Note: This is about history, not the usual humor or political commentary. However, it is a field where I actually have professional credentials. So enjoy!
I have a friend who, like myself, writes the occasional essay. opinion piece or Political commentary. He is a legend in the US Marine Band community as the retired long-time guitarist with the Marine band, having played the White House far more times than I have fingers. He is also the author of one of the best moments in network TV history, (link posted at the end of this screed) that being the scene from The West Wing where the president (Martin Sheen) responds to a female “Dr Lauraesque” critic who flings scripture at him out of context. He responds with an almost verbatim recount of my friend’s letter, originally posted elsewhere. When the show aired, someone pointed out the original source of the material, and producer Aaron Sorkin, did the right thing and my friend got a sizeable check. He is also extremely detail oriented, so when I find even a small error in something he has written, you know I’m gonna tell him. Being me. I probably went into more detail than necessary but, part way in, I decided to make this an historical teaching moment for others too,
In a recent essay, my friend opined that the contact between the Americas and the rest of the world (which triggered what has come to be known as The Columbian Exchange) was probably the most significate event in recorded history. I agree with the concept but, like many of us do at times, he makes a supposition based on what many believe to be true, which is historically inaccurate. That statement in his concluding paragraph is that “Bananas, most beans, sugar cane, tobacco, cotton, and dozens of other valuable products were unknown in Europe until then.” At this point my “Bad History” alarm began ringing. And I responded:
" XXXX, I liked your piece on the Columbian exchange. I completely concur with your assessment of its impact and importance. There are a few inconsistencies however regarding the direction some crops travelled. Cane sugar, cotton and bananas were all known in Europe and had been for centuries, but there were those annoying middlemen (Italians and Arabs primarily, but also Portuguese and Spaniards) profiting from their import and sales.
Cotton has been spun, woven, and dyed since prehistoric times. It clothed the people of ancient India, Egypt, and China. Hundreds of years before the Christian era, cotton textiles were woven in India and their use spread to the Mediterranean countries.
The earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century in the accounts of Ahmed al-Ghaffar in Yemen. It was in Arabia that coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed, in a similar way to how it is prepared now. Coffee had spread to Italy by 1600, and then to the rest of Europe, Indonesia, and the Americas. Some (not you or I) think of it as American in origin, but it isn’t.
Sugar cane was known in the fertile crescent years before the Atlantic crossing and was in fact brought to the West as was coffee, by the Spanish in some of the earliest voyages, but it was the English who really began the whole “Sugar Planter” absentee landlord, slave labor, thing later. Sugar cane was first grown extensively in medieval Southern Europe during the period of Arab rule in Sicily beginning around the 9th century. ... Crusaders brought sugar home with them to Europe after their campaigns in the Holy Land, where they encountered caravans carrying "sweet salt".
The Portuguese, like the Spanish, situated between European and Arab cultures from Africa, found lands suitable for cultivation of sugar first in the Madeira islands. Following the introduction of the first water-driven sugar mill on Madeira, sugar production rapidly increased by 1455, using advisers from Sicily and financed by Genoese capital. This also was the place where commercial, race based, Black African plantation slavery began.
The accessibility of Madeira attracted Genoese and Flemish traders, who were keen to bypass Venetian monopolies. By 1480, well before Spanish contact with the Americas, Antwerp had some seventy ships engaged in the Madeira sugar trade, with the refining and distribution concentrated in Antwerp. By the 1490s Madeira had overtaken Cyprus as a producer of sugar. Thus, Cane sugar was well known in Europe before Columbus, as was coffee, cotton and bananas.
During the medieval period, bananas from the Granada region of Spain were considered among the best in the Arab world. In 650, Islamic conquerors brought the banana to Palestine. Bananas were grown in the Christian Kingdom of Cyprus by the late medieval period. Early Spanish encounters with bananas also occurred in the Philippines. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Portuguese colonists started banana plantations in the Atlantic Islands, Brazil, and western Africa. In other words, cotton, sugar cane, bananas and coffee came west, not east.
That said, the “new” world, populated by less technologically advanced cultures was seen as a sort of “tabula rasa” for concentrated European style agriculture and production for export, bypassing the Italian links to Asian sources. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull “Dum Diversas”, which legitimized the slave trade, at least as a result of war. It granted Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce war-conquered "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery. Thus the "legitimized" possibility of free labor was added.
Additionally, the treaty of Tordesillas had divided all the “undiscovered” lands between the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. This actually left all of the Americas, except the eastward projection of Brazil, under Spanish control and allowed the Spanish to treat Indigenous peoples as servants, while offering two choices, “convert to Catholicism or we can kill you with the Popes’ blessing.” This pronouncement, known as “the Requerimento” was to be read to locals, in Spanish of course, which none of them understood, sometimes even being read on board the ship before landing. The Spanish interpreted this act as Papal and Royal absolution for whatever horrors were about be inflicted on the newly minted enslaved subjects.
That aside the Spanish were really, at least initially, far more interested, initially, in precious metals than planting. The British however soon saw the opportunity for cutting out the European middleman (in the Sugar trade especially) and with the inception of race based African slavery, as a business, took brutality to greater heights in places like Barbados by the mid-1600s.
You are so right regarding corn, tomatoes, tobacco and potatoes, all of which went East and were instant hits. Oddly, enough tomatoes were initially grown only as ornamentals for several years after being introduced in Italy. I assume at one point someone tasted one and say, “Wait a minute, this would go great on pizza!”
Note: The far
more sinister aspect of all this was the microbes which carried flu, smallpox
and a horde of other European communicable diseases. Although we may never know the exact
magnitudes of the depopulation, it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent
of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years
following 1492! Tainos on Hispaniola (estimates range from 80,000 to over a million
were essentially extinct, and the population of central Mexico, originally estimated
at 15 million, was reduced to a tenth of that.
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