A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [203]
More than four centuries later we are still struggling to understand world financial markets and to control inflation.
Potosí remains proverbial for its wealth. Spaniards today still say something is ‘vale un Potosí – ‘worth a fortune’ – and the Spanish piece of eight lives on as a romantic prop in fantasy pirate stories. But it was in fact one of the foundation stones of the modern world, underpinning the first world empire, both prefiguring and making possible the modern global economy.
PART SEVENTEEN
Tolerance and Intolerance
AD 1550–1700
The Protestant Reformation split the western Christian Church into two rival factions and triggered major religious wars. The failure of either side to achieve victory in the Thirty Years War would lead, through exhaustion, to a period of religious tolerance in Europe. Three great Islamic powers dominated Eurasia: the Ottomans in Turkey, the Mughals in India and the Safavids in Iran. The Mughals promoted religious tolerance, allowing the Indian subcontinent’s largely non-Islamic population to continue to worship as they pleased. In Iran the Safavids created the world’s first major Shi’a state. At the same time, conquest and trade redrew the religious map of the world, and both Catholicism in the Americas and Islam in south-east Asia sought to accommodate the existing rituals of their new converts.
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Shi’a Religious Parade Standard
Gilded brass parade standard, from Iran
AD 1650–1700
It comes as a surprise to most tourists visiting Isfahan, the capital of Shi’a Iran in the seventeenth century, to discover in that very Islamic city one of the world’s great Christian cathedrals, full of silver crucifixes and wall-paintings telling the narratives of biblical redemption. This cathedral was built in the first half of the seventeenth century by Shah Abbas I, the great ruler of early modern Iran, and provides a superb example of how the world map of religion was redrawn in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The question at the centre of that redrawing was whether a state could hold more than one faith; the answer to it, in sixteenth-and seventeenth century Iran, was that it most certainly could. But the monotheistic faiths have always found it difficult to live together for long, and religious tolerance among them is usually both contested and fragile. In this chapter I will be exploring the situation in seventeenth-century Iran through an ‘alam – a lavishly gilded ceremonial brass standard. ‘Alams were originally battle standards, designed to be carried like flags into the fight, but in seventeenth-century Iran they were used in great religious processions and rallied not warriors but the faithful.
Shah Abbas was a member of the Safavid Dynasty, which came to power around 1500 and established Shi’a Islam as the state religion of Iran, a position it has held ever since. There is an interesting parallel with events in Tudor England, which became officially Protestant at about the same time as Iran became Shi’a. In both countries religion became a defining element of national identity, setting the nation apart from its hostile neighbours – Protestant England from Catholic Spain, Shi’a Iran from its Sunni neighbours, above all Turkey.
Shah Abbas, a contemporary of Elizabeth I of England, was a ruler of rare political nous and even rarer religious pragmatism. Like Elizabeth, he was keen to develop international trade and contact. He invited the world to visit his capital in Isfahan, welcoming Chinese envoys at the same time as hiring Englishmen as advisers; he expanded his borders and in the process captured Armenian Christians whom he brought back to Isfahan. There the Armenians developed the highly