Anyone looking at the Mediterranean basin in the middle years of the fifteenth century would have seen a curious mix of the dynamic and the routine. Politically and militarily, the region was in turmoil. Ottoman troops were encircling Byzantium and preparing to move in for the kill. And just as they stood poised to end the final chapter in the millennial history of the Roman Empire, Ottoman religious leaders prepared to assume control of the community of Islamic nations. These sweeping political changes took place against a stable but sharply divided agricultural and ecological backdrop. On the European and Christian side of the sea, the traditions of peasant farming dominated. Landlords had minimal control over cultivation of the fields and forests that they held but in important senses did not own. Agricultural and ecological decisions remained primarily in the hands of informal community leaders who were strongly bound by tradition. Cultivation in this region was what eighteenth-century critics later labeled subsistence agriculture, meaning that it sufficed to feed the people who worked the fields and produced enough extra to feed the landed classes and the tiny urban populations. Ecologically the region was in balance. There were good years and bad years, but crops were usually large enough to meet the nutritional needs of the region’s relatively small population. Cultivation was sustainable; cropping techniques kept the land from deteriorating and, in many cases, enhanced its fertility. It was certainly not the best of times from a cultural or political point of view, but by and large, the human community of the region lived in balance with its ecological resource base. The First Nature consensus was active on the land.
Agriculture on the Islamic side of the sea was decidedly different, but the ecological fit was about the same. Crops were more diverse, urban populations were larger, and a landlord’s control over the harvest, which typically yielded cash, was much greater. The Islamic region’s ability to recover from the devastations of the Mongol invasions gives important evidence of the continued ecological soundness of its agricultural regime. While the methods for ensuring harmony between the community and the resource base were very different from those practiced in the Christian regions of the littoral, the human impact on the region’s ecology appears to have been about the same all around the sea.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, the resolute actions of a small country at the sea’s western extreme turned the status quo on its head. Marginalized within a regional economy where power and wealth were concentrated at the far eastern end of the Mediterranean, Portugal took the lead in what became a decisive power shift when it launched a series of top-secret Atlantic voyages. Those voyages changed the character not just of the Mediterranean region but of the entire world. Although it is more usual to speak of the political, social, and economic implications of these voyages, world agriculture and ecology also experienced enormous changes as a consequence. New crops and radically new ways of exploiting land and labor increased the nutritional base—and the human population—while they eroded the First Nature balance between human communities and the landscapes on which they had long depended. The age of discovery, which was the starting point of the modern era, opened hostilities in the prolonged modern conflict between agriculture and ecology.
Under the sponsorship of Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese explorers pushed ever farther south on the west coast of the African continent. The hazardous journeys, which grew in length and scope with each successive sailing, tested and expanded naval technology. The passion that drove Prince Henry to expend his time, energy, and wealth on this series of Atlantic probes is in some ways as obscure as the record of the voyages themselves. His immediate and pragmatic motive was dominance in the African gold trade. Portugal had captured the North African town of Ceuta in 1415. The town was a haven for Moroccan pirates who harried Christian shipping in the fifteenth century. Depriving them of this important base of operations bought some security for Portuguese shipping. Ceuta was also an important market for the trans-African gold dust trade, which originated in Central Africa and flowed by various caravan routes across the Sahara to a handful of Mediterranean ports. Once the Portuguese captured Ceuta, Muslim traders took their precious commodity elsewhere. One of the clear goals of African exploration, then, was to make an end run around the trans-Saharan trade network and tap into the gold pipeline at or near its source, wherever that might prove to be.
The more abstract motive of the prince and his sailors reflected the crusading mentality that had served the Portuguese and the Spanish as they recaptured their home territories from the Muslim occupiers. As they saw it, sending Portuguese sailors and traders into Africa extended the boundaries of Christ’s kingdom on earth. With luck they might create a hedge of Christian kingdoms around the borders of European Christendom. Instead, as everyone knows, the enterprise of conversion matured into a campaign of brutal conquest, exploitation, and mass enslavement. As the Portuguese ports of trade stretched south along the Atlantic coast, the riches of Africa, including men, women, and children, flowed northward to European ports. In 1532, when the first slave ships reached the Portuguese colony of Brazil, the slave trade in the Americas began; its horrors convulsed the world for the next three centuries; its aftershocks are still felt today.
