Important in all this was the Church as custodian of knowledge and school for technicians. One might have expected otherwise: that organized spirituality, with its emphasis on prayer and contemplation, would have had little interest in technology. Surely the Church, with its view of labor as penalty for original sin, would not seek to ease the judgment. And yet everything worked in the opposite direction: the desire to free clerics from time-consuming earthly tasks led to the introduction and diffusion of power machinery and, beginning with the Cistercians, to the hiring of lay brothers (conversi) to do the dirty work. Employment fostered in turn attention to time and productivity. All of this gave rise on monastic estates to remarkable assemblages of powered machinery—complex sequences designed to make the most of the waterpower available and distribute it through a series of industrial operations. A description of work in the abbey of Clairvaux in the mid-twelfth century exults in this versatility: “cooking, straining, mixing, rubbing [polishing], transmitting [the energy], washing, milling, bending.” The author, clearly proud of these achievements, further tells his readers that he will take the liberty of joking: the fulling hammers, he says, seem to have dispensed the fullers of the penalty for their sins; and he thanks God that such devices can mitigate the oppressive labor of men and spare the backs of their horses.22
Why this peculiarly European joie de trouver? This pleasure in new and better? This cultivation of invention—or what some have called “the invention of invention”? Different scholars have suggested a variety of reasons, typically related to religious values:
1. The Judeo-Christian respect for manual labor, summed up in a number of biblical injunctions. One example: When God warns Noah of the coming flood and tells him he will be saved, it is not God who saves him. “Build thee an ark of gopher wood,” he says, and Noah builds an ark to divine specifications.
2. The Judeo-Christian subordination of nature to man. This is a sharp departure from widespread animistic beliefs and practices that saw something of the divine in every tree and stream (hence naiads and dryads). Ecologists today might think these animistic beliefs preferable to what replaced them, but no one was listening to pagan nature worshippers in Christian Europe.
3. The Judeo-Christian sense of linear time. Other societies thought of time as cyclical, returning to earlier stages and starting over again. Linear time is progressive or regressive, moving on to better things or declining from some earlier, happier state. For Europeans in our period, the progressive view prevailed.
4. In the last analysis, however, I would stress the market. Enterprise was free in Europe. Innovation worked and paid, and rulers and vested interests were limited in their ability to prevent or discourage innovation. Success bred imitation and emulation; also a sense of power that would in the long run raise men almost to the level of gods. The old legends remained—the expulsion from the Garden, Icarus who flew too high, Prometheus in chains—to warn against hubris. (The very notion of hubris—cosmic insolence—is testimony to some men’s pretensions and the efforts of others to curb them.)
But the doers were not paying attention.
5
The Great Opening
The greatest thing since the creation of the world, except for the incarnation and death of Him who created it, is the discovery of the Indies.
—FRANCISCO LOPKZ HE GOMARA, History of the Indies
There is one historical event which everybody knows. Even those whose predilections do not turn toward history know that Christopher Columbus discovered America. This general knowledge of one fact indicates how that singular achievement, the discovery of a New World, has captivated the sentiment of all Europe and all America as the most notable event in secular history.
—E. A. KIRKPATRICK, The Spanish Conquistadores
“You’re a lost civilization!” crowed the anthropologist to the Indian chief. “We don’t mind being lost,” answered the chief. “It’s being found that scares us.”
Not long ago the world was getting ready to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. One group after another competed to honor the man and the achievement. In the United States, which some would have named Columbia, where some seventy cities and towns and a large number of fair and fraternal institutions bear the discoverer’s name, where people of Italian descent have vied with Hispanics to draw merit and honor from their countryman (whether by descent or adoption), one could reasonably expect a repetition en grand of the quadricentennial of 1892: a world’s fair (the Columbian Exposition); mementos galore; and the following year, richly colored issues of commemorative stamps.
People felt good about Columbus in those days, and the expectation was that 1992 would be bigger and better (500 beats 400); but then something, everything, went wrong. Columbus, symbol of historical achievement, midwife of a new world, turned out to be a political embarrassment. It emerged—but there had been rumblings of dissent for years—that many people did not see the Admiral of the Ocean Sea as a hero, the European arrival in the New World as a discovery, the anniversary of this event as occasion for celebration.1
On the contrary. Columbus was now portrayed as a villain; the Europeans as invaders; the native inhabitants as innocent, happy people reduced to bondage and eventually wiped out by the rapacious, disease-carrying white man.2 In Berkeley, California, long a secessionist, irreverent (or rather, differently reverent) municipal enclave with its own foreign policy, the City Council renamed Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples’ Day and offered two performances of an opera entitled Get Lost (Again), Columbus, the work of a Native American composer named White Cloud Wolfhawk.3 Two years later, by way of affirming a choice, Mexico decided to issue commemorative coins in honor of the Aztecs and “a civilization of incredible sophistication in the arts, science and culture.”4 No praise for conquistadors.
