"The Impact of the Columbian Voyages on Europe"

Most historians seem to believe that the changes in and expansion of Europe had their origins in Europe and that they would have come about in the absence of the Encounter. These historians presume the changes inherent in the Renaissance engendered and precipitated the course Europe took. They treat the consequences of the Encounter on Europe as peripheral or in passing, as if they had little importance for the subsequent history within Europe. I contend that this is an erroneous perspective and that the effects have central significance to the course of European history. Recently, a few historians have given this perspective some additional emphasis, realizing that the changes wrought had far greater magnitude, more lasting duration, and greater significance to the course of European history. Using the works of these historians and the snippets found in various places in the record, this paper will demonstrate that the Encounter had at least as great an importance for Europe as most historians rightly insist it did for the rest of the world.(1)

A salient consequence of the Encounter was its impact on the mind of Europeans. Initially, this was confined, given the educational schema of the time, to the elite; but, in time, the effect was universal. The Earth was simply not as they had conceived it. Overnight their world expanded. The globe was now half again larger than they had believed. There were unanticipated populations of people, unsuspected continents and plants and animals that challenged credence. Moreover, this immediately called into question their sources of knowledge and faith. The intellectual challenge that this posed required a completely revamped or substantially revised cosmological outlook. In contrast, while the route pioneered by da Gama and Diaz around Africa was of great moment, it did not have a similar impact because Africa was a known and knowable quantity. The passage around Africa was, for all practical purposes, anticipated. Moreover, it had at its heart its formation as a commercial enterprise. Granted a large part of the impetus behind Columbus' voyage was of a commercial nature, but once the Europeans understood the significance of what he had stumbled upon they had to integrate a comprehensive knowledge shift into their belief system. This had enormous ramifications for all intellectual endeavors.(2)

In this changed world you could question both traditional beliefs and accepted practices. The realization that the received knowledge of scripture and, significantly, of authority no longer held the key to life not only loosed the demons of uncertainty, but also freed the intellect to investigate. Questions that had long been suppressed came rushing to the fore. Questions of the heresy of heliocentrism, Hus' dual communion, and of the temporal power of the church, among so many others, began anew. Only this time skepticism greeted the answers. With the inability to directly answer the problems posed by the newly uncovered knowledge ecclesiastic authority crumbled. In addition, the abuses and corruption of the church could no longer be explained away or hidden under the blanket of legalistic, Scholastic obfuscation based upon scripture that was accessible only to the initiated. The turn to direct observation and the development of the scientific method gained impetus. The obvious nature of the church's error now gave incentive and free rein to the mind of the Europeans to seek the correct answer without the intercession of the clerics. Copenican, Keplerian, Newtonian and other discoveries followed swiftly, opening the floodgates of modern knowledge.

In historiography the Encounter also had a significance. It boosted the progressive school of historic thought over the cyclic. The cyclic position propounded the 'Cult of Antiquity' through the rediscoveries of the Renaissance; but the Encounter was an accomplishment beyond the ken of the Ancients and argued that humankind was progressing rather than recovering. Meanwhile, the church could only stammer in impotence and do nothing to refute these 'heresies', which it once would have easily suppressed.(3)