The typical Mediterranean vessel was built for the sailing conditions of the inland sea, which were often challenging but less severe than those of the ocean. The Portuguese Atlantic voyages required ships capable of surviving swells that were considerably larger than those encountered on the Mediterranean, winds and currents that were stronger, weather that was less predictable and more violent. The first oceangoing vessels of the Portuguese were caravels. These were small ships, with keels and multiple masts fitted with triangular sails that favored maneuverability over speed. They had high, castle-like poop decks that both provided increased space on board and protected the ship from being washed over by wind-driven waves from behind. Unlike many Mediterranean vessels of the era, which were steered by oars, the caravels had a submerged rudder behind the keel that could be turned from the deck.1
The Portuguese established landfalls in West Africa as they pushed south in the age of exploration.
As the sailing range of the ships and the experience of the sailors grew, the Portuguese developed even heavier craft called carracks. These larger vessels had two forward masts with square sails but retained the triangular sail on their rearmost mizzen mast. The new configuration increased speed in favorable winds. The multiple small sails could be worked one or two at a time by a relatively small crew. These new ships were bigger and so able to carry more goods to trade and greater supplies of food and water, which allowed for longer continuous voyages. They were also fitted with cannon, and their crews and officers were heavily armed.
Coastal sailing was the norm in the Mediterranean in the fifteenth century, as it had been in the Roman era. To avoid treacherous currents near shore and to take advantage of prevailing winds, the Portuguese Africa fleet often sailed well out of sight of land. With no landmarks to follow, navigators learned to depend on increasingly sophisticated instruments and the careful notations of voyagers who had come before them. With each successive trial, the Portuguese expanded the range of their charts. Since their maps included information known nowhere else in the world at that time, they were vigilantly guarded. Death was the penalty for betraying their secrets. Disinformation in the form of false charts and incorrect readings fill today’s archives and make it almost impossible to tease out the voyages’ true extent and chronology.
Some details are clear. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of the African continent and explored its eastern coast. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama embarked with a fleet of ships that traded along the East African coast before setting out on a northeast bearing to sail the six hundred nautical miles across the Indian Ocean. This voyage finally achieved the supreme goal, one the Portuguese could hardly have hoped for from the start: a chance to break into the East Asian luxury trade, which had long passed from Arab ships to Venetian galleys. Circumventing the eastern Mediterranean and reaching India directly, Dias cut out both Arab and Venetian middlemen. His voyage and those that came after it established safe ports for the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.
In 1509 a mixed Muslim fleet that included ships of the Ottoman sultan and the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and forces from two Indian sultanates tried to drive the Portuguese away from India. Venetian captains advised them. Off the Indian city of Diu, a Portuguese fleet of eighteen heavily armed carracks took on a mixed fleet of generally smaller craft. Though more maneuverable, the smaller ships of the Muslim alliance were outgunned by the Portuguese. Adapted for near-shore sailing, these small ships rode low in the water, and the Portuguese ships towered over them. Arab boarding parties could not reach the decks of the taller ships. When their boats sailed in under the Portuguese cannon, the men aboard became targets for small arms fire from marines towering over them.
The decisive defeat by the Portuguese of a technologically inferior force at Diu ended Arab control of the Indian Ocean. After that, Muslim shipbuilding lagged behind European shipbuilding. European seafaring technology was more advanced. The Portuguese expanded their colonial outposts and gained control over the Strait of Malacca, between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea (Pacific Ocean), a major choke point on the east-west ocean routes. After that, trade in the Indian Ocean passed to a succession of Atlantic-based sea powers. As early as the sixteenth century, it became all too clear to Asian rulers that no indigenous power could dislodge a European occupier; only another European fleet could do that. While Islam remained the dominant religion in the area, Christian Europeans controlled international trade. The Ottoman Empire, which in 1515 overwhelmed the Egyptian Mamluks and seized control of the whole of North Africa, was the biggest loser.
While the Portuguese were exploring the African coast, Spanish explorers, intent on an even wider end run around Arab-Venetian control of east-west trade, had stumbled on a new continent. Spanish adventurers grabbed the gold of the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs. Although Portuguese diplomats negotiating in the papal court were able to secure a share of South American territory, they did not gain the immediate wealth that Spain enjoyed. Within a few decades, Spain’s golden bonanza made the country rich beyond the dreams of avarice. In the long run, however, the wealth proved more a curse than a blessing. Spain did not invest in new technologies or new industries. To make matters worse, the increased gold and silver reserves from the New World drove up the cost of goods across Europe. Inflation put special pressures on agriculture, which faced higher costs but had limited means of increasing prices.2
In the short run, the wealth of the New World spurred ambitions in the Spanish monarchy that were played out in colonization in the Americas and in a series of territorial wars in Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Dutch were among the first to feel the might of a newly energized Spain. The Low Countries were possessions of Hapsburg rulers who came to power in Spain early in the sixteenth century. Rebellions against Spanish dominance brought eighty years of warfare during which the Dutch fleet grew both in imitation of and in opposition to the Spanish armada. The Dutch made small but important gains in the New World, but they had lasting success in East Asia, and they replaced the Portuguese at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Indian Ocean. Throughout much of the seventeenth century, centralized, monopolistic Dutch trading companies—especially the Dutch East India Company—dominated the world market in nutmeg, mace, cloves, and cinnamon. They came close to monopolizing the trade in pepper. This group of spices and a few others were the heart of a trade that had for a thousand years passed along corridors that Muslim rulers controlled. Revenues from this trade were exceptionally high.
