Download PDF | Felipe Fernández-Armesto (auth.) - Before Columbus_ Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 1229–1492-Macmillan Education UK (1987).
294 Pages
Preface
Nowadays there are international conferences on Mediterranean history, and in the University of Oxford, in very recent years, seminars have been dedicated to it. ‘Atlantic studies’ have spawned books and articles with increasing frequency for nearly 40 years and, since 1955, a distinguished Spanish periodical has been devoted to them. This book is an attempt to explore some of the more promising possible connections between the two subjects. Part One gives an account of late medieval theatres of expansion in the western Mediterranean. Part Two sketches the beginnings of exploration and colonisation in the Atlantic. Throughout, the main quest is for elements of continuity or discontinuity between the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds and for approaches to an answer to Horace’s question:
... quid terras alio calentis sole mutamus?
— which I would paraphrase, ‘Why do some of us bother with alien climes?’ At the cost of some cross-references and summary repetitions, I have tried to make each chapter independent of the others, as many readers find this convenient. A few pages of introduction are devoted to a conspectus of the problems which afflict students and absorb historians. Conclusions, which are intended to address these problems, are advanced chapter by chapter, as I go along. If I try to suggest new arguments wherever they occur to me, this is not out of contrariness or ‘revisionism’ but simply because, in an adult life largely given to teaching, I have come to value books which seek to be stimulating at the risk of being wrong. In any case, I like the subject too much to see it fossilised in rocks of orthodoxy.
Much of the material, including the whole of Chapter 9, was accumulated with the aid of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship: I take pleasure and pride in acknowledging the kindness of the Trustees. A travel grant from the Trustees of the Arnold Historical Essay Fund allowed me to do some research in the Canary Islands. Chapter 5 is based on lectures given in the Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford in 1984 and Chapter 6 on a lecture to the External Studies Department of the University of Manchester in the same year. I am grateful for these opportunities and sources of stimulation. The book in its present form was the work of the vacations of 1985 and the spring and early summer of 1986. The unerring eye of Mr Christopher Butcher saved me from many infelicities of style, the careful scrutiny of Dr Maurice Keen from errors of fact and judgement. To the wise talk and scholarly examples of Professors Edmund Fryde and Peter Russell the book owes more, I fear, than they may care to acknowledge. Defects of my own devising remain. I owe a further debt to the Warden and Fellows of St Antony’s College, Oxford, who have let me pursue a subject only marginally relevant to the collective interests of the College, and who, with the other members and staff, make it an ideal place for learning and teaching.
A Note on Names
For personal names transliterated from Arabic, I followed standard practice, but place names follow the guidelines of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names: this results in some inconsistencies, but enables readers to check the places named in a widely available and comprehensive gazetteer. Where other forms are current in books in English, I give them in brackets at the first mention of the place concerned.
Other names are given in English wherever there is a wellestablished form, but otherwise in the national language. I make an exception in the case of the Infante Dom Henrique of Portugal for reasons explained on p.185. The names of monarchs of the House of Barcelona are given in Aragonese (and here I prefer the form, ‘Jaime’ to the archaising ‘Jayme’) if they were kings of Aragon, or in Catalan if only kings of Majorca, or in Italian if only kings of Sicily. This has the merit, for instance, of distinguishing Jaime II of Aragon from Jaume II of Majorca. Catalan place names are given in Castilian, where well-established equivalents exist (e.g. Lérida, Gerona) in the absence of established English forms, because this is the practice of most atlases which readers are likely to consult.
Introduction
Problems and Approaches
A few years ago, an advertising campaign of the Greek national tourist authority strewed the pages of glossy magazines with pictures of nubile tourists cavorting amid Doric ruins over the slogan, “You were born in Greece’. Taken literally, the words would have been obscure. Yet no reader can have had any difficulty in interpreting them as an allusion to the doctrine that ‘western society’ derives, by unbroken tradition, from Graeco-Roman origins. The doctrine may not be true; the terms in which it is commonly expressed may be misleading. Yet its influence is such that it forms part of the self-perception of almost every educated person in Europe and the Americas and much of the rest of the world today. Studies of periods of crisis in the transmission of the supposed legacy — in late antiquity or the early middle ages, when rival cultural traditions were received, or in the ‘age of expansion’ when western society is thought to have broken out of its heartlands — have concentrated, like Theseus in the labyrinth, on following as if it were a lifeline this single, tenuous thread.
