Recurso Agua

ration. Why were spices so highly valued? Since at least classical Greek times, spices were luxuries in western Europe. They were used in cooking and for medicinal purposes. In Europe during the Middle Ages, black pepper was the seasoning most commonly used after salt. Pepper was used in preparing meat and fish, stews, soups, and sauces. It was often combined with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger in cookies, gingerbread, and spiced wine. At the time, techniques of food storage were primitive at best, and pepper was a preservative that was used to disguise the flavors of rotting food. Pepper was used in medicines, too, as many believed it helped with digestion. The twelfth-century German nun Hildegard von Bingen baked peppery cakes to treat nausea.

Black pepper, native to Java and cultivated along the south- western coast of India, numbered among the most precious spices. The long distances over which it had to be carried made it extremely expensive. Peppercorns were valued equal to their own weight in gold, and medieval rulers exchanged them as gifts. Marco Polo emphasized the wealth of a certain Chinese city by declaring that “for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria [in Egypt] or elsewhere to be taken to Christian lands, there are a hundred to this port of Zaitun.”

The trade routes to Europe from the Spice Islands came through Egypt, via the Red Sea and the Nile, and then across the Mediter- ranean Sea to Venice. The disruption to European trade caused by the Crusades was made worse in 1429, when the Egyptian sultan declared a monopoly on the spice trade. The Venetian merchants, who imported 2,500 tons (2,267,961.8 kg) of pepper and ginger a year in the fifteenth century, were particularly hard hit by the royal monopoly. It was this threat that stimulated the European search for direct sea routes to India and the East Indies.

build. It had a flat bottom so it could be beached for loading and unloading cargo.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the hulk replaced the cog in northern Europe. Hulks were broad and rounded, with high bows and sterns. They were extremely strong and held a great deal of cargo.

In the fifteenth century, Portuguese shipbuilders combined ele- ments of these northern designs with features of Mediterranean ships. The result was the fast, oceangoing ship that ushered in the age of dis- covery: the caravel. At the same time, navigational aids improved dra- matically. Starting in the late twelfth century, European sailors began to use magnetic compasses, allowing them to locate directions. (Such compasses had been available to Chinese navigators since about the ninth century.) Early magnetized compass needles simply floated in bowls of water. By the fifteenth century, they were mounted on cards marked with the directions. The magnetic compass had a northerly ori- entation. This led to maps being drawn with north at the top.

Two other important instruments were the astrolabe and the quad- rant, which were used to determine latitude. They, too, became available in the fifteenth century. By the late Middle Ages, accurate hourglasses allowed sailors to measure time precisely. This helped improve the accu- racy of dead reckoning, a traditional method of navigation then still in use. Accurate time measurements also led to a new measure of nautical distance, the league. One league equaled the distance an average ship could sail in one hour in good conditions.

In the centuries to come, the great European voyages of discovery produced wealth, settlement, and colonization. Why the Europeans? There is no simple answer to this question. For one thing, Europeans had a strong incentive to seek distant parts. From the time of their conversion to Christianity, they had been drawn to the East. No other advanced civilization seemed interested in exploration.

Another incentive was trade. European merchants had long-stand- ing contacts in the Middle East. Venetian merchants were permanently established along the Black Sea by the thirteenth century. Europeans wanted more and more exotic goods. To supply them, traders looked for direct access to the spices and luxuries of the Far East and the gold of Africa. Europeans were eager to profit from trading directly at the source of these goods, and they sought sea routes to the East Indies in the late Middle Ages. The tremendous program of Portuguese exploration in the

the dawning of the age of discovery



fourteenth and fifteenth centuries aimed specifically to discover these routes. The Atlantic also attracted Europeans. As the Middle Ages drew to a close, it seemed more and more likely that Asia lay on the other side. The Middle Ages are the rich background of the European age of discovery. The great explorers who reached and explored the Americas, discovered the long sea routes to India, and circumnavigated the globe did not spring from some dark age. They were instead the beneficiaries of hundreds of years of smaller discoveries. These smaller discoveries were made by generations of earlier sailors, shipbuilders, navigators, scholars, mapmakers, and ordinary travelers—not only European, but Muslim, Indian, and Chinese as well.

An astrolabe from the fourteenth century is shown above. Its many uses include determining latitude and predicting the positions of the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars.

116

