Chasing the Horizon
How during the Age of Discovery the search for known unknowns unexpectedly became a journey for unknown unknowns
From Atlas of Prejudice: The Complete Stereotype Map Collection
1492 was a blockbuster year in world history with a beginning worthy of a Venezuelan soap opera. There was barely any time for opening credits. On the second day of January the last Muslim state on the Iberian Peninsula, the Emirate of Granada, was finally conquered by the armies of the Catholic Monarchs, a fanatical incestuous couple comprising of Isabella I, Queen of Castile, and Ferdinand II, King of Aragon. Their personal union would later become the foundation of what we know today as Spain.
For those lucky enough to be there, the sight of the surrender must have felt like the ultimate Castilian wet dream. The cross of Christ hung on the walls of the enchanting Alhambra palace. The Moorish Emir Muhammad XII slowly approached, holding the keys of his city, ready to present them to his conquerors and kiss their hands as a sign of capitulation. Suddenly, there came a dramatic ceremonial twist. To save the dignity of her son from complete emasculation, Muhammad’s mother begged the Catholic Monarchs to amend the protocol, so the city can pass in their possession without the aforementioned humiliating kiss. Isabella and Ferdinand agreed.
The crowd, deeply moved by the merciful gesture, spontaneously started to sing the Catholic evergreen Te Deum and burst into tears of joy. Rumor has it that only the mercy of the almighty Christian God, who opened the heavens to take a peek at the momentous celebration, spared those people from severe dehydration by miraculously reinforcing their lacrimal glands with holy water. According to a popular legend, when Muhammad XII reached a nearby hill on his way to exile, he turned back to see his beloved palace for the last time. Overtaken by sadness and corroding sense of loss, he started to weep until his mother, a true incarnation of a perfect Muslim dominatrix, consoled him with the words, “Thou dost weep like a woman for what thou couldst not defend as a man.”
Among the exalted crowd of Christians, who celebrated the fall of the Muslim Emirate, was a Genovese sailor called Christopher Columbus. He had more than one reason to be happy. The Catholic Monarchs had promised to finance his voyage to discover a Western route to India, one that would be free from the interference of infidels like Muhammad XII and his much more powerful brother-in-faith, the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople.
Most people believed Columbus was either on drugs or simply delusional. Yet Isabella and Ferdinand had little to lose from subsidizing a suicide mission of three ships. However, if such a route truly existed, Castile would have a chance to surpass both the incredibly wealthy Ottoman Empire to the East and the increasingly ambitious Portuguese Kingdom to the West, which was stubbornly looking for an Eastern maritime route to India.
In our age of reason we are often tempted to imagine Columbus as an adventurous explorer driven by an insatiable curiosity and a passion for the unknown.
The truth is a little bit different. Europe was a messy place at the end of the 15th Century. A significant part of it was ruled by Muslims. The Spanish Reconquista may have pushed out the Moors to Africa, and brought Christianity back to the Iberian Peninsula after 700 years of struggle, but in the East another great Muslim power was rapidly chipping away land from the Danubian Christian kingdoms. Its ambitions were far bigger than those of the small Moorish states in the dysfunctional Al Andalus, whose last remnant was the decadent Emirate of Granada. The Ottomans wanted it all and they wanted it now. After the conquest of Constantinople, they laid claim to the entire region previously ruled by the Roman Empire, which is to say no less than half of the continent.
European history is incredibly poor in symbols. Usually one would expect that as ages pass by, new ideas would come and older ones would be forgotten. Instead, many of them were repeatedly recycled, like a plot of a profitable action movie.
One of the ever recurring obsessions of various European rulers was the restoration of the Roman Empire. The city of Rome was considered the political center of the European world for so long that it became a synonym of political power. This didn’t change when Emperor Constantine abruptly moved the Roman capital to Constantinople. True to their habit, people just started referring to the new capital as the Second Rome.
In 476, after centuries of military struggle, moral decay, and political bankruptcy, the First Rome, or whatever ruins remained of it, finally fell in the arms of the barbarians. Despite no longer being in possession of its ancient capital, the Roman Empire continued to thrive to the East as if nothing significant happened.
The Romans in Constantinople could have never imagined that in the 16th Century a German historian called Hieronymus Wolf would coin a new name for their state — Byzantine Empire. From a historical point of view this made as little sense as naming modern Iraq Babylonia. But Western historians gradually fell in love with it, probably because it mischievously implied that the empire ruled from Constantinople had nothing to do with Rome itself.
