More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Many Jews chose to head for Constantinople. They were welcomed by the city’s new Muslim rulers. “You call Ferdinand a wise ruler,” Bāyezīd II purportedly exclaimed, greeting the arrival of Jews in the city in 1492, even though “he impoverishes his own country to enrich mine.”
One example of a man who fretted over the future of the faith was Christopher Colón. Although by his own calculations there were still 155 years to go before the Second Coming, Colón was outraged that little more than lip-service was being paid to matters of religion by the “faithful,” and was particularly appalled by Europe’s lack of concern for Jerusalem. With a fervour bordering on obsession, he drew up plans to launch a new campaign to liberate the Holy City,
Three ships set sail from Palos de Frontera in southern Spain on 3 August 1492, less than a month before the end of the world was being anticipated in Russia. As he unfurled his sails and set off into the unknown, little did Colón—more familiar as Christopher Columbus—realise that he was about to do something remarkable: he was about to shift Europe’s centre of gravity from east to west.
The age of empire and the rise of the west were built on the capacity to inflict violence on a major scale. The Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, the progression towards democracy, civil liberty and human rights, were not the result of an unseen chain linking back to Athens in antiquity or a natural state of affairs in Europe; they were the fruits of political, military and economic success in faraway continents.
Now, as Portugal’s ambitions began to grow, so did its might. First, Genoa was squeezed out of the gold trade; then in 1415, after years of planning, Ceuta, a Muslim city on the North African coast, was captured. This was little more than a statement of intent, for it had limited strategic or economic value. If anything, in fact, it proved counter-productive
When Henry the Navigator, the son of the King of Portugal, wrote to the Pope in 1454 to request a monopoly over the navigation of the Atlantic, he said his motivation was to reach “the Indians who, it is said, worship the name of Christ, so that we can…persuade them to come to the aid of the Christians against the Saracens.”
In the 1480s, Diogo Cão discovered the mouth of the River Congo, paving the way for the formal exchange of embassies with the powerful king of the region, who agreed to be baptised. This delighted the Portuguese, who used it to burnish their credentials with the papacy in Rome, especially when the King of Kongo went to war with his enemies carrying a papal banner bearing the sign of the cross.
Portugal guarded its expansion jealously, to the point that when Columbus approached João II around the end of 1484 to fund an expedition to take him westwards across the Atlantic, his proposal fell on deaf ears.
One, ostensibly written by Amerigo Vespucci but either heavily embroidered or more likely a forgery, told how the Italian explorer had been able to acquire “a hundred and nineteen marks of pearls” (around sixty pounds in weight), in exchange for “nothing other than bells, mirrors, glass beads and brass leaves. One [of the natives] traded all the pearls he had for one bell.”
The new arrivals might have admired the idyllic and naive characteristics of the people they encountered, but they were also proud of their instruments of death, which had evolved from centuries of near-incessant fighting against both Muslims and neighbouring Christian kingdoms in Europe.
Cortés exploited the situation perfectly—although stories that his successes stemmed from the Aztecs’ belief that he was the manifestation of the god Quetzalcoatl were later inventions.
So much treasure was being shipped, Charles V was told in 1551, that “this period should more rightly be known as an era dorada”—a Golden Age.
The latter in turn promptly issued heavily incentivised pirate-hunting contracts, known as contra-corsarios, to bring the worst culprits to justice. Those that were successful found rich rewards from the crown, and also considerable fame—such as Pedro Menéndez de Avilés who notched up his prey in the manner of a wartime fighter pilot chalking up kills.
A New World had been discovered overseas, but a new world was also being created at home, one where vibrant new ideas were encouraged, where new tastes were indulged, where intellectuals and scientists jostled and competed for patrons and funding.
The demise of the old imperial capital presented an unmistakable opportunity for the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome to be claimed by new adoptive heirs—something that was done with gusto. In truth, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal and England had nothing to do with Athens and the world of the ancient Greeks, and were largely peripheral in the history of Rome from its earliest days to its demise.
There were already communities of traders from close to home; among the first voices he heard were those speaking in a familiar tongue. “The Devil take you!” shouted one of two Muslim merchants from Tunis who could speak Spanish and Genoese; “what brought you here?!” After exchanging pleasantries, what they said next was music to his ears: “What good fortune you have, what good fortune! There are so many rubies here, so many emeralds! You should give great thanks to God for bringing you to a land where there are such riches!”
News of da Gama’s return home in 1499 was received with a mixture of shock, gloom and hysteria in Venice: one loud voice told all who would listen that the discovery of a sea route to India via southern Africa meant nothing less than the end for the city.
Less than half the 114 ships that passed the southern tip of Africa had returned safely,
the mine at Potosí, high in the Andes in what is now Bolivia, which turned out to be the single largest silver strike in history, accounting for more than half of global production for over a century.
Manila was, in the words of one modern commentator, “the world’s first global city.”
China was able to supply the export market in volume and to step up production accordingly.
The second reason why so much money flowed into China was an imbalance in the relationship between precious metals. In China, silver’s value hovered around an approximate ratio to gold of 6:1, significantly higher than in India, Persia or the Ottoman Empire; its value was almost double its pricing in Europe in the early sixteenth century. In practice, this meant that European money bought more in Chinese markets and from Chinese traders than it did elsewhere—which in turn provided a powerful incentive to buy Chinese.