Now, it was obviously not possible to erase or reverse history. No one was planning to evacuate and return to Europe; it was too late for Columbus to find his way. But there was enough anti-Columbus sentiment, especially in politically correct circles, to make rejoicing as out of place as a jig at a wake. So, no pageants; no souvenirs; no T-shirts and logos; no product endorsements; no reenactments (who could agree on the terms?); no oratory; no stamps; no coins; no prizes. And when the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., decided to do a quincentenary exhibit with thick glossy-paper catalogue, it did an ABC—Anything But Columbus.5 The exhibit covered the rest of the world, the other events of 1492 and years around. The most important event of all was deliberately omitted. History eviscerated.
As in most iconoclastic subversions of tradition, the attack on Columbus—or more accurately, on what followed his arrival—contains much truth, much nonsense, and some irrelevancy.
The truth lies in the unhappy fate of the indigenous peoples the Europeans found in the New World. With rare, trivial, and ineffectual exceptions, they were treated with contempt, violence, and sadistic brutality. They were almost wiped out by the microbes and viruses the Europeans unknowingly brought with them. Their land and culture and dignity were taken from them. They have nothing to celebrate.
The nonsense lies in quibbles about discovery: How could Columbus have discovered the New World? It was always there. The natives knew their land. It was they who had discovered it long before.* (We may not have a new Columbus stamp, but the U.S. Post Office, swift-to-stroke and politically irreproachable, issued a commemorative in 1992 recalling the Asians who crossed over to North America some tens of thousands of years ago, the ancestors of the American Indians.) Besides, Columbus clearly did not know where he was going. In 1492, the indigenous peoples discovered Columbus.
But of course they did, just as he discovered them. Encounter goes two ways. To note the reciprocity, however, does not justify throwing out one side of the pair.6
This kind of cavil, interestingly enough, is a major issue in mathematics. The research mathematician finds and reveals new theorems and proofs. He calls them “trut
hs.” Has he discovered them? Or created them? Were they always there to be found—inscribed from eternity in the great “Book,” as Paul Erdös called it? Or do they exist only by virtue of being invented? No matter. The mathematician has found/created them, and mathematical thought and imagination are thereby altered.7 So with Columbus’s discovery: once the news got back, thinking about the world and its peoples—the human imagination—was changed forever.
The irrelevancy lies in the argument that emphasis on the Columbian discovery Europeanizes a world process of encounter and exchange; that this Eurocentrism induces an easy triumphalism, leading historians to accentuate the false positive (the great age of exploration) and ignore the true negative (the catastrophic consequences of invasion).
Some of this complaint is true, but a good historian tries to keep his balance. The opening of the New World (for Europe it was new) was an exchange, but asymmetric. The European epiphany was the one that mattered. Europe it was that initiated the process, responded to the discovery, and set the agenda for further developments. On the operative level—who did to whom—this was a one-way business.
As for the self-congratulatory grandeur of these events, people, big and small, snatch at prestige where they may; and once invented, myths die hard. Yet the heroic discovery myths have not commanded the assent of scholars for many years—certainly not in the professional literature. Ever since Carl Sauer and Woodrow Borah and the California school of economic geography announced, on the basis of archeological remains, that the coming of the white man and his fellow-traveling pathogens (smallpox, influenza, etc.) had brought death to nine tenths of a Mexican Indian population of perhaps 25 million, no one has been able to look at the story in the same complacent way. *
These nomenclatorial dissents are a form of expiation and political mobilization. They aim to delegitimate rather than illuminate. The target is European (Western) dominion and the gains therefrom. The purpose: to impute guilt, provoke consciences, justify reparations. We can do better by asking what happened and why.
The discovery of the New World by Europeans was not an accident. Europe now held a decisive advantage in the power to kill. It could deliver its weapons wherever ships could take them; and thanks to new navigational techniques, European ships could now go anywhere.
Here let us pause a moment to consider the larger implications of this inequality. I would put forward a law of social and political relationships, namely, that three factors cannot coexist: (1) a marked disparity of power; (2) private access to the instruments of power; and (3) equality of groups or nations. Where one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so. Even if the state would abstain from aggression, companies and individuals will not wait for permission. Rather, they will act in their own interest, dragging others along, including the state.
That is why imperialism (the domination by one group of another) has always been with us† It is the expression of a deep human drive. There are other, finer sentiments: the altruistic impulse, ideals of solidarity, the golden rule. But such noble ideals, even when sanctioned and propagated by organized religion, have been honored as much in the breach as in the observance. Indeed, the loftiest principles, including religion, have all too often been invoked in the cause of aggression. Only a deliberate decision by political authority, not merely to abstain from such behavior but to prevent members of the group from engaging in it, can thwart this impulse.
No central authority existed in medieval Europe to take such a decision. On the contrary, competing sovereignties gave ample opportunity for private initiatives in war, and personal ties—feudal obligations and loyalties—helped warriors mobilize for depredation. And so it was that Europe, after centuries of compression and victimization at the hands of invaders, passed to the attack from the eleventh century on. The Crusades (First Crusade, 1096) were a manifestation of this outward push. They were promoted in part as a way of sublimating internecine violence and turning it abroad. This was a bellicose society.
