Page 649 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

barriers of separation and bringing all the peo- numbers of Europeans on the farther shores of Americas the scourge of syphilis, but in ex-
ples of the world into contact with each other, the Atlantic. change they wiped out a world. 7
they erupted into non-European space as if they By the fifteenth century, Portuguese traders The union of peoples, therefore, meant a
already owned it, bringing untold misery, death along the coast of West Africa had become union of germs, as death danced its macabre
and destruction in their train. Embarking all aware of the profits to be made in purchasing dance around the globe. But death came in
unaware on a process that would lead to the Africans and shipping them abroad—either to many forms, and not least by war. In their
creation of one world, they gave every impres- Lisbon for domestic service in Spanish and dealings with non-European peoples, Europeans
sion of wanting to mold that world in the image Portuguese households, or to the newly settled displayed from the beginning a marked predis-
of themselves. An early sixteenth-century Span- Atlantic islands where sugar was being planted. position to seize their territories, and to back up
ish humanist said as much when we wrote of By a process of natural extension this lucrative their commercial ventures by force of arms. It
Columbus that he "sailed from Spain . . .to mix trade in African slaves spread across the Atlan- was to the sound of gunfire that European
the world together and give to those strange tic to those areas where, for one reason or merchants fanned out across the world. In the
lands the form of our own." 4 another, the indigenous peoples of America words of the Malay Annals describing the Por-
Europeans were to prove less successful in proved unsuited to the kind of labor required by tuguese attack on Malacca in 1511, "the noise of
giving those "strange lands" the form of their European settlers eagerly exploiting the min- the cannon was as the noise of thunder in the
own in Asia than in the Americas, where the eral and agricultural resources of their newly heavens and the flashes of fire of their guns
great organized empires of the Aztecs and the occupied lands. As a result, during the sixteenth were like flashes of lightning in the sky: and the
Inkas succumbed before their onslaught. How- century a network was woven of commerce in noise of their matchlocks was like that of ground-
ever elaborate those empires, and however so- human chattels—a network that bound together nuts popping in the frying-pan." 8
phisticated many of their cultural and technical in mutual complicity chieftains and traders in The superior military technology of the Eu-
achievements, their isolation from other cen- the Kingdom of Kongo and the African interior ropeans brought them immediate advantages,
ters of civilization left them dangerously vul- with merchants in Seville and Lisbon, settlers especially in America, where the shock effect of
nerable to attack by peoples whose attitudes, in Mexico and Peru, and sugar growers in guns and horses played a significant psychologi-
behavior and technologies were a cause of mys- Brazil. Already by 1600 some 275,000 black cal role in the early, and critical, stages of the
tification and astonishment. Europe and Asia, slaves had been transported to Europe and Spanish conquest. But Asia already belonged to
on the other hand, had a long-standing, if America, and five times as many would be the gunpowder culture, and Europe's initial
mutually wary, relationship, and the same shipped in the century that followed. 6 superiority in military technology soon showed
was true for North Africa. For a long time the This great transoceanic movement of human itself to be a diminishing asset. The Ottoman
Portuguese, who were followed to Asia by the beings meant the development of new racial armies rapidly adopted and mastered European
Dutch and the English, were able to do little mixtures as Europeans, Asians, Africans and hand guns and field guns; by the late sixteenth
more than establish coastal enclaves for them- indigenous Americans cohabited and intermar- century many soldiers in the armies of the
selves, from which they were forced to compete ried, producing offspring of such a wide variety Mughals were armed with muskets; and, far-
on roughly equal terms with peoples whose of colors that in eighteenth-century Spanish ther east, the Chinese possessed their own
political, military and commercial skills matched America there was a vogue for series of paint- indigenous firearms, while the Japanese imported
9
or excelled their own. ings depicting different racial combinations, and successfully copied European cannon. Guns,
Everywhere these sixteenth-century Europe- each with its own particular name. The effect of no less than germs, were spreading across
ans went, however, they created lesser or greater the contact of peoples in this dawning Oceanic the globe.
disturbances, setting up ripples that were liable Age, however, was not confined to the transfer The aggressive behavior of these gun-carrying
to grow into whirlpools. Only Australasia would of genes. There was another and more sinister Europeans—described as "white Bengalis" by
remain excluded, for the better part of three legacy, for the contact of peoples meant the the astonished inhabitants of Malacca when the
10
centuries, from these ripples of disturbance that spread of disease. first Portuguese vessel arrived in port —was a
marked the opening of a new and multiplying Europe and Asia, united by land, had for source of bewilderment and consternation ev-
range of connections among peoples dispersed millennia shared each other's epidemics, and it erywhere they went. "What is it," the King of
over wide portions of the globe. If, by 1600 or was the Europeans who succumbed to disease the Tartars is said to have asked a party of
even 1700, this was still very far from being a when increasing numbers of them sought to Portuguese, "that you are looking for in those
European world, it was none the less a world in make a life for themselves in an unfamiliar other lands? Why do you expose yourself to
which Europeans, both by design and by acci- Asian climate and environment. In America, such great hardships?" After the Portuguese
dent, were acting as the precipitants of change. however, it was a different story. Isolated from spokesman had done his best to explain, the old
European overseas expansion meant, in the the great pandemics that periodically swept the Tartar shook his head and remarked: "The fact
first instance, a movement of peoples. During Euro-Asian landmass, the native peoples of that these people journey so far from home to
the sixteenth century some 240,000 men and America proved terrifyingly vulnerable to newly conquer territory indicates clearly that there
women migrated from Spain to America, while imported European diseases—smallpox, mea- must be very little justice and a great deal of
roughly the same number of Portuguese (largely sles, influenza—to which Europeans had devel- greed among them." 11
young men) migrated to Asia, the overwhelm- oped some degree of immunity. The consequence The greed of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
5
ing majority never to return. Europeans, how- was that, within a century of Columbus' land- Europeans for gold, silver, spices, and subse-
ever, even if still no more than a trickle of them, fall, the indigenous population of mainland quently for land, was indeed what had induced
were not the only peoples to be caught up in the America had shrunk by about 90%, and the them, in the sage words of the Tartar, to "fly all
process of overseas migration. Africans, too, Tafnos who populated the Antilles at the time of over the waters in order to acquire possessions
were involuntarily to be swept up in a move- his arrival had become extinct. The Europeans that God did not give them." It was an impel-
ment generated by the settlement of growing may have carried back with them from the ling force, and one that enabled them, as they

648 CIRCA 1492