Accidental Historian

Everything Old...

This is an old piece from the Washington Monthly.  In fact, it's a piece from 2008.  But it's new to me and that's why I want it to be new to you.  Read it.  It's fascinating.

The thing that drew me wasn't the A Plot, which is a truly interesting story of a bunch of Baltimore criminals trying to daffiest defense of all time.  The B Plot is what got my attention, specifically the way that the B Plot was the history of the Sovereign Citizens movement.  It pulls a lot of threads together, even to the point of the cranks who think that the layout of Washington D.C. is a secret message from the Masons.

Read it.  It's kind of long, but it's illuminating in that it ties Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Posse Commitatus movement together.  It's also illuminating in how it explains the rise of militias and how ol' Sheriff Joe out in Maricopa County thinks that he can arrest the President and all the county sheriffs who think they can stop the feds from taking away their guns.

Mostly it's interesting in the way that everything old is new again. [Via]

Repeating the Last Century, Part 4

I was reading The Communist Manifesto the other day, you know, as you do.  It occurred to me that Karl Marx’s historical reading of the nature of economics was spot on.  It also occurred to me that his conclusions of what had to happen as a result were somewhat less than spot on.  That should surprise no one, though.  We’re living on the back-end of the downfall of Communism as an actual, viable form of human governance, after all.

Still, there are parts of The Communist Manifesto that could have come from John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.  That’s why we’re here to talk about my reading habits.  I was actually going to play a game where I quoted Marx and claimed that it was from Darwin and then said, “Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you.”  But Marx used the word “bourgeoisie” nearly as often as Darwin uses extraneous commas, so I decided against it.  Also, he spoke of economic trends in the present tense, which would be a dead giveaway, at least for the five people who seem to frequent this blog and aren’t looking for evidence that Coldplay sucks.  So let’s do this in a more standardized way.

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Let’s talk Marxism.  Specifically, let’s talk Marxism as a critique of history:

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way.  This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land.  This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

That, quite literally, could have come directly from the pages of Darwin’s book.  Don’t believe me?  Let’s take a look.

By the first half of the nineteenth century a high degree of economic integration had developed between North West Europe and the British Isles and North East America.  The world economy of the later nineteenth century was partially the consequence of extending the dense commercial networks of the North Atlantic basin to new parts of the globe: South America, parts of Africa, India, South East Asia, Australasia, and East Asia.  One of its distinguishing features was that, right across the world, the price not just of luxuries but of even quite common commodities (like food grains) was decided not by local or regional factors but by market forces on a global scale.[1]

Darwin points out that the world market was a result of globalization.  Marx points out that the world market is a bad thing due to the fact that it’s a product of people who intend to profit from the market costs.  Neither Marx nor Darwin was wrong.

That’s the funny thing about Communism/Marxism/Socialism/whatever you want to call it.  The base assumptions made by Karl Marx weren’t wrong.  We’ve spent the last century in a conflict between Communism and capitalism based on the conclusions drawn by those conclusions, though.  There’s been a great deal of wrong drawn in that space.  The reason for that wrong was simple: part of the wrong was based on Marx’s own conclusion.  Part of the wrong was based on the lack of willingness on the part of the free market capitalists to acknowledge any path to economic security other than their own.  Part of the wrong was based on a belief that there is a binary response to the human condition.

In the next post I shall discuss how there isn’t a binary response to this conflict between Communism and capitalism.  I shall also discuss how, at least in the context of the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Century, we’ve given up allowing that conversation.

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[1] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 330.

1434 Fridays, Part 4

Welcome to my (probably) new (hopefully) weekly feature: 1434 Fridays.  That’s right.  I’m (possibly) going to knock 1434 every (most/some/at least one) Friday from here until I’m done with the book (get bored/lose my mind).  It’ll be excruciating, but also hopefully fun.  Hooray!

For those who don’t remember, I’m actually three posts into making fun of Gavin Menzies and his spectacularly historically inaccurate notion that the Chinese sent a giant, secret fleet to Italy in 1434 and kicked off the Italian Renaissance.  So far I’ve managed to write three posts that take up about twelve pages in order to deconstruct something less than two pages of 1434.  I’m doing this because there’s an important lesson: history is hard.  One idiotic and incorrect claim often requires one hundred facts to set straight.  As such, it’s usually easier to just say, “Eh, that guy’s a crank,” and leave it at that.”

For those of us who love history, though, having that opportunity to research and compile and instruct can be its own reward.  I have a fascination with the Age of Discovery and the early Renaissance and how Europeans changed the way they saw and thought of the world.  Taking on Gavin Menzies, then, is an opportunity both for snark and to do something I’d enjoy doing, anyway.  So it’s a win-win.  It’s also a really, really, long slog.  So let’s begin.

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on this blog before, but I have a real problem with the way history is generally taught.  We usually learn history as either a series of dates and names that have no connection or as a master narrative that makes it seems like Event A inexorably lead to Event B and then Event C was the only logical response.  Or, worse, we make it seem like Person A saw Event A and Event B and then went and intentionally caused Event C in order to get Outcome Z.  This is, for the most part, flat wrong.

We think about history in this manner because we see the historical narrative.  Certain people, places, and things are connected so we invoke a narrative to explain why they’re connected that often starts with the outcome or at least its place in history.  That narrative is wrong as often as not, but we keep telling it to ourselves because humans are addicted not to the facts but to the narrative that puts them all together.  That narrative is where conspiracy theories are born.  That narrative is why conspiracy theories often fall apart when you pick at the details.

If you go back to part 3 of the 1434 posts you’ll see that Menzies went after Martin Waldseemuller and Johannes Schoner and attempted to use their maps as proof that they’d learned about the world from Chinese maps.  Debunking that notion required a quick primer on pretty much every European map of the new world that existed at the time.  Feel free to refresh your memory, because things are about to get even more complicated.

These two rustic mapmakers were not the only Europeans with an uncanny prescience about unseen lands. In 1419, before European voyages of exploration even began, Albertin di Virga published a map of the Eastern Hemisphere that shows northern Australia. It was another 350 years before Captain Cook “discovered” that continent.

So…this is super awkward.  See, a bit of Google-fu brought me to a page on Gavin Menzies’ own site that included a description of the 1419 di Virga map and a comparison to the “1418” Liu Gang map which I shall get into shortly.  Here’s the link.  Notice anything about the di Virga map on Menzies’ own website?  If you said, “There’s nothing that looks even remotely like Australia on that map,” you’d be correct.  It’s interesting, too, since there was another, slightly different depiction of the di Virga map on Wikipedia that did actually show a landmass off to the east of the Eurasian continent.  You could make a case that the land out there is Australia, I suppose, but all the descriptions I’ve seen indicate that the inscription says “Caparu sive Java magna.”  It’s far more likely that di Virga simply penciled in a landmass to cover Java, which Marco Polo did visit, and possibly that other Pacific island that so beguiled the medieval European imagination: Cipangu, or Japan.

I should pause here and point something out.  The possibility that Chinese cartography influenced European cartography cannot and, for that matter, should not be dismissed.  The di Virga map is, in fact, a key place where it’s important to take a moment’s pause, as is the Martellus map I mentioned in part 2.  The reason it’s important to consider the possibility of Chinese influence is the Kangnido map I mentioned in part 3 as compared to the old Ptolemy map and the legacy of the Dragon’s Tail.  Europeans in the early part of the Renaissance thought that the Indian Ocean was landlocked.  Not all maps made in the early 1400s showed this, however, which was interesting considering that no European rounded the Cape of Good Hope before the very late 1400s and Vasco de Gama was the first European to sail from western Europe to India in a voyage that ran more-or-less concurrently with Columbus’s expeditions to the New World.

Toby Lester offers as good an explanation as we’ll probably get in The Fourth Part of the World:

During the early 1400s a few maps appeared in Europe that also suggested an awareness of Africa’s true shape.  A case in point is the world map of Albertin de Virga, made in Venice between 1411 and 1415.  Drawn before the Portuguese had even captured Ceuta[1], and probably incorporating knowledge obtained from Muslim or Chinese merchants, the map confidently portrays the continent as bulging out to the west in the north, and then honing itself gently to a point in the South.[2]

It stands to reason that Muslim cartographers would have some idea of what Africa looked like by the early 1400s.  That explanation is more likely than a Chinese-centered cartography, though.  Still, there was enough sharing of information between Europe, the Middle East, and China to make any explanation of mapmaking that doesn’t include some amount of sharing far more suspect than one that does.  For one, accounts of Marco Polo’s sojourn in the east had been available for nearly a century by then.  The Fra Mauro mappamundi was, for example, said to be based in part on a map brought back from Cathay by Polo himself.

