A History of the Universe: Volume Iii: Serendipity

By Henry Kong, MD

At last, here is the final and most ambitious installment of Henry Kong's dazzling historical trilogy. The core question is how the people of a divided, impoverished continent emerged to conquer the world with their technology and ideas. The serendipitous triumph of "Western Civilization" is an epic story every educated person should know. Henry Kong's crisp and succinct narration takes the reader from the Florentine Renaissance and the French Enlightenment to the Holocaust and the end of the human race. All the key events, important figures, and major trends in the arts, sciences, and geopolitics are here, along with fascinating, thought provoking counter factual scenarios. This book is a must for all history fans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 7, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595891320

Henry Kong, MD

Why did civilization start in the Middle East? How did Christianity and Islam become global? What caused the downfall of Ancient Rome and classical China? These are just a few of the questions answered in the second volume of Henry Kong?s remarkable journey through space and time. His quest is none other than the story of the human race. Dr. Henry Kong studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, history at Oxford, and medicine at Rutgers. He is currently an Internist with a private practice in Toms River, New Jersey.

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Copyright © 2007 by Henry Kong

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ISBN: 978-0-595-44813-5 (pbk)

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Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to the two most brilliant cultures of the last 500 years: The English and the Jews

And to my brilliant cultured English Jew, Jessica Treisman

Contents

Foreword

1 Inquisition

2 Enlightenment

4 Empire

5 Holocaust

6 Amerika

7 Infinity

Foreword

In the third volume of his ambitious History of the Universe, Henry Kong tackles the last 500 years of human history, covering everything from the Renaissance to the present day and beyond and ranging around the world. Each chapter includes a counterfactual question, stimulating us to wonder what might have happened if history had been just a little bit different. The style is accessible and engaging to the lay person without sacrificing accuracy. Dr. Kong’s goal is to make history comprehensible to everyone, and his enthusiasm for the subject material is contagious. J.T.

1

Inquisition

At least once in his life, a man who seeks truth must summon the courage to doubt everything.

—Descartes

Meditations

Ros: What’s the matter with you today?

Guil: When?

Ros: What?

Guil: Are you deaf?

Ros: Am I dead?

Guil: Yes or no?

Ros: Is there a choice?

Guil: Is there a God?

Ros: Foul! No non sequiturs, three—two, one game all.

Guil: (seriously): What’s your name?

Ros: What’s yours?

Guil: I asked you first.

Ros: Statement. One—love.

Guil: What’s your name when you’re at home?

Ros: What’s yours?

Guil: When I’m at home?

Ros: Is it different at home?

Guil: What home?

Ros: Haven’t you got one?

Guil: Why do you ask?

Ros: What are you driving at?

Guil: (with emphasis): What’s your name?!

Ros: Repetition. Two—love. Match point to me.

Guil: (sieving him violently): WHO DO YOU THINK YOU

ARE?

Ros: Rhetoric! Game and match! (pause.) Where’s it going to end?

Guil: That’s the question.

Ros: It’s all questions.

Guil: Do you think it matters?

Ros: Doesn’t it matter to you?

Guil: Why should it matter?

Ros: What does it matter why?

Guil: (teasing gently): Doesn’t it matter why it matters?

Ros: (rounding on him): what’s the matter with you?

(pause)

Guil: It doesn’t matter.

—Tom Stoppard

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

A new wave was sweeping over Europe at the start of the sixteenth century. The dislocations brought about by pandemics, the dissemination of the printed word, and the re—discovery of Classical Greek texts led to new ways of thinking and living. A small but influential minority of European men began to think outside the box and explore worlds beyond their own. What they would discover over the next five centuries would radically alter the condition of the human species.

Of course, changes were happening outside of Europe. The Aztecs of central Mexico were terrorizing the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande. Three thousand kilometers to the south, the Inca nation was building a major civilization throughout the Andes. The Songhays of Mali were getting rich monopolizing the Sahara caravan routes. The Ming Chinese were prohibiting free trade with outsiders, leaving them increasingly isolated. In the Middle East, the Ottomans were facing a dangerous new threat from the newly resurgent Persian empire of the Safavids. But the most important developments were taking place in Europe.

