Pre-1600: Science, Medicine, and Technology: Overview

Europe at a Crossroads. In the 1400s and 1500s the major states of Europe took their first steps toward imperialistic domination of much of the globe by exploring, conquering, and colonizing various regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The motives of these nations and the technological innovations that made possible their imperial expansion grew largely from the transformation of European thought and society during the period that historians call the Renaissance (1350-1600). For Europeans the Renaissance was above all a period of recovery. The 1300s had been a particularly disastrous era in European history. Millions had died as a result of successive waves of famine on the one hand and the appearance of the bubonic plague, or Black Death, on the other. Besides causing immeasurable human suffering, these disasters also threw Europe’s economy into turmoil and crisis. Moreover, Christian Europe in the early and mid 1400s increasingly found itself threatened by the growing power of the Muslim Ottoman empire, which extended its reach into the Mediterranean Sea and even into southeastern Europe itself. Recovery from these years of crisis came gradually through the course of the 1400s. By the end of the century a new spirit of assertive self-confidence had grown within European culture and civilization—a spirit turned by some toward expansion as they began to build overseas empires.

Changing Worldviews. The Renaissance was also an era during which scholars and sailors began to rethink traditional ideas about the physical globe and Europe’s place on it. Contrary to long-standing myths that survive even today in our popular culture, Columbus and his contemporaries were not the first to conclude that the earth was spherical in shape. For at least two thousand years before Columbus, in fact, all educated Europeans had understood that the earth was round. The ancient Greeks had even produced remarkably accurate estimates of the earth’s circumference. What was new in Columbus’s time was the widespread idea that it might be possible for European ships to sail across oceans to reach other continents. In the early fifteenth century several European misconceptions continued to stand in the way of the possibility of such ocean voyages. Many people had long believed, for instance, that if a ship sailed too close to the equator the intense heat of the tropical sun not only would prove fatal to crews but also would even begin to melt the ship itself. Two fifteenth-century developments led to the gradual dismissal of such mental obstacles. First, scholars in Italy—the center of much of Europe’s cultural innovation in the Renaissance—engaged in lively debates and discussions during which they questioned geographical ideas. Studying long-forgotten books written by ancient Roman geographers, for instance, the Italian scholars of the 1400s learned that the earth’s equatorial zone was in fact inhabited, and some of them proposed that it should be possible for Europeans to sail through or even settle in such tropical regions. Second, in contrast to the mere speculation of the scholars, some European navigators of the era actually set out on successive voyages into previously uncharted waters, gaining in the process practical experience against which to test traditional ideas concerning ocean travel. Fifteenth-century Portuguese expeditions along the African coast, for example, eventually managed to sail south through the equatorial zone, disproving conclusively the old ideas concerning the impossibility of such voyages.

The Lure of Asia. By the 1400s many Europeans had long dreamed of the possibility of establishing direct seaborne commercial trade routes to the ports of India, China, and the “Spice Islands” of Indonesia. Since the late Middle Ages wealthy Europeans had developed a taste for a variety of consumer products of East Asian origin, including pepper and other spices as well as silk cloth. Such products, however, could reach European markets only via complicated trade routes that passed through the Islamic lands of the Near and Middle East, where Muslim traders held a monopoly on commerce. Similarly once the products reached the Mediterranean Sea they were transported to European markets by the equally monopolistic merchants of Venice and other Italian cities. Thus by the time they reached Europe, Asian goods were simply too expensive for all but the wealthiest of Europeans. Many Europeans left out of the profitable Asian trade dreamed of finding a direct ocean trade route to Asia in order to bypass the Muslim and Venetian middlemen. One possibility was to sail south from Europe around the southern tip of Africa and east across the Indian Ocean to the ports of Asia. In the early fifteenth century, however, no one in Europe knew whether or not such a voyage was possible since no one knew the southern extent of the African continent. A series of fifteenth-century Portuguese expeditions answered this question by successfully pioneering this southeastern passage to Asia via the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s southern tip. Portuguese efforts culminated in the landmark 1497–1499 voyage of Vasco da Gama all the way around Africa to India and then back to Portugal via the same route. Direct trade with Asia made tiny Portugal one of Europe’s leading commercial powers in the sixteenth century.

Columbus. Meanwhile other fifteenth-century Europeans speculated that rounding Africa might not be the quickest and simplest way for European vessels to reach Asia. Some had in fact already proposed that it might be possible for ships to reach Asia by sailing directly west across the Atlantic Ocean and around the globe to Asia. In the fifteenth century the “known world” for Europeans consisted of only three major continental landmasses—Europe itself, Africa, and Asia. No European in 1492 knew that North and South America stood between Europe’s western shores and East Asia. In short Columbus did not set out in 1492 with the intent of “discovering America.” Instead his explicit goal was to provide a new and quick ocean route to Asia by sailing west. After a long and arduous search for financial backing for his proposed expedition, Columbus finally secured the support of the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand. Sailing across the Atlantic in three small vessels with a combined crew of only ninety men, Columbus in October 1492 made landfall on an island in the Bahamas. His expedition then ventured south, visiting Cuba, Hispaniola, and many of the other islands of the Caribbean Sea. Over the coming decades Spain took its first steps toward empire in the Americas by establishing colonies and settlements on these Caribbean islands, often enslaving their native populations. Columbus himself, however, never realized the nature or territorial extent of the lands he had discovered. Even after making a total of four voyages to the Caribbean region, Columbus maintained until his death in 1506 that the lands he had visited were islands near or parts of the Asian mainland. He had no idea that what he had found was an entire new world previously unknown to Europeans.