The key thing to realize here, though, is that if Gavin Menzies had simply claimed that the Chinese knew more than the Europeans of the 1400s about the navigation of the Indian Ocean the appropriate response would probably be something like, “Well, duh.”  European maps from before 1300 or so weren’t exactly based on anything closely resembling reality and the ones up until about 1600 still had some weirdness.  Hell, they were still bugging anyone and everyone from Africa or Asia about the Prester John fellow until sometime around 1500 and Gog and Magog were hanging out in Siberia for most of that time, too.

When confronted with an aberration on a European map it’s actually best to work under the assumption that the cartographer was either incorrect, making a wild guess, or treating legendary lands as real places.  This, though, is where the narrative and the conspiracy theories come into play.  We know now that the Americas exist and where they are.  We know now that Australia and Antarctica exist and where they are.  Any map that contains things that look like the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica before their official discoveries, then, invite speculation.

So let’s get back to the di Virga map and the Liu Gang map that Gavin Menzies compared it to.  The Liu Gang map is supposedly a 1763 copy[3] of a 1418 map.  So Menzies calls the di Virga map a 1419 map and claims he copied it from the Liu Gang map after di Virga ran into the Chinese somewhere.  The problem here is that there is no full date on the di Virga map, just the numbers 141.  Every other source I’ve seen reads the map as created in either 1411 or 1415.  So that’s a pretty strong mark against Menzies’ interpretation.

This is how conspiracies work, though.  There are two things, one of which is a map that is most likely a forgery.  Then there’s another map that’s most likely not a forgery but that seems to match up with the forged map and also has anachronisms and a fuzzy date.  So Menzies took the most generous possible interpretation of the fuzziness of the date and turned it into proof of his own theory.

I have, however, run a marathon where a brisk walk down the block would have been enough.  Remember: Gavin Menzies’ theory is that the Chinese discovered the New World in 1421.  His book, which has a copyright of 2002, makes absolutely no mention of Liu Gang, which you’d think it would since, y’know, it would be slam-dunk evidence.  That’s because Liu Gang didn’t reveal his map until 2005 or 2006.  Whether Liu Gang is in on the hoax is debatable, but for the sake of argument let’s say his story is correct and that he’s been suckered by a fake map.

Liu Gang’s map supposedly dates to a 1418 map created by Zheng He that shows the entire world pretty much as we know it today.  Gavin Menzies originally claimed that Zheng He discovered the New World on a voyage that lasted from 1421 through 1423.  So who gave Zheng He his 1418 map before his 1421 voyage?  Was it St. Brendan?

I’m gonna go with St. Brendan.

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[1]A Muslim fortification on the opposite side of the Strait of Gibraltar from, well, Gibraltar.  The Portuguese captured it in 1415 as part of the long struggle between the Christians of the Iberian Peninsula and the Muslims of North Africa.  It’s currently a semi-autonomous Spanish possession because of things that are totally outside the scope of this project.  The Portuguese push to explore along the coast of Africa didn’t start until well after Ceuta.

[2] ] Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name, (New York: Free Press, 2009), 207.

[3]Purchased by a man named Liu Gang.  Liu Gang claims that it’s a copy of a 1418 map created by Zheng He as part of his voyages.  I choose to call it the Liu Gang map, though, since that’s easier and calling it the Zheng He map wouldn’t be accurate.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 3

The difference between a good history course and a bad history course is simple.  In the good history courses students learn how to take disparate bits of information, pull them together, and come to a deeper understanding of what was happening in the world.  In the bad history courses students simply learn names, dates, and places with no connection.  In the truly terrible history courses students learn names, dates, and places with an ideological bent to convince them to buy into an ideology or patently false interpretation of reality.

This, for the record, is why you hear Evangelical Christians spout off about liberal schools indoctrinating children.  Evangelical Christians of the sort who worry about evil liberals and their agendas usually do so because they have an agenda themselves and can’t see anything outside of the framework of competing ideologies and force-fed interpretations of reality.  The idea of a good education and well-rounded students is an ideology, in that it is an ideology of instruction.  A good education producing well-rounded students does not and should not be an ideology of interpretation, however.  The simple fact is, though, that a well-rounded and knowledgeable student will most likely not take the blinkered reality of the zealot, which makes it appear to that blinkered zealot that there is a nefarious goal in mind.

This interplay of notions of how reality works is what drew me to the particular bits of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 that occasioned these posts.  It is, in fact, a tale of convergence.

In the latter third of the book I hit a section called “Global Economics” that focused mostly on the British Empire and its system in the late 1800s, since that was the height of the empire upon which the Sun never set.  British thinking about money and globalization, then, dominated much of the world’s thinking about money and globalization.  All of that came together to produce this remarkable passage:

London’s size and wealth thus grew in sympathy with the surging growth of international trade.  Among its merchants and bankers,[1] it was an article of faith that what was good for London  was good for the world.  The idea of free trade and the open economy was adopted in Britain in the 1840s and ‘50s not just as a policy but as a total world-view, an ideology promoted with crusading passion.  It imagined a world in which peoples would be freed from their bondage to rulers by the flood tide of commerce.  Individual freedom and international trade would move forward together.  Free trade was regarded as the key to British economic success, and to the economic progress of the rest of the world. (The alternative – protection – was rejected politically in Britain before 1914, and its supporters were divided over what to protect.)  Its champions insisted that letting the market decided on what it made sense to produce was the most efficient way to use economic resources.[2]

Stop me if you’ve heard any of this recently, possibly in a contemporary and immediate context.  The fascinating thing about the bit that I quoted above is that it is still an economic stand made by proponents of free market capitalism and libertarianism today.  It’s also fascinating in the way that it’s an ideology that eats its own tail.

We think now of free market capitalism and the freedom that it entails in the minds of its supporters as the downside of the legacy of the Cold War.  As such, we think of it, discuss it, and argue about I in the context of that great ideological conflict of the 20th Century: the fight between capitalism and Communism.  However, if you put Darwin’s passage above in the proper historical context something leaps out immediately.  Britain adopted free market economics in the 1840s and ‘50s and it became at fully entrenched, unassailable position over the next thirty years.

Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848.  He wrote Das Kapital two decades later.  Marxism, then, arose as a counterpoint to the increasingly entrenched capitalistic free market system.  The reasons for this are pretty obvious, especially if you follow me through my two points of convergence.  I’d already realized we seem to be repeating history in a disturbingly similar way.  What threw me off was the way other people are seeing the same thing but from different perspectives.

The day after I read the bit about economics Fred Clark put up a post about Christianity Today’s objections to employee health care and compared it to the old Gilded Age notion of the company town.  Fred’s purposes for discussing the company town were different than John Darwin’s reasons for discussing British adherence to free market capitalism and my reasons to start thinking about Marxism and Communism but they all pointed in exactly the same direction.  The system only works if the people at the very top who control the conversation do so while exploiting the people at the bottom and not allowing them to point it out.

The latter half of the paragraph from After Tamerlane should, hopefully, draw the conclusion completely together.

Countries without capital or an industrial base should concentrate their efforts on the production of “staples”: the raw materials or foodstuffs for which a world demand existed.  They should use the income that their staples earned to buy the manufactures they needed, and to pay back the interest on the capital they borrowed – since staple production could expand only if there were railways and harbours to bring the goods to market.  Any other policy – for example building up industrial production behind a wall of tariffs – was not only inefficient (because industrial goods could be bought more cheaply abroad), it was also unjust.  It meant that the consumer was taxed in favour of those who had gained the production of tariffs, a political process that (so free-traders implied) was invariably corrupt.  Enlightened colonial rule should thus enforce free trade (as the British did in India), just as wise diplomacy should always encourage it.[3]

Consider the implications of the free market system as envisioned by 19th Century British capitalists.  Those “staples” were raw materials.  In some cases it was things like food or tea.  In most cases, though, it was things like cotton and silk that would then be sent elsewhere and then turned into textiles and sold back to the producers of the raw materials.