Is it merely coincidence that the Reformation began little more than a quarter century after the Encounter, when all attempts at renewal and reform of the church in the preceding two centuries had failed? It strains credulity to believe so. Moreover, the change in circumstances can also account for the hostility that erupted from the Reformation. The betrayal of beliefs exemplified by the incapacity of the church to accommodate, through scripture, the newly acquired knowledge required a response from those misled by the church. The response of the deceived is often extreme, violent or both. Little did Columbus realize when he began his mission to assist 'Their Catholic Majesties' to the wealth of the Orient and to Christianize the heathen that he would preside over the birth of the church's devolution. The knowledge that the church could be wrong, indeed, was wrong, on items of overwhelming significance was part of Columbus' cargo on his return. The apprehension of this anomaly enabled those whose questions would have been answered previously by suasion, suppression, excommunication or execution to garner enough support to resist the church successfully. The failure of previous 'heretics' (e.g., Hus) came, in part, from their inability to point to a specific instance in which the church could be shown to be unequivocally wrong. The Encounter made it plain to everyone that the church was in serious error. That understanding led to the inescapable conclusion that another mistake was not only possible, but probable. Therefore, morality dictated resistance to the edicts of the church when conscience concluded that the church was once again mistaken. Logically, reductionem ad absurdum, this led to the belief that the church could be right in nothing, thus warranting a complete break and the conception of the church as the tool of the Anti-Christ. This justified any and all types of opposition to the church up to and including violence. Religious schism developed early in the Sixteenth Century, multiplied rapidly and became more and more radical, eventually culminating in the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years' War.

As with any war, the Wars of Religion created want among the people who had the misfortune to be caught in the ebb and flow of the fighting. This was not new to war nor was hunger a new burden to the Europeans. However, something to ease that problem was on the horizon. The Encounter was about to supply Europe with badly needed alternatives to the small grain plants upon which they depended. While not a glamorous aspect of the Encounter, this constituent of it, according to McNeill, may well constitute the one with the most impact.(4) While the adoption of introduced American plants such as, potatoes, tomatoes, corn (maize), and others was not immediate, it did have long term repercussions when it finally occurred.

The small grains (rye, wheat, etc.) require specific environmental factors of soil fertility, generous climatic conditions, and agricultural technique which limit the areas in which they can be grown. Further, their ability to sustain a population requires a certain amount of land planted in them per capita. Moreover, depletion of the nutrients of those areas under small grain cultivation demands frequent fallow periods, usually one year in three, to combat weeds and reinvigorate the soil. Maize and potatoes, on the other hand, do not have requirements of the same stringency nor are their demands on the soil as great. Therefore, the American cultigens can be grown on more marginal lands, or more intensively on better lands. Additionally, both crops are more nutritious on a per acre basis than any of the small grains. These elements led to an enormous change in the agricultural system of Europe.(5)

The change precipitated by the introduction of American cultigens did not come about at once. As in any population, the peasants of Europe were loathe to change the agricultural habits of centuries to include these newly furnished plants. Their inertia did not allow for the widespread cultivation of American maize or potatoes until the start of the Eighteenth Century. Perhaps the long interval before adoption of this change is why previous historians have not recognized the significance of this aspect of the Encounter. However, with the advent of famine during the Seventeenth Century's economic downturn, the potato, in particular, was adopted across northern Europe. Many reasons contribute to this changeover from small grains to the American food crops. First, and probably foremost, the potato is a complete nutritional package which, in necessity, can be used to maintain, even increase, a family's health. Moreover, as mentioned above, it can be produced on more marginal land and can generate a sufficient caloric and nutritional supply to sustain a person on approximately one-quarter the area required by the small grains. Additionally, potatoes thrive in the wet, cool climate of the northern European land mass. They are not as labor intensive to cultivate as wheat. Further, potatoes can be shielded from confiscation by marauding armies or bandits just by leaving them in the ground. It is simply more difficult to dig up a field of potatoes than to confiscate a barn full of wheat, thus, they become a dietary support in times of turmoil. Maize, likewise, provides more nutrition per acre and grows in less hospitable conditions than the small grains. However, it is more suited to warmer climes and was adopted in the Iberian Peninsula and across southern Europe. There are, unfortunately, drawbacks in the nature of maize. Although, in contrast to the small grains, it is nutritionally superior, it does not provide the complete package that potatoes do and must be supplemented. Moreover, the Europeans tended to view it as animal feed, which reduced its impact on human nutritional needs.(6)

