The people living at the western end of Eurasia were
inordinately fond
of expensive culinary commodities that they knew to originate at the
eastern end. The other feature was the geopolitical dominance of Islam.
Despite the success of the Iberian Christian states in ending Muslim
rule in their own backyards, and eventually evicting from the peninsula
all Muslims who did not convert to Christianity, they had only chipped
away at the western edge of the Muslim world. In the meantime their
gains were being dwarfed by the menacing expansion of Muslim rule in
the Balkans under the Ottomans. Indeed for Busbecq, a Fleming who was
sent on an embassy to Istanbul in the mid-sixteenth century, an Ottoman
conquest of the core territories of Europe did not seem far away. Under
such conditions, any attempt to mount a massive attack on the Islamic
world by land was likely to prove expensive and futile. The question,
then, was whether the peninsular peoples could use their maritime
resources to outflank their Muslim enemies. Such a strategy might not
seem very realistic, but sending a few ships out into the unknown was
at least relatively cheap compared with risking an army in the field;
and thanks to the Mongol interlude, Europeans now had a better idea
what to expect if they succeeded in finding their way to the far side
of Islam.
The rest is the story of the Portuguese and Spanish
voyages of
discovery. It began with the gradual exploration of the west coast of
Africa by the Portuguese in the middle decades of the fifteenth
century. In 1492 it shifted to a different tempo after the rulers of
Spain stepped in to finance an improbable scheme touted by Columbus for
reaching the East Indies by sailing west—an idea that seemed sound in
principle, but in practice relied on worthless geographical data. The
Portuguese had rightly turned him down in 1484, and though in 1492 he
firmly believed he had succeeded in reaching the East Indies, what he
had actually done was, of course, stumble across the New World. The
Portuguese then dispatched an expedition led by Vasco da Gama that
reached India by way of the Cape of Good Hope in 1498; this route
proved viable, and further extensions of it took the Portuguese to
Southeast Asia in 1509, China in 1514, and Japan in 1543. The Spanish
did not give up easily and in 1519 sent out an expedition under
Magellan that reached the East Indies by rounding South America and
crossing the Pacific; the route was commercially useless, but the
single ship that completed the journey home had the consolation of
being the first to circumnavigate the globe. All in all, the themes of
the story are men possessed by wild ideas, none wilder than those of
Columbus; rulers prepared to make limited investments in these unlikely
propositions, especially when competition between states began to raise
the stakes; and expeditions that were miserably small by fifteenth-
century Chinese standards, but for better or worse achieved far more
dramatic results.
As might be expected, the impact of the Iberian expansion
on the non-
European world varied enormously; we will get more of a sense of this
in the next section when we turn to three very different non-European
responses. But at this point we need to focus on a basic distinction
between the Old World and the New.
In the New World the coming of the Spanish led to a
general demographic
collapse and the disintegration of the indigenous civilizations. The
key factors in this were the susceptibility of New World populations to
Old World germs, and the military and technological gap between the
native peoples and the invaders. Of the two factors, Spanish germs
proved more lethal than Spanish arms; in Mexico even the Tlaxcaltecans
suffered massive mortality, despite the fact that they had formed a
close alliance with the Spanish (a Tlaxcaltecan had the right to ride a
horse and be addressed respectfully as "Don"). The demographic collapse
of native America led in turn to the rapid development of a
transatlantic slave trade, which brought some ten million Africans to
the New World before it ended in the nineteenth century. In the
Americas, then, the Europeans could roam more or less at will,
introduce new populations, and effectively monopolize state structures.
In the Old World the Iberian impact was quite different.
None of the
established territorial states went down to the intruders; even the
Portuguese intervention in neighboring Morocco was a signal failure.
Instead, they sought to dominate the sea, and to that end made efforts
to seize islands and promontories that could serve as outposts of
empire. The only significant case of early territorial conquest in the
Old World was the Spanish adventure in the Philippines, a region of
Eurasia so peripheral that in the sixteenth century it was still barely
touched by the state structures and high cultures already present in
much of island Southeast Asia. Of course there were dreamers. For
example, one Spanish Jesuit in 1588 had a plan for a conquest of China
in which the Spanish and Portuguese would be aided by Christians from
Japan and the Philippines; but this proposal got nowhere.