For the British this made perfect sense.  They had all the factories, after all, and manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials and generally have a higher profit margin.  Part of the reason that manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials, it’s important to note, is that manufactured goods include raw materials.  So the British were buying materials from their undeveloped colonies at price X and selling them back at price X + Y.  Moreover, they were also engaging in infrastructure improvements – mostly the building of railroads – that worked to their benefit.  Infrastructure improvements allowed the colonizers to move raw materials to port and bring manufactured goods back to the producers of the raw materials and also allowed them to quickly move troops around so a smaller number of British forces could be used to hold a larger area than if large, permanent garrisons were necessary.  All of this, then, could be billed to the colonized people under the guise of paying their rightful share for all of the civilization the British had gifted to them.

It should be blatantly obvious that the things the British were paying for in this system were far lower in price than the things they were getting paid for in return.  This doesn’t make any economic sense until you realize that the world’s primary source of capital at the time was London.  The Brits were more than happy to make loans to cover the difference at a reasonable interest rate.

The goal of British free market capitalists, in short, was to turn the entire world into a company store.

This was an untenable situation.  The British proponents of free market capitalism didn’t see it that way, but they were the isolated ones at the top.  They could afford to sit around in their splendid isolation and discuss how the economic situation that was best for them was also best for everyone else.

It wasn’t, for the record.  That’s why Marxism and then Communism began to gain traction at the same time.  It’s important to note, though, that Marxism was initially supposed to be a workers’ revolt in the already industrialized world.  It wasn’t until Trotsky and the Comintern that Communism took on the agricultural workers’ revolt that we think of today in places like Vietnam and Central America.  As such, it’s useful to consider another link that I ran across that very afternoon.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal put a link up to a Foreign Policy article with the snarky description, “Charles Emmerson makes case at Foreign Policy that world in 2013 eerily similar to world in 1913. True, the Czar and the Kaiser have been restless of late, and the Entente is irresolute.”

Emmerson offers this great summation of what I was thinking at the time: “In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously refracted through time. It is impossible to look at it without an uncanny feeling of recognition, telescoping a century into the blink of an eye. But can peering back into the world of our great-grandparents really help us understand the world we live in today?”

Yes.  Yes it can.  And we’ve got a ways to go.

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[1]One thing that did annoy the fuck out of me whilst re-reading the book was the apparent lack of the services of a good copy editor.  Darwin apparently has some sort of written Tourettes that compels him to splatter commas all over the place.  That might be a British thing, I suppose, but I’ve read a few British historians in my day and don’t remember seeing that many egregious commas.  John Julius Norwich, for one, seemed to know where to put his commas.  Each page also seemed to have at least one or two minor but obvious grammatical errors or missing words or something similar.  It gave me a sad.

[2] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 335.

[3]Ibid., 335-336.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 2

[Note: I changed the name of this series, as the first name I came up with was awful.  This one isn't all that much better, but it doesn't make me cringe.  So, hey!]

There’s a reason I decided to start my exploration of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 with a comparison to Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory.  Well, there are two.  The first is that the whole 1421 is fairly well-tread ground ‘round these here parts and John Darwin also brought China up since, y’know, it was kind of important in Eurasian history.  The second is because I truly enjoy mocking Gavin Menzies and his 1421 theory.  John Darwin actually took down both the 1421 theory and one of the main supports upon which the subsequent 1434 theory was built in the space of about three paragraphs.  This was done unintentionally, though, as Darwin’s book doesn’t mention Gavin Menzies at all.

For those who happened to stumble onto this blog recently and have no idea what the 1421 theory is, I suppose I should offer an explanation.  Basically, a retired British naval officer with no formal training in history got it into his head that the Chinese discovered America in 1421.  This theory was based on some pretty specious evidence and then supported by a great deal of research that depended on the theory being true.  At its core, though, the 1421 theory was based on one absolutely accurate bit of historical truth: in the early 1400s the Chinese emperor sent magnificent treasure fleets all the fuck over the place under a eunuch named Cheng-ho.

I mentioned in the first post on this topic that there are basically two incorrect ways of looking at the history of the last couple centuries.  The first is one of inevitable Western supremacy over the globe.  The second is to look at the West as a rapacious horde that set upon well-developed or even superior cultures in other parts of the world and attempted to destroy them.  The former type of history tends to make incorrect assertions about the quality of Western civilization.  The latter type of history tends to go too far in the opposite direction and make untenable claims about the superiority of the colonized over the colonizers in everything except technology and military might.

Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory and its follow-on theory that China actually started the Renaissance in 1434 are near-perfect examples of fantastical histories that make untenable claims to support and anti-colonial stance.  The claims themselves are unsupportable without making the most generous possible assumptions about other, seemingly related discoveries.  They also completely ignore the standard scholarship about how the history of China, Europe, and the New World played out.  More importantly, at least as far as the 1421 theory is concerned, the claims are so much vapor.  We know that Europeans made it to the New World and began to exploit its resources from 1492 on.  Even if the Chinese did discover the New World in 1421 they did nothing with it.  Even if Cheng-ho did discover the west coast of North America this would not put him on the same level as Christopher Columbus or John Cabot.  It would put him on the level of the Vikings who planted an unsuccessful colony on Nova Scotia a couple centuries before Columbus.  It would, in short, be an interesting historical footnote.

The whole idea, though, doesn’t actually do anything to help with Menzies’ central theory that China was better than Europe.  Rather, the idea mocks that notion, since it operates under the implicit assumption that the Western notion of progress and success is the correct framing.  Ergo, Menzies makes the assumption that since the 15th Century was the Age of Exploration in Western history then China must have been exploring even more, even better, and even earlier.  Anything else, according to this formulation, is an implicit admission that Chinese culture was inferior to European culture.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Chinese Empire at the time of Menzies’ supposed 1421 voyage was undergoing a drastic change that was well within the scope of what China had been for most of the previous millennia and would be well within the scope of what China would be for the next four centuries.

Let’s let John Darwin offer the explanation:

The early phase of Ming rule in China between 1368 (when the dynasty began) and the 1430s had seen the forceful reassertion of a distinctly Chinese political and cultural tradition after the long interlude of alien rule under the Mongol Yuan.  The early Ming emperors reinvigorated the bureaucratic state and the examination system on which it rested.  They swept away the chief ministers of the previous regime and created a personal absolutism.  They proclaimed devotion to Confucian orthodoxy, and fostered the collection and publication of Confucian texts.  In 1420 Peking was reestablished as the imperial capital, once the completion of the Grand Canal assured regular supplies from the great grain-basket of the Yangtze valley.  In all these ways the Ming were the real founders of the system of government that lasted in China until the revolution of 1911.  Their reaffirmation of Confucian cultural supremacy lasted almost as long.[1]

That’s a lot of stuff for the emperors to be working on at the same time they were supposedly sending fleets to discover the Americas and then destroying all of the records.  This also highlights the strength of the Chinese system.  China, at its core, was a stable, self-sufficient empire.  With the exception of the occasional worries over Korea, Japan, or Vietnam, China was rarely overly threatened by a neighboring external force.  The Mongols were the only conquerors that China knew for well over a millennia.

Consider the geography of China.  Once the borders of the Chinese empire were defined they were pretty much the same as what we think of today when we think of China.  On the eastern edge was the ocean.  On the southern edge was the jungle and small, not particularly threatening kingdoms of Indochina.  On the southwestern edge and the west there were formidable geographical barriers keeping China separated from the next great basin of civilization in India.  To the north was Mongolia and the doorstep to the vast, nearly empty steppes.  There was, in short, nowhere for China to go if it wanted to expand.  Since almost the whole of the known hospitable lands were already under the control of the imperial power there was also no struggle of small kingdoms to ignite the desires of would-be world conquerors.  China instead created their bureaucratic civil service and set out to make themselves into the most stable and long-running civilization in world history.  Only ancient Egypt could compete.

Western history has traditionally interpreted Chinese stability as a form of cultural stagnancy.  This could not be further from the truth, as the other Asian cultures looked to China with both envy and awe and often attempted to duplicate Chinese systems and successes in their own lands.  European travelers to China in the period before Western colonization began in earnest were similarly overawed by the greatness that was China.

