In the 16th century, the Spanish occupied the New World, and the Portuguese landed on the coasts of India, China and Africa, usurping territory and other resources. The Iberians extended their influence outward. Some historians understand this as the first European globalization, where philosophy, religion, architecture, and art began to spread and different parts of the world began to influence each other. Unlike Braudel, French historian Serge Gruzinski's Four Parts of the World is one of the leading works on global history of this period, and unlike Braudel, his analysis focuses particularly on the dissemination of cultural goods. And this includes the flow of books – Glukinsky gives examples of books, some published in the early seventeenth century.
"The rest of the world regularly receives European literature and is accustomed to reading them, both classic and new, masterpieces and ordinary works". And this kind of reading and writing is not a one-way flow, including the imagination and borrowing of the knowledge of the "other". Mexico City became the center in the 16th century, showing the convergence of different parts of the world. In his analysis of mobility, Gluginsky did not ignore or shy away from the immense suffering and trauma caused by colonization.
Original author | [fr] Serge Grukinsky
The Four Parts of the World: A History of Globalization, by Serge Grudinsky, translated by Li Zheng, Oriental Publishing House, November 2022.
Book, start drifting
Without the circulation of books, Tsimar Pahern's academic bibliography, Barbuena's textual allegory, and the various quotations that filled the ceremony of welcoming the reliquary in Mexico City in 1578 would be unimaginable. The spread of European books across oceans is the most concrete manifestation of the movement of all the carriers of knowledge during the Renaissance. But books not only exported European modernity, but also gave birth to connections between Iberians and people from the rest of the world.
At the beginning of the 16th century, European books also embarked on a conquest of the Iberian region, crossing the Atlantic with Spanish conquistadors, missionaries and representatives of the kingdom. Earlier, European books had reached the coast of Africa and India with the Portuguese. After that they reached Japan and China.
For the first time in their history, these books flowed like ships across all the world's oceans. It is difficult to estimate the exact number of these books exported at that time. It is documented that more than 8,000 books were shipped from Spain to the West Indies between 1558 and the end of the 17th century. But it is likely to increase this figure by a factor of 10, taking into account smuggling and the export of books that are not under the control of the Iberian authorities. The flow of European resources is not just a mechanical, unconscious migration. This flow has led to a series of secondary effects and a return to Europe that are difficult to predict and coordinate a response to. For example, European literary classics are reproduced elsewhere outside Europe with the help of translation. Around 1520, when Dual de Resende came to the Moluccas, as a courier sent by the King of Portugal, he brought with him the works of Cicero that he had translated during his long journey. Another Portuguese, Onli Garci, an expert in ore and silver digging techniques, brought with him the works of Camões and Petrarch when he came to Spanish-ruled America, translating them into Castilian during his journey between the two hemispheres.
Footage from the documentary España, la primera globalización (2021).
Like images, European books embarked on a globetrove beyond the borders of the Portuguese Empire. A sample copy of the Antwerp geographer Abraham Otlius' atlas Universal Maps arrived in Japan and was later presented by Matteo Ricci to the Ming emperor of China. Theodore de Bree's Topographic Map of Roman Cities (Frankfurt, 1597) depicting the splendor of Ancient Rome and Georg Braun and Frans Hocgenberg's Map of the Cities of the World (Cologne, 1575-1583) both suffered similar fates. These books were exported and traveled the world with their readers. These books accompany their owners across the ocean.
People use reading to kill time on ships, reading alone or aloud to their travel companions. The popularity of authors, the commercial interests of booksellers, can cause people in different parts of the world thousands of kilometers away from Europe to read the same books as Europeans. Book lovers are scattered across Africa, Asia and the Americas, forming a readership interested in the same subject, the same religious text, Latin classics or best-selling novels.
The generation of a worldwide readership
A Spanish study in Manila in 1583 contained 23 literary books, including Geronimo de Urea's Riostó's Roland and Jacob Sanazaro's Arcadia. The books that crossed the ocean are not all those that are remembered by posterity. Today, on this side of the Pyrenees, who remembers Giorgio de Montemayor's Diana and its sequel. In Cervantes' Spain, the parish priest, who had carefully read Don Quixote, believed that enthusiasm should not be given to this masterpiece, which "ranks first among such books". The executioners of the Inquisition saw this best-selling novel with idyllic life in the hands of the Portuguese in Salvador in Bahia (1591) and the Spanish in the Philippines (1583). The fact that the fourth part of Diana's Ana, published in Spain in 1582, appeared in Manila a year later, is an indication of how quickly the books circulated, often better than they do today.
Spaniards, mestizos, and Indian literati, who were numerous, formed a market that attracted the attention of booksellers from the Iberian Peninsula.
A still from Honor de cavalleria (2006).
A significant portion of the first edition of Don Quixote was shipped across the sea to the Americas and Peru, where the books had just been published and booksellers knew they could fetch good prices. And the "bad book" was also exported and sold quite well.
