by Ian Mortimer
A crucial element behind the sudden desire to discover new lands was the circulation of manuscripts describing the wealth of foreign kingdoms. Marco Polo’s work was popular, with its stories of populous cities, strange cultures and rich treasures. The equally bejewelled and almost entirely fictitious Travels of Sir John de Mandeville, written in the fourteenth century, was even more widely read. The retelling of such stories no doubt suggested to many poor sailors that voyages beyond the horizon might be the way to secure a fortune. In 1406, Giacomo de Scarperia’s translation into Latin of Ptolemy’s eight-volume Geography, written in Greek in the second century AD, triggered debate as to what lay beyond the known borders of the world, and how it might be systematically plotted using latitude and longitude. However, exploration was exceedingly dangerous, and, generally speaking, the armchair travellers who could read Geography in Latin were not the sort of people who could lead pioneering expeditions. The adventurers in society were not motivated by curiosity but by gold. However, when a highly educated prince, who had boundless curiosity and could afford to equip an exploratory expedition every year, met with a crew of treasure-hungry sailors, the world changed.
The prince in question was Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), the third son of King John I of Portugal and the great-grandson of Edward III of England who, by then, was famed as the greatest chivalric monarch Christendom had known since Charlemagne. In 1415 the youthful Henry, ardent for some glory of his own, persuaded his father to sail with a large army and lay siege to the strategic port of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, at the very tip of North Africa. The expedition was a success. Ceuta fell and Portugal achieved its first bridgehead in what is now Morocco. But that was just the start. From 1419, Prince Henry sent ships every year to explore more of Africa. Repeatedly they failed to get further than Cape Bojador on the western coast of the Sahara, which was notorious for its fogs, violent waves and strong currents. Sailors claimed that the ‘Green Sea of Darkness’ (as the Arabs called it) would wreck them if they sailed beyond that point.2 The plain fact was that, after sailing for miles along the desert coast, they could find precious little reason to risk their lives going further. However, in 1434, Gil Eanes, one of Prince Henry’s captains, rounded Cape Bojador and returned. That old Green Sea of Darkness excuse simply wouldn’t wash any more.
In 1441–3 two captains, Afonso Gonçalves and Nuno Tristao, independently reached Cape Bianco, where the Saharan coast ends. Their return put the exploration of Africa on to a new footing, for they brought back black slaves and gold dust. All fears of the dangers of the Atlantic evaporated in the excitement of imminent wealth. In 1455, Prince Henry employed the Venetian sailor Cadamosto to sail to the Guinea coast and push the boundary of knowledge even further southwards. By then, the Portuguese had begun trading horses for slaves in that part of Africa: one horse for nine or ten slaves, in case you’re wondering about the exchange rate. To facilitate such a trade, Portuguese shipwrights adapted traditional ship designs to the conditions of the Atlantic, producing the lateen-rigged caravel, which could sail much closer to the wind than anything previously built. The Portuguese Crown kept up the momentum of Henry’s expeditions by granting him a fifth of all the profits from southern exploration and the sole right to authorise voyages, effectively giving him the right to subcontract the exploration business, including the slave trade.
The Portuguese Empire may have been born out of chivalry and crusading zeal, but by the time of Prince Henry’s death in 1460, it was driven by profit. The more money expedition leaders made, the easier it was for them to persuade backers to fund their voyages and the more ambitious they became in venturing south. The islands of São Tomé and Principe – in the armpit of the African continent – were discovered in the early 1470s. In 1482, King John II ordered a fort to be constructed at Elmina, on the Gold Coast, to protect and preserve Portuguese interests in the region – the first of many such forts, or ‘factories’, that the Portuguese built to run their seaborne empire. Two years later the king commissioned a team of experts to determine the best way of calculating latitude, by reckoning the position of the Sun. In 1485 Diogo Cão reached Cape Cross, south of the mouth of the Congo. In 1488 Bartholomew Dias discovered that, by sailing south-west – away from the African mainland – you could catch south-westerly winds that would speed you around the Cape of Good Hope. Thus the Portuguese discovered the route into the Indian Ocean.
