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                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

LOOKING BACK, Page 16

The Millennium of Discovery


How Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and developed a civilization
that came to dominate the entire world

BY JOHN ELSON


    On the campuses of America these days, Eurocentrism is a
naughty word, a no-no in an age of political correctness. Yet
there is no gainsaying the reality that the central theme of
the second millennium is, to cite the title of a popular book
by the British historian J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West.
In the first part of this era, Europe began to develop a
civilization that was able to compete with richer and more
sophisticated cultures, particularly those of China and Islam.
And with the Age of Exploration, midway through the 15th
century, European civilization gradually became the dominant
intellectual and political force in world history.

    All the landmark movements that have shaped the modern era
-- from the ocean voyages of Columbus and Magellan to the
Protestant Reformation and the print revolution, from the
development of the scientific method to the Industrial
Revolution -- were largely produced by those hated demons of
American multiculturalists, dead white European males. Until
1400, all but a handful of innovations in European life had
been anticipated by the Arabs or the Chinese. After 1600,
virtually every technological change that affected the world and
the way people lived -- from the telescope to the typewriter,
from the fork to the steam engine -- has been the product of
Western ingenuity.

    That ingenuity, coupled with an aggressive wanderlust,
brought Europeans and their culture to the ends of the earth. By
the year 1914, 84% of the world's land surface, apart from the
polar regions, was under either a European flag or that of a
former European colony. Of the nine nominally independent
non-Western nations, Bhutan and Ethiopia were politically
insignificant; Afghanistan, China, Siam, Nepal, Persia and the
Ottoman Empire were under varying degrees of thrall to Western
powers; only Japan was truly autonomous.

    There is no moral or spiritual superiority implied in the
assertion of European accomplishment. The hegemony of European
civilization was based largely on the successful application of
new knowledge to solving problems and conquering nature, and
much of that success was based on circumstance and ingenuity.
Italian merchants of the 14th century, for example, rather than
the bureaucrats of China, devised the essential principles of
accounting like double-entry bookkeeping and such financial
devices as the bill of exchange and limited liability. That is a
major reason why banking, and hence capitalism, developed in
Europe rather than in the Far East.

    The triumph of the West was in many ways a bloody shame -- a
story of atrocity and rapine, of arrogance, greed and ecological
despoliation, of hubristic contempt for other cultures and
intolerance of non-Christian faiths. Nonetheless, as Hugh Thomas
argues in A History of the World, "it is obvious that it is
Western Europe ((and)) North America which, since the 15th
century at least, for good or evil, ((have)) provided the
world's dynamism."


    In the year 1000, Western Europe was just emerging from the
long depression commonly known as the Dark Ages. The Continent's
condition was in some ways like that of Eastern Europe today,
which is ethnically riven, economically fragile and still
uncertain as to what follows a generation or more of tyranny.
Shortly before the beginning of the millennium, the Holy Roman
Emperor Otto III (unlike many others who were to bear that
title, he was reputed for his asceticism) moved his capital and
court back to the Eternal City. But what little grandeur Rome
still possessed paled by comparison with the splendors of "the
new Rome," Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire.

    Although much reduced from its territorial apogee in the
9th century, Byzantium was one of three centers of wealth and
power in the known world of the 11th century. India and China
were the others. Islam, although in a period of temporary
decline and political confusion, held sway as a militant
spiritual force from the Iberian Peninsula along the southern
littoral of the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. There were
sophisticated cultures elsewhere, notably the Mayan of Mexico,
but they were virtually out of touch with other civilizations --
thus lacking an essential condition for being considered part of
world history.

    Little of Europe's coming dynamism was apparent in the year
1000, although there were signs that the Continent was, ever so
slowly, getting richer. Wider use of plows had made farming more
efficient. The planting of new crops, notably beans and peas,
added both variety to Europe's diet and enriching nitrate to its
soil. Windmills and watermills provided fresh sources of power.
Villages that were to become towns and eventually cities grew
up around trading markets.

    Yet the modern nation-state, with its centralized
bureaucracies and armies under unified command, would not come
into being until the 15th century. For most of the Middle Ages,
Roman Catholicism was Europe's unifying force. Benedictine
abbeys had preserved what fragments of ancient learning the
Continent possessed. Cistercian monks had cleared the land and
pioneered in agricultural experimentation. Ambitious popes vied
with equally ambitious kings to determine whether the spiritual
realm would hold sway over the temporal, or vice versa.
Symbolic of the church's power were the great Gothic cathedrals
of Europe: construction of Reims began in the 13th century, and
Chartres -- the most glorious of all such edifices -- was
consecrated in 1260.

