6. Europe in the World

EMPIRE OF THE WORLD

Cicero once identified the Roman empire with an imperium over the world. He meant that nowhere else except under Roman aegis did the population belong to a coherent civil and political community. The emergence of Christendom made that ‘belonging’ coterminous with Christianity. Outsiders, whom Aristotle and the Greeks had taught Cicero to call ‘barbarians’ because they lacked ‘civility’, now became synonymous with ‘pagans’. By the Central Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Emperor and the papacy had become joint custodians of the inherited historical and sacral claims to an imperium over the Christian world. The Italian writer Andrea Alciato made the bond between Christendom and the heritage of the Roman empire explicit: ‘since . . . all who were in the Roman world were made Roman citizens, it follows that all Christians are today the Roman people; this principle excludes from citizenship those who in Asia, Africa and other provinces do not profess the faith of CHRIST. They are enemies of the Roman people and lose the rights of the Roman civitas.’ Europe’s first age of overseas expansion paradoxically occurred just at the moment when Christendom’s universalism, along with the institutions which sustained it, was disintegrating. Overseas expansion provoked a debate about what it was to ‘belong’ in Europe. Humanists acknowledged that a res publica implied a distinction between those who were its citizens (civitates) and those who were not. But whether such ‘civility’ (and, if so, on what grounds and to what degree) extended to those peoples with whom Europeans came into closer contact after 1520 became an anthropological question, and then a judgement-call about what it was to be European.

Europe’s early colonialists were unwilling to abandon Christendom’s universalist ideals. Portuguese and Castilian claims to overseas dominions rested upon papal grants. The ceremonials surrounding the Hispanic possession of new lands consciously reflected a continuing sense of the imperium of Christendom. So the last Aztec emperor, Moctezuma II (‘Montezuma’), was presented, in a carefully choreographed scene, as donating his empire on the eve of his death to Charles V, thereby reflecting biblical precedents and imperial continuities. By placing the Pillars of Hercules alongside the Habsburg arms with the tag ‘Plus Ultra’ (‘Yet Further’), ‘universal monarchy’ was identified with Emperor Charles V. In the context of Christendom’s overseas expansion that meant ‘world monarchy’. Even after the abdication of Charles V in 1556 and the separation of the Holy Roman Empire from the monarchia of Philip II and his successors to the Spanish throne, the Spanish empire still retained the vestiges of larger claims for its authority around the globe.

Papal and imperial legitimation for ‘world empire’ became, however, increasingly irrelevant. The French monarchy contested it. Where was the clause in Adam’s will, Francis I is supposed to have asked Charles V, by which the emperor had been bequeathed half the world? The English monarchy ignored it, asserting its own, independent claims to legitimacy in the name of an obligation to civilize and convert the heathen to true Christianity. ‘Now the Kings and Queens of England have the name of Defenders of the Faith,’ proclaimed Richard Hakluyt in A Discourse on Western Planting (1584), they have an obligation to ‘maintain and patronize the faith of Christ’ (i.e. the Protestant religion). The following year, he wrote enthusiastically of the three objectives of the ‘Virginia Enterprise’: ‘to plant Christian religion, to traffic[,] to conquer’. All three were inextricably interlinked. As the Mayflower pioneer Edward Winslow put it in his Good Newes from New England (1624), America was the place where ‘religion and profit jump together’. But each objective was separately and in relationship to each other, contested and open to rival interpretations in a way which defeated any universalist projection of Europe’s expansion. And with geographical expansion came a greater awareness that the wider world was composed of different cultures and states, many of which (Ottoman, Chinese, Indian) were not only geographically larger, but as sophisticated as that of Christendom, even if their cultural values and religious systems were different. Claims to universal authority upon the old foundations of Christendom were, when looked at in this new global perspective, as Hugo Grotius bluntly said in 1625, daft (stultum).

A yet more fundamental issue of legitimacy was initially raised in the context of the Spanish empire in America. A Dominican theologian, Francisco de Vitoria, presented it in a lecture ‘On the American Indians’ (De Indis) at Salamanca University. ‘By what right (ius),’ he asked, ‘were the barbarians subjected to Spanish rule?’ Papal claims to dispose of secular dominion to whomsoever it chose could surely not extend over pagans as well as Christians. An alternative answer was that native Americans had surrendered their authority voluntarily to the empire. But that required putting a thumb over the evidence of the wilful plunder of the Conquistadors in central and southern America and native hostility towards being subjugated. A further possible answer was to say that the legitimacy of Spanish rule over the Indians lay precisely in the fact that the latter had been conquered, which opened the door to redeploying arguments used in the Spanish Reconquista. Such a response could be used, however, to equally good effect by other powers in Europe. They, too, could claim that they had conquered parts of the world and that this gave them legitimacy to rule there. The argument increased the importance of not simply ‘discovering’ new lands overseas, but laying claim to them.

How Europe’s colonizers took hold of their overseas colonies differed, depending on where the discoverers came from and what sort of dominion they wanted to establish. A Dominican, Antonio de Montesinos, told Hispanic colonizers on the island of Hispaniola in 1511 that they would no more be saved ‘than Moors or the Turks’ because of their barbaric treatment of the natives. That led the Spanish crown to take legal advice on how best to establish its rule in the Americas. Thereafter it required Conquistadors to read out a document known as the ‘Requirement’ (Requerimiento; after 1573, ‘Instrument of Obedience and Vassalage’) before they acknowledged the subjection of (or, if they refused its terms, ‘attacked’) indigenous people. The proclamation bizarrely assumed that native peoples would understand the language and terminology in which it was framed, and recognize the overlordship over them to which it laid claim. In return for their recognition of that overlordship, the document promised that those acting in the name of the Spanish monarchy would ‘leave your women and children free, without servitude so that with them and with yourselves you can freely do what you wish . . . and we will not compel you to turn Christian’. If, however, they refused, the representatives of the Spanish monarchy promised ‘with the help of God’ to ‘enter forcefully against you, and . . . to make war everywhere . . . and to subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and His Majesty, and . . . to take your wives and children . . . to make them slaves . . . and to take your goods . . . and to do all the evil and damages that a lord may do to vassals who do not obey or receive him’. The text reflected both the practices of the Reconquista and the emerging realities of a Spanish empire that sought to integrate and convert (albeit by ostensibly peaceful means) indigenous peoples into Spanish colonial dominion. Struck by the absurdity of the ‘free choice’ offered to the Indians, Bartolomé de las Casas said that he did not know whether to ‘laugh or to cry’. Spanish officials forbade the use of the term ‘conquest’, requiring the more innocuous ‘pacification’, to describe the imposition of Spanish rule.

French colonizers were particularly scrupulous to distance themselves from the forceful conquest implied in the Spanish Requirement. Instead they used Catholic benediction rituals to mark the voluntary subjection of natives to French rule. So, when François de Razilly’s expeditionary force arrived at the mouth of the Amazon in July 1612 (at the island which would become São Luis de Maranhão), he sent a delegation to ask the local Tupi ‘if they continued in the same wish as they had in the past to receive the French’. Only with the consent of the natives did the latter go ashore and cut a tree to make a cross which was carried in procession through various villages and then planted to serve ‘as witness to each [Indian] of the desire they had to receive Christianity and a continual memorial to them and all their posterity as to the reason why we took possession of their land in the name of Jesus Christ’.

The notion of possession deployed by Portuguese mariners, by contrast, reflected the maritime and coastal nature of their claims to dominion. When a Portuguese fleet reached the coast of Brazil in 1500, Captain Nicolau Coelho put ashore to trade with the Tupi natives while its astronomer and pilot disembarked to measure the height of the midday sun and describe the position of the stars, marking a point (which could then be represented on a map) with a wooden cross, cut from local wood. This time the cross was an assertion of maritime supremacy, associated with shoreline markers. It was later contested by Elizabeth I in 1562. When asked by the Portuguese ambassador to acknowledge Portuguese sovereignty over ‘all the land discovered by the Crown of Portugal’, she refused to do so on the grounds that ‘in all places discovered . . . he had no superiority at all’. ‘Discovery’ (in the sense that Queen Elizabeth understood it, but not in the way the Portuguese did) was not ‘possession’. The French navigator from Dieppe Jean Parmentier sailed two ships to Sumatra in 1529 with the aim of breaking the Portuguese spice monopoly which had resulted from its claims to the sea-routes to the East. He declared that the Portuguese manifested an ‘excessive ambition’ and that ‘it seems that God only made the seas and land for them, and that other nations are not worthy of sailing’.

The Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius was one of several commentators to maintain (in On the Law of Prize and Booty, 1604–5) that Portuguese claims to have discovered the oceans, and thereby to have established rights over the sea-routes, was to close them off to others and enforce boundaries where none existed in nature. Yet Grotius conceded that finding genuinely new land overseas came legally into the category of acquiring property which had no claimant – like finding a coin in the street. Dutch colonists were scrupulous about defining the precise latitude and contours of what they laid claim to, proving that it was genuinely ‘terra incognita’, or (if not) basing their legitimacy on the grounds that it had been conceded or negotiated with locals, and that it was sustained by regular trade, occupation and investment. Early English colonists in North America, by contrast, had the luxury of being able to claim that they had taken possession of unoccupied land which hitherto belonged to nobody at all and that they had conquered it from no one. They built houses and fenced off their land to delineate a ‘plantation’ where, as in Ireland, the justification for colonization rested on putting land to good use for God’s glory in a way that the natives declined to do.

The world map bears the imprint of European claims from this period in place-names. Columbus’s passion for naming the islands, promontories and rivers that he discovered was repeated by his successors in the Spanish Americas. The earliest historian of its colonial empire, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, remarked that reading a Spanish navigational chart was like reading ‘a calendar or catalogue of the saints that is not very well ordered’. Unlike the Portuguese (who Europeanized indigenous names), the Dutch, English and French used renaming strategies reflecting the Europe from which they came. The Dutch and the English adopted the names of their towns, provinces, explorers and rulers. French nomenclature in North America reflected those individuals whose patronage at court would foster a new colony. Names were contested or changed along with the colonizer. The English colonist John Smith, the founder of Jamestown, asked Prince Charles for a patent giving him the authority to eliminate all the names in North America assigned by other nations in favour of English ones. For the Dutch, the fact that their names (Jakarta as ‘Batavia’; the ‘Mauritz’ river, later the Hudson) were used by other nationalities was an additional proof of their rightful possession. Queen Elizabeth, however, was sceptical. She told the Spanish ambassador in 1580 that having ‘given Names to a River or Cape . . . does not entitle them [Spaniards] to ownership’. Physical possession was what counted, and the capacity to hold on to a colony by force. By 1650, Europe’s overseas empires reflected a pragmatic, possessive, competitive and unstable process of acquisition. There was no agreed framework of law or final court of appeal where de facto occupation, legal charters, recognitions, histories, cartographies, boundaries and ceremonies of possession could be adjudged beyond the rhetoric of claim and counter-claim, which preoccupied diplomats as much as it gave voice to the mercantilist self-interests of those who had a stake in empire, and the most to lose.

AGENTS OF EMPIRE

Authority was dispersed in Europe’s fledgling empires. At their inception, a small number of people, without experience or much by way of mandate but in command of gunpowder technologies, held the initiative. In just two years from the moment of his landing in Vera Cruz in July 1519, the Conquistador Hernán Cortés and about 500 horsemen were able to defeat the Aztec empire of over 11 million inhabitants. The operation was carried out on the basis of a commission accorded him in the name of the Spanish crown by magistrates of the ‘town’ of Vera Cruz which he had himself established upon his arrival. In 1530, his imitator Francisco Pizarro led a syndicate which siphoned off the early spoils of the Mexican success into an expedition to Peru, initially with even fewer soldiers of fortune. Three years later, in November 1533, the fate of the Inca empire was sealed in an afternoon with the capture and sack of Cuzco. Fortune favoured these brazen few. The gold that was looted from Cuzco made Pizarro and his supporters richer than they could have imagined. In the longer term, however, their success opened an era of bitter and bloody rivalries, resolved only a generation later by a Spanish government stepping in with reluctance finally to organize the colony.

Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean, Afonso de Albuquerque, the second ‘governor’ of Portuguese India, established a few fortified sites in the Indian Ocean from which to control its seaborne trade. In little over a decade, and with never more than fifteen ships and about 3,000 men under his command, he and his collaborators established the direction and strategy of a new ‘state’, the Portuguese State of India (Estado Português da Índia), through to the next century. They built military fortifications and naval bases at Cochin (1503) and Goa (1510) with which to overawe local traders. They then tried to control the strategic entries to the Indian Ocean at the Cape of Good Hope, Socotra at the entrance to the Red Sea, and Hormuz and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. They cemented their influence by subjugating the small Muslim states of East Africa and conquering the islands of Madagascar and Mauritius. Then, in 1511, Albuquerque’s forces captured Malacca, a dominant local trading state in the Far East and key to the South China Sea. It was a remarkable demonstration of the possibilities of maritime overlordship with the determined application of a small force.

Yet Portuguese success was ultimately only partial. They did not establish a lasting control of the trades in spices, silk and calicoes, not least because local shippers were still able to bring fine spices from the Moluccas through the Strait of Sunda to Atjeh in northern Sumatra, and because the Portuguese never captured Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea. The Portuguese Estado was based, however, on an important reality, which was that, by participating in the intra-Asian trade (mainly by extorting protection money through issuing safe-conducts to local traders), they offset the costs of maintaining their presence and diminished the need for importing bullion from Europe to pay for the Asian goods that they brought to Europe. India consumed probably twice as much of the spices produced in Southeast Asia as Europe, and China three quarters of all the pepper production of Sumatra. Capturing control of the intra-Asian trade lay at the heart of the Portuguese commercial ascendancy.

The marauding Dutch and English, who did their best to dismantle the Portuguese commercial empire after 1600, understood the lessons of monopoly maritime empires in general, and the significance of these intra-Asian trades in particular. With still more single-minded ruthlessness and greater resources than the Portuguese, the Dutch moved in to control the choke-points of pepper and spice production at the turn of the century, and to dominate the intra-Asian trade themselves. In 1596, the first heavily armed Dutch fleet arrived by sailing directly across the Indian Ocean and through the Sunda Strait to the Bay of Bantam, the most important harbour of Java, the island where pepper was grown, and the hub of maritime Southeast Asia. In 1602, the Dutch adventurers coalesced into the East India Company (known as the VOC: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), a merchant consortium which financed an average of about thirteen ships a year for the East over the first decade of its existence, sufficiently successfully to become a profitable and permanent quasi-state institution. In 1612, it invited subscriptions for a terminable joint stock over a period of years. Its officers swore an oath of allegiance to the States General of the Netherlands and promised to furnish information about events in Asia while agreeing to surrender ships, capital and manpower to the Dutch authorities in emergencies. In return, they had the power to negotiate treaties, build fortifications, and enlist soldiers and crew. The company was an arm’s-length auxiliary of the Dutch state.

All but one of the early fleets returned with cargoes, information and experience, cumulatively significant in establishing the Dutch presence in the East. However, not until 1610 did shareholders receive a dividend. But since shares were rarely offered to anyone beyond the initial circle of investors, their values rose. In addition, investors had a privileged position on the company’s governing body, and so owning shares afforded entry to an important oligarchy. Its seventeen directors had the complicated task of planning operations in the Far East. Their three meetings a year took delicate commercial and political decisions.

The base of operations in the East Indies was first at Bantam and then, when the relationship with the inland powers on the island deteriorated, at Jakarta. The governor-general, Jan Coen, applied the lessons of Portuguese monopolistic commercial overlordship to the Dutch East Indies. Nutmeg and mace were obtained only from the Banda Islands, whose inhabitants discovered that they could sell their spices not only to the Portuguese but also to the interloping English, and at better prices than those contracted with the Dutch. Coen led an assault in 1621 using Japanese mercenaries which resulted in the massacre or flight of all but 1,000 or so of the 13–15,000 local inhabitants. They were replaced by slaves, convicts and indentured labour to run new Dutch spice plantations. It was the beginning of an ultimately successful Dutch attempt to bar Asian and European rivals from buying Moluccan spices. From there, the Dutch set about extending their influence in the East and South China Sea, where they were lured by the silver flows from Japan and Manila. Meanwhile, they and the English exploited Portuguese weakness on the eastern (Coromandel) coast of India, cleared the Bay of Bengal of Portuguese and Burmese pirates, and gained trading privileges in Bengal, thus opening up this rich region to intensive trade with both Asia and Europe. Finally, in 1616, Pieter van den Broecke, a founder-member of the company, developed ‘factories’ (fortified strongholds) in what the company called the ‘western quarter’ at the entrance to the Red Sea. Van den Broecke tasted ‘something hot and black’ in Mocha in 1614, one of the first Dutch merchants to sample coffee.

