They were part of a rich world that lay just beyond Columbus's reach. The Caribbean is a hard sea to cross. On average, in the sixteenth century, it took Spanish convoys almost twice as long to get from Santo Domingo to Veracruz, on the coast of Mexico, as it did to cross the entire breadth of the Atlantic. For more than a generation after Columbus's first crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, in 1502, Spanish pilots struggled to learn the pattern of the currents. In 1527, the navigators of the expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez still had not done so: bound for Mexico from Cuba, they actually sailed backward-imperceptibly driven back, night after night, by the Gulf Stream. When they reached what they thought was their destination, they were on the west coast of Florida.

Nonetheless, Columbus did get an inkling of what was in store on the mainland. In 1502, vainly scouring the American isthmus for a way through to the Pacific, he caught a glimpse of a huge, laden trading canoe that proved the existence in the vicinity of societies wealthy enough to exchange their surpluses. It was a sign that the kind of rich, recognizably "civilized" peoples he had sought since his arrival in the New World really existed and lived not far off.

Indeed, great civilizations stretched, almost continuously, interrupted only by sea, across Eurasia, North Africa, and Mesoamerican and Andean America like a girdle around the world. But the girdle was still unbuckled. The Americas remained isolated. Because of the lay of the land and the drift of the currents, it was hard for the inhabitants to explore their own hemisphere and get to know each other's civilizations. The Aztecs and Incas knew almost nothing of each other. Nowadays scholars deprecate comparisons between these two great hegemons, because their differences were more interesting and-to most people-more surprising than their similarities. But it is worth beginning with an appreciation of the similarities.

Both occupied high alt.i.tudes with corresponding advantages and disadvantages: the defensibility of mountain fastnesses, the moderation of high-alt.i.tude climates in tropical zones, the richness-which only precipitate mountains can confer-of many different ecosystems concentrated in a small s.p.a.ce at different alt.i.tudes and on slopes and in valleys of contrasting relationships to sun and wind. In both regions, animal proteins were relatively scarce by Old World standards: there were no big quadrupeds; domesticable meat-producing species were few and small. Albeit for different reasons, both the Aztecs and the Incas relied heavily on maize and treated it as a sacred substance.

Similar paradoxes dappled the technologies of both peoples. Both built monumentally in stone without developing the arch. Both traded and traveled across vast distances without making use of the wheel. Both favored cityscapes apparently symbolic of cosmic order, rigidly geometric and symmetrical. Both worked only soft metals and despised iron. Both were upstart empires, erected with astonishing rapidity, from small regional states, in a few generations. Both encompa.s.sed astonishing environmental diversity-far exceeding anything Europeans could achieve, or even imagine-and both relied for their cohesion, and perhaps their survival, on their ability to shift products between eco-zones to meet local shortages, ensure a variety of supply, and cheat drought and famine. Both faced resentful and rebellious subject or victim populations. Both practiced religious rites that demanded human sacrifices, and therefore needed methods of war and government calculated to provide specimens. Both were committed to warfare of increasing range and therefore escalating costs, without knowing how to cope with the consequences. Both, in about 1492, were at or near their peak: their time of fastest expansion and greatest security.

"Aztecs" is a vague term for a group of communities who collaborated in dominating central Mexico. Scholars have never agreed on whom to include in it. The term rarely occurs in sources earlier than the eighteenth century, and it is doubtful whether anyone thought of himself as an Aztec before then: Aztecs called themselves "Mexica"-a plural noun in Nahuatl, the language they shared with many other peoples of central Mexico-or spoke of themselves as members of their own particular communities, the city-statelets that filled the densely crammed world of their high valley. The best perspective from which to see their world is that of an unmistakably Aztec place, which in today's language we think of as the Aztec "capital": the hegemonic city-state of Tenocht.i.tlan, which stood on the present site of Mexico City, in the middle of what was then a huge lake.

Detail of the tribute claimed by Tenocht.i.tlan, showing deerskins and "smoking tubes," dues from the implacably hostile mountain communities of Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco.

J. Cooper Clark, ed., Codex Mendoza, Codex Mendoza, 3 vols. (London, 1938), iii. Original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 3 vols. (London, 1938), iii. Original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Tenocht.i.tlan was at the center of the complex web of tribute exchange that crisscrossed Mesoamerica, receiving food, textiles, luxury goods, and victims for human sacrifice from hundreds of other states, and garnering vastly more than it disbursed. It is hard to retrieve a sense of what the city was like, because the Spaniards who conquered it in the 1520s razed it and smothered it with a new city, adjusted to a European aesthetic. Today, even the lake has disappeared under the sprawl of Mexico's capital. For Tenocht.i.tlan, however, the lake determined the way of life. It provided security, but-in combination with the dizzying alt.i.tude, which froze many important crops-it made agriculture hard. In 1519, Spanish adventurers first saw Tenocht.i.tlan's marketplace, which they described with awestruck admiration. But almost all the fabulous array of goods on show had to come from elsewhere, paddled in canoes or borne on human porters' backs-for no beasts of burden existed-across the causeways that linked the city to others on neighboring islands and on the lakesh.o.r.e.

The huge population-now incalculable except by guesswork, but usually reckoned at between fifty and a hundred thousand people-made the Spaniards liken Tenocht.i.tlan to Europe's biggest cities: such a vast concentration of manpower could not be self-supporting; the Tenochca, the people of Tenocht.i.tlan, were committed to war and commerce. Their success was measurable in the height and spread of the huge temples and palaces of stone that enclosed the central plazas. The temples, elevated on tall stepped pyramids, dominated the skyline. When the Spaniards first saw them from afar, they seemed fantastic and fearful, like the castle turrets of a fairy-tale ogre, at once gloomy and gaudy, daubed with images of monstrous G.o.ds and human sacrifices in which telluric reds and aquatic blues predominated. When the beholders got close up, the impression they got was even more perplexing: the cruelly steep temple steps were stained with the blood of human sacrifices.

The obliteration of the indigenous cities means that the impressions we have of them are not really our own: we see them through the frightened eyes of early observers. But many smaller-scale works of Aztec art survive, demonstrating sensibilities modern Westerners can understand sympathetically-even identify with. The contrast between Aztec and Inca art in this respect could hardly be greater. The world vision reflected in Inca art is painfully, uncompromisingly abstract. Weavers and goldsmiths splayed and straightened human and animal forms. Textiles and reliefs embody an unbending imagination, in which tense lines and sharp angles contain every image like the bars and walls of prisons. There is less naturalism in Inca art than in that of orthodox Islam, in which an abstract aesthetic traditionally prevails. The Incas recorded data and perhaps literature in knotted strings, which are probably as efficient a medium of symbolic notation as what we call writing-but it is a method that excludes pictures of the rich, vivid kind that flowed from Aztec minds onto the pages even of their most prosaic records.

