1492: The Year Our World Began (3 page)

When he got back to Nuremberg in 1490, his tales excited expectations he could not honestly or perfectly fulfill. Still, although he had little or no practical experience in navigating or surveying, he was a representative armchair geographer of his day, who conscientiously compiled information of varying degrees of reliability from other people’s maps and from sailing directions recorded by real explorers. The data he brought to Germany from Portugal were bound to arouse the enthusiasm due to shards of insight from the cutting edge of the exploration of the earth.

The most conspicuous feature Martin incorporated from the latest Portuguese discoveries was his depiction of the Indian Ocean as accessible from the west, around the southern tip of Africa. He shows the African coast trailing a long way eastward—a relic of an old mapmaking tradition that represented the Indian Ocean as landlocked and effectively barricaded to the south by a great arc of land, stretching all the way from southern Africa to easternmost Asia. Not until the 1490s, or the very end of the 1480s at the earliest, did Portuguese geographers feel certain that the sea lay open beyond what by then they began to call
the Cape of Good Hope. Speculative cartography had broached the possibility for nearly a century and a half, but the first map to reflect explicitly the observations of Portuguese navigators was made in Florence in 1489. Even then, the trend of the African coast beyond the Cape of Good Hope remained in doubt, and before commissioning more voyages, the Portuguese court waited—as we shall see—for reports from agents sent overland into the Indian Ocean to assess the ocean’s accessibility from the south.

Behaim’s effort was amateurish. On his globe, the old information was familiar and most of what was new was false. But his representation of the world is more important for some of the ways in which it is wrong than for the few things he got right. For many of his errors and assumptions fitted the agenda of an increasingly influential group of geographers in Nuremberg, Florence, Portugal, and Spain, who corresponded with one another and propagated their own, revolutionary way of imagining geography.

In Nuremberg, the person who did most to promote and organize the globe-making project was the merchant and city councilor Georg Holzschuher, who had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and became disinterestedly curious about the geography of the world beyond his reach. The Jerusalem pilgrimage had long been a focal theme of mapmakers in southern Germany, and Holzschuher—whom, exceeding the evidence, I imagine as awestruck by the wonders of creation—appreciated the possibilities of integrating all the available data in a single map. Part of a pious beholder’s wonder at the diversity of the world was delight in the myths and marvels of traditional travel literature and chivalric romance. Behaim’s globe included many of the imaginary isles and prodigies that speckled other medieval maps. He featured the island where, in hagiographical literature, St. Brendan the Navigator found paradise, along with Antilia—the mythic Atlantic land where escapees from the Moors supposedly founded seven cities. The island home of the Amazons appears, with another inhabited exclusively by men with whom the Amazons supposedly got together from time to time in order to breed.

Alongside religious inspiration, traditional sensationalism, and scientific curiosity, hardheaded commercial interest motivated Nuremberg’s merchant-patricians. Johannes Müller Regiomantanus, the leading cosmographer in the city’s lively scholarly community until his death in 1476, was in no doubt that the city’s advantages for “very great ease of all sorts of communication with learned men everywhere” derived from the fact that “this place is regarded as the centre of Europe because the routes of the merchants lead through it.”
⁸
The town council voted to finance Behaim’s work, and he loaded his globe with information directed at these patrons. He focused on the sources of spices—the most valuable products of Asia. In practice, pepper dominated the spice trade. Most of it came from southwestern India. It accounted for more than 70 percent of the global market by volume. High-value, low-bulk products, however, were disproportionately important: cinnamon from Sri Lanka, and cloves, mace, and nutmeg from specialized producers in the Banda Islands and the Moluccas. Europeans speculated rhapsodically about the provenance of the spices. St. Louis’s biographer imagined fishermen of the Nile filling their nets with ginger, rhubarb, and cinnamon dropped from the trees of the earthly paradise and floated downstream from Eden.

