historical context - institucional · on the day one serpent (august 1521), tenochtitlan finally...

UNIT I : [extra materials- chapter 1]

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

NORTON, Mary Beth; KATZMAN, David et all. A People and a Nation: a History of the United States. 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986, 1100 pp

chapter 1. the making of old world and new,1492-1650 ................................................................ 1 1.1. societies of the Americas and Africa ................................................................................................. 2 1.2. Africa: its people .............................................................................................................................. 7 1.3. West Africa (Guinea) ........................................................................................................................ 8 1.4. Europe and its explorations ............................................................................................................ 10

UNIT I: HISTORICAL CONTEXT

chapter 1. the making of old world and new,1492-1650 [p.4]

It spread over the people as great destruction," the old man told the

priest. "Some it quite covered [with pustules] on all parts—their faces, their

heads, their breasts. . . . There was great havoc. Very many died of it. They

could not stir; they could not change position, nor lie on one side, nor face

down, nor on their backs. And if they stirred, much did they cry out. Great was

its destruction. Covered, mantled with pustules, very many people died of

them. And very many starved; there was death from hunger, [for] none could

take care of [the sick]; nothing could be done for them."

It was, by European reckoning, September 1520. Spanish troops led by

Hernando Cortes had abandoned the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan after failing

in their first attempt to gain control of the city. But they had unknowingly left

behind the smallpox germs that would ensure their eventual triumph. By the

time the Spaniards returned three months later, the great epidemic described

above had fatally weakened Tenochtitlan's inhabitants. Even so, the city held

out for months against the Spanish siege. But in the -Aztec year Three House,

on the day One Serpent (August 1521), Tenochtitlan finally surrendered. The

Spaniards had conquered Mexico, and on the site of the Aztec capital they

built what is now Mexico City.

After many millennia of separation, inhabitants of the Eastern

Hemisphere—the so-called Old World— had encountered the residents of the

Americas, with catastrophic results for the latter and untold benefits for the

former. By the time Spanish troops occupied Tenochtitlan, the age of

European expansion and colonization was already well under way. Over the

next three hundred and fifty years, Europeans would spread their civilization

across the globe. They would come to dominate native peoples in Asia and

Africa as well as in the New World of the Western Hemisphere. The history of

the thirteen tiny English colonies in North America that eventually became the

United States must be seen in this broader context of worldwide exploration

and exploitation.

That context is complex. After 1400, European nations sought to

improve their positions relative to neighboring countries not only by fighting

wars on their own continent but also by acquiring valuable colonies elsewhere

in the world. Simultaneously, the warring tribes and nations of Asia, Africa,

and the Americas attempted to use the alien intruders to their own advantage

or, failing that, to adapt successfully to the Europeans' presence in their midst.

All the participants in the resulting interaction of divergent cultures were

indelibly affected by the process. The contest among Europeans for control of

the Americas and Africa changed the course of history in all four continents.

Strategies selected by American and African tribes influenced the outcome of

the Europeans' contest as well as determining the fate of their own societies.

Although Europeans emerged politically dominant at the end of the long

process of interaction among divergent cultures, they by no means controlled

every aspect of it.

Nowhere is that lack of European control shown more clearly than in

the early history of the English settlements in North America. England's first

attempts to establish colonies on the mainland failed completely. Its second

tries—in the early seventeenth century— succeeded only because

neighboring Indians assisted the newcomers. The English colonists prospered

by learning to grow such unfamiliar American crops as corn and tobacco and

by developing extensive trading relationships with Native Americans."

Eventually, as shall be seen in Chapter 2, they discovered a third source of

UNIT I - HISTORICAL CONTEXT

2

prosperity—importing enslaved African laborers to work in their fields.

Only in this last case were the English able to exert more than partial

control over the success of their efforts. To achieve the first goal of providing

food, they had to adopt agricultural techniques suited both to the new crops

and to an alien environment. As for the second goal, maintaining the trade

networks essential to their survival required them to deal regularly on a more

or less equal basis with people who seemed very different from themselves

and who were far more familiar with America than they were. The early history

of the United States, in short, can best be understood as a series of complex

interactions [p.5] among different peoples and environments rather than as

the simple story of a triumph by only one of those groups—the English

colonists.

1.1. societies of the Americas and Africa In the Christian world, it was the year 1400; by the Muslim calendar,

802; by Chinese count, 2896, the year of the hare; and to the Maya, who had

the most accurate calendar of all, the era started with the date 1 Ahau 18 Ceh.

