even use the same phrases. Overall, the level of scholarship is discouragingly
low, perhaps because their authors are more at home in American history than
European history. They don’t seem to know that the Renaissance was syncretic.
That is, Italians combined ideas from India (via the Turks), Greece (preserved
by Muslim scholars), Arabs, and other cultures to form something new.
Authors also provide no real causal explanations for the age of European
conquest. Instead, they argue for Europe’s greatness in transparently
psychological terms—“people grew more curious.” Such arguments make
sociologists smile: we know that nobody measured the curiosity level in Spain
in 1492 or can with authority compare it to the curiosity level in, say, Norway
or Iceland in 1005.
Several textbooks claim that Europe was becoming richer and that the new
wealth led to more trade. Actually, as the historian Angus Calder has pointed
out, “Europe was smaller and poorer in the fifteenth century than it had been in
the thirteenth,” owing in part to the bubonic plague.^5
Some teachers still teach what their predecessors taught me fifty years ago:
that Europe needed spices to disguise the taste of bad meat, but the bad Turks
cut off the spice trade. Three books in my original sample—The American
Tradition, Land of Promise, and The American Way—repeated this falsehood.
In the words of Land of Promise, “Then, after 1453, when Constantinople fell
to the Turks, trade with the East all but stopped.” But A. H. Lybyer disproved
this statement in 1915! Turkey had nothing to do with the development of new
routes to the Indies. On the contrary, the Turks had every reason to keep the old
Eastern Mediterranean route open, since they made money from it.^6
In 1957 Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff published a book that has become a
standard treatise for graduate students of history, The Modern Researcher, in
which they pointed out how since 1915, textbooks have perpetuated this
particular error. Probably several of the half-dozen authors of the offending
textbooks encountered The Modern Researcher in graduate school. Somehow
the information did not stick. This may be because blaming Turks fits with the
West’s archetypal conviction that followers of Islam are likely to behave
irrationally or nastily. In proposing that Congress declare Columbus Day a
national holiday in 1963, Rep. Roland Libonati put it this way: “His Christian
faith gave to him a religious incentive to thwart the piratical activities of the
Turkish marauders preying upon the trading ships of the Christian world.” Of
course, recent developments, most especially the terrorist attacks of September