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Conditions for Discovery: The Fifteenth-Century Background of Columbus
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18851 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
6,533 Words |
| Author
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James Riley
James Riley is professor of Latin American history at Catholic
University. |
A number of years ago, William McNeill of the University of Chicago wrote an influential book, The Rise of the West, which became one of the foundations for organizing courses in world history. In that book, McNeill described what he called the "Ecumene," which represented the contact and mingling of cultures from all parts of the world, and then went on to weave the story of world history around the cycles of opening and closing the Ecumene. Contacts between various parts of the globe, he showed, were a constant of world history. Imperial Rome and China had commerce and exchanged ambassadors, and then lost contact as conditions changed. Marco Polo and the papal ambassadors who followed him reestablished the Ecumene between the West and China. The kingdom of Prester John was a myth, but ambassadors and Christians traveled from Ethiopia to Rome throughout the Middle Ages. Even Castile, one of the most provincial of the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, sent an ambassador to Tamerlane's court in Samarkand, and he wrote a book about his experiences.
During the medieval period, China sent out great naval expeditions that might have reached the western Pacific and made contact with Peru; however with time, the memory of these contacts was lost. Like those of Leif Ericksson, possible African voyagers to the Western Hemisphere, and all the other counterclaimants to the honors given Columbus, the Chinese explorations had little impact on world history.
There is a great controversy over what we are commemorating in 1992; was it a discovery? was it an encounter? was it a collision at midnight? There is equal controversy over whether Columbus should be honored. Was he a hopelessly deluded and confused innocent? Was he a calculating and vicious slave trader? Was he just incredibly luck? Should he ultimately be held responsible for the destruction of countless millions of indigenous lives and the death of great civilizations? Or should he be reversed as the individual who opened up a great period of human progress?
The argument regarding all of those characterizations will be carried on elsewhere. As described by McNeill, what Columbus did do--and what made 1492 a dramatically different event in world history--was to bring the final and permanent establishment of the Ecumene. For better or worse, 1992 must be honored because 1492 changed mankind forever.
What I would like to consider in this essay are the European developments of the fifteenth century that prepared the way for Columbus' voyage, and the manner in which the
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