1492: The Year Our World Began (2 page)

The relish with which illustrators of the Nuremberg Chronicle adapted Dürer’s drawings of the Dance of Death evokes apocalyptic expectations.
Nuremberg Chronicle.

Joachim’s message impassioned readers and hearers in every walk of life, but none more than some members of the new order of friars that
Francis of Assisi founded in the thirteenth century. Francis seemed to embody some of Joachim’s prophecies. He and his followers exemplified the life that Christ and the apostles supposedly led. They owned nothing, shared everything, and lived from alms. They were inspired propagandists, evangelizing the poor, confronting pagans, even—in Francis’s own case—preaching to ravens when no one else would listen. The Franciscans radiated a spirit of renewal of the world. When Francis submitted to what he took to be God’s call, he tore off his clothes in the public square of his home town, to signify his renunciation of wealth and his utter dependence on God—but it was also the sign of someone making a new start. His standards of poverty and piety were hard for his followers to sustain after his death, but a tendency among the friars insisted on fidelity to his spirit. These “Spiritual” Franciscans, who grew ever more apart from the rest of the order in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were aware of the parallels between Francis’s life and Joachim’s prophecies, and they became increasingly focused on efforts to ignite the Age of the Spirit.

Meanwhile, Joachimites scoured the world for a potential “Last Emperor.” In the thirteenth century, Joachim’s native Sicily became part of the dominions of the rulers of Catalonia and adjoining regions in eastern Spain, known collectively as the Crown of Aragon. Perhaps for that reason, candidates for the role of the Last Emperor regularly emerged from Aragon. To some of his courtiers, Ferdinand of Aragon, who came to the throne in 1479, seemed a promising choice, especially as he was already, by marriage, king of Castile, the neighboring kingdom to the west, and bore the traditional title “King of Jerusalem.” His program of conquests in the 1480s, against infidels in the kingdom of Granada and pagans in the Canary Islands, seemed to invoke implicitly the image of an all-evangelizing, all-unifying monarch.

In part, millenarian fervor in Christendom was a reaction to the recent and current expansion of Islam and the successes of the Turks. The horns of the crescent protruded ominously from Constantinople into central Europe and from Granada into Spain. Aragonese councilors,
bred in fear of the Turks, hoped that the junction of the Aragonese and Castilian crowns would provide the strength they needed for the struggle. Castilians agreed. “With this conjuncture of two royal scepters,” declared a Castilian chronicler, “Our Lord Jesus Christ took vengeance on his enemies and destroyed him who slays and curses.”
⁵
Columbus promised the king that the profits of his proposed transatlantic enterprise would meet the costs of conquering Jerusalem from the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land, fulfilling the prophecies and speeding the end of the world.

Ferdinand was not the only ruler to conjure up messianic language and anticipations of an imminent climax of history. Manuel the Fortunate of Portugal was equally susceptible to flatterers who assured him that he was chosen to reconquer Jerusalem and inaugurate the last phase of the world. Charles VIII of France, as we shall see, had a similar notion about himself, and used it to justify the invasion of Italy he launched in 1494. People nowadays generally think of Henry VII, who captured the throne of England in an uprising at the end of a long series of dynastic squabbles in 1485, as an almost boringly businesslike, hardheaded king. But he, too, was a child of prophecy, vaunting his “British” ancestry as evidence that he was destined to return the kingdom to the line of its ancient founders, fulfilling prophecies ascribed to Merlin, or to an “angelic voice” in the ear of an ancient Welsh prophet. In Russia, 1492 was, according to the consensus of the orthodox, to be the last year of the world.

