Western Europe in the year of Agincourt and Ceuta, 1415, was as yet only reaching out to Madeira and the Azores, though the Canaries, closer to the- 23 -African coast, had been known for over half a century. By 1485 the second great Portuguese thrust under João II was under way, and Columbus had just proffered to that king his alternative westwards course to the Orient. In seventy years Iberia, building on the experience of voyagings from the Azores to the Bight of Benin, had become technologically equipped for the vaster achievement of girdling the globe. But the use of this technology for so unprecedented an enterprise not only called for organisational capacity, but depended also on a particular ideological or moral climate.

An adequate technology, and powers of organisation, were indeed available to other peoples: to the Arabs, whose shipping and navigation were certainly not inferior to those of Europeans and whose commerce extended from Sofala in Mozambique to Canton and beyond; to the Chinese themselves. Indeed, in the very month of the taking of Ceuta, the fourth expedition of Cheng Ho returned to China from the east coast of Africa. This was through seas long navigated, from known port to known port; but his fleets were numbered in tens or even scores of ships and thousands of men; some of the ships themselves, and their numbers, were certainly much larger than those of any armada of the King of Portugal, then or for three centuries thereafter. The objectives were part commercial and part diplomatic, showing the flag on a giant scale, demanding tribute. But there was no follow-up; after the seventh expedition in 1431–3 such activity abruptly stopped, perhaps because of Mongol pressures on the northern frontiers of the Ming Empire.^[79]

But Europe needed Asia far more than Asia needed Europe. Islam was ‘the unavoidable intermediary’, seemingly securely entrenched with no compelling motive to attempt improving on a most profitable middleman's position; and China, despite the dramatic excursions under the Ming dynasty, returned into her basically self-sufficing self. Myron Gilmore suggests that one factor, and a main factor, in the European seizure of the initiative was that ‘the attitude of the European world’ to those beyond its horizons was never ‘completely closed and assured’; and the openness of European society allowed for a fruitful co-operation of individual and state enterprise. It seems at all events that the great intellectual—and emotional—opening of the Renaissance coincided in time with a phase of relative stasis, if not of decline, in the Arab world, which had lost some of the outgoing energy of its earlier centuries, and with one of retreat to the home base in the Chinese.^[80]

The mental ardours of the age of Humanism, its desires ‘Still climing after knowledge infinite, And alwaies mooving as the restles Spheares’,^[81] must surely have played their part. But neither intellectual curiosity nor fervour to spread the Faith would have been likely to secure the necessary backing without the auri sacra fames, the cursed lust for gold which could compel the hearts of men not only to infamy but also to deeds of high courage. In an age when ‘the amassing of a hoard of bullion’ was among ‘the prime objects of statecraft’, any state able to do so was bound to further the discovery and exploitation of new sources- 24 -of wealth, whether in the precious metals themselves or in commodities which commanded high prices, such as pepper and the other spices.^[82] This demanded capital and organisation on a scale not available in Portugal and Castile, except for the preliminary exploring voyages, and then often with difficulty. For major exploitation, outside sources of capital increasingly became necessary: Genoese, Florentines, the great German houses such as the Fuggers and the Welsers, took their shares:

Nor would it be realistic to think that non-material factors, except sometimes a desire for adventure or escape, had much weight for the rank and file who manned the ships. For the officer class, duty to one's Prince was initially probably as important a motive as any; later, fame and El Dorado were always around the next peninsula. A few young gentlemen joined up to see the world and share the glory—Pigafetta, sailing with Magellan, is an outstanding exemplar. But the ordinary seaman, who shipped glory with every wave, would doubtless ‘have preferred a coat For keeping off the spray’.^[84] For the most part, unless compelled, they seem simply to have signed on for the job, accepting risks philosophically: it was just an extension of an already tough, hard, life. These, the unknown crews, faced dirt, rough living, poor food, disease, danger, in conditions to which the only modern parallel would be life in a concentration camp.^[85]

Seventy years after Ceuta, the two options had been delineated: Columbus's way, west across the Atlantic; da Gama's, south around Africa. A century after Ceuta, both these great avenues of traffic and endeavour were well entered into a vigorous life, though it was already sure that Columbus had found not Cipangu and Cathay but a New World. Between the Old World and the New, between the furthest thin-drawn tentacles of European penetration east and west, lay the last and greatest unknown quantity, the as yet unchristened Pacific.