8

GOING GLOBAL

THREE BIG THINGS

Everything about China amazed Marco Polo. Its palaces were the best in the world and its rulers the richest. Its rivers supported more ships than all the waters of Christendom combined, carrying more food into its cities than a European could imagine anyone eating. And what food it was, so subtle that Europeans could scarcely believe it. Chinese maidens excelled in modesty and decorum; Chinese wives were angelic; and foreigners who enjoyed the hospitality of the courtesans of Hangzhou never forgot them. Most amazing of all, though, was China’s commerce. “I can tell you in all truthfulness,” said Marco, “that the business … is on such a stupendous scale that no one who hears tell of it without seeing it for himself can possibly credit it.”

That, it turned out, was the problem. When Marco returned to Venice in 1295 many of those who thronged to hear his stories did not, in fact, credit them.* But despite its occasional oddities, such as pears that weighed ten pounds, Marco’s account is quite consistent with what we see in Figure 8.1. When he went to China its social development was far ahead of the West’s.

Figure 8.1. A shrinking gap in a shrinking world: trade, travel, and turbulent times bring East and West together again

There were three big things, though, that Marco did not know when he marveled at the East. First, its lead was shrinking, from almost twelve points on the index of social development in 1100 to less than six in 1500. Second, the scenario foreseen at the end ofChapter 7—-that Eastern ironmasters and mill owners would begin an industrial revolution, unleashing the power of fossil fuels—had not come to pass. Marco admired the “black stone” that burned in Chinese hearths, but he admired China’s fat fish and translucent porcelain just as much. The land he described, for all its marvels, remained a traditional economy. And third, the fact that Marco was there at all was a sign of things to come. Europeans were on the move. In 1492 another Italian, Christopher Columbus, would land in the Americas, even if he remained convinced until his dying day that he had reached China, and in 1513 Columbus’s cousin Rafael Perestrello would correct the family’s confusion by becoming the first European who actually did sail to China.

Another three centuries would pass between Columbus’s landfall and the West regaining the lead in social development from the East. The long period covered by this chapter was not the end of the Eastern age. It was not even the beginning of the end. But it was, without doubt, the end of the beginning.

THE RACE OF SATAN

Kaifeng, January 9, 1127. The city walls shook under the crunch of battering rams and the blast of bombs. No one could really see what was going on in the driving snow but still the Chinese defenders on the ramparts fired great iron bolts from their giant crossbows and sprayed burning gunpowder into the dark, hoping to hit the creaking siege towers coming toward them. Three thousand men from the Jurchen Empire, the latest threat to China’s northern borders, had fallen in the first assault on the walls—some burned up, others smashed by stones, more pierced with arrows—but still the attackers gathered up their dead and regrouped. They were used to worse.

Inside the walls, though, where barely a hundred men had fallen, even this scattering of bodies unnerved the defenders. Officers melted away and rumors spread, and all too soon, muffled by the snow, came the rumble of returning siege towers and the deadly hiss of more arrows. We do not know exactly how the panic begin, but suddenly tens of thousands of men were streaming from the battlements, desperate to get away. The enemy was inside, looting, burning, raping, and killing. Many of the palace women drowned themselves rather than endure what lay ahead, but the emperor just waited to be led into captivity.

The fall of Kaifeng was a self-inflicted wound. Despite the eleventh-century economic boom, the Song dynasty’s endless war against the Khitans on the northern frontier was a constant financial drain and the emperors kept looking for new ways to pay their bills. Consequently, when in 1115 the “Wild Jurchens” of Manchuria offered to help fight the Khitans, Emperor Huizong eagerly accepted (Figure 8.2). It should have worried him that these Jurchens had gone from being backwoods farmers to fearsome cavalrymen in just twenty years, but it did not. Huizong was a connoisseur of music, a noted painter, and a calligrapher of genius, but no statesman, and his advisers mostly preferred office politics to facing hard facts. By backing the Jurchens, Huizong created a monster that devoured first the Khitans and then Huizong himself. It would have swallowed the desperate remnants of the Song court, too, had they not fled on boats. Only in 1141 did a frontier settle down between the Jurchens, now ruling northern China, and a much-reduced Song state based at Hangzhou.*

Figure 8.2. Creating monsters: the Jurchen and Song empires in 1141. Dotted areas show China’s main coalfields.

The fall of Kaifeng and the disruption of north-south trade that followed meant that social development barely grew at all in the twelfth century. Yet while it stagnated, development did not actually collapse; Kaifeng quickly recovered from the sack, even becoming the Jurchen capital at one point, and Hangzhou grew into the metropolis that so impressed Marco Polo. The coalfields of southern China were not as rich as those of the north, but they were abundant all the same, and twelfth-century industrialists learned how to use cheaper, dirtier coal in iron production and even how to extract copper from the polluted by-products of ironworking. Trade, paper money, fossil fuels, and commodity production kept growing, and in 1200 a Chinese industrial takeoff still looked as possible as it had a century earlier.

What changed all that was a ferocious young steppelander named Temujin. Born in frozen Mongolia in 1162, Temujin came from the ultimate broken home. His father, Yesugei, had kidnapped Temujin’s mother, Hoelun, from her original bridegroom, impregnated her, and named the resulting baby after a man he had killed. So distant were Temujin’s parents that they once forgot him when moving camps and waited a year before coming back to look. After they married Temujin off at eight, Yesugei was murdered (not, perhaps, before time) and his fellow tribesmen then cast Hoelun out, stole her animals, and left her to starve. Temujin rushed home and supported Hoelun by hunting rats. He also murdered his older half-brother, who, under tribal law, had the right to marry Hoelun. Next Temujin was sold into slavery, and by the time he escaped, his fiancée had been abducted and was perhaps carrying another man’s child. Temujin killed her captors and got her back.

Temujin was a hard man, but had he not been, the Mongols would not have given him the title Genghis Khan*—“Fearless Leader”—and he would not have become history’s greatest conqueror. It does not take a therapist to suspect that his path to power (via hunting down and killing his blood brother Jamuka,^† transforming Mongol warfare by ignoring the claims of kinship, and siding against his squabbling, alcoholic sons in every dispute) owed something to his early family experiences.

In some ways not much had changed on the steppes in two thousand years. Like so many chiefs before him, Genghis Khan was driven partly by fear (of China) and partly by greed (for its wealth). These motives pushed him into raiding the Jurchen kingdom in northern China and using the loot to bribe other Mongol chiefs to follow him. In other ways, though, a great deal had changed, and not even the khan stood above the historical law that you can’t step into the same river twice. For half a millennium Chinese, Muslim, and Christian settlers had been pushing towns, irrigation, and the plow into the steppes. Farmers took land from the nomads, but what the nomads took from the farmers was knowledge of their weapons and ways.

The nomads, it transpired, got the better of the deal. Once again the advantages of backwardness came into play, and Genghis Khan—the most brilliant of all nomad chiefs—learned to integrate city-dwelling engineers into his cavalry armies so well that he could storm any fortification as easily as he could defeat any army. He plundered his way from the Pacific to the Volga before his death in 1227 (Figure 8.3), sweeping away obstacles “as lines of writing are effaced from paper,” according to a Persian eyewitness. After the Mongols passed though, “those abodes became a dwelling for the owl and the raven; in those places the screech-owls answer each other’s cries, and in those halls the winds moan.”

Genghis Khan needed no index of social development to tell him that China was the mother lode of plunder. So far as we can tell, he intended to steal everything, drive the peasants off the land, and convert the whole of northern China into winter pastures for his tough steppeland ponies. In 1215 he destroyed more than ninety cities, leaving Beijing burning for a month. After his death in 1227, though, wiser (Chinese) counsels prevailed, insisting that leaving peasants in place and taxing them would pay better.

An opportunity to try the new policy came quickly. Undeterred by the fact that Huizong’s alliance with the Jurchens against the Khitans had ended with the Jurchens sacking Kaifeng and kidnapping the emperor, in 1234 a new Song ruler proposed a similar alliance with the Mongols against the Jurchens. The outcome was even worse: the Mongols swallowed the Jurchen Empire and brought China’s armies to the brink of collapse.