Still, there was the bit about the Mongol conquest to consider.  It’s important to realize, though, that China changed the Mongols far more than the Mongols changed China.  Such was the strength of Chinese culture that the interlude under the Mongol thumb was more of an aberration and slight readjustment of society.  As such, when the Ming came to power in 1368 their goal was not to prove their awesomeness by conquering the world, but to reassert the old Chinese way of doing things.  In fact, let’s see what Darwin has to say about it.

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan.  In deference to Confucian beliefs, the Ming emperors embraced an agrarian ideology in which land was true wealth, and wealth was anchored in social obligations both upward and downward.  Social order and cultural cohesion, the vital conditions of imperial stability, were locked into the system of agrarian production on whose food payments and land taxes dynastic authority depended.[2]

China, in short, was primarily inward looking during the period of the early 1400s.  That still doesn’t explain the fact that there were, in fact, voyages of vast treasure fleets under one of the Ming emperors.  Again I shall let Darwin offer an explanation.

Ming diplomacy was intended to secure the external conditions for internal stability.  From the point of view, the famous voyages dispatched by the emperor Yung-lo around the Indian Ocean under the eunuch Cheng-ho were an aberration, prompted perhaps by fear of attack by Tamerlane and his successors.[3]

I shall pause here and point out a few things.  First, we know that there were treasure fleets under Yung-lo.  We also know that they were only really dispatched around the Indian Ocean.  Those voyages are all the records we have.  Menzies took those voyages and offered a fanciful notion that they managed to make it all around the globe and discovered the Americas over half a century before Columbus’ voyage.

Menzies’ theory makes little sense, however.  China was not an easttward-looking empire in the early 1400s.  They were looking west, south, and north.  The Ming Dynasty was still relatively fresh and looking to reassert itself.  Exploration and adventurism wasn’t the sort of thing that would cement their power in the agrarian, inward-looking Chinese system.

Darwin’s bit about Tamerlane, in fact, offers the most plausible explanation for why the Chinese treasure fleets might have existed at all and why they would necessarily focus on the Indian Ocean.  Remember that the Ming had just thrown off the Yuan.  The Yuan were alien monarchs put in place by foreign conquest under the Mongols.  The Timurids under Tamerlane appeared to be the true heirs to the Mongol legacy of Gengis and Kublai Khan would have been just as terrifying a specter to the new Chinese emperors as they were to the Middle Eastern and European rulers who had just barely beaten back the Mongol hordes.  These fears would play out in the Indian subcontinent, where Tamerlane's heirs created the Mughal Empire, which would last in one form or another for over three centuries.

It’s also important to consider the exact nature of the particular emperor who sent the treasure fleets out.  Further, we must consider the aftermath.  Again we look to John Darwin.

Yung-lo, the “second founder”, who reigned from 1403 to 1424, was an exceptionally determined and aggressive monarch.  His naval imperialism, the protracted effort to incorporate Vietnam into his empire, and his military drive against the Inner Asian nomads may all have been part of an abortive strategy to assert China’s primacy throughout East Asia.  But the strain was too great.  His successors adopted a drastic alternative.  The adventure in sea power was quickly abandoned.  Private overseas travel and trade were forbidden.  And to secure North China against invasion from the steppe, or unwelcome contact with its nomads, they preferred to rely not on military expeditions but on the Great Wall.[4]

This doesn’t completely negate the 1421 theory, but it does call the notion itself into question.  It certainly puts the kibosh on the notion of the subsequent 1434 theory, though.

As such, consider this a branching off.  I will be working on two separate sets of posts.  The former will stay in the 1400s in China so I can mock Gavin Menzies and his 1434 theory some more.  The latter will jump forward some four and a half centuries so that we can look with John Darwin into how the world we live in today is simply walking back across the same ground as the world of a century ago.

Why?  Because it’s been a while since I’ve written about history.  It’s also been a while since I’ve decided to undertake a series of posts that there’s no freaking way I could possibly complete.  Let’s see if this is any different…

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[1]John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 87.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid., 88.

[4]Ibid.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 1

History is a complicated subject.  There’s really no way to get around that fact.  The problem, though, is that most people think that history is really, really simple.  Everyone took history in school, after all.  The history they took was just a collection of names and dates and places and all anyone had to do was remember who did what on which day.  Simple, right?

Names and dates and places and important battles are easy to remember and put into a multiple choice test.  Knowing names and dates and places, however, isn’t what history is about.  The point of the study of history is to figure out why a particular person was in a particular place to fight a particular battle or make a certain discovery or whatever.  That particular bit of understanding tends to be rather involved and it’s why there are a lot of people out there who can write books extending to several hundred pages about things most people can’t be arsed to read even an article abstract on.

We know a great deal about history, though, because of all of those historians who spend their days writing about crap that most people don’t care to know or understand.  The simple truth is, in fact, that although we don’t and can’t know everything there is to know about history, there’s very little out there that can completely re-write the history books.  This is why when some kook comes out with a new book about how so-and-so did such-and-such and there’s been a gigantic cover-up real historians shrug and then go on with their business.  It’s self-evident to actual historians that such a thing isn’t possible, so they tend to ignore it.

It is, in fact, trivially easy to disprove the kooks in most cases.  The problem is, though, that it requires an assertion of historical knowledge that most historians have or will readily accept but that isn’t exactly common knowledge amongst non-historians.  It’s much easier, really, to say, “Yeah, that’s not how that worked,” than it is to actually explain why it is that it didn’t work that way.  The difference in effort, too, explains part of the reason why trained historians don’t spend a lot of time debunking the kooky theory.  They just go back to their real interest, which is incrementally changing the history books to incorporate new knowledge and remove outdated theories based on our understanding of the world before that knowledge came to light.

There is one way that historians end up rewriting history books, however.  It’s not about pulling new information out of the ether.  It’s not about making some mind blowing discovery that negates everything we thought we knew before.  It’s about taking what we already knew and looking at it from a different perspective.  Historians do that all the time.

One of the most magnificent examples of re-writing our understanding of history came out in 2008.  English historian John Darwin published a massive tome called After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.  I actually picked up a copy of the book back in the summer or fall of 2008 because the book looked fascinating.  His goal, as the subtitle suggests, was to break down the history of global empire for the previous six centuries.  He did so in just over five hundred pages, which means that the book is both densely packed with information and argument and shallow in how deeply it deals with the background information behind any single idea or argument.  In short, it’s the sort of book that only a historian can truly appreciate, since it requires a deep underlying understanding of many things.

I first read the book shortly after I bought it and I remembered appreciating it but not getting too much out of it beyond an appreciation for what Darwin’s arguments were.  I pulled it out again well over a month ago and started re-reading it, this time much more slowly than in the past.  The second time around I think I managed to appreciate just how truly magnificent and breathtaking the book is in its breadth and scope.

Darwin’s argument, basically, is that traditional western interpretations of history are wrong in that they’re written with a certain air of inevitability and cultural superiority.  This is truly important, since we’re sitting on the back end of the legacy of European colonialism and we’re still dealing with the fallout of that legacy.  More importantly, though, we’re still dealing with the ingrained cultural notions that are the inevitable outcome of that colonial ideal.  Europeans and Americans still function under the misapprehension that there’s something inherently superior in Caucasian culture and genetic makeup when compared to non-Caucasian culture and genetics.

Darwin’s work also butts up against the most common non-Western notions of history.  Since Westerners had an understandable tendency to attempt to erase the history and culture of their colonial possessions and replace it with their own, supposedly superior, culture and history, we do have pretty wide gaps in the historical records of the people colonized by Westerners.  Those gaps have been subsequently filled in by partisans who have tried to play up their culture and downplay or outright villainize the involvement of Europeans.  Interestingly enough, though, in many cases these histories either implicitly accept Western framing of the notion of history or attempt to completely obliterate Western history in an attempt to de-legitimatize Western historians.  Both approaches are highly flawed and lead to conclusions that are far from accurate.

This time around I was most fascinated by Darwin’s treatment of world history from 1880 or so through the early days of the Cold War.  I realized while rereading the book that we seem to be basically replaying large parts of world history in the years leading up the World War I.[1]  His arguments brought the world of today into greater focus.

