The Millennium of Discovery

By John Elson

ON THE CAMPUSES OF AMERICA THESE days, Eurocentrism is a naughty word, a no-no in an age of political correctness. Yet there is no gainsaying the reality that the central theme of the second millennium is, to cite the title of a popular book by the British historian J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West. In the first part of this era, Europe began to develop a civilization that was able to compete with richer and more sophisticated cultures, particularly those of China and Islam. And with the Age of Exploration, midway through the 15th century, European civilization gradually became the dominant intellectual and political force in world history.

All the landmark movements that have shaped the modern era -- from the ocean voyages of Columbus and Magellan to the Protestant Reformation and the print revolution, from the development of the scientific method to the Industrial Revolution -- were largely produced by those hated demons of American multiculturalists, dead white European males. Until 1400, all but a handful of innovations in European life had been anticipated by the Arabs or the Chinese. After 1600, virtually every technological change that affected the world and the way people lived -- from the telescope to the typewriter, from the fork to the steam engine -- has been the product of Western ingenuity.

That ingenuity, coupled with an aggressive wanderlust, brought Europeans and their culture to the ends of the earth. By the year 1914, 84% of the world's land surface, apart from the polar regions, was under either a European flag or that of a former European colony. Of the nine nominally independent non- Western nations, Bhutan and Ethiopia were politically insignificant; Afghanistan, China, Siam, Nepal, Persia and the Ottoman Empire were under varying degrees of thrall to Western powers; only Japan was truly autonomous.

There is no moral or spiritual superiority implied in the assertion of European accomplishment. The hegemony of European civilization was based largely on the successful application of new knowledge to solving problems and conquering nature, and much of that success was based on circumstance and ingenuity. Italian merchants of the 14th century, for example, rather than the bureaucrats of China, devised the essential principles of accounting like double-entry bookkeeping and such financial devices as the bill of exchange and limited liability. That is a major reason why banking, and hence capitalism, developed in Europe rather than in the Far East.

The triumph of the West was in many ways a bloody shame -- a story of atrocity and rapine, of arrogance, greed and ecological despoliation, of hubristic contempt for other cultures and intolerance of non-Christian faiths. Nonetheless, as Hugh Thomas argues in A History of the World, "it is obvious that it is Western Europe ((and)) North America which, since the 15th century at least, for good or evil, ((have)) provided the world's dynamism."

In the year 1000, Western Europe was just emerging from the long depression commonly known as the Dark Ages. The Continent's condition was in some ways like that of Eastern Europe today, which is ethnically riven, economically fragile and still uncertain as to what follows a generation or more of tyranny. Shortly before the beginning of the millennium, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III (unlike many others who were to bear that title, he was reputed for his asceticism) moved his capital and court back to the Eternal City. But what little grandeur Rome still possessed paled by comparison with the splendors of "the new Rome," Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire.

Although much reduced from its territorial apogee in the 9th century, Byzantium was one of three centers of wealth and power in the known world of the 11th century. India and China were the others. Islam, although in a period of temporary decline and political confusion, held sway as a militant spiritual force from the Iberian Peninsula along the southern littoral of the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. There were sophisticated cultures elsewhere, notably the Mayan of Mexico, but they were virtually out of touch with other civilizations -- thus lacking an essential condition for being considered part of world history.

Little of Europe's coming dynamism was apparent in the year 1000, although there were signs that the Continent was, ever so slowly, getting richer. Wider use of plows had made farming more efficient. The planting of new crops, notably beans and peas, added both variety to Europe's diet and enriching nitrate to its soil. Windmills and watermills provided fresh sources of power. Villages that were to become towns and eventually cities grew up around trading markets.

Yet the modern nation-state, with its centralized bureaucracies and armies under unified command, would not come into being until the 15th century. For most of the Middle Ages, Roman Catholicism was Europe's unifying force. Benedictine abbeys had preserved what fragments of ancient learning the Continent possessed. Cistercian monks had cleared the land and pioneered in agricultural experimentation. Ambitious popes vied with equally ambitious kings to determine whether the spiritual realm would hold sway over the temporal, or vice versa. Symbolic of the church's power were the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe: construction of Reims began in the 13th century, and Chartres -- the most glorious of all such edifices -- was consecrated in 1260.