Some scholars attribute great consequences to this increase in food availability. McNeill contends that the introduction of American food crops had many long term repercussions on Europe. At the top of his list is the avoidance of any downward correction to population growth. This allowed for the enormous demographic increase in Europe in the years following the adoption of American cultigens, particularly maize and potatoes. McNeill ascribes the rise of industrial Germany to the potato, as it freed agricultural workers for movement into urban areas and industry. Therefore, it was a critical factor contributing to German unification and, indirectly, the two world wars of the Twentieth Century. He also asserts that maize contributed to the increase in Greek and Serbian populations and thus to the rise of their military power and success in overcoming the Turkish domination in the Balkans.(7)

Ponting and Crosby believe that there is a demographic cycle which runs in approximately three hundred year increments. That is, every three centuries there is a limit reached in relation to the ability of the contemporaneous agricultural technique to provide for the maintenance of its population levels. This results in a demographic correction that consists of famine or epidemic, through which the population declines to below the point of the maximum carrying capacity of the agriculture and, with the numbers of people depressed, recovery ensues, setting the process in motion again. Crosby maintains that the introduction of the American plants allowed Europe to avoid the correction he thinks should have occurred in the Seventeenth Century. Consequently a significant demographic increase gave Europe the ability to free agricultural workers to spur the industrial revolution, to accumulate the excess population that made possible the emigration of some sixty millions, and to avoid the economic downturn that China and the Islamic world suffered in previous corrections that affected their societies. Also, Crosby argues that the potato enabled the English landowning aristocracy to compel the peasants to relocate onto small plots during the Enclosure movement because the peasants were able to feed themselves adequately on less acreage.(8) Ponting concurs with Crosby and McNeill, particularly on the aspect of the demographic safety valve. However, he adds the caveat that the dependence on monoculture agriculture sometimes results in adverse consequences and, as an example, cites the potato blight induced famine in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century that caused the death of about one million from starvation and the emigration of another million.(9) These are outcomes of immense importance which have had extensive impact on Europe, but have not been sufficiently investigated and are only now beginning to be addressed.

If the introduction of American plants had the effect of creating conditions for the increase of European population, the introduction of European diseases had the opposite effect on American demographics. Curiously, the virulence of the European diseases among the American peoples was not duplicated by American diseases when they reached Europe. In fact, the only disease that made an impact on Europe at this time, and its origins are still debated, was syphilis. Scholarship is divided on the origins of the disease and it is known to have existed in a different form in Europe before 1493. It is still not known whether it was an import from America, a mutation of the existing disease of yaws or some combination thereof. The timing of syphilis' appearance and archeological research are crucial factors which mitigate for its American origins. Today syphilis does not hold the prominent place in our consciousness that it did prior to the advent of antibiotics to treat it. However, not only has it subsided from the public consciousness, but it was also more malignant at the time of its first identification. Humans tend to become more resistant to any particular disease through time and the symptoms and lethality of syphilis have diminished, although, of course, untreated it can and still does kill. Syphilis ran through the population of Europe as quickly, although with somewhat less deadly effect, as had the plague earlier. The first cases were found in Barcelona in 1493, the first epidemic occurred in Italy in 1494 and subsequent outbreaks moved north and east throughout Europe, reaching as far as Russia by 1499. The impact on European history is somewhat obtuse. Speculation by historians is that the dynastic difficulties that the ruling houses of Europe experienced in the next centuries, lack of heirs, sterility, insanity, et cetera, were a result of the 'French disease', one of the sobriquets applied to syphilis. Some attribute the demise of the houses of Tudor and Valois and the strife associated with the fall of those lineages to the consequences of this disease, one of its effects being the inhibition of the ability of females to bring a child to term.(10)