All sorts of people had a stake in Europe’s overseas empires. The term ‘merchant empire’ is an appropriate one, even for the Hispanic colonial empires in America, because it was the bankers in Europe’s money centres and their factors in the ports of departure that furnished the capital and determined what was bought and sold. Their agents were as essential to the trades in pepper, spices, silks and calicoes from the East as they were to the precious metals, hides, dyestuffs and sugar from the New World. Europe’s naval skills and technologies were transformed by the knowledge and experience of the seamen who sailed the ships, the dockyard workers who built them, the cannon-founders who armed them and the cartographers and instrument-makers who helped them to find their passage.

The number of Europeans who went overseas before 1650 remained modest, and many of them were temporary residents. Even when there was a steady stream of settlers, as from the Hispanic ports each year for the Americas, it can rarely have been more than a few thousand individuals a year. Between Sofala (the Portuguese fort in East Africa) and Macao there were probably not more than 15,000 Portuguese in 1600. There were about the same number of Dutch ‘free burgher’ settlers in the East Indies by 1650, the ambitious colonization plans of Joan Maetsuyker, governor of Ceylon (1646–50) and the longest serving Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, being a flop. By the mid-century, however, Dutch New Amsterdam (New York) may have contained about 7,000 Europeans, while the stream of English migrants to America contributed to steady colonial growth (Connecticut, 5,500 in 1643; Massachusetts, some 16,000; Virginia, about 15,000). European settlement in the outer islands of the Caribbean, by contrast, was spectacular. Fertile land was let out to planter-settlers on easy terms, and there were ready profits to be made from tobacco, indigo and cotton cultivation. By 1640, the European population of Barbados was over 30,000 and St Kitts’s about 20,000 – densities of settlement which rivalled those of the most advanced economic regions of Europe itself.

Europe’s first overseas empires were held together at nodal points. On the coast of Africa and in the Far East these were factories, strategically located to run a tourniquet around points of supply and trade. In colonial America they were the ports of transhipment and embarkation and the governing capitals. By 1620, about 200 cities, built on a grid pattern to match the contemporary conception of an ideal town, had been established in central and southern America. They were its judicial and administrative hubs, nominally self-governing entities with colonial councils, but answerable to local judicial tribunals (audiencias) and viceroys. The latter’s appearance in New Spain (Mexico) in 1535 and Peru in 1543 characterized a state that was determined to rule its colonies as directly as possible and along European lines, despite the distance.

In the majority of these nodal points, and still more outside them, Europeans were a minority. Only in the Caribbean islands, where the decimation of indigenous peoples was the prelude to their replacement by Europeans, and in the English colonies of North America, where colonization involved pushing the indigenous peoples back into the hinterland, were Europeans the majority. In the Portuguese factories of the Far East, European settlers became heads of households by intermarrying with local people of various ethnicities and religions. In Goa, for example, Portuguese lived alongside Gujarati and Muslim traders, Armenian and Jewish merchants, Indian Hindus from various castes, Nestorian Christians, as well as Malayan and Chinese traders. In the circumstances, it was remarkable that the Portuguese were not completely absorbed into local society. But that was a tribute to the power of a merchant-based diaspora, the dispersal of the Portuguese explaining why that language remained the trading lingua franca of maritime Asia after the Portuguese empire itself had declined.

In Dutch Batavia and Spanish Manila it was a similar picture. By 1650, when the walled city of Batavia that had been built in the 1620s was full to bursting point, the Dutch settled with natives because there was a shortage of European women willing to make the trip to the Far East. Their children became half-European (in Dutch mestiezen – ‘mestizo’). The directors insisted that they could marry only on condition that their womenfolk were baptized Christians and that their children (‘and their slaves as far as possible’) were brought up as Christians and taught Dutch. Dutch settlers dwelt alongside ethnic Javanese and other Asians who had adopted something of a European culture (mardikers), as well as Chinese who could speak Portuguese but otherwise lived in accordance with their own traditions. The conquest of Spanish America, too, entailed European settlers being a minority amid the indigenous Indian population, despite the efforts to segregate one from the other. The mines and plantations required both Indian skilled and semi-skilled labour as well as imported slaves from Africa. Over time, the settler population of American-born Europeans (criollo, ‘creole’) grew to be the most significant element among the élites in Mexico and Peru and the foundation for a distinctive sense of colonial American identity.

European colonial identities were still in the making by 1650, forged by encounters with others but in a continuing dialogue with metropolitan Europe. Colonial settlers sought to distance themselves from the indigenous local population, especially when trying to answer critics back home. The sense of a ‘barbarian’ other was never more refined than among displaced Europeans abroad, seeking to assert their superiority. Deploying a language of improvement, López de Gómara in his General History of the Indies (Historia General de las Indias) justified the conquest of Hispaniola and New Spain on the grounds that the regions had been transformed by settlers in a way that Indians had proved themselves incapable of doing: ‘We found no sugar mills when we arrived in these Indies, and all these we have built with our own hands and industry, in so short a time.’ American Indians exemplified to colonists all that they were not, or should not be. They were barbarians, pagans, profligate, undependable, un-industrious and irrational, to be treated (whatever royal legislation declared) cursorily and badly, their protests (the riots which occurred, for example in Bahia in 1610, or São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 1640) being a sign of their untrustworthiness.

Dutch Company directors emphasized that Asian peoples should be treated fairly only because it was so often not the case. The decisions recorded in the plea-books of their officials at Batavia frequently refer to Indonesians, Chinese and Muslims with derogatory epithets (such as ‘vile’, ‘mean’). That led the Dutch naturalist Jakob Bontius to protest against his fellow-countrymen’s dismissal of Asians as ‘blind heathens’, ‘treacherous Moors’ and ‘feckless barbarians’. A Dutch Reformed preacher at Amboina in 1615 compared the sobriety of local Muslims with the drunken behaviour of his fellow Europeans. The Dutch sea captain and heroic figure of the Dutch Eighty Years War against the Spanish, Piet Hein, served in both the West and the East Indies in the early seventeenth century. He witnessed at first hand native hostility towards European arrogance: ‘They feel very deeply the wrong that is done them, and this is why they become even wilder and more savage than they already are. When a worm is trodden on, it turns and wriggles. Is it surprising, then, that an Indian who is wronged revenges himself upon someone or other?’ He was writing in the wake of the massacre of Europeans by Indians at Virginia in 1622, one of a cluster of incidents in which ethnic and racial conflict heightened the sensibilities of being European. Rijkloff van Goens, eventually Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, was conscious of being European when he wrote in 1655: ‘we are deadly hated by all nations in Asia’.

When colonialists compared themselves with their distant mother country, they discovered themselves at once the same, and yet different from their countrymen of origin. That was a small part of the process by which Christendom decomposed into something else. Many of the early settlers in Hispanic America sought to recreate the world which they had left behind them. Others (notably the Franciscans in the missionary orders and, in a different context, the ephemeral French Protestant communities in Brazil and Florida, later the Protestant Separatists in New England and the Jesuits in Paraguay) wanted to create a European order that was better than the one from which they had separated. For Franciscan missionaries, that meant realizing the millennial dream of Christendom. Early Jesuits saw the Americas as a chance to recreate Eden. ‘If there is a paradise here on earth,’ wrote one Jesuit in 1560, bemused by the strange flora, exotic animals and wild terrain, ‘it is, I would say, here in Brazil.’