Only the peculiarities of Mongol politics prevented the Song Empire from falling in the 1230s. When Genghis Khan died in 1227 his son Ögödei had replaced him as Great Khan, but Genghis’s grandsons had immediately started maneuvering to see who would succeed Ögödei. Some of them, worried that letting Ögödei conquer China would put too much power in his hands and would favor his son in the succession struggle, pressured the minor Mongol chiefs to back a gigantic raid in the far west instead. In 1237 they got their way, and the main Mongol hordes abruptly wheeled westward.

Figure 8.3. Where the nomads roam: the boundaries of the Mongol Empire when Genghis Khan died in 1227 and (heavy broken lines) the wars his sons and grandsons waged between then and 1294

Europeans literally did not know what hit them. To Matthew Paris, an English chronicler, the invaders were an utter mystery. “Never,” he said, “has there been any mode of access to them, nor have they themselves come forth, so as to allow any knowledge of their customs or persons to be gained through common intercourse with other men.” Incorrectly interpreting the name Tatars (one of the terms used for the Mongols) as a reference to Tartarus, the ancient Greek name for Hell, Matthew wondered whether they were “an immense horde of that detestable race of Satan.” Or maybe, he speculated, they were the Lost Tribes of Israel, finally going home. Despite recognizing that the Mongols did not speak Hebrew and seemed unaware of Mosaic Law, Matthew decided this must be right: having gone astray before Moses received the Ten Commandments, these were Jews who

followed after strange gods and unknown customs, so now in a more wonderful manner, owing to the vengeance of God, they were unknown to every other nation, and their heart and language was confused, and their life changed to that of the cruel and irrational beast.

Some Christians concluded that the logical defense against the Lost Tribes of Israel was to massacre local Jews, but that produced predictably few results. The Mongols overwhelmed the massed knights of Germany and Hungary and probed as far as Vienna. But then—just as suddenly as they had abandoned China—they departed, turning their ponies around and herding their prisoners off into Inner Asia. The whole point of the European raid had been to influence succession to the khanate, and so when Ögödei died on December 11, 1241, Europe abruptly lost all importance.

When the Mongols did look west again, they sensibly chose a richer target, the Muslim core. It took them just two weeks to breach Baghdad’s walls in 1258. They left the last of the caliphs without food or water for three days, then threw him into a pile of gold and told him to eat it. When he did not, he and his heirs were rolled in rugs and trampled to death.*

An Egyptian army finally stopped the Mongols on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in 1260, but by then their rampage had put the seal on two centuries of economic decline in the old Muslim heartlands of Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Mongols’ greatest impact on the West, though, was what they did not do. Because they did not sack Cairo it remained the West’s biggest and richest city, and because they did not invade western Europe, Venice and Genoa remained the West’s greatest commercial centers. Development tumbled in the old Muslim core but continued to rise in Egypt and Italy, and by the 1270s, when Marco Polo set off for China, the Western core had shifted decisively into the Mediterranean lands that the Mongols had spared.

The Mongols definitively abandoned their Western wars when one more khan died and his successor, Khubilai, immortalized by the English poet Coleridge’s drug-crazed vision of his palace at Xanadu* (“That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!”), finally determined to finish off China. This was the hardest war the Mongols ever fought, and the most destructive. It took a five-year siege of the great fortress Xiangyang to break Chinese resistance, and by the time Khubilai chased the last Song child-emperor into the sea in 1279, the complex infrastructure that had brought China to the verge of an industrial revolution was breaking down. Eastern social development went into free fall.

Natural disasters certainly contributed to this. After recovering from the Jurchen sack, Kaifeng’s real decline began when the Yellow River burst its dykes in 1194, destroying the canals that fed the city, brought in its coal, and carried away its products. But the Yellow River had flooded plenty of times before; the big difference now was that Mongol destruction magnified nature’s cruelties. In the 1230s famine and epidemic followed the Mongol armies, carrying off a million people around Kaifeng and perhaps even more in Sichuan, and in the 1270s the death toll was even worse. Overall, the four horsemen of the apocalypse that stalked China in the thirteenth century—migration, state collapse, famine, and disease—reduced the population by perhaps a quarter. Despite Marco Polo’s amazement, China was no longer on track toward an industrial takeoff by 1290. In fact, the gap between East and West was closing.

GUNS, GERMS, AND CAST IRON

When Eastern social development had fallen before, from the first until the fourth century CE, it had been part of a Eurasia-wide paradox. The sharp rise in social development in the first millennium BCE had effectively shrunk the distance between the cores, and a handful of travelers, traders, and raiders had created overlapping zones of contact across the steppes and Indian Ocean. This Old World Exchange was a consequence of rising development but also generated the forces that would undermine development, and when the Western core failed to break through the hard ceiling around forty-three points, the horsemen of the apocalypse dragged down both cores.

By the ninth century Eastern development had recovered enough to set off a Second Old World Exchange. Merchants, missionaries, and migrants crossed the steppes and Indian Ocean, again building overlapping zones of contact (Figure 8.4). By Genghis Khan’s boyhood years, traders were already carrying not just luxuries such as spices and silk but also bulk foods across the Indian Ocean in quantities even Romans would have envied, and from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to Majapahit in Java, cosmopolitan merchant cities were flourishing.

The Mongol conquest of the steppes brought stability to a second East-West artery, and Khan Ögödei, eager to turn the new capital he built at Karakorum into a worthy imperial metropolis, reportedly lured merchants there by paying 10 percent over whatever price they asked for their goods. He “would sit,” the Persian scholar Rashid al-Din wrote, “every day, after he finished his meal, on a chair outside his court, where every kind of merchandise that was to be found in the world was heaped up in piles.”

Along with merchants came clerics, drawn by the Mongols’ relaxed attitudes about religion. “Just as God gave different fingers to the hand,” Ögödei’s successor told a Christian, “so He has given different ways to men.” Curious about these ways, in 1254 the khan decided to stage a public debate among Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians. Only in Karakorum could this have happened.

A great crowd gathered to watch the learned doctors, but the experiment was not a success. Following Mongol traditions, the contestants were served fermented mares’ milk between rounds of debate, and as the day wore on, their arguments lost focus. Their dialectical skills blunted by alcohol, the Christians lapsed into singing hymns. The Muslims responded by chanting Koranic verses, and the Buddhists withdrew into silent contemplation. Eventually, too drunk to go on, the Christians and Muslims followed their example.

Figure 8.4. The Second Old World Exchange: eight overlapping zones of trade and travel that carried progress and disaster from one end of Eurasia to the other

Despite the failure of interfaith dialogue, Westerners kept coming. Muslim traders carried Eastern goods to Caffa in Crimea, selling them there to Italians, who not only sold them on to north Europeans (Chinese silk first showed up in French markets in 1257) but also followed the goods back to their source. Marco Polo’s uncles left Caffa in 1260 and kept moving until they reached Beijing, then made a second trip, with young Marco in tow, in 1274. Missionaries followed, and in 1305 a Christian friar who had just arrived in Beijing could boast that the steppe route was faster and safer than the sea route.

The First Old World Exchange had strung a few gossamer-thin threads end-to-end across Eurasia, but the Second spun a real web, with enough people moving across it to make the centuries after 1100 the first true age of technological transfer. This worked almost entirely to the advantage of the backward West. Something so seemingly obvious as the wheelbarrow, invented in China around the first century CE, made it to Europe only around 1250, and horse collars, used in China since the fifth century CE, arrived there about the same time.

By far the most important technological transfer, though, was cheap cast-iron tools. These appeared in China in the sixth century BCE and were common by the first. Arabs knew about cast iron by the eleventh century CE, but Europeans not until 1380. If you have ever tried moving earth without iron picks and shovels you will know what a difference this made. Once when I was a graduate student on an excavation in Greece the key to our storeroom went missing and we had to start digging without our collection of iron tools. Soil seems remarkably hard and heavy when you approach it like a pre-1380 European. I can vouch that the Second Old World Exchange revolutionized Western energy capture.

So, too, its information technology. Chinese artisans first made paper from mulberry bark in 105 CE, and wood-pulp paper was common by 700. Arabs learned of paper around 750 (reputedly by capturing Chinese papermakers in central Asia) but Italians only started buying it from them after 1150 and making their own in 1276. By then Chinese publishers had been using engraved woodblocks to print paper books for five centuries and using movable type for two centuries; Europeans only borrowed or reinvented woodblocks around 1375 and movable type around 1430. Chinese and Indian innovations in rigging and steering also moved west, passing through Arab hands into the Mediterranean in the late twelfth century.

