1492: The Year Our World Began (14 page)

Mehmet’s conquests, however, had been so costly that the empire needed a respite. The state’s great institutional weakness, moreover, was an ill-defined system of succession, which tended to plunge the empire into civil war at every sultan’s death. So when Mehmet died in 1481, a spell of chaos ensued. Otranto was lost, and when the new sultan, Bayezid II, got hold of power, a reaction against Mehmet’s policies
set in. Bayezid exercised more caution, restrained the Ottoman war machine, and repudiated his predecessor’s Romanizing policy. He restored to mosques the lands Mehmet had secularized to pay for his wars, and—at least at the level of rhetoric—proclaimed a return to Islamic law as the law of the state. He also reframed war as jihad, though his summons to arms, which shows that booty and land were still the main objectives of Ottoman campaigns, was addressed to “[a]ll who wish to join in the sacred conquest, engage in the pleasure of raiding and jihad, and who desire booty and plunder, and all brave comrades who gain their bread by the sword.”
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The Temple candelabrum of Jerusalem, reputedly designed by Moses under divine inspiration, symbolized Judaism for the compilers of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Nuremberg Chronicle.

Bayezid did not, however, depart from all Mehmet’s principles. He saw the expulsion of 1492 as a chance to enrich his own realms and granted Jews unlimited rights to enter and settle. Chroniclers represented this as the result of compassion. Calculation had more to do with it. One of Bayezid’s few recorded jokes was a jibe at the supposed
wisdom of the king of Spain, “who impoverishes his country and enriches our own” by expelling Jews.
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At least as significant for the future of the Mediterranean world was Bayezid’s option in favor of his predecessor’s maritime policy. He did not relax the effort to build up the navy; rather, he pursued it with increased vigor. The transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a great maritime power was one of the most astonishing episodes in the history of the Mediterranean. No landlubbers had taken to the sea so rapidly or successfully since Rome defeated Carthage. The Turkish vocation for the sea did not spring suddenly and fully armed into existence. From the early fourteenth century, Turkish chiefs maintained pirate nests on the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean. Some allegedly had hundreds of vessels at their command. The greater the extent of coastline the Ottomans conquered, as their land forces stole west, the greater the opportunities for Turkish-operated corsairs to stay at sea, with access to watering stations and supplies from onshore. Throughout the fourteenth century, however, these were unambitious enterprises, limited to small ships and hit-and-run tactics.

From the 1390s, the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I began to build up a permanent fleet of his own, but without embracing a radically different strategy from that of the independent operators who preceded him. But the winds and currents of the Mediterranean favor warships joining battle from the north or west, because they tend to have the wind in their sails. So the Christian powers that lined those shores generally got the better of adversaries from Islam. Venice, Genoa, and the Spanish states established a sort of armed equilibrium—a surface tension that covered the sea and that the Turks could not break. Set-piece battles usually occurred in spite of Turkish intentions and resulted in Turkish defeats. As late as 1466, a Venetian merchant in Constantinople claimed that for a successful engagement Turkish ships needed to outnumber Venetians by four or five to one. By that date, however, Ottoman investment in naval strength was probably higher than that of any Christian state. The far-seeing sultan Mehmet II realized that the momentum of
conquests by land had to be supported—if it was to continue—by power at sea.

Bayezid II hoped, at first, to remain focused on investment in a large army, and to rely on an understanding with Venice to keep the empire secure in the Mediterranean. But the Venetians proved unreliable and, in particular, unwilling to place their ports at Ottoman disposal. Even if the empire’s expansionist ambitions lay dormant for a while, there were still pirates to deal with and commerce to protect. So Bayezid ordered ships “agile as sea serpents,” impressing Christian technicians to help build them. The shadow of a pretender inhibited him. His brother, Djem, whom he had defeated in a contest for the throne, had taken refuge, first with the Mamluks of Egypt, then with the Christians of the West. The Mamluk frontier was hard to hold. On the European front, ferocious campaigns in 1491 and 1492 led to defeat in Austria, though Bayezid strengthened his hold on the western shore of the Black Sea. With Djem out of the way, however, Bayezid’s ambitions were loosed. When his chief rival for the throne died in 1495, he felt secure enough to challenge Venice’s maritime supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. In the war of 1499–1502, the effects were dramatic. Bayezid sent three hundred ships against the Venetians in the first year. By the end of the war, his fleet of four hundred vessels included two hundred galleys mounted with heavy guns. No other Mediterranean power could match this might. Venice was humbled, and the Ottomans were elevated to something like superpower status—commanding force greater than that of any conceivable alliance of the empire’s enemies. In the new century, Egypt and most of the North African coast as far as Morocco fell under Ottoman dominion.

