Introduction to Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

The Worlds of the Fifteenth Century

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The Meeting of Two Worlds This nineteenth-century painting shows Columbus on his first voyage to the New World. He is reassuring his anxious sailors by pointing to the first sight of land. In light of its long-range consequences, this voyage represents a major turning point in world history. French painting, 19th century/Monastery of La Rabida, Huelva, Andalusia, Spain/Bridgeman Images

The Shapes of Human Communities

Paleolithic Persistence: Australia and North America

Agricultural Village Societies: The Igbo and the Iroquois

Pastoral Peoples: Central Asia and West Africa

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: Comparing China and Europe

Ming Dynasty China

European Comparisons: State Building and Cultural Renewal

European Comparisons: Maritime Voyaging

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: The Islamic World

In the Islamic Heartland: The Ottoman and Safavid Empires

On the Frontiers of Islam: The Songhay and Mughal Empires

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: The Americas

The Aztec Empire

The Inca Empire

Webs of Connection

A Preview of Coming Attractions: Looking Ahead to the Modern Era, 1500–2015

Reflections: What If? Chance and Contingency in World History

Zooming In: Zheng He, China’s Non-Chinese Admiral

Zooming In: 1453 in Constantinople

Working with Evidence: Islam and Renaissance Europe

“Columbus was a perpetrator of genocide …, a slave trader, a thief, a pirate, and most certainly not a hero. To celebrate Columbus is to congratulate the process and history of the invasion.”1 This was the view of Winona LaDuke, president of the Indigenous Women’s Network, on the occasion in 1992 of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Much of the commentary surrounding the event echoed the same themes, citing the history of death, slavery, racism, and exploitation that followed in the wake of Columbus’s first voyage to what was for him an altogether New World. A century earlier, in 1892, the tone of celebration had been very different. A presidential proclamation cited Columbus as a brave “pioneer of progress and enlightenment” and instructed Americans to “express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of four completed centuries of American life.” The century that followed witnessed the erosion of Western dominance in the world and the discrediting of racism and imperialism and, with it, the reputation of Columbus.

This sharp reversal of opinion about Columbus provides a reminder that the past is as unpredictable as the future. Few Americans in 1892 could have guessed that their daring hero could emerge so tarnished only a century later. And few people living in 1492 could have imagined the enormous global processes set in motion by the voyage of Columbus’s three small ships—the Atlantic slave trade, the decimation of the native peoples of the Americas, the massive growth of world population, the Industrial Revolution, and the growing prominence of Europeans on the world stage. None of these developments were even remotely foreseeable in 1492.

Thus, in historical hindsight, that voyage of Columbus was arguably the single most important event of the fifteenth century. But it was not the only significant marker of that century. A Central Asian Turkic warrior named Timur launched the last major pastoral invasion of adjacent civilizations. Russia emerged from two centuries of Mongol rule to begin a huge empire-building project across northern Asia. A new European civilization was taking shape in the Renaissance. In 1405, an enormous Chinese fleet, dwarfing that of Columbus, set out across the entire Indian Ocean basin, only to voluntarily withdraw twenty-eight years later. The Islamic Ottoman Empire put a final end to Christian Byzantium with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, even as Spanish Christians completed the “reconquest” of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims in 1492. And in the Americas, the Aztec and Inca empires gave a final and spectacular expression to Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations before they were both swallowed up in the burst of European imperialism that followed the arrival of Columbus.

Because the fifteenth century was a hinge of major historical change on many fronts, it provides an occasion for a bird’s-eye view of the world through a kind of global tour. This excursion around the world will serve to briefly review the human saga thus far and to establish a baseline from which the enormous transformations of the centuries that followed might be measured. How, then, might we describe the world, and the worlds, of the fifteenth century?

A MAP OF TIME
1345–1521 Aztec Empire in Mesoamerica
1368–1644 Ming dynasty in China
1370–1405 Conquests of Timur
15th century Spread of Islam in Southeast AsiaCivil war among Japanese warlordsRise of Hindu state of Vijayanagara in southern IndiaEuropean RenaissanceFlourishing of African states of Ethiopia, Kongo, Benin, Zimbabwe
1405–1433 Chinese maritime voyages
1415 Beginning of Portuguese exploration of West African coast
1438–1533 Inca Empire along the Andes
1453 Ottoman seizure of Constantinople
1464–1591 Songhay Empire in West Africa
1492 Christian reconquest of Spain from Muslims completed; Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage
1497–1520s Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean world
1501 Founding of Safavid Empire in Persia
1526 Founding of Mughal Empire in India

SEEKING THE MAIN POINT

What predictions about the future might a global traveler in the fifteenth century have reasonably made?