The idea that the demand for spices was the result of the need to disguise tainted meat and fish is one of the great myths of the history of food. Fresh foods in medieval Europe were fresher than they are today, because they were produced locally. Preserved foods were just as well preserved by salting, pickling, drying, or conserving in fat and sugar as by canning, refrigeration, freeze-drying, and vacuum-packing today. In any case, as we shall see, taste and culture determined the role of spices in cooking. Spice-rich cuisine was desirable because it was expensive, flavoring the status of the rich and the ambitions of the aspirant. Moreover, the preponderant fashion in cuisine in late medieval Europe imitated Arab recipes that called for sweet flavors and scented ingredients: milk of almonds, extracts of perfumed flowers, sugar, and all the dainties of the East.

A menu from Richard II’s England featured small birds boiled in almond paste with cinnamon and cloves, served with rose-scented rice boiled soft in almond milk, mixed with chicken’s brawn, scented with sandalwood and flavored with more cinnamon and cloves together with mace. European cookbooks advised adding spices to dishes at the last possible moment so as to lose none of the precious flavor to the heat. A fourteenth-century merchant’s guidebook lists 288 distinct spices. In a fifteenth-century cookbook written for the king of Naples, there are about 200 recipes, 154 of which call for sugar; 125 require cinnamon, and 76 need ginger. Spices for the wedding banquet of George “the Rich,” Duke of Bavaria, and Jadwiga of Poland in 1475 included 386 pounds of pepper, 286 pounds of ginger, 257 pounds of saffron, 205 pounds of cinnamon, 105 pounds of cloves, and 85 pounds of nutmeg. Medicine, as much as cuisine, demanded spices, almost all of which were part of the Eurasian pharmacopoeia, as needful in the apothecary’s shop as in the kitchen. Medieval recipes involve the combination of medical and culinary lore in order to balance the bodily properties—respectively, cold, wet, hot, and dry—that were believed to cause disease when their equilibrium was disturbed. Most spices were hot and dry. In sauces, they could correct the moist and wet properties physicians ascribed to meat and fish. Pharmacists’ records feature pepper, cinnamon, and ginger in prescriptions for almost every ailment from pimples to plague.
⁹

European markets had always been at a disadvantage in securing spice supplies. China absorbed most of the production. The residue available to Europeans had to travel long distances, through the hands of many middlemen. Europe, which was still a poor and backward corner of Eurasia compared with the rich economies and civilizations of maritime Asia, produced nothing that Asian markets wanted in exchange. Only cash would do. In the first century
BC
, Rome’s greatest natural historian complained that a taste for spice-rich food enriched India and impoverished Europe. Europeans “arrive with gold and depart with spice,” as a Tamil poet put it.
¹⁰
A fourteenth-century guidebook for Italian merchants in the East explained that there was no point in taking anything
to China except silver, and reassured readers that they would be able to rely on the slips of paper—a kind of money still unfamiliar in Europe—that Chinese customs officers gave them at the border.
¹¹

Profit beckoned anyone ingenious or determined enough to buy spices at or near their source. Medieval merchants made heroic efforts to penetrate the Indian Ocean. The routes all involved hazardous encounters with potentially hostile Muslim middlemen. You might try to cross Turkey or Syria to the Persian Gulf or, more usually, attempt to get a passport from authorities in Egypt and ascend the Nile, transferring, via desert caravan, to the Red Sea at a port controlled by Ethiopians. Not surprisingly, many attempts failed. When they succeeded, they remained dependent on native shipping to get the goods across the Indian Ocean and on local middlemen for transport to the shores of the Mediterranean. European merchants who overcame the difficulties became part of the existing trading networks of maritime Asia. Before the 1490s, no one had opened direct routes of access from the European market to the Eastern sources of supply.

Behaim designed his globe to address that problem directly. He was “well fitted to disclose the east to the west.”
¹²
That was the opinion of his friend and a fellow merchant of Nuremberg, Hieronymus Münzer, who also traveled extensively on the Iberian Peninsula and took part in the network of correspondence that united Portuguese and Nuremberg geographers with counterparts in Florence. The letters of recommendation Münzer wrote on Behaim’s behalf show the values they all shared. They advocated belief in “experience and trustworthy accounts” over book learning and reliance on ancient geographers.
¹³
To that extent, they shared the worldview of modern science, but it would be rash to see them as precursors of the scientific revolution. For wishful thinking, rather than reason or evidence, made them reject classical wisdom.