By convention, the Christian year 1500 is the starting point of modern Western history. It is a good place for us to start as well. That year, the veteran Genoese mariner Cristoforo Columbo was 54 years old. He was still trying, in vain, to convince anyone who would listen that he had reached an island off the coast of India. A brilliant and enigmatic 48 year old homosexual Florentine renaissance man named Leonardo da Vinci had recently completed a mural of Christ’s Last Supper. His fellow Florentine Michelangelo Buonarroti, just 24, was commissioned by the powerful Medici family to sculpt a statue of the biblical David as a symbol of their city. In Portugal, a young Ferdinand Magellan, barely out of his teens, was fantasizing about making a grand tour clear around the globe. In the backwater college town of Cambridge, England, a 34 year old visiting Dutch scholar named Erasmus was giving lectures on the compatibility of individualism and Church doctrine. In Germany, a 17 year old Martin Luther, already alarmed by the excesses of the Catholic Church, was having second thoughts about joining the clergy.

‘Renaissance Humanism’ can be traced to the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He maintained that the properties and power of the human intellect (perception, emotion, memory, judgment, and reflection) are God—given gifts that are meant to be used for the betterment of others and the Church. But while one has the duty to serve God through hard work and good deeds, one can and should also enjoy all the beautiful things open to the senses. The sociologist Charles Murray in his book, Human Accomplishment, the Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950, puts it this way:

‘Aquinas grafted a humanistic strain onto Christianity that joined an inspirational message of God’s love and his promise of immortality with an injunction to serve God by using all of one’s human capacities of intellect and will—and to have a good time doing it.’

Here was a refreshingly significant departure from the gloomy and fatalistic medieval conception of life’s purpose.

By the fifteenth century, at least among the minority of educated and well—to—do in parts of northern Italy and northwestern Europe, the humanistic world—view started to catch on. The mantra was ‘man as the measure of God’. The human body was no longer considered to be a source of shame and evil, but, rather, a beautiful and holy shrine to be praised and even worshiped. The study of anatomy, sculpture, and architecture took off. The twin muses of individualism and creativity, especially in the visual arts, began to be held in high esteem.

Nowhere was the creative streak more alive than in Florence. Throughout the Middle Ages, this small Tuscan city—state took a back seat to her more powerful neighbors, Genoa, Venice, and Milan. But fueled by her aggressive merchants and bankers and the ubiquitous Medici family, which essentially ran the city, Florentine fortunes skyrocketed in the early to mid fifteenth century. The patriot Leonardo Bruni, the painter Masaccio, the sculptors Ghiberti and Donatello, the architect Brunelleschi, and somewhat later, the political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli all lived and worked amid the bustle of Florence. Not since Classical Athens, to which the Florentines consciously compared their city, was so much genius concentrated in such a small place and time.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the artistic techniques of linear perspective, chiaroscuro, and sfumato had been mastered. The works of the Florentine painters were in demand throughout the courts of Europe. But the best was yet to come. Quite serendipitously, two of the greatest artists of all time appeared in the city almost simultaneously. The first was Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). He is best known for his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, now at the Louvre, but painting was only one of his many pastimes. From his amazingly fertile mind and bizarre left—handed backward script sprang hundreds of inventions, architectural designs, and anatomical studies. Even the mystical and now infamous forgery, the Shroud of Turin, is credited to his hand. The other superhuman genus was Michelangelo (1475–1564). In his extraordinarily long and fruitful life, the maestro produced masterpiece after masterpiece: David, Moses, the Pieta, the Sistine Chapel frescos, the Laurentian Library, the Medici tombs, the Campidoglio, the floor plan for Saint Peters Basilica, and many more. It helped that he had powerful and persuasive patrons like Cosimo d’Medici and Pope Leo X, but the fountain of his inspiration and motivation came from deep within his own tortured soul.

Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael Santi (1483–1520) make up the great triumvirate of the Italian High Renaissance. To the list should probably be added the Venetians Giorgione and Titian. Their works, such as the Tempest, and the Bacchanal, have a lushly romantic, lyrical quality absent from Florentine art. This level of brilliance was simply too good to last. By 1520, the fortunate historical anomaly that was the High Renaissance was over. Leonardo and Raphael were dead, and Rome was sacked by the German (Holy Roman) armies of Charles V. But by then, the tradition of technical excellence and individual flair had been successfully exported to the rest of northern Italy and beyond. The remainder of the century produced many more artists of genius, though not at the same level as Michelangelo (who continued to work until the 1560s): the Italians Bronzino, Tintoretto, and Correggio, the Greco—Spaniard Domenico Theotocopuli ‘El Greco’, and the Venetian architect, Palladio. Their disparate styles have come to be known as ‘Mannerism’.

The philosophy of humanism went beyond just art. To quote the English historian Norman Davies in his book, Europe: a History:

[Humanism] is credited with the concept of human personality, created by the new emphasis on the uniqueness and worth of individuals. It is credited with the birth of history, as the study of the processes of change, and hence of the notion of progress; and it is connected with the stirrings of science—that is, the principle that nothing should be taken as true unless it can be tried and demonstrated. In religious thought, it was a necessary precondition for Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience. In art it was accompanied by renewed interest in the human body and in the uniqueness of human faces. In politics it gave emphasis to the idea of the sovereign state as opposed to the community of Christendom, and hence to the beginnings of modern nationality. The sovereign nation—state is the collective counterpart of the autonomous human person.

… Left to itself, humanism will always find its logical destination in atheism. But mainstream European civilization did not follow that extreme road. Through all the conflicts which ensued, a new and ever—changing synthesis was found between faith and reason, tradition and innovation, convention and conviction. Despite the growing prominence of secular subjects, the overwhelming bulk of European art continued to be devoted to religious themes; and all the great masters were religious believers.

The Renaissance masters of Italy, despite all their maverick individualism and vainglorious audacity, remained steadfast believers in the Catholic Church. The artists of Northern Europe often had quite a different outlook. It is illustrative to compare Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’ scene from the Sistine ceiling, painted between 1508 and 1512, with the ‘Crucifixion’ from the Isenheim Altarpiece, completed around the same time by the German master Matthias Grünewald. The latter work is simply terrifying to behold; it is perhaps the most emotionally gut—wrenching painting in all Western art. Christ’s hideously tortured and twisted body lies broken and bleeding on the Cross; on his face is a look of unimaginable agony. Off in the corner is Mary Magdalen, kneeling by the side of her lover, her grief positively palpable.

Michelangelo’s fresco is very different. God and Adam make contact with languid serenity. Their bodies are buffed out to perfection. These are not suffering mortals, but supernatural heroes. Moreover, the painting is symmetrical. Heaven and earth, light and dark, the right hand of God and the left hand of man are perfectly balanced. The differences in style go way beyond the temperaments of two great artists. It is indicative of a growing gulf between conservatives and reformers within the Catholic fold.

While humanism made a deep impression throughout Western Europe, it was in the North (especially Germany and Scandinavia) that it expressed itself as a form of protest against orthodoxy. The Catholic Church was then, as it is now, a hotbed of sex scandals and influence peddling. Starting with the learned theologian (and ardent Catholic) Erasmus, independent minded thinkers began to chip away at the conspicuous consumption, intellectual complacency, and outrageous immorality of the clergy. The Church reached its nadir during the papacy of Michelangelo’s patron and member of the Medici clan, Julius II (1503–1513). He helped to finance his wars, Saint Peter’s Cathedral, and expensive personal habits by the selling of indulgences (paper certificates ‘guaranteeing’ various amounts of time off from Purgatory in the afterlife) to gullible and vulnerable peasants throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The Germans were effectively paying a poor tax to enrich Italian aristocrats and popes. This did not sit well with a certain stubborn monk of rather crude habits from Wittenberg, Saxony. His name was Martin Luther.

On Halloween, 1517, an outraged Luther nailed his 95 Theses arguing against the sale of indulgences and other abuses to the door of his church. The Protestant Reformation was born. Over the next few years, he formulated the principles that would later come to be known as Lutheranism. The pope excommunicated him for his troubles. Luther publicly burned the notice. In 1521, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V summoned Luther to the Imperial Diet of Worms. He didn’t flinch. Fortunately, Luther had some powerful sponsors to protect him, including the prince of Saxony.