Even secular thinkers, untouched by religious enthusiasms, were susceptible to prophecy. Admiration for ancient Rome and classical Greece was one of the strongest strands in the common culture of the Western elite, and the ancients were enthralled by oracles and auguries, omens and portents. Just as Joachimites sought prophecies in scripture, humanists scoured classic texts. Virgil’s prediction of a golden age supplied a kind of secular alternative to the Age of the Spirit. In Virgil’s own mind this was not really a prophecy, but flattery addressed to his
own patron, Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and calculated to sanctify the emperor’s reputation by association with the gods. The golden age, Virgil’s readers hoped, was imminent. According to Marsiglio Ficino, presiding genius of Florence’s Platonists, it would start in 1492. He was thinking—as a good classicist should—of an ancient Roman prophecy: that in the fullness of time the “Age of Gold” would be renewed—the era that preceded Jupiter’s supremacy among the gods, when Saturn ruled the heavens in harmony and peace prevailed on earth. Astrology, in which Ficino and many members of his circle were expert, helped. In 1484 a conjunction of the planets named after Saturn and Jupiter excited expectations of some great mutation in the world. Astrologers in Germany predicted twenty years of tumult, followed by a great reform of church and state.

Naturally, competing prophetic techniques spawned competing prophecies. In the 1480s, some expectations focused on the Last World Emperor, others on the dawn of the Age of Gold, others on cataclysm or reform. Almost no one who made a prediction of the future anywhere in Christendom expected the world to continue as it was.

Though they were wrong about most of the details, the prophets who expected change were right. Events in 1492 would make a decisive contribution toward transforming the planet—not just the human sphere but the entire environment in which human life is embedded—more profoundly and more enduringly than those of any previous single year. Because the story of how it happened is a global story, it has many starting points. But if we start in the southern German city of Nuremberg, we can get a privileged vantage point, from which the whole world becomes visible at a glance.

In Nuremberg, in the course of 1492, the most surprising object to survive from that year was taking shape: the oldest surviving globe of the world. The lacquered wooden sphere, mounted on a metal frame so
as to be free to spin at a touch, gleams with continents and islands painted in tawny browns. Seas shimmer in what at the time would have been expensive dark blue pigment—except for the Red Sea, which is a vivid, and also expensive, carmine. Little, scroll-like insets speckle the surface, full of tiny texts in which the cartographer explained his methods and pretended to esoteric knowledge. It was not the first globe ever made. Nor, even for its time, was it a particularly good attempt at realistic mapping: the length of Africa was distorted; the cartographer wildly misplaced capes along the coast, which explorers had measured with some accuracy; he made up names, otherwise unrecorded, for many places; he inserted evidently false claims to have seen much of coastal Africa for himself.

Despite the errors and rank falsehoods, the globe is a precious record of one vision of what the world was like at the time and a key to what made the year special—why 1492 is the best year from which to date the beginnings of the world we are in now and the era we call modernity. The globe made the world seem small: a nephew of St. Francis Borgia’s, writing a thank-you letter to his uncle for a gift of a globe in 1566, said that he had never realized how small the world was until he held it in his hands. Martin Behaim, like Columbus—who based his theory of a navigably narrow Atlantic on the conviction that, as he said, “[t]his world is small”
⁶
—underestimated the size of the planet. But he was a prophet of one of the effects of the processes that started in 1492: the world became smaller in a metaphorical sense, because the whole of it became imaginable and mutually accessible.

Behaim’s globe was, at least, an attempt to innovate—an ambition curiously absent in the work of Muslim mapmakers at the time. Perhaps because they were heirs to a rich medieval legacy, scholars in the Islamic world seem to have been satiated with cartography and uninterested in mapping the world afresh until Western advances forced them to try to catch up. One of the classical texts that Europeans hailed as a novelty in the fifteenth century—the
Geography
of the second-century Alexandrian scholar Claudius Ptolemy, had been well known in the Islamic
world for many centuries; but until an Italian map based on Ptolemy’s information arrived in Constantinople in 1469, no Muslim cartographer seems to have thought of making use of it to enlarge the representation of the world. In 1513, an Ottoman cartographer produced a world map in Western style, copied from Western prototypes and using data, apparently captured at sea by Turkish warships, on Columbus’s voyages. After a long period of dominance in all the sciences, the Islamic world seems to have fallen suddenly behind in that of mapping.

