Afro-Eurasia Before 1492
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
Before October 1492, when Christopher Columbus’s flotilla of diminutive ships arrived in the Caribbean, Earth was a very different place. On one side of the planet one could come across one distinct set of foodstuffs, diseases, human populations, religions, languages, spices, perfumes, and scientific traditions. On the other side an entirely different set prevailed. The two hemispheres, the Americas on the one hand and Afro-Eurasia on the other, were each extremely diverse internally — neither was uniform in any sense — but the lives of people in one hemisphere seldom had a direct impact on the lives of those in the other. Earth’s two major landmasses were decoupled. Before the end of the fifteenth century there were almost no links between them at all, with the notable exceptions of some apparently minor (but fascinating) trade across the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska and the brief period of Scandinavian settlement in Greenland (and, even more briefly, Newfoundland).
In 1492 this changed; the two hemispheres came together. The diseases and ideologies and implements of one hemisphere collided with the human beings in another. Euro-American civilisation was born — and with it, if you ask me, our modern world.
Genocide and the destruction of whole civilisations must be the most lasting legacy of this collision. So many indigenous Americans were killed by incoming European settlers and by newly introduced Afro-Eurasian diseases to which they had no immunity, like smallpox, measles, influenza and plague, that the global climate was altered as a result. Formerly densely populated areas became barren of humanity. American crops and animals were introduced to Afro-Eurasia and vice versa; potatoes spurred population growth across northern Europe, and sweet potatoes did the same in China and in the highlands of New Guinea. Over time the two hemispheres became ever more tightly entangled, and the products of one hemisphere were indigenised and naturalised in the other. We find it hard, now, to think of Italy without tomatoes or Argentina without cows. The change has been so total that it has become almost invisible, and it takes real effort to envision the effects of the Columbian exchange — as this coming-together of the two hemispheres is now known — and, more importantly, to imagine a world prior to it.
If you’ve been following my work for a while then you will have seen me discuss the Columbian exchange many times; I am obsessed with it. It inspires almost every word I write in one way or another. In this post I want to look at some of the key differences between the two hemispheres before 1492, before the Columbian exchange — something that I believe should be at the heart of medieval studies. My focus here is on Afro-Eurasia and initially on plants and animals, but towards the end of this piece I will broaden the scope to look at other, non-biological, things.
What things could one find in Afro-Eurasia before 1492 that one could not find in the Americas? What plants and animals did indigenous Americans not have access to before the end of the fifteenth century? What plants and animals, conversely, were absent from Afro-Eurasia but were (reasonably) common in the Americas before then? What other things did medieval/pre-Columbian Afro-Eurasians have in common with one another?
Afro-Eurasian Plants and Animals
I want to start here with a simple list of plants and animals that were reasonably common in Afro-Eurasia, or which were at least found in several different parts of the hemisphere, before 1492. You can find a pretty decent list of these things on Wikipedia, actually, although the emphasis in that list is different from mine: Among other things, the Wikipedia list includes coffee, which wasn’t very common at all outside northeastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula before the end of the fifteenth century.
The list of cultivated plant species in pre-Columbian (or, as I would call it, medieval) Afro-Eurasia is potentially very long indeed, and there isn’t space to list every plant, spice, animal, or mineral found transregionally before 1492. Nonetheless, here’s my own little curated list of common medieval Afro-Eurasian plants and their products to give you some idea of the situation:
Aubergine/eggplant, almond, apple, bananas, barley, betel/areca, black pepper, brassicas (cabbage, turnip, kohlrabi, etc.), camphor, cannabis, cardamom, carrot, chickpea, cinnamon, citrus fruits (lemon, lime, orange, etc.), cloves, coriander, cotton (Gossypium arboreum), cumin, dates, frankincense, garlic, ginger, grapes, lentils, lettuce, mastic, melon, millet, mint, mung bean, nutmeg, oak gall, olive, onion, opium, peas, pistachio, rice, rosewater, rye, saffron, sage, sorghum, soy, sugarcane, taro, tea, turmeric, walnut, watermelon, wheat, yam (Asian and African)…
And here’s a considerably shorter (and equally incomplete) list of tamed and domesticated animals that appear in medieval Afro-Eurasian texts and art:
Buffalo, camel, cat, chicken, cockatoo, cow, donkey, elephant, goat, goose, guinea fowl, horse, peacock (Figure 1), pig, pigeon, sheep, yak…
Almost all of these plants and animals are familiar to us today in one form or another, and they could all have been known, by name if nothing else, to people in different parts of Afro-Eurasia before the Columbian exchange. This is not to say that all of these plants and animals were used or consumed all across Afro-Eurasia, or even that they were known by name across the entire supercontinent before 1492. Yaks, for instance, only lived around and north of the Himalayas in Inner Asia; they suffer in the heat and aren’t very viable beasts of burden outside of a limited zone. Nonetheless, there are medieval European descriptions of yaks — one in Latin by William of Rubruck, one in Greek by Kosmas Indikopleustes — and there are even words for ‘yak’ in the languages of Southeast Asia as far as Java and Bali. Knowledge of the existence of yaks was thus widely distributed, if not perhaps particularly common, in medieval Afro-Eurasia.