The conversion of the Indians, in particular, was a spiritual challenge afforded by God as the prelude to the Final Judgment. But, to be valid, conversion had to be more than outward conformity. Baptism had to be preceded by instruction in the faith, preaching, catechism and education – and then accompanied by acculturation into European ways of thinking and behaving. The task proved next to impossible. Teaching, catechizing and baptizing hundreds of thousands of Indians with the small resources to hand could only be roughshod. Persuading or compelling Indians to move into towns, organized around a church and convent reserved for them so that they could be educated to European ways, came at a cost. It resulted in a hybrid Christianity, one that had some affinities with the sacral landscape of late medieval Europe, in which the cult of the Virgin was superimposed on, or conflated with, cults of corn-goddesses and earth-mothers. Pagan fertility rites were Christianized by the inclusion of a preliminary Mass and procession but they remained identifiable to local people for what they were. Such hybridity was increasingly at odds with Reformed (Catholic) Christianity in the Post-Reformation. As the Franciscans looked back on their efforts and their often critical relationship with the secular authorities in Spanish America over their treatment of the Indians, their millennial dream faded. Their deception was part of the fall of the established notion of western Christendom as a belief-community. The hopes for the coming of Christ’s Kingdom were carried forward within the new confessional conflictual environment of the Protestant Reformation by New England Puritans and by the Jesuits in Paraguay, determined to complete the task of Christianizing the Indians using the resources of a global Catholic Christianity.

In the Far East, Christendom came up against different realities. The enhanced awareness of the Islamic challenge to Christendom in the sixteenth century was not simply a response to the Ottoman threat to Europe’s southeastern flank. It was also because Europe came into closer proximity with Islam in the Indian Ocean and the Far East. Wherever Islam was a significant presence, the efforts of Christian missionaries proved more arduous, and local attitudes towards the Portuguese (to a lesser extent, the Dutch and English in the seventeenth century) turned hostile. This was the case in parts of the east coast of Africa, but also in the Far East. In the Banda Islands, for example, Muslim clerics outnumbered Christian missionaries and it was only in non-Islamicized parts of India, or in islands like Amboina (which Francis Xavier visited in 1546) where Islam had yet to penetrate, that Christianity established a presence. Elsewhere in Indonesia, Islam was spreading rapidly, especially where Hinduism was in retreat. The Muslim merchant sultanates of coastal Java proved the most bitterly hostile to the Portuguese conquerors of Malacca. Similarly, the spread of Islam in southern India in the sixteenth century threatened the Portuguese presence, even in Goa (which withstood a two-year siege, beginning in 1569).

By then, Counter-Reformed Christianity was also being felt in India. There were efforts to exclude non-Christians from public office. An Inquisition was established in 1560 to investigate apostates and heretics, Nestorian Christians finding themselves treated as the latter. At a synod of the Portuguese Catholic Church at Udayamperoor (Diamper) in 1599, they were officially denounced and, for a time, disbanded as an organized community. The majority of conversions to Christianity were among Indians of low caste seeking to escape the pressures of that social system. Missionary zeal contributed to making the Portuguese hated as both pirates and persecutors among indigenous populations. If the same was not true for the Dutch in the Far East in the early seventeenth century it was because Reformed Christianity lacked missionary zeal and also because the colonialists exploited the rivalries between local Islamic powers and against the Portuguese to their own advantage.

Overseas empires depended on ships. The convoys that set sail from the river Guadalquivir (Seville and Cádiz) for the Spanish Americas and from the Tagus (Lisbon) bound for the Far East were organized and paid for by merchants. In the India Office in Lisbon, established in 1505–6 to oversee Portuguese dealings with Asia – as in its Spanish equivalent, formed a couple of years earlier – the paperwork of a merchant empire accumulated as the complexities of these colonial operations unfolded. The Asia convoy involved stamina and risk. The flotilla of up to ten ships set out between February and April from Lisbon on the outward leg of a 25,000-mile round-trip (the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe at the equator), aiming to catch the summer equatorial winds and currents off the coast of South America to take them round the Cape of Good Hope in order to work up the coast of East Africa and put in to the Portuguese factory port on the island of Mozambique, and the first opportunity for some lucrative trading. That part of the voyage was long and gruelling even when nothing untoward happened. Fresh supplies ran out, joints and gums swelled, and there was frequently dysentery aboard. It was not uncommon for up to a third of the ship’s crew to die in one passage. From there, they followed the coast to the northern tip of Somalia before crossing the Indian Ocean. From Goa and Cochin, the Portuguese travelled on to Malacca, the monsoon governing the passage of the ships. The Dutch deployed a larger number of smaller vessels – up to a hundred of about 600 tons each, as opposed to the 1,000-ton Portuguese carracks.

The return journey involved setting out after Christmas the following year to catch the favourable monsoons and then, once in the Atlantic, to let the southeasterly winds take them northwest into the low-pressure equatorial doldrums, hoping to catch winds and currents which would take them back to the Azores and the European coast. At least 16 percent of the ships never made their destination. Those which did so left Europe in ballast, carrying precious metal and copper supplemented by some trade goods and company supplies for the fortress factories. They returned low in the water, stacked with chests of spices (nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, mace), sacks of black peppercorns, and bales of silk and cotton cloth stored between decks.

Only very high profits could justify this effort. Cloves bought in the Spice Islands and sold into the Indian market often made 100 per cent profits; the price of mace in Calicut was ten to fifteen times that in Great Banda, while nutmeg was thirty times higher. Indian textiles could sell in the Far East at double their purchase price. Much of the profit was made in the Far East. Selling spices into the European market was about the marketing of scarcity and the commoditization of mystique, so there was some elasticity of demand. But it was not inexhaustible, and the competition between the Dutch and English East India Companies led to oversupply and a weakened market price before the Dutch tightened their monopoly in the Far East and the English Civil War disrupted the activities of its East India merchants. Spices remained a risky commodity, especially when merchants had to commit themselves over a year in advance to purchase and shipment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Portuguese sold them on to consortia of Italian, German and Flemish merchant banking houses, which then shared the risk. The involvement of merchants from northwest Europe in the financing of the spice trade was the prelude to their becoming directly involved in it through their own East India Companies.

The Spanish New World fleet operated differently. Ships did the round trip to Central America in nine months. That made servicing Spain’s colonial empire a realistic proposition. The fleets were organized in convoys from the middle of the sixteenth century to avoid the depredation of French, and later English and Dutch, marauders waiting in the Bay of Cádiz. They were escorted by a navy, and there were generally two a year. One headed for New Spain and the port on the island of San Juan de Ulúa facing Vera Cruz, and the other for Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia, from where it passed to Nombre de Dios or Portobelo on the north coast of the Panama isthmus to await the merchants travelling from Peru through Acapulco. In the 1520s already nearly a hundred ships per year carried merchandise across the Atlantic between Spain and its American colonies. That represented about 9,000 tons of carrying capacity. By 1600, the yearly average had grown to 150–200 ships with a total tonnage of 30,000–40,000 tons – the increased carrying capacity due to the fact that the size of vessels had doubled. On the outward voyages, they transported the provisions that colonists needed. On the return, in addition to the precious metals from the New World, came hides, indigo, cochineal and sugar. Although the volume of the cargoes varied, the change in Europe’s trading scale was cumulatively massive. The products from Europe’s overseas empires broadened Europe’s consumables markets – and in a way which moralists regarded as threatening inherited Christian values.

THE SONS OF NOAH

Slavery was an established part of every Eurasian civilization and it had been a feature of European society in the Middle Ages. By 1500, however, most people in Christendom were free. Paradoxically, it was at just that moment that Europe’s encounter with the wider world led to a rediscovery of slavery, albeit on different foundations: chattel-based and racial. Slaves were treated as the ‘movable property’ of their owners and European law gave unprecedented freedom to owners to do what they liked with them.

Only Africans were enslaved, their colour being a marker for social segregation. In the sixteenth century black slaves were often to be found in well-to-do European households, especially on Europe’s coastal rim and in southern Europe. In Portugal, the economy came to rely on chattel slavery. It surprised the Flemish humanist Nicolas Cleynaerts, travelling in the service of Hernando Columbus (the explorer’s son): ‘All places are full of slaves. Captive blacks and Moors perform all tasks. Portugal is so crowded with these people that I believe that in Lisbon there are more black men and women than free Portuguese.’ They were owned by the king, the nobility, churchmen and even ordinary people. They laboured in the fields, crewed Portuguese ships, cleaned the hospitals and worked around the house. They were shipped from Equatorial Africa and sold in Lisbon by the sixty to seventy slave merchants whose contracts made them wealthy. Slaves were openly for sale on the streets in manacles, neck-rings and padlocks; the purchase price was negotiated with a broker. Their only possibility of release from slavery was if they successfully ran away or were granted their manumission by their owner.