One of the most conspicuous differences between what might be called ‘western society’ or ‘western civilisation’ and its presumed Hellenic origins lies in its geographical configurations. The Mediterranean ‘frog-pond’ of Socrates has been replaced by the Atlantic ‘lake’ across which we traffic in goods and ideas and around which we huddle for our defence. Rather as the Romans had colonies in northern Europe, which extended their world beyond the Mediterranean basin, so we have our outposts elsewhere: Pacific and Indian Ocean colonies and a worldwide spread of cultural influences, which are sometimes thought to justify talk of a ‘global civilisation’. But our essential axis is the Atlantic, whereas the Romans’ was the Mare Nostrum. The questions therefore arise: when, how and why, if at all, did this remarkable displacement from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic take place, and how — and to what extent — did it happen without loss of continuity with the Mediterranean original?
Historians who think along these lines have tended to seek ‘the origins of Atlantic civilisation’ — the phrase belongs to the great Belgian scholar, Professor Charles Verlinden — in the late middle ages and early modern period. That may be the wrong place. After the discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the New World tended to drift away again from the Old, developing internal economic systems, ‘creole’ identities and finally independent states. Only with the improved communications and mass migrations of the late nineteenth century, perhaps only with the transatlantic partnerships of the world wars in the twentieth, did it become possible for scholars to formulate questions about Atlantic civilisation. On the other hand, a genuine achievement ot the late middle ages was the creation of awareness of Atlantic ‘space’, which was there to be exploited for what it was worth, and into which features of Mediterranean life may be seen, with hindsight, to have been funnelled or squeezed.
This book makes no pretensions to charting the fate of civilisations, but it does attempt to describe the contribution made by explorers and colonists to that growth of awareness. By separating some of the ingredients of ‘civilisation’ — personnel, ways of life, institutions, forms of government, economic techniques, habits of thought and belief and behaviour — and by tracing their movement from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, it may be possible to cast some light on changes which, whatever their implications for the ‘course of history’, command attention because they involved or affected a large number of late medieval people.
At another level from that of ‘civilisations’ — and one better calculated to appeal to English-speaking readers — the problem can be seen as one of ‘economies’. Naturally and historically, western Europe has two economies — a ‘Mediterranean’ and a ‘northern’ — separated by a narrow strait, with widely differing sailing conditions along the two seaboards, and a chain of breakwaters which determines the flow of rivers and therefore the directions of exchange. For much of Europe’s history, communication between these two zones was not easy. Limited access through the Toulouse gap, the Rhone corridor and the Alpine passes kept restricted forms of commerce alive, even in periods when commercial navigation from sea to sea was abandoned. When Mediterranean craft resumed large-scale seaborne commerce in the late middle ages, they faced enormous problems of adaptation and acclimatisation. Heavy seas threatened ships low in the gunwales; Finisterre was their ‘Cabo de Nao’, beyond which lay a long excursion out to sea around or across the Bay of Biscay. Galleys, which carried much of the trade, depended on huge inputs of victuals and water from on shore. All in all, the journey called for great sang-froid and was, in its way, when it started in the late thirteenth century, almost as bold a venture as the Portuguese swoop out into the south Atlantic, 200 years later, in search of the westerly trade winds. The gradual integration of the northern and southern economies depended on the navigation and exploration of the Atlantic and became increasingly tied up, from the fifteenth century onwards, with the development of an Atlantic economy which embraced both zones. In this context, 1t seems proper to look to the subject and period of this book for help with the problem of how the gap between the two halves of the modern European economy came to be bridged, and what contribution was made during the late middle ages.
These questions beg a deeper one. The experience of Europe’s age of expansion is unique in the history of the world. Other imperial societies have expanded into areas contiguous with their homelands. Some have migrated over great distances in search of the means of life. Examples of both phenomena occurred in Europe before the start of our period. Yet only in Europe (except perhaps in the copy-cat case of Japan), and only since the late middle ages, have imperial and commercial ends been pursued across the world without restraint. Europe’s idiosyncracy seems even more acute when compared with the experience of the Chinese — a people better fitted for a worldwide imperial role, because of their density of population, unity of command and superiority in technology. In the mid-fifteenth century, however, when the Indian Ocean had been explored and the foundations of an overseas empire laid in Java, the Chinese pulled back, perhaps because the decisionmaking élite there was not as dependent on or committed to longrange trade as was that of much of Latin Christendom.
This singularity of European history and its evident effects on the rest of the world have inspired historians to seek explanations, often by examining the individual motives of participants in the process of expansion — whether pious or greedy, crusading or chivalric or commercial, whether sprung from a syndrome of selfconfidence or from the psychology of escape. Sometimes the examination of motives has overspilled into a search for collective mentalities or else yielded, among historians who see overseas expansion aS a mass movement, to a quest for the grinding ‘structures’ of economic determinism, such as relentless demographic pressure, cyclical commodity shortages or social systems productive of desperate or ambitious outcasts; others stress economic “conjunctures’ — mysteriously generated demands for gold or spices.
