Western Europeans' hopes and expectations about their world had been shaped by a shared past. Although they were diverse peoples, their similarities were strong enough to allow us to describe the common features of fifteenth-century European economies, family arrangements, war-making practices, and political systems, all of which contrasted in important respects with those of indigenous North Americans during the same period. Understanding these common features helps us to explain how and why they behaved as they did, both in Europe and also in Africa and the Americas. On the other hand, it is important too to understand how western European societies were changing, since those changes help to explain changes in the behavior of European colonizers over time.
By 1400, western European peoples had lived in fully sedentary agricultural societies for several millennia. Most people engaged in farming, raising wheat, oats, and barley, along with some livestock and poultry. Men and women divided the tasks of farming: men plowed the fields and herded cattle or sheep, while women were responsible for vegetable gardens, dairies, and food processing. Although the division of labor in European societies was more or less evenly shared by members of each gender, legal and political power was not. Western European family relations were invariably patriarchal, that is dominated by men, rather than complementary as in Native American families. When families owned property, men generally controlled it. Another important difference was that western European societies were markedly more hierarchical than Native American societies. Everywhere farmers were less likely to own the land they farmed than to be tenants or serfs on property owned by a manor lord. Social hierarchy was thought to be natural, and thus inevitable. Manor lords and members of the nobility typically had the power to govern those who lived on their land, and enjoyed significantly greater power and wealth than the rest of the population.
Much like indigenous North Americans, western Europeans by the end of the fourteenth century were in the midst of their own historical transformation. European peoples too had recently been forced to adapt to the effects of the Little Ice Age, the cooling trend that during the fourteenth century shortened growing seasons throughout much of the world. One major difference from North America was that human societies in Europe had by 1300 become overpopulated, relative to people's capacity to produce food. Europeans were therefore chronically malnourished. Thus when climate change shortened growing seasons, the impact in Europe may have been even more devastating than in North America. Food shortages produced famines, which were followed in the middle of the fourteenth century by devastating plagues. The population fell dramatically, sometimes by as much as 40 to 50 percent. The resulting instability slowed economic activity and trade.
Paradoxically, one long-term result of the population decline in western Europe was to raise the wages paid for work, giving some ordinary people new opportunities to make money. Eventually farm production stabilized and the population recovered. In England, the lives of many tenant farmers became less stable, as landlords took advantage of new opportunities for profit and forced their tenants off parts of their land. On the other hand some tenant farmers became more productive and were able to negotiate more rights to the land on which they farmed. Meanwhile trade and commercial ties, which had declined during the crisis, gradually began to revive. During the fifteenth century European merchants in urban centers once again began looking for new trading opportunities. To some extent they were being forced by political changes to adapt, for by the middle of the century the Ottoman empire had gained control over many of the older trade routes to Asia. European merchants had to look beyond the Mediterranean for commercial prospects.
Like North Americans, most ordinary Europeans did not identify with a government or a state, but with their villages and local communities. No empire had arisen to control western Europe since the fall of Rome, though most western Europeans in 1400 were at least nominally Roman Catholics, governed in religious matters by the pope. For centuries monarchs and nobles had competed with one another for power and authority. By the fifteenth century, this competition had grown very expensive. Armies were growing larger, and keeping them supplied with arms cost money. In order to wage war effectively, monarchs in Spain, France, Portugal, and England developed government institutions such as courts, tax collection systems, and mechanisms for the impressment of soldiers so that they could raise funds and amass armies. These institutions laid the foundations for the modern nation-state. Thus, just as in North America, the trend in western Europe was towards the consolidation and centralization of political power. However the war-making powers of European princes and kings were vastly different than those of Native American chiefs, since they did not have to obtain the consent of their warriors every time they went to war, and could raise and support large armies to fight wars over extended periods of time.
2 The Portuguese in Africa
During the fifteenth century, two related developments began to push western Europeans to begin to look beyond their borders towards the rest of the known world – not across the Atlantic, but south towards Africa and, eventually, east towards Asia. First was a series of incremental advances in sailing techniques and technologies which made possible longer commercial expeditions down the Atlantic coast. Portuguese and Catalan merchants and sailors had been engaged in slave raiding and in trade with the Canary Islands for about a century. As these Iberian seamen gradually learned to utilize technological advances in ship construction and navigational instruments, they gained the ability to explore further and further south along Africa's Atlantic coast. Expeditions sponsored by Portugal's Prince Henry reached the Senegal region in 1444, Sierra Leone around 1460. Later expeditions explored the Gold Coast, the site of modern Ghana, in 1471, and Benin in 1472. Each of these destinations provided opportunities to raid trading caravans for gold and, occasionally, slaves, or to establish ties with local traders. Eventually, Portuguese sailors and their sponsors broadened their objectives to seek a new passage to the Indian Ocean so as to avoid the Ottoman Turks, who controlled the eastern Mediterranean. In 1487 Bartholomew Díaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama reached India by the same route.
