In China, state officials were not well paid, which led to regular corruption scandals and extensive inefficiencies. Worse, even when correctly and fairly assessed, taxpayers could not keep up with the irrational exuberance of a government that was keen to spend on grandiose schemes on the assumption that revenues would only ever rise. They didn’t. By the 1420s, some of the richest parts of China were struggling to meet their obligations.93 The bubble had to burst, and in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, it did. The Ming emperors raced to cut costs, calling time on improvements to Beijing, suspending expensive naval expeditions and projects like the Grand Canal scheme that at its height employed tens if not hundreds of thousands, constructing a water network to connect the capital with Hangzhou.94 In Europe, where data is more plentiful, deliberate efforts were made to deal with the contraction by debasing the coinage – although the relationship between the shortage of precious metal, hoarding and fiscal policy is a complex one.95
What is clear, however, is that global money supplies ran short from Korea to Japan, from Vietnam to Java, from India to the Ottoman Empire, from North Africa to continental Europe. Merchants in the Malay peninsula took matters into their own hands and struck a crude new currency out of tin, of which there was a plentiful local supply. But, put simply, the precious-metal supply that had provided a common currency linking one side of the known world with the other – albeit not always in standard unit, weight or fineness – broke down and failed: there was not enough money to go round.96
It is possible that these difficulties were made worse by a period of climatic change. Famine, unusual periods of drought coupled with cases of destructive flooding in China tell a powerful story of the impact that environmental factors had on economic growth. Evidence from sulphate spikes in ice-cores from the northern and southern hemispheres suggest that the fifteenth century was a period of widespread volcanic activity. This triggered global cooling, with knock-on effects across the steppe world, where intensifying competition for food and water supplies heralded a period of dislocation, especially in the 1440s. All in all, the story of this period was one of stagnation, hard times and a brute struggle for survival.97
The effects and ramifications were felt from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, fuelling a growing sense of unease about what was going on in the world. Although the rise of Timur’s empire had not provoked widespread fear in Europe, the rise of the Ottomans certainly made many increasingly anxious. The Ottomans had swarmed across the Bosporus in the late fourteenth century, delivering crushing defeats on the Byzantines, the Bulgarians and the Serbs and establishing themselves in Thrace and the Balkans. Constantinople was left hanging by a thread, a Christian island surrounded by a sea of Muslims. Passionate pleas for military support from the royal courts of Europe went unanswered, leaving the city dangerously exposed. Finally, in 1453, the imperial capital fell, the capture of one of the greatest cities of Christendom a triumph for Islam, which was once again in the ascendant. In Rome, there were accounts of men crying and beating their chests when news came through that Constantinople had fallen, and of prayers being offered by the Pope for those trapped in the city. But Europe had done too little when it mattered; now it was too late.
The fate of Constantinople was the source of acute concern in Russia, where it was seen not so much as heralding a Muslim resurgence as marking the imminent end of the world. There were long-standing Orthodox prophecies that Jesus would come at the start of the Eighth Millennium and sit at the Last Judgement, and these seemed to be on the point of being fulfilled. The forces of evil had been unleashed and had delivered a devastating blow to the Christian world. So convinced were senior clergy that the apocalypse was at hand that a priest was sent to western Europe to find more specific information about precisely what time of day it would take place. Some decided that there was no point in calculating the dates when Easter and other moveable holy-feast days would fall in the future, on the basis that the end of time was about to arrive. Based on the Byzantine calendar that was used in Russia, the timing seemed to be crystal clear. Using the date of the Creation as 5,508 years before Christ, the world was going to end on 1 September 1492.98
On the other side of Europe, there were others who shared the conviction that Armageddon was fast approaching. In Spain, attention focused on Muslims and Jews, at a time of growing religious and cultural intolerance. The former found themselves expelled from Andalusia by force of arms, the latter issued with an uncompromising order to convert to Christianity, leave Spain or be executed. Desperate to liquidate their assets, a fire-sale ensued, with property scooped up by investors who picked up vineyards in exchange for pieces of cloth, as estates and fine houses were sold for a pittance.99 What made it worse was that within a decade these bargains were to soar in value.
Many Jews chose to head for Constantinople. They were welcomed by the city’s new Muslim rulers. ‘You call Ferdinand a wise ruler,’ Bāyezīd II purportedly exclaimed, greeting the arrival of Jews in the city in 1492, even though ‘he impoverishes his own country to enrich mine’.100 This was not simple point-scoring: in scenes which would bemuse many today but which evoke the early days of Islam, Jews were not just treated with respect but welcomed. The new settlers were given legal protection and rights, and in many cases were given assistance to start new lives in a strange country. Tolerance was a staple feature of a society that was self-assured and confident of its own identity – which was more than could be said for the Christian world where bigotry and religious fundamentalism were rapidly becoming defining features.