Along with ancient technologies such as the wheelbarrow, Westerners also picked up the newest advances. The magnetic compass, first mentioned in a Chinese text in 1119, had reached Arabs and Europeans by 1180, and guns moved even faster. During the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of China, Eastern craftsmen learned how to make gunpowder oxidize quickly enough that it would explode, not just burn, and started using this nasty new trick to propel arrows from bamboo tubes. The oldest known true gun—a foot-long bronze tube found in Manchuria that could fire lead bullets—probably dates to 1288. In 1326, barely a generation later, a manuscript from Florence described a brass gun, and illustrations painted in a manuscript from Oxford the next year show two crude but unmistakable cannons. The first known Arabic use of guns came soon after, in a war in Spain in 1331. Most likely western Europeans learned about guns directly from Mongols on the steppes and then taught Spanish Muslims. It took another generation, until 1360, for these loud new weapons to work their way back to Egypt.

Over the next few centuries guns would change much in the West, but even so, the most important commodities being moved around in the Second Old World Exchange, as in the First, were germs. “Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague that devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” wrote the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. “It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out.” The Black Death* had arrived.

The plague probably evolved in Inner Asia and spread along the Silk Roads. One Arabic scholar (who himself died of it) said it began on the steppes around 1331, and in that same year an epidemic raged along the middle Yangzi Valley, reportedly killing nine people out of ten. We cannot know if this was the same bacillus that devastated Eurasia over the next two decades, but a plague mentioned on Mongolian tombstones in 1338 and 1339 almost certainly was. In 1340 we lose sight of it for a few years; then—abruptly—it was everywhere at once. Sickness gripped China’s east coast in 1345, and the next year a Mongol army brought the plague to Caffa in Crimea,* the very city from which Marco Polo’s uncles had departed for Beijing nearly a century before. The Second Old World Exchange had come full circle.

In 1347 merchants carried the pestilence to every harbor in the Mediterranean. From England to Iraq the classic symptoms of bubonic plague showed up—“Swellings appeared suddenly in the armpit or the groin, in many cases both,” a French chronicler recorded in 1348, “and were infallible signs of death.” A pneumonic mutation, spread by coughing, was even deadlier. “People spat bits of blood, and one was covered with blotches and died,” a poet in Damascus bluntly commented. He died of plague in 1363.

Author after author describes graveyards too full to accommodate more corpses, priests dropping dead while reading the last rites, and entire villages emptied. “The souls of men have become very cheap,” another Damascus poet observed. “Each soul is worth but a kernel”—a gruesome pun on the word “habbah,” meaning both “kernel of grain” and “pustule,” the bubonic plague’s first symptom.

By 1351 the disease had killed a third or even half of all westerners, working its way from the Mediterranean to the fringes of Muscovy, whence it raced back to China. That year the “green-eyed Christian[s]” whom the emperor recruited from Inner Asia to fight rebels brought the plague with them. It killed half the army and then ravaged China every year until 1360. We cannot calculate the death toll, but it was clearly horrendous.

There is no good time for something like the Black Death to visit humanity, but it is hard to think of a worse time than the 1340s. The balmy Medieval Warm Period had drawn to a close, ushering in what climatologists often call the Little Ice Age. From Norway to China, glaciers grew. The Denmark Strait, separating Greenland and Iceland, regularly froze after 1350. Norsemen abandoned their settlements on Greenland and polar bears wandered across the ice bridge to Iceland, which was now cold enough for them. The Baltic Sea froze in 1303 and again in 1306–1307; in 1309–1310 the river Thames in temperate England iced over too. Between 1315 and 1317 it rained so much in northwest Europe that crops rotted in the ground and—a truly astonishing detail—it got too muddy for knights to fight.

With harvests failing and loved ones dying, it was hard not to conclude that God was sending a message. In China endemic banditry turned into religious revolt, directed mainly against the Mongol occupiers. As the alien emperor amused himself with pleasure boats and orgies, messianic cult leaders announced that the Buddha was returning to right the world’s wrongs and usher everyone into Paradise. By 1350 the empire was disintegrating.

We know rather little about events in the old Western core in Iraq, whose Mongol rulers were every bit as incompetent as those in China, but in Egypt and Syria the plague may have strengthened Islam. Clearly not everyone bought the official line that the plague was meant to punish only infidels (for believers, death from it was a mercy and a martyrdom)—the chronicler al-Wardi, for instance, wrote, “We ask God’s for giveness for our souls’ bad inclination; the plague is surely part of His punishment,” and vendors of magical defenses had a field day—but the most popular responses by far were mass prayer sessions, processions to the tombs of holy men, and tougher laws against alcohol and moral laxity.

Things looked much grimmer to many Christians. Not only did God seem to be punishing them—“My mind reels as I prepare to write of the sentence that divine justice, in its infinite mercy, meted out to men,” one Italian lamented—but the church itself also seemed to be coming apart. In 1303 a French king had had the pope himself beaten up and thrown in prison, and soon thereafter the papal court relocated to Avignon in France, where it became a byword for corruption and decadence. One pope even made it illegal to say that Jesus had been poor. Eventually some cardinals decamped back to Rome and elected a counterpope, who squabbled with the Avignon pope over every conceivable issue; and for a few debilitating years after 1409 there were actually three rival popes, all claiming to be God’s vicar on earth.

Since the church had failed them, people took matters into their own hands. The most creative were the Flagellants:

Stripped to the waist, they gathered in large groups and bands and marched in procession through the crossroads and squares of cities and good towns. There they formed circles and beat upon their backs with whips, rejoicing as they did so in loud voices and singing hymns … Many honorable women and devout matrons, it must be added, had done this penance with whips, marching and singing through towns and churches like the men.

Others favored more traditional remedies such as massacring Jews, even though (as one of the popes pointed out in 1348) Jews were dying as fast as Christians. But nothing worked, and social development in the Western core around the Mediterranean fell as fast in the great plague delivered by the Second Old World Exchange as it had done during the plagues delivered by the First. No wonder the end seemed nigh.

DIFFERENT RIVERS

History looked to be repeating itself. In the first century CE Western social development had risen to a hard ceiling around forty-three points, strained against it, and set off a centuries-long, Old World–wide collapse. Eleven hundred years later, Eastern social development rose to the same level and set off similar disasters. Had von Däniken’s aliens from outer space been orbiting Earth again in 1350 they might well have concluded that human history was locked in a series of boom-and-bust cycles, bouncing against an unbreakable hard ceiling.

But like all the spacemen I have imagined so far, they would have been mistaken, because another historical law was also operating. I commented earlier that not even Genghis Khan could step into the same river twice; and neither could the horsemen of the apocalypse. The cores across which the horsemen rode during the Second Old World Exchange were very different from those they had devastated during the First Old World Exchange, which meant that the Second Exchange had very different consequences from the First.

Most obviously, both cores were geographically bigger when the Second Exchange intensified around 1200 than they had been during the First (Figure 8.5), and size mattered. On the one hand, larger cores generated larger disruptions: it is hard to quantify calamity, but the plagues, famines, and migrations that began in the thirteenth century do seem to have been even worse than those that began in the second century. On the other hand, though, larger cores also meant greater depth to absorb shocks and larger reserves to hasten recovery. Japan, Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean Basin, and most of Europe escaped Mongol devastation in the thirteenth century; Japan and Southeast Asia avoided the Black Death in the fourteenth too; and in the very heart of China the Yangzi Delta region seems to have come through the disasters remarkably well.

Economic geography had also changed. Around 100 CE the Western core was richer and more developed than the Eastern, but by 1200 the reverse was true. It was the Eastern core, not the Western, that was now straining against the hard ceiling, and Eastern commercial networks (especially those linking southern China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean) dwarfed anything in the West.

Figure 8.5. Size matters: horizontal lines mark areas in the Eastern and Western cores ruled by states around 100 CE, on the eve of the first Old World crisis, and diagonal lines show where states had spread by 1200, just before the second crisis

Changes in political geography reinforced economics. Back in 100 CE most trade in each core had gone on within the boundaries of a single great empire; by 1200 that was no longer true. Both cores were politically messier than they had been in antiquity, and even when great empires once again consolidated the old heartlands after the Black Death, the political relationships were very different. Any great empire now had to deal with a surrounding ring of smaller states. In the East the relationships were mainly commercial and diplomatic; in the West they were mainly violent.

