The Great Divide

have traditionally been dismissed as, and much more closely based on fact than
     anyone had previously imagined. Once we learn to decipher them – as is now
     happening – they tell us quite a bit about deep time.

T HE S HAMAN AND THE S HEPHERD : T HE G REAT D IVIDE
    T HE I BERIAN M OMENT
    T owards the end of the fifteenth century, various historical forces came together to create a situation in which Europeans in general and the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula in particular felt impelled to venture overseas as both explorers and conquerors. They did so as a result of a complex of motives, of which two stood out: acquisitiveness and religious zeal. The search for a new route to the spices of the East was one factor but, as Bernal Díaz wrote, he went to the Indies, as he thought, ‘to serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do’. 1
    Spanish nobles were especially familiar with this ideology, if such it can be called, because they were accustomed to a long and successful war against the Muslim states in Spain that had offered both ‘occasion and excuse’. The rest of Europe (i.e., Christendom) had by that time enjoyed a long respite from Muslim pressure on its eastern and southern edges due to the conquests of Genghis Khan whose swift victories, with a highly efficient cavalry operating over a vast area, and a remarkable religious tolerance, had made travel to the East safe and stimulated trade. The great monarchies of northern Europe had by now lost interest in crusading and had abandoned the fight against Islam to those who had Muslim neighbours in the Balkans and Byzantium, and the Iberian Peninsula.
    The advent of the Ottoman Turks, who took Constantinople in 1453, was however a dangerous development. Newly Islamised, and a proud people who had also converted from being horsemen to sailors, the emergence of the Turks as the most powerful state of the Middle East (they invaded Italy in 1480), made them a distant but still menacing threat that required the Spanish to fear the only Muslim state surviving in Europe at the time, the ancient and highly civilised kingdom of Granada.
    Within the Iberian Peninsula, Christian and Muslim states had coexisted side-by-side for centuries and had often formed alliances when it suited them. Moreover, the peninsula had become the principal point of contact between the two cultures, notably in Toledo where Jewish, Arab and Christian scholars had collaborated on a seminal series of works which ensured that the best of Greek thought survived and was translated and glossed into the languages of the new universities that sprang up from the twelfth century on. Philosophical, astronomical and medical works featured strongly in this tradition.
    But Granada was not as strong as she looked – by now she paid tribute to Castile and the rulers of the Spanish/Christian state knew that it was only a matter of time before the former entity was incorporated into the latter. That moment came with the accession of Isabella, in 1474. Intensely religious, ascetic, fearful of the lurking danger in the East, Isabella set about subduing her Moorish neigh-bour, village by village and town by town, beginning in 1482, a campaign that took a decade to complete but finally succeeded when the capital fell in 1492.
    There was also, as J.H. Parry has pointed out, a curious parallel between the Ottoman Turks, in the East, and the Castilians of Spain. ‘The Castilians had never been as parasitic upon the horse in the same degree as the Turks, but they too, in Andalusia and elsewhere, employed mobile and largely mounted forces against sedentary communities. Among them, in the arid uplands of Castile, pastoral pursuits, the grazing of semi-nomadic flocks and herds, had long been preferred to arable farming . . . The man on horseback, the master of flocks and herds, was best adapted to such conditions . . . As the work of the conquest proceeded, the Castilians, or the upper classes, the fighting classes among them, retained their pastoral interests and possessions, their mobility and military effectiveness, and their respect for the man on horseback.’ 2
    These were the people who settled the New World and it helps explain why small bands of mounted Spaniards could achieve such remarkable victories and could then settle as quasi-feudal overlords, retaining their pastoral interests and relying on conquered peasants to grow grain for