1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [19]
Some of the vessels anchor in Panama, while others go to Mexico. Watching from the plane, observe that the Panamanian silver crosses the isthmus, bound for Europe, whereas most of the Mexican silver is bound ultimately for Asia. How much goes where is the subject of brisk dispute, both by customs officials in 1642 and by historians today. The Spanish monarchy, perpetually hungry for cash, wants the silver in the home country. Spanish colonists want to send as much as possible to China—coins and bars can be traded there more profitably than anywhere else. The tension leads, inevitably, to smuggling. Official statistics suggest that no more than a quarter of the silver went across the Pacific. In the past historians have largely assumed that government scrutiny kept the smuggling to perhaps 10 percent of the total, meaning that the official statistics were roughly correct. A new wave of researchers, however, argues that smuggling was rampant; China sucked up as much as half of the silver. The debate is more than pedantic. One side regards European expansion as the primary motivating force in world affairs; the other views the earth as a single economic unit largely driven by Chinese demand.
Follow the Europe-bound silver as it is carried by mule train over the mountains to Portobelo, then Panama’s main Caribbean port. Guarded by an armada of galleons, bristling with guns and crewed by as many as two thousand seamen and soldiers, the silver traverses the Atlantic every summer, its departure timed to avoid hurricane season. The convoy bellies up to the mouth of the Guadalquivir, Spain’s only major navigable river, and then sixty miles upstream to Seville.
Unloaded onto the quays, the chests of treasure are the emblem of a paradox: silver from the Americas has made the Europe of 1642 affluent and powerful beyond its giddiest fantasy. But Europe itself is plagued from one end to the other by war, inflation, rioting, and weather calamities. Turmoil is nothing new in Europe, which is divided by language, culture, religion, and geography. But this is the first time that the turmoil is intimately linked to human actions on opposite ends of the earth. Trouble volleys from Asia, Africa, and the Americas to Europe, shuttling about the world on highways of Spanish silver.
Cortés’s conquest of Mexico—and the plunder that came from it—threw Spain’s elite into delirium. Enraptured by sudden wealth and power, the monarchy launched a series of costly foreign wars, one overlapping with another, against France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. Even as Spain defeated the Ottomans in 1571, discontent in the Netherlands, then a Spanish possession, was flaring into outright revolt and secession. The struggle over Dutch independence lasted eight decades and spilled into realms as far away as Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Along the way, England was drawn in; raising the ante, Spain initiated a vast seaborne invasion of that nation: the Spanish Armada. The invasion was a debacle, as was the fight to stop rebellion in the Netherlands.
War spawned war. In 1642, Spain is combating secession in Andalusia, Catalonia, and Portugal, which it has ruled for six decades; France is fighting Spain on its northern, eastern, and southern borders; and Swedish armies are battling the Holy Roman Empire. (Emperor Ferdinand III, the son-in-law of one Spanish king and the father-in-law of another, is so closely allied with Spain