Technology. European exploration and expansion in the Renaissance would have been impossible without a number of critical technological innovations. From Portugal and Spain, for instance, came new classes of sailing ships, particularly the small caravel and the larger carrack, that were capable of long-distance ocean voyages. European mariners in the age of exploration also improved their ability to find their way in open ocean waters by making use of a variety of navigational tools including the magnetic compass and the astrolabe, an instrument that helped ship pilots calculate latitudinal position at sea. Even with the aid of such devices, however, navigation remained throughout the age of exploration a highly inexact science. Until the 1700s European navigators remained almost completely baffled, for example, by the problem of calculating longitude at sea. As a result European mariners in the age of exploration occasionally found themselves lost at sea, often resulting in the deaths of entire crews. Renaissance-era developments in military technology also played an important role in making possible Europe’s overseas conquests and the establishment of global empires. Gradual improvements in artillery and handheld firearms, for example, contributed to the military advantage enjoyed by Europeans when they encountered the people of the Americas and other parts of the globe during the age of exploration and expansion.

Naming America. Other European expeditions soon followed the ocean path blazed by Columbus in 1492. Even before Columbus’s death in 1506, some of his contemporaries had already begun to speculate that the lands on the other side of the Atlantic were not Asia after all. Among the earliest Europeans to reach this conclusion was the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who in 1502 published a highly popular book recounting his travel experiences in what he called the “New World.” In 1507 a group of mapmakers in France decided that it would be best to credit Vespucci rather than Columbus with the “discovery” of the New World since it had been Vespucci and not Columbus who had first publicly recognized that these newly found lands were not parts of Asia. As a result their map called the mainland of this New World “America,” after Amerigo. Their map sold thousands of copies throughout Europe, and the name America stuck.

Looking for a Passageway. Even as they came to realize that the profitable Asian trade still lay half a world away from the Americas, some Europeans continued the search for Columbus’s original objective: a westerly sailing route to Asia. From 1519 to 1522 an expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan succeeded in finding such a route. Magellan led his ships from Spain across the Atlantic and around the southern tip of South America. From there the expedition crossed the Pacific Ocean to the Philippine Islands, where Magellan died in a battle. His remaining crew, however, continued the journey, eventually returning to Spain after having passed across the Indian Ocean and around the tip of Africa. In the process Magellan’s crew had become the first expedition ever to circumnavigate the globe. The southwestern passage from Europe to Asia via the tip of South America, pioneered by Magellan’s ships, however, proved simply too treacherous to sustain regular commerce. The failure of the Magellan expedition to find a convenient southwestern route encouraged the major states of Europe to target instead the North American Atlantic coastline in search of a more easily navigable northwestern passage to Asia. Throughout the sixteenth century repeated efforts by English, French, and Spanish explorers to locate such a route all proved fruitless. In the process of this search, however, the Europeans learned a great deal about the geography and native populations of North America’s eastern coast.

Mapmaking. Sixteenth-century European maps illustrate well Europe’s growing knowledge of the world’s oceans and continents, including North America. Cartographers not only incorporated the new data brought to them by explorers into their ever-more-comprehensive world maps, but they also devised new and more-accurate ways of representing the three-dimensional globe on a flat, two-dimensional map. Particularly significant in this regard was work of the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, the inventor of the “Mercator projection” technique preferred among mapmakers and navigators even today. Accurate geographical knowledge was critical to the imperial ambitions of many European states, and many of the best sixteenth-century maps were jealously guarded as state secrets, especially by the Spanish and Portuguese governments. Other maps, however, were published and broadly disseminated, including Mercator’s landmark 1595 world atlas, which sold thousands of copies across Europe.

Legacy. Columbus’s voyages marked the establishment for the first time of sustained contact between the people and cultures of the Old World (Asia, Africa, and Europe) and those of the New World (the Americas). Perhaps no other event in recorded history has surpassed the overall impact of this development on the world as a whole. For many of the natives of the Americas, for instance, the coming of the Europeans brought subjection to the imperial domination of European states and the introduction of deadly diseases such as smallpox that killed millions. Europeans also introduced into the Americas a variety of plant and animal species. Some of these European introductions, including wheat and the horse, dramatically transformed the cultures and landscapes of the Americas. Yet the impact of sustained contact between the Old World and the New World significantly transformed Europe as well. From the Americas, for example, explorers brought back a variety of plants that would eventually reshape European diets and agriculture. Corn, tomatoes, and potatoes—all originally American crops—have over the centuries since Columbus’s voyages become staples in the diets of people not only in Europe but also in many areas of Asia and Africa. In short, contact between the Old World and the New World gradually transformed the lives of people around the globe.