By the end of the sixteenth century, wherever Europeans settled overseas they imposed or accepted racially based slavery. The pattern was set in the colonization of the Canary Islands in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. Then, in 1518, Charles V granted licences to import thousands of blacks into the Spanish colonies through Seville (which, like Lisbon, had a large population of black slaves). From 1530, however, slaves were shipped directly from Africa to reduce mortality at sea. By 1650, African slaves predominated in the migration to the New World.

Aristotelian philosophy provided justifications for why black African slavery was part of the natural order. And the slave trade could be justified on the precedents of the crusading past. The biblical story of Noah’s three sons – Shem, Ham and Japhet – became the starting-point for understanding racial difference and for justifying racialism. Whatever had gone on in the Ark to lead Noah to curse Ham was the explanation for blackness, an inherited curse and inferiority which European legal discrimination and cultural attitudes reinforced. In an account of Martin Frobisher’s voyage to discover the Northwest Passage, published in 1578, his lieutenant George Best described Ham’s curse as being that ‘all his posteritie after him should bee so blacke and loathsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde’. The Spanish philosopher Francisco de Vitoria thought the slave trade was entirely legitimate, so long as the slaves had been taken in a just war: ‘It is enough that a man be a slave in fact or in law, and I will buy him without a qualm.’ By the mid-seventeenth century, slavery was justified as an economic necessity. When the Dutch stormed the Portuguese Brazilian sugar plantations in 1634–8 to establish the colony of ‘New Holland’, their commander, Johan Mauritz of Nassau-Siegen, floated the idea of using free white labour in the sugar-mills at Pernambuco. But he rapidly came round to the view of the Portuguese whom they had supplanted: ‘It is not possible to effect anything in Brazil without slaves . . . they cannot be dispensed with upon any occasion whatsoever: if anyone feels that this is wrong, it is a futile scruple.’

The Indians were a more complicated matter. The Requirement turned them into servants of the Spanish monarchy. To make war upon, and enslave, them would be like declaring war on Seville, said Vitoria. The question was into what category of human beings did they fit? The first reaction – as with the flora and fauna of the New World – was to homologate them on the basis of superficial likeness to a known type. Oviedo, the earliest historian of the Indies, thought that Indians resembled ‘Ethiopians’, barbarians from North Africa. They might not be slaves by conquest but they fitted Aristotle’s category of ‘natural slaves’, whom Vitoria had learned about while studying in Paris. Natural slaves were those whose intellects were not sufficient to control and direct their emotions. As the jurist and magistrate in the first colonial law court in the New World (at San Domingo), Juan Ortiz de Matienzo, put it, they are ‘participants in reason so as to sense it, but not to possess or follow it’. The fashion for physiognomy inclined philosophers and theologians to categorize people in accordance with their bodily appearance. It was not difficult to construct a physiognomy of the Indians that confirmed that they were ruled by their passions. They made no provision for the future. Their psyche (or ‘soul’) was such that they could only be fully human (i.e. capable of ‘virtue’) through their master. That is why, so the argument went, freedom was unnatural to a natural slave.

The problem was that, as more knowledge accumulated about the Indians, the more problematic became any categorization of them as natural slaves. Francisco de Vitoria belonged to the Salamanca School, scholars whose philosophical approach involved teasing out the ‘law of nature’ – that is, understanding not just the principles imparted by God at Creation to the world, but what it was that enabled us to be human beings in relationship to it. In his university lectures on the issue, delivered as disquiet about the mistreatment of Indians in Peru was growing, Vitoria wanted to relate the ‘affairs of the Indies’ to the ‘republic of the whole world’. He wanted to determine whether the Indians had been treated in accordance with ‘God’s law’ (of which the law of nature was a reflection). He proved that they had a sense of territorial rights, a rational order to their affairs, a recognizable form of marriage, magistrates, rulers, laws, industry, commerce, politeness and civic culture. In each category, Vitoria highlighted – and thereby clarified – what would become the defining characteristics of being ‘European’ – how he understood that one could be truly ‘human’. His thinking was a microcosm of how those who occupied the space of Europe came, through their encounters with others, to understand who they were, and in ways that took them beyond Christendom’s belief-communities.

Vitoria was a university professor, weighing arguments against one another. There was, he admitted, a serious case against, as well as for, equating Indians with Europeans. Indian society had no written laws. Its magistrates were weak. It permitted polygamy, matrilineal descent and nudity in public. Above all there was evidence of cannibalism, a subject which was a European obsession because, like sodomy and bestiality, it seemed a perversion of the law of nature. Columbus had been told by the Arawaks about the ‘Caribs’ who ‘eat men’. Bouts of human sacrifice among the Mexica were supposed to be followed by cannibalistic orgies. The Paraguayan Guaraní and the Yucatan Maya were reported to be cannibals. The Brazilian Tupinambá were said in 1554 to ‘eat their victims down to their last fingernail’. Europeans believed these stories because they wanted to. It was a way of simplifying the otherwise complex and irresolvable issues of what made Indians different from Europeans. What one ate determined who one was; the better the food, the more virtuous a person resulted. So, Vitoria concluded, the Indians had a long way to go before they became fully human in the way that Europeans understood it. It was not simply a matter of their being converted to Christianity. Christianized Indians would still, in some sense, be ‘barbarians’ because they could not properly recognize right from wrong (food included). As the Franciscan Juan de Silva said, they were as incapable of distinguishing ‘between right and wrong as between a thistle and a lettuce’. They needed ‘civilizing’. That meant education, not just in the sense of schooling but in the sense of a fundamental reformation of the individual psyche, a lengthy process. In the meantime, the ‘barbarian’ had to be accepted as not European but ‘within’ the European order of things.

Bartolomé de las Casas ensured that these issues received a more public airing. He was twenty-eight years of age when he left for the New World in 1502, becoming first a planter and then a chaplain to the Conquistadors, experiencing at first hand the brutality that Spanish conquest meted out to the Indians. His first response was to found a utopian colony in which natives would be converted by persuasion, living in harmony with colonists in an ideal Christian community where Indians would have hospitals and churches and be taught how to work the land by Spanish farmers. Lacking practicality, it was a fiasco when it was attempted at Cumaná on the coast of what is now northern Venezuela. Las Casas joined the Dominicans in 1523 and lobbied on behalf of the Amerindian people. He was able to argue, along with Vitoria only with more detailed evidence, that pre-conquest Amerindian society ticked Aristotle’s boxes as a civil society. Indians’ conversion should therefore be by persuasion, and not by force, and their labour should be free. His greatest successes were persuading the papacy to issue a bull (Sublimus Dei, 29 May 1537) outlawing Amerindian slavery, and inspiring reformers at Charles V’s court to enact the New Laws (1542) which regulated the labour service of Indians on colonial plantations in the New World.

Peruvian landowners, outraged by the efforts of its first viceroy, Blasco Núñez Vela, to enforce the new legislation, staged a revolt. They were led by Gonzalo Pizarro, one of three Conquistador brothers. The rebel colonists deposed and killed the viceroy, declaring Peru independent of Spanish authority. Only the arrival of Pedro de la Gasca as his replacement, promising to abrogate the New Laws, restored Spanish rule. In Mexico too, where Las Casas was appointed bishop of the newly formed diocese of Chiapas, colonial revolt became widespread. Returning to Spain in 1547 and ostensibly living a life of seclusion in the Dominican monastery of Valladolid, he waged a campaign for the moral high-ground in academia and around the emperor. The ‘30 Juridical Propositions’, presented to the Council of the Indies in 1547, sought to exploit the differences over the succession of Charles V between the emperor and his son Prince Philip.

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was Philip’s tutor, a humanist-trained Aristotelian who had spent some time in Italy. He became the mouthpiece for Las Casas’s opponents. Sepúlveda thought he understood the arguments for a Habsburg ‘world monarchy’. He advocated a crusade against the Turks and went on to argue (in a dialogue probably composed in 1544) that America was Spanish by the laws of conquest. By those same laws, the Amerindians were their slaves. Cannibalism, incest, sacrifice, nudity – and other unnatural acts of which the Indians were apparently guilty – had to be stopped by force. Force (legal, moral, physical) could be used in their conversion on the same grounds that justified the Inquisition and the repression of Protestant heresy. The Council of the Indies referred the matter to an academic conference at San Gregorio College in Valladolid in 1550–51. Both sides gave as good as they got, and each thought they had the better of the argument. In reality, the council retained (in 1552) a watered-down version of the New Laws. If they were influenced by the debates at Valladolid, they were even more susceptible to the arguments that Indian slave labour could not produce a skilled workforce for the silver mines.

