1492: The Year Our World Began Read Online Free PDF Page A

that began to unfold in 1492 would dispel that ignorance, reunite the world’s sundered civilizations, redistribute power and wealth amongthem, reverse formerly divergent evolution, and reforge the world. Of course, a single year can hardly have wrought so much work on its own. Strictly speaking, it was not until 1493 that Columbus was able to explore exploitable two-way routes across the ocean. The route he used to reach the Caribbean in 1492 was, as we shall see, nonviable in the long run and had to be abandoned. The linking of the hemispheres was clearly a huge step toward the making of what we think of as “modernity”—the globalizing, Western-dominated world we inhabit today—but it was hardly complete even in 1493. All Columbus really did was open possibilities that took his successors centuries to follow up. And even the potential was hardly the product of a couple of years. Only in the following few years could the possibilities of remaking the world, with a new, previously unimaginable balance of wealth and power, really be glimpsed. Other explorers developed more routes back and forth across the North and South Atlantic, to open connections with other parts of the Americas, and created a new seaborne link, or reconnoitered new land routes, from Europe to southern and central Asia.
    To most people, anyway, it was not 1492. Even to people in Christendom, it was not yet necessarily 1492 when, by our reckoning, the year began on January 1. Many communities reckoned the year as beginning on March 25, the presumed anniversary of Christ’s conception. A spring beginning had logic and observation on its side. In Japan, television still broadcasts the opening of the first cherry blossom every year. Each culture has its own way of counting time.
    The Muslim world, which dwarfed Christendom at the time, counted—and still counts—the years from Muhammad’s exile from Mecca, and divided them into lunar months. In India, outside Muslim areas, the numbering of years was an indifferent matter when viewed against the longevity of the gods, whose world was renewed every 4.32 million years in an eternal cycle. Their current age had begun in what we count as 3012 BC . For everyday purposes, in northern India, people generally counted the years from a date corresponding to 57 BC in our calendar. In the south of the subcontinent, the year AD 78 was thepreferred starting point. For much of their past, the Maya of Mesoamerica recorded all important dates in three ways: first, in terms of a long count of days, starting from an arbitrary point over five thousand years ago; second, according to the number of years of just over 365 days each of the current monarch’s reign; and third, in terms of a divinatory calendar of 260 days, arrayed in twenty units of 13 days each. By the late fifteenth century, only the last system was regularly used. The Incas recorded dates for only 328 days of the solar year. The remaining 37 days were left out of account while farming ceased, after which a new year commenced.
    In China and Japan, there was no fixed date on which a new year started; each emperor designated a new date. Meanwhile, people celebrated New Year’s Day on different dates, according to local custom or family tradition. Years were named after one of twelve animals, as they still are: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, bird, dog, and pig. The cycle of twelve interlocked with another cycle of ten, so that no year name was repeated until sixty years had elapsed. In a parallel system, years were also numbered in order from the start of an emperor’s reign. January 1, 1492, was the day named Jia Chen, the second day of the twelfth month of the year Xin Hai, or the fourth year of the Hongxi reign. Xin Hai had begun on February 9, 1491, and would end on January 28, 1492. The year Ren Zi then began and lasted until January 17, 1493. December 31, 1492, was the thirteenth day, named Ji You, of the twelfth month of