Regardless of the name or the reckoning system, the two-hundred-year period

that followed changed the course of world history. For thousands of years,

human societies had developed largely in isolation from each other. The era

that began in the Christian fifteenth century brought that long-standing

isolation to an end. As European explorers and colonizers sought to exploit

the resources of the rest of the globe, peoples from different races and

cultural traditions came into regular contact for the first time.

The civilizations that had developed separately had several basic

characteristics in common. All had political structures governing their secular

affairs, kinship systems regulating their social life, and one or more sets of

indigenous religious beliefs. In addition, they all organized their work

assignments on the basis of the sexual division of labor. Throughout the

world, men and women performed different tasks, although the specific

definitions of those tasks varied. Many, but not all, of the societies shared yet

another characteristic: they relied on agriculture for their essential food supply.

(Some of the world's societies were nomadic, surviving by moving continually

in search of wild animals and edible plants.) Agricultural civilizations, assured

of steady supplies of meat, grains, and vegetables, did not have to devote all

their energies to mere subsistence. They accumulated wealth, produced

ornamental objects, and created elaborate rituals and ceremonies. In brief,

they developed distinctive cultural traditions.

These cultural distinctions became the focal point for the interactions

that occurred in the fifteenth century and thereafter among the various human

societies. The basic similarities were obscured by the shock of discovering

that not all people were the same color as oneself, that other folk worshipped

other gods, or that some people defined the separate roles of men and

women differently from the way one's own society did. Because three major

human groups—Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans—met and

mingled on _ the soil of the Western Hemisphere during the age of European

colonization, their relationships can be examined in that context.

1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. PaleoPaleoPaleoPaleo----IndiansIndiansIndiansIndians

Since the earliest known humanlike remains, about 3 million years old,

have been found in what is now Ethiopia, it is likely that human beings

originated on the continent of Africa. During many millennia, the growing

human population slowly dispersed to the other continents. Some of the

peoples participating in this vast migration crossed a now-submerged stretch

of land that joined the Asian and North American continents at the site of the

Bering Strait. These forerunners of the Native-American population, known as


3

Paleo-Indians, probably arrived in the Americas more than thirty thousand

years ago—about the same time that parts of present-day China and the

Soviet Union were also being settled. The Paleo-Indians were nomadic

hunters of game and gatherers of wild plants. Over many centuries, they

spread through North and South America, probably moving as extended

families, or "bands." ("Tribes" were composed of groups of allied bands.)

By approximately 5,500 years ago (or B.P., the archeologists' term for

before the present), Indians living in central Mexico had begun to cultivate

food crops. Their most important products were maize (corn), squash, beans,

gourds, and chili peppers. As knowledge of agricultural techniques spread,

most Indian groups started to live a more stationary existence. Some

established permanent settlements; others moved two or three times a year

among fixed sites. Over the centuries, groups of North American Indians

adapted their once-similar ways of life to specific and very different

geographical settings, thus creating the diversity of cultures that Europeans

encountered when they first arrived (see map, page 6).

Primary mode of subsistence:

Agriculture

Hunting

Hunting-gathering

fish

[p.6]


4

[p.7]

The French artist Jacques Le Mcryne, who visited northern Florida in 1564-1565, showed one aspect of the sexual division of labor as practiced by the Indians of the region. At planting time, the men break up the ground with hoes made from fish bones while the women dig holes into which the} drop the seeds. Library of Congress.

Those Indian bands that lived in environments not well suited to

agriculture—because of a lack of adequate rainfall, for example—continued

the nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors. Within the area of the present-day

United States, these tribes included the Paiute and Shoshoni, who inhabited

the Great Basin (now Nevada and Utah). Bands of such hunter-gatherers

were small, because of the difficulties of finding sufficient food for more than a

few people. They were usually composed of one or more related families, with

men hunting small animals and women gathering seeds and berries. Where

large game was more plentiful and food supplies therefore more certain, as in

present-day Canada or the Great Plains, bands of hunters could be somewhat

larger.