Put together, these changes meant that the cores not only recovered faster from the Second Old World Exchange than from the First but also recovered in different ways.

In the West the Ottoman Turks quickly rebuilt an empire in the old heartland in the fourteenth century. The Ottomans were just one of dozens of Turkic clans that settled in Anatolia around 1300 after the Mongols had shattered the older Muslim kingdoms (Figure 8.6), but within a few years of the Black Death they had already got the better of their rivals and established a European bridgehead. By the 1380s they were bullying the pitiful remnants of the Byzantine Empire, and by 1396 they scared Christendom so badly that the squabbling popes of Rome and Avignon briefly agreed to join forces in sending a crusade against them.

It was a disaster, but Christian hopes briefly revived when Tamerlane, a Mongol chieftain who made Genghis Khan look well adjusted, led new steppe incursions into the Muslim world. In 1400 the Mongols annihilated Damascus and in 1401 sacked Baghdad, reportedly using the skulls of ninety thousand of its residents as bricks for a series of towers they built around the ruins. In 1402 Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans and threw the sultan into a cage, where he expired of shame and exposure. But then Christian hopes failed. Instead of staying to devastate the remaining Muslim lands, Tamerlane decided that the emperor of distant China had insulted him and swung his horsemen around. He died in 1405 while riding east to avenge the slight.

Saved by the bell, the Ottomans bounced back into business within twenty years, but as they advanced through the Balkans they had to learn some tough lessons. When the Mongols defeated them in 1402 both armies had fought as steppe warriors had done for two thousand years, with clouds of mounted archers enveloping and shooting down slower-moving foes. European armies could not compete head-to-head with these swarms of light horsemen, but they had improved their newfangled guns to the point that in 1444 a Hungarian army gave the ottomans a nasty shock. With small cannons mounted on wagons that were roped together as mobile forts, Hungarian firepower stopped the Turkish cavalry in its tracks. Had the Hungarian king not galloped out ahead of his men and got himself killed he probably would have won the day.

Figure 8.6. The revival of the West, 1350–1500. The shaded area shows the extent of the ottoman Turkish empire in 1500—by which time the Western core was moving decisively northward and westward.

The Turks, quick learners, figured out the best response: buy European firepower. This new technology was expensive, but even Europe’s richest states, such as Venice and Genoa, were paupers next to the sultans. Hiring Italians as admirals and siege engineers, training enslaved Christian boys as an elite infantry corps, and recruiting European gunners, the Ottomans were soon on the move again. When they began their 1453 assault on Constantinople, still the greatest fortress on earth and the main barrier to Turkish power, the Turks hired away the Byzantines’ top gunner, a Hungarian. This gunner made the Ottomans an iron cannon big enough to throw a thousand-pound stone ball, with a roar loud enough (chroniclers said) to make pregnant women miscarry. The gun in fact cracked on the second day and was useless by the fourth or fifth, but the Hungarian also cast smaller, more practical cannon that succeeded where the giant failed.

For the first and only time in its history, Constantinople’s walls failed. Thousands of panic-stricken Byzantines crowded into the church of Hagia Sophia—“the earthly heaven, the second firmament, the vehicle of the cherubim, the throne of the glory of God,” Gibbon called it—trusting in a prophecy that when infidels attacked the church an angel would descend, sword in hand, to restore the Roman Empire. But no angel came; Constantinople fell; and with it, Gibbon concluded, the Roman Empire finally expired.*

As the Turks advanced, European kings fought more fiercely against one another as well as against the infidel, and a genuine arms race took off. France and Burgundy led the way in the 1470s, their gunners casting cannons with thicker barrels, forming gunpowder into corns that ignited faster, and using iron rather than stone cannonballs. The result was smaller, stronger, and more portable guns that rendered older weapons obsolete. The new guns were light enough to be loaded onto expensive new warships, driven by sails, not oars, with gun ports cut so low in the hull that iron cannonballs could hole enemy ships right at the waterline.

It was hard for anyone but a king to afford this kind of technology, and slowly but surely western European monarchs bought enough of the new weapons to intimidate the lords, independent cities, and bishops whose messy, overlapping jurisdictions had made earlier European states so weak. Along the Atlantic littoral, kings created bigger, stronger states—France, Spain, and England—within which the royal writ ran everywhere and the nation, not far-flung aristocratic clans or popes in Rome, had first claim on people’s loyalties. And once they had muscled their lords aside, kings could build up bureaucracies, tax the people directly, and buy more guns—which of course forced neighboring kings to buy more guns too, and pushed everyone to raise still more money.

Once again there were advantages to backwardness, and the struggle steadily pulled the West’s center of gravity toward the Atlantic. The cities of northern Italy had long been the most developed part of Europe, but now discovered a disadvantage of forwardness: glorious city-states such as Milan and Venice were too rich and powerful to be bullied into any Italian national state, but not rich or powerful enough to stand alone against genuine national states such as France and Spain. Writers such as Machiavelli rejoiced in this liberty, but its price became crystal clear when a French army invaded Italy in 1494. Italian war-making had declined, as Machiavelli himself conceded, “into such a state of decay that wars were commenced without fear, continued without danger, and concluded without loss.” A few dozen up-to-date French cannons now blew away everything in their path. It took them just eight hours to smash the great stone castle of Monte San Giovanni, killing seven hundred Italians for the loss of ten Frenchmen. Italian cities could not begin to compete with the tax revenues of big states such as France. By 1500 the Western core was being reordered from its Atlantic fringe, and war was leading the way.

The Eastern core, by contrast, was reordered from its ancient center in China, and commerce and diplomacy ultimately led the way, even though the rise of new empires began in bloodshed as grim as anything in the West. Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty that reunited China, had been born into poverty in 1328 as Mongol power was falling apart. His parents—migrant laborers on the run from tax collectors—sold four of his brothers and sisters because they could not feed them, and abandoned Yuanzhang, their youngest, with a Buddhist grandfather. The old man filled the boy’s head with the messianic visions of the Red Turbans, one of many resistance movements fighting Mongol rule. The end was nigh, the old man insisted, and the Buddha would soon return from Paradise to smite the wicked. Instead, in the locust-and drought-ravaged summer of 1344, disease—quite likely the Black Death—carried off Yuanzhang’s whole family.

The teenager attached himself to a Buddhist monastery as a servant, but the monks could barely feed themselves and sent him out to beg or steal for his keep. After wandering southern China’s back roads for three or four years he returned to the monastery just in time to see it burned to the ground in the vast, roiling civil wars that accompanied the collapse of Mongol rule. With nowhere else to go, he joined the other monks in hanging around the smoking ruins, starving.

Yuanzhang was an alarming-looking youth, tall, ugly, lantern-jawed, and pockmarked. But he was also smart, tough, and (thanks to the monks) literate; the kind of man, in short, that any bandit would want in his gang. Recruited by a band of Red Turbans as they passed through the neighborhood, he impressed the other thugs and visionaries, married the chief’s daughter, and eventually took over the gang.

In a dozen years of grinding warfare Yuanzhang turned his cutthroat crew into a disciplined army and drove the other rebels from the Yangzi Valley. Just as important, he distanced himself from the Red Turbans’ wilder prophecies and organized a bureaucracy that could run an empire. In January 1368, just shy of his fortieth birthday, he renamed himself Hongwu (“Vast Military Power”) and proclaimed the creation of a Ming (“Brilliant”) dynasty.

Hongwu’s official pronouncements make it sound as if his whole adult life was a reaction against his terrible, rootless, violent youth. He promoted an image of China as a bucolic paradise of stable, peaceful villages, where virtuous elders supervised self-sufficient farmers, traders dealt only in goods that could not be made locally, and—unlike Hongwu’s own family—no one moved around. Hongwu claimed that few people needed to travel more than eight miles from home, and that covering more than thirty-five miles without permission should earn a whipping. Fearing that commerce and coinage would corrode stable relationships, three times he passed laws restricting trade with foreigners to government-approved dealers and even prohibited foreign perfumes lest they seduce the Chinese into illicit exchanges. By 1452 his successors had renewed his laws three more times and had four times banned silver coins out of fear they would make unnecessary commerce too easy.

“For thirty-one years I labored to discharge Heaven’s mandate,” Hongwu claimed in his will, “tormented by worries and fears, without relaxing for a day.” We have to wonder, though, how much of Hongwu’s struggle was just in his mind. Hongwu was eager to appear—in contrast to his Mongol predecessors—as an ideal Confucian ruler, but never actually banned foreign trade. His son Yongle even expanded it, assiduously importing Korean virgins for sex (because, he claimed, they were good for his health). But Ming monarchs did insist on keeping trade in official hands. This, they repeatedly announced, protected the (theoretically) stable social order and allowed foreigners to show due deference. “I do not care for foreign things,” one ruler explained. “I accept them because they come from far away and show the sincerity of distant peoples.” The fact that “tribute” (as the court called trade beyond the borders) was filling the imperial coffers was not worth mentioning.

Despite all the talk, trade flourished. In 1488 a shipwrecked Korean observed that “foreign ships stand as thick as the teeth of a comb” in Hangzhou harbor. Underwater archaeologists have found that merchant ships were getting bigger, and the fact that the emperors felt compelled to renew their laws about illicit trade quite as often as they did strongly suggests that people were ignoring them.

The effects of the commercial boom were far-reaching. Peasant incomes rose once more, families grew, and farmers streamed from their villages to open new lands or work in cities. Local worthies repaired roads, bridges, and canals after the violence of the preceding centuries, merchants carried food along them, and people everywhere rushed to market, selling what they could produce cheaply and buying everything else. By 1487 an official simply took it for granted that people “convert grain into cash, then convert cash into clothing, food, and daily necessities … there aren’t any people throughout the realm of whom this is not true.”

Commerce was interlinking the enlarged Eastern core just as much as war interlinked the states of the West. Population, agriculture, and finance all expanded rapidly in fourteenth-century Japan, and despite the Ming restrictions, trade with China steadily grew. Dealings with Southeast Asia were even more important: revenues from trade funded the rise of states such as Majapahit on Java, which dominated the spice business. Many local rulers came to depend on Chinese support for their thrones.

None of this required the kind of relentless violence that cursed the West, and other than a disastrous attempt to prop up a friendly regime in Vietnam, early Ming monarchs limited their fighting to the steppe frontier. The Mongols remained the only real threat to the dynasty. Had Tamerlane not died in 1405 he might well have overthrown the Ming, and in 1449 other Mongol clans actually captured an emperor. To pursue their steppe wars, though, the Ming felt that they needed not advanced guns but conventional armies with vast supply trains. When Yongle invaded the steppes in 1422, for instance, he took 340,000 donkeys, 117,000 carts, and 235,000 cart pullers to drag the twenty thousand tons of grain his army would eat.

Yongle walked softly but carried a big stick. In 1405 he announced that he was sending ambassadors “to the various foreign countries in the Western [Indian] Ocean to read out the imperial commands and to bestow rewards,” enmeshing commerce in a web of diplomacy, but along with them he also sent the biggest fleet the world had ever seen. To build it he summoned 25,000 craftsmen to add vast new dockyards to his capital at Nanjing. Lumberjacks in Sichuan picked out the best fir trees for masts, elm and cedar for hulls, and oak for tillers, then clear-cut entire forests and floated them down the Yangzi to the shipwrights. Laborers built giant dry docks, hundreds of feet long, to work on the great vessels. No detail was overlooked; even the iron nails got a special waterproof coat.

This was no war fleet, but it was designed for shock and awe. At its heart were the biggest wooden ships of all time, perhaps 250 feet long and displacing two thousand tons of ocean; and at its head was history’s biggest admiral, the Muslim eunuch Zheng He, said to have been seven feet tall and sixty inches around the belly (in some accounts, nine feet tall and ninety inches in girth).*

More than three hundred vessels set sail, carrying 27,870 men. The plan was to descend on the wealthy cities around the Indian Ocean, whose princes, waking up to find the seas outside their palace windows filled with Chinese sails, would hand over huge “tribute” payments, channeling trade through official channels. But it was also a grand adventure: the sailors seem to have felt they were plunging into a twilight zone, where anything was possible. In Sri Lanka (Figure 8.7) local Muslims showed them the biblical Adam’s footprints, while in Vietnam sailors thought they had to dodge the “corpse-head barbarian,” a kind of banshee that was

really a woman belonging to a human family, her only peculiarity being that her eyes have no pupils; at night, when she is sleeping, her head flies away and eats the tapering feces of human infants; the infant, affected by the evil influence which invades its abdomen, inevitably dies; and the flying head returns and unites with its body, just as it was before. If people know of this and wait until the moment the head flies away, and then remove the body to another place, the returning head cannot unite with the body, and then the woman dies.

Other than the threats in their own imaginations, though, the sailors encountered few dangers. The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world’s busiest waterway and then as now infested by pirates, but otherwise used force only when tricked into taking sides in a Sri Lankan civil war. Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not impress them (“If one’s eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances,” one of Zheng’s officers wrote; “Desolation, the entire country nothing but hills!”), and Mecca, which did (even if another officer inexplicably thought Islam’s holiest shrine looked like a pagoda).

The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good nine thousand miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng’s ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in his bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did. Plunging into the uncharted Pacific Ocean, Menzies says, Zheng’s lieutenant Zhou Man made landfall in Oregon in summer 1423, then sailed down America’s west coast. Menzies suggests that despite losing a ship in San Francisco Bay, Zhou persevered, putting in on the Mexican coast and getting all the way to Peru before picking up winds to head back across the Pacific. In October 1423, after a four-month detour, Zhou was safely back in Nanjing.

Figure 8.7. The fifteenth-century world as seen from China, showing the Ming diplomatic offensive in the Indian Ocean (solid line) and the route Chinese ships could have taken to reach the New World (broken line)

Conventional historians, Menzies suggests, have overlooked Zhou’s feats (as well as even more astonishing voyages that took Zheng’s subordinates to the Atlantic Ocean, the North Pole, Antarctica, Australia, and Italy) because Zheng’s official records disappeared in the fifteenth century; and because few historians have Menzies’s practical knowledge of navigation, they have failed to understand the clues hidden in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century maps.

Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they concede, is quite right that Zheng’s logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature—including not one but two eyewitness accounts of Zheng’s voyages—never mention any of these discoveries? How, they wonder, did fifteenth-century ships maintain the speeds Menzies’s theory requires? How did Zheng’s sailors map the world’s coasts the way Menzies claims they did? And why does the actual evidence Menzies musters for Chinese globe-trotting hold up so poorly to scholarly scrutiny?

I have to admit that I am on the side of skeptics; to my mind Menzies’s 1421 is on a par with von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? But like von Däniken’s speculations—or, for that matter, like the Albert-in-Beijing scenario in the introduction to this book—1421has the merit of forcing us to ask why things didn’t happen this way. It is a critical question, because if they had happened like Menzies says, the West might well not now rule.

ZHENG IN TENOCHTITLÁN

Tenochtitlán, August 13, 1431. Zheng He’s head hurt. He was too old for this. And too big. All day he had been sending messengers into the burning city, demanding that his allies stop massacring the Aztecs, but as the sun set through the smoke he had given up. After all, he tried to tell himself, he could not be blamed for the slaughter. These people were savages, indecent, ignorant of the Way or of God. They barely even knew what bronze was. All they seemed to care about was hacking their enemies’ chests open with glassy black stones and tearing out their still-beating hearts.

Zheng and his men of course knew the stories of China’s ancient Shang dynasty, whose unrighteous rulers so many thousands of years ago had sacrificed humans, and speculation was rife that here beyond the Eastern Ocean was a parallel world—stranger even than the land of corpse-head barbarians—where time had stood still and the Shang still ruled. Heaven, Zheng’s men speculated, must have assigned their expedition the role once played by the virtuous Zhou dynasty of antiquity; Zheng was a new King Wu, come to wrest heaven’s mandate from the wicked kings of this land and usher in a golden age.

Zheng had not anticipated any of this when the emperor had ordered him into the Eastern Ocean. Sail beyond the Eastern Ocean to the Isles of Penglai, the Son of Heaven had said. Since the Qin First Emperor, men have sought these Isles, where immortals live in palaces of silver and gold, the birds and beasts are pure white, and magic herbs grow. Ten years ago Our admiral Zhou Man set foot in this magical place, and now We command you to bring Us the herbs of immortality.

