[AUDIO EN BLANCO] Hello. My name is Diego Sola. I’m a researcher at the University of Barcelona’s Department of Modern History, and we’re at the Museu d’Història de Catalunya in the historical Palau de Mar building for this segment on the subject of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic World. Seville, 16th century. The scruffy port on the Guadalquivir is alive with people, goods, dreams and desires. Hundreds of ships sail from here each year to Andalusian ports on the Atlantic to transfer their cargo to more robust vessels, which in around 3 months cross the great ocean to arrive in America. From Seville to the corresponding destination port on the other side of the Atlantic, in Veracruz, the first truly global economic network was made. The first global network for not only goods but also people, ideas and, ultimately, cultural exchange. At the end of the 16th century, the route from Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico, joined this global network to the Pacific and the luxurious, expensive Asian products that travelled over on the so-called Manila Galleons. The Mediterranean, a complex character that had already outgrown itself, according to historian Fernand Braudel, now burst at the seams and was lording it with the great oceans. But it all started here, on this side of the pond, in the Mare Nostrum. What is it that drove the men of the Mediterranean to embark on these ocean adventures? Was it not enough to be lords of the sea that the Romans had united in antiquity? Was Europe not sufficiently rich, prosperous and advanced that they had to venture to unknown and possibly dangerous territories? Nothing was as simple as it seemed. Nobody leaps into the unknown or gambles their life if not for a very good reason. At the end of the middle ages, in 1453, the Byzantine Empire was in agony, beset and besieged by the Ottoman Turks who had for centuries been conquering the Near East. Constantinople, the old Roman capital of the East, fell into their hands, and Europe lost secure access to East Asia and her familiar and sought after products, such as silk, porcelain and spices. The Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, told of how Cathay [China], where he lived some 20 years, was so immense and rich that no more prosperous country existed on Earth. For a long time, the Silk Road, a trail of more than 8000 kilometres joining the Mediterranean in the West with Asia in the East, had been safe for trade caravans to cross, through deserts and fertile valleys, in search of the most valuable products. But this came to an end with the Byzantine collapse. The emergence of the European middle class, straddling the middle ages and modern era, increased demand for these products. Outright Ottoman rule in the Eastern Mediterranean complicated everything. And it was no longer so easy to get gold from Sudan with which to pay trade brokers along the Oriental route. At that time, the men and women of the Mediterranean thought of Africa as the land of gold. Abraham Cresques, a Jewish cartographer from Mallorca, had written that behind the mountains in the northern Sahara desert, lived the richest king, Mussa Mali, with an abundance of gold. Even so, both gold and silk seems to have vanished from the Mediterranean market. A solution had to be found. At some point, the perception of the Mediterranean sea as the exclusive property of the Venetians, Genovese, Catalans, Christians and so on, able to safely navigate its waters, changed. This insecurity, together with advancements in sailing and the astronomical instruments essential for navigation on the high seas, led the monarchies, especially those of Castile and Portugal, to propose an alternative route for travel to the Orient. The Portuguese made it to India, becoming masters of the east Atlantic, by following the African coast and entering by the Indian Ocean. The Spanish wanted to reach Asia by the West, but along the way Christopher Columbus unexpectedly ran into another continent, which was soon named America. The Mediterranean world had tumbled its own walls and created a network over the three oceans. The Atlantic, in particular, became an extension of European civilisation. In America, the Spanish and Portuguese created societies in the image of the Iberian civilisations. New Europes were constructed in the so-called West Indies. Have a look at this image. It’s the coronation of the Virgin in a Peruvian church. Would you have imagined that it was painted by an Italian master, Bernardo Bitti, who trained in Mannerist and Baroque painting in Italy in the late 16th century and then worked in Peru? Mediterranean Christian art was no longer sealed in, it had crossed the ocean to open up a new world. Emerging from Italy, it was the first art to have a global presence. In the 17th and 18th centuries, rival nations to Iberia, such as England, France and the Netherlands, took control of their own Americas, in the north of the continent, also recreating the social, cultural and economic systems of their countries. This was the beginning of the toughest rivalry and competition. Until then, Mediterranean ports such as the one we are at now, in Barcelona, remained disconnected from Atlantic adventure, but measures of liberalisation in the 18th century, as established in Spain by Charles III in the 1770s, opened the docks of these ports to trade with the New World, ushering in an era of great enterprise during which many ventured to the Americas, leaving behind the horizon you see at my back, across a sea more generous than wild, more ally than caprice, the Mediterranean, which had taught them to sail, and then saw them leave their families to seek their fortune in the first global economy. [AUDIO EN BLANCO] [AUDIO EN BLANCO] [AUDIO EN BLANCO]