In more favorable environments, Indians combined agriculture in

varying degrees with gathering, hunting,and fishing. The more heavily a tribe

relied on agriculture, the less likely it was to be highly mobile, since fields

required attention. The cultivation of crops also tended to increase the size of

Indian communities, because of the greater availability of food. Those tribes

that lived near the sea coasts, like the Chinook of present-day Washington

and Oregon, consumed large quantities of fish and shellfish, in addition to

growing crops and gathering seeds and berries. Tribes of the interior (for

example, the Arikara of the Missouri River valley) hunted large game animals

while also cultivating fields of corn, squash, and beans. That was true, too, of

the Algonkian tribes that inhabited much of what is now eastern Canada and

the northeastern United States. (Indians are often described by linguistic

groups, since large numbers of tribes spoke related languages and shared

similar [p.8] cultures. For example, the most important linguistic groups east

ot the Mississippi river were the Algokians and the Iroquoians, found primarily

in the north, and the Muskogeans of the south.).

1.1.2.1.1.2.1.1.2.1.1.2. SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN AMERICASEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN AMERICASEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN AMERICASEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN AMERICA

Agricultural Indians differed in how they assigned the task of cultivating

crops to the sexes. In the Southwest, the Pueblo peoples, who began raising

squash and beans by 3000 B.P., defined agricultural labor as "men's work."

In the East, by contrast, Algonkian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean peoples

allocated agricultural chores to women. Among these eastern tribes, men's

major assignments were hunting large animals and clearing the land. In all the


5

cultures, women gathered wild foods, prepared the food for consumption or

storage, and cared for the children.

The southwestern and eastern agricultural Indians had similar social

organizations. They lived in villages, sometimes sizable ones with a thousand

or more inhabitants. Pueblo villages were large multistoried buildings,

constructed on terraces along the sides of cliffs or other easily defended sites.

Northern Iroquois villages were composed of large, rectangular, bark-covered

structures (long houses), and Muskogeans and southern Algonkians lived in

similarly large houses made_of thatch. Most of the eastern villages were also

laid out defensively, often being surrounded by wood palisades and ditches. In

these cultures, each dwelling housed an extended family defined matrilineatty

(that is, through the female line). The families in such dwellings were linked

together into clans, again defined by matrilineal kinship ties.

1.1.3.1.1.3.1.1.3.1.1.3. INDIAN POLITICS AND RELIGIONINDIAN POLITICS AND RELIGIONINDIAN POLITICS AND RELIGIONINDIAN POLITICS AND RELIGION

In both southwestern and eastern cultures, the most important political

structures were those of the village. Indeed, among Pueblo and Muskogean

peoples the village council, composed of ten to thirty men, was the highest p

litical authority; there was no government at the tribal level. The Iroquois, by

contrast, had an elaborate political hierarchy linking villages into tribes, and

tribes into a widespread confederation. (The Iroquois Confederacy will be

discussed in detail in Chapter 2.) In all the cultures, political power was

divided between civil and war chiefs, who had authority only so long as they

retained the confidence of the people.

The political position of women varied from tribe to tribe. Women were

more likely to assume leadership roles among the agriculture people

(especially where females were the chief cultivators) than among nomadic

hunters. For example, women could become chiefs of certain Algonkian

bands, but they never held that position in the hunting tribes of the Great

Plains. Iroquois women did not become chiefs, yet tribal matrons nevertheless

exercised political power, as will be seen in Chapter 2. Probably the most

powerful female chiefs were found in what is now the southeastern United

States. In the mid-sixteenth century a female ruler known as the Lady of Cofi-

tachique governed a large group of villages in present-day western South

Carolina.

Indian religious beliefs varied even more than did, their political

systems. One common thread was that they were all polytheistic; that is, they

all involved a multitude of gods. Another was the relationship of the most

important rituals to the tribe's chief means of subsistence. That is, the major

deities of agricultural Indians like Pueblos and Muskogeans were associated

with cultivation, and their chief festivals centered on planting and harvest. The

most important gods of hunting tribes (like the Siouan-speakers of the Great

Plains), by contrast, were associated with animals, and their major festivals

were related to hunting. The tribe's main source of food and women's role (or

lack of role) in its production helped to determine women's potential as

religious leaders. Women held the most prominent positions in those

agricultural societies (like the Iroquois) in which they were also the chief food

producers.