For all intents and purposes (and historical accuracy), the Byzantine Empire was a direct continuation of its ancient predecessor. Despite the fact that Greek relatively quickly replaced Latin as the main language, people there continued to refer to themselves and their state as Roman. The name change in the West served to historically legitimize the Frankenstein monster called Holy Roman Empire, which was inhabited exclusively by sinners and never had Rome as its capital.
The Papacy started the Holy Roman Empire project as an attempt to maintain its spiritual and political independence, a frivolity that the Byzantine emperors and their subordinate patriarchs in the East had no desire to tolerate. In order to solve this problem once and for all, Pope Leo III came up with a brilliant idea. He seduced the most powerful leader in the West, Charlemagne, and crowned him a Roman Emperor on Christmas day, exactly 800 years after the (alleged) birth of Jesus.
Both men yearned for each other like a desert yearns for rain. Charlemagne, as vein as a Hollywood actress, was eager to consolidate his conquests in Italy and Saxony. Leo III needed an ally with a sizable army to cushion the Papacy from the Byzantine interference and extend his ambitions for universal spiritual domination.
It can be speculated who was the real beneficiary of this arranged marriage. Charlemagne probably cared more about slaying insubordinate Saxons, who just happened to be non-Christian, than about the holiness of his title. Leo III must have considered politics a necessary evil that could be tolerated until the second coming of his beloved employer Jesus Christ.
However, 1200 years later, the Papacy still stands, stubbornly holding on to the past, and preaching about the dangers of condoms and genetic engineering. Charlemagne’s Empire disintegrated soon after his death, and all that remains from it today is the emperor’s grave in the famous Aachen Cathedral, which, quite ironically, is owned by the Catholic Church. The spirit must be truly mightier than the sword.
Once they tasted the sweet nectar of world domination, the Roman popes never gave up their right to legitimize every political ruler in the world. It may seem naïve and delusional in retrospective, but those people weren’t at all detached from reality. They simply realized it can be bent upon their will.
Just in case someone had doubts about the seriousness of their claims, the popes started wearing a fancy 3-layer tiara that looked like a late 20th Century beauty parlor hair-dryer. Extravagant clothing has always been used for intimidation purposes but the papal tiara was a true masterpiece of its kind. It was also uncomfortable to wear, although what is a neck injury next to the promise of universal supremacy?
When the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453 they didn’t simply conquer a city. They acquired a symbol. It immediately became the capital of their empire and the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II titled himself Kayser-i Rûm, which, translated from Turkish, meant Roman Caesar. Thus, according to Mehmed’s logic, he obtained the right to rule over the First Rome as well. The Ottomans never managed to conquer Italy, even though in 1480 they occupied Otranto, a city in Apulia, which at the time was part of the Neapolitan Kingdom, the southern neighbor of the Papal State.
Sixtus IV, who had the misfortune to reign as Pope in those troubled times, got truly scared and even started making plans for Rome’s evacuation, in case the Ottoman hordes from Otranto decided to head north. Drawing fire exit labels with one hand and calling for a global Christian crusade against the infidels with the other, he finally hit the jackpot when Mehmed II died and a dynastic battle prevented further Ottoman expansion.
Perhaps this little twist of fate saved the Roman Pantheon from becoming a mosque and ensured that the just painted nude bodies of Adam and God in the Sistine chapel would not be covered by layers of hypnotizing arabesques. In stark contrast to the Papacy, the Muslims hadn’t yet developed an appreciation for homoerotic pornography.
The Roman claims of the Ottoman sultans were never truly relinquished. A testament to their ambition is the fact that the official name of their capital remained Constantinople throughout the entire history of their empire. It was changed to Istanbul only after the last Ottoman dynasty was removed from power and Turkey became a republic.
Another, far more interesting testament, is an engraving by Agostino Veneziano with the portrait of Suleiman the Magnificent, the great-grandson of Mehmed II. On it, the Sultan is depicted wearing a 4-layer tiara, especially handcrafted for him in Venice, the fashion capital of the Renaissance.
Its top is adorned with a huge feather, a provocation every Italian would no doubt appreciate. Nobody knows whether the Pope received a signed copy of the portrait, but Suleiman never missed an opportunity to show the tiara to his ambassadors. As diplomatic common sense dictates, if you can’t conquer your enemies, you can at least tease them!
