Why the West Rules--For Now (69 page)

So does the stagnation and then decline of social development after 1100 explain why Cortés, not Zheng, went to Tenochtitlán? Well, partially. It probably does explain why there were no great voyages of exploration in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But by 1405, when Zheng’s first Treasure Fleet sailed from Nanjing, Eastern social development was once again rising quickly. The very fact that Yongle kept sending Zheng across the Indian Ocean indicates an expansive mindset. As social development surged upward again, fifteenth-century intellectuals started looking for alternatives to Zhu Xi thought.

The extraordinary Wang Yangming, for instance, tried hard to follow Zhu’s rules. In the 1490s Wang spent a week contemplating a bamboo stalk, as Zhu had recommended, but instead of providing insight it made him ill. Wang then had just the kind of epiphany appropriate for a successful, expanding society: he realized that everyone intuitively knows the truth without years of quiet sitting and studying commentaries on Confucius. We can all attain wisdom if we just get out and do something. Wang, as good as his word, became a new Renaissance man, ranking among the period’s top generals, administrators, editors of ancient texts, and poets. His followers, rebelling still more against Zhu Xi thought, proclaimed that the streets were full of sages, that everyone could judge right and wrong for themselves, and that getting rich was good. They even advocated women’s equality.

The decision to end Zheng’s voyages was in fact made not against a background of conservative retrenchment but against one of expansion, innovation, and challenges faced and overcome. There is little to suggest that a rigid, inward-turned mindset cut off Chinese exploration in the fifteenth century while a dynamic Renaissance culture pushed Europeans across the seas. So what did?

THE ADVANTAGES OF ISOLATION

We have already seen the answer: once again it was maps, not chaps, that took East and West down different paths. Geography just made it easier for Westerners to wash up in the Americas than for Easterners (
Figure 8.10
).

Europeans’ most obvious geographical advantage was physical: the prevailing winds, the placing of islands, and the sheer size of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans made things easier for them. Given time, East Asian explorers would surely have crossed the Pacific eventually, but other things being equal, it was always going to be easier for Viking or Portuguese sailors to reach the New World than for Chinese or Japanese.

In reality, of course, other things are rarely equal, and in the fifteenth century economic and political geography conspired to multiply the advantages that physical geography gave western Europe. Eastern social development was much higher than Western, and thanks to men like Marco Polo, Westerners knew it. This gave Westerners economic incentives to get to the East and tap into the richest markets on earth. Easterners, by contrast, had few incentives to go west. They could rely on everyone else to come to them.

The Arabs were conveniently placed to dominate the western stretches of the Silk Road and Indian Ocean trade routes, and for many centuries Europeans, at the farthest end of both East-West arteries, mostly stayed home and made do with the crumbs that Venetians collected from Arab tables. The Crusades and Mongol conquests began changing the political map, though, easing European access to the East. Greed began trumping sloth and fear, pulling traders (particularly Venetians) down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean or, like the Polos, across the steppes.

When western European states began moving toward the high end and intensifying their wars after the Black Death, political geography added a push to the economic pull. Rulers along the Atlantic fringe were desperate to buy more cannons and were exhausting the usual ways to get rich (ramping up the bureaucracy to tax their subjects, robbing Jews, plundering neighbors, and so on). They were ready to talk to anyone who could offer them new revenue sources, even the shady, greedy characters who hung around harbors.

Figure 8.10. A third way of seeing the world: how physical geography stacked the odds in favor of western Europe by putting it just three thousand miles from America, while China had the misfortune to lie twice as far from the New World

The Atlantic kingdoms lay as far as it was possible to get from the Red Sea and Silk Road routes, but captains of all kinds, confident in their marvelous new ships, offered—in return for gifts, loans, and trade monopolies—to turn what had previously been geographical isolation into an advantage. They would find an Atlantic route to the Orient. Some promised to sail around the southern tip of Africa into the Indian Ocean, avoiding the awkward business of dealing with Venetians and Muslims. Others insisted they would simply sail west till they came around the globe and showed up in the East.
*
(A third approach, sailing over the North Pole, was for obvious reasons less attractive.)

Most Europeans favored heading south over heading west because they calculated—rightly—that they would have to sail a very long way west to get to the East. If there is any place for bungling idiots in this story, it surely belongs to Columbus, who opened the road to Tenochtitlán by massively underestimating the distance around the globe and refusing to believe that he had the numbers wrong. Conversely, if there is a place for great men, it must go to the Ming emperors’ tough-minded advisers who, after calculating the costs and benefits, shut down Zheng’s quixotic tours in the 1430s and “lost” their paperwork in the 1470s.

Sometimes a little bungling is a good thing, but in reality neither bungling nor good sense made much difference, because maps left little scope for chaps to do anything except what they did do. When Yongle came to China’s throne in 1403 he needed to repair his nation’s standing in South Asia. Sending Zheng’s Treasure Fleets to Calicut and Hormuz was an expensive way to do this, but it did work; but sending Zheng east into an empty ocean was simply out of the question, no matter how many herbs of immortality might lie there. It was always likely that fifteenth-century China’s administrators would eventually shut down the costly voyages into the Indian Ocean, and it was never likely that they would send fleets into the Pacific. Economic geography made exploration irrational.

It is also hard to see how European sailors could not have run into the Americas quite quickly once they struck out across the Atlantic in
search of a route to the riches of the East. Columbus and his men needed hearts of oak and intestines of iron to plunge into the unknown, the wind at their backs, with no guarantee of finding another wind to bring them home, but if they had balked, there were brave men aplenty in Europe’s ports to try again. And if Queen Isabella had rejected Columbus’s third proposal in 1492, Europeans would not have stopped sailing west. Either Columbus would have found another backer or we would simply remember a different mariner—Caboto, perhaps, or the Portuguese Pedro Alvares Cabral, who found Brazil blocking his way to India in 1500—as the great discoverer.

