Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery.

• Author: Kreutz, Andrej

Cultures in Conflict is an elegantly written essay based on the author's numerous previous lectures focusing on the multiple anniversaries of 1492. However, in addition to its penetrating historical analyses and thoughtful comparisons, it also contains some updated political comments which, although by no means baseless, nevertheless seem rather exaggerated and one-sided.

From an historical point of view, the author calls the reader's attention to the close relationship among the three major events of 1492: Columbus' discovery of America, the Christian conquest of Granada, the last outpost of Muslim power in the Iberian Peninsula, and the expulsion of the Jews a few months later from all of Spain. Particularly strong connections existed between the already long and multiple-level European struggle with Islam and the geographical discoveries of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries which would be extremely important and which in some way might be seen as its outcomes and continuities.

As the author reminds us, as early as the late Thirteenth Century, when the re-conquest of the Iberian peninsula, although already in progress, was still far from completed, Ramon Lhill, one of the leading Christian authorities on Islam at the time, argued that when the recovery of Spain was completed, it would be necessary to carry the war beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to the other side (p. 58). Spanish, Portuguese and, on the other side of Europe, Muscovite rulers, by driving the Muslims out of Iberia and Russia had won a great battle, but they had not yet won the war. The long drawn-out "holy" struggle between Christianity and Islam now simply continued on a much vaster scale. At least originally, the explorers and conquistadors searched not only for gold and spices, but perhaps even more for other Christians and allies in the ongoing confrontation between these two monotheistic religions. As Professor Lewis points out: "Columbus, too, was looking for Christians and spices and also for Priest John ... symbolically, he found them all and much more" (p. 73).

It was the discovery of America which, far more than the simultaneous conquest of Granada, in the long run ensured the triumph of Europe over its enemies, providing it with the riches of gold, silver, all sorts of natural resources and enormous immigration outlets, the role of which would soon grow immensely. What was probably no less important, it contributed decisively to the "breaking of intellectual molds and the fleeing of the human mind and spirit" out of the inherited frameworks of narrow traditions (ibid.).

However, all those and numerous other splendid achievements did not come without an enormous price which was largely paid by the peoples and continents that were undergoing the process of subjugation. Professor Lewis does not deny that, but his...