The second development was the effort by European kings and queens to centralize their political power, which enabled them to sponsor foreign conquests and enforce their claims to territorial sovereignty. By conquering non-Christian territories in northern Africa, European rulers could enhance their claims to be defenders of Christendom, while acquiring gold and other commodities could help them strengthen their military power. Portuguese rulers captured the Muslim city of Ceuta in 1415, and sponsored the creation of colonies in Madeira, Cape Verde, the Azores, and São Tomé, all islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the African coast, between 1420 and 1485. Some of these colonies became bases for trading and raiding. Others were turned into agricultural colonies, producing such commodities as sugar, wheat, and pepper. The Iberian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, whose kingdoms of Aragon and Castile had been unified through their dynastic marriage in 1469, turned much of their own expansionist energy towards the Mediterranean rather than towards Africa. Eventually they conquered the Islamic kingdom of Granada in 1492. But much like the Portuguese, they too looked towards the Atlantic islands for conquests and captured the Canary Islands between 1478 and 1496.
One result of both colonial expeditions and territorial conquests was to create closer and more sustained contacts between western European and West African peoples during the second half of the fifteenth century. Western Africa south of the Sahara was a diverse region politically and culturally. By 1400 West Africa proper, that is the region which today extends from Senegal in the West to Niger and Nigeria in the east, was a densely populated area whose people sustained themselves by farming. Its inhabitants communicated with the larger world to the east through a system of trade conducted along the Niger and Senegal rivers, as well as by overland routes. Islamic travelers had been coming here since the eighth century, and had converted some West A
fricans to Islam, though many still preserved their traditional religions. Rulers in the northern portion of West Africa controlled large and well-developed states with considerable resources. The empire of Mali became known for its wealth after one of its rulers, Mansa Musa I, made a pilgrimage to Mecca between 1324 and 1326, spending so much gold along the way that the price of gold on the world market became depreciated for years afterwards. By the middle of the fifteenth century Mali had been eclipsed by the Songhay empire, whose territories in extended from the Atlantic in the west to far beyond Timbuktu and Gao in the east, an area considerably larger than modern-day Spain and France combined. It was through these empires that caravans of traders carried gold, silver, iron, cloth, spices, and other commodities to Egypt and beyond. Further to the south, on the other hand, the population remained more isolated. People in western central Africa, south of modern-day Cameroon, lived in largely self-sufficient, tribal communities, mostly unaffected by world commerce.
When Portuguese merchants began traveling to West Africa in the 1430s and 1440s, their primary interest was gold. However, they might also buy other commodities, such as pepper, ivory, and slaves. Slaves could be exchanged with other traders for gold or sold in the Iberian peninsula as domestic servants, for slavery was legally permitted in the Mediterranean region. Islamic merchants had been bringing slaves along with other commodities to markets in ports like Valencia and Tunis and Alexandria since the eighth and ninth centuries. Indeed slavery remained a significant institution in the Mediterranean region, though it had declined in much of northern Europe by the Middle Ages with the rise of other forms of labor exploitation such as serfdom.
Slavery was common during the fifteenth century in much of Africa as well. Frequent wars among competing states in sub-Saharan Africa produced large numbers of captives who could be kept by the victors or sold to traders and exported. African elites wanted laborers so as to build their own wealth and prestige, especially important to their status since their legal systems generally did not recognize property in land. Most slaves were non-Muslims, since converts to Islam could not legally be enslaved. Their status varied. Most slaves during this period were employed as domestic servants rather than for commercial purposes, generally living in families and often becoming assimilated into the cultures into which they had been placed. The institution of slavery was sufficiently fluid that the children and grandchildren of slaves could often acquire greater rights and a higher social rank than the enslaved parents. However, such fluidity was not an invariable feature of African slavery. Some slaves, including many in the Songhay empire, were put to work on plantations growing wheat or rice. Here they had little hope of achieving a better life for themselves or their children.
Portuguese traders found that any African slaves they purchased could easily be resold to Portuguese planters, who wanted agricultural laborers for plantations in Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands. By the 1480s, African slaves carried on Portuguese vessels were increasingly being shipped to the Portuguese islands (and to the Canaries, which had been conquered by the Castilians) to grow and process sugar, a coveted luxury product for rich Europeans. Over the next few hundred years, this new demand for African slaves would produce a diaspora of tragic proportions, as slaves were transported by the millions from Africa to the Americas. But such a future was still inconceivable, since none of these Old World people had yet imagined that the Americas existed.
