Transcontinental movement associated with the vast Mongol Empire was soon accompanied by a frightfully mysterious killer that spread across Asia, Europe and North Africa. Lurking in shadows, and drifting through valleys and over the countryside in clouds of fog, the Black Death was one of the worst of the devastating disease outbreaks that had long contributed to superstitious belief in divine retribution. Plague was so terribly unnerving because in the popular imagination it was the icy grip of death reaching out to victims from the beyond; with no natural defense, remedy, or even mercy. But no plague invokes the memory of suffering and destruction like the Black Death of the fourteenth century that smothered the life from ravaged communities, and left many cities in ghostly ruins.
As citizens huddled together in fear and gathered at church in large masses to pray, the killer only grew stronger. And the faster people fled from infested areas, the faster the disease spread, getting established in more and more distant lands. The Black Death wrapped its grisly arms around its victims and sank piercing fangs into the depths of their being, pulling them to the grave faster than the ground could be opened to receive their spoiled bodies. Entire families succumbed to the agony and anguish of boils, blisters and buboes; fever, diarrhea, vomiting, hemorrhaging, coughing; and rotting, liquified tissues. Men buried their brothers, mothers buried their children and all wept until they were hollowed out and numb to the sorrow, as flesh rotted on the bone and the putrid stench of decay bittered mind and body alike.
Like biblical figures laying their sins on a sacrificial lamb, people searched for a scapegoat to blame, with ethnic, religious and other minorities becoming the victims of renewed persecutions. In Europe Jews, lepers, travelers, and homeless people were just some of those targeted for retribution. Christians used the outbreaks as another occasion to exterminate entire Jewish communities. And Muslims in the Middle East did likewise to the “unbelievers” that had not submitted to Allah. Houses were burned, businesses looted, and those minorities that failed to flee fast enough were in many cases butchered where they stood. The overall negative effects propagated dark times; society’s mood was bleak. Dismal public character was reflected in works of the period and the arts that finally had once again been making progress were temporarily stifled.
Together with wars and famines, recurrent bouts of disease saw populations decimated across Europe, Asia and North Africa. Europe, for example, has been estimated to have lost nearly half of its people during the 1300s. The effects of civil dissatisfaction, labor shortages and property redistribution transformed the political landscape in many countries. And for the time being, the consumptive pattern of population growth was held in check, not by an all-powerful god or insightful planning, but by tiny organisms of archaic origin. For all their warring and brutality, people were still quite susceptible to annihilation from organisms too small to see. But the survivors forged ahead, and though disease, famine and warfare continued to recur, the veil of gloom and despair slowly lifted.
The fifteenth century saw the rise of the Ottoman Empire, beginning in Anatolia. And in 1453 the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople, about a thousand years after the fall of Rome, finally marking the end of the Byzantine era and the demise of the last of the Roman Empire, even though much of what is now Germany was at that time being called the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was in fact, not Roman, but a confederation of German territories that elected kings that were in turn crowned as emperors by the Pope. The term Holy Roman Empire is first known to have been applied to the federation of largely German states about 454 years after Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was crowned Imperator Augustus on December 25, 800.
As the Eastern Roman Empire declined, the exodus of intellectuals from Constantinople and other Byzantine cities and their resettlement in Western Europe, particularly Italy, helped add to the blossoming artistic expression known as the Renaissance. Prior to that the art and science of the Hellenized world that survived in the Roman Empire was all but killed off as Christianity and Islam both worked to virtually strangle art and knowledge to the point it nearly withered to naught. The Byzantines did support some fine architecture, art and science, but were too weakened and pre-occupied by Muslim hostilities during much of their history to make large contributions to its historical development.
But finally, the necessary combination of stability, aptitude and interest came together again in Italy to breathe new life into society that had been suffocating under the blanket of the Dark Ages. Fifteenth century Italy captured some of the spirit of Athens from two thousand years before, and one of the cities at the heart of the Renaissance was Florence, under the patronage of the Medici family. Trade and banking had brought great wealth to the Medicis and they ascended to powerful political offices that included the papacies of Leo X, Clement VII, and Leo XI. The famous scientist Galileo was only one of many notable scholars and artists that received assistance from the Medicis, and he in fact tutored a number of the Medici children; even naming the four largest moons of Jupiter in their honor: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Sandro Botticelli, Donatello and Raphael were just some of the artists who worked in Florence, and still today many of their beautiful works can be seen in the city. The genius of Leonardo and brilliance of Michelangelo have yet to be eclipsed, and even from their own times they were regarded as masters of their crafts. Though Leonardo’s works of art such as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, with its intimate portrayal of emotion, are proclaimed as some of the great masterpieces of all time, and were complimented by his works in other fields such as anatomy and design; ultimately gaining him recognition as one of the leading minds of all time. And for five hundred years, the gentle yet powerful grace of Michelangelo’s sculpture and painting has remained the pinnacle of artistic expression. The genius these men exhibited was extraordinary, but it was also a reflection of the extraordinary circumstances that was Florence during the Renaissance.
