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Jonathan Lu's Reviews > 1492: The Year the World Began
1492: The Year the World Began
by
by
Very informative book about the geopolitical status of the world leading to vast explorations at the turn of the 15th century that is refreshingly non Euro-centric and well detailed in description of Africa, Maghreb, Central Asia, East Asia, and Meso-America. Really amazing to consider how after hundreds of years of isolation, in a span of just a few years so many different populations were ready to embark on geographical expansion. A few quotes and highlights that I took away:
[p18] "The idea that 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 […] 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.� Thus like silk textiles and gold, the drive for mercantilism of history’s largest monopolies (British and Dutch Far East India Co.) were driven by meeting the demands for the 1%.
[p20] “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. So the size of the world would work out, correctly, to about twenty-five thousand miles.� Here, the author also dispels the myth that the world was viewed as flat as it was well known since times of sailors seeing a rounded horizon.
[p55] “By the middle of the fifteenth century, as Mali declined, impressions were generally unfavorable. The empire was in retreat, ground between the Tuareg of the desert and the Mossi of the forest […] When European explorers at last penetrated the empire in the 1450s, they were disillusioned. Where they had expected to find a great, bearded, nugget-wielding monarch, such as the Catalan Atlas depicted, they found only a poor, harassed, timorous ruler […] It was a dramatic moment in the history of racism. Until then, white Westerners saw only positive images of blacks in paintings of the magi who acknowledged the baby Jesus. Or else they knew Africans as expensive domestic slaves who shared intimacies with their owners and displayed estimable talents, especially as musicians. Familiarity had not yet bred contempt. Disdain for blacks as inherently inferior to other people and the pretense that reason and humanity are proportional to the pink pigment in Western flesh were new prejudices. Disgust with Mali fed them.� Here the author dispels the early onset of racism, as documented by the great Arab explorer Ibn Battuta who first reached the kingdom of Mali that was in decline after eyars of war.
[p81] “England expelled its Jews in 1291, France in 1343, and many states in western Germany followed suit in the early fifteenth century. The big problem of the expulsion is not why it happened, but why it happened with it did. Money grubbing was not the motive. By refusing a bribe to abrogate the decree of expulsion, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon surprised Jewish leaders who thought the whole policy was simply a ruse to extort cash. The Jews were reliable fiscal milch-cows. By expelling those who worked as tax gatherers, the monarchs imperiled their own revenues. It took five years for returns to recover their former levels. The Ottoman sultan Suleiman I is said to have marveled at the expulsion because it was tantamount to ‘throwing away wealth.’� Describing here the situation in modern-day Spain of warring kingdoms and the origins of European anti-semitism that led to the well known Muslim protection of Jews at the time.
[p84] “But the widespread conviction that heresy arose mainly from Jewish example, or from the memory of Judaism in the progeny of converts, trumped the truth. The ”justice� the Inquisition delivered was attractive to anyone who wanted to denounce a neighbor, a competitor, or an enemy. It was perilous to anyone who was a victim of envy or revenge. And it was cheap. In no other court could you bring charges without incurring costs or risks.� Similar to ethnic fighting in modern day central African states, pragmatic material gain was more a factor than dogmatic belief.
[p107] Dispelling many myths about the Western European Renaissance: “Nor does the reality of the Renaissance match its reputation. Scanning the past for signs of Europe’s awakening to progress, prosperity, and values that we can recognize as our own, we respond to the excitement with which Western writers around the end of the fifteenth century anticipated the dawn of a new ‘golden age�. As a result, if you are a product of mainstream Western education, almost everything you ever thought about the Renaissance is likely to be false.
‘It was revolutionary.� No: scholarship has detected half a dozen prior renaissances.
‘It was secular� or ‘It was pagan.� Not entirely: the church remained the patron of most art and scholarship.
‘It was art for art’s sake.� No: it was manipulated by plutocrats and politicians.
‘The Renaissance elevated the artist.� No: medieval artists might achieve sainthood; wealth and titles were derogatory by comparison.