By 1530, the Lutheran movement was spreading like wildfire through the crazy quilt—work of German states, north into Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, and east through the Baltics, Prussia, and Poland—Lithuania. Perhaps half the population of the Holy Roman Empire was infected by the Protestant bug. Civil war soon broke out as dozens of Catholic princes and their Protestant counterparts faced off against one another. Emperor Charles was slow to react, but he eventually conceded some ground. The Council of Trent corrected some of the most egregious abuses, including the indulgences. But it was too little and too late. In the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the German princes won the right to decide the religion of their subjects.

The Protestant Reformation, like the Italian Renaissance, was launched by pious Catholics who had every intention of keeping Christendom intact. Luther was not a tolerant man, and, unfortunately, he was fiercely anti—Semitic. But he did open a passionate debate on the freedom of religion. Like Gorbachev in his attempt to reform Soviet communism, Luther’s effort to revitalize Christianity eventually shattered it beyond repair. Lutheranism was only the first round.

At the close of the Hundred Years War, the English were isolated from the continent. They had lost all of their once extensive possessions in France, save Calais. But the returning knights were almost immediately involved in more fighting. The latter half of the fifteenth century was marked by a dynastic conflict popularly known as the War of the Roses. For over three decades, two branches of the royal family, descended from the third and fourth sons of King Edward III (John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and Edmund, the Duke of York, respectively) were at each other’s throats. The House of York under Edward IV seemed to have the upper hand after its victory over the troops of the insane Henry VI and his enterprising French wife, Margaret of Anjou.

But King Edward was a flawed man. He was smitten by a comely and demure young woman he had met while riding around the Welsh countryside. She was Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of a recently slain Lancastrian knight. He boldly pursued her until she relented. Theirs was a passionate relationship which would eventually bear the future fruits of English greatness. Among Elizabeth’s direct descendants were her grandson, Henry VIII, and her great—granddaughter, Elizabeth I. But the reign of Edward IV was undermined by the ambitious and parasitic Woodville family. Worse, Edward led a life of debauchery and gluttony which ultimately led to his untimely demise in 1483. His two young sons, aged 12 and 9, next in line to the throne, met their ends in the Tower of London at the hands of their treacherous uncle (and Edward’s brother) Richard III. The reviled Richard was in turn cut down in the Battle of Bosworth Field two years later. The victor, Henry Tudor of the Lancastrian line, married the oldest child of Edward and Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the two rival houses and starting the Tudor dynasty. England had emerged from the Middle Ages.

Henry VII’s second son, the future Henry VIII, ascended the throne in 1509. He was an ambitious, impulsive, and generally overbearing man who possessed both great energy and a fiery temper. The first of his six wives was Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. When she failed to produce a son, Henry sought divorce. But Pope Clement VII, under the influence of the powerful Spanish monarchy, refused to annul their marriage. The opportunistic Henry, with the assistance of his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, and perhaps inspired by the recent publication of Machiavelli’s the Prince, took matters into his own hands and effectively declared war on the Catholic Church. King Henry was not a particularly religious man, and shared none of Martin Luther’s theological convictions, but he realized that he could capitalize on the widespread popular resentment of the Church’s great wealth. Between 1532 and 1534, Henry persuaded Parliament to pass a series of acts that cut off English support to Rome and curtailed Catholic authority. This culminated in the Act of Supremacy (1534), which completely abolished papal authority and elevated the King to Supreme Head of the Church of England. The vast Church lands were parceled out to the aristocracy. Without fully realizing it, Henry had created the political foundations of the Anglican Church.

In the midst of all of this, the amorous Henry fell under the spell of a feisty little seductress named Anne Boleyn. The two were secretly married in 1532, and the following September, Anne gave birth to a baby girl who would one day grow up to carry the sword of the Protestant movement against the mighty Catholic empire of Habsburg Spain as perhaps the most powerful of all English monarchs. But Henry wasn’t happy. What he really wanted was a baby boy. To make matters more complicated, he fell in love with another woman, Jane Seymour. In 1536, Henry imprisoned Anne on trumped—up charges of adultery and sodomy and had her and several of her alleged suitors beheaded. A week after Anne’s execution, Henry married Jane. Unfortunately, she died the next year giving birth to Henry’s only son, the future Edward VI. Jane was the only wife whose death Henry mourned. They are buried next to each other at Westminster Abby.

