Page 650 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

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mastered the world wind system, to develop
a series of trading routes that came to span the
globe.
One maritime route, pioneered by the Portu-
guese, ran around the coast of Africa and across
the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, to
compete directly, and with increasing success,
against the overland spice and silk routes that
had long linked Europe to the markets of the
East. Another, the monopoly of the Spaniards,
ran from Seville to the Caribbean and thence
to the ports of Vera Cruz in Mexico and of
Cartagena in present-day Colombia. This was
the route that supplied the American colonists
with European goods, and made possible the
return shipment, by way of exchange, of the
Mexican and Peruvian silver needed to replen-
ish the coffers of European princes and mer-
chants, and to pay for the deficit trade between
Europe and Asia. In the Indian Ocean as much
as in Europe or America the Spanish silver real,
minted in the mines of Zacatecas or Potosi,
became a coveted unit of exchange. To the
Spanish Atlantic, revolving around the regular
annual flow of American silver to Europe, was
joined a Portuguese Atlantic—the Atlantic of
sugar and slaves— running from Lisbon to
West Africa and the Azores, and thence to
Brazil. Into this Iberian-dominated Atlantic the
English, the Dutch and the French, arriving first
as interlopers, would infiltrate with increasing
success. fig. 2. Lorenzo Vaccaro, Allegorical Figure of America, 1692, silver, The
In 1565 the last remaining section of what Cathedral, Toledo
was to be a global transoceanic trade was fitted
into place when the first Spanish galleon sailed
back across the Pacific from Manila to unload a —found their way in growing quantity into the and its long-established ways. To the extent
cargo of cinnamon on the coast of Mexico. This homes of the European elite. African ivories, that they were accepted there, they were ac-
voyage marked the beginning of the regular carved in ways that reflected the presence and cepted for their silver, and this silver would not
sailing of the "Manila galleon" between Aca- the tastes of the Portuguese, who had pene- have been available to them in such quantities
pulco and Manila. Outward bound from Mex- trated far into the interior, and intermarried without Spain's exploitation of the mines of
ico it carried the silver needed for the purchase with Africans to form Afro-Portuguese com- Mexico and Peru. To the extent that the six-
of the products of China and the East—silks, munities, were brought back to Europe as prized teenth century saw the inauguration of a "world
porcelains and spices, jade and mother-of-pearl— curiosities (see cat. 63-71). European manu- economy," it was the Spanish conquest and
which were brought by fleets of junks to the factures—textiles and firearms—penetrated the settlement of the silver-producing regions of
Philippines, and then shipped in the Spanish markets of Asia, where Portuguese was becom- Central and South America that made possible
galleon to Acapulco, from where they would be ing the language of international maritime the beginnings of economic integration on a
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dispatched to the luxury markets of America trade. But Asia's appetite for commodities global scale.
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and Europe. Saluting Acapulco in his poem of from Europe, other than silver, was much smaller Cruelly wrenched from its isolation by the
1604 on the greatness of his native Mexico, the than the insatiable European appetite for the arrival of the Spaniards, America—symbolized
poet Bernardo de Balbuena wrote: "In thee products of the East. In spite of the arrival of in the allegories of the four continents that
Spain is joined with China, Italy with Japan, Portuguese merchants in the Persian Gulf, the began to appear from the 15705, as a naked
and ultimately a whole world in disciplined Indian Ocean and the Straits of Malacca, they woman with feather headdress, seated on an
commerce." 14 and their fellow-Europeans in the sixteenth armadillo, and sometimes surrounded by the
Balbuena's words vividly suggest how, with century were simply one more group of com- exotic flora and fauna of a strange new world 16
the development of these long-distance trading petitors, if outlandish ones, jostling in on long- —was tied hand and foot to Europe in ways
systems, all four continents—Europe, Asia, established local trading networks, and buying that Asia could never be. Occupied, governed,
Africa and America—were moving into a and selling as best they could. evangelized and exploited by Europeans, the
closer reciprocal relationship as suppliers and For all the dynamism and aggressiveness of Antilles and the vast mainland regions of Cen-
recipients. Oriental luxuries—Persian carpets, the "hat men," they were swallowed up in the tral and South America were drawn inexorably
Chinese porcelains, Javanese pepper and cloves vastness of Asia, with its teeming populations into the orbit of a European world determined

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