Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Right from the very beginning, these new lands were wild. The fate of the first garrison Columbus left in Hispaniola in 1493 warned as much. Once the admiral left, his men fell quickly to raiding the local tribes for gold and women, and bickering among themselves. They were soon murdered en masse by a local leader called Caonaobó.55 When Columbus came back to Hispaniola on his second mission, he did not immediately avenge their deaths. But he was no benevolent visitor either. Despite having specific orders not to maltreat the native people, Columbus did so: demanding tribute from them in gold, kidnapping and enslaving them, and building fortresses on their lands.

Columbus’s brute cynicism was founded in the cold reality of virtually every colonial program in history. Cruelty and inhumanity were the handmaidens of imperial expansion. There was no reason why the New World should be any different.

Ovando followed old crusader logic: unbelievers captured in war were fair game to be enslaved.

The blueprint for colonization was taking shape. And it was a far cry from the mood of excited inquisitiveness that had buzzed around the beach at San Salvador when Columbus first came ashore. Any brief age of innocence in the New World was over before it had begun.

By the mid-1520s, Spanish and Portuguese explorers and warriors known as conquistadores were swarming not only across the Caribbean, but also around the continental lands we now know as Mexico, Guatemala, Florida, and coastal Brazil.

Hernán Cortés, the stiff-necked Spaniard who brought back huge quantities of gold from Mexico after his campaigns of 1519–21, in which his troops crushed and overthrew the Aztec empire, deposing and probably murdering its last emperor, Moctezuma II. Some of this gold was the treasure that

Deploying superior technology and weapons, and bringing diseases like smallpox, to which the Indigenous Americans had little or no resistance, the conquistadores swept the ancient realms of the Americas away and established in their place their own transatlantic empires, which they bled in every sense to enhance the glory of their home countries back in Europe.

What they did not do, however, was to solve the fundamental problem that had stood since Ptolemy’s time: whether it was possible to get to the Indies by going west instead of east.

Americas (which were so named in the early sixteenth century for Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator who charted the coast of Brazil in 1501–2).

1497 John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), a Venetian sailor in the pay of the first Tudor king of England, Henry VII, set out from Bristol in search of a “northwest passage” to the Far East. He too hit a buffer, encountering lands that were probably Newfoundland (the region of the old Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows) before he turned back. In 1508–9 Cabot’s son Sebastian made another attempt, sighting what would later be dubbed Hudson Bay before opting to turn south, scouting the north American coastline as far as the Chesapeake.

any closer to a shortcut to the land of the khans.

In 1488, however, a Portuguese captain called Bartholomew Diaz (Bartolomeu Dias) had provided tantalizing evidence that another route might exist. Diaz had been tasked by John II with going farther along the African coastline than any European sailor before him, and in the course of a battle with the seas that lasted nearly eighteen months, he succeeded. In February 1488 he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, which he originally dubbed the Cape of Storms, and went as far as Algoa Bay (the inlet east of Port Elizabeth in modern South Africa)

The name second only to that of Columbus in the history of late medieval navigation is that of Vasco da Gama.

Unlike the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean was a sophisticated and highly developed maritime trading zone; although da Gama’s cannon proved effective defense when they were occasionally required to let them off, gunpowder was old hat, and the Portuguese enjoyed nothing like the technological advantages that had benefited Christopher Columbus.

On May 20 da Gama and his crew reached the coast of southwest India, and anchored in waters just off Calicut (Kozhikode, modern Kerala) on the Malabar Coast.

The Spanish may have led the way in forays to the New World in the west, but the Portuguese were not far behind them.

Taking advantage of trade winds in the Atlantic and monsoon patterns in the Indian Ocean, Portuguese fleets became a regular sight striking out from Lisbon to Cape Verde, southwest to Brazil, back around the southern tip of Africa, and then to India, sometimes through the channel between Mozambique and Madagascar, and at other times around the outside of the latter island.

Sea battles between these European interlopers and merchants native to the Indian Ocean became ever more frequent. But by the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were appointing permanent governors for their outposts on the Indian mainland, and carving out a settlement centered on Goa.

One hundred and fifty years later, the Portuguese had conquered hundreds of miles of the coastline of India, much of Sri Lanka, swaths of modern Bangladesh and Myanmar, and the tiny peninsula and archipelago of Macau, in southern China.

On the other side of the world, meanwhile, they had also taken control of Brazil, the stopping point on the first stage of the Carreira da India. This was, truly, a world empire, in which Portuguese forts, ports, trading stations, factories, and garrisons extended around the known world like a string of pearls.

The voyage that solved the long conundrum of sailing west to end up in the east was undertaken by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who set sail from Seville along the Guadalquivir in August 1519 with the intention of traveling all the way around the world.

Magellan—a secretive and extremely pious man who, like Columbus, constantly misled his crew about where they were going and what he hoped to achieve, did not live to see his journey’s end.

The epic, three-year adventure took its intrepid members across the Atlantic, around the southern tip of South America, and across the Pacific to the Philippines and Indonesia. After Magellan died, during a battle with natives on the island of Mactan, who would not readily accept the Christian faith he was attempting to foist on them, Elcano saw the mission home across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and back to Spain.

The journey took a terrible toll on its participants: of nearly three hundred men who set out, fewer than twenty came home. But it was both an exceptional feat of navigation and a symbolic landmark in human progress all the same. The earth, whose shape and nature had been a matter of speculation and mystery since the beginning of recorded history, was now subject to man’s full purview. And although many places remained unknown and unexplored by westerners—including the Australasian continent, much of central Africa, the Amazon rainforest, the American interior, Antarctica, and the Himalayan peaks—charting these places had become a question that began with the word when, not if or how.

So the voyages of European discovery were one critical factor in bringing the Middle Ages to a close. Besides the geographical and psychological achievement of Magellan’s circumnavigation, they also bore forth a new age of European global empires. Spain and Portugal were the first great maritime powers to start colonizing lands thousands of miles away, but they were followed not long afterward by the English, French, and Dutch, among others.