‘It was scientific.� No: for every scientist there was a sorcerer.
[p158] moving onto Columbus’s famous exploration, and describing his selling point in gaining support: “he suggested to Ferdinand and Isabella that the profits of his proposed voyage could be diverted to the conquest of Jerusalem, which according to the Franciscans� prophecies, would be the work of the ‘Last World Emperor� and one of the events with which God would prepare the world for apocalypse.� And thus we see the role of apocalyptic world destruction from religious fervor in driving foreign policy for 600 years.
[p194] “But the Chinese naval effort could not last. The scholar-elites hated overseas adventures and the factions that favored them so much that, when they recaptured power, the mandarins destroyed almost all Zheng He’s records in an attempt to obliterate his memory. Moreover, China’s land frontiers became insecure as Mongol power revived. China needed to turn away from the sea and toward the new threat. The state never resumed overseas expansion. The growth of trade and of Chinese colonization in Southeast Asia was left to merchants and migrants. China, the empire best equipped for maritime imperialism, opted out.�
[p212] “The widespread assumption that Vasco da Gama was the first to penetrate deep inside it when he rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 is a vulgar error. Italian merchants often plied their trade there during the late Middle Ages […] two circumstantial accounts survive from the fifteenth century: the first by Niccolo Conti, who had been as far east as Java, and had returned to Italy by 1444; the second by his fellow Florentine Girolamo di Santo Stefano, who made an equally long trading voyage in the 1490s.�
[p214] “Conti was scrupulous in enumerating the harems of great rulers and commending the sangfroid of wives who committed suti, flinging themselves on their dead husbands� funeral pyres. In India, he found brothels so numerous, and so alluring with ‘sweet perfumes, ointments, blandishments, beauty and youth,� that Indians are much addicted to licentiousness,� whereas male homosexuality, ‘being superfluous, is unknown.� In Ava, in Burma, the women mocked Conti for having a small penis and recommended a local custom: inserting up to a dozen gold, silver, or brass pellets, of about the size of small hazelnut, under the skin, ‘and with these insertions ,and the swelling of the member, the women are affected with the most exquisite pleasure.� Conti refused the service, because ‘he did not want his pain to be a source of others� pleasure.�
[p218] “There were, of course, regions intractable to Islam. In some circles, Islam met a skeptical reception. Kabir of Benares was a poet of secularist inclinations. ‘Feeling your power, you circumcise � I can’t go along with that, brother. If your God favoured circumcision why didn’t you come out cut?� Hindus fared little better in the face of Kabir’s skepticism: ‘If putting on the thread makes you a Brahmin, What does the wife put on? � Hindu, Muslim, where did they come from?�
[p230] “In 1493, when Columbus got back from his first voyage, no one � least of all the explorer himself � knew where head had been. In the received picture of the planet, the earth was an island, divided between three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. For most European scholars, it was hard to believe that what they called a ‘fourth part of the world� existed.�
[p260] “The incorporation of the Americas � the resources, the opportunities � would turn Europe from a poor and marginal region into a nursery of potential global hegemonies. It might not have happened that way. If Chinese conquerors had bothered with the Americas, we would now think of those areas as part of ‘the East,� and the international dateline would probably sever the Atlantic.�
[p262] “This world already looks doomed to extinction. Western power is going the way of previous dinosaurs. The United States � the last sentinel of Western supremacy � is in relative decline, challenged from the East and South Asia. Pluralism looks increasingly like a path to showdown instead of a panacea for peace. Population trends on a global level are probably going into reverse. Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that ‘modernity� is ending proclaim a ‘postmodern age.�
Yet this doomed world is still young: 1492 seems, on the face of it, too far back to look for the origins of the world we are in. Population really started to grow worldwide with the explosive force only in the eighteenth century. The United States did not even exist until 1776, and only became the unique superpower in the 1990s. The tool kit of ideas we associate with individualism, secularism, and constitutional guarantees of liberty really came together only in the movement we call the Enlightenment in the eighteenth-century western Europe and parts of the Americas, and even then they struggled for survival � bloodied by the French Revolution, betrayed by romanticism.�
[p18] "The idea that 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 […] 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.� Thus like silk textiles and gold, the drive for mercantilism of history’s largest monopolies (British and Dutch Far East India Co.) were driven by meeting the demands for the 1%.
