1492: The Year Our World Began (4 page)

In China and Japan, there was no fixed date on which a new year started; each emperor designated a new date. Meanwhile, people celebrated New Year’s Day on different dates, according to local custom or family tradition. Years were named after one of twelve animals, as they still are: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, bird, dog, and pig. The cycle of twelve interlocked with another cycle of ten, so that no year name was repeated until sixty years had elapsed. In a parallel system, years were also numbered in order from the start of an emperor’s reign. January 1, 1492, was the day named Jia Chen, the second day of the twelfth month of the year Xin Hai, or the fourth year of the Hongxi reign. Xin Hai had begun on February 9, 1491, and would end on January 28, 1492. The year Ren Zi then began and lasted until January 17, 1493. December 31, 1492, was the thirteenth day, named Ji You, of the twelfth month of Ren Zi, the fifth year of the Hongxi reign.

So a book about a year is fundamentally ahistorical if it treats the events that occurred between January 1 and December 31, by Western reckoning, of a given year as a coherent entity. Most people would not have thought of those days as constituting a year, any more than any other combination of days amounting to about 365 in all—or 260 days, or 330, or whatever other number happened to be conventional in their culture. In any case, no sequence of days encloses events so discrete that they can be understood except in a longer context. So in this book the
rules shall be flexible about dates, ranging back and forth from what we now think of as 1492 into adjoining years, decades, and ages.

A book like this, moreover, is necessarily about more than the past. Because we are imposing a modern notion of a year on people unaware of it at the time, this book, like other histories of particular years, is self-condemned to be retrospective. It is as much about us—how we see the world and time—as about people in the past. Historians’ job is not to explain the present but to understand the past—to recapture a sense of what it felt like to live in it. But, for present purposes, I want to depart from my usual historian’s chores. What I expect readers of this book to want to know about 1492 is not only or even primarily what it felt like to experience it, because most people had no sense of experiencing anything of the sort, but what its events contributed to the world we inhabit now.

Still, a year really did mean something, in a way no longer easily accessible to us in urban, industrial or postindustrial environments. The succession of seasons is hardly noticeable, except superficially—as hemlines rise and fall with the mercury in the thermometer, and as the density of clothing matches cloud cover. Heating and insulation indemnify us against summer and winter. U.S. homes are now typically hotter in winter than summer, thanks to the ferocity of the boilers and the frigidity of the air-conditioning. Global trade brings out-of-season food even to relatively poor people in relatively rich countries. Most modern Westerners have lost the lore of knowing when to eat what.

In 1492, almost the entire world lived by farming or herding, and the whole of the rest by hunting. So the cycle of the seasons really did determine almost everything that mattered in life: the rhythms at which crops grew or animals migrated determined what one ate, where one lived, what clothes one wore, how much time one spent at work, and what sort of work one did. Reminders of the passage of time, carved on church doors for worshippers to see as they entered, commonly included scenes, arrayed month by month, of the activities the cycles of weather regulated: typically, tilling in February, pruning in March,
hawking in April, mowing in June, grape treading in October, plowing in November. Japanese poems conventionally began with invocations of the season. Chinese writers associated each season with its appropriate food, clothes, and decor. The whole world lived at a pace and rhythm adjusted to the seasons.

Everywhere people watched the stars. In Mediterranean Europe, the motions of Orion and Sirius, as they climbed to midsky, signaled the wine harvest. The rising of the Pleiades announced harvest time for grain, their setting the time to plant. The Maya watched the motion of Venus anxiously, because the planet governed days propitious respectively for warmongering and peacemaking. Muhammad had taught Muslims that new moons are “signs to mark fixed periods for men and for the pilgrimage.”
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In China, astronomers were vital policy consultants, because the prosperity of the empire depended on the accurate timing of imperial rites according to the motions of the stars, and part of the emperor’s duty was to monitor the skies for signs of celestial “disharmony.” For this was a world without escape from the elements, or relief from the demons that filled the darkness, the storms, the heat and cold and hostile wastes and waters. Witchcraft persecution was not a medieval vice but an early modern one, which started as a large-scale enterprise in much of Europe in the late fifteenth century. In Rome in 1484, the pope heard reports of many men and women who “deny with perverse lips, the faith in which they were baptised” in order to “fornicate with demons and harm men and beasts with their spells, curses, and other diabolical arts.” Regulations for persecuting witches followed.
¹⁶

Nature seemed capricious, gods inscrutable. Plague in Cairo in 1492 reputedly killed twelve thousand inhabitants in a single day. A flood wiped out most of the army of the ruler of Delhi a year later. Many Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 perished in North African famines. The infections Columbus’s men took to the New World wrought near-destruction on the unaccustomed, unimmunized inhabitants. There were over one hundred thousand people on the island of Hispaniola, by a conservative estimate, in 1492. Only sixteen thousand survived a generation later.

