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

elements, or relief from the demons that filled the darkness, the storms, the heat and cold and hostile wastes and waters. Witchcraft persecution was not a medieval vice but an early modern one, which started as a large-scale enterprise in much of Europe in the late fifteenth century. In Rome in 1484, the pope heard reports of many men and women who “deny with perverse lips, the faith in which they were baptised” in order to “fornicate with demons and harm men and beasts with their spells, curses, and other diabolical arts.” Regulations for persecuting witches followed. 16
    Nature seemed capricious, gods inscrutable. Plague in Cairo in 1492 reputedly killed twelve thousand inhabitants in a single day. A flood wiped out most of the army of the ruler of Delhi a year later. Many Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 perished in North African famines. The infections Columbus’s men took to the New World wrought near-destruction on the unaccustomed, unimmunized inhabitants. There were over one hundred thousand people on the island of Hispaniola, by a conservative estimate, in 1492. Only sixteen thousand survived a generation later.
    Yet, although they were at the mercy of nature, people could change the world by reimagining it, striving to realize their ideas, and spreading them along the new, world-girdling routes explorers found. The changes wrought in 1492, and their world-shaping consequences, are proof of that. Most of the transforming initiatives that helped to produce modernity came, ultimately, from China. Paper and printing—the key technologies in speeding and spreading communications—were Chinese inventions. So was gunpowder, without which the world could never have experienced the “military revolution” that based modern warfare on the massed firepower of huge armies; nor could the traditional balance of power, which kept sedentary civilizations at the mercy of horse-borne enemies, ever have been reversed. The “gunpowder empires” that outclassed ill-equipped enemies around the early modern world, and the modern nation-state, which arose from the military revolution, would simply never have come about.
    Industrialization would have been impossible without the blast furnace and the exploitation of coal for energy, both of which originated in China. Modern capitalism would have been impossible without paper money—another idea Westerners got from China. The conquest of the world’s oceans depended on Western adaptations of Chinese direction-finding and shipbuilding technologies. Scientific empiricism—the great idea on which Westerners usually congratulate themselves for its impact on the world—had a much longer history in China than in the West. So in science, finance, commerce, communications, and war, the most pervasive of the great revolutions that made the modern world depended on Chinese technologies and ideas. The rise of Western powers to global hegemony was a long-delayed effect of the appropriation of Chinese inventions.
    Nevertheless, the effective applications came from Europe, and it was in Europe that the scientific, commercial, military, and industrial revolutions began. To recapitulate: this perplexing shift of initiative—the upset in the normal state of the world—started in 1492, when the resources of the Americas began to be accessible to Westerners whileremaining beyond the reach of other rival or potentially rival civilizations. In the same year, events in Europe and Africa drew new frontiers between Christendom and Islam in ways that favored the former. These events were surprising, and this book is, in part, an attempt to explain them. For Europe—formerly and still—was a backwater, despised or ignored in India, Islam, China, and the rest of East Asia, and outclassed in wealth, artistry, and inventiveness. The ascent of the West, first to challenge the East and ultimately to dominate the world, began in earnest only in 1492. People in every generation have their own