Las Casas had the last word. Sometime in 1552, an unauthorized publication appeared in Seville of a little book that he had written a decade before under the title Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias). His motive was ‘the very great and final need to make known to all Spain the true account and truthful understanding of what I have seen take place’. Recounting the conquest of the Americas, he said that the Spanish had appeared in the ‘sheepfold’ like ‘revenging wild beasts, wolves, tigers or lions’, language also used in the papal bull (Exsurge Domine, 15 June 1520) against Luther. The true story of Indian ‘destruction’ – Spanish power, greed and money – presaged the collapse of Christendom and the end of the world. Las Casas’s little book was a counter-history of the Conquest. Translated into French and published in Antwerp in the late 1570s, and from there into English and Dutch in 1583, it was woven into the Protestant ‘Black Legend’ of the Hispanic empire, reinforcing the links between colonial conquest and maltreatment overseas and religious confrontation and massacre at home. So the debates about slavery, conversion and colonialism worked their way into mainstream controversies about the nature of power and violence.

In the New World, Las Casas’s ideas lived on. For him, the Indians were co-equal descendants of Adam and Eve, perhaps even better than Europeans because, following conversion, their Christianity would be pristine. Might they not also be the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, in which case was the discovery of the New World an indisputable sign from God of the imminent coming of the millennium? That was the conviction among the first generation of Franciscan missionaries in the New World following their arrival there in 1524. Enjoying a freedom from episcopal and inquisitorial authority in the New World that was never theirs in the Old, these ‘reformed’ (that is, ‘spiritual’) Franciscans responded to the challenge of Christian mission with apostolic fervour. Franciscan millennial vision faded in the New World towards the end of the sixteenth century, but the idea that the Amerindians might be the descendants of the Lost Tribes reappeared among New England Protestants towards the mid-seventeenth century. The debates about converting American Indians would continue through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to be a reflective encounter with what it was to be European.

THE EUROPEAN EAST

Medieval Christendom’s boundaries were defined by the belief community that it embodied. The rise of the Ottoman Turks, the revival of Crusade, and the ensuing conflicts in the Mediterranean and southeastern Europe sharpened the political, cultural and religious divisions in those regions. That was not the case for Europe’s Slav frontier to the east of the Polish-Lithuanian condominium and the Baltic. Geography offered no natural frontiers to demarcate those that lived in the European landmass from the rest of the Eurasian continent. As western Christendom disintegrated, the rationale for the traditional frontiers with Orthodox Christianity diminished. At the same time, the rise of Muscovy as a powerful entity, mirroring political processes which were similarly at work in western Europe, blurred the boundaries on Europe’s eastern margins.

In 1480, the Muscovite princes ceased to be tributaries to the Mongol Golden Horde. The following century was a crucial period of Russian consolidation and expansion. Based on the growth of more settled agriculture around the upper Volga on the labour-scarce but land-rich estates of the boyar nobility, the Rurik dynasty of ‘grand dukes’ proclaimed themselves ‘tsar’ (‘Caesar’) over all Rus. Grand Duke Ivan III was offered a crown by the Holy Roman Emperor, but he rejected it. Eastern and western Christendom were separate and apart. Russian princes, he said, derived their authority from God alone. So Ivan organized his own coronation in 1503, adopting the Byzantine double eagle as his emblem and appropriating the ceremonial and ritual of Byzantium.

Muscovy grew massively in the sixteenth century. From a tiny population in 1462 of about 430,000, by 1533 2.8 million inhabitants owed allegiance to the tsar, and 5.4 million by 1584. The expansion consolidated Muscovite authority in the Polish Ukraine to the southwest, where Christendom’s authority had been enfeebled by attacks from the Crimean Tatars. Muscovy equally cemented its grip on the lower Volga river basin, overwhelming the khanate of Kazan in 1552 and establishing its presence on the shores of the Caspian Sea in 1556. Many new fortress towns in stone were constructed, along with smaller forts in wood. To the east and before the end of the sixteenth century, Russians began settling in western Siberia, forts and kremlins marking its territorial expansion. By 1600, Muscovy ruled from Arkhangelsk (known in English as Archangel) on the White Sea, to Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga on the Caspian Sea.

The power of the Muscovite state rested on the unique authority of the tsar. When the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I sought to comprehend what it was that Ivan III had which he did not, he received the reply: ‘We Russians are devoted to our sovereigns, whether they be merciful or cruel.’ That loyalty was based on the tsar’s role to protect the Rus from attack by the nomadic peoples of central Asia. The tsar’s authority was strengthened in the course of the sixteenth century by Muscovite military institutions, notably the professional units of harquebusiers (streltsy, or ‘shooters’), introduced by Ivan IV in the years before 1550, and some of the trappings of a centralizing state that were common in western Europe. It also benefited from the group of loyalist retainers instituted by Ivan IV. The 6,000 secret informers (oprichniki) which formed that grouping swore an oath of allegiance to the tsar, undertaking to inform him of any plots or rumours against him. The oprichnina earned Ivan the epithet of ‘the Fearsome’ (or ‘the Terrible’) and, in the seven years from 1565 to 1572, it humbled the Russian nobility.

The consolidation of the Muscovite state made the question of the border with Europe more problematic. Russian expansion south and east, into the forests and river systems of central Asia, opened up the possibility that ‘Europe’ (under the aegis of a ‘Europeanized’ state) was engaged in a further expansion, less advertised than that which followed on from the discovery of America, but no less important. As in America, the processes were not state-led in any simple or straightforward way. The consolidation of the Muscovite state created a diaspora of those who did not choose to live in, or were forced by circumstances to flee, the land of Rus. They included peasants running away from serfdom, ruined and disgraced landholders and servitors (the victims of the oprichnina), common fugitives and prisoners of war. Some young Russians chose to ‘go cossacking’ in the service of the Don and Yaik Cossacks before returning to settle down in the Muscovite army. Some were attracted to the trade in silks, hides and saddles in the lower reaches of the Dnieper, Don and Volga rivers, and the profits to be made by those willing to take up the challenge. The southern steppe population became a mix of different ethnicities – Muscovites, Poles, Circassians, Moldavians and a smattering of Germans and Slavs – and a tinderbox for ‘Pretender’ rebellions against the tsar in the early seventeenth century. The repression of revolt then became the pretext for a further extension of the tsar’s authority. A small but important part of the Great Muscovite Law Code (Sobornoe Ulozhenie) introduced by Tsar Alexis in 1649 sought to deter the mass migration of peasants that fed Russian expansion to the south and east by tying the serfs to the land.

Russian expansion into Siberia owed as much to private initiative as to state sponsorship. Enterprising Russians organized traders and trappers and funded private bands of Cossacks to break the resistance of local Siberian natives to their intrusion. They were then followed by military servitors of the tsar who collected tribute in fur for the state, which then went to fund the military emplacements that supported the expansion. Erofei Khabarov (nicknamed ‘Sviatitskii’) matches closest the pioneers who opened up America to European expansion. Originally a peasant, he became an enterprising farmer in western Siberia. In 1625, he undertook his first voyage from Tobol’sk, the site of the only surviving stone kremlin in western Siberia, built in 1585–6 by a contingent of hired Cossacks, on a river vessel to the settlement at Mangazeya, a new colony on the Taz river. The Taz flows into the Arctic Ocean and it offered an export route around the Arctic coast in the summer for furs to the English traders at Archangel. In 1632, he led an expedition to the Lena river, where (at the mouths of the Kuta and Kirenga tributaries) he established a farming settlement and built a salt-works. In 1649–50, he set off with a band of military servitors across the Olekma river to the Amur river watershed in eastern Asia, exploring its tributaries and provoking conflict with the Manchu, reaching Okhotsk on the Pacific coast. At the same time, before and after the severe dislocation of the wars of succession at the end of the Rurik dynasty and the beginning of the Romanovs (Russia’s Time of Troubles, 1598–1613), foreign prisoners of war and criminals were forcibly relocated to Siberia. They joined the wandering peoples who crossed the Urals of their own accord to escape the Muscovite state and find a new life for themselves. Before the death of Tsar Alexis in 1676, the overlordship of the Russian tsar encompassed over 3 million square miles, larger than the Ottoman empire and dwarfing contemporary western European states.

