Joan-Pau Rubies

The Sasivikallu Ganesa statue from Hampi, Vijayanagara, a Hindu empire that existed deep within southern India. Travellers to the East from the West encountered many rituals and monuments and wonders, which they reported in letters, diaries and written accounts. Although many of the places and events they encountered seemed utterly alien, there were levels on which they could begin to understand these societies and make explicit comaprison with their own homes. "In this temple of Darcha, is an idol in the figure of a man as to his body, and the face is that of an elephant with trunk and tusks, and with three arms on each side and six hands, of which arms they say that already four are gone, and when all fall then the world will be destroyed ; they have this as article of faith according to their prophecies." From R. Sewell, A Forgotten Empire, 1900.

Yet there was a world beyond Europe, a world which included states and kingdoms as diverse as China, Japan, the Mughal and Ottoman Empires. What was kingship like in the East? There were centuries of contact between East and West mainly through travellers such as Marco Polo, merchants and, more recently, missionaries. Many of them brought back tales of exotic kings. But were these kingdoms and monarchs any different from the kingdoms and monarchs back in Europe? And what dialogue was there concerning images of kingship in the East and West?

Travellers tales: centuries of contact

Travel writing in the early modern world. (1:20 min)

People in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries travelled outside Europe to other parts of the world, largely as a result of the colonial expansion of Europe. A lot was written about other societies. Travel literature is the body of literature which is based on this experience of being overseas: it is just a variety of documents, sometimes quite different from each other, which reflect this experience of being abroad. Some of them are very literary, but the great majority are not. Many of them are administrative documents or tracts written for a purpose.

For example, a Jesuit would write a letter about his experiences, from his perspective as a missionary, to his superiors or his colleagues. A merchant would write about the products he found; a conqueror would write about the great conquests he had performed, usually exaggerating success and awarding himself and his friends great glory. That is really what travel literature in this period is about.

Tales of Eastern kingdoms

Travelling to and understanding the East. (4:52 min)

Travel to the East has a longer history than travel to the Americas. There has always been travel to the East, from the Greeks onwards. We have very few early accounts, and often these are edited so much that by the time we get a text we don't know how much we have of the traveller himself, and how much is an elaboration. Typically, Marco Polo's account was written together with a more professional writer. There are extremely different versions of his manuscripts and one never quite knows whether Marco Polo prepared different versions or whether there was a master version. So it is quite difficult to get to the real experience. Things change after the sixteenth century when the Portuguese create a colonial system and the accounts of the East are much more regular, and we know better who wrote them and what their circumstances were.

t were extremely varied. China was a large bureaucratic empire with a Confucian Mandarin class and an Emperor who had an enormous amount of authority. India had very small kingdoms, such as Calicut,  on the Malabar coast in southern India. There were much larger kingdoms in the north, but in this case they were not Hindu but Muslim rulers, the most famous being the Mughal empire which grew throughout the sixteenth century and became known to Europe mainly during the reign of Akbar through the missions of Jesuits. In Japan there was a very fragmented system, with a nominal Emperor who had almost no real power and a nominal position of prime minister, which a number of generals tried to attain. When the Portuguese got there in the middle of the sixteenth century, there was no real centre of authority. Rather, there were many local lords, like feudal overlords, struggling for power and forming factions.

For the Portuguese and the missionaries who were there--the Jesuits--these were extremely different political systems, very different political realities existing side by side in what Europeans perceived as a single area. There was not one oriental monarchy, but, just as in Europe, there were many varieties. That raises an interesting question for us. Did Europeans see according to their prejudices or do they acknowledge realities which are different to their preconceptions?

	Thinking Point
	To what extent do you think it was possible for the West to view the East accurately in the sixteenth century?

I think that the answer lies halfway. They acknowledge realities because they have to; their interest is not simply constructing an image for consumption in Europe. In many instances these people are writing with practical aims. If you want to conquer, you have to understand the political weaknesses and the military capabilities of your enemy. If you want to convert, you have to understand the cultural assumptions of the people you wish to convert. Finally, if you wish to trade, you need to get along because most of the time you are not trading as conquerors but as a group of foreigners among others who are tolerated by local rulers. Europeans often had to request the right to trade, so they needed to understand these societies.