What Adam Smith did not say in 1776, however, is how England fitted into the equation. For if the century that followed the discoveries of the 1490s belonged to Spain and Portugal, with the fruits showered on the empires of the east, then the next 200 years would belong to countries in the north of Europe. Against all expectations, the world’s centre of gravity was about to move again. This time it would belong to a Britain that was about to become Great.
Stories spread quickly through Protestant Europe, noting the Spaniards’ grisly treatment of those whom they believed to be their inferiors. The analogy was obvious: the Spanish were natural-born oppressors who behaved towards others with ominous cruelty; given the chance, they would persecute those closer to home in just the same way.
The effects of the flood of riches were felt elsewhere. As it was, there had been a price revolution across Europe as inflation took hold thanks to the money flow from the Americas, which naturally led to more and more consumers chasing a finite quantity of goods. Growing urbanisation exacerbated the problem, driving prices higher still. In Spain, the price of grain alone quintupled in the century after Columbus’ discoveries.
From the 1550s, as the English built quicker and stronger warships, the Dutch focused their efforts on developing vessels that handled even better, could carry more cargo, required fewer crew to operate—and were therefore cheaper to run. These ships, called fluyts, set a new benchmark for commercial shipping.
The Dutch did their homework and were well prepared when they set sail. While their European predecessors who had crossed the Atlantic and rounded the Cape of Good Hope were journeying into the unknown, the Dutch were not. They knew what they were looking for and where to find it.
The creation of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC)—the East Indies Company—and not long afterwards the sister corporation for the Americas, the West-Indische Compagnie (WIC)—the West Indies Company—was a textbook example of how to set up a world-class multinational corporation.
The influence of the Silk Roads began to be felt in the arts. A thriving ceramics industry blossomed in Haarlem, Amsterdam and above all in Delft, heavily influenced by the look, feel and design of items imported from the east. Chinese visual themes dominated, while the characteristic blue and white wares developed centuries earlier by
With demand increasing for objects that helped show status, the arts in general in the Netherlands flourished. Some have suggested that 3 million paintings were produced in the seventeenth century alone.
It was inevitable that this would stimulate new ideas and also raise standards, providing a context for painters like Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer to create works of breathtaking beauty.
The Dutch Golden Age was the result of a finely executed plan. It also had the benefit of being well timed, coming at a time when much of Europe was in disarray, engaged in endless rounds of costly and inconclusive military hostility which engulfed the continent during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48.
But it was Europe’s entrenched relationship with violence and militarism that allowed it to place itself at the centre of the world after the great expeditions of the 1490s.
The effective conquest of Bengal marked a signal moment in so far as it changed Britain from being a country that supported colonies of its own émigrés to becoming a domain that ruled other peoples.
As prices rose in London, sparking protests at home, it seemed obvious to Marx that Britain’s imperialist policies were being dictated by a small elite and came at the expense of the masses. Communism was not born of the Crimean War, but it was certainly sharpened by it.
The problem was Russia and the Tsar. Apart from harking back to imperial Rome (the word Tsar is a simple contraction of “Caesar),” the Tsar’s formal title in all its glory when used in official correspondence and on formal occasions made reference to an elaborate and lengthy list of the territories that he lorded over.
The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the connection with the Chinese Eastern Railway, led to an immediate boom in trade, with volumes nearly trebling between 1895 and 1914.
The problem was that Germany was poorly located geographically to gain access to the Atlantic and to trade with the Americas, Africa and Asia; Hitler therefore set his sights on the east. Behind his decision to reconcile with the Soviet Union was the idea that this would give him access to his very own Silk Road.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muḥammad al-Ḥusaynī, had welcomed the rise of a man he later referred to as “al-ḥajj Muḥammad Hitler.” The German leader’s anti-Semitic views were grist to the mill of a man happy to call for the death of Jews, whom he referred to as “scum and germs.”
Among those flying in the raids in the second half of 1941 was a young fighter pilot who later recalled coming in low to catch a Sunday-morning cocktail party of French airmen and “a bunch of girls in brightly coloured dresses” in full swing. Glasses, bottles and high heels flew everywhere as the British fighters attacked and all took cover. It was “wonderfully comical,” wrote the pilot of one of the Hurricanes—a certain Roald Dahl.
Hitler plunged into despair as the realisation of what was happening dawned on him. A classified British report revealed that in a speech given on 26 April 1942, despite the apparent successes in the east, the German leader was betraying clear signs of paranoia and fatalism, together with growing evidence of what was termed a Messiah complex.
By the time of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, it was thought that Israel had built up an arsenal of thirteen nuclear devices.63 The
“I think the Iranians pose a major threat without any question to the countries of the Middle East,” the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, was quoted as saying in July 1982; “they are a country run by a bunch of madmen.”90
The consequences proved catastrophic. Over the course of the next three decades, global affairs would be dominated by events in countries running across the spine of Asia. The struggle for control and influence in these countries produced wars, insurrections and international terrorism—but also opportunities and prospects, not just in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in a belt of countries stretching east from the Black Sea, from Syria to Ukraine, Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, and from Russia
The story of the world has always been centred on these countries. But since the time of the invasion of Kuwait, everything has been about the emergence of the New Silk Road.
The age of the west is at a crossroads, if not at an end.
While we ponder where the next threat might come from, how best to deal with religious extremism, how to negotiate with states who seem willing to disregard international law, and how to build relations with peoples, cultures and regions about whom we have spent little or no time trying to understand, networks and connections are quietly being knitted together across the spine of Asia; or rather, they are being restored. The Silk Roads are rising again.