At the same time, the consolidation of the Muscovite state made interactions between the European landmass and the Rus much more sustained. The tsars actively encouraged such contacts. They welcomed Dutch and English representatives at their court, and sought access to European gunpowder technologies. They were repeatedly hampered by their lack of direct access to the Baltic, so the opening up of the Arctic Ocean and White Sea route via Archangel changed the dynamics of the relationship. Europe’s American silver lubricated trade with Muscovy, just as it did with the Far East. Prices in Russia went up in the second half of the sixteenth century. Rye, the principal grain in Muscovy, fetched 23 den’gi per chetvert’ in around 1550, but sold for over 80 in the bad harvest years of 1586–8, and for well over 40 during the last decade of the sixteenth century. At the same time, the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope understood the significance of a strong Muscovite state as an ally against the Turks, and fostered missions to establish closer links with that objective in mind.

As in America, however, more sustained contact with Russia led to a sharpening of Europe’s sense of its own identity. In Poland and Lithuania, the traditional boundary between the western and the Orthodox churches began to break down when a portion of the Orthodox Church disavowed Muscovite tutelage. A Metropolitan archbishop ‘of Kiev and all Russia’ was established under Polish influence in 1558 at the beginning of the Livonian War (1558–83). The Kiev Metropolitan succeeded in garnering the loyalties of the Orthodox population of Lithuania and a section of the discontented nobility of western Russia, although not that of the peasants. In 1595, the king of Poland proclaimed the union of this Orthodox Church with the papacy, a significant reinforcement of Counter-Reformed Rome’s claims to a global Christianity. But the Greater Russian hinterland remained faithful to the Orthodox Metropolitan in Moscow.

With dissident varieties of western and eastern Christianity now in place, it was no longer the difference between Orthodox and western Christianity which could define Christendom. To the degree that a frontier existed, it was part of a mental map, carried by individual Europeans, and therefore ambiguous and debatable. Europe’s emerging sense of its own identity in relation to America and the world at large played a part in defining its relationship to the European East. What was identified as ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ in the American Indian became counter-posed as ‘cruel’ and ‘despotic’ in Russian political culture and society. The English explorer Jerome Horsey, who spent seventeen years at the court of last Rurik tsars and knew the country well, was struck by its arbitrariness and brutality. Reporting on the siege of Novgorod in 1569–70 by the forces of Tsar Ivan IV, he noted that the city was ransacked by 30,000 Tatars and 10,000 harquebusiers who ‘without any respect, ravished all the women and maids, ransacked, robbed and spoiled all that were within it of their jewels, plate and treasure, murdered the people, young and old, burnt all . . . set all on fire . . . together with the blood of 70,000 men, women and children slain and murdered’. If he is to be believed, it was a massacre that dwarfed what would occur in Paris at the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572. He took it as defining what set Russia apart from the Europe that he knew. That was the view, too, of the Polish king, writing to Queen Elizabeth I a few years later as the Livonian War was coming to a close: ‘We seemed hitherto to vanquish him [the tsar] only in this, that he was rude of arts, and ignorant of policies . . . we that know best and border upon him, do admonish other Christian princes in time, that they do not betray their dignity, liberty and life of them and their subjects to a most barbarous and cruel enemy.’

One of the English merchants to visit Russia in the later sixteenth century was Giles Fletcher, a City of London official who was sent as ambassador to Moscow in June 1588 to preserve the privileges that English merchants of the Muscovy Company had gained for themselves. The company had been established in 1551 to seek out a Northeast Passage to China. Three ships left London on 10 May 1553, of which that captained by Sir Hugh Willoughby became trapped in ice off the coast of Murmansk, the poor crew freezing to death. The vessel led by Richard Chancellor found its way to the estuary of the Northern Dvina river in the White Sea where its captain was escorted ashore to make the long journey (over 600 miles) to Moscow for a meeting with Tsar Ivan IV. Chancellor returned with promises of trade privileges. By the time of Giles Fletcher’s visit, the Muscovy Company had established its warehouses in Archangel, Kholmogory, Vologda and Moscow, and about twelve ships a year made the passage, a voyage that lasted as long as that to the New World.

Fletcher returned to England in 1589 and wrote about his experiences in Of the Russe Commonwealth. He was impressed by the scale of everything: the size and potential of the country, not to mention the rigours of its winter climate. Of the towns, it was Moscow that he recalled most clearly: over 40,000 houses protected behind three layers of curtain walls and bigger than London. The buildings were mostly made of wood and you could buy them as a kit to put up in a day. Good Puritan that he was, Fletcher noted that God’s providence had ensured that timber was in such ample supply that these houses were cheap (although God had apparently neglected to consider the risk of fire). Fletcher had good contacts with the merchant élite and was overwhelmed at the scale of their emporia, reflecting the country’s vast potential. Grain was plentiful and cheap. The pastoral economy created surpluses of tallow and cow-hide. Furs from northern Russia were available in profusion. Train-oil (used in cloth and soap manufacture) was produced in large quantities from the annual seal cull in St Nicolas Bay. Although Moscow’s merchants dominated this economy, provincial merchants became rich too. He heard of three brothers (the Stroganovs, though he did not know their names) from Solvychegodsk (‘salt on the Vychegda river’), a settlement closer to Archangel than Moscow. They were among the earliest pioneers in Siberia.

Fletcher realized that this eastern outback had huge resources. But he turned his discourse on Russia into a warning-piece to Elizabeth I. Russia was ‘a true and strange face of a Tyrannical state, (most unlike to your own) without true knowledge of GOD, without written Lawe, without common iustice’. Its government was ‘much after the Turkish fashion . . . plaine tyrannicall’. Fletcher had in mind some anti-Puritan (and, as he saw it, absolutist) currents at the English court. His work was so outspoken that its publication was banned by order of the queen whose beneficent rule it sought to advertise. The text would, however, be published a couple of generations later during the English Civil War, playing its part in the anti-royalist propaganda of the time. Fletcher was just one of an emerging group of travellers, diplomats and merchants from Europe whose detailed knowledge of the country emerged in print in the years before 1650. Their accounts served to consolidate the picture of a Russia whose state and society might have some affinities with those of Europe, but which did not share its values.

EUROPE IN THE MIRROR OF THE WORLD

European utopian writing was defined as a genre in the wake of America’s discovery. Thomas More’s ‘new island’ of Utopia (in Greek, ‘No-Place’), described in the dialogue by the sailor Raphael Hythloday, supposedly one of Amerigo Vespucci’s crew, took readers outside the place with which they were familiar in order to see it, as it were, from the outside in. Utopia was all that the humanist Thomas More wanted contemporary Christendom to be. Its citizens were public-minded, law-abiding and hard-working. They abhorred waste and lived virtuously in common with one another. ‘Outside Utopia, to be sure, men talk freely of public welfare, but look after their private interests only,’ Hythloday reported. ‘In Utopia, where nothing is private, they seriously concern themselves with public affairs.’ Utopia knew no enclosure of common land for private gain. Utopian rulers did not start wars for their private dynastic objectives. There was no hereditary nobility to lord it over others and bleed the public purse for their own profit. Using a familiar Platonic allegory, More turned the newly discovered lands into a mirror for a European space in which personal acquisitiveness was undermining the law, morality and common beliefs on which Christendom rested. The lesson that More wanted his dialogue to leave with his readers was that it was better to engage in the uphill task of reforming the common weal, albeit imperfectly, than not to do so at all. Published initially in Latin in 1516, his little treatise became translated from the later 1540s (Italian, 1548; French, 1550; English, 1551; Dutch, 1553), which was when Europe’s internal regional conflicts first began to mesh with confessional strife.

