Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  25. J. J. Saunders, The History of Medieval Islam (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 22.

  26. Bulliett, 105–106.

  27. Rodinson, 32.

  28. Saunders, 13–14.

  29. Karen Armstrong, Muhammad (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1993), 65–86.

  30. Rodinson, 36. This author’s insights on Islam suffer neither from his Marxism nor from his atheism.

  31. Sura 4:29.

  32. Narrated by Ibn Abbas, 3:34:311, and by Hakim bin Hizam, 3:34:296, from http://www.usc.edu­/­dept­/­MSA­/­fundamentals­/­hadithsunnah­/­bukhari­/­034.sbt.html #003.034.264.

  33. Ibid., narrated by Jabir bin Abdullah, 3:34:310.

  34. Saunders, 47.

  35. Ibid., 91.

  36. Hourani, 57–61.

  37. Bengt E. Hovén, “Ninth-century dirham hoards from Sweden,” Journal of Baltic Studies, 13:3 (Autumn 1982): 202–219.

  38. Edwin O. Reischauer, “Notes on T’ang Dynasty Sea Routes,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 5 (June 1940): 142–144.

  39. Saunders, 115–122.

  40. Hourani, 52.

  41. Subhi Y. Labib, “Capitalism in Medieval Islam,” The Journal of Economic History, 29:1 (March 1969): 93–94.

  Chapter 4

  1. Rustichello, The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Signet Classics, 2004), vii–xxiv.

  2. The numbers came much later as modern historians such as S. D. Goitein and Frederic Lane sifted through the account books and letters of Cairene and Venetian merchants with forensic exactitude.

  3. Chau Ju-Kua, Chu-Fan-Chi, and trans. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (New York: Paragon, 1966), 14.

  4. Quoted ibid., 27.

  5. Friedrich Hirth, “The Mystery of Fu-lin,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 33 (1913): 193–208.

  6. Chau Ju-Kua, 15.

  7. Ibid., 205.

  8. Quoted in Hourani, 64.

  9. S. Maqbul Ahmad, ed., Arabic Classical Accounts of India and China (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1989), 36.

  10. Ibid., 46.

  11. Ibid., 51–52.

  12. Arabic Classical Accounts of India and China, 38–40, 46–47, 52–52, 56.

  13. Burzug Ibn Shahriyar, trans. L. Marcel Devic, The Book of the Marvels of India (New York: Dial, 1929). 23.

  14. Ibid., 74.

  15. Ibid., 93.

  16. Ibid., 92–95.

  17. Ibid., 45.

  18. Ibid., 44–52.

  19. Hourani, 77.

  20. Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 16.

  21. Chau Ju-Kua, 7.

  22. Ibid., 146–147.

  23. Ibid., 22–23.

  24. Quoted in Howe, 37–39.

  25. Ibid., 39.

  26. Richard F. Burton, trans., The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (London: Burton Club, 1900), 6:25.

  27. M. N. Pearson, “Introduction I: The Subject,” in Ashin Das Gupta, ed., India and the Indian Ocean 1500–1800 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987), 15.

  28. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, 5.

  29. Ibid., 32–33.

  30. Ibid., 34

  31. Igor de Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys to the Great Khans (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 202.

  32. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean, 29.

  33. Samuel Lee, trans., The Travels of Ibn Battuta (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 108.

  34. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 196.

  35. Lee, 108–109.

  36. Labib, 90.

  37. Dunn, 191.

  38. Rustichello, 204.

  39. Dunn, 223.

  40. Lee, 204–205.

  41. C. Defremery and B. R. Sanguinetti, Voyages d’Ibn Battuta (Paris: 1979), 4:282–283, quoted in Dunn, 258.

  42. Lee, 209.

  43. Rustichello, 204.

  44. Lee, 216; and Dunn, 260.

  45. Patricia Risso, Merchants of Faith (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995) 19–20.

  46. Pearson, 18.

  47. Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 42–43.

  48. M. H. Moreland, “The Ships of the Arabian Sea around AD 1500,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (January 1939): 67.