Even in the midst of beauty, however, ugliness can be found lurking, and the fine efforts of great artists weren’t unopposed. A fire-brand priest by the name of Savonarola preached that old, tired fallacy that the end time was at hand, and he insisted that works of art and literature not in keeping with the strict, repressive long-standing Catholic dogma were of an evil nature. Savonarola would have kept the world in the Dark Ages had it been up to him; a world in which pleasure was loathed and fear exalted, as it is in much of the Muslim world and some Christian communities still today. After gaining power in Florence in 1494 he instigated the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities in which many great works were burned or otherwise destroyed. But justice would have a say, and Savonarola got his comeuppance in the end, as his crimes against the pleasures of history were avenged when he too was burned at the stake on the very site of his book burning bonfire in the year 1498.
The flowering of the arts would spread from Italy through the rest of Europe along with the fortune of global trade and empire in coming centuries. But as art was reaching new heights in Italy, the fifteenth century was seeing other remarkable accomplishments, including the spread of printing presses after 1440 following the model of Johannes Gutenberg that revolutionized the printing industry. Though the printing press was developed centuries earlier in China, the challenge of assembling the great variety of moveable type necessary to represent the unwieldy Chinese system of writing proved a great hindrance to prolific Chinese printing, whereas the small alphabets of Europe were much more easily managed. As it offered tremendous speed and labor advantages, mechanized printing spread rapidly, and greatly enhanced the literacy of Europe along with the dissemination of different ideas. But there was still more discovery to come. To top off the dynamic fifteenth century, just in time to fill the newly popular presses, came even more exciting news that gripped the imagination of the Old World.
The discovery came after unification of Spain through the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand, and the subsequent reconquest of Cordova that set the stage for a larger Spanish economic and political presence. But like the rest of Europe, Spanish trade was hindered by Muslim control of important trade routes to India, China and even Africa. At that time Portugal rivaled Spain for the lead in what would come to be known as the Age of Discovery by laying claim to newfound islands and establishing trading posts in Africa. And following the early lead of Prince Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama had rounded the southern tip of Africa for Portugal and established a sea route to India; with its supplies of highly desirable trade goods.
Portugal’s growing trade network helped prompt Spain to sponsor a trip of exploration into the vast unknown western sea when approached by a native Italian promising a shorter sea route to Asia, even though the Spanish Crown had initially rejected his proposal. Not only did Spain at first balk on his far-flung plan, Christopher Columbus also asked Portugal, Italy and England to fund his risky and dramatic voyage but had no immediate takers. And that was because most royal advisors believed Columbus was underestimating the distance required to sail west from Europe to Asia. However, while the advisors were correct in their assertion that Columbus’ estimation of time and distance was overly optimistic, they had no idea what, if anything might lie beyond the great ocean for Columbus to discover, and he would find it when his persistence with the Spanish Court eventually paid off.
Convinced that the transoceanic trip to the Orient was suitably short, he set sail under the Spanish flag in 1492. There were doubters of course, but there were also a lot of people that were convinced: convinced that the expedition would be lost at sea. It was commonly believed that such a trip would lead to disaster when the crew exhausted the food and water supplies before making landfall, but fortunately for Columbus, the Americas lay in his path. And he reached the islands of the Bahamas just five weeks after re-supplying at the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa. Then, after triumphantly exploring some Caribbean islands he returned to Spain and announced an exaggerated discovery of rich islands near China and India.
And even more astonishingly, during all four voyages Columbus made to the New World he never realized that he reached lands less than halfway to Asia; and died still apparently holding to the belief that he had found a short route to India. However, others believed differently, and shortly after the death of Columbus, Martin Waldseemuller published a world map naming the new land America in honor of explorer Amerigo Vespucci who, during his own journey, correctly surmised that the landmass they were exploring was a continent[s] previously unknown to the Old World.