While the Ottomans took command of the eastern Mediterranean, Spain ascended to something approaching similar control in the western half of the same sea. Once the kingdoms began to recover from the self-inflicted damage of the expulsion of the Jews, the united power of Castile, Aragon, and Granada was insuperable. King Ferdinand had inherited Sicily, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, and Sardinia along with his
lands on Spain’s eastern shore, as well as a claim to the throne of Naples, which he enforced by conquest early in the new century. The Spanish crown added substantial territories in northern Italy not long after and had acquired Melilla on the North African coast in 1497—though Spain’s many other attempts at conquests in the same region rarely succeeded and never lasted long.

So in the aftermath of 1492, and partly as a result of the events of that year, battle lines were drawn in the Mediterranean for the next century. If neither of the giant powers that faced each other across that sea ever established overall supremacy, it was in part because sailing conditions in the Mediterranean naturally divided it in two halves. The Strait of Messina and the sea around Sicily is like a stopper, corked by the racing current and hazardous whirlpools against shipping in both directions. Though navigable in times of peace, the confluence of the two halves of the Mediterranean is easily policed. Because of the winds and currents, the Turks, despite the numerical superiority of their fleets, remained at a permanent disadvantage. The consequence of the stalemate between Spain and Turkey was that the unity of the Mediterranean world, of which Greek and Phoenician navigators laid the foundations in antiquity, and which the Roman Empire achieved, was never reestablished. The shores of the sea have similar climates and ecosystems and many elements of common culture. But they have remained divided, with Islam confined to the south shore and patches of the eastern Mediterranean, while the northern and western ends of the ocean have remained in Christendom. The sea that was once the “middle sea” of Western civilization became and remained a frontier.

In one further, supremely important way, nature always constrained the Ottomans’ naval effort, however much time and investment they put into it. Just as the Strait of Messina squeezed access to the western Mediterranean, so the Turks’ approach to the Indian Ocean got trapped in the narrows of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, from where easily policed straits guard the way eastward. After 1492, as we shall see, when Europeans began exploring the ocean highways that led them
across the Atlantic and on to the wind systems of the world, the disadvantages for Turks would become painfully obvious and ultimately insuperable.

From every rational point of view, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain seems to have been a foolish and disastrous policy. The assumptions on which it was based were false. The evidence cited in its favor was faulty. The arguments used to justify it were unconvincing. The material cost to the Spanish kingdoms in wasted wealth and talent was incalculable. Instead of solving the problem of converso inconstancy, it worsened it by increasing the numbers of insincere or imperfectly instructed converts. In part, however, it has to be understood as a successful episode in a much longer and bigger story: the consolidation and homogenization of European states. Measures against other communities regarded as foreign were common in the period, both in Spain and throughout Europe. Though the Spanish monarchs did not expel any other groups from the whole of their territories, they did subject foreign communities to arbitrary forms of discrimination, sometimes confiscating property and taking a fairly searching attitude to requests for naturalization.