Zheng had seen more of the world than anyone who had ever lived. Nothing surprised him anymore, and if he had run into dragons and giant sharks, like the old stories said he would, he would simply have dealt with them. But what he most expected was exactly what he did find at first—nothing. After sailing up the coast of Japan, bestowing titles on its unruly warlords and receiving their tribute, his fleet had run with the wind for two months, chasing an endlessly receding blue horizon where sea and sky merged. And when his nearly mutinous men finally sighted land it was all trees, rain, and mountains, in its way worse even than Africa.

It took more long weeks of drifting down the coast before they found natives who did not run away—natives who in fact sailed out to meet them, bringing marvelous foods they had never tasted before. These hospitable, half-naked barbarians had no herbs of immortality, although they did have pleasantly intoxicating herbs to smoke. Nor did they have palaces of silver and gold, though they seemed to be saying that these things lay inland. And so with just a few hundred men, a few dozen cavalry, and a smattering of native words, Zheng set off to find the immortals.

Sometimes he had to fight, but firebombs had a salutary effect and the savages rarely stood their ground. Even after his powder ran low, horses and steel swords were almost as effective. His best weapons, though, were the natives themselves. They treated his men like gods, carrying their supplies and flocking to fight for them. Zheng could follow the wise tradition of using barbarians to fight barbarians, simply helping “his” barbarians, who called themselves the Purépecha, feed some ancient grudge they bore the neighboring barbarians, the Aztecs. Zheng could not work out what the grudge was, but no matter; step by step, the barbarians’ civil war brought him closer to the immortals.

Only when Zheng joined his allies outside the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán did he finally admit that there were no immortals. Tenochtitlán was grand enough in its own way, with broad, straight streets and stepped pyramids, but there were no pure white animals, no silver-and-gold palaces, and certainly no herbs of eternal life. In fact, death was everywhere. Hideous boils and pustules had started carrying the barbarians off by their thousands, their bodies stinking even before they died. Zheng had seen plagues aplenty, but none like this. Barely one in a hundred of his own men caught it, surely a sign of God’s pleasure in Zheng’s task.

Right up to the last moment it was touch-and-go what the pestilence would do first—leave Zheng’s barbarians too weak to storm Tenochtitlán or the enemy barbarians too weak to defend it. But once again Heaven decided in Zheng’s favor, and under cover of the last bombs and crossbow bolts his horsemen had led the charge across the causeways into Tenochtitlán. After a vicious but one-sided struggle in the streets—Aztec stone blades and cotton padding against Chinese steel swords and chain mail—resistance collapsed and the Purépecha set about torturing, raping, and stealing. Itzcoatl, the last Aztec king, they pierced with many darts as he fought at the gate of his palace, then threw him into a fire, carved out his heart before he died, and—horror of horrors—sliced off and ate chunks of his flesh.

Zheng’s questions had been answered. These people were not immortals. Nor was he King Wu, initiating a new age of virtue. The only question remaining, in fact, was how he would get all his plunder back to Nanjing.

GREAT MEN AND BUNGLING IDIOTS

In reality, of course, things didn’t happen this way, any more than things in 1848 happened the way I described in the introduction. Tenochtitlán did get sacked, its Mesoamerican neighbors did do most of the fighting, and imported diseases did kill most people in the New World. But the sack came in 1521, not 1431; the man who led it was Hernán Cortés, not Zheng He; and the killer germs came from Europe, not Asia. If Zhou Man really had discovered the Americas, as Menzies insists, and if the story really had unfolded the way I just told it, with Mexico becoming part of the Ming Empire, not the Spanish, the modern world might look very different. The Americas might have been tied into a Pacific, not an Atlantic economy; their resources might have fueled an Eastern, not a Western industrial revolution; Albert might have ended up in Beijing rather than Looty in Balmoral; and the West might not rule.

So why did things happen the way they did?

Ming dynasty ships certainly could have sailed to America if their skippers had wanted to. A replica of a Zheng-era junk in fact managed the China–California trip in 1955 (though it could not get back again) and another, the Princess Taiping, got within twenty miles of completing a Taiwan–San Francisco round trip in 2009 before a freighter sliced it in two.* If they could do it, why didn’t Zheng?

The most popular answer is that things happened the way they did because in the fifteenth century Chinese emperors lost interest in sending ships overseas, while European kings (some, anyway) became very interested in it. And up to a point, that is clearly correct. When Yongle died in 1424 his successor’s first act was to ban long-distance voyages. Predictably, the princes of the Indian Ocean stopped sending tribute, so the next emperor sent Zheng back to the Persian Gulf in 1431, only for his successor, Zhengtong, to reverse policy again. In 1436 the court refused repeated requests from the shipyards at Nanjing for more craftsmen, and over the next decade or two the great fleet rotted. By 1500 no emperor could have repeated Yongle’s voyages even if he had wanted to.

At the other end of Eurasia, royalty was behaving in exactly the opposite way. Portugal’s Prince Henry “the Navigator” poured resources into exploration. Some of his motives were calculating (such as lust for African gold) and some otherworldly (such as the belief that somewhere in Africa there was an immortal Christian king named Prester John, who guarded the Gates of Paradise and would save Europe from Islam). All the same, Henry funded expeditions, hired map-makers, and helped design new ships that were perfect for exploring the west coast of Africa.

Portuguese exploration was certainly not all smooth sailing. Upon discovering the uninhabited Madeira Islands (Figure 8.8) in 1420, the captain in charge (Christopher Columbus’s future father-in-law) released a mother rabbit and her young on Porto Santo, the most promising piece of real estate. Breeding like they do, the bunnies ate everything, forcing the humans to relocate to the densely forested main island of Madeira (“wood” in Portuguese). This island the colonists set alight, compelling them, a chronicler tells us, “with all the men, women, and children, to flee [the fire’s] fury and to take refuge in the sea, where they remained up to their necks in the water, and without food or drink for two days and two nights.”

But having destroyed the native ecosystem, the Europeans discovered that sugarcane thrived in this charred new world, and Prince Henry put up the money for them to build a mill. Within a generation they were importing African slaves to labor in their plantations, and by the fifteenth century’s end the settlers were exporting more than six hundred tons of sugar every year.

Plunging farther into the Atlantic, Portuguese sailors found the Azores, and nudging down the African coast, they reached the Senegal River in 1444. In 1473 their first ship crossed the equator, and in 1482 they reached the Congo River. Here, for a while, headwinds made sailing farther south impossible, but in 1487 Bartolomeu Dias hit on the idea of volta do mar, “returning by sea.” Swinging far out into the Atlantic, he picked up winds that carried him to what he named the Cape of Storms (known today, more optimistically, as the Cape of Good Hope) at Africa’s southern tip, where his terrified sailors mutinied and forced him home. Dias had not found Prester John, but he had shown there could be a sea route to the Orient.

Figure 8.8. The world as seen from Europe, and the paths taken by fifteenth-century European explorers

By Yongle’s standards the Portuguese expeditions were laughably small (involving dozens of men, not dozens of thousands) and undignified (involving rabbits, sugar, and slaves, not gifts from great princes), but with the benefit of hindsight it is tempting to see the 1430s as a—perhaps the—decisive moment in world history, the point when Western rule became possible. At just the moment that maritime technology began to turn the oceans into highways linking the whole planet, Prince Henry grasped the possibilities and Emperor Zhengtong rejected them. Here, if anywhere, the great man/bungling idiot theory of history seems to accomplish a lot: the planet’s fate hung on the decisions these two men made.

Or did it? Henry’s foresight was impressive, but certainly not unique. Other European monarchs were close on his heels, and in fact the private enterprise of countless Italian sailors drove the process quite as much as the whims of rulers. If Henry had taken up coin collecting instead of navigating, other rulers would have filled his shoes. When Portugal’s king John turned down the Genoese adventurer Christopher Columbus’s crazy-sounding scheme to reach India by sailing west, Queen Isabella of Castile stepped in (even if he had to pitch the idea to her three times to get to yes). Within a year Columbus was back, announcing—doubly confused—that he had reached the land of the great khan (his first mistake was that it was actually Cuba; his second, that the Mongol khans had been expelled from China over a century earlier). Panicked by reports of the Castilians’ new route to Asia, Henry VII of England sent the Florentine merchant Giovanni Caboto* to find a North Atlantic alternative in 1497. Caboto reached icy Newfoundland, and—as enthusiastically muddled as Columbus—insisted that this, too, was the great khan’s land.