Yet, although they were at the mercy of nature, people could change the world by reimagining it, striving to realize their ideas, and spreading them along the new, world-girdling routes explorers found. The changes wrought in 1492, and their world-shaping consequences, are proof of that. Most of the transforming initiatives that helped to produce modernity came, ultimately, from China. Paper and printing—the key technologies in speeding and spreading communications—were Chinese inventions. So was gunpowder, without which the world could never have experienced the “military revolution” that based modern warfare on the massed firepower of huge armies; nor could the traditional balance of power, which kept sedentary civilizations at the mercy of horse-borne enemies, ever have been reversed. The “gunpowder empires” that outclassed ill-equipped enemies around the early modern world, and the modern nation-state, which arose from the military revolution, would simply never have come about.

Industrialization would have been impossible without the blast furnace and the exploitation of coal for energy, both of which originated in China. Modern capitalism would have been impossible without paper money—another idea Westerners got from China. The conquest of the world’s oceans depended on Western adaptations of Chinese direction-finding and shipbuilding technologies. Scientific empiricism—the great idea on which Westerners usually congratulate themselves for its impact on the world—had a much longer history in China than in the West. So in science, finance, commerce, communications, and war, the most pervasive of the great revolutions that made the modern world depended on Chinese technologies and ideas. The rise of Western powers to global hegemony was a long-delayed effect of the appropriation of Chinese inventions.

Nevertheless, the effective applications came from Europe, and it was in Europe that the scientific, commercial, military, and industrial revolutions began. To recapitulate: this perplexing shift of initiative—the upset in the normal state of the world—started in 1492, when the resources of the Americas began to be accessible to Westerners while
remaining beyond the reach of other rival or potentially rival civilizations. In the same year, events in Europe and Africa drew new frontiers between Christendom and Islam in ways that favored the former. These events were surprising, and this book is, in part, an attempt to explain them. For Europe—formerly and still—was a backwater, despised or ignored in India, Islam, China, and the rest of East Asia, and outclassed in wealth, artistry, and inventiveness. The ascent of the West, first to challenge the East and ultimately to dominate the world, began in earnest only in 1492. People in every generation have their own modernity, which grows out of the whole of the past. No single year ever inaugurated anyone’s modernity on its own. But for us, 1492 was special. Key features of the world we inhabit—of the way power and wealth, cultures and faiths, life-forms and ecosystems are distributed around the planet—became discernible in the historical record for the first time. We are still adjusting to the consequences.

The Extinction of Islam in Western Europe

January 2: Granada falls to Christian conquerors.

T
he king of Granada rose early…and made his person ready in the way that Moors do when faced with danger of death.” His mother clung to him despairingly.

“Leave me, my lady,” he said. “My knights await me.”

As he rode to confront the enemy camped outside the walls of his capital, after eight months of siege, throngs of starving citizens assailed him, with weeping mothers and howling babies, “to shout out that…they could no longer bear the hunger; for this reason they would abandon the city and go over to the enemy camp, allowing the city to be captured, and all of them to be taken prisoner and killed.” So he relented of his determination to fight to the death, and decided to try to negotiate an honorable surrender.
¹

Working in the year Granada fell, illustrators of Diego de San Pedro’s
Cárcel de amor
unmistakably depicted the siege, under a commander with King Ferdinand’s features.
Woodcut from D. de San Pedro,
Cárcel de amor
(Barcelona: Rosembach, 1493).

Presumably, the chronicler who told this impressive but improbable tale—with its chivalric touches and heart-tweaking sentiments—was romanticizing. For most of the previous ten years of warfare in Granada, Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muhammad—Muhammad XI, or “Boabdil,” as Christians called him—had not behaved with exemplary valor but had relied on conspiracy, compromise, and a series of tactical alliances to stave off what seemed like inevitable defeat for his realm at the hands of the hugely bigger neighboring kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.