1.1.4.1.1.4.1.1.4.1.1.4. AZTEC AND MAYAAZTEC AND MAYAAZTEC AND MAYAAZTEC AND MAYA

The most advanced Indian civilizations on the North American continent

were located in present-day Mexico and Guatemala (Mesoamerica). The

major Indian societies encountered by • Spanish in the sixteenth century—e

Aztec and the Maya—were the heirs of earlier civilizations (such as the

Olmec), which had also built great empires. Characteristic of these

Mesoamerican cultures were large cities, ceremonial sites featuring massive


6

pyramid-shaped temples, rule by an hereditary elite of warrior-priests, primary

dependence on agriculture for food, and religious practices that included

human sacrifice. The Aztec, who entered central Mexico in the fourteenth

century, were a warlike people who had consolidated their control over the

entire region by the time of Cortes's arrival. The Maya, whose civilization was

already in decline when the Spaniards came, were the intellectual leaders of

Mesoamerica. They invented systems of writing and mathematics, and their

calendar was the most accurate then known.

In the fifteenth century, then, a wide variety of Indian cultures,

comprising perhaps 4 to 6 million people, inhabited North America. In modern

Mexico, hereditary rulers presided over vast agricultural empires. Along the

Atlantic coast of the present-day United States, Indians likewise cultivated

crops, but their political systems differed greatly from those of Mesoamerica.

To the north and west, in what is now Canada and the Great Plains, lived

nomadic and seminomadic societies primarily dependent on hunting large

animals. Still farther west were the hunter-gatherer bands of the Great Basin

and the agricultural Indians of the Southwest. Finally, on the Pacific coast

lived tribes that based their subsistence chiefly on fish. All told, these diverse

groups spoke well over one thousand different languages. For obvious

reasons, they did not consider themselves as one people, nor did they—for

the most part—think of uniting to repel the European invaders. Instead, each

tribe or band continued to pursue the same goal it always had: bettering its

own circumstances relative to its neighbors, regardless of who those

neighbors were.

John White, an artist who accompanied the exploratory mission Raleigh sent to America in 1585, sketched Pomeioc, a typical Algonkian village composed of houses made from woven mats stretched over poles, and surrounded by a defensive wooden palisade. Library of Congress.


7

1.2. AFRICA: ITS PEOPLE Fifteenth-century Africa, like fifteenth-century America, housed a

variety of cultures adapted to different geographical settings (see map, page

10). Many of these cultures were of great antiquity. In the north, along the

Mediterranean Sea, lived the Berbers, a Muslim people of Middle Eastern

origin. (Muslims are adherents of the Islamic religion founded by the prophet

Mohammed in the seventh century.) On the east coast of Africa, city-states

dominated by Muslim merchants engaged in extensive trade with India, the

Moluccas (part of [p.11] modern Indonesia), and China. Through these ports

passed a considerable share of the trade between the eastern Mediterranean

and Far East; the rest followed the long land route across Central Asia known

as the Silk Road.

In the African interior, south of the Mediterranean coast, lie the great

Sahara and Libyan deserts, huge expanses of nearly waterless terrain that

pose a formidable barrier to travel. Below the deserts, much of the continent is

divided between tropical rain forests and grassy plains. Over the centuries,

this fertile landscape came to be dominated by Bantu peoples, who left their

homeland in modern Nigeria about two thousand years ago and slowly

migrated southward across the continent, assimilating and conquering other

ethnic groups (like the Pygmies and the San) as they went. The capital of their

empire was the great city whose ruins are now known as Zimbabwe, the

"stone houses."

[p.10]


8

1.3. WEST AFRICA (GUINEA) Most of the unwilling black migrants to the Americas came from West

Africa, or Guinea, a land of tropical forests and small-scale agriculture that

had been inhabited for at least ten thousand years before Europeans set foot

there in the fifteenth century. The northern region, or Upper Guinea, was

heavily influenced by Islamic culture. As early as the eleventh century, many

of its inhabitants had become Muslims; more important, the trans-Saharan

trade between Upper Guinea and the Muslim Mediterranean was black

Africa's major connection to Europe and the Middle East. In return for salt,

dates, and such manufactured goods as silk and cotton cloth, Africans

exchanged ivory, gold, and slaves with the northern merchants. (Slaves, who

were mostly captives of war, were in great demand as household servants in

the homes of the Muslim Mediterranean elite.) This commerce was controlled

first by the great kingdom of Ghana (ca. 900-1100), then by its successor, the

empire of Mali, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Black

Africa and Islam intersected at the city that was the intellectual and

commercial heart of the trade, the near-legendary Timbuktu. A cosmopolitan

center, Timbuktu attracted merchants and scholars from all parts of North

Africa and the Mediterranean.