One example of a man who fretted over the future of the faith was Christopher Colón. Although by his own calculations there were still 155 years to go before the Second Coming, Colón was outraged that little more than lip-service was being paid to matters of religion by the ‘faithful’, and was particularly appalled by Europe’s lack of concern for Jerusalem. With a fervour bordering on obsession, he drew up plans to launch a new campaign to liberate the Holy City, while at the same time developing a second fixation about the precious metals, spices and gems that were so abundant and cheap in Asia.101 If only it were possible to get better access to them, he concluded, they could in turn easily fund a major expedition to liberate Jerusalem.102 The problem was that being based in the Iberian peninsula placed him at the wrong end of the Mediterranean and made his grand idea little more than a pipe dream.103
Maybe, just maybe, there was hope. There were, after all, the voices of astrologers and cartographers like Paolo Toscanelli in Florence, who had argued that a route to Asia could be found by sailing west from the edge of Europe. After a titanic struggle to convince others to share a vision which bordered on the reckless and foolhardy, Christopher Colón’s scheme finally started to become concrete. Letters of greeting were prepared for the Great Khan – with a blank space to be filled in once his exact name was ascertained; he was to be an ally in the recovery of Jerusalem. Interpreters were recruited so that it would be possible to converse with the Mongol leader and his representatives. Specialists were hired who knew Hebrew, Chaldean (related to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus and the disciples) and Arabic, the language that was thought likely to be most useful for dealing with the Khan and his court. As one scholar notes, rising anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe meant that just as Arabic was being frowned on and prohibited by law in the Old World, it was also considered the best way to communicate when western Europe finally connected with the Far East.104
Three ships set sail from Palos de Frontera in southern Spain on 3 August 1492, less than a month before the end of the world was being anticipated in Russia. As he unfurled his sails and set off into the unknown, little did Colón – more familiar as Christopher Columbus – realise that he was about to do something remarkable: he was about to shift Europe’s centre of gravity from east to west.
When another small fleet under the command of Vasco da Gama set out from Lisbon five years later on another long voyage of discovery, rounding the southern tip
of Africa to reach the Indian Ocean, the final pieces necessary for Europe’s transformation fell into place. Suddenly, the continent was no longer the terminus, the end point of a series of Silk Roads; it was about to become the centre of the world.
11
The Road of Gold
The world changed in the late fifteenth century. There was no apocalypse, no end of time, as Columbus and others feared – at least not as far as Europe was concerned. A series of long-range expeditions setting out from Spain and Portugal connected the Americas to Africa and Europe and ultimately to Asia for the first time. In the process, new trade routes were established, in some cases extending existing networks, in others replacing them. Ideas, goods and people began to move further and more quickly than at any time in human history – and in greater numbers too.
The new dawn propelled Europe to centre-stage, enveloping it in golden light and blessing it with a series of golden ages. Its rise, however, brought terrible suffering in newly discovered locations. There was a price for the magnificent cathedrals, the glorious art and the rising standards of living that blossomed from the sixteenth century onwards. It was paid by populations living across the oceans: Europeans were able not only to explore the world but to dominate it. They did so thanks to the relentless advances in military and naval technology that provided an unassailable advantage over the populations they came into contact with. The age of empire and the rise of the west were built on the capacity to inflict violence on a major scale. The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, the progression towards democracy, civil liberty and human rights, were not the result of an unseen chain linking back to Athens in antiquity or a natural state of affairs in Europe; they were the fruits of political, military and economic success in faraway continents.
This seemed unlikely when Columbus set sail into the unknown in 1492. Reading his logbook in the twenty-first century, excitement and fear, optimism and anxiety still spill out of it. Certain though he was of finding the Great Khan – and of the role he would play in the liberation of Jerusalem – there was, he knew, every chance that the journey would end in death and disaster. He was heading for the east, he wrote, not by the ‘way it is customary to go, but by the route to the West, by which route we do not know for certain that anyone previously has passed’.1
There was, nevertheless, some precedent for this ambitious expedition. Columbus and his crews were part of a long and successful period of exploration that had seen new parts of the world open up in Africa and the eastern Atlantic to the Christian powers on the Iberian peninsula. This had been driven in part by attempts to access the gold markets of West Africa. The mineral wealth of this region was the stuff of legend, a region known to early Muslim writers simply as ‘the land of gold’. Some contended that ‘gold grows in the sand as carrots do, and is picked at sunrise’. Others thought the water had magical properties that made bullion grow in the darkness.2 The output of gold was prodigious and its economic effects were huge: chemical analysis shows that Muslim Egypt’s famously fine coinage was made from gold from western Africa, transported by trans-Saharan trade routes.3
Much of this commercial exchange was controlled from late antiquity onwards by Wangara traders.4 Malian by origin, these tribesmen played much the same role that Sogdian merchants did in Asia, traversing difficult terrain and setting up points along the dangerous routes across the desert to enable them to trade over long distance. This commercial traffic led to the emergence of a network of oases and trading bases, and in time to the development of flourishing cities such as Djenné, Gao and Timbuktu, which became home to royal palaces and splendid mosques, protected by magnificent baked brick walls.5
