Fields of Blood (44 page)

It is wrong to claim, as some scholars have done, that Philip created the first modern secular kingdom; these were not yet sovereign states.
¹²⁶
Philip was resacralizing kingship; these ambitious kings knew that the king had once been the chief representative of the divine in Europe and argued that the pope had usurped their royal prerogative.
¹²⁷
Philip was a theocratic ruler, whose subjects called him “semi-divine” (
quasi semi-deus
) and “king and priest” (
rex et sacerdos
). His land was “holy,” and the French were the new chosen people.
¹²⁸
In
England too, holiness had “migrated from the crusade to the nation and its wars.”
¹²⁹
England, claimed the chancellor when he opened the Parliament of 1376–77, was the new Israel; her military victories proved her divine election.
¹³⁰
Under this sacral kingship, defense of the realm would become sanctified.
¹³¹
Soldiers who died fighting for a territorial kingdom would, like the Crusaders, be revered as
martyrs.
¹³²
People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating
Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war.

Part Three

9

O
n January 2, 1492, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and
Isabella of Castile celebrated their victory over the Muslim kingdom of Granada in southern
Spain. Crowds watched the Christian banners unfurled on the city walls with deep emotion, and bells pealed triumphantly throughout Europe. Yet despite the triumph of that day, Europeans still felt threatened by Islam. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks had obliterated the Byzantine Empire, which for centuries had protected Europe from Muslim encroachment. In 1480, the year after the monarchs’ accession, the Ottomans had begun a naval offensive in the Mediterranean, and Abu al-Hassan, sultan of Granada, had made a surprise attack on the port of Zahara in Castile. Spain therefore was on the front line of the war with the Muslim world, and many believed that Ferdinand was the mythical emperor who was expected to unite Christendom, defeat the Ottomans, and usher in the Age of the
Holy Spirit in which
Christianity would spread to the ends of the earth.
¹
Western Europe was indeed about to achieve global dominance, but in 1492 it still lagged far behind Islamdom.

The Ottoman Empire was the strongest and most powerful state in the world, ruling
Anatolia, the
Middle East,
North Africa, and
Arabia. But the Safavids in
Iran and the
Moghuls in India had also established
absolute monarchies in which almost every facet of public life was run with systematic and bureaucratic precision. Each had a strong Islamic
ideology that permeated every aspect of their rule: the Ottomans were staunchly
Sunni; the Safavids
Shii; and the Mughals leaned toward Falsafah and
Sufism. Far more efficient and powerful than any European kingdom at this time, they marked the culmination of the agrarian state, and were the last magnificent expression of the “conservative spirit” that was the hallmark of premodern society.
²
As we have seen, all agrarian societies eventually outran their intrinsically limited resources, which put a brake on innovation. Only fully
industrialized societies could afford the constant replication of the infrastructure that unlimited progress required. Premodern education could not encourage originality, because it lacked the resources to implement many new ideas. If people were encouraged to think innovatively, but nothing ever came of it, the ensuing frustration could lead to social unrest. In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression.

In any traditional empire, the purpose of government was not to guide or provide services for the population but to tax them. It did not usually attempt to interfere with the social customs or religious beliefs of its subjects. Rather, a government was set up to take whatever it could from its peasants and prevent other aristocrats from getting their surplus, so warfare—to conquer, expand, or maintain the tax base—was essential to these states. Indeed, between 1450 and 1700, there were only eight years when the Ottomans were not involved in warfare.
³
An Ottoman treatise expressed succinctly the agrarian state’s dependence on organized violence:

But for centuries now, Europeans had been devising a commercial economy that would result in the creation of a very different kind of state. The modern world is often said to have begun in 1492; in fact, it would take Europeans some four hundred years to create the modern state. Its economy would no longer be based on the agrarian surplus, it would interfere far more in the personal lives of its subjects, it would be run on
the expectation of constant
innovation, and it would separate religion from its politics.

Present at the ceremony in Granada was
Christopher Columbus, the monarchs’ protégé; later that year he sailed from the port of Palos in
Spain to find a new
trade route to the Indies, only to discover the
Americas instead. In sponsoring this voyage, Ferdinand and
Isabella had unwittingly taken an important step toward the creation of our globalized, Western-dominated world.
⁵
For some, Western modernity would be empowering, liberating, and enthralling; others would experience it as coercive, invasive, and destructive. The Spaniards and Portuguese, who pioneered the discovery of the New World, imagined that it was simply waiting to be carved up, plundered, and exploited for their benefit. So did
Pope Alexander VI, who, as if he were undisputed monarch of the globe, divided it between Spain and
Portugal from pole to pole and gave Ferdinand and Isabella a mandate to wage a “just war” against any native peoples who resisted the European colonialists.
⁶

But Alexander was no Innocent III. Papal power had plummeted during the fourteenth century, and the balance of power had passed to the kings. Seven successive popes had resided in
Avignon (1309–77), firmly under the thumb of the French kings. In 1378 a disputed papal election divided the Church between the supporters of
Urban VI in Rome and Clement VII in Avignon, and the kings of Europe had taken sides according to their own rivalries. The schism ended only with the election of
Martin V at the
Council of Constance in 1417, but the popes, now safely back in Rome, never recovered their former prestige. There were reports of corruption and immorality, and in 1492 Rodrigo
Borgia, father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia and two other illegitimate children, had won the papacy by flagrant bribery, taking the name of Alexander VI. His chief goal as pontiff was to break the power of the
Italian princes and secure their wealth for his own family. His mandate to Ferdinand and Isabella was, therefore, of dubious spiritual value.