In the Near East until recently, Europeans were often known as "Franks," a reference to the French and German warriors who marched and rode in the Crusades. These eight extraordinary missions, which took place over the course of two centuries, marked the beginning of what J.M. Roberts calls "Europe's long and victorious assault on the world." The Crusaders had mixed motives: religious zeal blended uneasily with unabashed greed. The professed goal of the Crusades was the liberation of Jerusalem, which had been captured by Islamic forces in 638. Although Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, marking their victory with a fearful slaughter of Muslim and Jewish women and children, the Christian colonies they set up in the Levant proved to be fragile kingdoms and were soon recaptured.

Like many other episodes in human history, the Crusades had significant side effects. One was a heightened animosity between Christendom and Islam in the Middle East, which eventually cut Europeans off from land routes to India and China. The need for new avenues of trade with the Far East led to the seafaring explorations of the Age of Discovery. Thanks to the Crusaders, Europe had developed a yearning for such oriental luxuries as silks, perfumes, rare spices and (some historians believe) four-poster beds.

Another consequence was a fatal weakening of Byzantium, which never recovered from a brutal sacking by Crusaders in 1204. Western Europe had rediscovered some of the lost learning of ancient Greece in translations made by Arab sages. A steady exodus of Hellenic scholars from the decaying empire brought westward the more detailed knowledge of antiquity that eventually fueled the revival of classical learning known as the Renaissance. A startling contrast to the struggle between Crusaders and Saracens in the Holy Land was the peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews in Islamic-ruled medieval Spain, which had been conquered by the Muslims in 711. In an era that became known as the convivencia, scholars from all over Europe made pilgrimages to the schools and libraries of Cordoba, Madrid and Salamanca to study Arabic literature, astronomy and medicine -- and to enjoy such sensual pleasures as food cooked in olive oil and music played on the guitar.

The Jews, a prosperous middle-class minority in this tolerant society, served as translators and go-betweens. Among other skills, Spanish Jews were famed as ironsmiths. After Spain was reunited in 1492 by the Christian armies of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand (who was part Jewish), the Jews were given a cruel choice: convert to Christianity or go into exile. Many of these craftsmen set up shop in Italy. "Ghetto," which means "iron foundry," was the name of the island in Venice that became the city's Jewish quarter.

Humanity's instinct for order wants precise timetables for great events. When, for example, did the Renaissance begin? Charles Van Doren, in A History of Knowledge, argues for 1304; that was the birth year of poet Francesco Petrarch, whose life and work epitomized the revival of classical learning in Italy. Many other historians favor 1453, the year of Constantinople's fall. The Middle Ages, in the consensus view, ended during the 14th century. But J.M. Roberts in The Penguin History of the World points out that certain features of medieval life -- notably a feudal system that bonded serfs to the soil they tilled -- persisted in Eastern Europe until the 19th century.

It is possible, however, to date with some precision the beginning of the Age of Discovery, which opened the world to European shipping -- and European imperialism. Around 1419 Portugal's Prince Henry (commonly known as "the Navigator," but wrongly so, since he never took part in any exploratory voyages himself) established a maritime training center at Sagres, on his country's Atlantic coast. Inspired by Henry's seafaring passion, such explorers as Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco Da Gama sailed down the coast of Africa and eventually to India. From the rival ports of Palos and Cadiz, under the flag of Spain, Christopher Columbus set out westward on his seminal voyage of discovery, eventually journeying four times to what he never believed was a New World. His discovery of America, Van Doren notes, "is probably the single greatest addition to human knowledge ever made by one man."

Several factors made the Age of Exploration possible. Medieval cartographers piously placed Jerusalem at the center of the earth. But in the 15th century, Western scholars rediscovered Ptolemy's Geography, with its maps of a semispheric earth that (more or less) accurately located such distant places as Iceland and Ceylon. Improvements in rigging enabled the construction of larger, more maneuverable ships with both square-rigged and fore-and-aft sails. The development of the quadrant (an Arabic invention) and magnetic compass (possibly from China) made navigation more accurate; the stern- fastened rudder made ship handling easier.

