Sublime

The reconquest of Spain from Muslim rulers by the mid thirteenth century had encouraged the opening of a regular sea route between the Mediterranean and the ports of the English Channel and the North Sea. Lisbon, Seville and later Cadiz became the connecting links between the Atlantic and Mediterranean systems. Long before Columbus, Atlantic Iberia

While Spain at the western end of the Mediterranean was establishing its dominion in the Americas, the Ottomans had carved out, against much tougher opponents and on a far grander scale, a vast tri-continental empire, assembling in Busbecq’s awed phrase ‘the might of the whole East’.

within thirty years of Columbus’s first American landfall, the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés and his company of adventurers signalled that European intrusion into the Americas held a different significance from the piecemeal colonization of Europe’s oceanic periphery or Portugal’s hijacking of Asian trade.

The forward move on to the American continent was the work not of princes or capitalists at home in Europe, but of gold-hungry frontiersmen spurred on by the rapid exhaustion of the islands’ deposits. Without the short-lived gold rush on the Caribbean islands and the nearby Tierra Firme, the impetus towards the territorial conquest of the mainland

Unlike the great offshore land masses of Greenland and Newfoundland, these islands were hospitable, colonizable and readily accessible to seaborne invaders. They could be conquered piecemeal and quickly reinforced from Europe. Their indigenous populations lacked adequate military organization and were tragically vulnerable to Old World diseases.

The Portuguese kingdom was a small weak state perched on the Atlantic periphery. But by c.1400 its rulers and merchants were able to exploit its one magnificent asset, the harbour of Lisbon. Europe’s Atlantic coast had become an important trade route between the Mediterranean and North West Europe.

Perhaps any of the great Eurasian states would have enjoyed a similar success: Tamerlane would have made short work of Montezuma. It was the Occident’s good fortune that its geographical position – closest to the Caribbean antechamber of the pre-Columbian empires – gave it a decisive lead in the acquisition of new lands in the Outer World.