Ottoman Constantinople, for its part, became an obsession of another rising superpower to the north, Russia, whose capital was often referred to as the Third Rome after the Ottomans conquered the Second. No longer a physical location but an abstract cause, Rome became the European Apple of Discord just like Abraham became the common founder of three monotheistic religions that continue to despise each other. It may sound counterintuitive but shared symbols don’t always bring people closer. Very often they have the opposite effect and, instead of love and understanding, provoke hatred and envy.
It was such envy that inspired Christian Europe in the 15th Century to emancipate itself from the much more advanced Muslim powers of the East. The Ottomans and the Arabs controlled trade with India through the Red Sea and the famous Silk Road, another important symbol in European history. Being frequently at war with the Muslim world, Christian Europe had little chance to negotiate favorable prices for all the exotic goods it was craving. The solution was easier to formulate than to execute. Europeans had to find a way to trade directly with India just like their Roman predecessors did for centuries.
It’s definitely not true that at the time people believed the Earth was flat and Columbus had to convince everybody of the opposite. In fact, people were well aware of the roundness of the planet, at least since Aristotle found a way to prove it in 330 BC. Some historians claim the misconception of the flat Earth belief was intentionally spread during the 19th Century by the early supporters of the theory of evolution who wanted to portray the Catholic Church as more backward than it actually was. But neither the Church nor any educated scholar of the Columbian era insisted that the Earth was a giant pancake carried by elephants. Ironically, such ludicrous beliefs would develop much later in human history, proving beyond doubt there’s not a direct correlation between scientific progress and human stupidity.
What people in the 15th Century didn’t know for sure was whether Africa could be circumnavigated. Until then, nobody bothered to check because it wasn’t a necessity. Most thinkers were satisfied to simply theorize about it.
Some believed Africa extended so far to the south that its landmass encircled the Indian Ocean and met with Asia at its other end, making India inaccessible to any ships from the Atlantic. Others believed the Earth was divided in climatic zones that prevented anyone from crossing the Equator. According to this theory, the sun rays at the equatorial regions were so powerful that they made the seawater boil. A voyage through this latitude would turn every ship into a steaming soup of human flesh and crackling wood.
There were navigational challenges as well. Sea travel was mainly done along the coasts. No one dared to head for open sea. The compass was a relatively new invention, and Europeans were too reliant on the constellations of the Northern Hemisphere for orientation.
But things were starting to change, and by the time Columbus entered the scene, the Iberian kingdoms were building the most advanced ships in Europe. What didn’t change was the scope of people’s imagination. The same old stories about gold and spices ignited the same old ambitions. Layer after layer of myths, from Alexander the Great to Marco Polo, pointed at India as the source of all riches.
Occasionally there was a tale or two about people who headed west for something slightly different. Saint Brendan of Clonfert departed from his native Ireland in search of the Island of the Blessed. He was one of those monks that felt compelled to spread Christianity as far as possible. Before embarking on his great adventure, Brendan circumnavigated Ireland to make sure that each and every person he encountered was truly convinced that a virgin woman could get pregnant, and her hymen could be restored after the birth of her child. Only then could he allow himself to head west.
On his journey he encountered a lot of interesting things that made total sense, at least to him: a coagulated sea, devils, Judas vacationing in Iceland, lots of sheep, and several birds singing Christian psalms. In the meantime, a monster attacked his ship, but God, as always interested in the smallest details of human affairs, tweaked the laws of gravity, so the waters of the sea could shift and save Brendan from peril. That’s right! Whenever they didn’t dream of gold and spices, Europeans yearned to baptize the entire world, just in case there was any doubt that their God was the True One. The thrill of exploring the unknown, of solving the mysteries that lie beyond people’s trivial imagination, wasn’t on the menu yet. It had to wait a few centuries until the Age of Enlightenment, which succeeded the creative chaos of what we now affectionately call Renaissance, began to transform European civilization, and from a tribe of proselytizing bigots turned it into true citizens of the world. The process is still continuing today.
Columbus unintentionally started the trend on October 12, 1492 when he set foot on an island in what is today the Bahama Archipelago. Just like Cervantes never revealed the hometown of Don Quixote, Columbus wasn’t very precise in describing which island exactly had the honor to welcome the first Castilians to the New World.
Moreover, there are different versions about what he thought he discovered. According to some sources Columbus was convinced he had reached Japan, which Westerners at the time called Cipango. According to others, he thought he arrived in India. Nobody could make a real difference anyway. For the Europeans, every piece of land east of the Ganges River was pure myth. They called those regions India extra Gangem.
Historians agree about one important thing. Columbus had no idea he landed on a new continent. He remained convinced that he had found a route to India until his death. It would take some time for Europeans to actually discover that he discovered a continent.