Along the coast of West Africa and in the south, or Lower Guinea, Islam

had less influence. There, most Africans continued to practice their indigenous

religions, which—like those of the agricultural Indians of the Americas—

revolved around rituals designed to ensure good harvests. The vast interior

kingdoms of Mali and Ghana had no counterparts on the coast. Throughout

Lower Guinea, individual villages composed of groups of kin were linked into

small, often rigidly hierarchical kingdoms. At the time of initial contact with

Europeans, the region was characterized by fragmented political and social

authority.

Just as the political structures varied, so too did the means of

subsistence pursued by the different peoples of Guinea. Upper Guinea runs

roughly north-south from Cape Verde to Cape Palmas. Its northernmost

region was the so-called Rice Coast, lying just south of the Gambia River

(present-day Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea). The people who lived there

fished and cultivated rice in coastal swamplands. The Grain Coast, the next

region to the south, was thinly populated and not readily accessible from the

sea because it had only one good harbor (modern Freetown, Sierra Leone).

Its people concentrated on farming and animal husbandry.

South of the Grain Coast, at Cape Palmas, the coastline turns east, and

Lower Guinea begins. The Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast were each named

by Europeans for the major trade goods they obtained there. The Gold Coast,

comprising thirty little kingdoms known as the Akan States, later formed the .

basis of the great Asante kingdom. Initially many of the slaves destined for

sale in the Americas came from the Akan States. By the eighteenth century,

though, it was the next section of Lower Guinea, the modern nations of Togo

and Benin, that supplied most of the slaves sold in the English colonies. The

Adja kings of the region, which became known as the Slave Coast,

encouraged the founding of slave trading posts and served as middlemen in

the trade.

The ancient kingdom of Benin (modern Nigeria), which lay east of the

Slave Coast and west of the Niger River, was the strongest and most

centralized coastal state in Guinea. Long before Europeans arrived it was, like

Mali, a center of trade for West and North Africa. Like the peoples of the Rice

Coast, those who lived in Benin along the delta of the Niger made much of

their living from the water. They fished, made salt, and used skillfully

constructed dugout canoes to carry on a wide-ranging commerce. [p. 12]


9

A West African village as drawn by a European observer. A wooden defensive palisade surrounds the circular houses made of woven plant materials. In this the African village resembles Pomeioc, the Indian village pictured on page 9. But note a major difference—a herd of livestock enclosed in a larger fence. Note also that the Africans are growing Indian com, thus illustrating the exchange of plants between America and Africa (see page 19). Library of Congress.

SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN WEST AFRICASEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN WEST AFRICASEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN WEST AFRICASEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN WEST AFRICA

The societies of West Africa, like those of the Americas, assigned

different tasks to men and women. In general, the sexes shared agricultural

duties, but in some Guinean cultures women bore the primary responsibility

for growing crops, whereas in others men assumed that chore. In addition,

men hunted, managed livestock, and did most of the fishing. Women were

responsible for childcare, food preparation, and cloth manufacture.

Everywhere in West Africa women were the primary local traders. They had

charge of the extensive local and regional networks through which goods

were exchanged among the various families, villages, and small kingdoms.

Despite their different modes of subsistence and deep political

divisions, the peoples of West Africa had largely similar social systems

organized on the basis of what anthropologists have called the dual-sex

principle. In the societies of West Africa, each sex handled its own affairs: just

as male political and religious leaders governed the men, so females ruled the

women. In the Dahomean kingdom, every male official had his female

counterpart; in the Akan States, chiefs inherited their status through the

female line and each chief had a female assistant who supervised women's

affairs.

Indigenous religious beliefs likewise stressed the complementary nature

of male and female roles. Both women and men served as heads of the cults

and secret societies that directed the spiritual life of the villages. Although

African women rarely held formal power over men (unlike some of their Native

American contemporaries), they did govern other females.

The West Africans brought to the Americas, then, were agricultural

peoples, skilled at tending livestock,[p.14] hunting, fishing, and manufacturing

cloth from plant fibers and animal skins. Both men and women were

accustomed to working communally, alongside other members of their own

sex. They were also accustomed to a relatively egalitarian relationship

between the sexes. In the New World, they entered societies that used their

labor but had little respect for their cultural traditions. Of the three peoples

whose experience intersected in the Americas, their lives were the most

disrupted.


