Chapter I: Classical Civilizations
The Greeks
One might ask, and perhaps rightfully so, what do the ancient Greeks of Antiquity have to do with the formation of the Mediterranean World in the Age of Charles I of Aragon and Spain some 2,000 years later? At the face of it, it would appear as if the two civilizations and two empires are so far separated by time and technology that they have no relationship to the world that Charles was born and raised in, and eventually came into a great conflict with the Ottomans for domination of the sea at the center of the world. It is my intention to highlight
histoire Longue durée (the long duration of history popularized by the great Ferdinand Braudel) and hopefully show how seemingly unrelated events and moments in history have a deep impact in the world that we live in today. History only gets one run, so what happened even long ago has a deep and meaningful influence upon the Mediterranean world of Charles I.
The Greek civilization is the first Western civilization in the dichotomization of the global civilizations. Primitive democracy, which had little resemblance of contemporary democracy which finds its roots in the Protestant Reformation, is generally highlighted as being among the many reasons why the Greeks are the mother of Western civilization. The Persians, one of the great opponents of the later Greek city states, was a major threat the Greeks had to deal with when the Persian King Xerxes gathered a large invasion force to cross into the Greek homelands. The factional and rivalrous Greeks who were busy squabbling among themselves for dominance in the Mediterranean - as Greek colonies had spread from Anatolia to Italy and Sicily, Xerxes invasion finally united the powerful Greek nations just as Agamemnon had done during the Greek conquest of Troy some many generations prior.
Indeed, had the Greeks not united and confronted the Persian invasion by forces, much of the world could have been starkly different. The philosophies and sciences of the Greeks, typified by men like Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Epicurus, and Democritus may have been lost if were not for the Persian incursion and invasion. Almost paradoxically, the rise of Persia led to the Greeks incorporating Zoroastrian philosophy into their own philosophy, which in turn, influenced the development of Christian theology and philosophy when the Early Church Fathers and the Medieval Scholastics spent their time synthesizing Greek philosophy with Jewish philosophy. Thus, in a way, the intellectual and scientific tradition of the West comes from the East. But, perhaps more important was the victory of the Greeks at Salamis ensured that the Mediterranean would become a lake for the Western civilizations to contest over.
A fledgling Rome was not a power that would have been able to stop the prospective conquest of the “King of Kings” (the title the Persian rulers had given themselves) had the Greeks failed to stop the Persian invasion. Thus, had the Persians been able to capitalize on their early victories and had defeated the Greeks, the Mediterranean World of Charles I would have been radically different. In so many ways, the Mediterranean of Charles I mirrors the Mediterranean world more than 2000 years ago. Another great power was rising in the East - the Ottomans, who would come to inherent and absorbed the great Hellenic empires and all of their traditions ever since the birth of Muhammad and the rise of Islam. Thus, Charles always invoked himself as the new Leonidas in his bid to attain Mediterranean mastery against the new Xerxes, the Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz “The Magnificent.”
Just as the Battle of Salamis cemented the birth of a Western Mediterranean world, the victory won by Charles’ father, King Ferdinand III at the Battle of Toledo against the French would give birth to a Spanish Mediterranean that Charles inherited. After being defeated in a string of battles against the mighty French armies, the tremendous victory at Toledo, which I shall cover in greater detail in my work, is the seminal moment in Spanish history that united the Iberian Peninsula behind the House of Trastámara and gave rise to Spain as the pre-eminent military power in Europe for well over a century!
The Greeks themselves were a people rich in history and tradition. Not only are they the forerunners of Western civilization, the Hellenization of the “Known World” in the conquests of Alexander the Great was also a tremendous accomplishment, even though the Wars of the Diadochi weakened the fragmented and splintered Greek Empires and they, one by one, fell to the conquests of the Roman Republic before her transition to the Roman Empire. In many ways, the Romans themselves were Greek. Roman tradition and mythology, beginning with Virgil’s
Aeneid , maintained that the Roman state and Roman people were the descendants of Aeneid, the survivor of the Siege of Troy. The Roman gods and goddesses were Latinized versions of the Greek gods. Roman philosophy and political theory was indebted to Greek philosophy and so forth.