  49. Ibid., 68.

  50. Ibid., 182–192.

  51. William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004).

  52. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1970), 6.

  53. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), IV:3:480–482. There is some controversy surrounding the precise size of the fleets’ largest ships, with some scholars placing their maximum possible size at only three hundred feet. See Ma Huan, 31.

  54. Levathes, 73–74.

  55. Ma Huan, 108–109.

  56. Ibid., 139.

  57. Levathes, 119, 140–141.

  58. Ibid., 186.

  59. Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (New York: Morrow, 2003). For a penetrating critique of Menzies’s thesis, see Robert Finlay, “How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America,” Journal of World History, 15:2 (June 2004): 229–242. From the abstract: “. . . based on a hodgepodge of circular reasoning, bizarre speculation, distorted sources, and slapdash research. In reality, the voyages described did not take place.”

  60. Ma Huan, 6–7, 10–11.

  61. The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and The Book of Francisco Rodrigues, I:42.

  62. Ibid., I:41–42.

  63. Ibid., II:234.

  64. Ibid., II:268.

  65. Abu-Lughod, 309.

  66. Robert Sabatino Lopez, “European Merchants in the Medieval Indes: The Evidence of Commercial Documents,” Journal of Economic History, 3 (November 1943): 165.

  67. The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and The Book of Francisco Rodriguez, II:270.

  68. Ibid., II:253.

  69. Ibid., II:273–274.

  70. Risso, 54.

  71. C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (New York: Knopf, 1969), 45.

  Chapter 5

  1. E. Ashtor, “Profits from Trade with the Levant in the Fifteenth Century,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 38 (1975): 250–275. For quote, see Stefan Zweig, Conqueror of the Sea (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1938), 5.

  2. Frederic C. Lane, “Venetian Shipping during the Commercial Revolution,”The American Historical Review, 38:2 (January 1933): 228.

  3. Abu-Lughod, 52–68.

  4. Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 16, 78.

  5. Pliny, 12:30.

  6. Joanna Hall Brierly, Spices (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), 4–8.

  7. John Villiers, “Trade and Society in the Banda Islands in the Sixteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies, 15, no. 4 (1981): 738.

  8. Warmington, 227–228.

  9. Quoted in Dalby, 40.

  10. Chau Ju-Kua, 209. See also Geoffrey Hudson, “The Medieval Trade of China,” in D. S. Richards, ed., Islam and the Trade of Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 163.

  11. Turner, 85, 92.

  12. Ibn Khurdadhbih, Al-Masalik Wa’l-Mamalik (“Roads and Kingdoms”) in Arabic Classical Accounts of India and China (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1989), 7. Henry Yule, ed., The Book of Marco Polo (London: John Murray, 1921), ii:272.

  13. Geffroi de Villehardouin and Jean, Sire de Joinville, trans. Frank T. Marzials, Memoirs of the Crusades (New York: Dutton, 1958), 42.

  14. Ibid., 122–143.

  15. Howe, 33.

  16. David Ayalon, The Mamluk Military Society (London: Variorum Reprints, 1979), IX:46.

  17. Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam (N
ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 78.

  18. Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 10–25. For criticism of this thesis, see P. H. Sawyer and R. H. Hilton, “Technical Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough,” Past and Present, 24 (April 1963): 90–100.

  19. Andrew Ehrenkreutz, “Strategic Implications of the Slave Trade between Genoa and Mamluk Egypt in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century,” in A. L. Udovitch, ed., The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin, 1981), 337.

  20. David Ayalon, “The Circassians in the Mamluk Kingdom,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 69 (July–September 1949): 146.

  21. David Ayalon, “Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army—I,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 15 (1953): 206–207.

  22. Ayalon, “The Circassians in the Mamluk Kingdom,” 146.

  23. Pipes, 83.

  24. Ibid., 83–84.

  25. Ayalon, The Mamluk Military Society, Xb:6.

  26. Ibid., Xb:15.

  27. Ibid., Xa:197, 221.

  28. Ehrenkreutz, 336.

  29. Saunders, 165.

  30. Ibid., 47, 49.

  31. Ayalon, The Mamluk Military Society, VIII:49.

  32. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 21, 56–57.