Sometime allies of the Dutch against the Spanish, the English became major rivals of their cross-Channel neighbors in the seventeenth century. The English East India Company was founded a few years before the Dutch enterprise, but the latecomers were clear winners in the final competition. Officially the rivalry ended in 1688, when a Dutch prince, William of Orange and Nassau, became the new English king. In reality, the economic competition persisted and reached its resolution only in the eighteenth century, when income from the British trade with India exceeded the value of the Dutch spice trade.
Opinion about the age of exploration, for centuries a source of pride in Europe, has within a single lifetime undergone a polar change. What was once labeled discovery has been downgraded to rediscovery. Indigenous peoples were there to greet Da Gama and Columbus, so in what sense can Europeans be called discoverers of what others already knew? For many regions of the world, European “discovery” opened the way to subjection, decimation, and despair. Exploration all too quickly led to epidemic diseases and the imposition of European control over native peoples. Still, for good or ill, the age of exploration remains a turning point in world and Mediterranean history, comparable in its effects to the greatest revolutions in human society, the Neolithic Revolution and industrialization.
The Levantine Neolithic Revolution, along with others in south China and northern South America, were rare, isolated moments when native plants were transformed in significant ways. First the plants were taken from their wild environment and transformed into crops. Then those crops were disseminated throughout the contiguous areas where climate allowed them to grow. When domestic plants and animals reached the edges of their tolerance for heat, cold, or dryness, or faced geographical barriers like deserts, mountains, and oceans, their dispersal stopped. The plants and animals of the Mediterranean Neolithic colonized all of Europe and the islands of the Atlantic, along with West and South Asia. The high steppe, desert, and mountain habitats of Central Asia did not support the cultivation of temperate climate crops, so the wave of advance of the Mediterranean Neolithic halted at their edges.
The domesticates of south China circulated through East Asia and the island archipelagos of the Pacific. A slow trickle of domesticates from the south Chinese Neolithic made their way westward for millennia, traveling overland on the long and twisting Silk Road or by sea through the equally tortuous routes from east to west. Whichever path a good happened to travel, it passed through the hands of many merchants and rested in the saddlebags or cargo holds of a number of carriers before it reached its final destination. The powers in every region through which these products passed enacted some kind of tax or tariff, adding greatly to the cost. Every good traded over these transcontinental routes needed to be small, light, and precious.
The sites of Neolithic Revolutions—where plants and animals were domesticated—are few and scattered.
Under the restraints that limited east-west trade before the Renaissance, Asian domesticates could not play the same fundamental role in the west that they did in the east. Still, there had always been a trickle of commerce linking the Mediterranean and the south Chinese Neolithics; but before the Age of Discovery, European conquest, and colonization, products of the South American Neolithic were completely isolated from the other two. Based principally on the cultivation of corn (maize), squash of various kinds, beans, and potatoes, the South American Neolithic spread in the pre-conquest era from its base in northeastern South America to the ocean boundaries of the two American continents.3
During the sixteenth century, international shipping erased these millennial boundaries, and domesticates spread through every region where climate allowed their cultivation. The geography that had limited crop dispersal was replaced in the age of exploration by an ocean-based world geography whose limiting factors were climate and soil rather than the accidents of domestication history. The spread of domesticates transformed cultures and enriched the whole world’s nutritional resources, and the result was an upsurge in world population.
In the classic book The Columbian Exchange, Alfred W. Crosby described both the benefits and the costs of commerce between the Old World and the New. Diseases like smallpox that ravaged New World communities were the most devastating of the unintended imports that Spanish explorers brought with them, and the suffering and death these diseases caused to unprotected communities worldwide has been well documented. Crosby also pointed out the number of domesticated plants and animals that reached the New World with the conquerors. These imports benefited not only European colonists but indigenous peoples. Horses, which reached the North American heartland well ahead of the Europeans who had imported them, transformed the lives of Plains Indians. It gave them a new and more effective way to hunt bison and a potent cultural symbol around which to build a distinctive way of life. In the Southwest, the Navaho lifestyle was completely reshaped around sheepherding. Sheep, like horses, were brought by the Spanish.