The Aztecs' most characteristic art-in which they excelled and introduced new refinements to Mesoamerican tradition-was sculpture in the round. The pieces most engaging to a modern eye are small-scale, wrought into lifelike shapes by a respect for nature, meticulously observed. A couple-human in some sense but simian featured-sit, each with an arm around the other, exchanging looks with tilted heads that suggest suddenly questioned affection. A serpent with yawning jaws and a malevolent eye stretches a long, forked tongue lazily over his own coils. A dancing monkey personifies the wind, with a belly distended by trapped flatulence and an erupting fart suggested by the way his tail is raised. A rabbit strains nervously to sniff food or danger, with a nose just raised or wrinkled to evoke a twitch.6 The imperial self-image of the Tenochca leaps fully armed from the vividly ill.u.s.trated pages of doc.u.ments from their archives, or from copies or abstracts made soon after the Spanish conquest. The most spectacular records are gathered in a book probably made in the early 1540s for a Spanish viceroy who wanted to report to Spain on the tribute levels, conquest rights, and structures of provincial government practiced by the Aztecs before the Spaniards arrived. The compilation never reached Spain. French pirates captured the ship in which it traveled. The French king's official geographer snaffled it, then sold it in 1580 to an English intelligence gatherer, who hoped to glean from it something about the vulnerabilities of the Spanish monarchy. An English scholar of language first coveted and then appropriated it, in the hope of learning about the Aztecs' writing system. The doc.u.ment, known as Codex Mendoza, Codex Mendoza, ended up in the library of the University of Oxford, where the pictures that enliven it still gleam with the brash colors of native dyes. ended up in the library of the University of Oxford, where the pictures that enliven it still gleam with the brash colors of native dyes.

The first ill.u.s.trated page discloses one of the Tenochcas' favorite myths of themselves. It depicts the foundation of Tenocht.i.tlan, reputedly in the year 1324 or 1325, recalling the waterlogged site, strewn with aquatic plants, and the squat, flimsy, reed-thatched huts that preceded the vast temples, palaces, and plazas, all of stone, that glorified imperial Tenocht.i.tlan. The legendary founder, Tenuch, whose name was as obviously derived from the city's as that of Romulus was from Rome, appears with his face blackened by sacred dye, surrounded by his nine companions, each identified with a name glyph. Ozmitl, for instance, means "pierced foot" in the language of the Aztecs, and a foot with an arrow through the ankle appears on the doc.u.ment in explanation, with a tie line to Ozmitl's portrait.

A rampant eagle dominates the scene. Though we can be sure, from external evidence, that a native painter created it, the way he drew the eagle, with wings outspread and claw extended, owes something to the conventions of European heraldry, as though the draftsman wanted to equate the power of his people's ancestors with that of European hegemons, who also affected eagle symbols: the Romans, obviously, or the Habsburg dynasty, who at the time ruled so much of Europe, including Spain, and claimed overlordship over the rest. For the Tenochca, the eagle image recalled the story of how an eagle led Tenuch to her island aerie, where a p.r.i.c.kly pear grew out of a rock as a sign from the G.o.ds that he should found his city there. In the image, the eagle perches on the name glyph for Tenocht.i.tlan: a fruiting cactus (called nochtli nochtli in Nahuatl) and a stone ( in Nahuatl) and a stone (tetl in the same language). A skull rack, like those on which the Aztecs exhibited the rotting heads of the captives they sacrificed, stands by the eagle's nest, just as the b.l.o.o.d.y bones of her own victims piled up around her home. The Tenochca saw themselves as eaglelike. They adorned their shields with clumps of eagle down and enriched their war gear with costly eagle feathers. Some of the elite wore eagle disguises for important rituals, including war, and they levied tribute in the form of live eagles from some of their subject peoples. Their city was their aerie, and they stained it with blood and adorned it with bones. in the same language). A skull rack, like those on which the Aztecs exhibited the rotting heads of the captives they sacrificed, stands by the eagle's nest, just as the b.l.o.o.d.y bones of her own victims piled up around her home. The Tenochca saw themselves as eaglelike. They adorned their shields with clumps of eagle down and enriched their war gear with costly eagle feathers. Some of the elite wore eagle disguises for important rituals, including war, and they levied tribute in the form of live eagles from some of their subject peoples. Their city was their aerie, and they stained it with blood and adorned it with bones.

Codex Mendoza's depiction of the legendary culture hero, Tenuch, guided by an eagle to found Tenocht.i.tlan in its defiantly mountainous lakebound island.

J. Cooper Clark, ed., Codex Mendoza, Codex Mendoza, 3 vols. (London, 1938), iii. Original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 3 vols. (London, 1938), iii. Original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

In North America, most native origin myths depict the people as having sprung from the land, with a right of occupancy that dates from the beginning of time. The Aztecs saw themselves differently. They were self-proclaimed migrants who came from elsewhere and whose rights were rights of conquest. They told two rival stories about their past. In one, they were Chichimeca, dog people, former nomads and savages who ascended to the valley of Mexico from the deserts to the north and who survived as victims of longer-established denizens, through sufferings that demanded vengeance. In the second version of the myth, they were descendants of former hegemons, the Toltecs, whose homeland lay to the south, where the ruins of their great city of Tula had lain abandoned for centuries. Strictly speaking, the two stories are mutually contradictory, but they convey a consistent message: of warlike provenance, lost birthright, and imperial destiny.

Tenocht.i.tlan could not even have survived, let alone launched an empire, without an ideology of violence. Its site is over seven thousand feet above sea level, at an alt.i.tude where some of the key crops that nourished Mesoamerican ways of life will not grow. There is no cotton, of which, by the late fifteenth century, Tenocht.i.tlan consumed hundreds of thousands of bales every year for everyday clothing and for the manufacture of the quilted cotton armor that trapped the enemy's blades and arrowheads. Cacao, which Mesoamericans ground into the theobromine-rich infusion that intoxicated the elite at parties and in rituals, is a lowland crop that grows only in hot climates. The Tenochca speckled their lake with "floating gardens" laboriously dredged from the lake bed, for producing squashes, corn, and beans. But even these everyday staples were impossible to grow in sufficient amounts for the burgeoning lake-bound community. Only plunder on a grand scale could solve the logistical problems of keeping the city fed and clothed.

