Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture by Colin M. MacLachlan

Author:Colin M. MacLachlan [MacLachlan, Colin M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, Mexico, Spain & Portugal, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science
ISBN: 9780674286436
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

1492 in the European Context

On the Iberian Peninsula by the middle of the century, Castile could look forward to victory over the Moors: the Christians may not have an easy time of it, but the trend favored them and appeared irreversible. In the wider Mediterranean world, one could not be so sanguine. The decade of the 1450s appeared to represent an acceleration of the biblical clock. That year, Mahomet II succeeded his father as the Ottoman sultan. The Turks conquered much of the Balkans, as the aptly named terror of Europe squeezed the remnants of Rome’s eastern empire, and in 1453, the unthinkable occurred as Constantinople fell into Ottoman hands. The shock stunned the Christian world, which viewed the bastion city as able to withstand any siege. Aeneas Silvus Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) viewed the calamity as the “second death of Homer and a second destruction of Plato.” The humanists worried that western Europe would be thrown back into the dark ages.25 The westward advance of Islam caused near panic—whether Rome would be next became a question, if not as yet a certainty. In the face of the threat, Pope Pius II (1458–1464) in 1461 proposed what amounted to a policy option to consider the religious inclusion of Mahomet II. As a lure, the pope suggested that such a conversion would make Mahomet the greatest man of his time as well as the emperor of the Greeks and the east. Pius went on to list the things that Islam and Christianity had in common, mainly one God, agreement on the centrality of faith, an afterlife of reward or punishment, immortality of the soul, and the acceptance of the Old and New Testaments. With more than a touch of desperation, Pius appealed to reason in support of his view that the prohibition of theological discussion under Muslim law itself violated reason.26 What is interesting here is the idea that a fusion and creation of an Ottoman–Eastern Orthodox rite might be possible (at least in the mind of Pope Pius). It is not clear that the letter formally reached the sultan, although Ottoman spies might have reported its existence. Mahomet II in any case would have had little reason to entertain the idea as the victorious onslaught continued.

The unraveling of security and the realization that most of the world to the east posed a danger to Christianity made a seaborne escape into the Atlantic crucial as a way of circumventing the psychological and actual Muslim barrier that followed the fall of eastern Christendom. The Portuguese led the way as they inched down the coast of Africa hoping to break the Arab monopoly on the spice trade by a daring run around blocked land routes. Their plan included making contact with a semimythical Prester John, reputed to be the monarch of an isolated Christian kingdom somewhere in eastern Africa. Rumors of the existence of the Coptic kingdom filtered through Muslim sources. Columbus’s idea of sailing west to India fitted in with the grand scheme.

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