The Greeks were great traders and colonizers, much like the Spanish under Charles. Their empire and civilization came to stretch across the entire Mediterranean basin, primarily to gain the lucrative trade routes that had been established over centuries of explorations and inter-cultural communications. The great trading network that the Spanish and Ottomans would contest one another over was the product of the the cementing of Greco-Phoenician relationships. The great Semitic civilization of the Phoenicians had, centuries prior to the Greco-Persian conflict, had seen Phoenician traders reach as far as the Straits of Gibraltar and establish the world’s first major sea trading network. After the Phoenicians had faded away, the Phoenician colony of Carthage and the explorations and colonization of the Greeks helped to build upon the foundation of the Phoenician trading networks. Thus, the Greeks were indispensable in preserving and expanding the vast network of sea trade started by the ancestors of Queen Dido.
The Greeks, being the forerunners of Western civilization and classical learning, would give the West a remarkable intellectual tradition passed down by various groups and institutions over their heyday had long passed. The Roman intellectual tradition was indebted to the Greeks. The Christian intellectual tradition, which preserved the tradition of Greek scholasticism, science, and philosophy, kept the torch of Western thought alive after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and Europe entered its “Dark Age.” The only institution in the West that preserved the torch of enlightenment, high culture, and education was the Catholic Church. Thus, the Church itself nurtured an infant Western society until the period of the Renaissance which begins with the influx of Byzantine Greek scholars fleeing the conquests of the Ottoman Empire. The Byzantines, although the heirs of the Roman Empire, were culturally, linguistically, and intellectual a Greek people (but one could say the Romans were Greek as well). After the fall of Constantinople in 1449 to the Turks,* Byzantine scientists and philosophers fled across the Mediterranean to places like Italy and Spain and brought with them a greater volume of classic Greek wisdom which sparked the Renaissance.
Nearly 2000 years after the classical Greek civilization had disappeared, the Greeks had given birth to the “great awakening” of the Renaissance which influenced the formation and identity of Western Europe and helped to create three of the great intellectual revolutions that all occurred during the reign of Charles I: The Protestant Reformation, the Counter Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.
The Reformation and Counter Reformation, two of the most important events in the development of Western intellectual history and thought, have their roots in classical Greek philosophy. Reformation theology and Counter Reformation theology saw a renaissance in Greek scholasticism and philosophy as Protestant and Catholic defenders of the faith used the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and others to validate their positions. Spain would become a seat of power for the Counter Reformation under Charles I.
All of this may have been lost to us if were not for the Greeks and their accomplishments at Thermopolyae and Salamis. Indeed, the Greeks themselves influenced the Arabs and Islamic tradition as well. Greek science and philosophy experienced a renaissance in the great Islamic Arab empires of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages as their conquests of the Byzantine Levant exposed them to the workings and teachings of the Greek Atomists and philosophies of Plato and Aristotle which helped give birth to the Hanafi Legal tradition - the Hanafi School being the most progressive of the major Islamic legal traditions which was embraced by the Ottoman Empire, which was arguably the most progressive Empire and people in the world until the rise of the Enlightenment.
The Mediterranean world of Charles I was a Mediterranean that was preserved and reinforced by the Greeks two millennia ago. Thus, the legacy of the Greeks cannot be understated. The rise of the Roman and Arab civilizations, which also contribute to the Mediterranean world of Charles I are indebted to the Greeks. Thus, I shall naturally write about the importance of the Romans and Arabs in their contributions to the world of Charles I in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, I have stated that the Greeks preserved and reinforced the foundational Mediterranean that had been created by the Phoenicians and the heirs of the Phoenicians - the Carthaginians. The importance of the classical civilizations in the foundation, development, and preservation of the Mediterranean would come to a threshold with the Fall of Rome and the rise of the Barbarian successor kingdoms who allowed the great logistical infrastructure established by the Phoenicians, preserved by the Greeks, expanded by the Romans, then rebuilt by the Arabs and the successor Islamic civilizations that came into conflict with the Western Europeans who would inherit and absorb this Mediterranean world built many millennia ago are indispensable in understanding the world of Charles I and why a great Mediterranean Kingdom came to conquer the New World and eventually led them into a clash with the Ottomans where the fate and destiny of the world was in balance.
*Obviously, OTL the Fall of Constantinople happened in 1453. But as this is an AAR, although I am also included much OTL history in it, has to reflect gameplay developments as well. The Fall of Constantinople occurred in 1449 in TTL.