[p20] “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. So the size of the world would work out, correctly, to about twenty-five thousand miles.� Here, the author also dispels the myth that the world was viewed as flat as it was well known since times of sailors seeing a rounded horizon.
[p55] “By the middle of the fifteenth century, as Mali declined, impressions were generally unfavorable. The empire was in retreat, ground between the Tuareg of the desert and the Mossi of the forest […] When European explorers at last penetrated the empire in the 1450s, they were disillusioned. Where they had expected to find a great, bearded, nugget-wielding monarch, such as the Catalan Atlas depicted, they found only a poor, harassed, timorous ruler […] It was a dramatic moment in the history of racism. Until then, white Westerners saw only positive images of blacks in paintings of the magi who acknowledged the baby Jesus. Or else they knew Africans as expensive domestic slaves who shared intimacies with their owners and displayed estimable talents, especially as musicians. Familiarity had not yet bred contempt. Disdain for blacks as inherently inferior to other people and the pretense that reason and humanity are proportional to the pink pigment in Western flesh were new prejudices. Disgust with Mali fed them.� Here the author dispels the early onset of racism, as documented by the great Arab explorer Ibn Battuta who first reached the kingdom of Mali that was in decline after eyars of war.
[p81] “England expelled its Jews in 1291, France in 1343, and many states in western Germany followed suit in the early fifteenth century. The big problem of the expulsion is not why it happened, but why it happened with it did. Money grubbing was not the motive. By refusing a bribe to abrogate the decree of expulsion, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon surprised Jewish leaders who thought the whole policy was simply a ruse to extort cash. The Jews were reliable fiscal milch-cows. By expelling those who worked as tax gatherers, the monarchs imperiled their own revenues. It took five years for returns to recover their former levels. The Ottoman sultan Suleiman I is said to have marveled at the expulsion because it was tantamount to ‘throwing away wealth.’� Describing here the situation in modern-day Spain of warring kingdoms and the origins of European anti-semitism that led to the well known Muslim protection of Jews at the time.
[p84] “But the widespread conviction that heresy arose mainly from Jewish example, or from the memory of Judaism in the progeny of converts, trumped the truth. The ”justice� the Inquisition delivered was attractive to anyone who wanted to denounce a neighbor, a competitor, or an enemy. It was perilous to anyone who was a victim of envy or revenge. And it was cheap. In no other court could you bring charges without incurring costs or risks.� Similar to ethnic fighting in modern day central African states, pragmatic material gain was more a factor than dogmatic belief.
[p107] Dispelling many myths about the Western European Renaissance: “Nor does the reality of the Renaissance match its reputation. Scanning the past for signs of Europe’s awakening to progress, prosperity, and values that we can recognize as our own, we respond to the excitement with which Western writers around the end of the fifteenth century anticipated the dawn of a new ‘golden age�. As a result, if you are a product of mainstream Western education, almost everything you ever thought about the Renaissance is likely to be false.
‘It was revolutionary.� No: scholarship has detected half a dozen prior renaissances.
‘It was secular� or ‘It was pagan.� Not entirely: the church remained the patron of most art and scholarship.
‘It was art for art’s sake.� No: it was manipulated by plutocrats and politicians.
‘The Renaissance elevated the artist.� No: medieval artists might achieve sainthood; wealth and titles were derogatory by comparison.
‘It was scientific.� No: for every scientist there was a sorcerer.