Granada already seemed an anachronism—the last Muslim-ruled state on the northern shore of the western Mediterranean. Muslims lost Sicily three centuries earlier, and by the mid–thirteenth century, Christian conquerors from the north had swept up all the remaining kingdoms of the Moors—as they called Muslims—in what are now
Spain and Portugal. Ferdinand and Isabella, joint monarchs of Aragon and Castile, or, as they preferred to say, “of Spain,” justified the war with religious rhetoric in a letter to the pope:

In a sense what they said was true, for they could have saved the costs of the war and exacted handsome tribute from the Moors. But other considerations impelled them, of a nature more material than they admitted to the pope. Granada was a rich country. It was not particularly populous. Despite wildly excessive guesses in the traditional literature, it is hard to make the total population add up to much more than three hundred thousand. But it could feed many more with its prodigious harvests of millet, which Christians would not eat. The products of Granada’s industries—silk, leather wares, arms, ceramics, jewel work, dried fruits and nuts, almonds and olives—were bountiful, and increasing demand for silk in Europe boosted the economy. About a tenth of the population lived in the capital, served by the 130 water mills that ground the daily millet.

The kingdom of Granada represented a source not only of revenue but also of patronage. Many of the nobles who fought for Ferdinand and Isabella in the civil war that inaugurated their reign remained inadequately rewarded and potentially restive. The royal patrimony had
shrunk, and the monarchs did not wish to relinquish more of it to already overmighty subjects. The towns of the kingdoms had resolutely opposed attempts to appropriate their lands. Acquisition of Granada would solve the monarchs’ problems. According to the laws, rulers were not allowed to alienate their inherited patrimony but could do what they liked with conquered lands. By the end of the conquest of Granada, more than half the surface area of the kingdom would be distributed among nobles.

Thanks to Granada’s economic boom, the Moors’ strength to defy and attack their Christian neighbors was greater in the late fifteenth century than for a long time previously. The lords of neighboring lands responded with mingled fear and aggression. But the war was not only a matter of frontier security or territorial aggression. It has to be considered in the context of the struggle against the rising power of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, whom the Spanish monarchs perceived as their most formidable enemies in the long run. The pressure of Islam on the frontiers of Christendom had mounted since the midcentury, when the Turks seized Constantinople. The loss of Constantinople ratcheted up the religious content of Christian rhetoric. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, launched a huge naval offensive, invaded Italy, and developed relations with Muslim powers in North Africa and with Granada itself. Ferdinand was not just the ruler of most of Christian Spain. He was also heir to wider Mediterranean responsibilities as king of Sicily, protector of Catalan commerce in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, and hereditary stakeholder in the legacy of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. He was apprehensive of the Ottoman advance and eager to clear what seemed like a Muslim bridgehead from Spain.

Meanwhile, each side in the potential conflict over Granada was succoring the other’s enemies. In the 1470s, rebel refugees from Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s vengeance took shelter at the court of the ruler of Granada, Mulay Hassan, while Ferdinand encouraged and negotiated in secret with dissidents in Granada. For Mulay Hassan’s crown, too, was disputed. Doubts of the propriety of his accession (for the rules of suc
cession in Granada were never clearly defined) disturbed the scruples of members of his dynasty. Court intrigue and seraglio conspiracies bedeviled the throne, and rebellions were common.

Finally, among the causes of the conflict, Ferdinand and Isabella hoped that war would distract their nobles from their own squabbles and bring internal peace to Castile. Although, in the opinion of at least one chronicler, Christians who made allies of the Moors “deserved to die for it,” and although the law expressly forbade it, the practice was common, and the private wars of the aristocracy in regions bordering Granada thrived on the exotic diet of infidel support. As a device for getting Spanish nobles to cooperate against a common enemy, the war worked. Once the fighting began, such inveterate foes as the Marquess of Cadiz and the Duke of Medina Sidonia—“my enemy incarnate,” as Cadiz called him—joined forces and exerted themselves in each other’s support. Isabella’s secretary reminded her that Tullius Hostilius, one of the legendary kings of ancient Rome, had made unprovoked war merely in order to keep his soldiers busy. The enterprise against the Moors would “exercise the chivalry of the realm.”
³

The war fed on religious hatreds and generated religious rhetoric. But more than a clash of civilizations, a crusade, or a jihad, the war resembled a chivalresque encounter between enemies who shared the same, secular culture. Throughout the fighting, as always in medieval wars between Spanish kingdoms, there were warriors who crossed the religious divide.

