreat of Islam

China was not the only civilisation that retreated into itself. Much of the Islamic world, formerly a beacon of progress in a backward world, became seemingly trapped by the limits of scripture, unprepared to accept the value of any teaching or development not expressly mentioned in the Qur’an. Why innovate when everything anybody needed to know was written in the Qur’an? As David Landes states, ‘
Islamic science, denounced as heresy by religious zealots, bent under theological pressure for spiritual conformity.
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Islamic refusal to accept the idea of a printed Qur’an meant that such countries generally remained opposed to the printing press, a key channel for spreading the ideas of the Renaissance, which led to the intellectual development of Western Europe. What nobody predicted was quite the extent and speed at which Europe would ultimately grow.

V

The Ascent of the West

AD 1450 - 1780

Fortuitously for Europe, Islamic scholars were beginning to reject development not expressly mentioned in the Qur’an and the Hadith
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just as the Chinese were limiting their relations with the outside world and looking backwards to Confucian writings from the 6th century BC. Europe on the other hand, until that point behind both the Chinese and the Islamic world in its general development, was about to witness a shift that would drag it out of the Middle Ages, change the course of history, and lead to European domination of the world.

The Renaissance (early 15th – late 16th Centuries)

The causes of this shift were many. They revolved around the exchange of ideas and goods that increased in volume after the end of the Crusades, the discovery of new worlds which led people to question what they believed, the challenge to the teachings of the Church and its authority after repeated schisms, and the sudden influx of knowledge brought to Europe by scholars fleeing the Ottoman advance.
 

Often referred to as the Renaissance, from the French word for ‘rebirth’, and generally understood to have taken place from the early 15th to the late 16th centuries, the period saw a deep transformation of the way in which Europeans thought, ruled, and lived.
 

The most important technical and cultural innovation of the Renaissance was the introduction of Guttenberg’s printing press around 1450. Without the ability to spread new ideas rapidly and cheaply, it is unlikely that Europe would have developed at the speed at which it did. The printing press saw the start of a communications revolution in which by 1480 books were being printed in the major cities of Germany, France, the Netherlands, England and Poland. To put it into perspective, ‘
in the 50 years following the invention more books were produced than in the preceding thousand years.
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With larger print runs came lower unit costs, thus making books both more available and cheaper to the wider public. What’s more, books were also increasingly published in the local language of the region as opposed to Latin, which contributed to building a sense of nation-hood.
 

While the printing press made the Renaissance, its invention also happened to coincide with a period of relative peace in Europe. The Hundred Years War between France and England had ended in 1453 – coincidentally the same year as the fall of Constantinople – and the conflict between Muslims and Christians in present-day Spain
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had ended in favour of the Christians. Trade and agriculture, so long disrupted, first by the Barbarian invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries and then by the hostility between Christianity and Islam, flourished again and a feudalistic European society was slowly replaced by a society driven by trade.
 

 
The Italians, and the Florentines and Venetians in particular, took advantage of their location between East and West to accumulate huge wealth. A life of business and politics became as respected as a life in the Church. Many classical ideas, which had flown eastward with the fall of Rome a thousand years earlier, returned to Europe and led to a revival in the intellectual and artistic appreciation of Greco-Roman culture. Non-religious themes were no longer frowned upon and rich patrons bankrolled architecture and buildings, the likes of which no one had seen since Roman times. Great families such as the Medici became renowned as great patrons of the arts, for which the Renaissance is so famous; Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are just two of the brightest stars in a constellation of artists that benefited from them and other rich patrons during this time. Tremendous advances were also made in the fields of mathematics, medicine, engineering, and architecture.

The Spice Trade

Europeans had been trading with the East for centuries, generally through Arab and Indian intermediaries, selling bulk goods such as timber, glassware, soap, paper, copper and salt in return for silk, incense and spices. Silk was a luxury compared to the coarse clothes of the time, incense was used to hide the smells of a society unaccustomed to hygiene, and spices (cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and black pepper) were used to make food taste better, to preserve it and to hide the smell of spoiling meat; low food supply and a lack of grain to feed animals through the winter months meant that animals were routinely slaughtered in autumn; with no ice available, the use of pepper was one way in which meat could be preserved.

Cloves were specifically prized by Europeans for medicinal purposes, with some doctors even suggesting that nutmeg could protect against the plague. As a result, at one point nutmeg was worth more than its weight in gold and caused people to risk their lives to import it. Pepper grew predominantly in India, with nutmeg and cloves only growing in one place on earth: on a few small islands called the Moluccas (in present-day Indonesia), north-west of present-day New Guinea. These islands became known as the Spice Islands, and the efforts of European nations to find a westerly route to them would fundamentally affect the future of the world.
 

The Age of Exploration (1450-1600)

The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 acted as a key driver for European exploration. Overland routes into Persia, Central Asia and China were lengthy, dangerous and already expensive thanks to all the middlemen involved. They were now taxed even further.

Long since addicted to silk and spices, and jealous of the riches of Venice and other Italian cities that had benefited from this trade, the Portuguese sought to develop a sea route to the East around the continent of Africa. In this way they looked both to bypass the Ottoman taxes and to undercut the Italian trade.
 

The other impetus to exploration came from Africa itself. The Portuguese needed gold to pay for their imports from the East, but the main European access to gold came from Africa via the trans-Sahara caravan routes. Several African kingdoms, such as Ghana, had grown fabulously wealthy on the back of this trade and the Portuguese wanted to establish sea routes down the coast of Africa in order to obtain the gold at its source.
 

Working their way down the African coast, they rapidly proved that such small expeditions could be successful and profitable. The son of the king of Portugal, Prince Henry (aka the Navigator), dreamt of an ocean route to the Spice Islands and became a famous patron of the maritime sciences. In addition to funding voyages of discovery, he established a school of seamanship in southern Portugal where mapmakers, geographers, astronomers and navigators could discuss and improve upon the latest maritime technology.