While this may not have been a political ramification of the first magnitude, others, concomitant to the Encounter, were. The Encounter represented a sea change in the power of the European nations. To this point the developing European nation-states were a barbaric periphery within the Eurasian political world, albeit an aggressive, expanding group of barbarians. For the centuries called the Dark Ages and which were only that for the Europeans, the Chinese and the Islamic Empires dominated the Eurasian political and economic scene. The 'Franks' had attempted to project their power overland in the Crusades and, after some early limited success, had ultimately been ignominiously ousted by the forces of Islam. The Norse had driven to the west only to be defeated by the forces of nature and the same autochthonous inhabitants that would fall so comparatively easily to the forces of Spain, England, and others half a millennium later.(11)

With the Encounter we find the lands on the edge of the Atlantic, after millennia of mutual isolation, reintegrated into a global system and subsumed in the European sphere of influence. Substantial enhancement of the power of the European states resulted from these circumstances.(12) The balance of power was affected worldwide, but in Europe the consequences moved it, over time, from the backwater it had been to the center of the world stage. Moreover, these conditions set the globe to serving the machinations of the Europeans for control over Europe. The Europeans finally stemmed the tide of the Ottoman Turks and contained them in the Balkans. Additionally, these changes placed great power in the hands of Spain, creating an hegemonic authority on the European mainland for a century and a half. It was the Spanish king, in his guise as the Holy Roman Emperor, that turned back the Turk. However, this power was unable to introduce central control over the Germanic lands of the Empire and wasted its strength in a futile attempt to do so. This conflict, born of the Reformation, which, as shown above, was also generated by the Encounter, so weakened the Iberians that their political ascendancy slipped away to the north. The Dutch, the French and ultimately the English were the beneficiaries of this power transfer. Moreover, the perception that Spanish power derived from its empire in America inspired the French, Dutch and English to seek colonies of their own. This reinforced and crystallized the transformation from regional terrestrial based power and empire to global and maritime ones. Thus, European conflicts went global. Additionally, colonies and conflict over empire, East, West and Middle East, added fuel to the burgeoning fires of nationalism that were beginning to flare, with all the associated strife that nationalism entails.(13)

Further political changes took place in the relations between the church and state. In this the Encounter favors the secular. The tendency toward state power increasing at the expense of the church had previously begun, with the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict and the 'Babylonian Captivity' as examples. The opportunity presented by the American peoples for the expansion of the faith was thought to give the church a great boost in power and prestige. However, Elliott proposes that this was not the case. In his view it did not benefit the church. He believes that the best and brightest became missionaries to America and the East, thereby depriving the church of its finest people. The power that flowed to Europe from America was to the crown and not the church. The Americas became a sink for the energies of the church, siphoning off its most capable personnel so that the church was unable to respond appropriately to the crisis of faith that presented itself as a result of the Encounter. By the same token, the secular powers gained by the ability to transport dissidents or others whose ideas and energies might oppose their authority or sap the country's vitality. This reinforced political stability within the various countries and the absolutism of monarchies, once the religious wars ended.(14)

The shift that maximized the significance of naval power and instituted the global Weltanshauung (world view) of the Europeans is also important because it accents the realm of trade and economics that had become one of the driving forces in European and world history by the time of the Encounter. According to McNeill, a "commercial transmutation" had started at about the time of the advent of the Current Era. This 'transmutation' began with the development of world trade and set up the foundations of capitalism. McNeill contends that the world is approaching the last stages of the 'transmutation' as it advances toward world government.(15) Perhaps the key factor in this is the development of interdependence and intercommunication. The Encounter was one step along the road of this transmutation. However, this step was one that was fraught with economic significance, because it added important segments to the evolution of the world system that we know today. Economic life and politics became intertwined and the facilitation of commerce was, and is, perceived to be in the best interest of the government, whatever its structure. Abbe Reynal called the Encounter a revolution in commerce and nations' power. The Americas provided the resources that shifted the European economy into a higher gear.(16)