The voyages of Columbus did more than discover entire continents previously unknown to much of the world; they set off a rush to colonize and exploit not only the New World, but any lands with value that weren’t well defended. Of course, land-grabbing conquest wasn’t new; colonization was just one more way to extend empire, and colonization by sea went back as far as ancient empires and traders like the Phoenicians staking claims in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. And perhaps the most famous raiders and colonizers were the Norse Vikings that established settlements on distant lands by sea centuries earlier. But the growing priority of commerce, and competition between European powers was changing the focus of expansion, bringing the whole of the world in reach of ambitious countries with modern merchant marines.
The most important early powers in the Age of Discovery, Spain and Portugal, entered into a pact to split the world between them with Spain taking the lands west of a line in the Atlantic and Portugal taking the east. That ostensibly gave Spain control of much of the Americas and Portugal control of Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands. In 1519 a Spanish expedition, led by Ferdinand Magellan until his death, circumnavigated the world. His ships rounded the southern tip of South America and sailed across the vast Pacific. The search for fame and fortune was costly however, as Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines in a conflict with natives, and only one of his original five ships was able to complete the journey back to Spain. But despite the challenges, as excitement built, Spain and Portugal were joined by other European powers, principally England, the Netherlands, and France, in the race to build empire through the acquisition of overseas territory. At the height of Europe’s world dominance, the European powers would eventually come to exchange occupied territories like trading cards in war resolutions and economic negotiations.
Spain’s conquest and subjugation of the New World is legendary; spreading across the Caribbean, Central America, South America and North America like the curse of Old World diseases they brought with them. The native people of the Americas were devastated in a manner similar to the way the Black Death had ravaged Europe and Asia. The Spanish conquered the Aztecs and Incas and even explored North America in their lust for gold. The fabled city of gold, or El Dorado, was never found, but precious metals were taken from the natives by the shipful and transported across the Atlantic to the Spanish treasury, financing additional expeditions to extract the wealth of occupied lands.
Setting an ominous tone for New World inhabitants, Columbus himself reported how agreeable and easily defeated the natives of the islands he first visited were and that in the name of none other than the Holy Trinity as many of their number could be taken for slavery as could be sold. And under the auspices of God and country, many slaves were initially taken from the New World as slaves, but as large plantations prospered, the trend soon reversed and slaves flowed in from nearby territories. And finally, after the decimation of local populations through warfare and disease, slaves were brought in from the Old World by Spain and other Imperial powers to provide the intense labor necessary for high production agriculture.
It was Portugal, in particular, that established a highly profitable and voluminous slave trade. Even before Columbus’ voyages to the New World, Portugal had opened a slave market in the town of Lagos in 1444 to import African slaves for sale in Europe. Aided by tribal rivalry, wherein warlords raided neighboring tribes to capture slaves to sell, Europeans trafficked in African slaves for hundreds of years following Portugal’s example. And such modernly objectionable behavior was even reinforced by some Popes through papal bulls which encouraged the subjugation into perpetual slavery of those who didn’t believe in Christ, although little mention was made of freeing the converts to Christianity and their descendants.
The technological divide between Old World and New was so great that Spain’s conquest of the Americas was accomplished with relatively few soldiers. But it was not advanced weaponry alone that aided Spanish conquest. In the process, Spanish cavalry even reintroduced the horse to its native land, whence they migrated to Asia, Europe and Africa. But horses, along with camels, eventually died off in the Western Hemisphere. And the Spanish cavalry, wearing steel armor, carrying steel weaponry, and riding their large horses was an intimidating sight to the Americans. Swords, lances, crossbows, artillery, firearms, and even attack dogs offered the Spanish a lopsided advantage over natives that were often equipped with little more than wood clubs and spears.
Like most of the world, the lands the Spanish invaded was often populated by tribes hostile to one another, and also ruled by brutal overlords. For example, the Aztec Empire was still relatively young and actively seeking to extend its range by subduing surrounding tribes. Many of the Aztec’s captives were sacrificed to their bloodthirsty sun god in horrific rituals. So the Spanish had little trouble recruiting additional fighters to challenge the existing rulers. Another great Spanish advantage was their treacherous cunning. Often they rode right into the center of local power under peaceful pretenses, only to capture the ruler and demand capitulation. In the case of the Inca conquest, Francisco Pizarro captured Atahualpa and demanded a large ransom. But, after receiving the ransom of gold and silver, Pizzaro refused to release the Inca leader, and later had Atahualpa executed to deprive the natives of a leader that might challenge their control.
