For thousands of years, people in the Americas and people in Europe had been isolated from each other. The few, almost random contacts between the two continents had left no lasting impact on either continent. That changed abruptly, beginning 500 years ago.
In the early 1400s, European seamen began to explore the Atlantic Ocean in earnest. Then, in 1492, a European explorer named Christopher Columbus bumped into America. His arrival in America was an accident. Nevertheless, it triggered a chain of events that would completely transform the Americas, Europe, and the rest of the world.
To understand why Europeans were exploring, and to understand what they did when they became aware of the American continents, we need to understand Europeans in the 1400s and 1500s. First and foremost, we need to examine what Europe and Europeans were like in the 1400s, on the eve of "discovery."
In the 1400s Europe was just coming to the end of an era called the MIDDLE AGES. Therefore, we call it MEDIEVAL EUROPE. That is the era which has become romanticized for its kings and queens, armored knights and crusaders. In reality, it was not a romantic time, especially in the 1300s and 1400s. Indeed, some historians have called that time period the "Age of Adversity," marked by religious insecurity and corruption, terrible plagues and long, destructive, civil wars that wreaked havoc on much of the continent and England. Even when Europeans started to pull out of that pitiful age, the basic experiences and traditions of the average person continued to reflect medieval life in many ways.
I. Let's begin, like I did with the American Indians, by looking at some basic information about the population and the economic methods that sustained people.
A. The POPULATION of Europe, in the 1400s, was large and growing. There were about as many people in Europe as there were in all of the Americas. Since Europe is a smaller than the Americas, more people lived in each square mile of Europe.
B. The European population was not healthy. So it is sometimes hard to believe that it was actually growing in the late 1400s. Europe was disease ridden. Death from disease was a fact of life. There are two basic reasons for that -- poor medicine and disastrous sanitation.
1. Europeans had DEADLY MEDICINE. By modern standards, Medieval European doctors were terrible. For example, they believed that many illnesses were caused by evil forces that invaded a person through his blood. Therefore, to heal a sick person, the doctors would BLEED him/her. If they could let out enough blood, the person would get well, they believed. Often they would put leeches on the person to suck out his blood. Sometimes the doctors would use less sanitary methods -- they might simply cut a wound in the person's arm and let it bleed. When a person did not get well from the bleeding, the doctors would decide that s/he needed to be bled some more.
a. As a result, many people did not die of disease; they died because the doctors accidentally bled them to death. The practice of BLEEDING people continued until the late 1700s!
(For example, the famous artist, Raphael, was bled to death by doctors after he had a heat stroke. Later, legend has it that George Washington was bled to death when he called his doctor for help with an abscessed tooth.)
b. Interestingly, most people were too poor to pay the doctors, so they did not get such medical "help." They were the fortunate ones.
2. Europe had much more serious problems than its doctors. After all, most people never saw a doctor. For all practical purposes, Medieval Europeans had NO SANITATION. They may have been the dirtiest people in the entire world at the time.
a. The rivers ran with the worst kind of sewage from towns and villages
along their banks. The wealthy, if their houses stood beside the river,
might even have toilets that overhung the river, so that they deposited
directly into the water. That same river was the primary water source
for everyone who lived along it. So, first you go to the bathroom in the
river, then you get a bucket of water from it!
b.
Towns and large villages had the worst problems. Town leaders sometimes
tried to keep things clean, but their city ordnances were crude and hopelessly
inadequate to the task. The sewage system of the typical town consisted
of a smelly trickle down the middle of the street. People relieved themselves
into chamber pots, which were regularly dumped into the street to drain
out to the river, lake, or ocean. When enough people did that, or when
it rained, the center of every street became a river of bacterial filth.
(1) To make matters worse, people worked in those streets, they bought and sold food in those streets, and children played in those streets!
(2) Probably, every once in a while, a lazy person simply dumped their chamber pot over the balcony into the streets below, or onto the heads of passers by.
(3) So, for all practical purposes, Europeans were living in their toilets.
c. Europeans were not good about personal cleanliness. They did not bathe until it was absolutely necessary -- when they began to stink so badly that their friends avoided them.