There is also a tendency among historians of this subject to distinguish motives from means, as in popular detective fiction, and treat both as preconditions of European expansion. While the motives were of long standing — indeed, it is hard to discern any ‘new’ motives in the critical period — the means were of late medieval contrivance, and lay in the development of techniques of shipbuilding, navigation and cartography. There is something in this analysis. Atlantic commerce and exploration were facilitated by the cogs and carracks of the high middle ages and the caravels of the fifteenth century. Long-range navigation in the northern hemisphere required no new instruments or techniques, but beyond the line, out of sight of the pole star, the demands of an unfamiliar heaven were different. Yet all the technical developments of the period were achieved in the course and as a result of experiments in navigation which were being made anyway. It seems that the search for ‘causes’ or ‘origins’ of Europe’s overseas expansion can be rewarded only by taking a very long-term view, acknowledging that, like appetite, exploring or empire-building ‘vient en mangeant’, and that the process grows, cumulatively but slowly, from modest beginnings.
If from some perspectives Latin Christendom seems an unlikely candidate for expansion, the leading role of improbable communities within it — particularly from Portugal and Castile — is one of the most beguiling aspects of the problem. In a sense, it is to be expected that poor and peripheral peoples should espouse initiatives that convey a promise of wealth. In exploring neighbouring seas, late medieval Castilians and Portuguese were like certain ‘emergent nations’ today, desperately drilling for offshore resources with foreign capital and foreign technicians. In recent years, the search for an explanation of Iberian fortunes has concentrated on the partly covert role of the foreigners — especially Italians and chiefly Genoese, who brought the resources of a more developed economy and the experience of long colonial and commercial traditions to bear on the difficulties of exploring and exploiting the Atlantic. The question of the extent of the foreign stake in the Iberian empires is sometimes thought to be related to that of how far ‘modern’ colonisation is continuous with ‘medieval’, as if the depth of Italian involvement were a measure of the profundity of the Iberian empires’ medieval roots. In part, this may be a result of the myth that Iberians were ‘shy traffickers’ or that their own medieval experience was irrelevant to the erection of commercially orientated seaborne empires. In order to make progress with the investigation of the problem, it will be useful to dispense with such assumptions and look afresh at all three of these late medieval ‘empires’ — Portuguese, Castilian and Genoese — to identify the ‘roots’ of each and the relationship between them.
The conspicuous failure, among the peoples who took part in the overseas expansion of the late middle ages, is that of the Catalans. The ‘lost tribe’ of the age of expansion, virtually ignored in most books on the subject, they tend to be regarded either, like the Venetians, as a people with no Atlantic vocation, or else dismissed as gripped by an inexplicable ‘decline’. Yet for the first generation of Atlantic exploration, Catalan-speakers, especially from Majorca, contributed by far the most. Their traditional trading links with north Africa made them well placed and well disposed to break into the Atlantic; their colonial experience was almost as extensive as and in some ways more varied than that of the Genoese, and, because it included the establishment of sovereign island-colonies, seems peculiarly relevant to the Atlantic. No explanation of the ‘rise’ of Portugal or of Castile can be complete without a thorough retrospect on the frustrations of the Catalans. In the same context, the failure of France — in many ways, the kingdom best placed to dominate the early Atlantic world — also needs to be considered. In the past, the debate about the relative contributions of various ‘national’ or proto-national groups to European expansion was pursued jingoistically and concentrated on rival claims to priority in major discoveries. It is still worth pursuing today, but for other reasons: if we could tell why the French and Catalans held back, we should better understand why the Portuguese, Genoese and Castilians sallied forth, and so come closer to identifying some of the dynamic features of the late medieval Latin Christendom.
In all cases of the expansion of particular peoples, whatever their relative importance, the immediate results embraced a common feature: the establishment of colonial societies — settler communities in new and sometimes uncongenial environments, often in close proximity to indigenous cultures. In defining the natures and describing the behaviour of those societies, it seems wise to bear some basic questions in mind. First, what difference did environmental change make? However tenacious, for instance, the traditions which early Atlantic settlers brought from the Mediterranean, Atlantic islands were different from Mediterranean ones and Atlantic archipelagoes differed widely from one another. Were these ‘frontier’ societies, moulded and changed by new challenges and opportunities, or were they ‘transplantations’ of metropolitan society, which they resolutely aped or unconsciously mirrored? Or, rather, as these descriptions are not mutually exclusive, what was the balance, in each case, between creation and innovation? Secondly, what did it feel like to live in one of these societies? What self-perception, and what perception of the community to which they belonged, did settlers at various levels of society and in different occupations have? The sources only allow sporadic insights, but it is helpful to try to make the most of them if we are not to be distracted, by problems of historians’ invention, from seeing what participants saw. Finally, where there was an indigenous society — and sometimes, as in Madeira and the Azores, colonists were the only inhabitants — what mental image did the colonists form of the host culture? It is rarely possible to say anything about what the natives thought of their ‘guests’, but only through a consideration of the problem of what they thought about each other, can the problem of how they behaved towards each other be approached: colonial societies, economies and institutions sprang from mental attitudes which were products of mixed traditions and experience.