Back in the Old World members of the Habsburg family ruled most of Western Europe at one time or another. After the Spanish Habsburg, Philip II, took the Crown of Portugal in 1581 the old division of the world into a Spanish Western Hemisphere and a Portuguese Eastern Hemisphere was largely ignored. The whole world of sea trade now belonged to Spain. Spain’s influence was exercised around the globe from the Americas to Asia and the Pacific Isles. The wealth and power the worldwide empire brought to Spain emboldened the Monarchy’s pride, and rulers of Spain held themselves in higher and higher esteem. Natives of the colonies were reduced to slavery for the glory of Spain, while Jews and Muslims were forcibly expelled from Spain itself. And the jewel of the crown’s domestic dominance came in the form of the Spanish Inquisition which was initiated to hunt down and exterminate any remaining threats to the crown and the Christian faith.
However, as Spanish power and pride multiplied, Spain entered into conflict with other European powers. When Charles V divided his Empire largely into Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, holdings in the Netherlands went to Philip II of Spain. But troubles with Spanish rule in the Netherlands fueled by a Christian divide between Catholics and Protestants resulted in a Dutch revolt. After England joined the ensuing Eighty Years War in support of the Dutch it defeated the vaunted Spanish Armada in a surprising historical military upset. And France too, fought against Spain over the Southern Netherlands that would eventually become Belgium, Luxembourg and part of France, helping to further even the political and economic playing field, opening up more colonial opportunities for other European powers.
Not all trade and commerce was aimed at world domination, of course. In the 1590s the first Dutch commercial tulips were cultivated from stock imported from the Ottoman Empire, establishing a trade for which they’re still famous to this day. The Dutch were already successful maritime traders, and following their independence from Spain they too established a great trading empire, with Amsterdam becoming one of the wealthiest and most capitalistic cities of the world, as reflected by the rise of the Dutch master painters. And though many trade networks and much exploration had long been financed by private financiers, the Netherlands developed the first full-time stock exchanges where individuals could gather to invest in commercial enterprises.
At the time many stock exchanges were still secondary to other business concerns, with a lot of early stock exchanges being located in pubs or other popular meeting places. It may be worth noting that the Dutch stock market experience had a large influence in London; and later New York, or New Amsterdam as it was called by the Dutch prior to British control of the town, where Wall Street took its name from the old wall protecting New Amsterdam’s northern boundary. The wall itself was removed by the British in 1699, well before the New York Stock & Exchange Board, later renamed the New York Stock Exchange, was founded in 1792; more than 150 years after a Dutch stock market crisis that brought economic ruin to many investors, triggered by over speculation in none other than the tulip trade.
The Dutch took control of some Portuguese colonies and established others all around the world, in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Pacific Islands. Some Dutch colonies were organized and administered by private enterprise; foremost of which was the Dutch East India Company chartered by the States-General of the Netherlands in 1602. Dutch development priority was given to the Pacific Islands and the Far East. Trading centers and supply posts were established in Africa, and modern Iran, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, China and Taiwan. As Netherland prosperity continued in the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company grew to be the wealthiest private enterprise the world had ever known.
Denmark also established a strong trade with Japan, an island nation steeped in history and tradition. Having a relatively small land area, permanent settlement was established early in Japan. The Japanese were living in wooden houses more than ten thousand years ago. But Japanese influence wasn’t felt much outside of Japan. In the seventeenth century, in reaction to concerns over imperialistic intentions by Europeans, Japan isolated itself by implementing heavy restrictions of trade and foreign travel. The only countries with which Japan would allow trade were Denmark and China. And after the Dutch suffered multiple losses in wars with other European powers, the trading port at Japan was one of the few foreign assets the Netherlands had left.
After about two centuries however, Japan’s self-imposed isolation was disrupted by a show of force by the United States navy under Commodore Perry. In 1853 he sailed into the harbor at Edo, present day Tokyo, with four ships of war and demanded Japan open up trade with the West. The ironclad warships were unlike any the Japanese had seen and they were duly impressed. The following year Perry returned with seven ships and signed the Convention of Kanagawa opening Japan to U.S. trade. Following that trade coup by the U.S.; Russia, France, and Great Britain convinced Japan to sign similar trade treaties, putting Imperial Japan in an uncomfortable position of being influenced by foreign powers.
Though relatively quiet, the French also had colonial ambitions, being early explorers and settlers of North America. In a fruitless attempt to find a water passage to Asia, they were sailing along the Atlantic coast of North America by 1524. Though not finding the hoped-for northwest passage, they did establish their first settlement in North America in Canada along the St. Lawrence River at the site of what is now Cap-Rouge, Quebec in 1541. However the French suffered a setback when weather, disease and hostility of the natives combined to scrap that first attempt at colonization.
