Europe was still under the shadow of the Black Death when Prince Henry launched the first modest voyages which were to lead, in almost exactly a hundred years, to the first girdling of the earth by men. That plague had carried off one-quarter, or more, of the population of western Europe;^[44] and recovery from the- 11 -wrath of God, or the bite of the flea, was inhibited by the wars of men. Whatever factors lay behind the sudden, if thin-spread, European expansion far beyond the ends of their then-known earth, population pressure was not one of them.

The political leit-motiv of most of the fifteenth century in Europe, and of most of its individual countries, was disunity and internecine war; and this in face of the continuing advance of the Ottoman Turks, who even before the century opened held much of the Balkan peninsula, and during it took not only Constantinople but also the rest of the Balkans (up to and including Bosnia), Greece and the Ionian Islands, and even—briefly (1480–1)—Otranto in Italy itself. Not even this manifest menace could impose any but the most local and temporary alliances within Christendom; the years from 1402 until 1454, when ‘a concerted Italian effort’ might have saved Europe from the Turks, ‘were consumed by three of the wealthiest and most advanced communities in the world [Florence, Milan, Venice] in a contest which had no significance for civilization.’^[45] Pius II died at Ancona waiting vainly for Venetian galleys to take him on his crusade, and the quick recovery of Otranto owed more to the unexpected death of Mohammad II than to the modest local league formed to regain it.^[46]

In the Holy Roman Empire, the burning of Jan Huss in 1415 was followed by twenty years of Hussite Wars; and the long reign of Frederick III (1440–93) was a time of internal weakness and constant encroachment by border powers—Burgundy, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary—only relieved, towards the end, by the marriage which brought most of the Burgundian territories to his son Maximilian, and paved the way to the unwieldy but giant domain of Charles V. In 1415, again, England, flushed with the delusive spirit of the Agincourt song, was fatally embarked on the losing game of the conquest of France; and when that dream was wrecked she plunged into her own thirty years' war, which by a bitter irony has received the chivalric, almost idyllic, title of the Wars of the Roses. Long after the end of the Hundred Years' War some of the finest provinces of France—Normandy, Gascony, the Ile de France itself—were still devastated, and some tracts had almost reverted to wilderness.^[47] The recovery under Louis XI was slow and painful, impeded at first by the ambitions and arrogance of Charles the Bold of Burgundy; and the strength so carefully and unscrupulously built up by Louis was soon perverted by Charles VIII to the adventurism of the Italian wars. In Iberia, both Aragon and Castile were more than normally wracked by endemic dynastic and feudal conflicts until the Union of their Crowns in 1474. Only Portugal seems to have escaped internal war, but for a brief and slight affair in 1448–9. It is perhaps only as a chance result of dynastic accidents that the Crown of Castile was united with that of Aragon rather than of Portugal.

Nevertheless, beneath this surface agitated by the showy or bloody futilities of princes and dukes and bishops, there ran the continuities of commerce, expanding into new factors potent to shape a new world. The fall of Constantinople was very far from closing down trade with Asia—there was another Islamic power, that of the Mameluke Sultans, in Egypt until 1517—but despite some- 12 -‘shrinkage of the Mediterranean trade system’,^[48] Venice and Genoa still sent their great ships to northern ports, and these fleets had a multiplier effect:

The capitalism of the age may have been young, but it was already far from primitive, nor was it confined to commodity trading. While most manufacture was literally done by hand, the great textile industries of Flanders and Italy had long been in the hands of moneyed entrepreneurs who put out piece-work to artisans working in their homes, a form of organisation which, on the scale of the times, might be considered mass production. But a few industries demanded a more centralised plant: a great Venetian ship, for example, could be over 1000 tons and was a most complicated machine, and the state shipyards of Venice called for a large specialised labour force. New trades such as printing and gunfounding, the extension of mining to deeper levels, called for organisational as well as technological innovation.^[50] The Fuggers began as simple cloth merchants and graduated to finance; the second Jacob Fugger (1459–1525) managed an economically virtuous circle of lending to the Habsburgs on the security of mining royalties, by which he secured the mines themselves and more money for more lending.…^[51] Monopolies, corners and cartels were already incipient. As the bankers for Charles V's wars, the Fuggers were the power behind the Imperial throne; almost, the first multinationals.

‘Of all the economies, [Europe's] was the most imbued with monetary techniques utilizing both hard cash and other media of exchange’, and hence already in the fifteenth century Europe had ‘established herself at the center of a vast but weak world economy.’^[52] This early lead in money power certainly contributed not only to the organisation of the Discoveries in the specific sense of financial backing, but to the whole climate which impelled to them. All actions had their reflex; gold made more wars possible, more wars bred the need for more gold. The great work of the latter part of the century in England, France, and Spain was the reduction to order of a turbulent nobility. The cost of guns was a factor limiting the attractive prospects of war for private ends; the bigger the ruler, the better the credit for guns and men. Bankers and monarchs were natural allies.

From about 1435, then, we have in the west four relatively well-knit and increasingly ‘national’ states; and if England was as yet relatively weak and isolated, and France seduced into the Italian adventure, Portugal and Spain, poised on the very edge of the Westerly-Trade Wind circulation, of vital- 13 -importance to the development of ocean routes, were well placed to initiate the expansion.^[53]

We must however distinguish: Castile rather than Spain, for Aragon was still deeply involved in the western Mediterranean, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was still under her Crown. Indeed, the American Conquista was almost exclusively a Castilian prerogative, and until 1596 this restriction had the force of (often breached) law.^[54] Portugal, as we have seen, had enjoyed a full century of domestic peace after the national rising (1383–5) which had brought the bastard but able House of Aviz to the throne, a rising of the gentry and of the towns and the arraia-miuda or menu peuple rather than of the nobles, who feared to ‘affront so great a Lord as the King of Castile.’^[55] Crown and people were thus well in accord, and the resulting dynamism—‘Bliss was it in that dawn …’—which still thrills through the pages of Fernão Lopes's Crónica de D. João I, coupled with the very unusual team spirit of Prince Henry and his brothers, the grandsons of John of Gaunt, provided a very encouraging milieu for the grand design. And one reason for Portuguese priority on the real road to the Indies may be that suggested by Livermore: the discovery had to wait until the maritime technology was ready, but this once given,

As the sequel will show, the Portuguese had taken the measure of Ptolemy to a much greater degree than had the Spaniards.