Timothy Foote - 1492. In Columbus Time

There they all are, just as they were in the engravings of our schoolbooks. The natives clad mainly in innocence. The Spaniards with their swords and pointy helmets. The Great Discoverer himself, roasting in dark doublet and hose, usually on his knees in the sand, head raised to heaven. And beside them, the shape of a great cross, which, in perspective, looms higher than the distant masts of the three small ships offshore.

For Americans, it was a familiar image. Christopher Columbus , we knew, never put foot or keel on the continent of North America. He claimed what he called the Indies not for any collection of future Protestants from Northern Europe but for Catholic Spain in the fifteenth century. But we were happy to see the man as a hero and the moment on the beach in 1492 as the start of something that eventually produced the best hope yet for liberty and self-government.

The landing led to much else, of course. A cartoon, for instance, shows passengers on an antique vessel admiring a vast, rolling landscape. I came here seeking religious freedom, one says, but now I think maybe Ill go into real estate. Just in recent years, the landing has stirred surprise and outrage both at Columbus (he was, it appears, a slave trader with little concern for the environment) and at the exploitation following his arrival, as Spanish adventurers claimed the land and enslaved its people.

Even in the context of history, some shock is in order. If we are surprised, though, it may be because, apart from a Borgia orgy or two, we tend to think of the period that launched Columbus to the New World as a golden age: bold thrusts across uncharted seas; forays back in time to revive the lost learning of Rome and Greece; and that sunburst of artistic genius never since equaled. It was show-time and go-time for humanity - in short, the end of the Middle Age s and the dawn of Western science, the dazzling moment when the modern world was born.

Modernity was a long way off, though, and human nature, then as now, was unreliable. Despite all the expenditure of intellectual energy and egg tempera, Western Europe from 1450 to 1506, roughly Columbus lifetime, was a period breathtakingly different from ours. Among other things - and this we tend to forget - it was a time when people believed so deeply that the body is but a sleeve of flesh containing an immortal soul that, in good faith, they could see other men and women tortured to save their souls. It was a time so precarious that any rise in population was taken as a sign of prosperity. It was also a time of much terror, war, pestilence, famine, slavery, religious persecution, and, most emphatically, not one to encourage gentleness or ecological concern.

During Columbus lifetime, his eventual sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella , united the kingdoms of Aragon (his) and Castile (hers), and, with startling religious and secular ferocity turned Spain, with a population of under 10 million, into a nation.

The great event of the year 1492 was not Columbus sailing but the Spanish victory in Granada, returning the last portion of Spanish soil in Moorish hands. That same year, the Spanish Inquisition issued an ultimatum to all Spanish Jews: Convert to Christianity or leave the country in four months. A major exodus to North Africa occurred in August 1492, the month when the Nina , the Pinta , and the Santa Maria hoisted sail and headed west into the stream of history.

The long boot of Italy, where the Renaissance was born, consisted of five principal parts: the Kingdom of Naples , the Republic of Florence (dominated by the Medici family ), the Duchy of Milan , the Papal States , which waxed and waned according to churchly ambition, and the Republic of Venice . Only Venice was a great power, a sprawling city-state that stretched for miles west and north from the Adriatic. The parts of Italy constantly were fighting with one another and were later being fought over by Spain and France in combinations and alliances that shifted, sometimes from month to month, making carnage constant. And all this time, Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote of the end of the fifteenth century and after, the monarchs of the West year by year became more and more accustomed to a colossal political card game in which the stakes were this or that province of Italy.

Other Italian cities, nominally republics, had given themselves into the hands of despots, benevolent and otherwise, to insure a defense against roving bands of soldiers and to maintain some kind of order within their gates. Venice alone remained a real republic, run by an austere and farsighted oligarchy, with overseas possessions, such as the island of Cyprus. The city served as a trading center for the Mediterranean world as far as the Black Sea, and her fleet was a bulwark against the encroaching Ottoman Turks . Venice was renowned for her courtesans. She had a retirement fund and pension system for domestic servants. She created the worlds most skilled diplomatic corps. Her espionage service was the envy of the world. It can find out what the fish are doing and also about the fleet which Spain is preparing in her ports, one sultan wrote an agent in Seville.

In 1453, when Columbus was not yet two years old, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II sent a shudder through Venice and all Christendom by taking Constantinople , center of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantine Empire . In those days, if a city resisted, it was official policy, often not followed, to kill the men and sell the women and children into slavery. They killed Emperor Constantine in battle and converted the basilica of Santa Sophia into a mosque. Two years later, they took Athens and converted the Acropolis into a mosque. The threat from Islam did not end until 1683, outside the gates of Vienna.

Like the city-states of Italy, the courts of fifteenth-century Europe, famous for splendor and squalor, were more medieval than modern. Think of nobles and ladies arrayed in gorgeous, colored costumes that trailed in the mud or swept among the rushes on the floor of the great hall where dogs gnawed bones and defecated. Baths were rare by modern standards, perfume prevalent. You brought your own knife to the table, used it to cut off what you would eat, which was deposited on a slab of hardtack bread, known as a trencher - whence the expression a good trencherman. Basically you ate with your hands. (Even in the sixteenth century, people ate with their hands. The great essayist Michel de Montaigne noted glumly that in his haste at meals he sometimes bit his fingers.)

There were new codes of manners (dont scratch yourself or pick your teeth at table) and how-to books (how to give a joust). Melees mock war between mounted knights caused so many injuries that the practice soon would be phased out. War never went out of style, but it was changing with the advent of guns and explosives. Meanwhile, one measure of how wide a road had to be was the length of a knights lance if he rode with it sideways across the saddle.

Kingdoms were becoming nation-states or absolute monarchies, enlisting or extorting financial help from wealthy cities and merchants, raising forces to make war on rival countries and to strengthen the crown by putting down brigandage and local disorders. The cumulative effect of violence on common people, who suffered most from war, hardly can be imagined. Much of the fighting was done by groups of undisciplined men who fought for hire or for booty. In Italy, they were led by condottieri, freelance commanders who were a law unto themselves. One of the most feared, Bartolomeo Colleoni , still throws a chill into tourists who run across his grim likeness, a huge equestrian statue by Andrea del Verrocchio that stands in a piazza in Venice.

If passing troops did not rape, burn, and pillage, they lived off the land, stripping it so thoroughly that military commanders understood an army could never retreat along the same path it had advanced over. People huddled together, praying to be passed by, or ran for the nearest walled town. As guns and explosives were perfected, even walled cities were no guarantee of safety. And when the fighting eased, bands of ex-soldiers roamed the countryside, robbing and killing, sometimes taking possession of whole towns.