Geronimo Contreras' Jungle Adventure, a book that appears in the Index of Forbidden Books, connects the two oceans and it was shipped to Manila. In the early 90s of the 16th century, Brazil, ruled by the Portuguese, received books as dubious as Diana, such as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Giorgio Ferreira de Vaconcelos' Euphrozina (1555), which were banned by the Lisbon Inquisition. Everywhere these books went, the commissioners of the Holy See Priesthood had to keep their eyes open: "Books are one of the main reasons for carrying out ship inspections, especially the cargo boxes on board are very important".
At the same time as the circulation of books, European languages also became globalized. The 16th century was the era of the spread of ancient languages such as Latin and Greek, as well as modern languages such as Castilian, Portuguese and Italian. In Mexico City, indigenous students of the Imperial College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco began learning Latin in 1536, as did Goa. By the end of the 16th century, Japanese students at Ikeda Gakuin were also learning Latin, with 93 students in 1596. The emergence of new readerships reflects that the global circulation of books does not just follow the opening and travel of sea routes.
The rise of large-scale printing houses
The local production of European books required the transport of valuable equipment, the establishment of printing houses, the mastery of new working languages and curious printers around the world. Mexico City received Lombards such as Giovanni Pauly, Turin such as Antonio Ricardo, and Rouen such as Pierre Ochat. Working in Goa were Flemish people such as Johannes de Endem, as well as Castilians such as Juan Gonzle and Juan de Bustamante. They worked with indigenous assistants, who quickly became familiar with letterpress printing—originally from ancient China.
Beginning in 1538, with the technical and financial support of the Klumberg family in Seville and the instigation of the Mexican bishop and governor, the first printing house in the Americas was established. More than 40 years later, in Lima, Antonio Ricardo, a Piedmontese native from Mexico City, also established a printing house. In Goa, Asia, nearly 20 years after the capital of New Spain, the Jesuit College Press published the society's first book, Philosophical Inferences. In 1588 (the sixteenth year of the Wanli calendar), Macao, China, published the first book, Father Bonifacus's "Education of Catholic Children", using European movable type printing. In 1584, the first European publishing house landed in Japan, and later, thanks to the efforts of the Jesuits, more than 80 books were published. Publishing activity in the Philippines under Spanish rule was relatively minimal: Manila did not publish the Spanish and Tagalog Christian Doctrines until 1593. From the mid-16th century to 1636, 23 books were published, with Portuguese India in third place after Mexico City (about 300 books) and Japan (more than 80 books). These technological relay stations are being established at both ends of the world at the same time. Goa published its first philosophical book in the 50s of the 16th century, and Mexico City published some of the great works of the Augustinian Alonso de la Villa Cruz: The Compendium of Logic (1554), The Dialectics (1554) and The Speculation of Physics (1557).
The Bishop's Palace in Mexico City was built in 1556 and the Bishop's Palace in Goa 12 years later. There is also parallelism and synchronicity between Japan and Mexico: in 1594 the Latin grammar of the Portuguese Manuel Álvarez was published as an important linguistic tool in Mexico and Japan, respectively.
Footage from the documentary España, la primera globalización (2021).
The globalization of European languages was accompanied by another form of invasion. Fragments of the classics and large texts of Christianity were gradually translated into Amerindian and Asian languages, thus entering societies that until then were completely alien to European traditions. Essopp's Fables were translated into Nahuatl in Mexico City and into Japanese in Nagasaki. The Japanese version of the Fable, decorated with paintings created by the Japanese disciples of the Jesuit Nicolò, reached Father Matteo Ricci, who dedicated it to an official of the Chinese court. This trend of translation allowed Amerindian languages that had never been written before to be written phonetically, acquiring a physical presence in the form of books or in the form of loose texts. Indeed, this is particularly true for Nahuatl, Maya, Quechua, Tupi in Brazil, and Timukua in Florida.
Iberian flows in different parts of the world drove the spread of the Latin script with the European printed script. This driving force, which had been created in the Americas, was advanced in Goa and then reached the Far East. Japanese is also transcribed into Latin. Tagalog, as a Filipino language, has also been transliterated into Latin. Because Thomas Pinpin, a native of Radino and the owner of the printing house, was a bilingual Filipino, he published his Castilian textbook in 1610, using the Latin alphabet. Words, words travel with books. The word "livre" in European languages ("libro" in Castilian) translates to "librong" in Tagalog, and the word "amoxtli" in Nahuatl used to refer to ancient hieroglyphs and in New Spain it meant "book".
Regional languages were used for the printing of map books, letterpress printing, Latin grammar, a template for all European languages, and a dictionary was compiled as a reference following the model of the Ambrose Callepinus dictionary. In the Americas and Asia, monks eager to communicate with future Christians added various "skills" as keys to the world's languages: The Art of Mexican and Castilian by the Franciscan friar Alonso de Molina, and the Art of the Japanese Language by the Jesuit João Rodríguez (Nagasaki, 1608).
These dictionaries are even more ambitious: Alonso de Molina's Castillan-Nahuatl, Nahuatl-Castilian dictionaries were published in Mexico City in 1571, and the Latin-Japanese Dictionary was published 80 years later in Amakusa in Japan. In addition to the large number of books sent to the four parts of the world by publishers and booksellers in the Iberian Peninsula, there are also the earliest dictionary books, religious writings and anthologies from Europe, which also appeared in the Americas and Asia. These books responded to the need for evangelism around the world, and through these books European printing and literature spread throughout the world.
New knowledge flows back to Europe
Iberian flows were driven by Europe, and its American and Asian stations usually served only as regions. In this context, the return of printed matter from the Americas and Asia to Western Europe has long been an exception.
The Portuguese physician García da Horta's Introduction to Indian Botany, Dialogues on Ayurvedic and Pharmacological Medicine, published in Goa in 1563, deserves attention. The work begins with a dialogue between the author and a Spaniard interested in Ayurvedic herbs, aimed at European readers in order to correct and enrich their knowledge of Indian plants. The book was an astonishing success. It was translated into Latin by Charles de Escrez (Crucius) in 1567 and later into Italian by Aníbal Brigundy (Venice, 1575), and was cited early in European publications, such as the early publication of Juan Fragoso (Alcalá, Castel de Henares, 1566) and the writings of Cristovo de Acosta (Burgos, 1578).
The arrival of exotic "crappy medicines" on the European market and their adoption as medicinal plants in the West stimulated great interest and commercial interests, so that the relevant information was not quickly disseminated. So there was a reverse flow, and new knowledge spread from the stations in distant regions to Europe.
《加勒比海盗》（Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl，2003）剧照。
The success of García da Horta's work in Europe is unique, but it is not an isolated situation. Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, Spanish physicians published numerous books in Mexico aimed at European readers. Francisco Bravo, in his Use of Medicines (1570), publicly denounced his Seville counterpart Nicolás Monades for a surgical problem and raised objections to the Italian Fracaste on typhoid fever. Juan de Cardenas' The Question and the Wonderful Secret of the Indians (1591) is an anthology of novelties in the New World, determined to escape "the oblivion of the unique wonders of all the provinces of the West." However, neither Bravo nor Cárdenas was far from García da Horta's intelligence, and neither was able to conquer the European market and did not receive the support necessary to spread across the Iberian Peninsula and the mainland.
The Spanish Portuguese Empire compiled more manuscripts than the prints of the Americas or Asia, which carried the return of information to Western Europe, bringing with it an unprecedented wealth of documents. Texts that can be seen by European literati often contain images, such as the writings of the missionaries Bernardino de Sahagón and Diego Durán on Mexico, the chronicles of Pedro Siza de León and Guamán Poma de Ayala on ancient Peru, the letters of the Jesuits Norbrega and Anchita on Brazil, and the writings of Luis Frez on Japan. Some of these manuscripts sent to Europe went to Western European publishing houses rather than on the shelves of large libraries – in which case they were often forgotten.
Footage from the documentary "Discovery Atlas" Mexico Revealed (2007).
Similarly, the Latin Natural History of Mexico by Francisco Hernández was proofread and published in Rome after many twists and turns. The works of Amerindian-European mestizos such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Diego Valades were also awarded the award of printing, the former in Lisbon and the latter in Rome and Perugia.
In addition to manuscripts written by Indians, Amerindians-Europeans, or Europeans, the same flow brought strange artifacts to Europe that exposed Western European scholars to other forms of expression: Chinese books and Chinese ideograms, Mexican hieroglyphs, and Peruvian knotted ropes.
In the 70s of the 16th century, Queen Catherine of Portugal had two Chinese books, which were "printed history books". In Lisbon, Bernardino de Escalante had the privilege of reading Chinese books, from which he drew inspiration and introduced some ideograms in his treatises on Portuguese navigation. Some Mexican manuscripts passed from European royal families to private artefacts collections by pirates or royal librarians. Some of them were copied in Rome, such as the Codex of Rios. The frescoes created by the painter Ludovico Buti in Florence are full of tropical birds and Mexican warriors, simply mixing American elements with Asian elements . More than 10 years after the publication of the work of Bernardino de Escalante, the Franciscan friar Diego Valades introduced Mexican hieroglyphs in his printed edition of Christian Rhetoric and explored the mnemonics of these scripts. The cover of Antonio de Herrera's Indian chronicle features drawings borrowed from a Mexican manuscript, which is now in the collection of Paris.
Original author/[fr] Serge Grukinsky
Excerpt/Luo Dong
Editor/Luo Dong
Introduction proofreader/Liu Jun