Fighting began as an extension of business by other means. For most of the fifteenth century, Granada’s internal struggles weakened the kingdom and invited conquest, but Castilian kings reckoned that it was easier and more profitable to collect tribute. Traditionally, Granada bought peace by paying tribute to Castile every three years. The sources are imperfect, but contemporaries—presumably exaggerating—reckoned the value of the tribute at 20 to 25 percent of the revenue of the king of Granada. Even at more modest cost, the system was inherently unstable, because in order to sell truces, the Castilians had to keep up raids,
and Granadines exploited breaches of the peace to launch counterraids of their own. Renewals of the truce were therefore always tense. Both sides appointed arbitrators to settle disputes arising from breaches of the peace, but the machinery seems to have been ineffective. Instances were repeatedly referred to the Spanish monarchs, who could respond only by making overtures to the king of Granada; and he, on the Moorish side, was one of the worst offenders in the matter of truce breaking. The Moors, the chronicler Alonso de Palencia thought, were “more astute in taking advantage of the truce”—by which he meant that the balance of profit from raiding accrued to their side.

Mulay Hassan committed his greatest outrage in 1478, when he sacked the Murcian town of Cieza, putting eighty inhabitants to the sword and carrying off the rest. The helplessness of Ferdinand and Isabella in the face of such action was disturbing. They could not obtain the hostages’ release by diplomacy and could not afford ransom. Instead, to those families too poor to pay the price they gave permission to beg alms for the ransoms, and relieved them of the need to pay dues, tolls, and taxes on money sent to Granada to obtain the Ciezans’ release.

By the end of the 1470s, however, Ferdinand and Isabella no longer needed peace on the Moorish front. War with Portugal and Castile’s own war of succession subsided. Unemployed warriors turned to the Moorish frontier, where Castilian noblemen were waging private war for profit. Mulay Hassan tried to quell them by seizing frontier strongholds. On a moonless and unsettled December night in 1481 they lunged forward against Záhara and other fortified places. The Christians were unprepared for an attack that was no longer a mere raid but an attempt to occupy permanently the assailants’ targets. At Záhara the attackers

Perhaps Mulay Hassan thought he could get away with it because the lord of the place was one of Isabella’s opponents. The Spanish monarchs, however, reacted with anger

The king of Granada is supposed to have explained to his courtiers how the Christians would beat them bit by bit, like rolling up a carpet from the corners. The story is a literary commonplace—the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II is said to have used the same image to explain his own strategy for conquering Europe a few years earlier. But it does describe what happened: a slow war of attrition, in which the invaders devoured the kingdom inward from the edges, slowly, exploiting internal conflicts among the defenders to make up for the deficiencies in their own strength.

For although the Christian kingdoms were hugely bigger than Granada, with opportunities for mobilizing far more men and ships, the aggressors could never make the disparity in resources work to their advantage as they should. At the height of the war, the aggressors numbered ten thousand horse and fifty thousand foot.

Armies on this scale were hard to gather and keep in the field, and harder still to keep supplied. The struggle for money, horses, men, siege equipment, arms, and grain dominates the surviving documents. Diego
de Valera, a chronicler who was the monarchs’ household steward, advised King Ferdinand to “eat off earthenware, if necessary, and melt down your tableware, sell your jewels, and appropriate the silver of the monasteries and churches, and even sell off your land.”
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The monarchs were entitled to interest-free loans from their subjects, and sometimes delayed repayment. As security for a sum raised from the city authorities of Valencia in 1489—a particularly tough year for the war budget—Isabella deposited a crown of gold and diamonds and a jeweled necklace. The Church was a willing source of subsidies for so holy an enterprise. Papal bulls from November 1479 authorized the monarchs to use some of the proceeds from the sale of indulgences for the expenses of the war. Early Christian victories convinced the pope to renew the grant until the end of the war. The Jews, who were exempt from military service, paid a special levy.

To some extent, medieval wars could help to pay for themselves. Booty was an important source of finance. A fifth of it belonged to the crown by law, while the captains responsible divided the rest between them. The capture of Alhama, the first Christian sortie of the war, yielded