Henry VIII, grotesquely bloated and racked with arthritis and gout, died in 1547. The political changes he put in motion became a religious revolution under the reforms of Thomas Cranmer, the Protestant Archbishop of Canter-bury. But the common people of England were not ready to accept such radical change. After the sickly teenager Edward VI died of tuberculosis in 1553, the Protestant nobility tried to crown their candidate Lady Jane Grey queen. But the rightful successor was Henry’s eldest child Mary, the staunchly Catholic daughter of Catherine of Aragon. The English people were divided right down the middle. They did not want to go back to the bad, old Catholic ways, but neither did they want a radical break with tradition. I suspect that deep down, the English have always been a conservative people. Queen Mary I started her reign by reversing most of the reforms put in place by the radical Protestants over the previous twenty years. She also executed scores of Anglican bishops, including the popular Lattimer and Ridley, who were burned at the stake in Oxford in 1555, and the elderly Archbishop Cranmer himself the following year, earning her the derogatory title, ‘Bloody Mary’. The last straw was when she tried to confiscate the lands taken from the Church a generation before. If the Catholics enjoyed a slight popular majority at the start of her reign, they lost it by a huge margin by its end. That came in 1558, when Mary died of ovarian cancer; she and her husband, Phillip II of Spain, left no heir. The kingdom passed on to Mary’s 25 year—old Protestant half—sister, Elizabeth. A nervous England braced for the coming Catholic storm.

The next round of the Protestant Reformation began in Switzerland in 1535. That year, the radical Frenchman Jean Calvin published his manifesto, Institution de la Religion Chretienne (Institution of the Christian Religion). In it Calvin summarized his theological and political views on the primacy of biblical text over the Catholic Church, original sin, and the concept of predestination. Calvinists believe that God has already chosen those who will and will not enter heaven. No amount of good work will make any difference. But those who are chosen are, by nature, faithful and puritanical. He taught his followers to be austere, thrifty, sober, and stoic, realizing, however, that being so is necessary, but not sufficient to be saved. Calvin fit in nicely as the governor of Geneva.

Calvinism had a natural appeal to the rising middle class throughout northern Europe. Its emphasis on close study of the bible had a positive impact on literacy and education. Its stress on fiscal prudence promoted free—market capitalism. Its struggle for acceptance as a minority religion encouraged its followers to embrace democracy. Its strict moral code led to sexual repression. While it may be a stretch to say that Calvinism was responsible for creating the ‘Protestant work ethic’ and its associated so—called ‘WASP’ psychology, it certainly played a major role.

One cannot help but notice that there were really two separate (though related) cultural breakthroughs in Europe. The first, the Renaissance, had its start in Catholic Italy in the early fifteenth century, and the second happened in the Germanic lands of the Holy Roman Empire a century later. The latter was the Protestant Reformation. Its impact is not to be underestimated. It is no coincidence that the hitherto ‘backward’ lands of illiterate peasants and village idiots would soon give rise to the most remarkable and sustained burst of artistic, scientific, economic, and military achievement in human history. Luther and Calvin lit the flames of that miracle.

Throughout the middle years of the sixteenth century, the twin Protestant schools of Lutheranism and Calvinism spread in tandem, sometimes at the expense of Catholicism, sometimes in conflict with each other. The more established Lutherans were firmly in control of northern Germany, Pomerania, East Prussia, the Baltic States, and Scandinavia. Calvinists gained the upper hand in Switzerland, Brandenburg (wrested from the Lutherans), Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and the northern parts of the Netherlands. They soon outnumbered the Lutherans. In addition, nearly a thousand Calvinist churches were established throughout central and southern France, where the believers called themselves Huguenots. Far to the east, Calvinists did remarkably well in the Christian outpost of Transylvania. There amid the religious mish—mash of Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Turkish Muslims, over a hundred Calvinist churches were built. In England, the Lutherans and Calvinists made less headway against the already well entrenched Anglican Church, but a sizable minority, calling themselves Puritans, did make a presence, especially in East Anglia. Finally, in 1560, the clergyman John Knox brought a form of Calvinism called Presbyterianism to Scotland. It has been their state religion ever since. By this point, Protestants of one stripe or another made up about 40% of the total European population of approximately 120 million people. This was a remarkable achievement considering that it had been less than half a century since Martin Luther posted his theses. But then the intensifying Catholic Counter—Reformation started to make up much lost ground.

