Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery by Bernard Lewis

Author:Bernard Lewis [Lewis, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1996-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Discovery

IN THE LATE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, when the reconquest was well under way but far from completed, Ramon Llull, one of the principal theoreticians of the Christian war against Islam, remarked that when the recovery of Spain was completed, it would be necessary to carry the war beyond the Strait of Gibraltar to the other side.1 He was not alone in this opinion. Similar perceptions and ambitions obviously inspired many of the Spanish and Portuguese rulers and commanders, not only during but also after the liberation of their national soil. Similar thoughts obviously occurred to the Muscovites, who, after freeing Moscow from Tatar rule, pursued their fallen masters into Tartary.

The same underlying assumption inspired all these policies: that by driving the Muslims out of Iberia and Russia, they had won a great battle, but they had not won the war, and that the long, drawn-out struggle between Christianity and Islam continued, on a vaster scale. Both Spaniards and Portuguese saw themselves as continuing the same struggle against the same enemy, and it was natural that when they encountered Muslims as far away as Ceylon and the Philippines, they called them Moors.

There was, of course, another, more practical, aspect to this new phase of what Gibbon called “the great debate.” When the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, arriving in India a few years after Columbus had sailed, remarked that he had come “in search of Christians and spices,” he was expressing perfectly this double aspect of the voyages of discovery. On the one hand, it was a strategic move in a religious war of global dimensions; on the other, it was a commercial ploy designed to cut out the middleman and go straight to the producer.

This was in a sense a conflict that antedated both Islam and Christendom. In the days when the rival empires of East and West were Rome and Persia and when Persia lay astride Rome’s routes to the East, the Romans tried to establish direct commercial links with China, the source of silk; with India, of hardwoods; with Southeast Asia, of spices. They did this by exploring the two outer routes that lay beyond both sets of imperial frontiers, venturing northward into the Eurasian steppes and southward into the Arabian Peninsula. The Christianization of Rome’s successors and the Islamization of the Eastern empire added a religious, and therefore also a new military and strategic, dimension to this ancient rivalry.

There were good, practical reasons for the victors in the reconquests, at both ends of Europe, to pursue their retreating enemies. There was the obvious tactical need to prevent them from regrouping and to forestall a counterattack. There was the growing desire to break free from the Muslim pincers that had gripped Europe from east and south since the high Middle Ages. Beyond these there was the more ambitious aim, by no means new, to outflank the power of Islam by finding co-religionists, business partners, and perhaps even allies in the remote lands beyond the eastern and southern limits of Muslim power.

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