Ferdinand and Isabella, like other monarchs of their day and later, wanted subjects with increasingly uniform notions of themselves and uncompromised allegiance to a common identity. They did not want—and probably could not envisage—a politically unified state. Their realms’ long, divergent histories and contrasting institutions defined and distinguished Aragon and Castile. When Ferdinand and Isabella called themselves “King and Queen of Spain,” they did not mean to erect a new superstate, but to inaugurate a period of close partnership between what would remain distinct countries. But they did want those countries to have consistent cultures and a common creed. In one respect, for Spain, the effect of their policy toward Jews was positive. Spain derived a kind of bonus, in the form of the talents of former Jews who opted for baptism. The numbers of the converts exceeded those of the
expelled. So much talent, so much potential had formerly enriched the Jewish community. Now, by effectively compelling conversions, the monarchs garnered that talent, forcing former Jews into the mainstream of Spanish life. Scholars have a tendency to seek converso origins for almost anyone of importance in Spanish culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but the scale of the achievements of former Jews and their descendants in letters, learning, science, and the arts was formidable—out of all proportion to their numbers. Converted Jews were the alchemical ingredient that made Spain’s golden age.

Culture and Conflict in Italy

April 8: Lorenzo the Magnificent dies in Florence.

T
he portents ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. By 1492, Lorenzo de’ Medici had been Florence’s boss for over two decades. Ever since he was twenty years old, he had ruled the city without ever occupying any formal office of state, manipulating its institutions and its wealth, encouraging its writers, scholars, and artists, and ruthlessly suppressing his political enemies. Until the omens appeared, the security he created seemed invulnerable.

On April 5, 1492, a woman leaped from her seat in the church of Santa Maria Novella at early mass and “rushed about with terrible cries,” claiming to see a “furious bull, with flaming horns, tearing down this great temple.” Shortly afterward, “the heavens suddenly became black with clouds,” and lightning felled the famous dome of the cathedral—the highest in the world at the time. The marble light trap at the summit toppled and crashed into the north wall, “and especially at the side where the Medici palace can be seen, great pieces of marble
were wrenched away with awful force and violence. In this portent it moreover happened that one of the gilded balls which also are to be seen upon the roof, was struck by lightning, and fell.”
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That was a peculiarly strong omen, as the balls were the symbols of the Medici and had been added to the skyline at Lorenzo’s behest.

Three days later, Lorenzo was dead. Politian, one of the poets in Lorenzo’s pay, was anxious that his correspondents should be under no illusion; the heavens had predicted his master’s demise: “And on the night on which Lorenzo died, a star, brighter than usual, and larger, hung over the country villa where he lay dying, and at the very moment at which it was ascertained that he breathed his last, it seemed to fall and go out.”
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So Lorenzo’s death was attended by a portent as powerful as at Christ’s birth. Lightning flashed for three nights following the event, illuminating the vault where the Medici dead lay entombed. As if in anticipation of the civil strife that followed, fighting broke out between the two caged lions kept for the terror and delight of the citizens. Lights glimpsed unnaturally in the sky and the howls of a she-wolf were among other events classed as omens. Even the suicide of a famous physician was interpreted as “an offering to the shade of the Prince” on the ground that “Medici” literally means “doctors.”

Lorenzo died joking that he wished death would wait until he had exhausted the contents of his library. A fellow humanist wrote to Politian with words of partisan consolation: “Is God angry with us, that he has taken from us, in the person of the wisest of men, all hope, all sign and symbol of virtue?” But he continued with a generalization few would contest: “The evils that befall us in our high places are often like snows, which, as they melt upon the mountain tops, make mighty rivers.” Lorenzo, the writer correctly affirmed, “maintained the peace of Italy.”
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The king of Naples bewailed the end of a life “long enough for fame but too short for the good of Italy.” What chance was there for peace to continue now that he was gone?