    In the Near East until recently, Europeans were often known
as "Franks," a reference to the French and German warriors who
marched and rode in the Crusades. These eight extraordinary
missions, which took place over the course of two centuries,
marked the beginning of what J.M. Roberts calls "Europe's long
and victorious assault on the world." The Crusaders had mixed
motives: religious zeal blended uneasily with unabashed greed.
The professed goal of the Crusades was the liberation of
Jerusalem, which had been captured by Islamic forces in 638.
Although Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, marking their
victory with a fearful slaughter of Muslim and Jewish women and
children, the Christian colonies they set up in the Levant
proved to be fragile kingdoms and were soon recaptured.

    Like many other episodes in human history, the Crusades had
significant side effects. One was a heightened animosity between
Christendom and Islam in the Middle East, which eventually cut
Europeans off from land routes to India and China. The need for
new avenues of trade with the Far East led to the seafaring
explorations of the Age of Discovery. Thanks to the Crusaders,
Europe had developed a yearning for such oriental luxuries as
silks, perfumes, rare spices and (some historians believe)
four-poster beds.

    Another consequence was a fatal weakening of Byzantium,
which never recovered from a brutal sacking by Crusaders in
1204. Western Europe had rediscovered some of the lost learning
of ancient Greece in translations made by Arab sages. A steady
exodus of Hellenic scholars from the decaying empire brought
westward the more detailed knowledge of antiquity that
eventually fueled the revival of classical learning known as
the Renaissance. A startling contrast to the struggle between
Crusaders and Saracens in the Holy Land was the peaceful
coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews in Islamic-ruled
medieval Spain, which had been conquered by the Muslims in 711.
In an era that became known as the convivencia, scholars from
all over Europe made pilgrimages to the schools and libraries of
Cordoba, Madrid and Salamanca to study Arabic literature,
astronomy and medicine -- and to enjoy such sensual pleasures as
food cooked in olive oil and music played on the guitar.

    The Jews, a prosperous middle-class minority in this
tolerant society, served as translators and go-betweens. Among
other skills, Spanish Jews were famed as ironsmiths. After
Spain was reunited in 1492 by the Christian armies of Queen
Isabella and King Ferdinand (who was part Jewish), the Jews were
given a cruel choice: convert to Christianity or go into exile.
Many of these craftsmen set up shop in Italy. "Ghetto," which
means "iron foundry," was the name of the island in Venice that
became the city's Jewish quarter.

    Humanity's instinct for order wants precise timetables for
great events. When, for example, did the Renaissance begin?
Charles Van Doren, in A History of Knowledge, argues for 1304;
that was the birth year of poet Francesco Petrarch, whose life
and work epitomized the revival of classical learning in Italy.
Many other historians favor 1453, the year of Constantinople's
fall. The Middle Ages, in the consensus view, ended during the
14th century. But J.M. Roberts in The Penguin History of the
World points out that certain features of medieval life --
notably a feudal system that bonded serfs to the soil they
tilled -- persisted in Eastern Europe until the 19th century.

    It is possible, however, to date with some precision the
beginning of the Age of Discovery, which opened the world to
European shipping -- and European imperialism. Around 1419
Portugal's Prince Henry (commonly known as "the Navigator," but
wrongly so, since he never took part in any exploratory voyages
himself) established a maritime training center at Sagres, on
his country's Atlantic coast. Inspired by Henry's seafaring
passion, such explorers as Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco Da Gama
sailed down the coast of Africa and eventually to India. From
the rival ports of Palos and Cadiz, under the flag of Spain,
Christopher Columbus set out westward on his seminal voyage of
discovery, eventually journeying four times to what he never
believed was a New World. His discovery of America, Van Doren
notes, "is probably the single greatest addition to human
knowledge ever made by one man."

    Several factors made the Age of Exploration possible.
Medieval cartographers piously placed Jerusalem at the center of
the earth. But in the 15th century, Western scholars
rediscovered Ptolemy's Geography, with its maps of a
semispheric earth that (more or less) accurately located such
distant places as Iceland and Ceylon. Improvements in rigging
enabled the construction of larger, more maneuverable ships with
both square-rigged and fore-and-aft sails. The development of
the quadrant (an Arabic invention) and magnetic compass
(possibly from China) made navigation more accurate; the
stern-fastened rudder made ship handling easier.