The question of ‘cultural contacts’ and particularly of the mental images to which they gave rise, suggests more general problems about the intellectual impact of the discoveries — both geographical and anthropological — on the metropolitan societies, as well as the colonial ones. The implications of the discoveries for cosmography and the ‘rise of science’ have been much discussed in the past. Historians have tended to see explorers as empiricists and exploration almost as a form of scientific experiment, which exploded the reputations of written authorities. The delight which Columbus took in disproving Ptolemy, or Ramusio in compiling explorer’s revelations, suggests that this analysis is not altogether silly, but the enormous amount of recent research on late medieval and early modern science has identified so many other influences that explorers are left with little room for a role. A more promising field of enquiry is the possible impact of the encounters with newly found and previously unsuspected societies of pagan ‘primitives’ on the development of a science of anthropology and on ways of understanding the nature of man. The debates provoked by the American Indians in the sixteenth century have become well known and some scholars have begun work on the medieval origins of the terms of those debates. In the period covered by this book, the potential significance of two major new encounters has to be considered. Black people had always been known in Latin Christendom, but late in the first half of the fifteenth century, Europeans began to come into contact with Blacks in their own ‘habitat’ — Black societies, which had previously been subjects of speculation only. Even earlier, in the 1340s, the aboriginal Canary Islanders (a neolithic and probably pre-Berber north African people) had begun to baffle and intrigue scholars. Most of what was said about American Indians was precisely foreshadowed in literature about the Canarians.
Part of the purpose of this book is to provide material with which to contemplate or approach these problems, and even to confront them directly. First, however, a confession must be made, which may console some readers and exasperate others: my interest in most of the problems has gradually diminished, except as an aid to writing questions for examinations. I no longer share historians’ common anxiety to explain change and prefer, on the whole, merely to describe it. The question I most want to ask myself about the past is, ‘What did it feel like to live in it?’ Not even, “What was it like?’, because we have so few means of answering or, indeed, exploring that question. A book addressed to a variety of readers cannot, however, be written self-indulgently, and I shall try to mix attempts to evoke, from the sources, experiences of people who took part in exploration and colonisation with discussion of the questions which readers are likely to ask or be asked.
My method will be to look in turn at the ‘arenas’ of colonial life in the western Mediterranean and Atlantic in our period, trying to suggest what each was like and classifying them tentatively, in terms of similarities and dissimilarities, as I go along, before returning at the end of the book to consider some implications, for Latin Christendom, of the discovery of Atlantic ‘space’. In the first five chapers I examine the great theatres of western Mediterranean expansion: the island-conquests of the House of Barcelona; the ‘first Atlantic empire’ created in the south-west of the Iberian peninsula, chiefly from Castile; the ‘Mediterranean land empire’, as I call it, in Levantine Spain, which, because of its differences of character must be separately treated; the Genoese colonial outposts which spanned the Mediterranean from west to east but which, though scattered, constituted a distinctive ‘world’ of their own; and the north African coast, with its Atlantic aspect, where Catalans, Provengals and Italians contended for commercial mastery. The subjects of the last four chapters of the book will be the course and characteristics of early European penetration of the Atlantic.
Two limitations must be stressed: the enquiry closes in 1492 on the assumption that the beginning of the story is less well known than the middle and end; a further and more tentative assumption is that the western Mediterranean in the late middle ages is a proper area of enquiry. It might be objected that the colonisation of the eastern Mediterranean by Latin peoples from the late eleventh century, or the medieval commerce and navigation of northern European peoples, is an equally good subject to start with if an understanding of the ultimate nature and direction of the expansion of western Christendom is the aim. The only principle on which I might try to justify my approach is that of ‘first things first’. Apart from a relatively small number of Flemings, relatively late in the story, and one ‘French’ episode which will be discussed (pp.175—84 below), it was western Mediterranean peoples alone — Iberian and Italian and, of the latter, chiefly Genoese — who explored and settled in the Atlantic in our period.
One problem of the historiographical tradition I am happy to ignore, even though it can be detected, remotely underlying historians’ treatment of all the others. The question of the usefulness of distinguishing medieval from modern times and of when, if ever, distinctive or essential features of the modern world can be detected, is a hoary old historiographical chestnut which I am content to leave, blackening amid neglected embers, until it finally explodes with a shattering pop.
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