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glance it looks very much as an Indian rhino should look – thick, solid legs, armoured back, a tail with a feathered end and, of course, the single horn. But something isn’t quite right – a lot of things, in fact, when compared with an actual rhino. The legs are scaled and end in large, splayed-out toes. The skin is pleated and lined and stands out stiffly from the legs – this is armour plating, not skin. It has a peculiar little extra horn on its neck – no one really knows where this came from – and the abnormally whiskery creature is covered in small scales and swirls which manage to look at once military and decorative.

It’s a long way from any actual rhino, but with the real animal drowned, Dürer’s imagined rhinoceros quickly became the reality for millions of Europeans. And he was able to satisfy the enormous curiosity in the beast by mass-producing its image, thanks to the new technology of wood-block printing.

Nuremberg, where Dürer lived, was a great commercial centre and home to the earliest printing shops and publishers. By 1515 Dürer himself was the master printmaker of the age, so he was ideally placed to convert his rhino drawing into a profitable print. Around 4,000–5,000 copies of Dürer’s rhino were sold in his lifetime, and many millions have sold in other forms since. The image stuck: in works of natural history, above all, Dürer’s rhino was unshiftable, even when more accurate depictions of the rhino later became available. In the seventeenth century copies could be seen everywhere, from the doors of Pisa Cathedral to a church fresco in Colombia, South America. And it now appears on mugs, T-shirts and fridge magnets.

Five years after Dürer produced his rhino, he had another exotic encounter. In 1520 in Brussels he viewed Aztec mosaics in the shape of masks and animals every bit as alien and exhilarating as the rhino: ‘all kinds of wonderful objects’, he wrote, ‘of various uses, more beautiful to me than miracles’. The new worlds that Europeans were encountering were going to change profoundly the way they could think about themselves.

PART SIXTEEN

The First Global Economy

AD 1450–1650

These were the years in which Europeans ventured far beyond their own continent for the first time, most significantly down the coast of western Africa into the Indian Ocean and across the Atlantic. The maritime empires that resulted were made possible by major developments in naval technology and brought about the first global economy, which used Spanish pieces of eight as its currency, from Europe to the Americas, China and Japan. Within that economy, the Dutch East India Company became the world’s first multinational company, transporting goods from the Far East to a European market. These explorers and traders brought different cultures into contact with each other for the first time, with varying results: when Spanish explorers arrived in Mexico it led to the destruction of the Aztec Empire; in contrast, the relationship between the Portuguese and the kingdom of Benin was mutually beneficial, with Portuguese sailors providing much-desired brass in exchange for ivory and palm oil.

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Mechanical Galleon

Mechanical galleon, from Augsburg, Germany

AD 1585

The magnificent ship is masted and rigged, ready to sail. High on the stern sits the Holy Roman Emperor of the German nation. In front of him his grandest subjects parade one after another, turning and making obeisance. Deep in the hull of the vessel an organ plays music. Then the cannons fire in an explosion of noise and smoke, and the imperial galleon moves majestically forward.

All this is happening in miniature. Our ship is an elaborately crafted model made of gilded copper and iron, which stands about one metre (40 inches) high. It was designed not to sail the seas but to trundle across a very grand table. It is a decoration, but also a clock and a musical box – all in the shape of a masted galleon of the kind developed in the sixteenth century across Europe to expand trade and to make war. Its intricate inner workings did once create