Yet they also carried their own assumptions and their own ideas. So there was some kind of dialogue, an interaction between assumptions of what these travellers imagined would be a political system according to the European experience, and the variety of situations they had to adapt themselves to. Their views of the places and the peoples they meet are forged according to the different agendas that they have.

Oriental ideals and oriental despots

The idea of the oriental despot. (3:52 min)

Europe was also involved in an inner dialogue about different political orders, some of which were contrasted with the oriental realities to develop further perceptions. There were two main tendencies at this time. One saw oriental regimes as tyrannical and despotic; the other one idealised oriental political systems as possessing the qualities that Europeans were struggling for. For example, China was seen by early writers as having a wonderful political order because they had a single political system, whereas the Europeans were fighting each other according to their different national and religious denominations. The Chinese were thought to have a very strong sense of central authority, which administered law, upheld justice and created prosperity. China was immensely prosperous and much larger than any single European state. It had an enormous and ancient civilisation, which the Europeans could not but admire because that is what they aspired to themselves. In that sense we could say that some European assumptions would find fulfilment in what they perceived.

Other images were more negative and dictated by European fears and concerns. For example, the same Jesuits who described China in a positive light for being a centralised civilisation would describe Japan as being a tyrannical regime because it had separate lords fighting for power. However, none of these images were stable. Even within those discourses themselves there were changes. The Jesuits soon became more sceptical about the virtues of the Chinese. In reality, there was a lot of corruption and bribery in this supposedly well-ordered society, and their mathematics and astronomy were soon considered inferior. Similarly, a number of writers in Europe railed against the Chinese for being despotic, because European ideas of political and civil liberty debated in this period were not to be found in China.

So the same evidence could give different answers according to what your political ideology was. If you believed in political liberty, like Montesquieu, then China would embody despotism. If you believed in paternalistic absolutist rulers, as the Jesuits tended to, then the Chinese looked quite good, at least initially.

European writing and the East

The growth of European cosmography. (2:36 min)

One can distinguish between different kinds of writings. The texts written by those concerned with practicalities, such as understanding trade to the East or planning the conquest of Cambodia, are more descriptive, although always selective with those descriptions. In Europe, especially from the late sixteenth century, there were people compiling such descriptions, armchair cosmographers or geographers trying to systematise them. They would often try to create comparative systems looking at regimes across the world. One of the most famous cosmographers was Giovanni Bottero, an Italian closely connected with the Jesuits, who basically synthesized the vast amount of information that had been acquired during the sixteenth century to write a new view of the world according to all the political regimes and religions that existed. Such encyclopedic ambition was being informed by the new primary descriptions coming from the East.

Reproduced with kind permission of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze. Ms. Portolano. 1

Mappa Mundi of 1457, called "Genoese." Cosmographers tried to come to grips with the world as travellers and missionaries described it in all of it's variety. The development of Portuguese seafaring in this era meant that map-makers were at pains to reconcile the traditional view of the world laid down by Ptolomey and so on with new and exotic tales from the Orient. Some featurs of this map have been taken from the narrative of Niccolo Conti, for example, the large lake in India and the great city of Biznigaria, representing the kingdom of Vijayanagara.

Finally, there are the straight political thinkers such as Montesquieu or even Machiavelli. All of these people were thinking in terms of theoretical positions and practical advice for European rulers, in which the oriental examples were often used as an alternative vision of politics, to be admired or denigrated. So there was this strong sense in which Europeans were trying to define themselves as having political principles that were not found in the East, such as respect for natural law, and respect for political and civil liberties (including private property).  One thing that Europeans failed to appreciate, on the other hand, was that oriental rulers practiced more religious tolerance than Christian kings. When the idea of tolerance grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writers like Voltaire would extol oriental examples.