American Plants and Animals
Yaks were not known in the Americas, however; even in principle, no pre-Columbian Mesoamerican description of a yak could exist. Indeed, none of the plants and animals listed above were present in America before 1492, with the probable exception of food brought along or planted by the aforementioned Scandinavian settlers in Greenland. You won’t find wheat or camphor mentioned in any Mesoamerican codices or inscriptions, nor will you see any of the species or products above mentioned in early ethnohistoric accounts of the Americas.
The indigenous peoples of the Americas nonetheless domesticated or cultivated hundreds of different plants not found in Afro-Eurasia, many of which are hugely important and widely consumed to this day. (I have coeliac disease, and I suspect that my diet is actually more American than Afro-Eurasian, even though I live in Europe.) None of these plants were known in Afro-Eurasia before the Columbian exchange, although some have close relatives in Afro-Eurasia (partly because until 56 million years ago Eurasia and North America were parts of a single contiguous landmass known to science as Laurasia). Modern commerical strawberries, for instance, originated in the Americas, but there were also wild strawberries in Europe in the Middle Ages.
In any case, the cultivated plants of indigenous America included but were not limited to:
Açai, amaranth, achiote/annatto (Bixa orellana), arrowroot, avocado, beans (Phaseolus spp. — Figure 2), bell pepper, blueberry, Brazil nut, cashew, chayote, chia, chocolate, coca, cotton (Gossypium hirsutum, G. barbadense), cranberry, guava, maize, manioc, oca, papaya, passionfruit, peach palm, peanut, pecan, pineapple, potato, pumpkin, quinoa, rubber, squash, strawberry, sweet potato, tobacco, tomato, vanilla, wild rice (Zizania spp.), yerba mate…
There’s also a more limited list of domesticated animal species, or at least species routinely exploited by people:
alpaca, bison, capybara, chinchilla, cochineal, guanaco, guinea pig, llama, quetzal, turkey…
None of these plants or animals could be found in Afro-Eurasia before the Columbian exchange — but many of them are completely indigenised there today. The Middle Ages in Afro-Eurasia is defined in part by the absence of these wonderful American things, in much the same way that ‘pre-Columbian’ America is partly defined by the absence of Afro-Eurasian things.
The Columbian exchange is still very much ongoing, by the way, and some of these things are still being introduced from one hemisphere to the other; alpacas are now a reasonably common sight on farms in England, the animals having been imported in the last few decades. The first shipment reportedly sailed from Chile in 1996, firmly within my lifetime.
There’s More!
Plants and animals are important, and I will be saying a lot more about the species listed above in future posts. There is, however, another dimension to medieval Afro-Eurasia. Shared traits across the supercontinent went beyond the exchange of spices and foodstuffs or knowledge of yaks and camphor trees. Below I have provided a brief list of some of the not-directly-organic things that one could find transregionally Afro-Eurasia before 1492 but which could not be found anywhere in the Americas in the same period. This is far from a complete list — it comprises things I could think of off the top of my head, really — and to be frank I think the study of just these sorts of links should be a scholarly discipline in its own right. Nevertheless, here are a few widespread medieval Afro-Eurasian phenomena that are worth investigating:
Arabic script, artificial glass (beads, vessels, etc.), the astrolabe, base-10 positional notation number system/’Hindu-Arabic’ numerals, the blowgun/blowpipe, chainmail, chess, Christianity, clockwork, the composite bow, dice, distillation, firearms, gunpowder, Indo-European languages or loanwords, Islam, Judaism, the junk, palm-leaf manuscripts, paper, the plough, sailing vessels (possibly known in the Americas), the shawm, silk cloth, steel, the story of the Buddha, swords, the watermill, wheeled vehicles, wool, (forms of) the zodiac…
As with the foods and beasts listed above, these things were not ubiquitous across Afro-Eurasia. I don’t know of any surviving medieval Javanese clockwork, for example, and composite bows seem to have been rare in Europe west of Hungary and Venice. Jews only appear to have made occasional trips to Southeast Asia and tropical Africa (although there seem to have been Christian settlements in medieval Sumatra). The story of the Buddha was only known in Europe in a fascinating Christianised form (and also in the text of Marco Polo’s Travels). Nonetheless, before Columbus went to the Caribbean, Afro-Eurasia was already coalescing as a single economic and cultural space, from Japan to Ireland and from New Guinea to Angola, and many of these things could be found over wide swathes of land and sea. These links went deep; they were botanical, zoological, ideological, technological, and religious.
My point here isn’t that Afro-Eurasia was ‘more advanced’ than the Americas, or that these connections bestowed an inevitable social and military advantage on Europeans when they arrived in the Americas, à la Guns, Germs and Steel. My point is instead that these links, in addition to the absence of American things, made Afro-Eurasia a particular place before the Columbian exchange — a particular place that requires its own periodisations and its own integrated histories in order for us to fully grasp it.
A. J. West — Lisbon, 2022 (posted here 2024).