In the Old World, imported crops became cultural icons as well as dietary staples. The Irish potato famine was a tragic episode in the generally beneficial history of the New World root vegetable introduced into the European diet. Throughout northern Europe, the potato provided more nutrients per acre than the cold-climate grains—principally oats and barley—that had been the dietary staples before its importation.
In the Mediterranean region, the impact of new domesticates and imported commodities was also revolutionary. Consider the tomato. Given its prominence in southern Italian cooking and in the international versions of Italian food, it is impossible to imagine it as anything but native to Italy. In fact, the tomato is native to South America. From there, cultivation spread north to Mexico, where the Aztecs named it xitomatl. Spanish colonists brought the fruit and the last three syllables of its name to Europe in the mid-sixteenth century. At that time, the Spanish royal house of Aragon controlled Sicily and southern Italy with Naples as their capital. The nearby town of San Marzano, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, is still home to the most highly prized Italian tomatoes.
The “Columbian exchange”—Crosby’s term, now widely adopted, for the exchanges of plants, animals, diseases, technology, and culture between the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic—provided many new crops to the Mediterranean region, but other domesticates reached the Mediterranean at about the same time through newly forged sea links to the east. Coffee, native to Ethiopia, was cultivated in Yemen as early as the fifteenth century. Its name in Arabic, qahwah, was originally a poetic epithet for the wine that Islam prohibited. Nonalcoholic coffee was an approved stimulant that came to be widely used by Sufi mystics. The beans were used medicinally in Venice by the end of the sixteenth century, and by 1640 coffee was being roasted, brewed, and served in specialty shops there that became the first cafés in Europe. The taste for coffee spread through the rest of the continent, and coffee plantations around the world soon augmented the supply that had made its way through the Ottoman and Venetian trading networks. Coffee was introduced to Europe through Mediterranean trade but was transformed into a widely used commodity by the network of colonial shipping and transplantation. Each culture that adopted coffee produced something like the coffee shop, but as any European traveler knows, the ambience and the favorite brew differ markedly from country to country.
Two of the best-loved foods of northern Italy are also imports. Polenta, a thick corn porridge to which multiple flavors can be added, is a favorite of northern Italian cooks. Corn entered the Italian diet from the New World. Rice came from the opposite side of the world. The Romans had imported small quantities from India, and Muslim farmers cultivated it in sites around the Mediterranean Sea. With the Christian reconquest of Muslim-held lands, however, rice cultivation disappeared in Europe until it was reintroduced in the fifteenth century.
Although potatoes, tomatoes, and corn (maize) easily adapted to European gardens, rice was an altogether different crop. Rice is a grass, and it can be cultivated like oats or wheat in dry fields, but yields are much greater in a wet environment like the rice paddies of East Asia. Creating this special environment where it had never existed before required many departures from tradition. As we saw in Chapter 9, Christian Mediterranean agriculture was bound by all sorts of rights, privileges, and customs. The peasants who worked the land had well-established ways of assigning and reassigning cropland, long-held views about how and what to plant, and controlled systems for guaranteeing the fertility of their soils. Innovations occurred, but they were slow to be adopted.
Cultivating rice on irrigated fields that were periodically drowned and periodically drained was not part of the tradition of the peasant cultivators of the Po Valley of northern Italy. To get them to do this unusual work required a new and more vigorous form of social control. This control was provided by despotic rulers—the Visconti of Milan—or capitalist managers from Venice. During the Renaissance, the despots of Milan were extending their reach into the Po Valley, and Venice was stepping up its conquests on the Italian mainland. As conquerors rather than traditional landowners, overlords from both cities were able to impose forms of social control and labor organization that overrode the rights and privileges of workers. By all accounts, this new form of management was not just demanding but abusive. Within twenty-five years of the first evidence of rice cultivation in the Po Valley, there are reports that rice workers, including many women and some children, were enduring long hours and miserable conditions in the fields.
Unlike traditional medieval agriculture, rice cultivation required a substantial capital investment. Land had to be acquired and fields combined so that a suitable cultivation environment could be created. Though the Po Valley was well watered, it was still necessary to acquire water rights to the natural flows and to the many canals that cut across the region. Bringing the water to the rice fields required ditches and channels to be cut, maintained, and skillfully managed. None of this work was cheap, none of it was self-sustaining, and none fell within the traditional obligations that peasants owed to their landlords. In addition to capital, the rice fields required labor on an unprecedented scale in a region that had been only marginally productive before.4 As with the preparation of infrastructure, cultivation was also labor-intensive; throughout the growing season, large numbers of workers were employed. These characteristics of rice production meant that the grain had to be an economic commodity; it could not simply be another part of the subsistence agriculture of the Christian Middle Ages. The requirements of its production—capital investment, wage labor, and a cash market—were all novel and all pointless if the crop did not return a profit.