As Europe’s religious divisions widened, so the idea of a newly discovered city on an island far away from Europe became a way of escaping from the tensions which had been created. In the Italian peninsula, the ‘Happy City’ (‘Eutopia’ was how Thomas More’s island was rendered in the Italian translation) was a world imagined by the Platonic philosopher Francesco Patrizi in a work published in Venice in 1553. As the Counter-Reformation took hold, so utopian writing became a way of putting into words ideas which otherwise would have attracted censure. Ludovico Agostini included an imaginary island republic in his ‘Dialogues on the Infinite’ (Dialoghi dell’Infinito, c. 1580), while Tommaso Campanella wrote his ‘City of the Sun’ (Città del Sole) from a Naples prison in 1602. Campanella imagined what a reformed Spanish empire might be like. He pictured state-run monastic granaries, seminaries turned into workhouses, and American Indians taught craft-skills and turned into a mobile labour force, all in the service of a providential Spanish monarchy whose destiny was to rule the world. Meanwhile, his contemporary Ludovico Zuccolo used the imaginary islands of ‘Belluzzi’ and ‘Evandria’ in 1625 to present what a reformed Venice could have been, a truly ‘Serene’ Republic.

Thomas More’s Utopia also appealed to Protestant Europe, especially when the politico-religious tensions of the Reformation were at their height. The belief in providence accorded Protestant utopias a millennial dimension, often heightened by their links in Protestant central Europe to reforming chemical physicians and mystic theologians. In the feverish climate in central Europe in the aftermath of the Defenestration of Prague and the appearance of the great comet in the last months of 1618, Johann Valentin Andreae published his Christianopolis, a model Christian society on a far-away island, whose inhabitants tell the arriving stranger that his visit was ‘under the leadership of God in order that you might learn whether it is always necessary to do evil and to live according to the custom of the barbarians’ (i.e. ‘Europians’). Andreae’s planned city had at its heart an educational and research establishment (bearing curious similarities to the observatory of Uranienborg built in the later 1570s by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe on the island of Hven). For Andreae, the reform of learning was essential to making human knowledge an instrument for improving the condition of humanity rather than the weapon of first resort in confessional conflict. Around the college of learning, Andreae placed the workshops, granaries and public facilities to sustain the reformed and cohesive society of which he dreamed. Francis Bacon would draw on Andreae’s Christianopolis when he wrote the New Atlantis, published in 1624. Both were models on which Samuel Hartlib, a refugee in London from Elbing as a result of the Thirty Years War, would base his sketch of the island of ‘Macaria’, published as the second session of the Long Parliament opened in October 1641 on the eve of the English Civil War. Hartlib was not alone in seeing the links between the planting of colonies in America and the practical realization of Christianopolis as a reformed polity whose values unreformed Europe had rejected.

If America had just been somewhere that Europe had not known very well before, wrote the Huguenot pastor Jean de Léry, who spent two years closely observing the Tupinambá of Brazil in 1556–8, then ‘Asia and Africa could also be named new worlds with regard to us’. What made America different was that it was a continent of which there was no prior textual knowledge from Antiquity. Its discovery became a full-stop answer for those who wanted to challenge the dominant Aristotelian philosophical consensus and champion the primacy of experience over received wisdom. The Jesuit historian José de Acosta found that he was cold at midday in the Tropics despite the heat of the sun. In Aristotle’s meteorology, that was an existential impossibility. But Acosta trusted his own senses and ‘laughed and made fun of Aristotle and his philosophy’.

The circulation of information in print about the New World was extensive. Travel and exploration narratives found a ready market. The letters of Hernán Cortés, for example, appeared in print in five languages, all before 1525. Oviedo’s ‘Summary’ natural history of ‘the Indies’ (America) was first published a year later. Peter Martyr Vermigli wrote the first complete ‘history’ of the New World discoveries in 1530. In 1534, Francisco Jerez’s True relation of the Conquest of Peru appeared in Spanish, German and French, while the first part of Oviedo’s more comprehensive natural history was published that same year. It was modest in comparison with the ‘decades’ of Antonio de Herrera’s General History of the Indies, published in the early years of the seventeenth century (1601–15) or Juan de Torquemada’s Indian Monarchies (Monarquía Indiana, 1615), a monumental history of the indigenous peoples of America. Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigations and Voyages (Navigationi et Viaggi, 1550) used the notion of a ‘collection’ of New World travelogues as a metonymy for the whole process of discovery. He dedicated the work to Girolamo Fracastoro because he ‘does not, as many do, merely imitate, or go from one book to another, modifying, transcribing, and declaring other men’s things’. He is a true ‘discoverer’ who ‘travelled the world collecting many new things never before heard of’.

The encounter with other human beings outside Europe involved a judgement. The observer had to place himself in relation to that other human being, and that place was relative, complex and emotional, as well as rational. Everyone was convinced (because Aristotle and classical Antiquity in general had taught them so) that human nature was uniform. So, the closer Europeans came into contact with the peoples of the New World (and, by extension, Africans and indigenous peoples of the eastern hemisphere), the more those peoples became a mirror in which Europeans saw themselves, their differences being mapped onto and used to explain or magnify the divisions within Europe.

When Vitoria sought a comparison for the Indians in Europe, he found it in the peasantry: ‘even among our own people, we can see many peasants who are little different from brute animals’. Jesuit missionaries from 1550 onwards wrote in their letters to Rome of ‘these Indies’ of rural Italy, places where the peasantry lived like ‘savages’, their beliefs seemingly little different from those of the Indians and as resistant to the ‘education’ that the Counter-Reformation offered them. Italians called the invading forces from beyond the Alps in the Italian Wars of the first half of the sixteenth century ‘barbarians’. The French scholar Étienne Pasquier took exception to the French being called ‘barbarians’, but then used the same epithet for the Germans. The ‘monsters’ with which travellers embellished their accounts (Amazons, androgynes, anthropophagi, giants, Cyclops, troglodytes, pygmies, people with tails) became domesticated and embodied into stereotypes of other Europeans. Cornelius Gemma, professor of medicine at Louvain, published a treatise in 1575 in which the various monstrous races were enumerated. But, he noted: ‘It is not necessary to go to the New World to find beings of this sort; most of them and others still more hideous can be found here and there among us, now that the rules of justice are trampled underfoot, all humanity flouted, and all religion torn to bits.’ He perhaps had contemporary pamphlet literature in mind, in which (for example) the French claimed that the English, like wild men, had tails, or that Protestants were monsters in the eyes of Catholics, and vice versa.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, and especially around 1580 (when the Spanish hegemony over the Portuguese overseas empire became a reality, and when Francis Drake had returned from his ‘circumnavigation’), French and Dutch writers and engravers republished the works of las Casas and others to fashion the ‘good savage’, the Indian who had been oppressed by the Spanish conquerors and who would become an ally against the ‘Machiavellian’ cruelties of their shared enemy. That year, Montaigne published his famous essay ‘On Cannibals’, adopting the tone of the gentleman in his study, contemplating with bemusement the world without. Montaigne referred to his meeting and trying to converse with a native Tupinambá in Rouen. He used the experience to calibrate his reactions to what was going on in contemporary France.

To do so, Montaigne drew on the freshly published account of the Protestant pastor Jean de Léry’s experience of the siege of Sancerre in 1573. During the siege, Léry entered the house of one of his flock who, starving, had eaten the flesh of his three-year-old daughter. Seeing her cooked tongue on plates, Léry wondered why his visceral revulsion had not been similar when he had studied the cannibalistic practices of the Tupinambá Indians during the Villegagnon expedition to Brazil in 1556–7. As a good Calvinist, he had a clear sense of where to draw the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and he was in no doubt that it was not just cultural but also theological. Only God ultimately knew who were saved and who were not, and Calvin had been unambiguous: ‘there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God’. Yet, in the case of the Tupinambá their superstition had become ingrained, transmitted from their forefathers, because they were the descendants of Ham and cursed. He interpreted Indian ritual shrieks as demonic possession. They were, in short, unredeemable.

Yet, back in Europe where it should have been different, it wasn’t. There too, cannibalism existed, and that was Montaigne’s point. ‘I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts,’ he said, ‘but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly we should be so blind to our own.’ When Jean de Léry recalled the ritual dances of the Indians, it was not in order to dismiss them as simply demonic: ‘hearing the measured harmonies of such a multitude, and especially in the cadence and refrain of the song, when at every verse they would let their voices trail, saying Heu, heuaure, heura, heuraure, heura, heura, oueh – I stood there transported with delight. Whenever I remember it, my heart trembles.’ The discovery of America awakened Europe to what was ‘curious’ and ‘wonderful’, but also ‘barbarian’. The savages became part of what it was to be European.