  33. Ehrenkreutz, 343.

  34. Howe, 98–99.

  35. S. D. Goitein, “New Light on the Beginnings of the Karim Merchants,”Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (August 1957): 182–183.

  36. Labib, 84.

  37. Ibid., 83.

  38. Walter J. Fischel, “The Spice Trade in Mamluk Egypt,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (August 1957): 161–173.

  Chapter 6

  1. This occurred as late as in the early twentieth century, when Han Chinese migrants flooded into Manchuria to hunt the creatures for their increasingly valuable skins. The migrants contracted the disease, touching off an epidemic that killed about 60,000. See Wu Lien-Teh et al., Plague (Shanghai Station: National Quarantine Service, 1936), 31–35.

  2. Ibid., 74–75.

  3. Mark Wheelis, personal communication.

  4. Wu, 289–291. See also Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1994), 5.

  5. A. B. Christie et al., “Plague in camels and goats: their role in human epidemics,” Journal of Infectious Disease, 141:6 (June 1980): 724–726.

  6. Hippocrates, Of the Epidemics, I:1, http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/epidemics.1.i.html, accessed December 23, 2005.

  7. Thucydides, 2:47–54. Recent isolates from the dental pulp of presumed victims demonstrated the presence of Salmonella enterica, suggesting typhoid fever as the causative organism. See M. J. Papagrigorakis et al., “DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the Plague of Athens,” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 10, no. 3 (May 2006): 206–214.

  8. J. F. Gilliam, “The Plague under Marcus Aurelius,” The American Journal of Philology 82, no. 3 (July 1961): 225–251. Also see McNeill, 131.

  9. There is an even more rapidly fatal third form of the disease, “septicemic plague,” which primarily involves the bloodstream. Although rare in the modern world, it was probably common during the Black Death. Wheelis, unpublished material. Also see Wu, 3, 317, 325.

  10. Ibid., 178–179.

  11. Procopius, The History of the Persian Wars, II:16, from The History of the Warres of the Emperour Justinian (London: printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1653).

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid., 23:31.

  15. Dols, 21–27.

  16. Josiah C. Russell, “That Earlier Plague,” Demography 5, no. 1 (1968): 174–184.

  17. McNeill, 147–148.

  18. Ibid., 138–139, 142.

  19. Ibid., 173–176.

  20. Mark Wheelis, unpublished material, personal communication. This sequence of events is speculative. Medical historians have pointed out that the Chinese outbreak of 1331 was not well described, and that the evidence for the outbreak of 1338 at Issyk-Kul is largely anthropological. Other possible mechanisms for the spread of plague to Kaffa eight years later include a long-standing reservoir in the ground rodents of the Caspian area, spread northward from Persia, or slow migration westward from China of the infection via rats and tarabagans without any intervention whatsoever from man.

  21. Horrox, 17.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Mark Wheelis, “Biological warfare at the 1346 Siege of Kaffa.” Emerg. Infect. Dis. [serial online] September 2002 [accessed December 15, 2005]: 8. Available from URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no9/01-0536.htm

  24. Horrox, 36.

  25. Ibid., 39. Gabriele de’ Mussi, it seems, was a highly skilled collator of primary and secondary observations, since he never left his Italian hometown of Piacenza. Some have questioned the importance of Kaffa in the transmission of the plague to Europe. For at least a decade, the organism had been bouncing between flea, rat, ground rodent, horse, camel, and human, westward across central Asia. The Mongols controlled many other Black Sea ports, and it is possible that the disease was transported through these as well.

  26. Allan Evans, review of Genova marinara nel duecento: Benedetto Zaccaria, ammiraglio e mercante. Speculum 11, no. 3 (July 1936): 417.

  27. Mark Wheelis, unpublished material.

  28. McNeill, 179, 182.

  29. Horrox, 20.

  30. Ibid., 9–13.

  31. Ibid., 209–210.

  32. Ibid., 13–18.

  33. Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 19. B. Z. Kedar, Merchants in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 5.