    Finally, there was need. The pioneering seafarers knew from
trade and returning travelers that in many respects the cultures
of Asia were superior to their own. Desperate for the wealth of
the East, Europe had little to offer in exchange but the one
true faith. Like the Crusaders, the explorers were inspired by
curiosity and the desire to get rich. But they also wished, as
the Spanish historian Bernal Diaz del Castillo put it, "to give
light to those who were in darkness." Wherever European colonies
were established, missionaries soon followed.

    The Age of Exploration enriched Europe, but its
consequences for the peoples of Africa and the Americas were
mostly disastrous. Africa had had a slave trade, conducted by
nomadic Muslim merchants, before the seafarers arrived, and the
traffic persisted even after European nations outlawed it
during the 19th century. In 1434 Portuguese adventurers brought
the first black slaves to Lisbon. As Europe's transatlantic
colonies grew in importance, so did the need for manual labor.
In all, writes Roberts, as many as 10 million slaves were
transported to the New World, perhaps 5 million of them in the
18th century alone. Nearly two million more died aboard the
crowded prison ships that carried slaves to work the sugar
fields of the Caribbean or the cotton plantations of the
American South.

    Native Americans were victimized by colonialism in a
different way: millions died of imported diseases like
smallpox, which their immune systems could not handle. The
conquistadores ruthlessly suppressed the imposing cultures of
Aztec Mexico and Incan Peru, which nonetheless made a lasting
and invaluable contribution to, among other things, world
cuisine. Tomatoes, potatoes, corn and peppers, together with
many other comestibles, were indigenous to the New World. So,
less happily for humankind, was tobacco.

    Disease also had a profound effect on the transformation of
Europe. In 1347 a ship escaping from a siege of a Genoan trading
post in the Crimea by Mongols and Hungarian Kipchaks landed in
Sicily. Many of its refugee passengers were suffering from a
hitherto unknown and fatal illness: the bubonic plague, carried
by the fleas to which rats were host by the millions. By the
start of the 15th century, the plague had killed up to 40
million people -- one-third of the Continent's population.

    The Black Death profoundly influenced the course of
history. It inspired a further exodus to the West of scholars
from Byzantium, which was especially hard hit by the disease. It
helped lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation by
creating an underlying mood of skepticism about the Roman
Catholic Church, whose prayers and rituals had appeared
ineffective in warding off the disease. (Coincidentally, the
church's credibility suffered during the Great Schism
((1378-1417)), when rival popes held sway in Rome and Avignon.)
Finally, the plague left a mass of discarded and unwearable
clothes. But these garments could be shredded to make rag
paper, a vital component of the print revolution that was just
getting under way.

    Around 1455, in the German city of Mainz, Johannes
Gutenberg printed the first books (Bibles, appropriately) from
movable metal type. By 1500, historians estimate, more than 15
million books were in print, including numerous editions of the
Greek and Roman classics that Byzantine scholars had brought to
the West. There was implicit subversion in these new/old
writings. The Athenian ideal of a republican city-state was a
challenge to the absolutist monarchies of Europe. The concept
that "man is the measure of all things," as Protagoras put it,
confronted the church's theocentric portrait of the universe.

    The new humanism was reinforced by Renaissance artists.
Michelangelo's David has a biblical subject, yet the statue
embodies a Greek-inspired ideal of masculine beauty, wholly
secular in its impact. Aristocratic patrons provided the wealth
that made possible this explosion of creativity. Much of
Florence's aesthetic splendor, from the Medici Palace to the
statuary of Donatello to the paintings of Fra Angelico, was
commissioned by the financier Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464),
known also (and suitably) as "Pater Patriae" (Father of His
Country). In many ways Medici was the prototype of the men who
created Western civilization, both the embodiment of its ideals
and the nourisher of its institutions.

    The print revolution not only made the Reformation possible
but also assured its success. Without the books that rapidly
spread the teachings of Martin Luther and the Swiss reformers
throughout Northern Europe, the church and its attendant secular
forces might have ruthlessly crushed the reformers, as they had
destroyed the Albigensian heretics of the 12th century. Between
1562 and 1598 alone, Europe endured nine religious wars. These
conflicts ended with the Peace of Vervins and the Edict of
Nantes, which provided freedom of worship for France's
Protestant Huguenots. By then the spiritual unity of the West
had been permanently shattered.

    Protestantism played a subsidiary role in yet another
revolution that challenged the church: the emergence of
capitalism. By the 14th century the roots of modern banking
could be found in northern Italy, where Florence's gold coin
(the florin) and Venice's (the ducat) became, in effect,
international currencies. But banking and Catholicism were then
uneasy partners: the church condemned usury -- defined then as
any interest on loans -- in language harsher than bishops today
use to denounce contraception. The reformers were more lenient.
Gradually Europe's great centers of commerce were established in
predominantly Protestant Holland and England. Innovation
followed upon fiscal innovation. Grain futures were traded in
Amsterdam in the 16th century. Paper currency began to replace
metal coins. The first check may have been written in London in
1675.