Maps made it as inevitable as things get—as inevitable, say, as when farmers replaced hunter-gatherers or states replaced villages—that the daredevil sailors of the Atlantic fringe would find the Americas sooner rather than later, and certainly sooner than the equally daredevil sailors of the South China Sea.

And once that happened, the consequences were largely predetermined too. European germs, weapons, and institutions were so much more powerful than Native American ones that indigenous populations and states simply collapsed. Had Montezuma or Cortés made other choices, the first conquistadors might well have died on the blood-soaked altars of Tenochtitlán, their hearts hacked from their screaming bodies and offered to the gods, but there would have been more conquistadors right behind them, bringing more smallpox, cannons, and plantations. Native Americans could no more resist European imperialists than native European hunter-gatherers could resist farmers seven or eight millennia earlier.

Geography mattered just as much when Europeans rounded South Africa and sailed into the Indian Ocean, but in different ways. Here Europeans entered a world of higher social development, with ancient empires, long-established trading houses, and its own virulent diseases. Distance and cost—physical and economic geography—kept European incursions as tiny as those to the Americas. The first Portuguese mission to sail around Africa and on to India in 1498 involved just four ships. Its commander, Vasco da Gama, was a nobody, chosen in the expectation he would fail.

Da Gama was a great captain, covering six thousand miles of open sea to catch the winds to take him south of Africa, but he was no politician. He did almost everything possible to justify people’s lack of faith
in him. His habit of kidnapping and flogging local pilots almost led to disaster before he even left Africa, and when his maltreated guides got him to India he offended the Hindu rulers of Calicut by assuming they were Christians. He insulted them further by offering paltry gifts, and when he finally extracted a cargo of spices and gems he ignored all advice and set sail into contrary winds. Almost half his crew died on the Indian Ocean and scurvy crippled the survivors.

But because profit margins on Asian spices exceeded 100 percent, da Gama still made fortunes for himself and his king in spite of all his blunders. Dozens of Portuguese ships followed in da Gama’s wake, exploiting the one advantage they did have: firepower. Slipping as the occasion demanded among trading, bullying, and shooting, the Portuguese found that nothing closed a deal quite like a gun. They seized harbors along the Indian coast as trading enclaves (or pirates’ lairs, depending who was talking) and shipped pepper back to Portugal.

Their tiny numbers meant that Portuguese ships were more like mosquitoes buzzing around the great kingdoms of the Indian Ocean than like conquistadors, but after nearly a decade of their biting, the sultans and kings of Turkey, Egypt, Gujarat, and Calicut—egged on by Venice—decided enough was enough. Massing more than a hundred vessels in 1509, they trapped eighteen Portuguese warships against the Indian coast and closed to ram and board them. The Portuguese blasted them into splinters.

Like the Ottomans when they advanced into the Balkans a century earlier, rulers all around the Indian Ocean rushed to copy European guns, only to learn that it took more than just cannons to outshoot the Portuguese. They needed to import an entire military system and transform the social order to make room for new kinds of warriors, which proved just as difficult in sixteenth-century South Asia as it had been three thousand years earlier, when the kings of the Western core had struggled to adapt their armies to chariots. Rulers who moved too slowly had to open port after port to the fierce intruders, and in 1510 the Portuguese cowed the sultan of Malacca, who controlled the straits leading to the Spice Islands themselves, into granting them trading rights. When the sultan rediscovered his backbone and threw them out, the Portuguese seized his whole city. “
Whoever
is lord of Malacca,” observed Tomé Pires, its first Portuguese governor, “has his hand on the throat of Venice.”

And not just Venice. “
China
,” Pires wrote,

is an important, good, and very wealthy country, and the Governor of Malacca would not need as much force as they say in order to bring it under our rule, because the people are very weak and easy to overcome. And the principal people who have often been there affirm that with ten ships the Governor of India who took Malacca could take the whole of China along the seacoast.

In the giddy years after 1500, almost anything seemed possible to the adventurers who had crossed the Atlantic and rounded Africa. Why not simply take over the East now they had got there? So in 1517 the Portuguese king decided to test Pires’s theory, sending him to Guangzhou to propose peace and trade with the Celestial Kingdom. Unfortunately, Pires was about as diplomatic as da Gama, and a three-year face-off developed, with Pires demanding to meet the emperor and local officials stalling. Pires finally got his way in 1521, the very year that Cortés entered Tenochtitlán.

Pires’s story, though, ended very differently from Cortés’s. On reaching Beijing, Pires had to wait more weeks for an audience, only for it to go disastrously wrong. While Pires was negotiating, a letter arrived from the sultan of Malacca denouncing the Portuguese envoy for stealing his throne. More letters flooded in from officials Pires had offended in Guangzhou, accusing him of cannibalism and espionage. Then, at the worst possible moment, the Chinese emperor dropped dead. In a swirl of accusations and counteraccusations Pires’s party was clapped in irons.

What happened to Pires remains unclear. One letter from a sailor imprisoned with him says he died in jail, but another account says he was banished to a village, where, twenty years later, a Portuguese priest met his daughter. The cleric insisted that the girl proved her identity by reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Portuguese and told him that Pires had grown old with a wealthy Chinese wife and only recently died. But all in all, it is most likely that Pires shared the fate of the rest of the embassy. After being pilloried and publicly mocked, they were executed
and dismembered. Each man’s penis was chopped off and stuffed in his mouth before his body parts were displayed on spikes around Guangzhou.