France’s second attempt was near the mouth of the St. Johns River in modern northeast Florida in the year 1564. That colony, Fort Caroline, was threatened by a Spanish colony established the following year called St. Augustine. But before the French could successfully drive the Spanish away, the Spanish marched on Fort Caroline, killed many of the settlers and sacked the fort. St. Augustine would go on to become the oldest continually inhabited European city in the United States, and France gave up attempting to colonize the Atlantic Seaboard.
Future French colonies were essentially fur trading posts that required few settlers and relied on good relations with local Indian tribes for trade and security, and they were concentrated along major waterways from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system. Some of the notable cities that grew from those trading posts include Quebec, Montreal, Detroit and St. Louis. The French colony of Louisiana, however, and establishment of Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi and Mobile were efforts at colonization based on much more generalized trade and agriculture. Like the other European colonial powers France also settled areas of the Caribbean and South America. But after a rare successful slave rebellion, Haiti gained its independence from France in 1804, becoming one of the first independent Caribbean nations. But not all French colonial efforts came to naught, by contrast, French Guiana north of Brazil in South America is still a part of France to this day. French Guiana is proportionately represented in French government and holds the distinction of constituting the largest landmass of the European Union outside of Europe.
One of the Johnny-come-latelies, England got serious about the race for colonial profit about a hundred years behind Spain, about the same time that one William Shakespeare was setting new heights in his productions for the English theater. Prior to the development of electronics and recording instruments of the twentieth century, live theater and later forms such as opera, were principal means of public entertainment. And Shakespeare’s prodigious talents transcended his work as an actor and producer of plays, to that of the World’s most renowned author, with mastery and innovation of a rapidly evolving language, and rich portrayal of mood and character. But like the great painters of the Renaissance, he didn’t display singular genius born only of internal inspiration. He was made better by his contemporaries like the Spaniards Lope de Vega who penned as many as 1500 plays, and the author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes.
In contrast to the creative beauty of the arts, early English forays into world trade in the age of discovery consisted to a considerable extent on the pirating of Spanish and Portuguese treasure and trading ships, which, of course, were generally themselves laden with ill-gotten goods. Today, many Americans associate European settlement of North America with the British, but by the year 1600 little had become of England’s 1583 claim on the island of Newfoundland off the coast of modern Canada. It was in a charter of 1600 that England granted special trade authorities to the British East India Company to carry out trade with Asia. And it was that charter granting exclusive rights to a private trade enterprise that would play a very instrumental role in forging what would become the mighty British Empire for the little island nation that had been overran by Germans, Romans, Norsemen and even Frenchmen with Norse ancestry.
England had slightly different ambitions for North America, but first England concerned itself with conquering and colonizing neighboring Ireland before colonizing the New World. After defeating Ireland in the Nine Years War ending in 1603, the English confiscated Irish lands and colonized them with English citizens to farm as plantations of England. And it was that model of agrarian colonization that the English followed in establishing colonies along the Atlantic seaboard of North America.
In 1607 the colony of Jamestown was founded in what is now Virginia in the United States. Other colonies followed along the East Coast and some Caribbean islands; alongside Dutch and French colonies. After fighting together in the largely religious war between Christian factions known as the Thirty Years War that ended in 1648, the English and Dutch soon turned on each other when England ordered all goods from its American colonies to be transported only on English ships. For years England had been growing envious of the Netherlands’ trade wealth, and after the Dutch seized much of Portugal’s colonial empire following the Thirty Years War, England was looking to compete more favorably with the Dutch for the lucrative shipping business.
Still, the Netherlands had the preeminent navy in the world for a good part of the seventeenth century and repeatedly beat back English attacks and invasion attempts. Actually, it’s one of the great twists of political irony that in amongst the Anglo-Dutch wars the Dutch were successful in having William III of Orange, a nobleman of the Dutch Republic, installed on the throne of England in 1688. However, William by no means had free reign over English affairs, his wife Mary wielded considerable influence as daughter of the previous king, James II, and Parliament restricted his authority. In the same year William took the throne, Parliament passed a Bill of Rights to that effect. The articles of that Bill of Rights included the right of subjects to petition the king, the right of Protestants to bear arms, the right to free elections, the right to freedom of speech in parliament, protection against excessive bail or fines and cruel and unusual punishments, and freedom from fines and forfeitures before conviction.
Catastrophically to the Dutch, William didn’t use his influence in England to Dutch advantage, but rather used his influence in the Netherlands to dictate terms favorable to the English. The English declared that all naval actions would be under their control and the Dutch Navy would be limited in strength to no more than sixty percent of that of the English Navy. In following years merchants flocked from the Netherlands to London to take advantage of the favorable trade conditions, and England profited greatly while the Netherlands were largely