As such, consider this the introduction of a series on John Darwin’s magnificent work and what it means to genuinely overturn standard notions of history.  Before I get to the 1800s, however, I feel it’s a good idea to make a baseline comparison between Darwin and someone else who thought he’d overturn all of history as we know it.  That’s right, we’re going to go look at Gavin Menzies.

Hooray!

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[1]Up to a certain point.  The geopolitical realities of the world in 2012 are far, far different from those of 1912.  The United States has no military or economic peer and there is no uneasy détente between equally balanced European powers who have their claws dug into colonies all over the world.  I do not, in short, expect that we’ll end up plunging into World War III at any point in the near future.  That said, it’s fascinating to see how people talk about the world today and compare it to how they talked about the world a century in the past.

Menzies Contra Reality, Part 3

Gavin Menzies illustrates the exact problem that anyone comes across when dealing with a conspiracy theory and its theorist.  The truth is complicated and often requires a great deal of information to simply approach the real explanation,[1] whereas a good conspiracy theory is usually pretty simple.  That’s why I had to spend seven pages deconstructing his first five paragraphs.  Fortunately, it’s about to get a bit simpler.  It also proves, yet again, that Menzies doesn’t know what historians, y’know, do.

First, Menzies starts with a rhetorical question:

Why was the strait named after Magellan when Magellan had seen it on a chart before he set sail? It doesn’t make sense.

First of all, that’s technically untrue.  Assuming that Magellan was looking at Schoner’s map, the Strait of Magellan most certainly is not depicted.  This is the Strait of Magellan:




At best, Schoner’s map depicts Drake’s Passage, which is actually the body of water below the South American continent.  But, um, let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt on that one…

Menzies follows his rhetorical question-and-answer by again showing his ass in public.  It’s almost like he likes that sort of thing.

The paradox might be explained had there been no maps of the strait or of the Pacific—if, as some believe, Magellan was bluffing about having seen a chart. But there were maps. Martin Waldseemüller published his map of the Americas and the Pacific in 1507, twelve years before Magellan set sail. In 1515, four years before Magellan sailed, Johannes Schöner published a map showing the strait Magellan is said to have “discovered.”

Let’s start with Waldseemuller’s map.  First of all, take a look at it:




I’d like to draw your attention to three things about that map.  First, it does not go far enough south to depict the bottom of the South American continent, which is where Magellan crossed into the Pacific.  Second, if you look at the eastern end of Asia you’ll see a prominently diagrammed dragon’s tail.  Third, Asia is extremely wide.  Waldseemuller’s depiction of Asia, Europe, and Africa, then, are definitely an evolution of the depiction of the world first advanced by Henricus Martellus in 1489.  His big innovation is the addition of America over on the left side.

In order to understand why he would have incorporated America, you need to understand a couple things.  First, Christopher Columbus had discovered…something in the intervening years.  No one in Europe really knew what that something was yet, though.  There were a bunch of maps that just kinda threw some landmasses out into the western Atlantic and then said, “Here ya go, stuff!”

The key map for understanding all of this is the Cantino Map.




If you look to the left of the Cantino Map you’ll see that there’s just a bunch of disconnected land tossed in there.  The 1505 Caverio Map is obviously based on the data set of and was, most likely, ripped directly off of the Cantino Map, since that’s how they rolled back in the day.




The thing that should be blatantly obvious about these early-16th Century maps is that the mapmakers had absolutely no idea what to make of the lands being discovered in the New World.  Take a look at the Ruysch map, made the same year as the Waldseemuller map.




That big white area to the left of Africa?  That’s what was penciled in to depict the discoveries in the New World.  I’m told by people who know how to read that map that the legend says it’s probably part of Asia, but they don’t know what it is.

The thing to realize here is that these are not maps made by people who have a complete concept of what the world actually looks like.  Eurasia covers way too much of the globe.  China has a giant peninsula that stretches halfway across the Indian Ocean.  The Americas are not exactly well-defined.  They’re also not consistently drawn.

Really, though, it’s the insistence on including the dragon’s tail that’s the most damning evidence that these maps were not handed to the Europeans by the Chinese.  You’d think that the Chinese would have noticed that they didn’t have a giant goddamn peninsula sticking a couple of hundred miles down from their southern shores.

We can, in fact, test this theory.  There are Chinese maps that predate the European maps we’re considering.  This is the Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, made about a century before the Martellus map:




This is its cousin, the Kangnido map, made a decade or so later:




The giant mass in the middle of both maps is China.  The stuff over on the right is the Korean peninsula and Japan.  The droopy thing over on the left that appears to be a tiny peninsula with a giant lake in the middle?  That’s Africa.  Yes, Africa, also known as a continent that’s significantly larger than China in reality.  Interestingly (and I am shamelessly using Wikipedia for this one, since, um, Chinese cartography is not my strong suit), they were still apparently using this basic map at least as late as the Honkoji map, which was made in 1560.  Assuming that wasn’t a decorative piece, that means that at least someone in the Chinese sphere still had no idea what Europe and Africa looked like 140 years after China supposedly circumnavigated the globe and handed maps off to the Europeans.  Hell, aside from the bit where the Europeans made Asia too big and put a big fucking peninsula on China, they seemed to have a better idea of what Asia looked like than that Chinese.  That’s super awkward.  For Gavin Menzies.

Menzies manages to make what might be the dumbest argument of all time, though.  So he’s got that goin’ for him.  Let’s look:

The mystery only deepens when we consider the two cartographers, Waldseemüller and Schöner. Were these two hoary old sea captains who had made heroic voyages across the Pacific before Magellan? Should we rename the strait after Schöner? Hardly.

Yup.  Neither Waldseemuller nor Schoner were actual sea captains.  That means that…um…what does that mean, exactly?  I believe that Menzies is making the argument that because Waldseemuller and Schoner weren’t hoary old sea captains they must have gotten their ideas for their maps from another source, thereby China.  Because it’s not possible that they got their ideas from, say, the Cantino map.  And it’s certainly not possible that one of them cribbed from the other.  Unless, of course, they did.

Let’s go see what Toby Lester has to say about that…

He began his story of the Waldseemuller map in The Fourth Part of the World with the tale of Father Joseph Fischer, a Jesuit and a professor of history and geography with a thing for old maps.  In 1901 he went to a castle in southern Germany called Wolfegg Castle in search of a rare 15th Century map that included Greenland (because, y’know, Greenland!).  Upon finding his map he decided to look in a small storage area that wasn’t part of the main castle library.

…Fischer soon came across something that piqued his curiosity: a large folio with red beech-wood covers, bound together with finely tooled pigskin.  Two Gothic brass clasps held the folio shut, and Fischer pried them open gently.  On the inside cover he found a small bookplate, bearing the date 1515 and a small inscription, which gave him the name of the folio’s original owner: Johannes Schoner, a well-known sixteenth-century German mathematician and geographer.  “Posterity,” the inscription began, “Schoner gives this to you as an offering.”[2]

To make a very long story short, that folio contained the only known copy of the Waldeseemuller Map.  Towards the end of the book Lester makes the primary point that I’d like to draw your attention to.

Schoner didn’t need the map for display or teaching purposes.  He needed it as a reference work, so he didn’t assemble or mount it.  Instead he bound it – along with a copy of Waldseemuller’s 1516 Carta Marina, a star chart engraved by Albrecht Durer in 1515, and celestial globe gores that he himself produced in 1517 – into an oversized, wood-covered folio that he could keep in his personal library.  In the years between 1515 and 1520 Schoner studied the map carefully.  He drew a grid of red lines across parts of its two central sheets, presumably to help him transfer the coordinates of paces he saw there to his globes – of which he produced several during those years, all of which rely heavily on the Waldseemuller map.[3]

When it gets right down to it, though the best critiques of Menzies’ theory come from a pair of unlikely sources: a pair of 16th Century mapmakers named Martin Waldseemuller and Johannes Schoner.  I’ll let Toby Lester explain for Waldseemuller.

Waldseemuller would live on for another eight years.  But something peculiar happened after Ringmann’s[4] death: Waldseemuller stopped using the name America.  In 1513, when his new edition of the Geography was finally printed, in Strassburg, neither of the two maps in the atlas that portrayed the New Word called it America or showed it surrounded by water.[5]

This is Waldseemuller’s similar 1516 Carta Marina:




If you think that looks familiar, well, scroll back up to the Caverio map.

