The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  It was not only the use of force and fortunate alliances that shattered the indigenous population. So too did the diseases that were brought from Europe.52 The inhabitants of Tenochtitlán fell in huge numbers to highly contagious outbreaks of smallpox, to which they had no resistance and which appeared for the first time around 1520.53 Famine followed. With mortality rates among women particularly high, agricultural production, for which they were largely responsible, collapsed. Matters were made worse because, as people fled to get away from the disease, there were fewer still to plant and harvest crops, so it was not long before the supply chain broke down completely. Fatalities from disease and hunger were catastrophic.54

  A calamitous outbreak, perhaps of influenza, but more likely smallpox again, accounted for a large proportion of the Cakchiquel Mayan population of Guatemala in the 1520s, where the stench of the rotting corpses hung heavily in the air as dogs and vultures devoured them. Then, a few years later, another pandemic struck: this time, measles. The old populations of the New World did not stand a chance.55

  The sea lanes to Europe now became thick with heavily laden ships from the Americas. This was a new network to rival those across Asia, in both distance and scale, and soon surpassed them in value: scarcely imaginable quantities of silver, gold, precious stones and treasures were carried across the Atlantic. Stories of the riches of the New World were heavily embroidered. One popular account in the early sixteenth century told of large nuggets of gold being washed from hillsides into rivers where they were then gathered in nets by the locals.56

  Unlike the tales told in Columbus’ first reports that flattered to deceive, precious metals really were now flowing homewards. Albrecht Dürer was stunned by the quality of the craftsmanship of Aztec treasures he saw exhibited in 1520. ‘Nothing I have seen in all my days rejoiced my heart so much as these things,’ he wrote of objects that included ‘a sun entirely of gold’ and a silver moon, both six feet in width. He was transfixed by ‘the amazing artistic objects’, marvelling ‘at the subtle ingenuity of the men in those distant lands’ who had created them.57 Boys like Pedro Cieza de León – who grew up to be a conquistador of Peru – stood on the quayside in Seville, staring in astonishment as they watched ship after ship being unloaded and treasure being taken off by the cartload.58

  Ambitious men raced across the Atlantic to take advantage of the opportunities that the New World presented. Armed with contracts and concessions from the Spanish crown, hardened figures like Diego de Ordás, who accompanied Cortés in Mexico and later led expeditions to explore Central America and what is now Venezuela, made vast fortunes for themselves, milking the local population for tribute. This in turn created a surge in the royal coffers back in Spain, as the crown took its cut.59

  It was not long before systematic approaches to information-gathering were being formulated at home, resulting in reliable maps being made, new finds being charted, pilots being trained and, of course, imports back home being catalogued and correctly taxed.60 It was as if a highly tuned engine had been switched on, pumping the riches from Central and South America directly to Europe.

  In addition, serendipity of timing, marriage ties, failed pregnancies and broken betrothals had produced a single heir to the kingdoms of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, as well as to territories sprawling across Burgundy and the Low Countries – and Spain. With seemingly unlimited funds flowing back across the Atlantic, the Spanish king Charles V was not just master of a new empire in the Americas but the dominant figure in European politics. Ambitions were recalibrated accordingly: in 1519, Charles moved to strengthen his position further, using his extraordinary financial muscle to ensure his election as Holy Roman Emperor.61

  Charles’s good fortune was disruptive for other European leaders, who found themselves outgunned, outmanoeuvred and outjostled by a ruler determined to expand his power ever further. His wealth and influence stood in sharp contrast with those of figures like Henry VIII of England, whose income was positively embarrassing compared with that of the church in his own country – to say nothing of that of his Spanish peer. Henry – a highly competitive man who in the words of the Venetian envoy to London had ‘an extremely fine calf to his leg’, combed his hair short and straight ‘in the French fashion’ and had a round face ‘so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman’ – could not have chosen a worse moment to try to shuffle his domestic arrangements.62

  At a time when Charles V had become the puppet-master of much of Europe and of the papacy, Henry’s insistence that he wanted his marriage annulled so that he could take up with Anne Boleyn – a woman who, in the words of one contemporary, was ‘not one of the handsomest women in the world’ but was blessed with eyes that were ‘black and beautiful’ – was reckless in the extreme given that the wife he was abandoning was none other than Charles V’s own aunt, Catherine of Aragon.63 In the upheaval that followed the Pope’s refusal to sanction an annulment, the King of England was not just taking on the papacy; he was picking a fight with the richest man in the world, and a man who was the master of continents.

  Spain’s growing importance in Europe and its rapid extension in Central and South America were little short of miraculous. A remarkable shift in wealth, power and opportunity had resulted in Spain’s transformation from a provincial backwater at the wrong end of the Mediterranean into a global power. For one Spanish chronicler, this was nothing less than ‘the greatest event since the Creation – other than the incarnation and the death of the one who created it’.64 For another, it was clearly God himself who had revealed ‘the provinces of Peru, from which such a great treasure of gold and silver had been concealed’; future generations, opined Pedro Mexía, would not believe the quantities that had been found.65

  The discovery of the Americas was soon followed by the import of slaves, bought in the markets of Portugal. As the Portuguese knew from their experiences in the Atlantic island groups and West Africa, European settlement was expensive, was not always economically rewarding and was easier said than done: persuading families to leave their loved ones behind was hard enough, but high death rates and testing local conditions made this even more difficult. One solution had been to send orphans and convicts forcibly to places like São Tomé, in conjunction with a system of benefits and incentives, such as the provision of a ‘male or female slave for personal service’, to create a population base on which a sustainable administrative system could be built.66

  Within three decades of Columbus’ crossing, the Spanish crown was already formally regulating the export and transport of slaves from Africa to the New World, awarding licences to Portuguese traders whose hearts and minds had been hardened by generations of human trafficking.67 Demand was almost insatiable in a region where violence and disease reduced life expectancy. Just as had been the case when the Islamic world boomed in the eighth century, a surge in the concentration of wealth in one part of the world meant there was a sharp rise in the demand for slaves from another. Wealth and bondage went hand in hand.

  It did not take long before African rulers began to protest. The King of Kongo made a series of appeals to the King of Portugal decrying the impact of slaving. He protested about young men and women – including those from noble families – being kidnapped in broad daylight to be sold to European traders who then branded them with hot irons.68 He should stop complaining, the Portuguese sovereign replied. Kongo was a huge land that could afford to have some of its inhabitants shipped away; in any event, he went on, it benefited handsomely from trade, including that of slaves.69

  Some Europeans, at least, were anguished by the plight of slaves and the seemingly relentless focus on extracting rewards from newly discovered lands. Although the prospect of recovering Jerusalem had slipped into the shadows, the idea of evangelisation as a Christian duty quickly emerged in its place.70 The European settlers in South America, one senior Jesuit wrote angrily in 1559, ‘fail to understand’ that the purpose of colonisation ‘was not so much to obtain gold or s
ilver, or to people the land or to build mills, or . . . bring wealth [home] . . . as it was to glorify the Catholic faith and save souls’.71 The point was to spread God’s word rather than to make money. It was a clear echo of the protests of Christian missionaries travelling along the burgeoning trade routes and settlements on the steppes of southern Russia and Central Asia centuries earlier, who likewise complained that a fixation with trade distracted from matters of higher importance.