Rice cultivation transformed landscapes and overrode traditional labor rights. The owners of the fields did not respect the region’s traditions or its ecology. In many ways, rice cultivation was a harbinger of things to come. It embodied a new sense of property, in which ownership implied absolute and unconstrained freedom of use—the right to unlimited exploitation. In most of Christian Europe an absolute sense of property with its attendant disregard for ecological limits and cultural traditions would not emerge until the eighteenth century.
Rice cultivation in the Po Valley also disenfranchised labor. Rice farmers were workers for hire, not peasants with inalienable rights of tenancy and a protected place in the manorial economy. This change of status led to immediate exploitation. The fact that ecological abuse and the exploitation of labor so often go hand in hand is evident from this first example. But rice remained a niche crop. It was not cultivated in many places, so the influence of the new agricultural regime that transformed the Po Valley was extremely limited. Only portions of Spain and southern France were involved in rice growing before the eighteenth century.
Rice had the power to reshape agriculture and dismantle regional ecologies, to undo, in short, the traditional practices that sustained First Nature. But sugar was the crop that changed the world. Sugarcane is a domesticated version of a plant that probably originated in New Guinea but is now extinct in the wild. The crop was certainly cultivated in India and East Asia during the first millennium BCE and perhaps earlier. Herodotus mentions sugarcane. When the armies of Alexander the Great reached India, stalks of the plant and small quantities of sugar were sent back to the west.
In Alexander’s era, sugar was brown and strongly flavored, but during the seventh century CE, Sasanian farmers and agronomists improved the refining process and produced sugar that was white and had a more intense sweetness. Their improbable process involved the use of ground limestone and bullock’s blood. These two additives captured impurities, which could then be skimmed off the boiling syrup. A second boiling with egg white gave the sugar a snowy sparkle. The syrup was then poured into conical molds, which produced loafs that were hard enough to endure rough transport.
Sugar was a highly desirable product, but its labor-intensive refinement and the cost of transporting a heavy commodity over the great distances that separated the canefields from the final consumers made sugar a luxury good. Muslim farmers grew sugarcane in Sicily and Spain, but the crop was abandoned when Christians reconquered these areas. Muslim canefields in the Levant had a different and far more consequential fate. When crusader knights gained a foothold in Palestine during the twelfth century, they became military rulers over towns and villages where sugar was grown and refined. The crop was as capital- and labor-intensive as rice, and work in the canefields was both difficult and unpleasant. Slaves, who did not commonly do agricultural work in any part of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, worked in the Levantine sugar fields and processing mills. The crusaders recognized a good thing when they stumbled on it, and rather than suppress sugar cultivation or substitute crops from back home, they stepped into the role of the Muslim landowners they had ousted. In Spain and Sicily farmers refused to work newly captured Muslim canefields, so they fell into disuse. In the Levant, where workers were less autonomous, Christian landlords reaped the benefits.
As Muslim armies fought back, the crusaders’ descendants lost their foothold in West Asia. Displaced sugar barons looked for new places where they could successfully grow the exceptionally lucrative crop. They took with them what they understood of sugar cultivation in the Levant. This included the most exploitative features of the cane culture, but it did not include those practices that had made the crop, along with other Muslim crops that were intensively cultivated, sustainable over the long term. Cyprus remained in Christian hands until 1570, and the Venetians made good use of the island as a producer of sugar. They established and exploited large plantations there and built sophisticated special-purpose refineries.5
Sugar production required capital and also political leverage; money by itself would not have been enough. In Cyprus, Venetian investment was supported by a monarchy that was sustained financially and diplomatically by the government. Building refineries, keeping them staffed with workers and stocked with the wood required for the repeated boiling of the sugar syrup was expensive. Paying workers and imposing onerous forms of labor on them was a necessity of the business, too, and here again the combination of finance and political muscle was crucial. Finally, bringing the finished product to consumers required merchant ships and naval security in the eastern Mediterranean, along with access to European markets. The Venetians had all of these in spades. When the Ottoman Turks finally deprived Venice of Cyprus, they struck an ultimately fatal blow to their empire and their financial viability.