3 Spain Encounters the New World
Christopher Columbus was well situated to take advantage of the technical advances pioneered by the Portuguese in navigating the Atlantic. Born in Genoa in 1451, Columbus spent much of his adult life as a sailor and merchant in Portugal and Madeira. He had extensive experience navigating the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic coast, traveling as far north as Iceland and as far south as the Portuguese colony of Sao Jorge da Mina. Columbus's travels aroused his curiosity and his ambition, and by the 1480s he had begun working out a set of theories about the size of the earth and the amount of time it would take to reach China by sailing westward across the Atlantic. Educated Europeans had long understood that the world was round, not flat, and that by sailing westward a mariner would, in theory, eventually reach the east. However, most geographers believed (with good reason) that the prospect of sailing all the way around the world was impractical. No ship yet built could possibly carry enough water and supplies for a voyage that was sure to take at least five months to complete. Nevertheless Columbus, unlike most geographers, was an unusually poor mathematician, who had managed to convince himself that the earth was smaller in circumference than most scholars believed.
In 1485, Columbus approached King John of Portugal to seek funding for an exploratory voyage from the Canary Islands to China across the Atlantic. He argued that the distance of the voyage would be less than 5,000 miles, instead of the 10,000–12,000 miles estimated by most mathematicians and geographers. The king refused, advised (correctly) by experts that Columbus's calculations were wrong and he would never make it to Asia. Advisers to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella reached the same conclusions. However, the Spanish king and queen proved more susceptible to persuasion and in 1492, after years of stalling, approved funding for a voyage. The Spaniards were fresh from the conquest of Granada: they were probably more fired up with missionary zeal than the Portuguese. Certainly they were aware that without some new discovery for Spain, their kingdoms would soon be eclipsed by the Portuguese in the race for profits from the seaborne trade. Columbus accordingly sailed from the Canaries on September 6, 1492. Luckily for him, he had made a mistake in assuming that there was no major landmass in the Atlantic between Europe and Asia. He reached land after five weeks – not Asia, as he had predicted, but the Bahama Islands.
Map 2 The age of exploration.
Columbus returned in March of 1493 to Spain, where Ferdinand and Isabella greeted him as a hero. The monarchs understood his voyage in the context of the Reconquista, the seven-decade-long struggle to defeat Islam throughout the Iberian peninsula, and saw it as a glorious opportunity for Christendom. They showered him with titles and promised him a tenth of all profits he could make by founding a colony in Hispaniola, one of the islands he had found in the West Indies. Additionally, they charged him to convert the indigenous peoples he had found in these new islands to Christianity.
We now know that Columbus was not the first mariner from the Old World to have reached the Americas. There is good evidence showing that Leif Erickson, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and other Vikings explored the northern coasts of North America and even established a temporary colony on the tip of Newfoundland at L'Anse aux Meadows around 1000 CE. Some speculative evidence has been offered to suggest that Chinese ships from the treasure fleets of Zheng He may have reached the shores of California around 1421. Nevertheless Columbus's voyage was unquestionably the most significant of all these journeys for the history of the world. It was Columbus's accidental “discovery” of the Americas that set in motion the dramatic reorientation of the relationships between peoples in four continents on both sides of the Atlantic that would transform the world between 1500 and 1800. It would produce what scholars call the Columbian Exchange, an exchange of plants, animals, and pathogens from one side of the world to the other that would cause the deaths of untold numbers of indigenous Americans (perhaps as much as 80 percent of the population) and transform the diets of Old World peoples through the introduction of American fruits and vegetables like corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and manioc. It would initiate massive migrations of peoples and shipments of goods, transforming economies, populations, and nations on both side of the Atlantic. It was these transformations that helped to bring into being the societies we now call American societies.2
Reports of Columbus's voyage were published and widely disseminated, and inevitably other Europeans sought to emulate his transatlantic voyage and explore further. Within five years of Columbus's first voyage, John Cabot, a Venetian seaman with a patent from H
enry VII of England, sailed from Bristol to find a route to China via the northwest, which the Spanish conquest had disappointingly failed to do. The French made similar efforts. The Portuguese followed suit, with even greater success. Like the Spanish, they were technologically and geographically well placed for exploring the Atlantic, since Portugal had been engaged in long-distance Atlantic voyages since the 1420s, considerably longer than Spain.
Initially it seemed that the Portuguese and Spanish would dispute control over their discoveries. However, under the auspices of Pope Alexander VI in 1494, the two crowns signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided their claims with an imaginary line 370 leagues (about 1,000 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain was to have exclusive rights to all new territories west of the line, while Portugal was to enjoy similar advantages to the east. Neither had any qualms about annexing such lands, since Christian doctrine had granted the right to the persons and property of heathens and infidels since the time of the Crusades. Even Cabot had been given full authority to “subdue, occupy, and possess” native habitations.
Document 4
License granted by Henry VII to John Cabot, reprinted in W. Keith Kavenagh, Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History (New York, 1973), Vol. 1, 18–19
This document shows the desire of England's King Henry VII to emulate Spain's example by sending an expedition to conquer non-Christian territories. Ironically, like the Spanish, Henry Vll had to employ an ltalian mariner to undertake the exploration for him. Question to consider: What kinds of assumptions does the author make about the kinds of people the English will find, and the kind of relationships they will create?
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