The early colonialists stormed violently into the New World as if they were conducting a giant acquisition raid, greed melding seamlessly with pious intent. The Portuguese set up sugar plantations in the
Cape Verde Islands, and between three and five million
Africans were torn from their homes and enslaved there. No American colony would be as gravely implicated in
slavery. When the Portuguese finally rounded the Cape and
exploded aggressively into the
Indian Ocean, their bronze cannons made short work of the slender dhows and junks of their rivals. By 1524 they had seized the best ports in eastern Africa, western India, the
Persian Gulf, and the
Malacca Straits, and by 1560 they had an oceanwide chain of settlements based on Goa.
⁷
This was a purely trading empire: the Portuguese made no attempt to conquer territory inland. Meanwhile, the Spanish had invaded the
Americas, slaughtering the indigenous peoples and seizing land, booty, and slaves. They may have claimed to fight in the name of
Christianity, but
Hernán Cortés was brutally frank about his real motivation: he simply wanted “to get rich, not to work like a peasant.”
⁸
In
Montezuma’s
Aztec Empire in central
Mexico, in each city Cortés would invite local chieftains to the central square, and when they arrived with their retainers, his small Spanish army would gun them down, loot the city, and go on to the next.
⁹
When Cortés arrived in the Aztec capital in 1525, Montezuma was already dead, and his now-shattered empire passed into Spanish hands. Survivors were decimated by European diseases for which they had no immunity. Some ten years later
Francisco Pizarro, using similar military tactics, brought smallpox to the
Inca Empire in
Peru. For Europeans,
colonialism brought unimaginable wealth; for the native peoples, it brought death on an unprecedented scale. According to one estimate, between 1519 and 1595 the population of Central Mexico fell from 16.9 million to 1 million and between 1572 and 1620 the Inca population had been halved.
¹⁰

Cortés and Pizarro were the heroes of the
conquistadores
(“conquerors”), men of low social status who went to the New World to become Spanish grandees. Their conquests were achieved with martial savagery and maintained by systematic exploitation. When they arrived in a new region, they would read out a formal statement in Spanish, informing the uncomprehending inhabitants that the pope had given their land to Spain so they must now submit to the Church and the Catholic monarchs: “We shall take you and your wives and your children, and make slaves of them and we shall take away your goods and do you all the mischief and damage that we can.”
¹¹
The Spanish did not need to import African slaves; they simply enslaved the local people to grow cash crops, work in the mines, and provide domestic labor. By the end of the sixteenth century, they were shipping on average 300 million grams of silver and 1.9 million grams of gold every year. With these unprecedented resources, Spain
established the first global empire, stretching from the Americas to the
Philippines and dominating large portions of Europe.
¹²

The Spanish colonialists felt no compunction about their treatment of the indigenous peoples—they regarded the “savage” as scarcely human and had been horrified to discover that the
Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and
cannibalism.
¹³
But at home the Dominicans adhered more faithfully to Christian principles and spoke up for the conquered peoples. The Church had no jurisdiction over these American “kings,” argued
Durandus of San Poinciana in 1506; they should not be attacked unless they were actually harming Europeans. The popes should send missionaries to these new lands,
Cardinal Thomas Cajetan argued, but not “for the purpose of seizing their lands or reducing them to temporal subjection.”
¹⁴
Francisco de Vitoria maintained that the conquistadores had no right to “eject the enemy from their dominions and despoil them of their property.”
¹⁵

The
Renaissance
humanists, however, were far more sympathetic to the colonial project. In
Thomas More’s
Utopia
(1516), a fictional account of an ideal society, the
Utopians went to war only “to drive invading armies from the territories of their friends, or to liberate oppressed people in the name of humanity from tyranny and servitude.” All very admirable, but there were limits to this benevolent policy: if the population became too great for their island to support, Utopians felt entitled to send settlers to plant a colony on the mainland, “wherever the natives have plenty of unoccupied or uncultivated land.” They would farm this neglected soil, which “previously had seemed too barren and paltry even to support the natives,” and make it yield an abundance. Friendly natives could be absorbed into the colony, but the Utopians felt no qualms about fighting those who resisted them: “The Utopians say that it is perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle or waste yet forbid the use and possession of it to others who, by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it.”
¹⁶

There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought.
¹⁷
The so-called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. From the outset, however, the philosophy of human rights, still crucial to our modern political discourse, did not apply to all human beings. Because Europe was frequently afflicted
by
famine and seemed unable to support its growing population, humanists like Thomas More were scandalized by the idea of arable land going to waste. They looked back to
Tacitus, an apologist for
Roman imperialism, who had been convinced that exiles had every right to secure a place to live, since “what is possessed by none belongs to everyone.” Commenting on this passage,
Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), professor of civil law at
Oxford, concluded that because “God did not create the world to be empty,” the “the seizure of vacant places” should be “regarded as a law of nature”: