John Jeffries Martin, A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (2022)

After Israel's tome, I wanted both to read something much shorter and to stick with the early modern period, which I've been enjoying recently. A colleague, Jacqueline Allain, had recently praised Martin's book. So, voila. A Beautiful Ending was engagingly written (far fewer names and offices than in Israel's book) and made an argument that was new and generally persuasive to me. I have to admit that whenever I've taught or thought about political leaders' motivations in earlier times, I've tended to discount religious motivations. For example, if I mention the European explorers and conquistadors and we come to the "three Gs" - god, gold, and glory - I only emphasize the latter two and suggest that spreading Christianity was largely a fig-leaf for power- and lucre-hunger. Martin provides enough evidence to make me reassess. Specifically, he shows that hopes for, and expectations of, a good apocalypse - an era, perhaps even 1000 years, of peace and prosperity - were very widespread from the 1400s to 1700s. His chapter on Columbus was all new to me, and quite surprising. I appreciated that he often stepped away from his European focus to examine the same phenomenon that was occurring among Jews and Muslims. On some fronts - especially regarding causality - I wish Martin had made a stronger case. He does best when he discusses why the early modern period, in particular, saw an upsurge in good apocalypticsm - the increasing destructiveness of warfare between newly powerful empires (Ottoman, Habsburg) and states spurred a longing for a radically better world, as did the Black Death and its aftershocks. He's less persuasive when he assesses the relative role played by apocalypticism and by power and wealth. Time and again he avers that the former was just as important as the latter, but he gives us no reason to agree with this view - aside from his own judgment. Finally, he briefly points to the connections between the religious belief in a radically better, perhaps even perfect, world and similar Enlightenment ideas. But again, he doesn't explore the connection in much, if any, detail. So he falls a little short when it comes to "the making of the modern world."

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (1987)

This book, by one of the preeminent historians of Iberian exploration and colonization, significantly deepened my understanding of the centuries-long background to Columbus and da Gama. The process was multi-sided and dynamic - first the Catalans took the lead in conquering Majorca in 1229; later Castile, in concert with Genoese financiers and navigators, came to the fore, especially with the slow conquest of the Canaries from the mid-fourteenth to late fifteenth centuries, which became the key launching pad for Columbus. As with the English domination and conquest of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland at about the same time (see the previous review), this process also involved many different actors - nobles, royal houses, Popes, Catholic orders - and motives. The book describes the "spectacular" emergence of sugar plantations on Madeira and some of the Canaries in the 1450s, and the further innovation, from the 1460s on the Cape Verde islands, of plantations worked by slave labor. One of the most fascinating aspects was the European struggle to understand and categorize the indigenous "primitive" Canarians - whether they were noble innocents or barbaric savages. In many ways, then, the European encounter with the peoples of the Americas were prefigured on this East Atlantic archipelago more than a century before Columbus. Reading this book made me want to read much more about Europe's dynamism of the high middle ages and reread books such as Thomas Ertman's The Rise of Leviathan (1997) and Robert Bartlett's seminal The Making of Europe (1994). I'd be curious to learn more, for example, about the state-building of Aragon-Catalan and of Castile. This book mentions the Reconquista but doesn't leave the impression that it played a predominant role in these states' dynamism.