The ‘New World’ was discovered by two audacious Italians (and named after a third) around the turn of the sixteenth century. Remarkably, both men were Genoese. Cristoforo Colombo, sailing due west out of Barcelona in search of India, made landfall at Samana Cay in the Bahamas in the early morning hours of October 12, 1492. There on the virgin beach, he planted the standards of Castile and Aragon. The Spanish Empire had begun. Columbo made three more trips across the Atlantic, discovering Hispaniola, Cuba, Panama, and Trinidad. But he always believed that he had reached some offshore arm of Asia. We still (inappropriately) call this part of the world the ‘West Indies’. Five years later, Giovanni Cabato, working for King Henry VII of England, discovered the aptly named ‘Newfoundland’. These two client states would eventually face off in a struggle of global proportions, but for now, Spain clearly had the upper hand.

There were several reasons behind the explosive Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) expansion into the Western Hemisphere. First, they had recently thrown out their Moorish overlords. After centuries of bitter struggle, a whole class of extremely tough warrior knights (the Conquistadores) found itself unemployed and spoiling for a fight. Second, and partly as a result of their experience under Islamic occupation, the Catholics developed an extreme, almost messianic, missionary zeal. They had already sharpened their persecutory skills in their torture and expulsion of Jews and Moslems. The church leaders believed it their God—given duty to convert, by force if necessary, all non—Catholics throughout the world. Third, Mediterranean trade had been largely monopolized by the Italians (especially the Venetians) and the Turks. There was little opportunity for latecomers like the Spanish to muscle into ‘Club Med’, so they started the ‘Atlantic club’ instead. Finally, new technologies with potentially tremendous maritime implications were just coming into use: the stern—post rudder, the multi—mast combination rigged caravel, the magnetic compass, and the nautical chart. Many of these inventions were pioneered in the workshops and docks of Spanish and, especially, Portuguese ports.

All that was needed was economic impetus. At the close of the fifteenth century, the really profitable markets were the spice trade of India and Indonesia, the silk and porcelain trade of China, and the African gold mines. The Portuguese quickly realized the possibility of tapping into all three without even having to compete directly with the Italians and Turks in the Mediterranean and the Levant. Vasco da Gama and Pedro Cabral led the way. By 1520, this tiny nation of less than a million people had established a truly impressive string of ports and forts from West Africa to the Orient. Through them, the Portuguese directed a kind of triangular trade involving African gold, Asian spices, and Chinese silk.

It went like this. Merchant ships would descend far down into the South Atlantic, perhaps making a layover in the wind—swept island of Tristan da Cunha (discovered in 1506 by a Portuguese admiral of the same name and now a British colony) and then catch the westerly trade winds that would bring them around the Cape of Good Hope (discovered by Diaz in 1486) and north along the Swahili coast of East Africa. At the ports of Sofala (1505) and Mozambique (1507), the Portuguese would load up on the gold dust swept down to the bottom of the Zambezi drainage basin. Then they sailed north, picking up supplies at Fort Jesus on Mombassa Island, Malindi (1498), and Mogadishu before venturing into the Arabian Sea.

The two strategic bottlenecks into the Middle East are Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea, and Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. The Arabs had long used these ports as gateways to the markets of India and Indonesia. This was recognized by da Gama, who attacked Arab shipping in the area. The Portuguese seized Hormuz from the local Omanis in 1513, giving them direct access to Kuwait and Mesopotamia, but they were defeated by the Arab fleet outside Aden. The two sides would fight a see—saw battle for mercantile supremacy in the Indian Ocean for the remainder of the century.