10

1.4. Europe and its explorations After 1400, Europe had begun to recover from centuries of decline.

Northern Europe—England and France in particular—had long been an

intellectual and economic backwater, far outstripped in importance by the

states of the Mediterranean, especially the great Italian city-states like Venice

and Florence. The cultural flowering known as the Renaissance began in

those city-states in the fourteenth century and spread northward, awakening

Europeans' intellectual curiosity. At the same time, the pace of economic

activity quickened. Near-constant warfare (for example, the Hundred Years'

War between England and France, which ended in a French victory in 1453),

promoted feelings of nationalism within the combatant countries. All these

developments helped to set the stage for extraordinary political and

technological change after the middle of the fifteenth century.

Yet in the midst of that change the life of Europe's common people

remained basically untouched for at least another century. European societies

were hierarchical, with a few wealthy aristocratic families wielding arbitrary

power over the majority of the people. Europe's kingdoms accordingly

resembled those of Africa or Mesoamerica, but differed greatly from the more

egalitarian, consensus-based societies found in America north of Mexico.

Most Europeans, like most Africans or Native Americans, lived in small

agricultural villages. But because the Roman Catholic church—to which

almost all Europeans belonged— insisted on exogamy (marriage to

nonrelatives), villages were not based solely, or even primarily, on kinship

groups, as they were in Africa or the Americas. On those continents, the kin

groups that constituted a village together controlled the surrounding land. Eu-

rope had no comparable coresident extended families; perhaps that was why

European land tended to be held by individual farmers rather than by villages

as a whole.

Even though European farmers, or peasants, had separate

landholdings, they nevertheless worked their fields communally, like most

Africans and Native Americans. That was because fields had to lie fallow

every second or third year to regain their fertility after having been planted

with wheat or rye, the most common European food grains. A family could not

have ensured its own food supply in alternate years had not the work and the

crop been shared annually by all the villagers.

In European cultures, men did most of the field work, with women

helping out chiefly at planting and harvest. At other times, women's duties

consisted primarily of childcare and household tasks (including food

preservation, Division of milking cows, and caring for poul- try). If a woman's

husband was an artisan or storekeeper, she might assist him in business.

Since Europeans usually kept domesticated animals (especially pigs, sheep,

and cattle) to use for meat, hunting had little economic importance in their

cultures. Rather, hunting was viewed mainly as a sport for male aristocrats.

Whereas in African or Native American societies women often played

major roles in politics and religion, in Europe men were dominant in all areas

of life. A few women from noble families—for example, Queen Elizabeth I of

England—achieved status or power, but the vast majority of European women

were excluded from positions of political authority. In the Catholic church,

leadership roles were reserved for men, who alone could become priests and

bishops. At the familial level, husbands and fathers expected to control the

lives of their wives, children, and servants (a patriarchal system of family

governance). In short, European women held inferior positions in both public

and private realms


11

Political andPolitical andPolitical andPolitical and TechnologicalTechnologicalTechnologicalTechnological ChangeChangeChangeChange

The traditional hierarchical social structure of Europe changed little in the fifteenth century, but the opposite was true of politics. The century witnessed rapid and dynamic political change, as ruthless monarchs expanded their territories through conquest and marriage and centralized previously diffuse political power in their own hands. In England, Henry VII in 1485 founded the Tudor dynasty and began uniting a previously divided land. In France, the successors of Charles VII unified the kingdom and established new, more secure sources of revenue. Most successful of all, at least in the short run, were Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. In 1469 they married and combined their kingdoms, thus creating the foundation of a strongly Catholic Spain. In 1492, they defeated the Muslims (who had lived on the Iberian peninsula for centuries) and expelled all Jews from their domain.

The fifteenth century also brought significant technological change to Europe. Movable type and the printing press, invented in Germany in the 1450s, made information more widely and more readily accessible than ever before. Other discoveries led to the development of navigational instruments like the astrolabe, which allowed oceanic sailors to estimate their position by measuring the relationship of sun, moon, or stars to the horizon. Such inventions simultaneously stimulated Europeans' curiosity about fabled lands across the seas and enabled them to think about reaching exotic places by ship. For example, Marco Polo's Travels, which described a Venetian merchant's adventures in thirteenth-century China and reported that that nation was bordered on the east by an ocean, circulated widely amonj; Europe's educated elites after it was printed in 1477, This book led many Europeans to believe that the\ could trade directly with China via ocean-going vesselsinstead of relying on the Silk Road or the trade route through East Africa. That would also allow them to circumvent the Muslim merchants who had hitherto controlled their access to Asian goods.

