Page 651 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

to remake them in its own "superior" image. with the western world ended in 1639 when the that impeded its best efforts to "give to those
Native Americans were introduced to the tech- Portuguese were expelled and the country closed strange lands the form of our own."
nology of iron, and the wheel. New crops and itself to westerners and their pernicious offerings. In the first place, this was a civilization that
animals were imported from Europe. For the Even in Iberian America, where an intense had grown accustomed to the idea of diversity.
settlers the absence of bread was tantamount to missionary effort was buttressed by the full Divided into competing political units—and
starvation, and wheat was planted where maize weight of the secular power, there was in many also, from the sixteenth century, into compet-
once grew. "The Indians," observed a Spanish regions a sullen resistance that took a thousand ing religious units —Renaissance Europe was
official, "should not be made to grow wheat, for forms. While the new faith gained enthusiastic a pluralist society, with none of the monolithic
this causes them great hardship. They do not converts, especially in Mexico, the tendency central control that characterized the contempo-
understand how wheat is grown, and do not among the indigenous populations was to ap- rary Ottoman and Chinese empires. While
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have plows. " Little by little the Spaniards propriate those elements of the conquerors' having no doubt of the superiority of its own
"improved" on American nature, with their religion and way of life, it was less dismissive of
sugar plantations, their vineyards, and their the "barbarians" beyond its own borders than
olive groves—nostalgic reminders of the world was the Chinese world. Debates within the
they had left. Similarly, they imported their medieval church had led to the conclusion that
own animals—horses, sheep, cattle, pigs, hens non-Christian societies legitimately enjoyed
and goats—drastically upsetting in the process property and lordship, and that Christians could
both the pattern of indigenous life and work, therefore claim no automatic right to dispossess
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and the ecological balance of the conquered non-believers of their lands. When the Span-
lands. 18 ish occupation of America reopened the debate,
The transfer, however, was not all one way. the leading Spanish scholastic of the age, Fran-
In opening America to the imports of Europe, cisco de Vitoria, reaffirmed this doctrine, and
Europe opened not only itself but the rest of the argued that the indigenous Americans, by dem-
world to those of America—not merely pre- onstrating their capacity for social life, had
cious metals, or emeralds from Colombia and proved themselves "citizens of the whole world,
Venezuelan pearls, but plants and foodstuffs which in a certain way constitutes a single
which in the course of time would add enor- republic." 20
mously to the range, and nutritional value, of Once it was accepted that these newly en-
the European—and African—diet. None, ex- countered peoples were entitled, at least in
cept perhaps tobacco, had an immediately dra- theory, to space of their own, they were simply
matic effect on the habits of the Europeans, but added in the European mind to the wide variety
beans, maize, and—above all—the potato made of peoples with whom the globe was shared.
the transatlantic crossing, with profound long- The Italians, after all, were different from the
term consequences for the eating habits, and French, and the French from the English, and
the demography, of a Europe that stretched they all spoke different languages. Therefore it
from Ireland to the Urals. was taken for granted that these peoples, living
By incorporating a hitherto isolated America in different climes and conditions, would have
into the beginnings of a global economic and fig. 3. "Maize" from John Gerard, The Herbal or their own peculiar characteristics and ways of
ecological system, the Columbian voyages made Generall Historic of Plantes (London, 1597). life, however strange or repugnant they might
a contribution of overwhelming importance to Cleveland Medical Library Association seem to European eyes. Their form of dress (or
the creation of a single world. But if this was to undress), their sexual mores, their differing
be a world united, was the unity to be imposed religion that suited their needs. Old deities and styles of worship made them exotic specimens
on European terms ? The expansionary charac- old shrines still retained their sacred aura and to be added to the many already to be found in
ter of European civilization, its lust for wealth, were assimilated into new and distinctively that encyclopedic compilation by Johann Boemus,
its desire to dominate and to convert, certainly American forms of Christianity with their own Omnium gentium mores, first published in
pointed in that direction. Yet from the begin- syncretic rituals and systems of belief. Worship 1520 before the peoples of America had seri-
ning there was resistance, sometimes open and of the Virgin Mary might replace that of Coat- ously impinged on the European consciousness. 21
sometimes concealed. Militant Christianity faced licue, but this had always been a world that took Given this acceptance of human diversity,
a formidable rival in militant Islam, champi- the metamorphosis of the gods in its stride. which was put down to climate and geography,
oned in North Africa and on the fringes of It would take a vastly superior European there were limits to the necessity, as well as the
Europe by an Ottoman empire which, in the technology, and a capacity for the control of feasibility, of imposing European norms on the
sixteenth century, was at the height of its space far beyond sixteenth-century logistical peoples of the world. Strenuous, and surpris-
power. In the complicated religious world of the possibilities, for a united world to become even ingly successful, efforts might be made by
Indian sub-continent Christian teaching made superficially a European world. In so far as this Spanish friars in Mexico to persuade the male
only very limited headway, while China re- was achieved at all, it would be achieved only in inhabitants to clothe themselves in trousers,
mained impervious and largely impenetrable to the nineteenth century. But—irrespective of but this was because the loincloth offended
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the West. Among the twenty million inhabi- the sheer technical difficulties in the way of Christian ideas of decency In other areas of
tants of Japan, the Jesuits had made some global domination, whether political, cultural or behavior, less offensive to Christian views of a
300,000 converts by the early seventeenth economic—sixteenth-century European civili- proper way of life, there was less pressure to
century, but the brief flirtation of the Japanese zation itself possessed certain characteristics conform. Here the characteristic European re-

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