Meanwhile, this is a reproduction of a globe that Schoner made in 1533:




If you’re thinking that looks kind of like South America attached to Asia by Central America, you’re correct.  That’s exactly what that is.

If nothing else, all of these maps prove that Europeans of the early 16th Century really didn’t know what the world looked like and were relying on a combination of educated guesses and blatantly stealing from past sources.  They were also quite indecisive about what to do with the world.  It’s kind of the exact opposite of the story Menzies would have us accept of a European world map suddenly created by a miraculous Chinese world voyage.

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[1]That’s one of those things where simply having a great deal of obscure knowledge is extremely useful.  I just happened to know that there was a mythical “dragon’s tail” attached to the eastern edge of Asia by mapmakers in the 15th and 16th century, so when I saw reference to one in the writings of Galvao I knew that it had a meaning that both Menzies and Laurence Bergreen missed.  It could be that I missed it because Galvao was referring to a different dragon’s tail, since his notion of Henry the Navigator buying a map with a feature called the dragon’s tail predates the addition of the peninsular dragon’s tail by several decades.  But in this case I’m willing to stand on my interpretation: Galvao didn’t know what he was talking about.

[2] Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name, (New York: Free Press, 2009), 14.

[3]Lester, Fourth Part, 385.

[4]Mathias Ringmann, the true driving force behind the creation of the Waldseemuller map and the book that accompanied it, which was mostly Ptolemy’s Geography mashed together with a copy of a letter purportedly from Amerigo Vespucci about his voyages to the New World.

[5]Lester, Fourth Part, 379-381.

Menzies Contra Reality, Part 2

In the last entry I made it all the way to the second paragraph of Gavin Menzies’ Introduction to 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance.  Hopefully I’ll make it slightly farther this time.  I’m guessing I’ll make it at least to the second page.

In Menzies’ second paragraph he claimed that Christopher Columbus had already seen a map of the Americas before he did his Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria thing in 1492.  The next logical step, then, is to drag the good name of Ferdinand Magellan through the mud.  This is, I believe, primarily because Gavin Menzies has never heard of John Cabot, Amerigo Vespucci, or Balboa.  More power to them, I say.

Either way Menzies again makes testable claims in relation to Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition.  He points out that the voyage wasn’t going well as Magellan transited the passage which is now known by his name down at the bottom of South America.  So we get this:

A member of the crew wrote, “We all believed that [the Strait] was a cul-de-sac; but the captain knew that he had to navigate through a very well-concealed strait, having seen it in a chart preserved in the treasury of the king of Portugal, and made by Martin of Bohemia, a man of great parts.”

This is from the Pigafetta account of Magellan’s expedition.  The Martin of Bohemia in question was Martin Behaim.  This is the super-helpful cleaned-up depiction of Behaim’s globe on Wikipedia:




If you look closely at that globe you’ll notice a few things.  First, you’ll notice that there is no strait of anybody, let alone Magellan.  It’s just a bunch of islands.  But if you look at the islands closely, you might notice a few other things.

First, Cipangu is on the left side, just above the Equator.  Just to its right you’ll see an island labeled “Sant Brandan.”  That would be the mythical Island of Saint Brendan, who supposedly traveled into the Atlantic and discovered a bunch of amazing stuff in the 6th Century.  Above and to the right of Sant Brandan you’ll see Antilia and Indicus.  Antilia is the mythical island of seven cities of gold that was depicted in the Pizzigano Chart and kicked off Menzies’ search for proof that the Chinese discovered America in 1421.  To the right of that are a bunch of other islands labeled Acores, Ferro, Canarie, and Cabo Verde.  Those are the Azores, Canaries, and Cape Verde Islands, which were long inhabited by the Portuguese and Spanish by 1492.  To the right of that are the west coasts of Africa and Europe.

Suspiciously absent, you might notice, is a giant landmass in between.  I mention this because it’s completely and totally fucking obvious right here that Gavin Menzies did not do his homework.  If he actually had a shit to give about true historical inquiry he might have looked at Martin Behaim’s map and noticed that it does not include America or anything even remotely America-like.

In fact, he could have read Laurence Bergreen’s Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, which was published in 2003.  Bergreen offers this explanation:

Pigafetta was inadvertently responsible for the case of mistaken identity; in all likelihood, he confused Behaim’s rendition with that of another Nuremberg mapmaker, Johannes Schoner, a professor of mathematics who produced two maps, one in 1515 and the other in 1520, close to the time Magellan was displaying a map to King Charles.  To the nonspecialist, Schoner’s maps closely resembled Behaim’s, and Pigafetta could easily have mistaken one for the other, especially since Schoner did not sign his production.[1]

Let us then consider Schoner’s map.




That includes something that looks a lot like South America.  It also includes something that looks like, um, a decent-sized island where North America would be.  And there’s a strait in between those two.  Also there’s a strait at the bottom, between proto-South America and a giant, completely out of place Antarctica-ish-looking place.

If you look directly to the left of not-North-America you’ll also see an interesting land form: Cipangu.  It’s called Zipangri in the Schoner map, but that is most definitely Cipangu.  It’s also roughly in the neighborhood of the Baja Peninisula in the North America of reality.  From there, too, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump from Cipangu to mainland Asia.

That’s what Magellan was looking for: a quick route through the newly-discovered lands in the Atlantic that would grant him easy passage to the Spice Islands and fantastic wealth.  In the Schoner map Asia and Europe take up far more of the world than they do in reality, which is how Schoner’s Atlantic, Pacific, and Americas can be so very narrow.  This is an explanation that goes all the way back to Claudius Ptolemy.

Ptolemy made two mistakes in creating his map of the world that compounded each other.  First, he underestimated the circumference of the world by about 14 percent.  Second, he overestimated longitudinal distances.  In his map Europe and Asia reached approximately 180 degrees around the globe.  This is technically true, but for the ancient and medieval mind the east side of Asia pretty much meant China.  The distance from the west coast of Portugal to the east coast of China is about 140 degrees.  In 1492 Henricus Martellus completed his map, which increased the size of Europe and Asia to 230 degrees.  The 1474 Toscanelli Map also extended Europe and Asia around 230 degrees.  Toscanelli or his allies attempted to argue for a western voyage to Asia based on his conclusions.[2]  Wikipedia offers a helpful illustration of what Toscanelli’s Map would look like in the real world:




Notice how Cipangu is between the west coast of reality-Mexico and the east coast of the Baja Peninsula.  If you’re thinking that’s pretty much exactly the same place Schoner put it…well…I am, too.  Make a note of that, as I’ll be getting back to it shortly.

However, I need to back up just a bit.  I mentioned the weird-pseudo Antarctica in the Schoner map.  The straight between South America and pseudo-Antarctica is at about 42 degrees south on the Schoner map.  The actual south end of South America is down around 60 degrees.  So that’s too low.  There is, however, the Rio de la Plata at 35 degrees.  Let’s go back to Bergreen here.

Years before Magellan arrived at the Rio de la Plata, both Spanish and Portuguese ships had searched for the strait at this very point.  Antonio Galvao, who served as the Portuguese governor of the Moluccas, wrote about a “most rare and excellent map of the world, which was a great helpe [sic] to Don Henry (the Navigator) in his discouries [sic].”  In 1428, Galvao said, the king of Portugal’s eldest son made a journey through England, France, Germany, and Italy “from whence he brought a map of the world which had all the parts of the world and the earth described.  The Streight of Magelan [sic] was called in it the Dragon’s taile[sic].”  A dragon’s tail was a fitting image for the strait, suggesting that it was dangerous, sinuous, and possibly mythological.  Columbus believed in its existence, too.[3]

I find this utterly fascinating.  For one thing, the 1428 map and Galvao’s description of it made it into Menzies’ 1421 and, not surprisingly, Menzies made a big fucking deal about it.  For another thing, both Menzies and Bergreen get this one completely and totally wrong.  It’s understandable, since Galvao’s explanation doesn’t exactly make sense, either, but the Dragon’s Tail is a specific feature of world maps from the 15th Century.  Let’s look at the Martellus map:




See that big peninsula sticking down from the east side of Asia?  There’s a term for that: The Dragon’s Tail.  To understand the Dragon’s Tail, we need to understand Ptolemy’s map of the ancient world.  Also we need to understand a bit of Aristotle’s cosmography.  Isn’t this fun?[4]




If you look at that map you’ll see two broadly-defined areas: white areas and blue areas.  The blue areas are water.  The white areas are land.  If you look over at the right side of the map and then trace it down along the bottom, you’ll notice that the land seems to surround a huge, inland sea that stretches between the west coast of Africa and the general area around India.  Ptolemy thought that the body of water we now call the Indian Ocean was landlocked.  Let that thought rattle around for a bit.