When victorious Muslim forces drove Christian lords from the eastern Mediterranean, the sugar crop and its technologies moved further west. Although many sites were tried, sugar production eventually took hold most strongly not within the Mediterranean itself but on its fringes, in Atlantic islands that had been first discovered in the fourteenth century. For a while the Canary Islands were the center of Christian sugar production; they were eventually displaced by Madeira, where the crop was more successful. Columbus brought sugarcane to the New World in 1493, and its cultivation on Hispaniola initiated the long reign of sugar in the Caribbean.
Like rice, sugar was an agricultural crop that Mediterranean powers transplanted from one world region to another. Sugar became the first colonial crop, and the way it was financed, cultivated, and traded during the sixteenth century set the pattern for the other great colonial commodities that followed: rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, coffee, cocoa, and tea. Sugar cultivation was the beta version of the international plantation economy. The plantation system, which relied on large field monoculture, slave labor, and international transport and finance was a form of land and labor exploitation that paved the way for the later adoption of these ecologically and ethically unsound practices worldwide.
The distinctive patterns of plantation agriculture that sugar pioneered have unmistakable Mediterranean roots, but sugar cultiation in the Christian Mediterranean itself was marginal primarily because it violated norms of medieval agriculture there. When settlers migrate to new lands, they typically bring their crops and farming traditions with them. The farmers who settled New England brought their wheat, rye, and barley, their horses, oxen, and milk cows, their bees, and even their weeds with them. Once settled, they did their best to re-create the English agricultural landscape they had grown up in. Early Spanish settlers did much the same thing. In Cuba, for example, they first cultivated olives, wheat, and grapes. These crops were not successful. The soil, moisture, and temperatures in Cuba did not favor them, yet the few colonists persisted, just as New England farmers did until the richer soils of the newly opened Midwest drew them away.
Subsistence agriculture was viable in the colonial homelands, where peasants could support themselves and grow a little extra to feed others. In the colonies, however, subsistence was not enough. Sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese colonies were not meant to provide new homes for European migrants. There was no excess population in Mediterranean Europe during the sixteenth century as there would be later on, and both Spanish and Portuguese exploration was driven by economics. Voyages of exploration were unaffordable unless a way could be found to make them self-supporting and, if at all possible, profitable. The gold of the Incas temporarily solved this problem for Spain. What made colonialism profitable in regions without stores of precious metals was plantation agriculture.
The Portuguese were the most successful early explorers, establishing themselves in both the east and the west. Though their international dominance was short-lived, they briefly held all the key pieces in their hands, pieces that they would assemble into a virulent package that would serve as the model for every future colonial plantation economy. By the sixteenth century, sugar producers had evolved tried-and-true methods for every phase of crop management, from planting through milling, concentration, and distribution. They had shown, too, that sugar production could be moved from one place to another.
During the course of the African explorations, the Portuguese added the final fatal ingredient to the package. The island of São Tomé off the West African coast served the Portuguese as a safe haven from which they could trade with the Kingdom of the Kongo. As the slave trade increased in volume and importance, and as its productive center shifted south along the African coast, this island became the headquarters of all facets of the Portuguese African venture. Sugar cultivation began there soon after Portugal colonized it in 1485, making the island the first site in the world where sugar production and African slavery were combined.
In the sixteenth century, Portugal reorganized its colonial government in Brazil and put control of territories there into the hands of entrepreneurial captains with unlimited rights to land and water and nearly absolute political authority. The captains in Bahia and Pernambuco in the Brazilian north soon put themselves in the sugar business. At first they worked the plantations with Indian slaves, but by the end of the sixteenth century, Africans brought directly across the South Atlantic became their major labor force. Once in Brazil, slaves were set to work in plantations where landlords controlled every aspect of their lives. Though their role was essentially economic—they were laborers, after all—the regime in which their labor was exploited was also a political one. Slaves had no recourse against an owner who held both an economic monopoly and absolute judicial authority. As in the rice economy of the Po Valley, the master had complete control over the conduct of a workforce without rights or traditions that in any way limited or mitigated his control.
This economic and labor-control system, developed and honed in Brazil, was exported either directly or as a model to every other region of the Americas where colonial crops were cultivated on a large scale. Sugar cultivation, which had always leapt from one locale to another as market and labor conditions dictated, predictably spread from Brazil to the Caribbean. On the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere, the plantation system of Brazil proved highly adaptable and highly profitable. Sugar was never a major colonial crop in the United States, but the plantation pattern was suited to other crops as well. Along the Carolina coast, plantation owners with huge slave forces cultivated rice and indigo. In the mid-Atlantic states, similar methods were used to cultivate tobacco. Cotton was the last of the colonial crops to be widely adopted; its colonial exploitation had to wait for the development of a mechanical means for separating the seeds from the lint of the cotton boll.