(Europeans were so used to the stench that a person had to become truly disgusting before his/her friends actually avoided him. A person might bathe once a month at best, once a year at worst. When they did bathe, it usually was by taking a dip in the river, without soap.)
(1) In the 1400s, Europeans appear to have become DIRTIER. They became convinced that bathing itself was unhealthy. Some believed that water might actually cause disease. They believed that water would give you a chill and the chill would lead to a cold, which would lead to pneumonia. Church officials believed that bathing led to nudity which led to promiscuous sex.
3.
Terrible medicine and unsanitary conditions led to a horrible MORTALITY
RATE. About 1/4 of all children died before their first birthday. About
½ of all children died before the age of 12!
(If a person could live past the age of 20, however, s/he probably had an extremely strong IMMUNE SYSTEM. His/her body could fight off diseases which would kill you and me in short order.)
4. Europe maintained its population largely because people had lots of babies. That, it seems, created a very unbalanced age distribution.
(a) About HALF of the population of Europe was probably LESS THAN 20 YEARS OLD! Most of those were children, many of them doomed to die shortly. There were always children underfoot. They were running amok EVERYWHERE!
(To get a good visual image of medieval towns, imagine narrow, cramped streets, puddled with smelly filth, filled with children, chasing each other and domestic animals, while a similar number of adults carry out a variety of simple chores.)
(b) Over the age of 20, adults' ages probably were distributed out all the way to 60 years old.
C. In spite of all those problems, the population of Europe was actually growing in the 1400s, particularly the late 1400s. Why? There were three main reasons:
1. A high birth rate.
2. An end to the worst plagues, such as the BLACK PLAGUE that had killed 1/4 to 1/3 of Europe in the 1300s.
3. Economic growth. Particularly improvements in agriculture.
II. A textbook can give you information on the birth rate and such things as the plagues. Let's look at the economy here. Europe's economy was universally based on AGRICULTURE. Europeans had been farming for thousands of years. They had developed more efficient farming methods than many Indian societies, and that allowed Europe to support a larger population. Still, farming was extremely inefficient by modern standards, so the vast majority of the population had to be farmers.
A. About 90% of Europeans were farmers, who lived in small villages in
the RURAL countryside. They produced enough food to feed themselves with maybe
10% left over. That went to feed the non farming population. Thus, only about
10% lived in towns and cities and worked at other activities besides farming.
B. Traditional historians are fond of pointing out that European TECHNOLOGY
was more "advanced" than the technology of Indians. That is partly
true and partly misleading. It seems fairly obvious, for example, that European
medical technology was less "advanced" than Indian medicine. So
we need to be more careful about how we describe technology. We can say that
European technology was more "efficient" than most Native Americans'
technology ONLY FOR CERTAIN ACTIVITIES:
1. Farming was one of those activities. By the luck of natural selection,
DRAFT ANIMALS had evolved in Europe, Asia, and Africa but not in the Americas.
Draft animals made many things possible for Europeans, particularly the
use of WHEELS and PLOWS.
2. Europe also had an advantage over Indians in METALS -- Europeans could
produce IRON TOOLS, and that made other kinds of construction possible.
3. Europeans had OCEANGOING SHIPS.
C. So Europeans were well fed, had lots of tools to build a larger variety of things, and could travel better. But European society was less efficient at producing long life and health, both physical and mental.
III. Better agriculture allowed Europeans to parallel the great agricultural civilizations of MESOAMERICA and sometimes go to greater extremes.
A. The key to everything was SURPLUS FOOD. Agriculture produced SURPLUS FOOD, and surplus food could be traded to SPECIALISTS for services. As a result, Europe had developed a HIGHLY SPECIALIZED DIVISION OF LABOR. Also, like the big Indian civilizations, European leaders were able to accumulate surplus food and other goods. As they accumulated such wealth, they were able to use it to buy armies and overpower their rivals. As a result, Europe had developed a complex social and political HIERARCHY.
B. To understand Europeans and their behavior, we need to look at those two things:
1. The different social groups in the HIERARCHY and how they operated
2. The different social groups in the DIVISION OF LABOR and how they operated.
Go To Medieval
Europe, Part 2: Hierarchy, Customs, and Social Groups
References:
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Copyright © 1999 Toren J.F. Hudson