Portuguese influence on the Malabar (western) coast of India began with da Gama and Cabral’s fateful meeting with the Hindu ruler of Calicut (in present day Kerala) in 1498. After the Indians killed some of Cabral’s men the following year (reportedly for being offered shoddy goods), da Gama returned to seek revenge. The Portuguese ruthlessly butchered and dismembered several dozen civilians, and bombed the town. The Hindus surrendered, and the Europeans returned with a valuable cargo of cardamom and pepper. This set a pattern. Trading posts were established from Diu (1535) in the north to Cochin (1517) in the south. These were eventually governed from the administrative capital of Goa, which remained Portuguese until the 1960s. In addition, the Portuguese effectively annexed the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1517. From its principal port of Colombo, they controlled the cinnamon market.

Scattered like jewels in a tropical sea, were the biggest prizes of all: the ‘spice islands’ of Indonesia: Ternate, Tidore, Timor, Amboina, and the Bandas. The key was the capture of the strategic choke—point of Malacca in 1511. For the rest of the century, the Portuguese enjoyed a virtual monopoly on nutmeg, mace, cloves, and other exotic condiments which were all the rage to Europeans sick of their unappetizing diet. All of this was paid for in African gold. There were further conquests to the north. In 1557, the Ming governor gave the Portuguese trade concessions in the town of Macao in gratitude for chasing out local pirates. The seedy Chinese colony (which eventually ended up specializing in gambling and prostitution) was ruled from Lisbon until 1999. It was the final Portuguese colony to go, falling to the Chinese two years after the British relinquished Hong Kong. Mozambique, Angola, and East Timor were given up in 1975. In 1543, Portuguese explorers discovered Japan. Thirty years later, they won exclusive trading rights in the city of Nagasaki. Although the xenophobic Japanese eventually expelled (or decapitated) the Europeans and closed the port to all foreign traffic, the East Asian trade remained vibrant. This was the last link in the great Portuguese trade route. From there, ships laden with Chinese silks and Indian and Indonesian spices made the return voyage to Lisbon. Portugal became one of the wealthiest states in Europe almost overnight. But these remarkable entrepreneurs had yet another trump card up their sleeve.

Most of us equate slavery with African—Americans living on the cotton plantations of the southern United States. But his was just one chapter in the long history of human bondage, and a late one at that. We should keep in mind that the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery is actually as old as civilization. The Ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Indians, and Polynesians all practiced it on a regular basis. The Abbasid Caliphate routinely rotated Turkish, Slavic, and Russian sex slaves for work in their harems. The Mamluk army was made up of slaves kidnapped from the Balkans as children. The Mongols practiced slavery on a continental scale. The serfs of medieval Europe and not—so—medieval Russia could be considered slaves. Between the ninth and nineteenth centuries, the Arabs uprooted perhaps as many as 15 million East Africans across the Sahara for distribution throughout the Indian Ocean basin. Their main distribution center in Zanzibar was finally shut down by the British Royal Navy during the reign of Queen Victoria. Within Africa itself, local rulers grew immensely rich trading slaves to neighboring tribes and to Arab merchants well before the appearance of the Europeans. Slavery was not so peculiar after all.

What changed after 1500 was the immense scale of the trans—Atlantic slave trade and the unmistakable racial character of the victims (for the first time, they were almost all black Africans). And starting in the early sixteenth century, the enterprising Portuguese cornered the increasingly lucrative African slave market. This success coincides with the growth of the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean.

To understand what was going on, we need to go back of the exploits of the early Spanish conquistadores in Hispaniola and the tastes of early modern Europeans. As more and more people were able to enjoy surplus wealth and leisure time, they began to develop a sweet tooth. Stimulants like coffee, tea, tobacco, chocolate, and especially sugar gradually replaced booze as the addictive chemicals of choice. By 1500, there was a tremendous and insatiable demand for these luxuries. Until the discovery of the Americas, the suppliers of these commodities were Arabs, Turks, and Venetians. They jacked up the prices and kept the goods out of the reach of most consumers. But quite serendipitously, the newly discovered ‘West Indian’ islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico were ideal for the planting and cultivation of many of these crops. Early Spanish gentleman planters grew wealthy exporting processed sugar cane to Europe. But the work involved was horrendous. The majority of the first Spanish laborers perished of malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical diseases within the first few years. Soon, the indigenous people were put to work. But unfortunately, most of them had already succumbed to European viral infections such as chicken pox, measles, and the flu. A cheaper and more reliable source labor was clearly needed.

