Europe's+Age+of+Discovery+1450-1550

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=**Europe's Age of Discovery**=

Read: // Worlds of History // pp. 21-74

__Terms for Exam Study:__

Christopher Columbus Mongol Empire Temujin Chinggiss Khan Khubilai Khan Zhu Yuanzhang Zheng He tribute Prince Henry the Navigator King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella San Salvador Taino people Potosi Transatlantic Exchange Discussion Question: How did world trading patterns change from 1500 to 1750? The question for this lecture is: how did world trading patterns change from 1500 – 1750? The answers, as we will see below, are quite complicated. In fact, the changes in world trading patterns did not begin with Christopher Columbus. Let me refer you to books like Gavin Menzies' //1421: the Year China Discovered America//, and Linda Noreen Shaeffer's excellent article titled "Southernization" as just two of many recent historical works that give us a new understanding of the global nature of human contact and trade well before **Christopher Columbus**' plowing into a set of rocks eventually to be called "America" in 1492. But this lecture will also give some context as well to this very interesting set of events in world history.

I want to start this lecture with a discussion of the Mongols, and the end of their dominance of the Eurasian Continent. To get more information on the Mongols, please go to the Hist 151 lectures and find the lecture on the **Mongol Empire**. Here, I'll just give a short overview. In 1169, in what is now called Mongolia, a man by the name of **Temujin** was born into a tribal nomadic society. Eventually, Temujin would come to dominate his own and many other tribes, unifying them under the name of his own tribal group - the Mongols - and he would come to be known as the "Great Khan" - C**hinggiss (or Ghengis) Khan**. By 1215, he had set his armies, of only a few hundred thousand, on the path to conquest, and by the time of the rule of his grandson **Khubilai (Khubla) Khan**, Mongol armies had come to control most of the continent of Eurasia, creating the largest land empire ever to exist in history (even up to the present time).

Now the story of the Mongols has traditionally been told as one of brutality and violent conquest, and there certainly was that. However, after completing their conquest of most of Eurasia, the Mongols created a network of trade, and enforced law upon that network or roads and towns, such that taxes and tariffs were reduced in a historical sense, making it less expensive to trade goods from one end of the continent to the other along the Silk Route, and making it safer, and thus again less expensive, to trade goods along the silk route.

Because of the new degree of ease and safety, international trade flourished. As trade grew, the Mongols who dominated it created systems of currency exchange, cash transfer using letters of credit, business loans, paper money, and banks that made it even easier to go into, and be successful at, business. In addition, the Mongols used Chinese labor and production techniques, which they paid for at lower than market value, causing massive social problems in China, to sell Chinese goods to Europeans and relatively inexpensive prices. This, along with the legendary quality of the Chinese and Central Asian goods being traded, tended to increase the market in Europe for Asian products. Trade was making Europeans into a solid market for Asian goods and making the enterprising Mongols, Chinese, and Central Asian traders rich in the process.

However, in 1294, Khubilai Khan died, and with him went Mongol control of China. There were a number of causes of the loss of control of China by the Mongols. The death of Khubilai Khan left the Mongols without a Great Khan, and although there had been no direct ruler of all the Mongol clans since Chinggiss' death in practical terms, after Khubilai the Mongols chiefs across Eurasia began engaging in a series of fights and contests to determine who would be the next Great Khan. This led to the withdrawal of most Mongol soldiers in China, and left it relatively exposed to attack.

At that very moment, a young peasant named **Zhu Yuanzhang**, who had grown up a younger son in a Chinese farming family in southern China was making his living as a monk and anti-Mongol agitator. He was a self-taught reader of the Chinese language, and, although by all accounts quite ugly in appearance, a very charismatic person with excellent leadership capabilities. By the mid 1300's (14th century) Zhu Yuanzhang had fallen in with a group of rebels, and having taught himself something about military strategy and battlefield tactics, after recruiting large numbers of what were essentially angry farmers to fight with him, he was able to drive the remaining Mongols out of southern China and take control of the ancient capitol city of Nanking by 1368. Here he claimed the Mandate of Heaven and proclaimed himself the first emperor of a new dynasty, which he called "Ming" - meaning the era of bright rule. Eventually, as his legitimacy as emperor and his financial and military resources increased, he was able to reconquer northern China, as well, and re-unify the empire crushed by the Mongols a century earlier.