Great discoveries are infectious: they encourage others to set out on their own expeditions. John II sent emissaries by land to Cairo and by sea to Calicut in India, to learn how to trade with the spice merchants there. His intention was, of course, to dominate such a trade, wresting control of it from the Arab seafarers who had hitherto traversed the Indian Ocean unopposed. In 1497 Vasco da Gama set out with four ships and sailed straight around the Cape of Good Hope and all the way to India. Two of his ships returned safely to Portugal in 1499. The news of the journey caused John II’s successor, Manuel I, to send out another fleet of 13 vessels under the command of Pedro Cabral, with da Gama’s navigators to help guide them. Cabral’s fleet sailed westwards across the South Atlantic, hoping to pick up the winds that Dias had discovered 11 years earlier. Instead, his fleet sailed so far west that it landed on the coast of Brazil. What once had been a modest annual advance of a few miles down the African coastline now became a massive sweep of global trade from Portugal across to Brazil, from Brazil back across the South Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope, then up the east coast of Africa and across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, in southern India. Just 85 years had passed since Prince Henry had suggested to his father that the Portuguese take Ceuta as a bridgehead in Africa.
For many years, Portugal was the only seafaring kingdom expanding the boundaries of Western geographical knowledge, so it was natural that Italian seafarers should serve the Portuguese Crown. In 1482 a Genoese navigator called Christopher Columbus entered the service of John II and sailed to Elmina. Columbus, however, was one of those rare men: an explorer who had read Ptolemy’s Geography. In 1485 he put a proposal before John II. If the king would provide him with three ships, sufficient supplies, the title of Admiral of the Ocean, and the right to rule any land he found, Columbus would sail westwards from Portugal to reach the shores of China. He calculated the distance to be less than 3,000 miles. The reason why he thought China so close was that he was following Ptolemy, who had grossly underestimated the diameter of the Earth, at a mere 18,000 miles (it is actually 24,901 miles).3 King John put Columbus’s proposal to his advisers; they were well aware of the shortcomings of Ptolemy’s calculation, and knew that China was far further than Columbus imagined. They advised the king to refuse the ambitious Genoese captain. Undaunted, Columbus next sought the patronage of Castile. Queen Isabella similarly sent his suggestion to her advisers, and they agreed with their Portuguese counterparts. His native Genoa, the doge of Venice and Henry VII of England all turned him down too.
The whole episode appears faintly ridiculous in retrospect, but the scholars were right: Ptolemy had made a mistake and this Genoese captain was too entrenched in his ambition to see it. Columbus, however, was utterly determined. He returned to Portugal, where he was again courteously but firmly rejected by John II. By this time he knew that Bartholomew Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and had found a sea route to India. So he went back to Castile, more desperate than ever. In 1492 Queen Isabella of Castile and her husband King Ferdinand of Aragon had just taken Granada and completed the Reconquista. Flushed with this success, they eventually agreed to Columbus’s proposal, no doubt presuming he would sail off into the sunset and never be seen again.
On 12 October 1492 Columbus reached the Bahamas. He went on to visit Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and built a fort on Hispaniola, which he left garrisoned with 39 men. On 4 March 1493, after weathering a storm, he put in at Lisbon to repair his ship – and no doubt also to gloat about proving the Portuguese experts wr
ong: he was convinced he had been to the fabled Far East of Marco Polo. Fired with self-congratulation, he wrote an open letter to Ferdinand and Isabella telling them and the rest of Christendom about his discovery, exaggerating the wealth of the islands he had discovered and urging the Spanish king and queen to pay for another expedition, from which he would return with great wealth. His prime concern, evidently, was his own enrichment. Unlike the Portuguese pioneers, who had no desire to conquer large swathes of territory, Columbus was set on winning his own personal empire.