The second thing we need to consider is Aristotelian cosmography.  Aristotle divided the world into five zones.  Broadly, these were two arctic zones, two temperate zones, and an area in between known as the torrid zone.  The notion we have of the Arctic Circle, the Antarctic Circle, the Tropic of Cancer, and the Tropic of Capricorn are holdouts of Aristotle’s notion of the world, as they are the dividing lines between various zones.  He believed that humans were incapable of surviving in the arctic zones and would burn up in the Torrid Zone.  He was also the only classical philosopher to maintain a hold on western European thought during the medieval period.  So when medieval cosmographers were drawing their T-O maps they were basing their world on Aristotle’s notion.

Aristotle had two other beliefs that matter a great deal.  The first was that there had to be a landmass of equal size on the opposite side of the Torrid Zone.  This was referred to as the antipodes, which is a term that literally means “opposed foot.”  The second was that there had to be a fourth part of the world somewhere, which would eventually be reached, with the first three being Europe, Asia, and Africa.  These two ideas are fundamentally linked.  Probably.

During the medieval period, however, people mostly kept to the notion of the uncrossable Torrid Zone.  Then Marco Polo made a brief mention of crossing so far south that the Pole Star could no longer be seen.  That meant that Marco Polo had crossed the Torrid Zone into the southern hemisphere and lived to tell the tale.

The Portuguese eventually figured out that Africa did end.  If you go back to the Martellus Map, however, you’ll see that Africa’s southeastern coast extends really far out into the Indian Ocean.  You’ll also see that there’s a giant peninsula that extends down from the east coast of China and stretches back towards Africa.  That’s an artifact of the Ptolemy map.  Martellus was the first European to make a map after the Portuguese found the southern tip of Africa.  He also believed that it was still possible that land extended all around the islands Marco Polo had visited, so he adjusted his map accordingly.

This feature was repeated on a whole bunch of maps.  The interesting thing is, though, that it started with Martellus’s map in 1489-ish.  So the timeline of Galvao mentioning Magellan and a “Dragon’s taile” and incorporating a date of 1428 is way off.  In my professional opinion, though, I’d say that Galvao got something wrong.

Meanwhile, remember that notion of an equally-sized antipodean landmass?  It lived on in the European imagination as a land called “Terra Australis” or “Terra Australis Incognita,” also known as “the unknown southern land.”  Eventually, of course, a large southern land was discovered down in the antipodes.  They called it Australia.  Later on they found Antarctica.  Some mapmakers, however, insisted on putting Terra Australis on their maps.  I strongly suspect that’s what Johanes Schoner was up to.

Either way, I’m up to, like, page 7 and part 2 of this series of posts.  I’ve covered approximately five paragraphs of Menzies’ Introduction.  Two of those paragraphs contain one sentence and a third contains a rhetorical question followed by the words, “It doesn’t make sense.”

We’re making GREAT time.

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[1]Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 170.

[2]Toscanelli also claims to have had a long conversation with an ambassador from Cathay in 1432, which most definitely got Menzies’ attention…

[3]Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World, 117-118.

[4]Yes.  Yes it is.

Menzies Contra Reality, Part 1

Gavin Menzies is an aggressively ignorant non-historian.  It’s true.  Oh, he’s also extremely fucking arrogant about it.  If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that ignorance and arrogance go hand-in-hand.  Also, too, they make for some interesting situations, especially if the ignorant and arrogant individual writes books specifically about the stupidity rampant in the rest of the world.

Those who have been around for a while might remember that I once attempted to make a series about the wildly historically inaccurate 1421, in which Menzies claimed that the Chinese circumnavigated the globe in 1421, made maps, and handed said maps to the Europeans who then immediately incorporated said maps into their own charts.  I gave up a short while in because I, um, I’m lazy.  And that’s how I roll.  Also because it seemed that I’d just end up writing, “No, seriously Gavin Menzies, what the fuck?” over and over again.  That’s got a shelf life…

Still, he wrote a second book.  I remembered that a while ago and even mentioned it on this here blog.  That same day I did my best Petrarch imitation and scoured the internet for my own copy of his famously difficult to find 1434.  Because, really, why not?

I make no promises of turning this into a series, but it’s worth talking about for a bit.

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Menzies has a singularly spectacular ability to piss me off within the introduction of his book.  I didn’t make it past the Acknowledgements page of 1421 before I got mad.  I didn’t make it past the first sentence of 1434’s Introduction this time.  That might seem like it’s an achievement, but I started with the Introduction.  So, yeah.  Either way, this is his first sentence (also, too, his first paragraph):

One thing that greatly puzzled me when writing 1421 was the lack of curiosity among many professional historians.

Now, for some this might be an indication that it’s time to re-think the premise or methodology used in offering the book.  Professional historians are, after all, a curious bunch.  They’re also an argumentative bunch, many of whom love nothing more to engage in an argument and win.  There is a reason why the first thing a historian needs to learn to be a good historian is historiography, also known as the history of history.  There is almost no known historical fact and there certainly isn’t any analysis of a historical fact that hasn’t been disputed at least once and, more likely, argued to death by men with beards and an unnatural appreciation for tweed.

Any good work of history contains a survey of the analysis of the results and a conclusion as to which side, if any, makes a stronger case.  This is a necessary part of the process of adding to the long lists of historical documents, especially for anything that has been picked over and over and over again.  It also shows, crucially, that the historian has done his or her homework.  More than that, it makes for testable claims if anyone wants to wander far afield of the historical consensus.

Historians love this shit.  It’s why they do what they do.  When Gavin Menzies released 1421 it was a book that literally turned everything we know about the last six centuries of world history on its head.  When real historians greeted it with a yawn that should tell you everything you need to know about the worthiness of Menzies’ claims.  His bafflement at why he was ignored then says everything we need to know about Menzies’ efficacy as a historian.

Fortunately, though, you don’t have to take my word for it.  He tells us exactly how good of a historian he is in the very next paragraph, also known as the second paragraph of the goddamn introduction to his goddamn book.

Alfter all, Christopher Columbus supposedly discovered America in 1492.  Yet eighteen years before he set sail, Columbus had a map of the Americas, which he later acknowledged in his logs.

This, right here, is what we call “an extraordinary claim.”  An extraordinary claim is one that requires extraordinary evidence.  Fortunately, this claim is also a testable claim.  But before we get to the evidence –  of which there is plenty – that Menzies is showing his ass in public, let’s see if we can apply pure reason to this statement.

We refer to certain islands in the Caribbean as the West Indies.  The somewhat-less-than-politically-correct term for the native occupants of the Americas is “Indians.”  The Indies were lands of fabulous wealth on the far eastern side of the Eurasian landmass that Europeans had been trying to reach and exploit for centuries by the time Colombo headed west from Spain.

Now, then, given this tiny bit of knowledge, what would you say is more likely?  Did Colombo land in the New World and mistakenly call it the Indies and its people Indians?  Or did Colombo know he was heading for the New World but pretend he was going somewhere else in order to participate in the biggest cover-up in history, wherein he, with the full cooperation of the Spanish sovereigns, the Spanish Court, his entire crew, and all of his partners in correspondence managed to participate in a conspiracy of silence that lasted from 1492 through 2002, when a former British submarine commander blew it all open with a book.  And then there was not one historian who could offer up a single shit about his discovery.

Which one seems more likely?

As it turns out, I’m fascinated by the Age of Discovery.  I think that’s how I originally heard about Gavin Menzies and his fevered fantasies featuring Chinese eunuchs.  I’m not exactly an expert in these things, but I do definitely know a thing or two.  In fact, for anyone who’s been paying attention, one of my favorite books is about exactly the claims Gavin Menzies makes at the beginning of 1434.