As the reach of Aztec hegemony lengthened, demand for exotic luxuries increased. Hundreds of thousands of bearers arrived laden with exotic tribute from the hot plains and forests, coasts, and distant highlands: quetzal feathers and jaguar pelts; rare conches from the gulf; jade and amber; rubber for the ball game that, like European jousting, was an essential aristocratic rite; copal for incense; gold and copper; cacao; deerskins; and what the Spaniards called "smoking-tubes with which the natives perfume their mouths." Elite life, and the rituals on which the city depended to stay in favor with the G.o.ds, would have collapsed without regular renewals of these supplies. The flow of tribute was both the strength and the weakness of Tenocht.i.tlan: strength, because it showed the vast reach of the city's power; weakness, because if the tribute flow stopped, as it would do soon after the Spaniards arrived and helped rouse the subject peoples against the empire, the city would shrivel and starve.

In and around 1492, no such prospect loomed: it was probably unthinkable. Ahuitzotl became Aztec paramount in 1486. In 1487, at the dedication of a new temple in his courtly center at Tenocht.i.tlan, the captives sacrificed were reliably estimated at more than twenty thousand. By the time of his death in 1502, tribute records credited him with the conquest of forty-five communities-two hundred thousand square kilometers. In the reign of his successor, Montezuma II, who was still ruling in Tenocht.i.tlan when the conquistadores arrived, forty-four communities are listed, but the momentum never relaxed. Montezuma's armies shuttled back and forth from the Panuco River in the north, on the gulf coast, across the isthmus and as far south as Xonocozco, on what is now the frontier of Mexico and Guatemala. The Spaniards did not find a spent empire, or a state corroded by diffidence or undermined morale. On the contrary, it is hard to imagine a more dynamic, aggressive, or confident band of conquerors than the Aztecs.

For the Aztecs' victims, the experience of conquest was probably more of a short, sharp shock than an enduring trauma. The fact that many communities appear repeatedly as conquests in the rolls the Aztecs preserved, as records of who owed them tribute, suggests that many so-called conquests were punitive raids on recalcitrant tributaries. The glyph for conquest is an image of a burning temple, suggesting that defeat was a source of disgrace for local G.o.ds. One of the astonishing features of Mesoamerican culture before the conquest is that people revered the same pantheon throughout and beyond the culture area the Aztecs dominated. So maybe the worship of common deities spread with war. But nothing else changed in the culture of the vanquished.

Typically, existing elites remained in power, if they paid tribute. Wherever records survive in the Aztec world, ruling dynasties at the time the Spaniards took over traced their genealogies back to their own heroes and divine founders, in unbroken sequences of many hundreds of years. It was rare for Tenocht.i.tlan to intrude officials or install garrisons. In early colonial times the Spaniards, who were looking hard for indigenous precedents for their own style of government in an attempt to represent themselves as continuators, rather than destroyers, of indigenous tradition, could find only twenty-two cases of communities ruled directly from Tenocht.i.tlan, and most of those were recent conquests or frontier garrison towns, suggesting that direct rule, where it occurred, was a transitional, temporary device.

So the hegemony of Tenocht.i.tlan was not an empire in the modern sense of the word. For years, when I was teaching Mesoamerican history to undergraduates, I sought a neutral word to describe the s.p.a.ce the Aztecs dominated. I felt immensely pleased with myself when I thought of calling it by the vague German term Grossraum, Grossraum, which literally means "big s.p.a.ce." But my pleasure fled when I realized, first, that the undergraduates could not understand what I meant and, second, that it was an absurd evasion to pluck a term from a culture that had nothing to do with the case. We may as well call it what it was: a tribute system of unparalleled complexity. which literally means "big s.p.a.ce." But my pleasure fled when I realized, first, that the undergraduates could not understand what I meant and, second, that it was an absurd evasion to pluck a term from a culture that had nothing to do with the case. We may as well call it what it was: a tribute system of unparalleled complexity.

The complexity is obvious from the lists of goods that fill doc.u.ments from the preconquest archives of the Tenochca state. For Tenocht.i.tlan, no tributary was more important than the city's nearest neighbor, Tlatelolco, which was on an adjoining island in a shared lake. Its strategic proximity was dangerous, and its loyalty was essential. Indeed, Tlatelolco was the only ally that never deserted Tenocht.i.tlan but fought on, during the siege of 1521, until the end, while the Spaniards detached all the other formerly allied and subject communities, one by one, from Tenocht.i.tlan's side, by intimidation or negotiation. In keeping with the city's supreme importance, Tlatelolco got special treatment from the ill.u.s.trators of Codex Mendoza. Codex Mendoza. Instead of using a simple name glyph to signify the city, they devoted much s.p.a.ce to a lively depiction of the city's famous twin towers-the double pyramid, reputedly the highest in the Aztec world, that adorned the central plaza. They also showed the conquered chief of Tlatelolco, whom the Tenochca called Miquihuixtl, hurling himself drunkenly down the temple steps in despair. More remarkable than the way they depicted the city is the tribute they listed-including large quant.i.ties of cotton and cacao, which could no more grow in Tlatelolco than they could elsewhere in the region. So Tlatelolco was evidently receiving tribute from farther afield and pa.s.sing it on to Tenocht.i.tlan. Instead of using a simple name glyph to signify the city, they devoted much s.p.a.ce to a lively depiction of the city's famous twin towers-the double pyramid, reputedly the highest in the Aztec world, that adorned the central plaza. They also showed the conquered chief of Tlatelolco, whom the Tenochca called Miquihuixtl, hurling himself drunkenly down the temple steps in despair. More remarkable than the way they depicted the city is the tribute they listed-including large quant.i.ties of cotton and cacao, which could no more grow in Tlatelolco than they could elsewhere in the region. So Tlatelolco was evidently receiving tribute from farther afield and pa.s.sing it on to Tenocht.i.tlan.

Other cities privileged in the imperial pecking order levied and exchanged tribute in similar ways. Tenocht.i.tlan topped the system, but it was not entirely exempt from the exchange. Annually, in mock battles, the city engaged in a ritualized exchange of warriors for sacrifice with Tlaxcala, a community on the far side of the mountain range to the southeast of Tenocht.i.tlan. The terms of exchange favored the hegemonic city, and Tlaxcala was also listed as paying tribute in other forms, including deerskins, pipes for tobacco, and cane frames for loading goods on porters' backs. But the system marked Tlaxcala out as special. When the Spaniards arrived, the Tlaxcalteca tested them, welcomed them, allied with them, used them against their own regional enemies, and supplied more men and material for the siege of Tenocht.i.tlan than any other group.

The fall (1473) to Tenochca conquerors of the neighboring city of Tlatelolco with the spectacular death of the defeated ruler, Moquihuixtl.

J. Cooper Clark, ed., Codex Mendoza, Codex Mendoza, 3 vols. (London, 1938), iii. Original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 3 vols. (London, 1938), iii. Original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Power in the Aztec world was many-centered, elusive, and exercised through intermediaries. Traditionally, historians represented the Inca hegemony as a complete contrast: highly centralized, systematic, and uniform. Inca imperialism was indeed different from that of the Aztecs, but not in the ways commonly supposed. Peter Shaffer's play of 1964, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, the best-ever dramatization of the conquest of Peru, captures received wisdom in a brilliant pa.s.sage of dialogue. Under the supreme Inca's all-seeing gaze, symbolizing the reach of his intelligence service, the Spaniards interrogate natives about the nature of the empire and hear that its organization is comprehensive, inflexible, and irresistible. The population is divided not among disparate natural communities but into bureaucratically contrived units of a hundred thousand families. The state controls all food and clothing. Every month, the people unite in the apportioned tasks of the season: plowing, sewing, roof mending. Obligations to the state dominate every phase of life. The ruler interrupts the dialogue to explain: "Nine to twelve years, protect harvests. Twelve to eighteen, care for herds. Eighteen to twenty-five, warriors for me-Atahuallpa Inca!" the best-ever dramatization of the conquest of Peru, captures received wisdom in a brilliant pa.s.sage of dialogue. Under the supreme Inca's all-seeing gaze, symbolizing the reach of his intelligence service, the Spaniards interrogate natives about the nature of the empire and hear that its organization is comprehensive, inflexible, and irresistible. The population is divided not among disparate natural communities but into bureaucratically contrived units of a hundred thousand families. The state controls all food and clothing. Every month, the people unite in the apportioned tasks of the season: plowing, sewing, roof mending. Obligations to the state dominate every phase of life. The ruler interrupts the dialogue to explain: "Nine to twelve years, protect harvests. Twelve to eighteen, care for herds. Eighteen to twenty-five, warriors for me-Atahuallpa Inca!"

The image is appealing, but misleading. The Inca system was not centralized. It did not resemble the "state socialism" that Shaffer's Cold Warera play portrays. On the contrary, the empire had distinctive relationships, crafted to meet each individual case, with almost every one of its subject communities.

The vision of Inca power crushing diversity out of the empire was a construction of early colonial historians. Some of them were clerics or conquistadores. They exaggerated Inca power to flatter the Spaniards who overthrew it and the saints who supposedly helped. Other makers of the myth were the descendants of the Inca themselves, who aggrandized their ancestors by making them seem equal or superior to European empire builders. Garcilaso de la Vega, for example, the most accomplished writer on the subject in the sixteenth century, whose book on his ancestors appeared eighty years after the Spaniards arrived in Peru, was the son of an Inca princess. He lived as what Spaniards called a senorito, senorito, embodying gentlemanly affectations, in the Andalusian town of Montilla, which was small enough and remote enough for him to be the most important local personage. His status is measurable in his scores of G.o.dchildren. For him the Incas were the Romans of America, whose perfectly articulated empire exhibited all the qualities of order, organization, military prowess, and engineering genius his European contemporaries admired in their own accounts of ancient Rome. embodying gentlemanly affectations, in the Andalusian town of Montilla, which was small enough and remote enough for him to be the most important local personage. His status is measurable in his scores of G.o.dchildren. For him the Incas were the Romans of America, whose perfectly articulated empire exhibited all the qualities of order, organization, military prowess, and engineering genius his European contemporaries admired in their own accounts of ancient Rome.

Roman models, however, are almost useless for understanding what the Incas were like. The best route is via the ruins of the states and civilizations that occupied the Andes before them. From the seventh century to the tenth, the metropolis of Huari, nine thousand feet up in the Ayacucho Valley, preceded and in some ways prefigured the Inca empire. The town had barracks, dormitories, and communal kitchens at its center for a warrior elite, while a working population of some twenty thousand gathered around it. Satellite towns around the valley imitated it, probably because they were colonies or subject communities. To judge from similar evidence farther afield, the influence or power of Huari reached hundreds of miles over mountains and deserts to Nazca. The Huari zone overlapped with the Incas' home valley of Cuzco, and the memory of their achievements remained potent.

Deeper inland, higher into the mountains, in an area that became a target for Inca imperialism, lay the ruins of the city of Tiahuanaco, near Lake t.i.ticaca, with an impressive array of raised temples, sunken courtyards, triumphal gateways, fearsome reliefs, crushing monoliths, and daunting fortifications. Spread over forty acres at an alt.i.tude higher than that of Lhasa in Tibet, it was a real-life Cloud Cuckoo Land, twelve thousand feet above sea level. Potatoes fed it. No other staple would grow so close to the snow line. To cultivate the tubers, the people built platforms of cobbles, bedding the potatoes into topsoil of clay and silt. To supply irrigation, and for protection from violent changes of temperature, they dug surrounding channels from Lake t.i.ticaca. The potato fields stretched nine miles from the lakeside and could yield thirty thousand tons a year. The state warehoused huge amounts and converted crops into chunu, chunu, a gastronomically unappealing but vital substance made by freeze-drying potatoes in the conducive climate of the high Andes. Tiahuanaco was obviously an imperial enterprise. To supplement potatoes, and to ensure against blight, the inhabitants had to conquer fields at lower alt.i.tudes, where they could grow quinoa and what modern Americans call corn-that is, maize. a gastronomically unappealing but vital substance made by freeze-drying potatoes in the conducive climate of the high Andes. Tiahuanaco was obviously an imperial enterprise. To supplement potatoes, and to ensure against blight, the inhabitants had to conquer fields at lower alt.i.tudes, where they could grow quinoa and what modern Americans call corn-that is, maize.

The Incas did much the same as their predecessors in Huari and Tiahuanaco, only on a vastly larger scale, all over the culture area they called Tawantinsuyu, "land of four quarters," which comprised the Andes and the mountains' flanks as far as the coasts and the forests. They practiced ecological imperialism, switching products between climates and sometimes shifting whole communities hundreds of miles in order to adjust the supply of labor to the needs of empire.

Much of the Inca world was settled at alt.i.tudes too high for maize, but the Incas' partiality for the crop was close to an obsession. They systematically shifted populations toward valleys suitable for growing maize. They stockpiled it in warehouses higher than its zone of cultivation, where it could feed armies, pilgrims, and royal progresses while supplying maize beer for ritual purposes. They engaged in what we now think of as state-sponsored science, developing new strains, adapted for high yields.7 Maize was not necessarily the best crop, from either an environmental or a nutritional point of view. The Incas favored it for more than utilitarian reasons: it was sacred to them, rather as the wheat of the Eucharist is sacred to Christians, perhaps in a way that the routine staples of the Andes, such as potatoes and sweet potatoes, could not attain, because they were too familiar. Maize was not necessarily the best crop, from either an environmental or a nutritional point of view. The Incas favored it for more than utilitarian reasons: it was sacred to them, rather as the wheat of the Eucharist is sacred to Christians, perhaps in a way that the routine staples of the Andes, such as potatoes and sweet potatoes, could not attain, because they were too familiar.