  34. Dols, 58–59.

  35. Horrox, 18.

  36. Ibid., 25. For municipal population figures see Daron Acemoglu et al., “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions and the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117 (November 2002): 1231–1294.

  37. Dols, 60.

  38. Ibid., 65.

  39. Ibid., 57.

  40. David Neustadt (Ayalon), “The Plague and its Effects upon the Mamluk Army,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1946): 67–73, quotes from 72.

  41. Quoted in Dols, 188.

  42. The most easily accessible and authoritative source of historical and world economic and population statistics is available at economic historian Angus Maddison’s website in Excel format at http://www.ggdc.net/Maddison/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file.xls.

  43. Abu-Lughod, 236–239; Dols 197, 265.

  44. McNeill, 130.

  45. Ibid., 7–8.

  46. Ibn Khaldun, trans. Franz Rosenthal, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 64.

  Chapter 7

  1. Anon., “Roteiro,”: ed. E. G. Ravenstein, A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama (London: Hakluyt Society, 1898), 75. This diary, which will be referenced hereafter as the Roteiro, or “journal,” kept by an unknown member of da Gama’s crew (quite possibly João de Sá, the scrivener on the São Rafael, commanded by da Gama’s brother Paulo, or Álvaro Velho, who also served on the same vessel) is the most important primary record of da Gama’s first voyage.

  2. Robert B. Serjeant, The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast: Hadrami Chronicles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 43.

  3. There can be little question that he had indeed done so, as the papal secretary’s notes record Niccolò de’ Conti’s precise descriptions of Moluccan parrots and the particularly dark-skinned aboriginal inhabitants of the islands. See N. M. Penzer, ed., and John Frampton, trans., The Most Noble and Famous Travels of Marco Polo Together with the Travels of Niccolò de’ Conti (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1937), 133. See also Howe, 70–74.

  4. Ehrenkreutz, 338–339.<
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  5. Charles E. Nowell, “The Historical Prester John,” Speculum, 28:3 (July 1953): 434–445.

  6. Robert Silverberg, In the Realm of Prester John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 3–7, quote, 45.

  7. Ibid., 43.

  8. Ibid., 2.

  9. Pearson, 83.

  10. Dana B. Durand, review of Precursori di Colombo? Il tentativo di viaggio transoceanio dei genovesi fratelli Vivaldi nel 1291 by Alberto Magnaghi, Geographical Review, 26:3 (July 1936): 525–526.

  11. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Columbus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9.

  12. J. H. Plumb, Introduction, in C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, xxvi.

  13. Silverberg, 194–195.

  14. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 28–29.

  15. Howe, 105.

  16. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 24–26, 41.

  17. This fictional story has Columbus sitting at dinner following his return from his first transatlantic voyage with a group of jealous noblemen, who proceed to denigrate his accomplishment—after all, anyone can sail west on the trade winds to the New World. Columbus asks them, “Who among you, gentlemen, can make this egg stand on end?” After each of the noblemen, in his turn, tries and fails, they declare the task impossible. Columbus then gently crushes the egg tip on the table and accomplishes the deed, adding, “Gentlemen, what is easier than to do this which you said was impossible? It is the simplest thing in the world. Anybody can do it—after he has been shown how!” http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=olcott&book=holidays&story=egg.

  18. Ibid., 33–34, 64.

  19. Unlike most true believers, however, Columbus rarely alienated anyone. Even after João II rejected his initial proposal, he was repeatedly invited back for further discussions. Another of Columbus’s old employers from his Mediterranean sailing days, the powerful Genoese Centurione trading family, underwrote his third voyage to the New World. (See Fernández-Armesto, 9.)

  20. For a comprehensive discussion of the historiography of Columbus’s motivations, see Cecil Jane, Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (London: Hakluyt Society, 1930), xiii–cl.

  21. C. Varela, ed., Cristóbal Colón: Textos y documentos completos (Madrid: 1984), 256, quoted in Fernández-Armesto, 134.