    Scientists, meanwhile, were demystifying the universe.
Strangely, no one knows for sure who invented the telescope,
but by 1609 Galileo Galilei had built one of his own. With it
he was able to confirm the heretical speculations of
Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho Brahe that the sun, not the earth,
was the center of our universe. The specific origins of the
microscope are equally obscure. In the 17th century, Robert
Hooke used it to describe accurately the anatomy of a flea and
the design of a feather; Antonie de Leeuwenhoek discovered a
world of wriggling organisms in a drop of water. The invention
of logarithms and calculus led to more accurate clocks and
optical instruments.

    By 1700 Galileo, Rene Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton and other
scientists had clarified the principles by which machines work,
an essential step in building ever better machines. Henceforth
Western civilization's technological supremacy was beyond
challenge. Mechanical invention led inexorably to another step
in the West's commercial and political hegemony over the world:
the Industrial Revolution.

    In Hugh Thomas' formulation, "The essential characteristic
of our times (that is, the years since 1750) is the manufacture
of goods for sale outside the neighborhood concerned, in a
factory, and by a machine." Factories, to be sure, predated the
Industrial Revolution: during the 16th century, one Jack of
Newbury employed more than 500 men, women and children at a
plant in Berkshire, England. But the true father of the modern
factory, most historians agree, was Richard Arkwright, who in
the late 1760s or early 1770s installed several water-powered
cotton-spinning machines at a workshop in Cromford. Thousands
more installations were to follow.

    Philosophers of the 18th century envisioned the universe as
a great machine, with God as its controlling engineer. And man
himself, they argued, was also a kind of machine, whose work
could be regulated according to scientific principles. One
beneficial side effect of this vision was a more scientific
approach to medicine. But mechanism also led to the dark,
satanic mills that William Blake railed against. In the
Americas, slaves working the fields were organized and
regimented according to factory principles.

    Mass production of goods required both eager markets and
raw materials. This increased the importance of colonies and led
Europe into endless conflicts over their control. Roberts argues
that the Seven Years' War (1756-63) was the first truly global
conflict: battles in Europe between the British and the French
and their allies were supplemented by skirmishes in North
America, India, the Caribbean and the Philippines. By the 19th
century, colonialism had become imperialism and Africa its
principal focus, as the Great Powers drew through deserts and
forests national borders that remain largely intact today, even
though they make little ethnic or economic sense.

    Modernization in world history, Roberts wrote, "is above
all a matter of ideas and techniques which are European in
origin." The political and philosophical insights of Western
thinkers would prove to be as revolutionary as the scientific
discoveries. Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688, which made
monarchy accountable to Parliament, embodied John Locke's
theory that government depends on the consent of the governed.
Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence took Locke two
steps further: people possess certain unalienable rights,
including the right to overthrow governments that deny them
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

    The French Revolution failed ultimately, but not its
central ideal: the right of all mankind to liberty and
equality. At the onset of another abortive revolution, the
European uprisings of 1848, appeared The Communist Manifesto,
written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their flawed but
emotionally powerful vision of an earthly utopia would haunt the
world for more than a century. Marx found corroboration for his
class-struggle theories in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of
Species, which theorized that all living things had experienced a
long evolutionary process.

    Cultures wax and wane; so do the visions that sustain them.
Christians of the hierarchical Middle Ages accepted St.
Augustine's dream of a spiritual City of God that was a
glorious contrast to the drab, earth-bound City of Man. For 17th
and early 18th century Europeans, the dominant metaphor was the
Great Chain of Being, an orderly progression from the lowliest
of existing organisms to God the creator on high. The 19th
century was an era of unparalleled growth and prosperity --
albeit unevenly distributed -- for Western Europe and many of
its former colonies. No wonder their prevailing belief was the
idea of inevitable progress, which translated into continuing
material success for the fittest who survived.

    This seductive dream was no more sustainable than previous
models of civilization. What really brought the nine centuries
to a shattering close was not the turning of a calendar page but
the Great War of 1914-18. "We are at the dead season of our
fortunes," wrote the young economist John Maynard Keynes,
contemplating the wreckage. "Never in the lifetime of men now
living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so
dimly." Along with millions of soldiers, faith in the
beneficence of progress died in that war's muddy trenches.