1.4.3.1.4.3.1.4.3.1.4.3. Motives for the ExplorationMotives for the ExplorationMotives for the ExplorationMotives for the Exploration

Thus the European explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries

were made possible by technological advances and by the financial might of

newly powerful national rulers. But primary motivation for the exploratory

voyages was a desire for direct access to the wealth of the East. That motive

was supported by a secondary concern to spread Christianity around the

world. The linking of materialist and spiritual goals might seem contradictory

today, but fifteenth-century Europeans saw no necessary conflict between the

two. Explorers and colonizers could honestly wish to convert heathen peoples

to Christianity. At the same time they could also hope to increase their

nation's wealth by establishing direct trade with China, India, and the Mo-

luccas, the sources of spices like pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg

(needed to season the bland European diet), silk, dyes, perfumes, jewels, and

gold.

The seafaring Portuguese people, whose land was located on the

southwestern corner of the continent of Europe, began the age of European

expansion in 1415 when they seized control of Ceuta, a Muslim city in North

Africa (see map, page 10). Prince Henry the Navigator, son of King John 1,

realized that vast wealth awaited the first European nation to tap the riches of

Africa and Asia directly. Each year he dispatched ships southward along the

coast of Africa, attempting to discover a passage to the East. Not until after

Prince Henry's death did Bartholomew Dias round the southern tip of Africa

(1488) and Vasco da Gama finally reach India (1498). Long before that, the

Portuguese had established trading posts in Guinea, so that they no longer

needed to use the long trans-Saharan trade route through Timbuktu. They

earned immense profits by transporting African goods swiftly to Europe.

Among their most valuable cargoes were slaves; when they carried African

Muslim prisoners of war back to the Iberian peninsula, the Portuguese

introduced the custom of black slavery into Europe.

1.4.4.1.4.4.1.4.4.1.4.4. CHRISTOPHER CCHRISTOPHER CCHRISTOPHER CCHRISTOPHER COLUMBUSOLUMBUSOLUMBUSOLUMBUS

Spain, with its reinvigorated monarchy, was the next country to sponsor

exploratory voyages, chiefly those of Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sea

captain.

Like other experienced sailors, Columbus believed the world to be


12

round. (Only ignorant folk still thought it was flat.) Where he differed from his

contemporaries was in his estimate of its size. He believed that Japan lay only

3,000 miles from the southern European coast—the distance is actually

12,000 miles—and therefore that it would be easier to reach the East by

sailing west than by making the difficult voyage around the southern tip of

Africa.

After being rejected as a crackpot by the monarchs of France, Portugal,

and England, Columbus sought and received financial backing from Queen

Isabella. Envious of Portuguese successes, she hoped to gain a foothold in

Asia for her nation. On August 3, 1492, with three ships under his command—

the Pinta, the Ntfki, and the Santa Maria—Columbus sailed west from the port

of Palos in Spain. On October 12, he landed on an island in the Bahamas,

which he named San Salvador and claimed for the king and queen of Spain.

Because he thought he had reached the Indies, he called the inhabitants of

the region Indians.

Columbus made three more voyages to the west, during which he

explored most of the major Caribbean islands and sailed along the coasts of

Central and South America. Until the day he died in 1506, Columbus

continued to believe that he had reached Asia. Even before his death, others

knew better. Because the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (who explored the

South American coast in 1499) was the first to publish the idea that a new

continent had been discovered, a mapmaker in 1507 labeled the land

America.

More than five hundred years earlier, Norse explorers had briefly

colonized present-day Newfoundland, but it was the voyages of Columbus

and his successors that finally brought the Old and New Worlds together.

John Cabot (1497), Giovanni da Verrazano (1524), Jacques Cartier (1534),

and Henry Hudson (1609 and 1610) all explored the North American coast

(see map, page 17). They were primarily searching for the legendary,

nonexistent "Northwest Passage" through the Americas, hoping to find an

easy route to the riches of the East. Although they did not attempt to plant

colonies in the Western Hemisphere, their discoveries interested European

nations in the New World for its own sake.

A 1622 English manuscript illustrated the seasonal cycle of work for ordinary farmers. In October, the month shown here, the wise husbandman (farmer) plowed his fields and sowed a crop of winter wheat (which the English called com). Note that these scenes contain only men, showing that the sexual division of labor in European agriculture was quite different from that of the Indians illustrated on -page 7. Folger Shakespeare Library.

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