The Discovery of the New World and the End of the Old

Preliminary Thoughts

American textbooks often carry the history of Europe up into the Renaissance, and then plunge into the Age of Discovery and Exploration as a preliminary to the study of United States history. As a result, we are much more aware of the effect of the Discovery of the New World, as the Europeans conceived it, upon the Americas, than the effect that the opening up of new lands had upon Europe. If we were more aware of the changes that the discoveries caused, we might be willing to concede that these discoveries were a basic factor in the end of the Middle Ages.


Gold and Silver

Columbus' voyage of 1492 was intended to discover a shorter all-water route to China and India than the route around Africa that was being opened up by the Portuguese, and the aim of both was to be able to by-pass the Muslim and Byzantine middle-men through which the spices of the East reached Western Europe. Although Columbus died still believing that he had opened up the Indies to Spain -- which is why Europeans called the native inhabitants of the Americas "Indians" -- most realized that a great land mass lay between them and the spices of the East, and also began to realize that there were sources of gold and silver there.

The natives had amassed a great deal of golden treasure over the centuries, and the first flood of "new" gold into Spain and Europe came as a result of the conquistadores [Spanish for "conquerors] seizing this accumulation. With the conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro, new gold began to be mined; and, with the discovery of the silver veins of San Luis Potosi in Mexico, vast amounts of silver began to appear. The European explorers began to search primarily for gold, for the "Land of El Dorado," a fabled land where, after the king bathed each morning, his subjects would cover his body with gold dust until he shone like the sun. Since the time of the conquistadores, a series of new sources of gold strikes have been made -- bonanzas, from the Spanish word meaning "prosperity" -- Colorado, California, South Africa, the Canadian Klondike. Well over 95% of the gold in use today was mined since 1500.

Gold is like anything else: the more there is of it, the less valuable it is. And so, as gold and silver arrived in Europe from the Americas, the price of everything began to rise steadily. Just to explain why that happened, consider that if a hundred people have one ounce of gold apiece, they all want to buy wheat, and there are only one hundred bushels of wheat for sale, the price of a bushel of wheat will be one ounce of gold. If those same people find a pirate treasure and divide it up so that each of them has two ounces of gold, but there is still only one hundred bushels of wheat for sale, the price of a bushel of wheat will be two ounces of gold. You can look at it another way. When the amount of gold (or any other medium of exchange) in circulation increases, the value of salaries, rents, and debts drops. There is a simple equation for all of this:

Price = the amount of currency divided by the supply of goods

The steady increase of gold and silver in Europe brought about what historians call The Price Revolution. People on fixed incomes were impoverished; it became more advantageous to owe money than to be solvent. Money lost value every day it stayed in one's pocket, so the only way to prosper was through trade. Nobles could no longer depend on their income from the rents paid by their tenants, and began to use their lands to raise sheep for wool and meat, or to produce other goods for sale. Land was no longer the basis of wealth, and the land-owners no longer the dominant economic class.



Food

We have said that most of the population of medieval Europe went to bed hungry and that their diet was unbalanced and boring at best. The new plants that were introduced from the New World changed that situation. A medieval peasant could expect to harvest about 600 pounds of wheat from an acre of land. It took a long time for the Europeans to get used to these new plants, but when that same acre of land was planted in potatoes -- native to South America -- the peasant could plan on harvesting 50,000 pounds of food. It was even harder for the Europeans to get adjusted to corn -- eating it made many of them sick, and they weren't accustomed to planting row crops in their fields -- but they could harvest 1800 pounds of corn on the acre that had given them only 600 pounds of wheat. Some Europeans, such as the Italians, eventually became used to corn, but it was used primarily as food for chicken, geese and other fowl, and for pigs. If the introduction of potatoes produced a caloric revolution, the acceptance of corn brought about a protein revolution. Since the land of Europe could now produce more food, the relative price of food began to drop. The productive capacity of the land had caught up with the population, and the average European could now eat more. The Europeans, in turn, introduced corn into Africa and sweet potatoes in China, where these new foods also changed conditions dramatically

He could also eat better, since a number of lesser food crops arrived from the New World that made possible a more varied diet. The French imported tomatoes, which they called "apples of love," and used them for ornamental purposes in their flower gardens. They thought that they were poisonous, which, in fact, many of the early varieties were. In time, however, the poison-producing capacities of the tomato were bred out, and the tomato became one of the most popular additions to European cuisine. There were many other food plants brought back to Europe -- particularly many varieties of squash, beans, pumpkins, peppers -- that introduced a welcome variety, as well as a wide range of vitamins, into the European diet. The health of the average European began to improve, and his height, weight, and strength increased. As this occurred, his resistance to disease grew.

Drugs

We have noted that medieval Europeans displayed violent swings of emotions. Part of this may have been simply a difference in cultural norms, but it should be noted that the men and women of medieval Europe had relatively little personal control over their states of mind. Like most other parts of the world, the Europeans had an effective depressant in alcohol, but, unlike any other of the world's civilization, they did not have an alkaloid stimulant. These were quickly important from their native lands, and their use swiftly spread. The first was cocoa from the Aztecs, a rich source of caffeine, and Europeans began their long love affair with chocolate.



I suppose that the basic question is why you are so much wealthier than they. The usual answer is that you are enjoying the fruits of global commerce and the Industrial Revolution. But neither of those things would have occurred without the discovery and exploitation of the New World. That's one reason to consider that 1492 is as good a date as any and better than most to mark the end of the middle ages. It also marked the beginning of a 500-year boom economy for Europeans and their descendants, but that's another matter.


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