On the cusp of the revolutionary change that discovery and colonization created, one country spearheaded an intellectual and cultural flowering. Beginning in the late thirteenth century, northern Italy, especially Tuscany, underwent a social revolution with a widespread impact. Though the term “Renaissance” is now in disrepute among scholars, the marked change in outlook that was once routinely signaled by that word cannot be dismissed so easily. The Tuscan city of Florence has long been seen as the origin of the multiple phenomena that make up the Renaissance. In 1100 it was one of many European centers of luxury cloth production. Florentine merchants sold their wares in seasonal markets throughout Europe. Since there were Florentine traders in many parts of the world, it became something of a matter of course for these merchants to extend credit to each other wherever they might be. The Florentine international banking industry grew from this relatively simple habit, based largely on transferable letters of credit. Other Italian cities were soon active in the credit business, and before the fourteenth century was old, Italian bankers were financing commerce throughout Europe and North Africa. When they extended credit to political leaders, their power and influence grew, along with the volatility of their investments.
Florence, Milan, Venice, and other northern Italian cities soon began to include merchants of enormous wealth among their citizens. What distinguished the wealthy of Florence and Venice from those in many other places was their ability to transform money into political power and their adoption of new and unprecedented ways to display and use their riches. Florence was an early leader in the creation of public architecture and city planning. Along with improvements in the urban fabric, Florentine commercial wealth financed a revolution in painting and sculpture. Both revolutions were attuned not only to the world of spirituality, as earlier Christian art had been, but also, for the first time since the Roman Empire, to the experiences and characteristics of the material world. Working with the newly invented or rediscovered (the evidence is unclear) art of perspective, Renaissance sculptors and painters created an increasingly refined representation of the landscapes of daily life.
The city of Florence had always been linked to the countryside around it: the food that nourished citizens came from fields and pastures nearby. But in the case of Florence, the relationship was individualized and intimate. Most city people had a country village somewhere in their past, and most maintained some ties with their home place. When people of even modest means migrated to the city, they held on to their village properties if they could. Country real estate was a popular form of investment for anyone who could afford it. The rents on farms, orchards, and vineyards often came in the form of produce, and at different seasons of the year, a city family might venture out into the countryside to collect their annual dues of olive oil, wine, or pork.6
The wealthiest Florentine merchant families followed that pattern; country real estate was one of their most common forms of investment. The interdependence of urban and agricultural life was celebrated in particular Florentine fashion by the creation of country estates that combined functional agriculture with refined leisure in a setting designed to encourage appreciation of the productive landscape. Like the estates of the Romans that once dotted the Mediterranean countryside, the Renaissance Italian villa was a glorified country house that linked agriculture and recreation. For the first time since the classical period, farming and the landscape that nourished the human community captured the attention of the wealthiest and most influential social class.7 The First Nature conception appealed to the wealthy and powerful just as it was being expressed by artists of ability.
Early in the fifteenth century, Cosimo de’ Medici bought a large farm near the little town of Careggi. After he consolidated political control over the city of Florence in 1434, he had the property remodeled. Throughout the fifteenth century, the Medicis and other prominent Florentine merchant families repeated the process. The same sort of sites were favored again and again, and each house “was set right in the midst of its podere, or farm, usually in an olive grove.”8 As the Medicis gained power in Rome in the fifteenth century, they commissioned villas in the papal city as well. The Villa Medici still overlooks Rome from the Pincian Hill a little north of the Spanish Steps. The Villa Madama, designed by the painter Raphael for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, survives on its original site above the Vatican, but in a stripped-down form. The Este, Torlonia, Aldobrandini, and other prominent families built elaborate villas on the city’s outskirts and in sites farther afield.
The Villa Lante, one of the most celebrated Renaissance villas, was associated with two papal families, the Riario, relatives of Pope Sixtus IV, and the Montalto family of Sixtus V. Built far from Rome in the country outside Viterbo, the villa was under construction throughout much of the sixteenth century. It remained papal property until the nineteenth century. The Villa Lante begins on the outskirts of the little town of Bagnaia. Its upper end is buried in woods on the hillside above the town. The purpose of the villa, expressed in its layout, is to mediate between these two extremes, the forest and the town.9
Any comprehensive organization of landscape on this scale suggests a comparison with the greatest of all landscape-based works of art, Homer’s shield of Achilles. The linking of wilderness, cultivation, and civilization in an orderly and harmonious totality that characterizes the Villa Lante and others of its kind recalls the similar linking on the shield, but there are important differences. The shield appears to be concentric and to group activities in relation to its twin urban centerpoints. The farther from the center, the farther from civilized organization. The Renaissance villa is organized not concentrically but along a single dominant axis. At the Villa Lante, that axis can be drawn from the woods downhill through increasingly formal settings. It transects the gardens and the country residence, placed at the meeting place of the wild and the cultivated and representing a balance between the two.