In particular, they rejected classical traditions about the size of the world. But the ancients had probably got it roughly right. Eratosthenes, the librarian of Alexandria, had calculated the girth of the globe around the turn of the third and second centuries
BC
. He measured the elevation
of the sun at two points on the same meridian and the distance between the same points on the surface of the earth. The angular difference was a little over seven degrees, or about a fiftieth of a circle. The distance—in miles of value roughly corresponding to those most of Eratosthenes’ interpreters used at the time—was about five hundred miles. So the size of the world would work out, correctly, to about twenty-five thousand miles.

For Behaim and his collaborators, that seemed far too much. They felt either that the calculations were wrong or that miles of smaller value should be used. The evidence they cited was consistent with their prejudice in favor of observation over tradition. Whatever the ancient books said, Münzer insisted, the fact was that there were elephants in Africa and Asia, so those continents must be close to one another. “The habitable east,” he concluded, “is very near the habitable west.” China “can be reached in a few days” westward from the Azores.
¹⁴
Other evidence pointed the same way: driftwood washed ashore on Europe’s ocean edge; reports of castaways of allegedly oriental appearance on the same shores. A map described in Florence in 1474 illustrated the theory: it put Japan only about twenty-five hundred miles west of mythical Antilia, which probably appeared in the vicinity of the Azores, and located China a little over five thousand miles west of Lisbon. The details of what might lie in the unexplored ocean between Europe and Asia were in dispute, but one shared conclusion stood out. As Christopher Columbus put it, as he contemplated the theories that came out of Nuremberg, Florence, and Lisbon, “This world is small.” A viewer of Martin Behaim’s globe could sense the smallness, cupping the image of the world between his hands, seeing the whole of it with a single spin. The gaps in Behaim’s mapping symbolize the mutual ignorance of people in noncommunicating regions.

Events that began to unfold in 1492 would dispel that ignorance, reunite the world’s sundered civilizations, redistribute power and wealth among
them, reverse formerly divergent evolution, and reforge the world. Of course, a single year can hardly have wrought so much work on its own. Strictly speaking, it was not until 1493 that Columbus was able to explore exploitable two-way routes across the ocean. The route he used to reach the Caribbean in 1492 was, as we shall see, nonviable in the long run and had to be abandoned. The linking of the hemispheres was clearly a huge step toward the making of what we think of as “modernity”—the globalizing, Western-dominated world we inhabit today—but it was hardly complete even in 1493. All Columbus really did was open possibilities that took his successors centuries to follow up. And even the potential was hardly the product of a couple of years. Only in the following few years could the possibilities of remaking the world, with a new, previously unimaginable balance of wealth and power, really be glimpsed. Other explorers developed more routes back and forth across the North and South Atlantic, to open connections with other parts of the Americas, and created a new seaborne link, or reconnoitered new land routes, from Europe to southern and central Asia.

To most people, anyway, it was not 1492. Even to people in Christendom, it was not yet necessarily 1492 when, by our reckoning, the year began on January 1. Many communities reckoned the year as beginning on March 25, the presumed anniversary of Christ’s conception. A spring beginning had logic and observation on its side. In Japan, television still broadcasts the opening of the first cherry blossom every year. Each culture has its own way of counting time.

The Muslim world, which dwarfed Christendom at the time, counted—and still counts—the years from Muhammad’s exile from Mecca, and divided them into lunar months. In India, outside Muslim areas, the numbering of years was an indifferent matter when viewed against the longevity of the gods, whose world was renewed every 4.32 million years in an eternal cycle. Their current age had begun in what we count as 3012
BC
. For everyday purposes, in northern India, people generally counted the years from a date corresponding to 57
BC
in our calendar. In the south of the subcontinent, the year
AD
78 was the
preferred starting point. For much of their past, the Maya of Mesoamerica recorded all important dates in three ways: first, in terms of a long count of days, starting from an arbitrary point over five thousand years ago; second, according to the number of years of just over 365 days each of the current monarch’s reign; and third, in terms of a divinatory calendar of 260 days, arrayed in twenty units of 13 days each. By the late fifteenth century, only the last system was regularly used. The Incas recorded dates for only 328 days of the solar year. The remaining 37 days were left out of account while farming ceased, after which a new year commenced.