In many ways, we can say that the Ming Empire was created in reaction to that of the Mongols. Where the Mongols had been broad in their view of the world and its connections to China, the Ming rulers saw China in ancient terms as the center of the world, and everyone outside as barbarians. Where the Mongols had based their economic activity on trade across Eurasia, the Ming decided that the soul of China was land, and farming became once again the focus of economic and political policies. Where the Mongols had been cosmopolitan, the Ming hoped to isolate themselves from the world. One symbol of this was the massive investment involved in rebuilding the Great Wall of China (the wall that can now be visited is the Ming-era wall) for the first time since the Han Dynasty, and to a much more extensive degree than the Han.

The Ming Dynasty immediately set about the process of revitalizing Chinese agriculture by sponsoring the movement of farmers northward to territories that had been claimed by Mongols as great estates, and had not been farmed in generations. By giving tax holidays to farmers willing to relocate and homestead lands in northern China, the Ming were relatively successful at repopulating China. By extending the Great Wall and enforcing strict controls on borders and trade, the Ming were relatively successful in isolating China from Eurasia.

In another effort to reclaim China's ancient status in the world, the third Ming Emperor sent a series of voyages, commanded by his confidant and close friend, the Muslim Eunuch **Admiral Zheng He**, to bring various government officials to his coronation so that they could pledge fealty to him as Emperor of the Central Kingdom, Son of Heavean. Zheng He was also charged with touring the oceans from the South China Sea through the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, even down to the Horn of Africa, to gain "**tribute**" from leaders all over that part of the world, who acknowledged the central nature of China's civilization and their own subordination to it, and gave gifts of great value to the emperor (often then receiving even greater gifts in return, for the reason that it was assumed by the Chinese that the Son of Heaven, emperor of the Central Kingdom, could not allow himself to be outdone in gift giving by a subordinate monarch - the value of gifts given was a status symbol. Thus this cannot be characterized as trade, because the Chinese received no profit from it). These "Seven Great Voyages" occurred between 1405 and 1433, and the ships used were of greater number and of much greater size and technology than anything Columbus would have available in 1492 when he set out to find China.

All this, though, caused a problem in Europe. The Chinese voyages of tribute conducted by Zheng He did not visit the Europeans, though he may have known where Europe was, and certainly possessed the technology to get there. The trade routes, such as the Silk Route, across Eurasia were not brining more than a trickle of the Chinese goods that had been so plentiful during the period of Mongol rule of China, and Europeans had no means to go to China themselves - their maritime technology between 1368 and 1492 was insufficient to make the voyage, and the Silk Route and other land trade routes were dominated by Muslim traders, and went through Muslim kingdoms, passage through which, though it was possible, was an intimidating idea to Europeans who did not, in any case, know the way. So any trade that came to Europe from the far East, including jade, silk, Chinese porcelain, and even pepper from the Moluccas (Spice Islands) - the most valuable trade commodity in the world at the time - was very hard to get, and very expensive in Europe. No wonder, then, that by 1492 European explorers were desperately trying to find an alternate route to China and the Moluccas in order to take a part of that lucrative trade themselves. Columbus was one such adventurer. There were others. **Prince Henry the Navigator** of Portugal, interested in finding such an alternative route, had put up much of his own personal fortune to build his "Observatory" in Portugal - a library and institute for those navigators who were looking for ways to China via the sea.