By the early fourteenth century, Timbuktu in particular was not just an important commercial centre but a hub for scholars, musicians, artists and students who gathered around the Sankoré, Djinguereber and Sīdī Yayā mosques, beacons of intellectual discourse and home to countless manuscripts collected from all over Africa.6
Not surprisingly, the region attracted attention from thousands of miles away. There had been gasps in Cairo when Mansa Musa – or Musa, King of Kings of the Malian Empire – ‘a devout and just man’ whose like had not been seen before, passed through the city in the fourteenth century on his way to Mecca on pilgrimage, accompanied by an enormous retinue and carrying huge amounts of gold to give as presents. So much was spent in the markets during his visit to the city that a mini-depression is supposed to have been triggered across the Mediterranean basin and in the Middle East as the price of bullion apparently plummeted under the pressure of the huge inflow of new capital.7
Writers and travellers from far-distant countries made it their business carefully to note down royal lineages of the Malian kings, and to record the court ceremonies of Timbuktu. The great North African traveller Ibn Baūa, for example, journeyed across the Sahara to see the city and its majestic Mansa Musa for himself. The ruler would come out of the palace wearing a gold skullcap and a tunic made of the finest red cloth, behind musicians playing gold- and silver-stringed instruments. He would then sit in a lavishly decorated pavilion – topped by a golden bird the size of a falcon – to hear the day’s news from across his empire. With astonishing wealth at the king’s disposal, Ibn Baūa found it hard to hide his disappointment that Mansa Musa was not more lavish with his gifts – at least to him. ‘He is a miserly king,’ Baūa wrote, ‘not a man from whom one might hope for a rich present.’8
Christian Europe’s interest had also been piqued by tales of legendary riches that followed the gold being traded in Egypt and along the North African coast, in cities like Tunis, Ceuta and Bougie, which had been home for centuries to colonies of merchants from Pisa, Amalfi and above all Genoa, the primary conduit of African gold in the Mediterranean.9 Despite these mercantile contacts, there was little knowledge or understanding in Europe of how gold reached the coastal cities, or of the complex networks that brought ivory, rock crystal, hides and tortoiseshell from as far away as the Limpopo up the Swahili coast and into the African interior, as well as to the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. From Europe’s perspective, the Sahara was a blanket that shrouded the rest of the continent in mystery: there was no way of knowing what went on beyond the narrow, fertile coastal strip of North Africa.10
There certainly was an awareness, on the other hand, that land beyond the desert was home to great riches. This is something neatly captured by the famous Catalan Atlas, a map commissioned by Pedro IV of Aragon in the late fourteenth century, which depicts a dark-skinned ruler, usually assumed to be Mansa Musa, dressed in western fashion and holding a huge nugget of gold alongside a note spelling out the scale of his wealth: ‘so abundant is the gold found in his country’, it says, ‘that he is the richest and most noble king in the land’.11
For a long time, however, the pursuit of direct access to the gold and treasures of western Africa remained fruitless; the barren coastline of what is now southern Morocco and Mauritania offered small incentive and even less reward, and there seemed little point in sailing south past hundreds of miles of inhospitable and uninhabited desert into the unknown. Then, in the fifteenth century, slowly, the world began to open up.
Expeditions into the eastern Atlantic and down the African coast had led to the discovery of a series of island groups, including the Canary Islands, Madeira and the Azores. As well as raising the possibility of further discoveries, they also became lucrative oases in their own right thanks to their climate and rich soils that made them perfectly suited to crops like sugar, which was soon being exported not only to Bristol and Flanders but as far as the Black Sea. By the time Columbus set sail, Madeira alone was producing more than 3 million pounds in weight of sugar per year – albeit at the cost of what one scholar has described as early modern ‘ecocide’, as forests were cleared and non-native animal species like rabbits and rats multiplied in such numbers that they were seen as a form of divine punishment.12
Although the ambitious rulers of Castile, who ha
d slowly consolidated power in most of the Iberian peninsula, had an eye on expanding into this New World, it was the Portuguese who seized the initiative.13 Since the thirteenth century, Portugal had been actively building trading links to connect northern and southern Europe with the markets of Africa. As early as the reign of King Dinis (ruled 1279–1325), large transport ships were regularly dispatched to ‘Flanders, England, Normandy, Britain and La Rochelle’ as well as to ‘Seville and other parts’ of the Mediterranean, filled with goods from Muslim North Africa and elsewhere.14
Now, as Portugal’s ambitions began to grow, so did its might. First, Genoa was squeezed out of the gold trade; then in 1415, after years of planning, Ceuta, a Muslim city on the North African coast, was captured. This was little more than a statement of intent, for it had limited strategic or economic value. If anything, in fact, it proved counter-productive as it came at considerable expense, upset long-standing commercial ties and antagonised the local population thanks to heavy-handed gestures such as the celebration of Mass in the city’s great mosque, which was converted into a Christian church.15
This belligerent posturing was part of a wider hostility towards Islam that was growing across the Iberian peninsula at the time. When Henry the Navigator, the son of the King of Portugal, wrote to the Pope in 1454 to request a monopoly over the navigation of the Atlantic, he said his motivation was to reach ‘the Indians who, it is said, worship the name of Christ, so that we can . . . persuade them to come to the aid of the Christians against the Saracens’.16
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