By the same token, breathtaking as Zhengtong’s error now seems, we should bear in mind that when he “decided” not to send shipwrights to Nanjing in 1436 he was only nine years old. His advisers made this choice for him, and their successors repeated it throughout the fifteenth century. According to one story, when courtiers revived the idea of Treasure Fleets in 1477 a cabal of civil servants destroyed the records of Zheng’s voyages. The ringleader, Liu Daxia, we are told, explained to the minister of war,

The voyages of [Zheng] to the Western Ocean wasted millions in money and grain, and moreover the people who met their deaths may be counted in the tens of thousands … This was merely an action of bad government of which ministers should severely disapprove. Even if the old archives were still preserved they should be destroyed.

Grasping the point—that Liu had deliberately “lost” the documents—the minister rose from his chair. “Your hidden virtue, sir,” he exclaimed, “is not small. Surely this seat will soon be yours!”

If Henry and Zhengtong had been different people, making different decisions, history would still have turned out much the same. Maybe instead of asking why particular princes and emperors made one choice rather than another, we should ask why western Europeans embraced risk-taking just as an inward-turned conservatism descended on China. Maybe it was culture, not great men or bungling idiots, that sent Cortés rather than Zheng to Tenochtitlán.

BORN AGAIN

“At the present moment I could almost wish to be young again,” the Dutch scholar Erasmus wrote to a friend in 1517,* “for no other reason but this—that I anticipate the near approach of a golden age.” Today we know this “golden age” by the name Frenchmen gave it, la renaissance, “the rebirth”: and as some people see it, this rebirth was precisely the cultural force that suddenly, irreversibly, set Europeans apart from the rest of the world, making men like Columbus and Caboto do what they did. The creative genius of a largely Italian cultural elite—“first-born among the sons of modern Europe,” a nineteenth-century historian famously called them—set Cortés on the path to Tenochtitlán.

Historians normally trace the roots of the rebirth back to the twelfth century, when northern Italy’s cities shook off German and papal domination and emerged as economic powerhouses. Rejecting their recent history of subjection to foreign rulers, their leaders began wondering how to govern themselves as independent republics, and increasingly concluded that they could find answers in classical Roman literature. By the fourteenth century, when climate change, famine, and disease undermined so many old certainties, some intellectuals expanded their interpretation of the ancient classics into a general vision of social rebirth.

Antiquity, these scholars started claiming, was a foreign country. Ancient Rome had been a land of extraordinary wisdom and virtue, but barbarous “Middle Ages” had intervened between then and modern times, corrupting everything. The only way forward for Italy’s newly freed city-states, intellectuals suggested, was by looking backward: they must build a bridge to the past so that the wisdom of the ancients could be born again and humanity perfected.

Scholarship and art would be the bridge. By scouring monasteries for lost manuscripts and learning Latin as thoroughly as the Romans themselves, scholars could think as the Romans had thought and speak as they had spoken; whereupon true humanists (as the born-again called themselves) would recapture the wisdom of the ancients. Similarly, by poking around Roman ruins, architects could learn to re-create the physical world of antiquity, building churches and palaces that would shape lives of the highest virtue. Painters and musicians, who had no Roman relics to study, made their best guesses about ancient models, and rulers, eager to be seen to be perfecting the world, hired humanists as advisers, commissioned artists to immortalize them, and collected Roman antiquities.

The odd thing about the Renaissance was that this apparently reactionary struggle to re-create antiquity in fact produced a wildly untraditional culture of invention and open-ended inquiry. There certainly were conservative voices, banishing some of the more radical thinkers (such as Machiavelli) to drain the bitter cup of exile and intimidating others (such as Galileo) into silence, but they barely blunted the thrust of new ideas.

The payoff was phenomenal. By linking every branch of scholarship, art, and crafts to every other and evaluating them all in the light of antiquity, “Renaissance men”* such as Michelangelo revolutionized them all at once. Some of these amazing characters, such as Leon Battista Alberti, theorized as brilliantly as they created, and the greatest, such as Leonardo da Vinci, excelled at everything from portraiture to mathematics. Their creative minds moved effortlessly between studios and the corridors of power, taking time off from theorizing to lead armies, hold office, and advise rulers. (In addition to writing The Prince, Machiavelli also penned the finest comedies of his age.) Visitors and emigrants spread the new ideas from the Renaissance’s epicenter at Florence as far as Portugal, Poland, and England, where distinct local renaissances blossomed.

This was, without a doubt, one of the most astonishing episodes in history. Renaissance Italians did not re-create Rome—even in 1500, Western social development was still a full ten points lower than the Roman peak a millennium and a half earlier. More Italians could now read than in the heyday of the Roman Empire, but Europe’s biggest city was just one-tenth the size of ancient Rome; Europe’s soldiers, despite being armed with guns, would have struggled to better Caesar’s legions; and Europe’s richest countries remained less productive than Rome’s richest provinces. But none of these quantitative differences necessarily matters if Renaissance Italians really did revolutionize Western culture so thoroughly that they set Europe apart from the rest of the world, inspiring Western adventurers to conquer the Americas while conservative Easterners stayed home.

Chinese intellectuals, I suspect, would have been astonished to hear of this idea. Laying down their inkstones and brushes, I can imagine them patiently explaining to the nineteenth-century European historians who dreamed up this theory that twelfth-century Italians were not the first people to feel disappointed with their recent history and to look to antiquity for ways to perfect modernity. Chinese thinkers—as we saw in Chapter 7—did something very similar four hundred years earlier, looking back past Buddhism to find superior wisdom in Han dynasty literature and painting. Italians turned antiquity into a program for social rebirth in the fifteenth century, but the Chinese had already done so in the eleventh century. Florence in 1500 was crowded with geniuses, moving comfortably between art, literature, and politics, but so was Kaifeng in 1100. Was Leonardo’s breadth really more astonishing than that of Shen Kuo, who wrote on agriculture, archaeology, cartography, climate change, the classics, ethnography, geology,mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, meteorology, music, painting, and zoology? As comfortable with the mechanical arts as any Florentine inventor, Shen explained the workings of canal locks and printers’ movable type, designed a new kind of water clock, and built pumps that drained a hundred thousand acres of swampland. As versatile as Machiavelli, he served the state as director of the Bureau of Astronomy and negotiated treaties with nomads. Leonardo would surely have been impressed.

The nineteenth-century theory that the Renaissance sent Europe down a unique path seems less compelling if China had had a strikingly similar renaissance of its own four centuries earlier. It perhaps makes more sense to conclude that China and Europe both had Renaissances for the same reason that both had first and second waves of Axial thought: because each age gets the thought it needs. Smart, educated people reflect on the problems facing them, and if they face similar issues they will come up with similar ranges of responses, regardless of where and when they live.*

Eleventh-century Chinese and fifteenth-century Europeans did face rather similar issues. Both groups lived in times of rising social development. Both had a sense that the second wave of Axial thought had ended badly (the collapse of the Tang dynasty and rejection of Buddhism in the East; climate change, the Black Death, and the crisis of the church in the West). Both looked back beyond their “barbarous” recent pasts to glorious antiquities of first-wave Axial thought (Confucius and the Han Empire in the East; Cicero and the Roman Empire in the West). And both groups responded similarly, applying the most advanced scholarship to ancient literature and art and using the results to interpret the world in new ways.

Asking why Europe’s Renaissance culture propelled daredevils to Tenochtitlán while China’s conservatives stayed home seems to miss the point just as badly as asking why Western rulers were great men while Easterners were bungling idiots. We clearly need to reformulate the question again. If Europe’s fifteenth-century Renaissance really did inspire bold exploration, why, we should ask, did China’s eleventh-century Renaissance not do the same? Why did Chinese explorers not discover the Americas in the days of the Song dynasty, even earlier than Menzies imagines them going there?