Most of the navigators who frequented Henry's institute were of the opinion that the world was round, though common Europeans might not have been. Still. Columbus appears to have been one of very few who actually proposed that because of this fact, if one were to sail westerward from Europe far enough, one would eventually end up in the East, and China. He was the first to get his proposal accepted and funded by people who had enough money to risk doing so, and even then, Columbus had to shop his plan around to a number of different financiers before he found a pair that would put up the money and take the risk.

In a way, **King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella** of Spain were the perfect fit for Columbus' plans. You might even call them, in a sense, royal entrepreneurs. They had only just married and unified their two Iberian kingdoms, Aragon and Castille, to make Spain as we know it today. They were still in the process of "Christianizing" the Iberian peninsula by trying to drive the Muslim Abbasid Dynasty out - and would complete that task in 1492 - the same year Columbus sailed - by defeating the last Abbasid stronghold in Cordoba. Thus they were new to the unified kingdom situation, and looking for a number of things - they needed money, of course, and Columbus' promise of finding a trade route to China promised massive profits which the Crown would get a share in - this wealth would help pay back tremendous military debt. They also felt that they were on a mission to Christianize the world, and Columbus' expedition promised them a chance to take Catholic Christianity beyond the shores of Europe. Having just really won the war against the Abbasids, as well, they felt that nothing could go wrong. In fact, Spain was kind of the dynamic kingdom of Europe in this period - moving ahead on all fronts. So it makes sense that this is where Columbus, who was not Spanish, but from Genoa, got the cash to outfit his fleet and start the journey.

Along the way, of course, Columbus' three tiny ships with 95 men aboard in total ran into a small hitch in his plans to reach China. That small hitch was **San Salvador**, a small island that turns out to be an outlying island of the Central American continent. Columbus had, unknowingly, hit a huge landmass that would block his plans to sail west to China. He believed, however, that he had reached the coast of China until he died, even after several return voyages, and no sign of the large cities that he had read about in Marco Polo's accounts of his own time in China. However, Columbus' "discovery" - as he noted in his log, he found people there as soon as he landed, so the term "discovery" is relative to the perspective of

Europe, and even to South Western Europe, as there is clear evidence that Northern Europeans, Vikings from Norway and Iceland, had found, and settled in, North American well before Columbus - and there was the persistent problem of the native Americans, who had clearly, if one presses the point, "discovered" this place before Columbus. Still, Columbus had found a new part of the world, and, not having the trade goods or gold that his sponsors were expecting as a return on their investment, he found he had to justify his discovery to them in order to get the money to go back, and to avoid complete disgrace upon his return.

After panning in the rivers and finding no gold, and kidnapping natives to force them to learn Spanish so he could talk to them, and finding that there was noting of value from his standpoint that he could bring back, he loaded his ships with some plants, took a few **Taino people** as slaves to show that this was, at least, something of value, and sailed back to Spain.

His arrival caused a sensation. The discovery of a new continent sent imaginations flying in all directions, as people who had never seen or heard much about the Americas began to write or draw based on what they imagined was there. Many speculators decided to risk cash or life to go and find something worth bringing back. In Portugal, where the sighting of the coast of South America had been reported as early as 1475 by long-distance fishermen, the idea of setting up plantations for sugar and other subtropical plants sent many people there to claim land that was assumed to be empty - not much discussion went on initially about the rights of native peoples, although the Kings of Spain and Portugal initially did make it clear that their status as subjects of those kings made them equal to the subjects of the kings in the homelands - in other words, not automatic slaves. This proved hard to enforce from such a distance, though.

Eventually, Silver, and some gold, was discovered in the South American continent. Particularly, the Spanish found massive quantities of silver in what is now Peru, in the area of **Potosi**. Spanish silver (that is, native-American extracted silver, brought out through literally back-breaking labor that killed hundreds of thousands of workers who were, despite the law, forced to work in horrible conditions with no pay, and executed if they protested) was then sent to Spain in a very roundabout way that had major effects on the world economy.