By the end of the year, his wish to return had been granted and he set sail with 17 ships and 1,200 settlers and soldiers, all keen to find their fortunes. On his return to Hispaniola, he found his fort in ruins and the garrison dead, killed by the natives. He immediately started to exact revenge – and never stopped. His governorship was characterised by the systematic destruction of the indigenous population through enforced labour in the mines, disruption of families’ lives, enslavement, torture, capital punishment and disease. Bartolomé de las Casas, who later became the defender of the rights of the indigenous people of the New World, noted that Columbus’s cruelty had reduced the population of Hispaniola from over three million to just 60,000 by 1508: a death rate of 98 per cent in 15 years. Those who had travelled with Columbus on that second voyage were disinclined to tolerate his destructiveness: they had failed to find the fortunes he had promised them. By 1500 word had got back to Spain about his tyranny, and he was relieved of his position as governor.
Columbus’s actions are shocking. But it is perhaps unsurprising that the first man to lead an expedition across the Atlantic was merciless in his exploitation of the indigenous population. The early explorers had no wish to endure privations, miseries and dangers at sea for the sake of it; they only did so out of avarice. The greater their desire for gold, the greater the risks they were prepared to take. Columbus took the biggest risk of them all. If he and his men happened to encounter something of value before they drowned in a storm, there was every likelihood they would take it, torturing and killing those who stood in their way, and then simply sail on. Some historians have viewed the overseas expansion of the Iberian kingdoms as the extension of the Reconquista, and there is something to be said for that. But Christopher Columbus himself has more in common with the Vikings of the early eleventh century than the Crusaders of the twelfth.
The importance of Columbus’s first voyage was immense. While he himself always maintained that he had discovered parts of Asia, more discerning minds realised that he had found a wholly new land, which they called the ‘New World’ – and that was the catalyst for many changes. In the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Spain and Portugal divided this new world between them, Portugal being given the right to appropriate all the lands outside Christendom but within a line 370 leagues due west of the Azores. Cabral’s decision to sail as far westwards as Brazil in 1500 was no doubt inspired by the knowledge that Columbus had discovered land in that direction. In England, too, Henry VII sponsored the voyage of the Venetian navigator John Cabot, which led to the discovery of Newfoundland in 1497. In the east, the days of Arab and Venetian control of the spice trade were numbered. By 1500 the merchants of Europe could see that it was going to be less costly to ship large quantities of pepper, cinnamon and silk to Europe by way of the Portuguese sea lanes than carrying them in small packets along the Venetian-controlled land routes. The consequent investment in merchant shipping led to a shift in the balance of economic power. Portugal and Spain had formerly been on the edge of the known world; now they were at the heart of it, and as we have already seen, ‘a dominant capitalist city always lies at the centre of its trading region’. The leading families and merchants in both countries became wealthy. And as the emphasis on international business shifted towards ocean travel, so English, French and Dutch ports were that much nearer to the action than Venice and Genoa.
The most important point about Columbus’s discovery, however, was that he exploded the myth that everything worth knowing had already been discovered by the Greeks and Romans. That view had been summed up by Bernard of Chartres in the early twelfth century: medieval thinkers could see further than those of the ancient world, he argued, only because they were as dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants, so that although we perceive many more things than they, it is not because our vision is more piercing or our stature higher, but because we are carried and elevated higher thanks to their gigantic size’.
The rush for classical texts in the twelfth century in particular revealed how ancient wisdom underpinned medieval thinking; it continued to do so in the fifteenth century. Aristotle was still elevated above all other philosophers for his dialectical reasoning and scientific knowledge. Galen was still championed for his medical texts, Ptolemy for his astronomy and his geography. While some medieval people were capable of original thinking, Columbus’s discovery demonstrated unequivocally to the whole of Christendom that there was nothing absolute about classical learning. His discovery, and those of Cabot and Cabral, smashed the authority of Ptolemy to smithereens, for if the greatest geographer of the ancient world could have failed to notice an entire continent, how could he be relied upon for anything else? The last decade of the fifteenth century therefore witnessed nothing less than a cognitive revolution: a sudden and completely new way of thinking about the world, unfettered by previous knowledge and, indeed, impelled to go beyond it.