There is a Slavic proverb saying that everything new is just well-forgotten old stuff. It’s probably not a secret to anybody today that Columbus wasn’t the first European to reach the New World. To begin with, the boundary between the Old and the New World was purely subjective, drawn by the ignorance and the technological limitations of Christian Europe. But during the blissful stagnation of the Early Middle Ages there was another kind of Europe to the North. It belonged to the Vikings. They were often described as bloodthirsty animals by the medieval Christian historians, who, just like the Ancient Greeks, had the habit to consider every pagan civilization inherently barbaric.
A lot of time had to pass until Christian Europe started to study Viking history without dogmatic prejudice. This didn’t prevent the Vikings from exploring the entire European continent, reaching as far south as African Morocco and Asian Anatolia.
However, their real geographical achievements were to the northwest of Scandinavia. By the year 825 they reached the Faroe Islands. In 874 they settled in Iceland, where they would later write down their legends, known today as the Icelandic sagas. Those stories started a solid literary tradition which is still alive today. “Ad ganga med bok I maganum” is a popular saying in Iceland. It means “everyone gives birth to a book”. It’s almost literally true. One in ten inhabitants of this rocky island is a published author.
In 982, less than a century after their arrival in Iceland, the Vikings reached Greenland. In 1000 they went even further and landed in Newfoundland, where they settled comfortably in a place called Vinland. The first known American with European parents was born soon after. His name was Snorri Thorfinnsson. Of course, according to modern geographic convention, this is not entirely true because Greenland also belongs to America, and Vinland was settled 18 years later. That’s enough time for a Greenlandic baby to steal the coveted title.
The problem is that Greenland has always been politically considered part of Europe. After the mapping of the tectonic plates in the early 20th Century, definitions became even more elusive. When people started following the plate boundaries, it became clear that half of Iceland and Eastern Siberia should also be considered American.
How can we then speak of continental discoveries and why should we care that a xenophobic Christian fanatic called Christopher Columbus reached the Americas in 1492? Well, whatever discoveries were made by the Vikings, it’s an undeniable fact that few of the pious Christian Europeans from the South had a clue what was going on in the cold recesses of the barren Arctic. The Vikings were the only ones to benefit from their own discoveries. After their civilization declined, their adventures were either forgotten or turned into myths. The only memories left alive were those of plunder and rape.
Another thing that was conveniently forgotten was the booming trade between the Southerners and the “savages” from the North. Naturally, the Christians considered trade with Vikings and Muslims deeply immoral, but they couldn’t resist the exotic temptations those infidels had to offer. The epic love triangle of early medieval trade stretched from China to the shores of Iceland and the ports of the Italian maritime republics. Textile, spices, gem stones, and fur were transported on Persian caravans, Viking ships, and Frankish mules.
The infidels had a taste for pranks. The Vikings, who were hunting for narwhals in the cold Arctic waters, sold their tusks to the superstitious European nobility, advertising them as unicorn horns. Demand was high because the naïve Southerners were convinced beyond doubt that unicorns truly existed. Not that anybody had seen one. People just yearned to believe in made-up stories. The highly intellectual Leonardo da Vinci describes the unicorn hunt as a cunning ritual with disturbingly sexual undertones:
“The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.”
After reading lines like these, one can honestly regret that Sigmund Freud wasn’t born during the Renaissance. But I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finds an old book somewhere in Iceland titled Saga of the Sexually Repressed Southerner Who Traded Gold for Whale Teeth.
The stubborn belief in unicorns continued to thrive long after the last Viking embraced the Bible. Finally, in 1638, a physician from Denmark called Ole Worm, who became famous for his studies in embryology, proved beyond doubt that the unicorn horns on the market were actually narwhal tusks. It took some time for the evidence to sink in. Powdered unicorn horns continued to be sold as medicine at least for another century. But the real prank-masters were the Muslims. They never missed an opportunity to make their hypochondriac Christian neighbors to the west look stupid. After years of selling overpriced aphrodisiacs like black pepper, they found a true soft spot — mummies.
Mummies weren’t always rare. In fact, they were quite abundant until at least the 16th Century. Then, for the weirdest of reasons, the extremely civilized Europeans started eating them.
Ironically, this happened around the time in which the tomato arrived to Europe from America. It took about two centuries for it to appear as an ingredient in a European recipe because people feared it was toxic. The mummy, on the other hand, was an instant success.
Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, a famous surgeon, who entertained bored British aristocrats by performing autopsies on mummies and even mummified the dead body of Alexander, the 10th Duke of Hamilton, wrote in his History of Egyptian Mummies:
“No sooner was it credited that mummy constituted an article of value in the practice of medicine than many speculators embarked in the trade; the tombs were sacked, and as many mummies as could be obtained were broken into pieces for the purpose of sale”
The craze took Europe by storm, and ground mummy became as widely used as aspirin is today, at least among the people who could afford to pay for it. Francois I, the king of France himself, considered it a wonder medicine and always carried a pouch on his neck for emergencies. Similar to the unicorn horn, mummy remedies were prescribed long after it became apparent that they were neither medicines nor safe to consume.
If you think this wasn’t gruesome enough, there’s an even more sinister twist to the story. After Europeans ate the main supply, and it became harder and harder to harvest mummies from the ancient Egyptian graves, some traders started producing fake ones by soaking dead human bodies in bitumen. Strangely, it was bitumen itself that initially sparked the belief in the healing powers of Egyptian mummies, whose color and texture resembled the mysterious substance, which was a rarity in Europe ever since ancient times. Pliny the Elder prescribed bitumen for toothache.
History is full with such absurdities. They seem obviously ridiculous to the educated modern mind, but our forefathers didn’t live in a world mapped by satellites. Despite the efforts of many reckless men who attempted to establish global civilizations, the Antiquity and the Middle Ages were times of ever present mystery and uncertainty. Cyrus II, Alexander, Trajan, and Genghis Khan pushed the boundaries of the known world farther and farther, but until the Age of Discovery no single civilization ever succeeded to explore the entire planet and gather the vast amounts of knowledge we are now being served on a plate.
In the pre-Columbian days people must have stared at the horizon with the same sense of wonder with which we look at the vastness of interstellar space. It took more than a year for the top scientists at NASA to determine whether Voyager I, the first man-made object to ever leave the Solar System, had truly moved beyond the Heliopause, the boundary after which the Sun’s influence ends and interstellar space begins. Now we know that the probe passed this elusive region on August 25, 2012. We all missed the opportunity to pop a bottle of champagne. Perhaps after a couple of centuries, if we survive that long, people would celebrate Voyager Day instead of Columbus Day.
There’s little doubt that most of our assumptions about the Universe will be either corrected or proven wrong. Our children will probably giggle at the ridiculousness of those refuted ideas. No matter how knowledgeable modern physicists would like to appear, we are still gambling with concepts like string theory, dark matter, parallel universes, and supersymmetry. We even build enormous expensive laboratories like CERN, just to be able to smash electrons and search for mysterious new particles among their debris.
The real importance of the great Age of Exploration, and its culmination with the first voyage of Columbus, is that it kick-started globalization and ultimately pushed the mythical boundaries of our world to outer space.
People who study the legacy of Columbus may argue about the goals and the methods he employed, they may criticize his cruelty, which led to his incarceration and stripped him of his governorship of the West Indies. It was an age equally rich in heroism and disgrace, in spiritual conquest and moral defeat. A heartbreakingly enormous part of the Native American population was exterminated by systematic genocide or by European diseases brought by the same ships that helped expand trade and facilitate the routes for future cultural exchange.
The spoils of the Spanish conquest were irresponsibly wasted in fanatic religious wars across Europe, in which the German states in Central Europe lost more than 30% of their own population. This gruesome fact is rarely mentioned by historians when they discuss the detrimental effects of the plunder of the New World.
One can speculate that this tragedy delayed the development and emancipation of Germany with at least a century. It left the embryonic nation to rot under its own provincialism. As a result, Germany’s grotesquely delayed monster-birth completely obliterated the European balance of power and paved the way for WWI, at the beginning of which Spain was already a political corpse with zero value to any international alliance.
Karma has a twisted sense of humor but that doesn’t diminish the importance of this first voyage in the belly of the Atlantic and the reckless ambition of the sailor who initiated it. Columbus was a man living in an age when, for the first time in written human history, a civilization acquired both the resources and the technology to truly connect all parts of the surface of our planet, no matter how remote or mystical they might have been for previous generations. Just like Voyager is not a product of a single team of American scientists, the expedition of Columbus employed the efforts, the knowledge, and occasionally the ignorance of all civilizations that preceded it.
Interested in stereotypes? Continue reading:
An international bestseller, the Atlas of Prejudice has been published in English, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Italian. Its various hardcover, paperback, and electronic editions have sold more than 100.000 copies worldwide!