Seen from the monk’s cell or the scholar’s apartment, the world takes on a particular hue. Medieval clerics had recognized an ideal connection between plants, animals, and the hidden nature of God, a link that represented for them the sacredness of nature. These clerics, however, were almost completely divorced from both the peasants who worked the fields and the fruits of the peasants’ labor. With the exception of special orders like the Benedictines, clerics preferred to leave agriculture to secular control. In the Renaissance, however, and for some centuries, the men and women who held power in Italy overcame this dichotomy and celebrated the real landscape, not an abstracted and spiritualized version of it. Moreover, they celebrated it in relation to their own earthly state rather than subsuming it under their devotion to a God veiled in mystery. To reason about their world and to contemplate their place within it, they situated themselves at the meeting place of the natural and the artificial in the middle of the landscape that sustained them.
The merchant princes of Florence and the noble families of Rome set themselves in a landscape over which they held real power. When they contemplated the hills and valleys, they were not looking with the delight of an indifferent spectator but with a ruler’s eye. Ultimately, the Renaissance villa brought to life a philosophical ideal that would have been acceptable to the Stoics: the exercise of power must be grounded in the orderly processes of nature. Villa culture, then, was a remarkable counterpoise to the long history of Christian disregard for the active landscape.
The Renaissance has been portrayed with some accuracy as a time when the human image was widely depicted and the human scale was widely applied in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. The famous drawing attributed to Leonardo in which a man with outstretched arms and legs appears to be the modulus—the underlying measuring unit—of primary geometric figures is one example. The associated phrase “man is the measure of all things” reflects the same point of view. Renewed attention to the human scale was reflected in study and imitation of the surviving monuments of classical art and classical writing. “Humanus sum et nihil humanum alieno a me no puto” (I am human and I consider nothing human to be alien to me), a phrase by the Roman playwright Plautus, signaled a common ground between the humanism of the Renaissance and that of the ancients. The human scale was the scale of the Tuscan villa. The villa brought the human community and the idealized landscape into a harmony that could be experienced as well as articulated.
The merchant dynasties of Florence were not the only elite group who embraced villa life and its ideals during the sixteenth century. The merchants of Venice had long shunned any form of involvement in mainland Italy, preferring overseas investments and colonial postings to life on terra firma. This attitude changed dramatically in the late fifteenth century, and by the middle of the next century, Venice was deeply involved in the great blood sport of the era, Italian politics. Venice did reasonably well in accumulating territories and very well in staving off powerful opponents like Spain and France, which came to dominate parts of Italy during the sixteenth century.
Along with political conquests, which were typically made through alliances and the creation of puppet governments, Venetian merchants also became property owners in the marshy flatlands of the north Italian coast. This watery landscape, cut through by channels and dotted with flooded fields where rice was cultivated, was more familiar and more comfortable to a Venetian than a drier environment might have been. They built villas in this area about the same time that Florentines were building theirs. The two landscapes had little in common—the flat watery plains of the Po and the Brenta watersheds were nothing like the hilly and agriculturally diverse landscape of Tuscany—but the great houses in both areas represented similar ideas.
Rich Venetians were fortunate to have one of the greatest domestic architects of any era to call upon. Andrea Palladio is still recognized as a supreme designer. His buildings were influential in his own era, and they captured the imagination of architects from the sixteenth century onward. Palladio created his most celebrated houses for the Venetian elite in the marshy landscapes around the town of Vicenza. The buildings now tend to be seen and described in isolation, but their original setting was agricultural. The main houses were set among secondary structures that served pragmatic purposes. Thomas Jefferson imitated this Palladian principle at Monticello, where he integrated the formal central house with a series of what he called dependencies, secondary structures connected to the main house where the businesses of farm and manufacturing went on out of sight. The model for both the Venetian villas and Monticello was a working farm, functionally integrated into the landscape and intimately linked to a formal suite of ceremonial rooms, a deliberate echo of the Roman villa’s pars urbana. Some early Venetian estates in the region had been even more completely linked to agriculture. The attics of some early houses were designed as granaries to store rice. The windows of the main house, which stands higher than its surroundings, were positioned to give sweeping views over the rice fields. The Venetians, like the Florentines, appreciated the order created by a cultivated landscape. They saw themselves reflected in its contours.