Measuring time
You would have thought that the invention of the mechanical clock in the early fourteenth century might have drawn attention to the limitations of ancient thinking long before Columbus sailed. Such an instrument for measuring time certainly heralded a watershed in human history. But by the time clocks started to intrude on most people’s daily lives, few individuals cared to remember that there had been a time when they had not existed. Shakespeare mentions clocks or describes time as ‘o’clock’ in Macbeth (set in the eleventh century), King John (early thirteenth century), Cymbeline (pre-Roman Britain) and Troilus and Cressida (Ancient Greece). His play Julius Caesar even has a stage direction for a clock to chime the hour in Ancient Rome. Clearly he did not realise (or it was not important to him) that mechanical clocks were unknown in the ancient world.
The earliest reference to a mechanical timepiece appears in a text of 1271, which noted that clockmakers were trying to make a wheel that would complete one revolution every day, ‘but they cannot quite perfect their work’.4 Sixty years later, the problem was solved. Richard of Wallingford, abbot of St Albans, was developing a mechanical astronomical clock called Rectangulus when Edward III visited him in 1332.5 It not only told the time, it indicated the movements of the Sun, Moon and stars, and gave the time of high water at London Bridge. A mechanical 24-hour clock was set up in the church of St Gothard in Milan in 1335. Jacopo de Dondi installed an astronomical clock on the tower of the Palazzo Capitano in Padua in 1344. Four years later, his son Giovanni began work on the most famous medieval clock of them all: his seven-sided ‘astrarium’. This had seven dials showing the time over a 24-hour cycle, as well as the positions of the Moon and the five known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). By the time it was finished in 1368, there were public clocks striking regular hours in the Italian cities of Genoa, Florence, Bologna and Ferrara, and in the English royal palaces of Westminster, Windsor, Queenborough and Kings Langley. Charles V of France was so pleased with the hourly striking of the clock that he installed in the royal palace in Paris in 1370 that he ordered all the churches in the city to follow its lead in striking the hour, and had two more erected at the Hôtel Saint-Paul and the Chateau de Vincennes.6
While these references locate the invention of the clock firmly in the previous century, the majority of rural and small-town workers would not have heard one ring out before 1400. In the prologue to ‘The Parson’s Tale’, Chaucer states that it was ‘ten of the clokke’ – indicating that the reckoning of time and ‘the clock’ were synonymous – but the speak
er in that instance admits that he was not actually using a clock to tell the time; he was guessing it. In ‘The Sergeant-at-law’s Tale’, the poet describes in detail the methods people normally used to reckon the hour in 1386: by the amount of the sky that the sun had crossed, and by estimating the proportion of the length of a shadow of a tree to its height. The clock can hardly be said to have been the default method of telling the time in Chaucer’s period; hence its impact is better represented as a fifteenth-century change.
Rising demand for clocks led to their increased production, greater skill in metalworking, and a greater variety of clock design. All the known fourteenth-century examples are turret clocks or astronomical devices, but by 1400, portable clocks were on the horizon. Charles V of France owned an orloge portative in 1377, and the future Henry IV of England had a clock that could be transported in a basket by 1390.7 Among Henry V’s possessions at the time of his death in 1422 was a chamber clock; a spring-driven example made in about 1430 for Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, still survives. Such was the rate of development that by 1488, the duke of Milan could place an order for three chiming pendant watches.8 At the same time, astronomical clocks were added to civic halls and ducal palaces, and basic mechanical clocks were installed in parish churches and manor houses. At the Edgcumbe family house of Cotehele in Cornwall, a faceless household clock with a verge escapement was installed in the chapel not long after 1493; it is still there, ringing the hours.
So what? Did it matter how people told the time? Well, yes, it did. The use of a mechanical clock was a significant improvement on Chaucer’s method: to divide the passage of the Sun across the sky into 12 parts and estimate how much of that time had elapsed. Two problems arise from this solar calculation. The first is that it is obviously prone to inaccuracy. The second is that the unit of time varies: a daylight ‘hour’ in summer can be up to twice as long as an ‘hour’ in winter, as there is twice as much daylight to divide into 12 equal hours. Mechanical clocks standardised units of time; hence the need to specify the ninth hour of the clock, or ‘nine o’clock’, which is how we end up with the modern term.