What prompted Europeans to establish colonies in the Mediterranean and Atlantic - and how new was this phenomenon?
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What prompted Europeans to establish colonies in the Mediterranean and Atlantic - and how new was this phenomenon?
It used to be thought that Europe's westward expansion into the western Mediterranean and then into the Atlantic world was driven by the rise of the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman Turks capture Constantinople in 1453, it used to be theorized that that broke down irrevocably the connections between east and west and that Europeans, in order to get the stuff that they needed, had to start moving west; they couldn't move east anymore.
It turns out that this distinction has been exaggerated, that there were plenty of avenues for trade and commerce with the east, even after this event. The catalyst might be thought of as the fact that Europeans, for a very brief period of time (about two centuries), were able to trade directly with China. When the Mongol Empire controlled China, Europeans were traveling along the Silk Road and were able to have access to luxury goods and to bring them back to Europe. However, after the Mongol dynasties are deposed, China closes its borders to western travelers, and so travelers have to start looking westward.
They have to start looking westward because Europe's capacity for producing gold and silver for coinage has shrunk; the mineral deposits in Europe have exhausted themselves. Moreover, European money is going to the east to buy these luxury goods that Europeans want. Therefore, Europeans start looking for other sources of gold, and they look at Africa.
The traders and explorers who start to make these first forays into Africa tend to be those groups of people - the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Catalonians - who have direct access to the Mediterranean. They start establishing colonies on the islands of the western Mediterranean, including the island of Sicily but mainly on more western islands. And they start using colonial processes that, while not new, are familiar to us from the modern world. They start displacing native populations, which in this case are Muslims. They bring in colonists and establish plantations and there is a high degree of violence. They then start moving down the coasts of Africa, and so on.
The question of whether this is new is, as I said, difficult to answer. If we think back to the western civilizations that we've been studying in this book, we have to remember that the Phoenicians had trading colonies all over the Mediterranean and indeed as far north as the British Isles in the middle of the second millennium BCE. So, colonial impulses are not new. What is new here seems to be obviously the direction and the scope of these endeavors, but I think we have to remember: that humans desire a capacity to explore and that humans need to expand their resources and their power bases is really a recurring theme in western civilizations and in human history.
How much did European travelers know about the people and cultures of far-off lands?
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How much did European travelers know about the people and cultures of far-off lands?
They had a lot of information available to them but maybe the best way to answer this question is to look at Christopher Columbus. When Christopher Columbus set sail to discover, as he thought, a new route to India, he had on board with him two books. He had with him Marco Polo's account of his travels to China when the Mongols governed it in the 14th century. And he also had with him a book called The Book of Marvels, by a man named Jean de Montvieue, which may have been a pseudonym. The Book of Marvels is a notoriously unreliable book. We have Columbus' own copy of Marco Polo's accounts of his real travels and we also have this account of these fake travels and they seem to have carried equal weight with Columbus.
So even though Europeans are starting to have access to real information that comes from travelers' direct experience with people of exotic lands, they are still drawn to these fantastical fictional constructs of what other peoples are like. For example, even as we start getting maps that are more and more accurate, and navigational tools for navigating not only the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean but reaching out into newly discovered worlds using better maps, we at the same time have medieval maps of the world. The Mappa mundi, is what this kind of map is called, which imagines the world as being ringed about with monstrous races. Even in the 17th century, when you have explorers venturing into the Amazon or discovering new territories in the North Atlantic, they are always writing home to their patrons saying, "Someday soon, I will find these two-headed men. Someday soon, I will find the cannibals."
This inevitably colors the way Europeans experience and perceive the peoples that they do encounter. Rather than looking at these people for who they are and observing their customs, the Europeans are pretty convinced that the people are going to someday start to exhibit these monstrous behaviors that they were taught to believe. I guess this is an object lesson about the power of fiction, about the power of these ideas, which in many ways we can still see in our own culture in our attachment to Star Trek and Star Wars, these space epics. We have displaced our enthusiasm for monstrous races; we no longer tend to see them on Earth but we imagine them as still existing somewhere up there in the sky.