Apart from their highly popular supernatural series, the publishers of Believe It or Not comics also produced a series on the heroes of world history. Christopher Columbus, naturally, was among them. The imaginatively illustrated comic portrayed Columbus as an intrepid, heroic figure, forerunner of the Great White Explorers, who sails into the unknown to discover a new route to India. He is bankrolled by courageous and virtuous monarchs Isabella or Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon, joint rulers of what later became known as Spain. An ethereal Isabella is shown pawning her jewellery to finance Columbus’ voyage of discovery.
Popular histories are not meant to be taken seriously, of course. All the same, they should not be dismissed out of hand if only because they tend to reflect the received historiography of the day. When the comic on Columbus was produced over four decades ago, it was written from the point of view of an advanced, ascendant West celebrating its technological advancements over an exotic and backward East.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto shows that far from being the hero of a superior white race, Columbus was a low-born Genoese for whom exploration was a short-cut to upward mobility. That desperation for social advancement made him take a risk that explorers at the time would never take — sail with the wind instead of against it (the latter practice assured sailors a journey back home). Europe’s discovery of the New World, which followed Columbus’ first bewildering journey, is less the product of European brilliance and more the result of a convergence of historical forces — or, as the Americans would say, Columbus was the right guy at the right place at the right time.
Nevertheless, as Fernandez-Armesto argues in this book, Columbus’ voyage did prove world-changing. “No single year ever inaugurated anyone’s modernity on its own,” he acknowledges, but he makes the point that “events in 1492 would make a decisive contribution in transforming the planet — not just the human sphere but the entire environment in which human life is embedded — more profoundly and more enduringly than those of any previous single year”.
In the world Fernandez-Armesto profiles at the end of the 15th century, there were few signs of Europe’s ascendancy. The continent was a “backwater, despised or ignored in India, Islam, China and the rest of East Asia and outclassed in wealth, artistry and inventiveness”. Many of the technological inventions of today’s modern world — paper, the concept of paper money, the use of coal for energy, gunpowder, the blast furnace — originated in China. Yet, as Fernandez-Armesto writes, “The rise of western powers to global hegemony was a long-delayed effect of the appropriation of Chinese inventions.”
The Chinese at the time had far more advanced shipbuilding industry than any maritime state and more sturdy ocean-going vessels. Most Chinese merchants traded through the Indian Ocean as far as ports on the east coast of Africa. Why did the Chinese not cross the Pacific to the Americas or sail round the Cape of Good Hope? One reason was that there was nothing the Chinese wanted beyond what they bought and sold in the Indian Ocean basin, so they saw no reason to engage in high risk-taking adventures. The second was the growing instability on China’s western borders around the 1420s as Mongol power revived. With security concerns turning landwards, the Chinese emperor cut maritime budgets sharply, effectively putting an end to official maritime imperialism (Fernandez-Armesto makes the interesting subsidiary point that while the great maritime empires have all declined, China is still here).
As for Arab traders, the “Indian Ocean was an arena of such intense commercial activity and so much wealth that it would have been pointless for indigenous peoples to look for markets or suppliers elsewhere.” Plus, there was a serious shortage of shipping to spare for such ventures. Geography also dictated trade routes. The terrible storms around the Cape of Good Hope and the course of the monsoon winds pinioned the traders into this self-sufficient world of prosperity. As significantly, contemporary geographical knowledge suggested that Europe was locked out of the Indian Ocean by a tongue of land curling at the end of the African continent.
In Europe, on the other hand, the demand for spices was growing. But not, as popular history tells us, to mask the odour of decaying meat and fish. Fernandez-Armesto points out that the food was far fresher in medieval Europe than it is today, and food preservation techniques via salting, freezing, drying and so on were well established. Just as Japanese and French food are de rigueur in India today, “spice-rich cuisine was desirable because it was expensive, flavouring the status of the rich and the ambitions of the aspirant”. Spices were also key ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry.
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Proposals for trans-Atlantic voyages of discovery were not novel either. Much like venture capitalists today, the business climate in southern Europe at the time — lubricated by gold and ivory from Africa and sugar revenues from the newly colonised Canaries — was conducive for financiers to eye riskier ventures. Columbus sailed out on the finances of Spanish and Italian financiers (Isabella merely had an anxious, competitive eye on the gains of Portuguese explorers) and did not actually know where he’d arrived for some years. But the journey of an arriviste was the start of a tradition of trans-Atlantic exploration that created the world we live in today.
1492 may not be steeped in learned theory, but as an entertaining and sensibly written potted history of the medieval world, it’s worth a read if only to refute the dated notions and prejudices of history.
1492: THE YEAR OUR WORLD BEGAN
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Bloombury
321 pages, £12.99