Well, not really.  It’s not about Gavin Menzies claims.  It’s about the actual reality of the things that Gavin Menzies makes the claims about.  As such, I shall be trotting out Toby Lester’s The Fourth Part of the World quite a bit here.  On some level that’s cheating.  Menzies published 1421 in 2002 and 1434 in 2008.  Lester published The Fourth Part of the World in 2009.  So Menzies couldn’t possibly offer anything to contradict Lester.  By the same token, Lester doesn’t mention Menzies once.  Menzies would probably mention this as part of the conspiracy of silence from real historians.  Lester – who isn’t actually a real historian, either, but a journalist who happens to know how to do the history thing – did something that Menzies didn’t do, though: his homework.

Homework, in this case, is boring-ass research.  It involves reading a lot of books and chasing down manuscripts and synthesizing historiography.  It’s not Indiana Jones-esque globetrotting in search of crystal skulls or Holy Grails or dudes who can rip still-beating hearts out of chests.  That would be awesome, but that ain’t how it works.  For someone who’s done their homework Gavin Menzies’ theory is, well, stupid.  It’s also self-evidently stupid.  Let’s continue:

Indeed, even before his first voyage, Columbus signed a contract with the king and queen of Spain that appointed him viceroy of the Americas. His fellow ship’s captain Martín Alonso Pinzón, who sailed with him in 1492, had too seen a map of the Americas—in the pope’s library.

Um…no?  I mean, seriously, no.  Columbus was told that he’d be made Admiral of the Ocean Sea if he found the Indies.  He was also told that he’d be made governor of any land he discovered and claimed for Spain.  America was not mentioned at all, mostly because America wasn’t named until Waldseemuller and Ringmann put the word on their map of the world in 1507.  But that’s a technicality.  Let’s see what Toby Lester has to say about the subject.

Ophir, Saba, Tarshish, Cipangu: Columbus believe that Hispaniola might be any one of those places, or perhaps all of them at once, a single land that over the ages had been known by a succession of different names.  Even several years later, after having devoted much study to this question, Columbus still hadn’t worked out an answer.  Instead, he had identified even more possibilities.  “This island is Tarshish,” he wrote in a letter to Pope Alexander VI in 1502, “It is Chittim, it is Ophir and Ophaz, and Cipangu, and we have named it Hispaniola.”[1]

For those who aren’t up on their mythical lands, Tarshish, Chittim, and Ophir are all lands mentioned in the Bible that can be shorthanded as “far away” and “really fucking rich.”  I have no idea what Ophaz is.  Cipangu, though, is the key to this whole thing.  The idea of the place came to Europe in the Travels of Marco Polo and it’s not actually a legendary island at all.  We know it as Japan.

In fact, you might want to keep that little tidbit in mind.  It’ll come up a time or seven in the future…

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[1]Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name, (New York: Free Press, 2009), 281.

The Red Apple, Part 2

The word “Jihad” is difficult to use in the post-9/11 world.  Right-wing Christians use the word every twenty-three seconds or so and use the idea of Jihad as synonymous with Islam itself and pretty much every single Muslim.  It’s useful for people who want to alienate the other and justify a war by the oldest excuse in the book: they started it!

A counter-narrative of Jihad arose to make an equal and opposite claim.  I have no idea where it came from, nor do I know where I heard it.  It went thusly, however: Islam is a religion of peace and Jihad is about the inner struggle for purity, but it was corrupted to make Jihad about holy war against the enemies of Islam.  Moreover, the specific version I heard indicated that Jihad was corrupted because Saladin needed a rallying cry to get the various Muslim tribes and kingdoms to unite against the threat of the European Crusades.

This is a convenient counter-narrative.  It’s based in a certain amount of truth, too.  Jihad has two or three meanings and the notion of Jihad as holy war is actually only the lesser struggle.  This is disputed, of course, by historians who claim that Jihad was primarily used to mean actual, physical war.  I don’t know enough to make a judgment call.  It doesn’t matter, however, as the argument is actually somewhat immaterial.

The counter-narrative of Jihad as Muslim anomaly and response to the Crusades pretends that Saladin’s fight to re-take the Holy Land from the infidels arose in a vacuum.  It’s not like the Qu’ran was written sometime around 700 and then, boom, 400 years later there was a Crusade and the Muslims were all, “Oh, shit, now what are we gonna do?”  Muslims and Christians were pretty much at war from the time Islam was founded.  That’s why there were Crusades in the first place.

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It’s actually really hard to claim that Islam is a religion of peace.  Muhammed was pretty much constantly warring with someone or other.  Muhammed died in 632.  Exactly one century later Charles Martel defeated a Muslim army at the Battle of Tours-Poitier.

For those keeping track at home, that means that in the course of a century the descendants of Muhammed’s religion of peace had managed to conquer North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and curl all the way around to threaten Paris, France.  They had to go the long way around because Constantinople was still at the height of its powers within living memory and blocked invasion of Europe from the east.

Oh, yeah, Constantinople.  In the century between the death of Muhammed and the Battle of Tours-Poitiers Muslim armies had besieged that great city no less than three times, including one siege that lasted for five years and another that involved the troops bringing seeds to plant their own crops so they could be in it for the long haul.  They weren’t so much beating swords into plowshares as bringing plowshares to make sure the swords would get use.

Islamic cosmography, meanwhile, had come to divide the world into three broad categories.  First was the House of Islam, where Islam was the rule.  Second was the House of Safety, where Islam was not the rule but Muslims were allowed to live in peace.  Third was the House of War, which was pretty much everywhere else.  This was also nearly synonymous with Christian Europe.

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A question must be asked before we can proceed: What were the Crusades?

This largely depends on who you talk to.  In the specific telling of the story of the Crusade as a sudden release of violence from a previously peaceful Islamic culture the Crusades were a horrible atrocity and – because words have little meaning these days – Western terrorism on a grand scale.  This is wrong.  It’s not completely and totally wrong.  But it’s definitely wrong.

The First Crusade was a direct result of the Battle of Manzikert.  The Battle of Manzikert came was a direct result of the mutual embrace between the Turkmen and the Muslims.

Early Muslims were primarily nomadic Arabic tribesmen.  They traveled fast, struck hard, and terrorized civilized people.  It was their mobility and ability to endure hardship that allowed them to destroy the Persian Empire and cross North Africa in the space of just a few decades.

They eventually settled down, though.  Empire tends to do that.  In general it’s a good thing, but the practical matters of imperial administration tend to get in the way of overrunning nearby kingdoms.

Then the Muslims ran across the Turks, who hung out around Anatolia and the Caspian Sea.  The Turks were nomadic horsemen of a tradition not all that dissimilar from the Huns or the Mongols.  In the Turks the Muslims saw the spirit of the gazi: holy warriors who cared about nothing more than spreading Islam.

It was the Seljuk Turks who provided the opening for the Muslim conquest of Anatolia, which would mark the long, slow strangulation of the Byzantine Empire.  In 1071 Romanos IV Diogenes lost to a Seljuk army at Manzikert in decisive fashion.  This didn’t destroy the Byzantines, but it destabilized the empire and left all of Anatolia vulnerable to the Turks.  In true Byzantine fashion, though, it was a civil war following the loss at Manzikert that allowed the Turks to take the Byzantine heartland, as opposed to the loss in the battle itself.

In 1095 Alexios I Komnenos was forced to do the unthinkable: request help from Rome to stop further Seljuk incursion.  In 1078 they had taken Nicaea, which was both practically at Constantinople’s doorstep and one of the most important cities to the Byzantine cause.  It could not be re-taken without help.  Latin Christians considered Orthodox Christians half-breed heretics, however.  They weren’t about to go take Anatolia just to keep the Byzantine Empire safe, even if it was in their own best interests.  They needed a bigger justification.  Thus a simple attempt to retake the Byzantine breadbasket became an apocalyptic war for the center of the world.

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The First Crusade was wildly successful.  The Crusaders started in Constantinople and marched through Anatolia, retaking Nicaea in the process.  They then conquered Antioch and Jerusalem and established the crusader states.

Less than a century later Egyptian Muslim troops flying the banner of jihad conquered Jerusalem under the banner of Jihad.  Their commander was known in the West as Saladin.  Surprisingly, his reputation was as an exemplar of chivalry and not bloodthirsty savagery.

We shall look at that later.