“I am not Florence’s lord,” Lorenzo wrote in 1481, “just a citizen with a certain authority.”
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This was strictly true. To be a lord was not a practi
cal aspiration where republican virtue was ingrained. Other Florentine communes had submitted to lords in the course of the late Middle Ages, but not Florence—or so Florentines kidded themselves. Leonardo Bruni, the great ideologue of early-fifteenth-century Florence, was proud that while tyrants triumphed elsewhere, his city had remained true to its heritage as a foundation—so myth sustained—of ancient Roman republicans. Political malcontents who plotted to kill Lorenzo in 1478 saw themselves as embodying the virtues of Brutus, sacrificing Caesar to preserve the purity of the republic. “
Popolo e libertà!
” were rebels’ recurrent watchwords—not to be taken too literally, as most rebellions were struggles of excluded families against those the Medici favored, and few conspirators were willing to sacrifice the blessings of oligarchy: they just wanted the freedom to exploit them for themselves. Alamanno Rinuccini, one of the most thoughtful of the rebels’ supporters, secretly denounced Lorenzo in an unpublished
Dialogue on Liberty,
but his main gripe was with the parvenus the Medici raised to eligibility for office.
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The exceptional majesty with which the Nuremberg Chronicle displays Florence suggests the close links between the humanist scholars of the two cities.
Nuremberg Chronicle.

The “certain authority” Lorenzo admitted to elevated him above all his fellow citizens. He never held any political office. He was never even
a member of Florence’s executive council, much less head of state—but that did not matter. The Florentine constitution was saturated in republican principles and riven with safeguards against tyranny: in consequence, the nominal officeholders could never get a grip on power. They rotated at two-month-long intervals, selected by a mixture of indirect election and lottery from mercurial lists of eligibly rich or aristocratic families. The key to permanent power lay not in holding office oneself but in managing the system. Lorenzo ruled by stealth.

The first element in his system of management was the dexterous manipulation of institutions and networks. He joined everything, cultivated everybody. Unlike earlier Medici rulers, he chatted with fellow citizens in the cathedral and piazza. He belonged to far more confraternities, guilds, and committees than anyone could hope to attend regularly; but they were a means of extending his network of obligation and of keeping himself informed of what was going on in the city. The formal business of all the organizations he joined was reported to him as a matter of course; more important, perhaps, the gossip transacted at meetings fed back into his system. Ruling a republic was a matter of cybernetics. The key lay in manipulating the system of indirect election and selection by lot that led to membership on the ruling council and other influential committees. Rinaldo Albizzi, for instance, who had briefly forced Lorenzo’s father from power and into exile, neglected to fix the elections, with the result that his supporters were ousted and his enemy recalled. The only way to be sure was to be crooked. Lorenzo used bribery and intimidation to fix the rules of eligibility, privilege his own creatures and cronies, and make sure that the final lottery for office was always rigged.

As a result, though he had no formal right of jurisdiction—which, at the time, was considered to be the main attribute of sovereignty—he dispensed justice, in effect, arbitrarily, according to his whim. On a notorious occasion in 1489, he ordered a peremptory public execution—with the scourging of bystanders who had the temerity to object. The only palliation one can offer is that his gout—which always
tortured him—was peculiarly painful that day. Effectively, the Medici were monarchs. Lorenzo was the fourth of his line to run the city in succession. When he died, leading citizens lined up to beg his son to take over.

Lorenzo relied on wealth to buy the power he could not get by force or guile. Largesse made him magnificent. The mob that rallied in Lorenzo’s support when he survived an assassination attempt in 1478 hailed “Lorenzo, who gives us bread.”
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He milked the state (the evidence, though not conclusive, is too suggestive to discount) and embezzled money from his own cousins when they were his partners in business. He dispensed wealth corruptly to gain and keep power. He never solved the problem of balancing wealth with expenditure; as Lorenzo famously said, “In Florence, there is no security without control.” But control cost money, and Lorenzo, like his predecessors, tended to overspend to buy it. He inherited a fortune of over 230,000 florins by his own estimate. This was the biggest fortune in Florence, though depleted from its peak in his grandfather’s day. Fraud leached it. A new enterprise—exporting alum—nearly proved ruinous. Lorenzo’s personal extravagance made matters worse.
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The next element in Lorenzo’s system was the exploitation of religion. Though a mere private citizen of ignoble ancestry, he affected sacrality almost as if he were a king. His love poems are justly renowned. His religious poetry was of greater political importance, which is not to say that it was insincere; to become a great saint, it is no bad first step to be a big sinner. Indeed, there is something convincing about Lorenzo’s lines, with their yearning for “repose” with God and “relief” for the “prostrated mind”: the intelligible longings of a heart bled by business and a conscience stirred by the responsibilities of power. In “The Supreme Good,” he confronts this issue:

Confraternities to which he belonged chanted his calls to repentance. He invested heavily in adorning the religious foundations his family had endowed and boosting their prestige. In particular, he nurtured the Dominican house of San Marco in Florence—a nursery of greatness, where Fra Angelico painted. San Marco struggled to survive financially and recruit postulants until Lorenzo poured wealth into it. His motives were not merely pious. He saw San Marco as a venue for supporters: it was at the heart of the quarter of the city that had the longest associations with the Medici family. He tried to make it the dominant house for the Dominicans of Tuscany and a source of wider influence over the affairs of the Church. He also tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to organize the canonization of Archbishop Antonino of Florence, the pet churchman of his house in his father’s day. When Lorenzo died, his supporters portrayed him as a saint.
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Finally, and hardly consistently with saintly aspirations, he made an art of intimidation. Wealth bought power in its crudest form: toughs and bravos to bully fellow citizens within the city; and mercenaries and foreign allies to cow Florence from without. Lorenzo cultivated allies—sometimes the popes, sometimes the kings of Naples, always the Dukes of Milan. Invariably, part of the deal was that they would send troops to his aid in the event of an attempted coup or revolution in his city. It was not just that everyone knew he could afford to crush opposition with mercenaries or foreign troops if he wished. He practiced the politics of terror to overawe opposition. The city of the Florentine enlightenment was a cruel, savage, bloody place, where the body parts of condemned criminals strewed the streets and revengers mimed ritual cannibalism to round off vendettas. Lorenzo impressed his enemies with horrifying displays of terror and implacable campaigns of vengeance.

The participants in the conspiracy of 1478 suffered the most vicious—but not unrepresentative—violence Lorenzo ever unleashed. Normally, criminals died on gibbets just outside the walls so as not to pollute the city, but Lorenzo had the conspirators tossed screaming from the windows of the palace of the governing council. The crowds in
the main square could watch them dangle and twitch, convulsed by their death throes, before slaking their vengeance by literally tearing the bodies to pieces when they hit the ground. Lorenzo made vindictiveness a policy, harrying his victims’ survivors into beggary. For a while, the government of Florence even made it an offense to marry one of the conspirators’ orphaned or bereft womenfolk: this was equivalent to condemning the women to starve to death.

Lorenzo was magnificent, of course, in art as well as power. As art patrons, the ruling branch of the Medici were never leaders of taste. For them, art was power and wealth. Lorenzo was not, however, the boor modern scholarship has made out. He was a genuine, impassioned aesthete. His poetry alone is ample evidence of a replete sensitivity and a perfect ear. He had, perhaps, a less than perfect eye. His aim was to collect objects of rarity and stunning visual effect: jewels, small-scale antique triumphs of bronze and gold work and gem work. The courtyard of the Medici palace was lined with ancient inscriptions—a display of fashion and wealth.

He was not a builder on the lavish scale of his Medici predecessors. Politics, perhaps, constrained him. He remained actively interested in all public building projects and quietly embellished many of the grand buildings and religious foundations his family traditionally patronized. But there was a touch of vulgarity and ostentation even about the architecture he favored: the cathedral’s golden topknot was a conspicuous reminder of that, especially when the prophetic thunderbolt struck it down. The paintings Lorenzo favored—it was a trait apparently heritable in the ruling line of the house of Medici—were old-fashioned by Renaissance standards: the hard, gemlike colors of the works of Gozzoli and Uccello, the rich pigments—gilt and lapis lazuli and carmine—that glowed like the fabulous collection of jewels Lorenzo assembled. His taste for battle paintings was part of his pursuit of the cult of chivalry. Tournaments were among his favorite spectacles, and he assembled gorgeous ritual armor in which to appear in the lists. But goldsmiths’ work, jewelry and small, exquisite antiquities, constituted his biggest
expenditure: wealth that could be handled for tactile satisfaction and moved quickly in case of a change of political fortune—the potential solace of exile, such as befell Lorenzo’s father and son.
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