And what well-chosen adversaries! The Crusades renewed the centuries-old war of Christendom against Islam, of faith against faith, carried into the heart of the enemy camp. In theory, no cause was more holy; but in the event and as always, the idealistic goal was cover for arrant thuggery and cupidity. Three good days of rapine and murder in Greek Constantinople, with assorted massacres of Jews and Christians along the way (but were Eastern Christians really Christian?), were worth all the loot of Jerusalem and the precarious comforts of petty kingdoms in Anatolia and Muslim Palestine.*
The crusader invasion did not take. The Muslims expelled the intruders and have cherished that success ever since as a sign of divine judgment. But the war against the Muslim was going on in other places too, most notably in Spain, where over the course of the following centuries (final victory, Granada 1492) Christian kingdoms had increasing success against a multitude of jealous successor sheikhdoms. These were the debris of el-Andalus: “every qa’id and man of influence who could command a score of followers or possessed a castle to retire to in case of need, styled himself sultan and assumed the insignia of royalty.”8
In this intermittent combat, the Muslims were handicapped by their dependence on Berber soldiers brought over from North Africa—mercenaries short on loyalty to the rulers who engaged them. Against these stood Christian barons and bullies, given to victimizing peasants and clerics, whom the Castilian monarch, on the understandable advice of the Church, sent to war against the infidel. It was a repeat of the motivation of the First Crusade to the Holy Land: better them than us. Bumblers on both sides, which is why the struggle took so long. But logistics and demography favored the Christians. “Christendom was spreading slowly south, as if by a process of titration rather than flood.”9
In the end, civilization succumbed and ferocity triumphed. Cordoba, once the greatest center of learning in Europe, fell in 1236; Seville, the great economic metropolis of el-Andalus, in 1248. Both were taken almost in a fit of absent-mindedness: Ferdinand III of Castile did not really think he was ready to roll up the Moors in the valley of the Guadalquivir. The emir made a deal to withdraw as Ferdinand’s vassal to the tiny mountain stronghold of Granada, which hung on by pursuing a strategy of timorous collaboration and systematic indifference to the fate of fellow Muslims in other parts. As ye sow…when it was Granada’s turn to go (1490-92), its appeals for help went unanswered. So the last Moorish ruler of Granada negotiated a well-paid exit and left Spain scorned by his own mother: she knew a coward when she saw one.
The victors in this reconquista were Portugal, which liberated its territory from the Muslims by the mid-fourteenth century, and Castile, an expansionist frontier state of caballero pastoralists (what we would call cowboys) and roughnecks and soldiers of fortune for whom the great Moorish cities of the south, with their marble palaces and cool fountains, green gardens and centers of learning, were an irresistible target.10
And after reconquista, then what? Well, the land had to be grabbed up and resettled, estates bounded and exploited, peasants (especially Muslim cultivators) set to work for their new lords. And the kingdom had to be Christianized, for Queen Isabella was a passionate believer. Whatever concessions to Islam had been made by way of negotiating the surrender of Grenada, no such commitment could long hold against the claims of true faith. The Church, through the Holy Office of the Inquisition, to say nothing of lay spies and snitches, kept very busy. Converts from Judaism, most of them involuntary, hence untrustworthy, had to be kept under close surveillance; the same for ex-Muslims. Castilian society was afflicted with a pious prurigo, a scabies of the spirit.
Yet all of that left energy for further campaigning and adventure. Demobilization does not come easy for men who know little but the sword and the horse, the camaraderie of combat, the thrill of killing and the joys of rapine. Even before the final expulsion of the Moor from the Iberian peninsula, Portugal and Spain were moving on to probe and attack beyond the water. The first tar
gets were islands in the Mediterranean and the shores of North Africa. King Jaime I of Aragon took the Balearics in 1229-35 and boasted of it later as “the best thing man has done in the last hundred years.” The Portuguese in turn took Ceuta in 1415; Casablanca in 1463; Tangiers in 1471.
War has a way of legitimating its cause and celebrating its conquests. So with these new crusaders: poets sang their praises and they sublimated their violence in chivalric codes and posturing. Maritime expeditions took on special virtue and merit: “There was more honor,” said Jaime I, in conquering a single kingdom “in the midst of the sea, where God has been pleased to put it,” than three on dry land. By the end of the century, his chronicler was bragging that no fish could go swimming without the king’s permission.11
It takes money to fight. The pattern of these “noble” quests was that of the traditional, feudal “business” enterprise. Some baron—what one historian calls an “aristocratic hooligan”—set off at the head of a war band with the ruler’s blessing and sometimes his money, often in ships furnished by merchants near and far, to grab what he could grab. What he could take and hold was his, subject to distribution of spoil and rewards to his men, dividends to his backers, and a commitment of support and loyalty to his overlord.
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