Tuesday, December 29, 2015

O the Future! How Can We Tell?

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.




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