[p158] moving onto Columbus’s famous exploration, and describing his selling point in gaining support: “he suggested to Ferdinand and Isabella that the profits of his proposed voyage could be diverted to the conquest of Jerusalem, which according to the Franciscans� prophecies, would be the work of the ‘Last World Emperor� and one of the events with which God would prepare the world for apocalypse.� And thus we see the role of apocalyptic world destruction from religious fervor in driving foreign policy for 600 years.
[p194] “But the Chinese naval effort could not last. The scholar-elites hated overseas adventures and the factions that favored them so much that, when they recaptured power, the mandarins destroyed almost all Zheng He’s records in an attempt to obliterate his memory. Moreover, China’s land frontiers became insecure as Mongol power revived. China needed to turn away from the sea and toward the new threat. The state never resumed overseas expansion. The growth of trade and of Chinese colonization in Southeast Asia was left to merchants and migrants. China, the empire best equipped for maritime imperialism, opted out.�
[p212] “The widespread assumption that Vasco da Gama was the first to penetrate deep inside it when he rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 is a vulgar error. Italian merchants often plied their trade there during the late Middle Ages […] two circumstantial accounts survive from the fifteenth century: the first by Niccolo Conti, who had been as far east as Java, and had returned to Italy by 1444; the second by his fellow Florentine Girolamo di Santo Stefano, who made an equally long trading voyage in the 1490s.�
[p214] “Conti was scrupulous in enumerating the harems of great rulers and commending the sangfroid of wives who committed suti, flinging themselves on their dead husbands� funeral pyres. In India, he found brothels so numerous, and so alluring with ‘sweet perfumes, ointments, blandishments, beauty and youth,� that Indians are much addicted to licentiousness,� whereas male homosexuality, ‘being superfluous, is unknown.� In Ava, in Burma, the women mocked Conti for having a small penis and recommended a local custom: inserting up to a dozen gold, silver, or brass pellets, of about the size of small hazelnut, under the skin, ‘and with these insertions ,and the swelling of the member, the women are affected with the most exquisite pleasure.� Conti refused the service, because ‘he did not want his pain to be a source of others� pleasure.�
[p218] “There were, of course, regions intractable to Islam. In some circles, Islam met a skeptical reception. Kabir of Benares was a poet of secularist inclinations. ‘Feeling your power, you circumcise � I can’t go along with that, brother. If your God favoured circumcision why didn’t you come out cut?� Hindus fared little better in the face of Kabir’s skepticism: ‘If putting on the thread makes you a Brahmin, What does the wife put on? � Hindu, Muslim, where did they come from?�
[p230] “In 1493, when Columbus got back from his first voyage, no one � least of all the explorer himself � knew where head had been. In the received picture of the planet, the earth was an island, divided between three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. For most European scholars, it was hard to believe that what they called a ‘fourth part of the world� existed.�
[p260] “The incorporation of the Americas � the resources, the opportunities � would turn Europe from a poor and marginal region into a nursery of potential global hegemonies. It might not have happened that way. If Chinese conquerors had bothered with the Americas, we would now think of those areas as part of ‘the East,� and the international dateline would probably sever the Atlantic.�
[p262] “This world already looks doomed to extinction. Western power is going the way of previous dinosaurs. The United States � the last sentinel of Western supremacy � is in relative decline, challenged from the East and South Asia. Pluralism looks increasingly like a path to showdown instead of a panacea for peace. Population trends on a global level are probably going into reverse. Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that ‘modernity� is ending proclaim a ‘postmodern age.�
Yet this doomed world is still young: 1492 seems, on the face of it, too far back to look for the origins of the world we are in. Population really started to grow worldwide with the explosive force only in the eighteenth century. The United States did not even exist until 1776, and only became the unique superpower in the 1990s. The tool kit of ideas we associate with individualism, secularism, and constitutional guarantees of liberty really came together only in the movement we call the Enlightenment in the eighteenth-century western Europe and parts of the Americas, and even then they struggled for survival � bloodied by the French Revolution, betrayed by romanticism.�
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Reading Progress
February 27, 2015
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Started Reading
February 27, 2015
– Shelved
May 25, 2015
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Finished Reading