Muslim cartographers largely contented themselves with recycling old world images, derived from great pioneers of mapmaking in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The only innovation in the interim was the attempt to superimpose a grid of lines of longitude and latitude—a technique Ptolemy had first proposed—on out-of-date information. Broadly speaking, Muslims in the 1490s had two types of map at their disposal: one formal and rigid, with no attempt at realism; the other, free-flowing and conceived—at least—to be realistic. The first form was familiar to many readers from the work of Ibn al Wardi, who died in 1457, and whose compendium of geographical tidbits,
The Unbored Pearl of Wonders and the Precious Gem of Marvels,
was much copied. In his version of the world, Arabia is tiny but perfectly central, gripped between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea like a nail head in a vise. Africa extends eastward almost to the limits of the Ecumene. Deep in East Africa, the legendary Mountains of the Moon—twin triangles of gold—seem to pour the Nile across the continent. Opposite the great river’s mouth, the Bosporus flows to the northern edge of the world, dividing Europe from Asia. The more informal maps that appeared frequently in fifteenth-century works derived from the work of one of the finest mapmakers of the Middle Ages—the twelfth-century Sicilian master al-Idrisi. Typically, they also placed Arabia in the center of the composition, but they gave it a reliable shape, and showed the Nile flowing from the Mountains of the Moon, located a little way beyond the equator.

If Muslim cartography made it hard to picture the world of 1492, surviving Chinese sources are even less helpful. Chinese attempts to
map the world existed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. None has survived, however, beyond purely schematic representations of the cosmos—a circle representing heaven, a rectangle representing the earth—designed to evoke the old Chinese saying that the heavens are round but the earth has sharp corners. For an idea of how Chinese cartography made the world look, the best map to turn to is Korean. The
Kangnido
was made in 1402 and much copied, not only in Korea but also in Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. A copy dated 1470 survives. In a passage of promotional writing accompanying the map, the principal patron, the Confucian scholar Kwon Kun, describes “looking on in satisfaction” as the map took shape and describes its purpose—to inform and enhance government—as well as the process by which the cartographer, Yi Hoe, who is also known for maps of Korea and celestial maps, made it. “The world is very wide,” the text observes. “We do not know how many tens of millions of li [a unit of distance equal to less than half a kilometer] there are from China in the center to the four seas at the outer limits.” The writer condemns most maps as “too diffuse or too abbreviated” but says that Yi Hoe compiled his work from reliable Chinese predecessors of the fourteenth century with corrections and additions, “making it a new map entirely, nicely organized and well worth admiration. One can indeed know the world without going out of his door!”
⁷

The map shows Eurasia and Africa in a great sweep from a huge and detailed Korea to a vaguely delineated Europe, sketchy in outline but emblazoned with about one hundred place-names. China is copiously detailed, India less so—though recognizable in shape, with Sri Lanka like a round ball at its toe. Indochina and the Malay Peninsula are a tiny, insignificant stump. Japan is displaced well to the south of its real position, and none of the islands of Indonesia or even of the China Sea, except the Ryukyus, are identifiable. Africa and Arabia are etiolated and squashed toward the western edge of the world. A huge inland sea occupies most of the African interior. The map exudes pride and ambition—an effort at a global vision; a belief, at least, that such a vision was
possible. The excitement the globe of 1492 aroused in Nuremberg seems closely paralleled in Korea.

Martin Behaim made the Nuremberg globe in his native city. A merchant by vocation, he had traveled around western Europe making deals and knew parts of the Low Countries and Portugal well. One of his trips abroad, in 1483, probably had an ulterior motive: to postpone or avoid a sentence of three weeks’ imprisonment for dancing during Lent at a Jewish friend’s wedding. He was in Lisbon in 1484 and seems to have caught the geography bug in that city of Atlantic explorers, where coastal surveying voyages down the west of Africa were under way, mapping the regions Martin would get so badly wrong on his globe. His claim to have accompanied those expeditions is unsupported by any other evidence, and seems incompatible with his errors. His ambitions exceeded his knowledge.