The Incas also needed lowland products. Coca sustained a life of a higher order than corn. For the elites for whom it was reserved, it unlocked realms of imagination and stimulated ritual. Whereas maize beer, the commoners' tipple, could intoxicate, coca could inspire. The Urubamba Valley specialized in producing it, in an arc along the rivers Torontoy, Yanatil, and Paucartambo,8 where the Incas imported labor from the lowlands on either side of the mountains to supply the manpower. Even more than coca, cotton and chilies were vital: the one for clothing, the other to flavor food and animate life. Chilies grew well alongside the Vilcanota River north of Cuzco and were among the products for which the Supreme Inca, Huayna Capac, located his estate at Yucay in the early sixteenth century. Honey, and exotic feathers for elite costumes, were among the products the forests produced. Though the Incas always disparaged the forest as a wild and fretful place, they adapted to it. Indeed, when the Spaniards drove the Inca rulers from the highlands, they took refuge in the forest and sustained a luxurious life in a new, lavish capital at Vilcabamba until the Spaniards descended and burned it, extinguishing the last independent Inca state, in 1572. where the Incas imported labor from the lowlands on either side of the mountains to supply the manpower. Even more than coca, cotton and chilies were vital: the one for clothing, the other to flavor food and animate life. Chilies grew well alongside the Vilcanota River north of Cuzco and were among the products for which the Supreme Inca, Huayna Capac, located his estate at Yucay in the early sixteenth century. Honey, and exotic feathers for elite costumes, were among the products the forests produced. Though the Incas always disparaged the forest as a wild and fretful place, they adapted to it. Indeed, when the Spaniards drove the Inca rulers from the highlands, they took refuge in the forest and sustained a luxurious life in a new, lavish capital at Vilcabamba until the Spaniards descended and burned it, extinguishing the last independent Inca state, in 1572.

The meaning of the Inca name is in some ways easier to grasp than that of the Aztecs. It was, at least, a name they used of themselves. It denoted at first-perhaps until the midfifteenth century-a member of a group defined by kinship in the Cuzco Valley. But it came to apply to selected members of a widespread elite, scattered, by the end of the century, along and around the Andes from northern Ecuador to central Chile. In part-and here a parallel with the Romans is inescapable-the extension of the name's embrace was a strategy of the state, rather like the progressive broadening of the label "Roman citizen." Inca rulers conferred the status of Inca on subjects of the imperial heartland, sent them into remote provinces, and admitted some collaborative elites in conquered territories to Inca ranks.

In some ways, the Incas did make stunningly despotic interventions in the lives of the peoples of the empire, chiefly in the form of ma.s.sacres and ma.s.s deportations. Terror was an organ of government. When, at an uncertain date, the Incas conquered the rival kingdom of Chimu, they razed the princ.i.p.al city of Chanchan almost to the ground and carried off the entire population. A few years before the coming of the Spaniards, Inca Huayna Capac drowned-it was said-twenty thousand Canari warriors in Lake Yahuar Cocha. The same ruler levied one hundred thousand workers-if colonial-period estimates can be believed-to build his summer palace, and relocated fourteen thousand in the Cochabamba Valley, from as far away as Chile, to provide labor for new agricultural enterprises. When the Spaniards captured Atahuallpa, the supreme Inca they ransomed and put to death, he had fifteen thousand people in his camp, whom he had forced from their homes in northern Ecuador and was transferring to new settlements. A census the Spaniards called for in 1571 showed that the population of Cuzco included the children and grandchildren of at least fifteen ethnic groups whom the Incas shipped in to supervise newly established economic activities, especially the manufacture of textiles that were formerly regional specialties. At least forty groups featured among workers in Yucay, where Huayna Capac had an estate.9 Colonial historians thought that the Incas routinely selected six or seven thousand families for resettlement every time they added a new place to their empire. In Moho, when the Spaniards announced the fall of the Inca empire, the entire population rose and left, returning to the homes from which the Incas had uprooted them. The resettlement policies the Incas enforced had nothing to do with h.o.m.ogenizing culture; on the contrary, migrants were required to preserve their own languages and customs and forbidden to mix with neighboring communities. Colonial historians thought that the Incas routinely selected six or seven thousand families for resettlement every time they added a new place to their empire. In Moho, when the Spaniards announced the fall of the Inca empire, the entire population rose and left, returning to the homes from which the Incas had uprooted them. The resettlement policies the Incas enforced had nothing to do with h.o.m.ogenizing culture; on the contrary, migrants were required to preserve their own languages and customs and forbidden to mix with neighboring communities.

Power over the environment matched this power over human lives. The Incas maintained a road network over 30,000 kilometers-getting on for 18,000 miles-long, with teams of runners capable, on favored routes, of covering 240 kilometers (or 150 miles) a day. Between Huarochiri and Jauja they climbed pa.s.ses 16,700 feet high. Way stations studded the system at alt.i.tudes of up to 13,000 feet. Here workers were rewarded with feasts and pain-numbing doses of maize beer. Armies found refreshment. Prodigious bridges linked the roads. The famous Huaca-cacha ("Holy Bridge") stretched 250 feet on cables thick as a man's body, high above the gorge of the Apurimac River at Curahasi. The roads streaked the empire with a uniform look that impressed Spanish travelers of the early colonial era and helped to create the impression that the Incas were h.o.m.ogenizers and centralizers whose roads were like grapples, holding the empire in a single grip. And the Incas did have what one might call a signature style-a kind of architecture that shaped the way stations, warehouses, barracks, and shrines that they built along the roads and at the edges of their empire: the habit of stamping the land with buildings that proclaimed their presence or pa.s.sing was a tradition they learned from Huari and Tiahuanaco. Similarly, they helped spread the use of their language, Quechua, from its heartlands in the northern and central Andes-though it was probably already a lingua franca of trade.

The roads were there not only to speed Inca commands and to carry Inca armies. They also linked sacred sites. The management of the sacred landscape of the Andes-the maintenance of shrines, the promotion of pilgrimages-was all part of the value the empire added to lives lived in its shadow. Rituals encoded political relationships in ways hard for modern Westerners to understand-scores of different ways, each appropriate to the traditions of the peoples involved. The Incas kept the images of local and regional deities from around the empire hostage in Cuzco, and literally scourged them when the guardian peoples of their shrine defaulted on payments of tribute or obligations of service. Lines, onto which roads were often mapped, radiated like sun rays from Cuzco, linking mountaintop shrines and pilgrimage places. A thousand scribes in Cuzco knotted memorials of sacred places, their calendars, and their rites into the woven braids that the Incas used to record data.

One of the most startling pieces of evidence was recorded among the Checas, a people of the Huarochiri Valley, between Cuzco and the coast. As they recalled their history, late in the sixteenth century, a supreme Inca, beset by enemies, had once, in a mythic past, called upon the guardians of shrines all over the Inca world to march to his aid. The ma.n.u.script represents the negotiations as dialogues between G.o.ds, who traveled to conferences on litters. Perhaps this is really how diplomacy unfolded. The Incas regularly a.s.sembled their mummified former rulers, who shared a meal together-the viands consumed by attendants-and conversed through professional shamans. The presence of divine images at parleys hallowed the events; and the convention that the words spoken proceeded from the minds of G.o.ds, rather than from their human spokesmen, would add diplomatic distance to the exchanges and freedom to the debate. But in this case none of the provincial G.o.ds would support the Incas, except Paria Caca, the eponymous lord of the mountain where the Checas went to worship, who offered to turn stones into warriors-for that was the image the Incas regularly used to evoke successful recruitment. All the G.o.d demanded in return was that the Incas offer sacrifice at his shrine by dancing there annually.

What did the Checas get by imposing this ritual on their ally? At one level, the dance was symbolic, showing that the G.o.d of the Checas could command the Incas and that the Checas' relationship to the dynasts of Cuzco was not one of simple submission. At another level, it was a matter of some practical utility. It ensured that the supreme Inca was available for regular consultations and that the obligations of hospitality were indefinitely renewed. The arrangement mattered deeply to the Checas. That was why they remembered it and wrote it down. Their reason for siding with the Spaniards in the war to overthrow the Incas was that the rulers in Cuzco dishonored the sacred promise to perform the annual dance.

Marriages also helped the empire cohere. Inca monarchs took brides from all over Tawantinsuyu, to attract the services of their kin-a practice the Spaniards would imitate to advantage-and to be hostages for their communities' good behavior. Huayna Capac had six thousand wives to help ensure the loyalties of subject communities. His mother had originally come to the Inca court from a frontier region in what is now Ecuador. When n.o.bles who were her kin threatened to leave Huayna Capac's service, he brought out her mummified carca.s.s or, perhaps, a statue, and bade her dissuade them by speaking to them-which she did through the medium of a native shaman.10 More evidence comes from the Huayllacan people who lived in towns near Cuzco. They recalled a time when one of their princesses married a supreme Inca. But they forfeited Inca friendship by allowing her and her son to be taken hostage by neighboring enemies, with whom the Incas then established a new marriage-based alliance. When the Huayllacans tried to retrieve the situation by a successful conspiracy to kill the offspring, the Incas took revenge, crushing them in battle, killing and banishing their leaders, and seizing much of their land. More evidence comes from the Huayllacan people who lived in towns near Cuzco. They recalled a time when one of their princesses married a supreme Inca. But they forfeited Inca friendship by allowing her and her son to be taken hostage by neighboring enemies, with whom the Incas then established a new marriage-based alliance. When the Huayllacans tried to retrieve the situation by a successful conspiracy to kill the offspring, the Incas took revenge, crushing them in battle, killing and banishing their leaders, and seizing much of their land.11 The results of the marriage habit were equivocal. Supreme Incas begat huge broods of emulous sons who soaked up expenditure, conspired for power, and usually ended up being slaughtered when one of them succeeded in the contest for the throne. Seraglio politics disfigured court life, where pillow talk was often of politics. As in the Ottoman Empire on the other side of the world in the same period, favored concubines used their privileged access to the supreme ruler to manipulate patronage and even to interfere with the succession. Partly to arrest this form of corruption, late in the fifteenth century supreme Incas took to marrying their full sisters and limiting the right of succession to the offspring of these impeccably royal unions.

Tribute was the cement of empire. At the installation of a new supreme Inca, hundreds of children from all the subject communities were strangled in sacrifice and buried, together with great numbers of other offerings from the provinces: llamas, rare sh.e.l.ls from the coast, artworks in gold and silver, and rich apparel, including cloaks made from bats' skins in Puerto Viejo and Tumbes. Parties of sacrificers set out from Cuzco, with children in their train, to repeat the offerings at important shrines around the empire, at distances of up to about 1,250 miles from Cuzco.12 Pots, woven goods, footwear, slaves, and coca arrived, as well as foodstuffs, people, and objects for sacrifice. From Huancayo in the Chillun Valley, the Incas levied a proportion of everything produced locally: coca, chilies, mate for making tea, dried birds, fruit, and crayfish. Fabulous amounts of gold served to "plant" the Incas' gardens with corncobs of gold and to plate the temples of Cuzco with gold and silver. In the garden of the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco, according to a wide-eyed Spanish report, "the earth was lumps of gold and it was cunningly planted with stalks of corn that were of gold." No wonder the Incas were unsurprised when the Spanish conquistadores demanded a roomful of gold as Atahuallpa's ransom. Pots, woven goods, footwear, slaves, and coca arrived, as well as foodstuffs, people, and objects for sacrifice. From Huancayo in the Chillun Valley, the Incas levied a proportion of everything produced locally: coca, chilies, mate for making tea, dried birds, fruit, and crayfish. Fabulous amounts of gold served to "plant" the Incas' gardens with corncobs of gold and to plate the temples of Cuzco with gold and silver. In the garden of the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco, according to a wide-eyed Spanish report, "the earth was lumps of gold and it was cunningly planted with stalks of corn that were of gold." No wonder the Incas were unsurprised when the Spanish conquistadores demanded a roomful of gold as Atahuallpa's ransom.

Rather as the Aztec hegemony relied on continual expansion to feed the growth of Tenocht.i.tlan and the demands of its high-roller elite, so Cuzco, with its huge and growing establishment, needed the momentum of conquest to continue indefinitely. "Most of the inhabitants," according to Pedro Pizarro, "served the dead." 13 13 The dead, it was said, "ate from the best lands." Expansion was necessary to provide domains for each successive supreme Inca's mummy. The system created potentially fatal instability at the heart of the empire: huge rival const.i.tuencies at court controlled their own resources and could back rival candidates for power. The results included instability at the core and friction on the frontiers. The rate of expansion had slowed by the time the Spaniards arrived, and the violence and trauma of succession conflicts jarred and weakened the state. The dead, it was said, "ate from the best lands." Expansion was necessary to provide domains for each successive supreme Inca's mummy. The system created potentially fatal instability at the heart of the empire: huge rival const.i.tuencies at court controlled their own resources and could back rival candidates for power. The results included instability at the core and friction on the frontiers. The rate of expansion had slowed by the time the Spaniards arrived, and the violence and trauma of succession conflicts jarred and weakened the state.

Nothing in pre-Hispanic Andean chronology is certain. The Jesuit missionary Bernabe Cobo, who struggled to understand Peru's past in the early seventeenth century, thought it was because the Incas were indifferent to chronology. He complained of how, if you asked natives for dates, they would speak vaguely of "a long time ago." But the Incas did have a sense of chronology, which they expressed in ways unintelligible to Europeans, a.s.sociating events together, counting generations, and reckoning in eras of unequal lengths, identified by the names of real or legendary rulers. No records are reliable enough, therefore, to justify the a.s.signing of events to particular years, but the Inca realm was expanding fast in the generation or two preceding the arrival of the Spaniards. Inca conquests of that period brought most sedentary peoples of the Andes into a single system, reaching nearly to the river Bio-bio in the south. According to the traditional chronology, Inca Tupac Yupanqui was on the throne in 1492. According to memories Spanish and native chroniclers recorded in the early colonial era, he was the widest-ranging of Inca conquerors. His father, Pachacuti, had launched the empire-building project, taking the Inca state from a regional power in the valley of Cuzco and its environs into what are now Ecuador, Bolivia, and coastal Peru. Tupac Yupanqui extended the conquests to comprise almost all the sedentary peoples of the Andean culture era and, it was said, scoured the sea for "isles of gold" to add to the empire.

Meanwhile, the world Columbus sought-which, as he said, "Alexander labored to conquer"-eluded him. But another world awaited, of wealth more easily exploited than that of Asia and the Indian Ocean, on the far side of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, just beyond his reach. As it turned out, the densely populated zone that stretched from East Asia across Europe and North Africa did not stop at the ocean's edge. There were uncontacted outposts of intense settlement and city life in Mesoamerica and the Andean region, in and around the lands of the peoples we know as the Aztecs and Incas. The route Columbus reported led Europe toward them and their gold and silver and millions of productive people. Beyond them, and in the Caribbean islands along the route, was a vast, underexploited terrain that could be adapted for ranchland and farmland and for a potential plantation economy that would enrich the West.

The incorporation of the Americas-the resources, the opportunities-would turn Europe from a poor and marginal region into a nursery of potential global hegemonies. It might not have happened that way. If Chinese conquerors had bothered with the Americas, we would now think of those areas as part of "the East," and the international dateline would probably sever the Atlantic.

Epilogue.

The World We're In History has no course. It thrashes and staggers, swivels and twists, but never heads one way for long. Humans who get caught up in it try to give it destinations. But we all pull in different directions, heading for different targets, and tend to cancel each other's influence out. When trends last for a short spell, we sometimes ascribe them to "men of destiny" or "history makers," or to great movements-collectively heroic or myopic-or to immense, impersonal forces or laws of social development or economic change: cla.s.s struggle, for instance, or "progress" or "development" or some other form of History with a capital H. H. But usually some undetectably random event is responsible for initiating big change. History is a system reminiscent of the weather: the flap of a b.u.t.terfly's wings can stir up a storm. But usually some undetectably random event is responsible for initiating big change. History is a system reminiscent of the weather: the flap of a b.u.t.terfly's wings can stir up a storm.

Because history has no course, it has no turning points. Or rather, it has so many that you might as well try to straighten a tornado as attempt to sort them out.

Random mutations, however, sometimes have enduring effects in history, rather as in evolution. Evolution generally makes a bad model for understanding history, but in some ways it offers useful a.n.a.logies. In evolution, a sudden, uncaused, unpredictable biological mutation intersects with the grindingly slow changes that transform environments. Something works for a while-a big, reptilian body, a prehensile tail, an expanded cranium-and a new species flourishes for a span before it becomes a fossil. Similar changes happen in human communities. Some group or society acquires a distinctive feature, the origins of which we struggle-usually unsuccessfully-to explain. It therefore enjoys a period of conspicuous success, usually ending in disaster, or "decline and fall," when the society mutates unsustainably or when the environment-cultural or climatic-changes, or when people in some other place benefit from an even more exploitable innovation. We scour the past to spot those moments of mutation, to try to identify those random convulsions that seem briefly to pattern chaos. It's like looking at a seismograph and seeing the first lurch.

The lines in the current pattern are conspicuous enough. We live in a world of demographic explosion. Western hegemony (which the United States exercises now virtually single-handedly and without much chance of keeping going, at present costs, for much longer) crafts the world, along with global intercommunication and, increasingly, global economic interdependence. Other features we can probably all perceive include cultural pluralism and the tensions it generates; competing religious and secular values-with consequent intellectual uncertainty; culture wars, which threaten to become "clashes of civilizations" rapid technological turnover; information overkill; hectic urbanization; pellmell consumption; growing wealth gaps; expensive but effective medical priorities; and environmental angst. The nearest things we have to universal values-apart, perhaps, from obsessions with health-are varieties of individualism, which favor some widespread trends toward, for instance, representative forms of government, codified human rights, and liberal economics. At the same time, ours is a ditherers' world, tacking without much sense of consistent direction, oscillating between addictions and antidotes. Wars alternate with revulsion from war. Generations alienated from their parents bring their children up to be their friends. Spells of social and economic overplanning are interspersed with madcap deregulation. People satiated with permissiveness go "back to basics."

This world already looks doomed to extinction. Western power is going the way of previous dinosaurs. The United States-the last sentinel of Western supremacy-is in relative decline, challenged from East and South Asia. Pluralism looks increasingly like a path to showdown instead of a panacea for peace. Population trends on a global level are probably going into reverse. Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that "modernity" is ending proclaim a "postmodern age."

Yet this doomed world is still young: 1492 seems, on the face of it, too far back to look for the origins of the world we are in. Population really started to grow worldwide with explosive force only in the eighteenth century. The United States did not even exist until 1776, and only became the unique superpower in the 1990s. The tool kit of ideas we a.s.sociate with individualism, secularism, and const.i.tutional guarantees of liberty really came together only in the movement we call the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century western Europe and parts of the Americas, and even then they struggled for survival-bloodied by the French Revolution, betrayed by romanticism.