  In the case of the New World, there were good grounds for complaint about the disregard for the benefits of spiritual rewards. Gold was heading back to Spain in such volume that by the middle of the sixteenth century some were describing the era as surpassing the legendary age of Solomon. So much treasure was being shipped, Charles V was told in 1551, that ‘this period should more rightly be known as an era dorada’ – a Golden Age.72

  Not all the riches extracted from the Americas made it back to Spain. Almost as soon as fleets began to bring treasure home, sharp-eyed adventurers and pirates based in ports in France and North Africa could be found trying to cut them off and seize the spoils for themselves – either lying in wait on the final approach to the mainland or, as time went on, venturing into the Caribbean to intercept fat targets further afield.73

  Accounts of the prizes on offer drew in opportunists from far and wide. ‘The reports of the great riches and glory’ that could be gained off the Atlantic seaboard of North Africa, wrote one contemporary despairingly, lured men there ‘with the same excitement that spurred the Spanish on to the mines in the Indies’.74 These included Muslim raiders, who as well as setting about capturing inbound ships laden with produce also turned their attention to ravaging ports and towns on the coast of Spain, carting off thousands of prisoners in the process, who were ransomed or even sold on as slaves.

  The raids were dressed up as being religiously motivated, although this was a heavily idealised way of seeing things. But even in the case of European piracy there were political points to be made. Attacks on Iberian vessels became a regulated industry, with licences known as lettres de marque being issued by Christian rivals to the King of Spain. The latter in turn promptly issued heavily incentivised pirate-hunting contracts, known as contra-corsarios, to bring the worst culprits to justice. Those that were successful found rich rewards from the crown, and also considerable fame – such as Pedro Menéndez de Avilés who notched up his prey in the manner of a wartime fighter pilot chalking up kills.75

  A New World had been discovered overseas, but a new world was also being created at home, one where vibrant new ideas were encouraged, where new tastes were indulged, where intellectuals and scientists jostled and competed for patrons and funding. The rise in disposable incomes for those directly involved in the exploration of the continents and the wealth they brought back funded a cultural transfusion that transformed Europe. A swathe of rich patrons emerged in a matter of decades, keen to spend on luxury. There was an increasing desire for the rare and the exotic.

  Europe’s new wealth gave it swagger and confidence, and also reinforced faith in a way that the recapture of Jerusalem had been expected to do. To many, it was entirely obvious that the seemingly limitless fortune yielded from the Americas was an affirmation of God’s blessings and had been ‘ordained by the Lord on high, who both gives and takes away kingdoms from whomever and in whatever way he wishes’.76 The dawn of a new era, a veritable Golden Age, caused the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, which had prompted wailing, breast-beating and tears in the streets of Rome, to be forgotten.

  The task now was to reinvent the past. The demise of the old imperial capital presented an unmistakable opportunity for the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome to be claimed by new adoptive heirs – something that was done with gusto. In truth, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal and England had nothing to do with Athens and the world of the ancient Greeks, and were largely peripheral in the history of Rome from its earliest days to its demise. This was glossed over as artists, writers and architects went to work, borrowing themes, ideas and texts from antiquity to provide a narrative that chose selectively from the past to create a story which over time became not only increasingly plausible but standard. So although scholars have long called this period the Renaissance, this was no rebirth. Rather, it was a Naissance – a birth. For the first time in history, Europe lay at the heart of the world.

  12

  The Road of Silver

  Even before the discovery of the Americas, trading patterns had begun to pick up after the economic shocks of the fifteenth century. Some scholars argue that this was caused by improved access to gold markets in West Africa, combined with rising output in mines in the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe, perhaps made possible by technological advances that helped unlock new supplies of precious metals. It seems, for example, that silver production rose five-fold in the decades after 1460 in Saxony, Bohemia and Hungary, as well as in Sweden.1 Other scholars point to the fact that tax collection became more efficient in the second half of the fifteenth century. Economic contraction had forced lessons to be learnt, not the least of which was the need to control the tax base more vigilantly – something that in turn led to what has been called the ‘revival of monarchy’, where centralisation was as important from a monetary point of view as it was socially and politically.2

  To judge from the account of a Korean traveller, the velocity of trade seems to have increased in the late fifteenth century. In the port of Suzhou, around seventy miles from Shanghai, ships were gathering ‘like clouds’, wrote Ch’oe P’u, waiting to take their shipments of ‘thin silks, gauzes, gold, silver, jewels, crafts’ to new markets. The city was filled with rich merchants and boasted impressive standards of living. ‘The people live luxuriously,’ he wrote enviously, noting that ‘market quarters are scattered like stars’ in this rich and fertile region.3 Although this was promising, the key lay not in the harbours of the Chinese Pacific coast but thousands of miles away, in the Iberian peninsula.