The quick answer is that no amount of Renaissance spirit would have delivered Song adventurers to the Americas unless their ships could make the journey, and eleventh-century Chinese ships probably could not. Some historians disagree; the Vikings, they point out, made it to America around 1000 in longboats that were much simpler than Chinese junks. But a quick glance at a globe (or Figure 8.10) reveals a big difference. Sailing via the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland, the Vikings never had to cross more than five hundred miles of open sea to reach America. Terrifying as that must have been, it was nothing compared to the five thousand miles Chinese explorers would have had to cross by sailing with the Kuro Siwo Drift from Japan, past the Aleutian Islands, to make land in northern California (following the Equatorial Counter Current from the Philippines to Nicaragua would mean crossing twice as much open sea).

Physical geography—and, as we will see later in this chapter, other kinds of geography too—just made it easier for western Europeans to cross the Atlantic than for Easterners to cross the Pacific. And while storms might well have blown the occasional Chinese ship as far as America*—and the North Equatorial Current could, conceivably, have brought them back again—it was never likely that eleventh-century explorers, however motivated by Renaissance spirit, would find the Americas and return to tell the story.

Only in the twelfth century did shipbuilding and navigation improve to the point that Chinese ships could have reliably made the twelve-thousand-mile round-trip from Nanjing to California; but that, of course, was still nearly four hundred years before Columbus and Cortés. So why were there no twelfth-century Chinese conquistadors?

It may have been because China’s Renaissance spirit, whatever exactly we mean by such a term, was in retreat by the twelfth century. Social development stagnated and then tumbled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and as the preconditions for Renaissance culture disappeared, elite thought did indeed turn increasingly conservative. Some historians think the failure of Wang Anshi’s New Policies in the 1070s turned Neo-Confucian intellectuals against engagement with the wider world; some point to the fall of Kaifeng in 1127; others see the causes in entirely different places. But nearly all agree that while intellectuals continued thinking globally, they began acting very locally indeed. Instead of risking their lives in political infighting at the capital, most stayed home. Some organized local academies, arranging lectures and reading groups but declining to train scholars for the state examinations. Others drew up rules for well-ordered villages and family rituals; others still focused on themselves, building perfection one life at a time through “quiet sitting” and contemplation. According to the twelfth-century theorist Zhu Xi,

If we try to establish our minds in a state free of doubt, then our progress will be facilitated as by the breaking forth of a great river … So let us now set our minds on honoring our virtuous natures and pursuing our studies. Let us every day seek to find in ourselves whether we have been remiss about anything in our studies and whether or not we have been lax about anything in our virtuous natures … If we urge ourselves on in this way for a year, how can we not develop?

Zhu was a man of his times. He turned down imperial offices and lived modestly, establishing his reputation from the ground up by teaching at a local academy, writing books, and mailing letters explaining his ideas. His one venture into national politics ended in banishment and condemnation of his life’s work as “spurious learning.” But as external threats mounted in the thirteenth century and Song civil servants cast around for ways to bind the gentry to their cause, Zhu’s philosophically impeccable but politically unthreatening elaboration of Confucius started to seem rather useful. His theories were first rehabilitated, then included in state examinations, and finally made the exclusive basis for administrative advancement. Zhu Xi thought became orthodoxy. “Since the time of Zhu Xi the Way has been clearly known,” one scholar happily announced around 1400. “There is no more need for writing; what is left is to practice.”

Zhu is often called the second-most-influential thinker in Chinese history (after Confucius but ahead of Mao), responsible, depending on the judge’s perspective, either for perfecting the classics or for condemning China to stagnation, complacency, and oppression. But this praises or blames Zhu too much. Like all the best theorists, he simply gave the age the ideas it needed, and people used them as they saw fit.

This is clearest in Zhu’s thinking on family values. By the twelfth century Buddhism, protofeminism, and economic growth had transformed older gender roles. Wealthy families now often educated their daughters and gave them bigger dowries when they married, which translated into more clout for wives; and as women’s financial standing improved, they established the principle that daughters should inherit property like sons. Even among poorer families, commercial textile production was giving women more earning power, which again translated into stronger property rights.

A male backlash began among the rich in the twelfth century, while Zhu was still young. It promoted feminine chastity, wifely dependence, and the need for women to stay in the house’s inner quarters (or, if they really had to go out, to be veiled or carried in a curtained chair). Critics particularly attacked widows who remarried, taking their property into other families. By the time Zhu Xi thought was rehabilitated in the thirteenth century, his pious ideal of re-creating perfect Confucian families had come to seem like a useful vehicle to give philosophical shape to these ideas, and when bureaucrats began rolling back property laws that favored women in the fourteenth century they happily announced that it was all in the name of Zhu Xi thought.

Zhu’s writings did not cause these changes in women’s lives. They were merely one strand of a broader reactionary mood that swept up not just learned civil servants but also people who were most unlikely to have been reading Zhu. For instance, artisans’ representations of feminine beauty changed dramatically in these years. Back in the eighth century, in the heyday of Buddhism and protofeminism, one of the most popular styles of ceramic figurines was what art historians rather ungallantly call “fat ladies.” Reportedly inspired by Yang Guifei, the courtesan whose charms ignited An Lushan’s revolt in 755, they show women solid enough for Rubens doing everything from dancing to playing polo. When twelfth-century artists portrayed women, by contrast, they were generally pale, wan things, serving men or languidly sitting around, waiting for men to come home.

The slender beauties may have been sitting down because their feet hurt. The notorious practice of footbinding—deforming little girls’ feet by wrapping them tightly in gauze, twisting and breaking their toes in the interest of daintiness—probably began around 1100, thirty years before Zhu was born. A couple of poems seem to refer to it around then, and soon after 1148 a scholar observed that “women’s footbinding began in recent times; it was not mentioned in any books from previous eras.”

The earliest archaeological evidence for footbinding comes from the tombs of Huang Sheng and Madame Zhou, women who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1243 and 1274, respectively. Each was buried with her feet bound in six-foot-long gauze strips and accompanied by silk shoes and socks with sharply upturned tips (Figure 8.9). Madame Zhou’s skeleton was well-enough preserved to show that her deformed feet matched the socks and sandals: her eight little toes had been twisted under her soles and her two big toes were bent upward, producing a slender-enough foot to fit into her narrow, pointed slippers.

Twelfth-century China did not invent female foot modification. Improving on the way women walk seems to be an almost universal obsession (among men, anyway). The torments visited on Huang and Zhou, though, were orders of magnitude greater than those served up in other cultures. Wearing stilettos will give you bunions; binding your feet will put you in a wheelchair. The pain this practice caused—day in, day out, from cradle to grave—is difficult to imagine. In the very year Madame Zhou was buried, a scholar published the first known criticism of footbinding: “Little girls not yet four or five, who have done nothing wrong, nevertheless are made to suffer unlimited pain to bind [their feet] small. I do not know what use this is.”

Figure 8.9. Little foot: silk slippers and socks from the tomb of Huang Sheng, a seventeen-year-old girl buried in 1243, the first convincingly documented footbinder in history

What use indeed? Yet footbinding grew both more common and more horrific. Thirteenth-century footbinding made feet slimmer; seventeenth-century footbinding actually made them shorter, collapsing the toes back under the heel into a crippled ball of torn ligaments and twisted tendons known as a “golden lotus.” The photographs of the mangled feet of the last twentieth-century victims are hard to look at.*

Blaming all this on Zhu Xi would be excessive. His philosophy did not cause Chinese elite culture to turn increasingly conservative; rather, cultural conservatism caused his ideas to succeed. Zhu Xi thought was just the most visible element of a broader response to military defeat, retrenchment, and falling social development. As the world turned sour in the twelfth century, antiquity became less a source of renewal than a source of refuge, and by the time Madame Zhou died in 1274 the sort of Renaissance spirit that might drive global exploration was sorely lacking.

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 mind-set 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.

Whatever his fate, Pires learned the hard way that despite their guns, here at the real center of the world Europeans still counted for little. They had destroyed the Aztecs and shot their way into the markets of the Indian Ocean, but it took more than that to impress the gatekeepers of All Under Heaven. Eastern social development remained far ahead of Western, and despite Europe’s Renaissance, sailors, and guns, in 1521 there was still little to suggest that the West would narrow the gap significantly. Three more centuries would pass before it became clear just what a difference it made that Cortés, not Zheng, had burned Tenochtitlán.