Every year about this time, it’s the custom of news analysts
to look back at events for the year, and come up with predictions, based on
their analyses, of what will happen in the year to come. This used to be the job of newspaper writers
and TV commentators, but now anyone can do it---and we do, on Facebook and
Twitter or blogs like this one. Maybe
the world as we know it will end next year, burned to a crisp by climate
change, or the human population decimated by a new plague or Isis or some other
group. Maybe we’ll just go along, and
some of us might even be royally bored—or not.
Humans try
everything to be able to predict the future, whether visiting astrologers,
reading the entrails of some unfortunate sacrificial beast, or consulting all
sorts of databases, polls and statistics.
In any event, it’s a crapshoot.
We can’t
even see a worldview, whatever our world might be, because we are right in the
middle of things, and are bound by the limitations of our own intelligence and
five senses. Let me give you an example
of wrong possibilities, conclusions come to by perfectly sound observations:
those of a German philosopher, physician and cartographer named Hironymus
Münzer, who made a very long journey around Western Europe in 1494-1495, and
wrote about it.
 |
| Münzer |
For a
biography of Münzer, there is a nice web summary at Project Gutenberg. I did a translation of the Spanish part of
the journey into English, and in 2010-2011 in a project called “Münzerama,” Myself
and two of my former graduate students followed about 2/3 of Münzer’s Spanish/Portuguese
route, chronicling what still remained from the sites he described.
 |
| Maximilian |
Our trip
was easy: a car, hotels, good roads, restaurants. Münzer’s journey was a real slog: mostly on
horseback, along narrow often rocky trails for the most part, staying sometimes
in castles, sometimes in primitive inns or even private dwellings. In a time of fortified cities and a sometimes
chaotic countryside, the only way to make the trip was to have good connections
to facilitate things. Münzer and his
companions evidently did: it’s most possible that he had tacit sponsorship of
the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian, then looking both for connections to overseas
trade being explored both in Spain and Portugal, and for matches for his two
children, Philip and Margaret. Münzer’s cartographic skills, published within
Hermann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle
in 1493 certainly gave him credibility.
 |
| João II |
Münzer met
with João II, King of Portugal in Évora, and had an audience with The Catholic
Kings, Fernando and Isabel at a monastery near present-day Madrid. He apparently discussed cartography and trade
with the former, who sent him on to Lisbon with introductions so that he could
personally report on Portuguese maritime trade.
Visiting the Catholic Kings gave him time to observe young prince Juan,
heir to the united Spanish Kingdom, and his sister Juana. Both of these children would marry the two
Hapsburg offspring in due course.
 |
| Fernando and Isabel, Juan and Juana + The Virgin and Dominican Saints |
But there
was so much more. 1494-5 was a watershed
time to be on the Iberian Peninsula, for two years earlier, the Catholic kings
had conquered the last Muslim possession in Spain, the Kingdom of Granada, thus
ending 700 years of Christian/Muslim conflict. This, together with their marriage,
joining Castile and Aragon, effectively reduced rival kingdoms on the peninsula
from five to three, and Navarre would be absorbed in 1512. Also in 1492,
Fernando and Isabel expelled their kingdoms’ Jews, and the royally sponsored
Inquisition was busily rooting out false converts (Münzer saw a few of these
unlucky ones in prison in Zaragoza). He
also witnessed the dispersal of the indigenous population (the Guanches) of the recently conquered
Canary Islands, and saw many of them being auctioned off into slavery in the
city of Valencia.
He saw
further signs of the Catholicization of Spain in many places, with the recent
conversion of most remaining mosques into churches, and the vigorous
establishment of many Franciscan and Dominican monasteries.. He actually attended a functioning Mosque in
Granada, which was soon to be closed as well.
Even more impressive was a visit to the Alhambra, former palace of the
Nasrid Kings, which still retained much of its fabled richness.
 |
| Banana |
Other
exotic experiences awaited: a crocodile skin and giant tortoise shell relics at the Monastery of Guadalupe, other exotic animals in private zoos, a stay
with a Muslim family and a chance to witness a Muslim wedding ceremony at Arcos
de Jalón, a visit to a glass factory and another to Lisbon’s Great Synagogue
(Portugal had not yet expelled its Jews), and his very first banana (that he
mistakenly called a prickly pear).
Münzer makes no mention of Columbus’s first voyage (the second voyage
was then in progress), but when Columbus had returned from his initial journey
in 1493, he was convinced that had reached the easternmost outposts of Asia.
The overall
impression carried back by the Northern visitor was that the realm governed by
the Catholic Kings, uniting to Spanish Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile with
Granada, along with a prosperous Portugal had ushered in a golden age of
Iberian peace and stability, with grand economic possibilities. This was radically different than the
situation a quarter of a century earlier, when Bohemian knight, Václav Šašek z
Birkova, and Gabriel Tetzel of Nuremberg visited the peninsula; at that time
things were far more unpredictable and dangerous, for Granada was still
separate, and civil wars were raging in both Castile and Aragon.
So in 1494-5, stability was the
breaking out all over. King João of
Portugal, having lost his son and heir Afonso in a hunting accident, had
confidence that his natural son Jorge could take on the succession. Fernando and Isabel were consolidating their
unified realms, not only by their relentless policies of religious, if not
ethnic cleansing, but in their further integration into the European mainstream
via marriage alliances with the family of the Holy Roman Emperor. The furthering of international trade with
Africa and Asia via maritime exploration put both Iberian countries on the road
to opening vast new markets. The report
to Emperor Maximilian must have been rosy indeed. Everything seemed organized and set.
But the Great Oracle was mum about
what happened next. Before the 16th
century began many of these bets were off!
The Spanish-Hapsburg marriages did happen in 1496 and 1497, but Prince
Juan died soon after, and the Spanish throne would pass to the Hapsburgs,
through the marriage of Juana (the crazy) and Philip (the handsome) and their
son Carlos, the future King of Spain and Holy Roman emperor all at once.. João would soon die too, and his natural son
Jorge would never rule, instead the throne passed to his cousin Manoel, who
married in succession two of Fernando and Isabel’s other daughters. As a condition of this alliance, the Jews of
Portugal were expelled too. Columbus, of
course, soon figured out that he had claimed a new continent, rather than an
old port for Spain, and Portugal would get a part of it too, as well as
sizeable markets in Africa and Asia. But
in the end, it was the Hapsburgs who really triumphed. By the time that Fernando and Isabel’s
grandson Charles took the combined Spanish/Hapsburg throne, he would rule over
a good piece of the known world, both old and new. Go figure!
So for 2016, I’m just going with
the flow, whether I like it or not.
Sources:
A good summary of Münzer's career can be found at: http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/hieronymus_münzer
I've translated Münzer's Spanish and Portuguese portion of the trip (from a Spanish translation, not the original Latin) Look for it soon at: http://art.utsa.edu/faculty/judith_sobre#additional
Our Münzer project of 2010-2011 can be found at http://munzerama.blogspot.com.
James Firth has produced a book on Münzer and his discussions between himself and João II on African explorations in Portugal entitled Doctor Hieronymus Münzer's Itinerary (1494-1495) and the Discovery of Guinea; it was self-published in 2014 and is available at Amazon.com.