  The solution came in two parts. Europe’s gradual economic upturn in the latter part of the fifteenth century had already stimulated consumer demand for luxury products. An immense reservoir of resources built up as the riches of the New World were shipped to Spain. In Seville, gold and silver were ‘stored like wheat’ in the customs house, prompting the construction of a new building that could receive the astonishing volume of incoming goods so that they could be taxed correctly.4 One observer wrote of his amazement as the haul of one fleet was unloaded: on one day alone, he saw 332 ‘cart loads of silver, gold and precious pearls’ being brought to be formally accounted for; six weeks later, he saw another 686 loads of precious metal being brought in. There was so much, he wrote, that the ‘Casa [de Contratación] could not accommodate it all and it overflowed onto the patio’.5

  The huge windfall that came with Columbus’ crossing of the Atlantic coincided with the spectacular success of another maritime expedition that was no less ambitious. Just as fears began to grow in Spain that Columbus’ attempts to find a route to Asia had been an expensive mistake, another fleet was equipped and made ready to sail. Placed under the command of Vasco da Gama, the crews were received by the King of Portugal, Manuel I, before they left. Pointedly neglecting to mention the recent discoveries across the Atlantic, the sovereign outlined da Gama’s objective: to find a ‘new way to India and the countries lying near to it’. In doing so, he went on, ‘the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ’ would be proclaimed as ‘new kingdoms and realms’ were seized from the Infidels – that is, the Muslims. But he had an eye on more immediate rewards too. Would it not be wonderful, he mused, to acquire ‘the riches of the East that are so celebrated by the ancient authors’? Just look, he continued, at how Venice, Genoa and Florence and the other great Italian cities had benefited from trade with the east. The Portuguese were painfully aware that they lay not just on the wrong side of the world but even at the wrong end of Europe.6

  That all changed with da Gama’s specula
tive expedition. Things did not look promising when his ships first reached southern Africa. The disappointment was less with the inhabitants, who dressed in skins and wore sheaths over their genitals, or with the food – the meat from seals and gazelles and the roots of herbs for chewing. It was that when samples of cinnamon, cloves, pearls, gold ‘and many other things’ were shown to the locals, ‘it was clear that they had no knowledge of them whatsoever’.7

  As he rounded the Cape of Good Hope and headed north, da Gama’s luck changed. At Malindi, he not only learnt of the passage east, but found an experienced pilot willing to help him deal with the monsoon winds and reach India. After a journey lasting ten months, he anchored off the port of Calicut.8 He had succeeded where Columbus had failed; he had found a sea route to Asia.

  There were already communities of traders from close to home; among the first voices he heard were those speaking in a familiar tongue. ‘The Devil take you!’ shouted one of two Muslim merchants from Tunis who could speak Spanish and Genoese; ‘what brought you here?!’ After exchanging pleasantries, what they said next was music to his ears: ‘What good fortune you have, what good fortune! There are so many rubies here, so many emeralds! You should give great thanks to God for bringing you to a land where there are such riches!’9

  Nevertheless, the Portuguese struggled to make sense of what they saw – just as Columbus had done. Temples filled with statues of Hindu gods wearing crowns were thought to be churches adorned with images of Christian saints, while water thrown in purification rituals was interpreted as holy water being dispensed by Christian priests.10 Stories of how St Thomas, one of Jesus’ disciples, had reached India and converted large numbers to Christianity had long circulated in Europe, prompting no end of erroneous conclusions to be drawn and brought back by da Gama – not least that there were large numbers of Christian kingdoms in the east ready to fight against Islam. Much of what was reported about what had been seen in the east turned out to be misleading or plain wrong.11