Most of the other features of our world were barely discernible before the nineteenth century, when industrialization empowered Western empires and made a genuinely global economy possible. Much of the intellectual framework familiar in today's world was new in the early twentieth century-the first era of relativity, quantum mechanics, psychoa.n.a.lysis, and cultural relativism. Individualism had to fight wars against collectivism. Democracy, pitted against totalitarianisms, won a solid-looking victory only when the twentieth century was nearly over. Environmentalism has emerged as a powerful worldwide ideology only in the last forty years or so. Some of the science and technology that make the way we think and live and fear distinctive are of more recent origin-nuclear weapons, micro-IT, the genetics of DNA, the currently fashionable techniques of disease control, the food-production methods that now feed the world. These sudden and rapid new departures are reminders that "modernity"-which, allowing for the variety of more or less equivalent terms, is every generation's self-description-never starts, but is perpetually renewed.

In any case, it is a fallacy to a.s.sume that origins are always remote, or that historical events are like big species-with long ancestries-or big plants with long roots. One of the lessons of our time, for those as old as I am or older, is that changes happen suddenly and unpredictably. Long-running pasts crunch into reverse gear. We who are middle-aged-who have not even seen out a normal lifetime-have watched the British Empire collapse, the Cold War melt, the divisions of Europe heal in "ever-closer" union, the Soviet bloc dissolve. Supposedly autochthonous national characters have self-transformed. The English, for instance-my mother's people-whom my father described after World War II, with their stiff upper lips and umbrellas as tightly rolled as their minds, have turned into people he would no longer recognize: as mawkish and exhibitionist as everybody else. The stiff upper lips have gone wobbly. The Spanish-my father's people-have changed just as much, in an even shorter time. The values of austerity, sobriety, quixotism, and lividly, vividly dogmatic Catholicism, which I knew as a child, have vanished, conquered by consumerism and embourgeois.e.m.e.nt. Spain is no longer-as the tourist slogans used to say-different. Almost every community has undergone similarly radical changes of character.

Structures based on cla.s.s and s.e.x today are unrecognizable from those of my childhood. Moralities-usually the most stable ingredients of the societies that adopt them-have metamorphosed. Gays can adopt children-an innovation my parents' generation could never have imagined. The pope has prayed in a mosque. Almost every morning brings an awakening like Rip van Winkle's into a trans.m.u.ted world. I struggle to understand my students' language: we no longer share the same cultural referents, know the same stories, recognize the same icons. When I search in cla.s.s for art we all have in common, it seems that we have hardly ever even seen the same movies or learned the same advertising jingles. The most bewilderingly abrupt changes have been environmental: a melting icecap, desiccated seas, diminished rain forests, engorged cities, perforated "ozone," species extinguished at unprecedented rates. The world we live in seems to have been made in a single lifetime. It is so mutable, so volatile, that to reckon its gestation at half a millennium or so, and date it from 1492, seems almost quaint.

The big change, I think, that has overtaken my own discipline in my lifetime is that we historians have more or less abandoned the search for long-term origins. What we used to call the longue duree longue duree has collapsed like a tidied-away telescope. When we want to explain the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, we no longer do as Edward Gibbon did in his cla.s.sic on the subject and go back to the age of the Antonine emperors (who were doing very well in their day), but say that migrations in the late fourth and early fifth centuries provoked a sudden and unmanageable crisis. When we try to explain the English Civil War of the 1640s, we no longer look back as Macaulay did to traditions supposedly traceable to the "Germanic woods," or even to the supposed "rise of Parliament" or of "the bourgeoisie" in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period, but see English government strained to the breaking point by a war with Scotland that started four years before the breakdown. To explain the French Revolution we no longer do as Tocqueville did in his unsurpa.s.sed history and look at the reign of Louis XIV, but see the financial conditions of the 1780s as crucial. To understand the outbreak of the First World War we no longer do as Albertini did and blame the deficiencies of the nineteenth-century diplomatic system-which was actually rather good at preserving peace-but at the relatively sudden collapse of that system in the years preceding the war, or even at the intractabilities of the railway timetables of 1914, which, according to A. J. P. Taylor's notoriously seductive theory, made the mobilization of armies irreversible once it was under way. has collapsed like a tidied-away telescope. When we want to explain the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, we no longer do as Edward Gibbon did in his cla.s.sic on the subject and go back to the age of the Antonine emperors (who were doing very well in their day), but say that migrations in the late fourth and early fifth centuries provoked a sudden and unmanageable crisis. When we try to explain the English Civil War of the 1640s, we no longer look back as Macaulay did to traditions supposedly traceable to the "Germanic woods," or even to the supposed "rise of Parliament" or of "the bourgeoisie" in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period, but see English government strained to the breaking point by a war with Scotland that started four years before the breakdown. To explain the French Revolution we no longer do as Tocqueville did in his unsurpa.s.sed history and look at the reign of Louis XIV, but see the financial conditions of the 1780s as crucial. To understand the outbreak of the First World War we no longer do as Albertini did and blame the deficiencies of the nineteenth-century diplomatic system-which was actually rather good at preserving peace-but at the relatively sudden collapse of that system in the years preceding the war, or even at the intractabilities of the railway timetables of 1914, which, according to A. J. P. Taylor's notoriously seductive theory, made the mobilization of armies irreversible once it was under way.

Still, it has long been the vocation of historians to thumb back through time, looking for the previously unglimpsed origins of what is conspicuous in every age. With surprising unanimity, the quest for the origins of most of what is distinctive in the modern world has led back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century and to Europe. Most textbooks still make a break-the start of a new volume or part-around 1500. Some of them still call this the beginning of the modern world. Historians-even those who disapprove of traditional periodization-loosely call the few centuries prior to about 1800 the "early modern period."

The intellectual movements we call the Renaissance and Reformation, for instance, have become a.s.sociated with claims or a.s.sumptions that they made modern social, political, cultural, philosophical, and scientific developments possible. The work of European explorers and conquerors around the globe makes a convincing starting point for the modern history of imperialism and globalization. The date textbooks used to treat as "the beginning of modernity" was 1494, when a French invasion of Italy supposedly unlocked influences from the Renaissance and began to spread them around Europe. A few writers have claimed to trace such supposed const.i.tuent features of modern thought as skepticism, secularism, atheism, capitalism, and even ironic humor to medieval Jewish tradition, and have argued that the absorption of these ideas into the European mainstream began with the effectively enforced conversion of Spanish Jews to Christianity.1 These claims are untrue but are suggestive in the present context, because the biggest bonanza of conversions almost certainly occurred in the year 1492, when all Jews who refused conversion were expelled from the Spanish kingdoms. These claims are untrue but are suggestive in the present context, because the biggest bonanza of conversions almost certainly occurred in the year 1492, when all Jews who refused conversion were expelled from the Spanish kingdoms.

So dating the beginnings of the modern world to a time close to 1500 or thereabouts has a long tradition behind it. I reject the thinking that underpins the tradition. In the breakers' yard of history, supposedly cosmic events get pounded into fragments, re