Finally, there was need. The pioneering seafarers knew from trade and returning travelers that in many respects the cultures of Asia were superior to their own. Desperate for the wealth of the East, Europe had little to offer in exchange but the one true faith. Like the Crusaders, the explorers were inspired by curiosity and the desire to get rich. But they also wished, as the Spanish historian Bernal Diaz del Castillo put it, "to give light to those who were in darkness." Wherever European colonies were established, missionaries soon followed.

The Age of Exploration enriched Europe, but its consequences for the peoples of Africa and the Americas were mostly disastrous. Africa had had a slave trade, conducted by nomadic Muslim merchants, before the seafarers arrived, and the traffic persisted even after European nations outlawed it during the 19th century. In 1434 Portuguese adventurers brought the first black slaves to Lisbon. As Europe's transatlantic colonies grew in importance, so did the need for manual labor. In all, writes Roberts, as many as 10 million slaves were transported to the New World, perhaps 5 million of them in the 18th century alone. Nearly two million more died aboard the crowded prison ships that carried slaves to work the sugar fields of the Caribbean or the cotton plantations of the American South.

Native Americans were victimized by colonialism in a different way: millions died of imported diseases like smallpox, which their immune systems could not handle. The conquistadores ruthlessly suppressed the imposing cultures of Aztec Mexico and Incan Peru, which nonetheless made a lasting and invaluable contribution to, among other things, world cuisine. Tomatoes, potatoes, corn and peppers, together with many other comestibles, were indigenous to the New World. So, less happily for humankind, was tobacco.

Disease also had a profound effect on the transformation of Europe. In 1347 a ship escaping from a siege of a Genoan trading post in the Crimea by Mongols and Hungarian Kipchaks landed in Sicily. Many of its refugee passengers were suffering from a hitherto unknown and fatal illness: the bubonic plague, carried by the fleas to which rats were host by the millions. By the start of the 15th century, the plague had killed up to 40 million people -- one-third of the Continent's population.

The Black Death profoundly influenced the course of history. It inspired a further exodus to the West of scholars from Byzantium, which was especially hard hit by the disease. It helped lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation by creating an underlying mood of skepticism about the Roman Catholic Church, whose prayers and rituals had appeared ineffective in warding off the disease. (Coincidentally, the church's credibility suffered during the Great Schism ((1378-1417)), when rival popes held sway in Rome and Avignon.) Finally, the plague left a mass of discarded and unwearable clothes. But these garments could be shredded to make rag paper, a vital component of the print revolution that was just getting under way.

Around 1455, in the German city of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg printed the first books (Bibles, appropriately) from movable metal type. By 1500, historians estimate, more than 15 million books were in print, including numerous editions of the Greek and Roman classics that Byzantine scholars had brought to the West. There was implicit subversion in these new/old writings. The Athenian ideal of a republican city-state was a challenge to the absolutist monarchies of Europe. The concept that "man is the measure of all things," as Protagoras put it, confronted the church's theocentric portrait of the universe.

The new humanism was reinforced by Renaissance artists. Michelangelo's David has a biblical subject, yet the statue embodies a Greek-inspired ideal of masculine beauty, wholly secular in its impact. Aristocratic patrons provided the wealth that made possible this explosion of creativity. Much of Florence's aesthetic splendor, from the Medici Palace to the statuary of Donatello to the paintings of Fra Angelico, was commissioned by the financier Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464), known also (and suitably) as "Pater Patriae" (Father of His Country). In many ways Medici was the prototype of the men who created Western civilization, both the embodiment of its ideals and the nourisher of its institutions.

The print revolution not only made the Reformation possible but also assured its success. Without the books that rapidly spread the teachings of Martin Luther and the Swiss reformers throughout Northern Europe, the church and its attendant secular forces might have ruthlessly crushed the reformers, as they had destroyed the Albigensian heretics of the 12th century. Between 1562 and 1598 alone, Europe endured nine religious wars. These conflicts ended with the Peace of Vervins and the Edict of Nantes, which provided freedom of worship for France's Protestant Huguenots. By then the spiritual unity of the West had been permanently shattered.