The Spanish silver galleon left Peru and sailed across the Pacific Ocean to Manila, in the Philippines, which was then a Spanish colony. There, it was transshipped to another galleon bound not for Spain, but for China, where the silver, prised by the Chinese, bought the highest quality silk in the world. This silk was then sent not to Spain, but to Japan, where the Silk was highly prised and brought more silver than it had taken to buy it in China. It was then taken back to Manila, where it was reloaded on a vessel bound for Spain around the Horn of Africa. This increased the silver coming in to Spain and caused a major infusion of cash into China, causing major currency deflation in both kingdoms because of an oversupply of cash, while causing a trade deficit in Japan and threatening to bankrupt Japan of all of its silver, the currency it used for international trade. All of these things had important policy effects in the kingdoms involved, which we will discuss in other lectures.

The new wealth, both in precious metals and commodities, also created a new system of trade across the Atlantic which had a reach and impact far beyond Spain, Portugal, and their small colonies. In fact, the trade in goods, whether they were precious metals (the dream of nearly every traveler to the New World but the reality for almost none), farm commodities, or the products of nature, was brisk between Europe and the Americas almost from the start. New products added to the European diet, and to the store of materials for tools in nearly every profession. Peppers were among the first agricultural products to make their way to Europe, and to China, changing the way food was prepared and eaten in whole regions of Eurasia. In return, European goods, animals, people, and plants were brought to the Americas, changing both the landscape and the structure of native societies. If peppers, and eventually tomatoes and peanuts and corn changed European and Asian diets and farms, European animals such as the horse and domesticated cow changed transportation, farming, and diet in the New World. If tobacco changed the habits of Europeans, plants and their accompanying insects, which often made the journey across the Atlantic with them, changed the fields and forests of the New World.

But the **Transatlantic Exchange**, as these movements of plants, animals, and microbes is called, was not only two-way. In fact, its basic shape was triangular, in the sense that there were three major points where the participants in the trade bought and sold goods that were transferred through it. Those three points included the ports of Europe, the ports of Africa, and the ports of the Americas. Between these, for example, commodities such as tobacco would be transferred to Europe from the Americas. The money from the tobacco might then be used to pay for inexpensive European manufactured goods for trade to Africans, and in western African ports, these goods would be traded for slaves. The slaves would then be taken to the Americas to provide labor to produce, for example, more tobacco.

This is only one example of the Atlantic Triangular Trade, but it works well as an illustration. In each of the three trading points there were specific goods and markets that served the overall trade. The Americas produced raw materials and basic commodities more than anything else, from wood to gold to grain to fruit. Europe, particularly after the Industrial Revolution took hold, produced the value-added manufactured goods. Africa provided the slaves by which free labor was achieved in the American market, allowing farmers to keep their commodities prices at rock bottom, which of course made the cost of raw materials less expensive for the European traders, who could then provide Europeans, Americans, and even Africans with better goods more cheaply. Each part of the trade was dependent on the continued working of the other part.

The answer to our original question is, then, a chain of cause and effect relationships. The success of the Mongols in conquering much of Eurasia led to a trading network that brought goods to Europe that Europeans did not want to live without. Once the Ming Dynasty shut trade across the silk route down to a trickle after 1368, Europeans began looking for new sources of those goods. Discovering that they did not have the desire or the ability to go to China by land routes, which were controlled by Islamic states, and did not have the technology to go by sea, led Europeans to improve their technology and navigational knowledge until they had the capability to go - by chance, this occurred with the sea passage rather than the land. Still, it required individual ambition, in the person, at first, of Christopher Columbus, and later a number of others.

Once they arrived in the New World, European explorers quickly identified products that they could sell in Europe, and began shipping them home. This led to a two-way, then three way triangular trade as African slaves became the labor force that provided American goods. Ultimately, it became more than the triangular trade as well, but reached to East Africa, the Middle East, India, the Moluccas, and China, and had major economic and political effects on all of these places and more.

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