The most obvious source of cheap labor was the west coast of Africa. There was already a well established local slave network in the area. Unfortunately for the Spaniards, however, Africa was in the Portuguese sphere of influence. Recall the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) which separated the world into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres. An obvious solution was for the Portuguese to set up slaving stations along the African coast and sell slaves to the Spanish sugarcane plantation owners in the Caribbean. In 1481, the Portuguese built the fort of Elmina on the Gulf of Guinea. There, they purchased slaves from the interior with gold (mined in East Africa) or guns (made in Europe) and then sold them to the Spanish. But the Portuguese soon did even better. In his outbound voyage to India (1500), Pedro Cabral accidentally discovered the east coast of Brazil and claimed it for Portugal. The following year, a Florentine captain named Amerigo Vespucci, then contracted to the Spanish navy as its chief navigator, charted much of the South American coast from the mouth of the Amazon to perhaps as far south as the Rio de la Plata. A brand new continent had been discovered, and it would be immortalized after the Italian. For some reason, North America was also named in his honor (Vespucci never even came close).

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Brazilian coast became one gigantic sugarcane plantation. Its capital, Bahia (founded 1549), was the chief entry point for West African slaves from the bustling slave factory of Luanda (founded 1576) on the Portuguese Angolan coast. It is estimated that between four and six million Africans were forced to make this harrowing journey. Perhaps a third of them died at sea. The Portuguese—Brazilian slave trade between 1500 and 1850 accounted for nearly half of all the African immigrants (free and slave) to the Western Hemisphere. In addition, nearly three million were shipped to the Caribbean, a million each to Spanish South America and Central America, and half a million to the future United States. These are staggering figures whose result can easily be seen on the faces and skin colour of the people of modern Brazil. Perhaps the most damaging effect of the European slave trade was its destabilization of indigenous African societies; it was a blow from which they have never recovered.

As onerous as it was, slavery was not the worst legacy of the Europeans in the New World. That distinction clearly belongs to the decimation of the native populations by the guns and (especially) germs of the newcomers. In the end, two major civilizations with populations approaching ten million each were utterly destroyed. Hundreds of smaller tribes were also wiped out. They were replaced by a vast Spanish and Portuguese speaking empire of Catholic Iberians, creoles, mestizos, mulattos, and Africans. It was, quite simply, the largest case of genocide in human history. This story starts with the very first contact in 1492. The natives did not have adequate immunity to the viral diseases endemic to Europe: smallpox, measles, influenza, and the like. The early Spanish believed that it was the will of God that thousands of Indians were dying all around them. The Europeans took this as proof of their superior chosen civilization and acknowledged the responsibility to convert and save the heathen savages (an early version of the Victorian ‘white man’s burden’) before it was too late. But the Catholic Church was not the answer. Within a generation of the Spanish arrival, perhaps a million Native Americans throughout the Caribbean were dead. The contagions soon spread to the mainland in the bodies of Conquistadores like Cortes and Coronado. That’s when the real holocaust began. A wave of death radiated out in advance of Spanish colonial expansion. When Francisco Coronado and Hernando de Soto’s expeditions discovered the Grand Canyon and the Great Plains of the future United States of America around 1540, they found abandoned settlements littered with decomposing bodies. By mid—century, over 20 million people in the New World (out of a total population of 35 million) had died of disease. This, more than anything else, was responsible for clearing the decks for the subsequent European domination of the Americas.

Disease was not totally a one—way street. Syphilis, previously unknown outside the Americas, was brought back to Spain inside one of Columbo’s sailors. While the disease was relatively benign in the Western Hemisphere, it became especially virulent once it crossed the Atlantic. The infection caused purulent open sores of the genitalia, dementia, and often a slow agonizing death. Within several years, it was rampant throughout the red—light districts and ports of the Mediterranean. By the end of the century, the cork—screw shaped spirochete bacterium had crossed all class and ethnic lines, disabling millions of Europeans.

But on the whole, the Europeans enjoyed a net gain from their intercourse with the Americas. New crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize (corn), and chili peppers were all introduced from there. These fine and nutritious foods