Protestantism played a subsidiary role in yet another revolution that challenged the church: the emergence of capitalism. By the 14th century the roots of modern banking could be found in northern Italy, where Florence's gold coin (the florin) and Venice's (the ducat) became, in effect, international currencies. But banking and Catholicism were then uneasy partners: the church condemned usury -- defined then as any interest on loans -- in language harsher than bishops today use to denounce contraception. The reformers were more lenient. Gradually Europe's great centers of commerce were established in predominantly Protestant Holland and England. Innovation followed upon fiscal innovation. Grain futures were traded in Amsterdam in the 16th century. Paper currency began to replace metal coins. The first check may have been written in London in 1675.

Scientists, meanwhile, were demystifying the universe. Strangely, no one knows for sure who invented the telescope, but by 1609 Galileo Galilei had built one of his own. With it he was able to confirm the heretical speculations of Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho Brahe that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The specific origins of the microscope are equally obscure. In the 17th century, Robert Hooke used it to describe accurately the anatomy of a flea and the design of a feather; Antonie de Leeuwenhoek discovered a world of wriggling organisms in a drop of water. The invention of logarithms and calculus led to more accurate clocks and optical instruments.

By 1700 Galileo, Rene Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton and other scientists had clarified the principles by which machines work, an essential step in building ever better machines. Henceforth Western civilization's technological supremacy was beyond challenge. Mechanical invention led inexorably to another step in the West's commercial and political hegemony over the world: the Industrial Revolution.

In Hugh Thomas' formulation, "The essential characteristic of our times (that is, the years since 1750) is the manufacture of goods for sale outside the neighborhood concerned, in a factory, and by a machine." Factories, to be sure, predated the Industrial Revolution: during the 16th century, one Jack of Newbury employed more than 500 men, women and children at a plant in Berkshire, England. But the true father of the modern factory, most historians agree, was Richard Arkwright, who in the late 1760s or early 1770s installed several water-powered cotton-spinning machines at a workshop in Cromford. Thousands more installations were to follow.

Philosophers of the 18th century envisioned the universe as a great machine, with God as its controlling engineer. And man himself, they argued, was also a kind of machine, whose work could be regulated according to scientific principles. One beneficial side effect of this vision was a more scientific approach to medicine. But mechanism also led to the dark, satanic mills that William Blake railed against. In the Americas, slaves working the fields were organized and regimented according to factory principles.

! Mass production of goods required both eager markets and raw materials. This increased the importance of colonies and led Europe into endless conflicts over their control. Roberts argues that the Seven Years' War (1756-63) was the first truly global conflict: battles in Europe between the British and the French and their allies were supplemented by skirmishes in North America, India, the Caribbean and the Philippines. By the 19th century, colonialism had become imperialism and Africa its principal focus, as the Great Powers drew through deserts and forests national borders that remain largely intact today, even though they make little ethnic or economic sense.

Modernization in world history, Roberts wrote, "is above all a matter of ideas and techniques which are European in origin." The political and philosophical insights of Western thinkers would prove to be as revolutionary as the scientific discoveries. Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688, which made monarchy accountable to Parliament, embodied John Locke's theory that government depends on the consent of the governed. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence took Locke two steps further: people possess certain unalienable rights, including the right to overthrow governments that deny them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The French Revolution failed ultimately, but not its central ideal: the right of all mankind to liberty and equality. At the onset of another abortive revolution, the European uprisings of 1848, appeared The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their flawed but emotionally powerful vision of an earthly utopia would haunt the world for more than a century. Marx found corroboration for his class-struggle theories in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which theorized that all living things had experienced a long evolutionary process.

Cultures wax and wane; so do the visions that sustain them. Christians of the hierarchical Middle Ages accepted St. Augustine's dream of a spiritual City of God that was a glorious contrast to the drab, earth-bound City of Man. For 17th and early 18th century Europeans, the dominant metaphor was the Great Chain of Being, an orderly progression from the lowliest of existing organisms to God the creator on high. The 19th century was an era of unparalleled growth and prosperity -- albeit unevenly distributed -- for Western Europe and many of its former colonies. No wonder their prevailing belief was the idea of inevitable progress, which translated into continuing material success for the fittest who survived.

This seductive dream was no more sustainable than previous models of civilization. What really brought the nine centuries to a shattering close was not the turning of a calendar page but the Great War of 1914-18. "We are at the dead season of our fortunes," wrote the young economist John Maynard Keynes, contemplating the wreckage. "Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly." Along with millions of soldiers, faith in the beneficence of progress died in that war's muddy trenches.