The American silver and gold that poured into Spain and from there dispersed throughout Europe enabled Europe to take part in the world economy as never before. The Monetarist theory, currently in eclipse as too simplistic, attributes most of subsequent history to this glut of bullion from the 'New World'. However, it can be used as a partial explanation in conjunction with other factors. The enormous amounts of gold and silver that came to Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries affected the European economy and its history. The influx of bullion was responsible for the inflation of the Sixteenth Century and the dislocation that that caused. It has also been held responsible for the depression of the 1750s. On the positive side, it allowed Europe to afford the commodities it desired from the East. It was also a major source of European capital formation(17)

The Encounter also had other economic effects on Europe. It stimulated world trade. It created new business opportunities and new entrepreneurs with individual initiative. This capitalistic outlook, even if mercantile, was instrumental in the final demise of 'feudalism' in Europe as wealth in land gave way to commercial wealth. This wealth came from increased trade. The larger volume of trade meant increased profits and, thus stimulated industrial growth in an effort to meet the market demands of the Americas' growing population. Indeed, one of the greatest roles that the Americas played was to provide a market for European manufactures, as there was little call for them elsewhere.(18) Crosby has also argued that the Europeans created the world economy to benefit themselves.(19) Their preeminence in that world economy through most of the last four hundred years speaks volumes in support of that argument. Lastly, the wealth that was accumulated from this new world economy was used to finance the political, military, industrial and additional commercial ventures of the Europeans for centuries afterwards.

Most historians conclude that the intellectual ferment, both secular and religious, displayed in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and exemplified by the Wars of Religion and the great scientific advances of those times, had indigenous origins and that the Renaissance played the major role in precipitating them. It is obvious from the preceding that their view relies on a traditional cultural imperative of Euro-centrism which fails to recognize the full import of the Columbian Encounter's contribution to those intellectual changes. Nor have they been able to take into account the impact of the agricultural revolution that the introduction of American food crops wrought and, thus do not recognize this highly significant facet of the Encounter's impact. Moreover, the political changes that ultimately raised Europe to preeminence in the world got much of their impetus from the influence of the power which America brought to the Europeans, both in the form of money and trade and in the form of a perspective change from continental and land-based to global and oceanic. Economically the Encounter transformed an area of limited economic potential into the dominant area of the world economy. Were it not for the Columbian voyages and the Encounter with the Americas, Europe would have continued as a dismal, second-rate backwater in world commerce and power. It was the resources of the Americas that purchased the ascendancy of the European nations, allowed the spread of her sons and daughters around the world and transformed Europe itself in ways still only incompletely understood.

Notes

(2)Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New, 1492-1650. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970; pg. 7-8, 14, 29-30, 32, 39.
Crosby, Germs..., pg. 15.

(3)Elliott, pp. 40, 51-52.
Crosby, Germs..., pg. 16.

(4)McNeill, W. "American Food Crops in the Old World." In Seeds of Change. Herman J. Viola & Carolyn Merchant, eds. Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991; pp. 43-59.

(5)Crosby, Germs..., pp. 92, 149, 151,155-156.

(6)Crosby, Germs..., pp. 19, 92, 149-151, 155-156, 159.

(7)McNeill, pp. 43-59.

(8)Crosby, Germs..., pp. 92, 151, 157, 159-161.

(9)Ponting, Clive. A Green History of the World. pp. 98-100, 106.

(10)Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972, pp. 123-127, 137, 142, 145, 158.

(11)Boorstin, Daniel J. The Discoverers. NY: Random House, 1983, pp. 203-217
Crosby, A. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 41-69.

(12)Crosby, Germs..., pp. 185-187.

(13)Elliott, pp. 78, 84, 88, 91-93.

(14)Ibid., pp. 78, 80-84.

(15)McNeill, W. The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View.

(16)Elliott, pg. 54.

(17)Ibid., pp. 54-56.
Parry, J. H. The Establishment of the European Hegemony, 1415-1715. NY: Harper & Row, 1966, pg. 65.

(18)Elliott, pp. 56, 62, 68.

(19)Crosby, Germs,..., pg. 18.