CHAPTER II

THE STORIES OF THE OLD EAST AND OF THE NEW WEST

The story of the New World before the coming of the Spaniards may be told shortly because we know so little of it.

At its far north-westerly corner the Continent of America is divided from Asia by a narrow strait. It is a shallow strip of ocean, and there is no doubt that there was a time when it did not exist as a dividing barrier, and that animals--man among the rest--poured into America from Asia at what was then a point of junction between them.

It is therefore generally thought that it was from the great birthplace and nursery of the human race, the central and northern parts of Asia, that the American continent was populated. The so-called Indian tribes which still exist both in North and South America are supposed to be the descendants of those Asiatic immigrants. One might almost say of them that they have no story, in the sense of any record along the lines of what we know as human progress in other parts of the world. Apart from what they have learnt from the white man since the year 1500--and unhappily they learned from him much evil, as well as good--they still represent what we imagine mankind generally to have been in nearly the earliest days of his existence as man and as something better than the apes. They represent man in the hunting phase: that is to say before he passed into the second {15} of the three recognised phases and became pastoral, a keeper of flocks and herds.

[Sidenote: The Red Indian]

Some historians and students of man's story tell us that a principal reason why the Indians of America had gone so little way in civilisation was because that great country had been so ill-supplied by nature with the species of animals which man has domesticated to his service. It has been said that America has no animals that could serve to develop the pastoral phase, no sheep or cattle. It may be so, yet I scarcely think that we can build the explanation very confidently on that as a foundation, for we do not know what man might or might not have done, in course of many generations, in domesticating some of the native animals of America. The only one that he does seem to have domesticated is the dog, and the dog he may have brought with him from Asia, or may have domesticated from one or other species of the American wolf. He had no horses before the Spaniards came, and it has been conjectured that one of the reasons why the Indians were conquered so easily is that they then saw for the first time a man on horseback, and thought that they were meeting some supernatural creature of unknown powers.

But America had its bison, commonly called buffalo, in countless numbers. Who can say that they might not have been trained to do service for man as readily as the wild cattle of Asia? America has its caribou, a kind of deer closely akin to the reindeer which is the invaluable servant of the Laplanders. There are native mountain sheep, and in the south there are the llama and the vicuna, which are species intermediate between the sheep and the camels.

Therefore it is difficult to be sure that it was any lack of animals capable of domestication that prevented the early inhabitants of America from passing into the pastoral stage.

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And then, most interestingly and most strangely, it appears that there were certain places in which, even before the Spaniards came, the Indians had cultivated plants--notably that maize, sometimes called Indian corn, which certainly seems as if it must have been imported into North America from the south.

[Illustration: MEXICAN PICTURE WRITING.]

Moreover, when the Spaniards came to Mexico, and again, and yet more strikingly, when they came to Peru, they found evidence of a civilization very much higher than that to which the great majority of {17} the inhabitants of the country had attained. They found finely worked treasures of silver and gold; they found large stone monuments. One circular stone which I have myself seen in the City of Mexico, called "The Calendar Stone," was engraved with signs which showed that the Mexicans had a system of reckoning time and the seasons of the year. They had a means of communicating thoughts and of recording facts by picture writing. They had large works in stone, for the conduct of water and for irrigation. When the Spaniards came to know something of the ways of thought and of the religion of the people, they found that the sun was the great god of their worship. They also had the hideous practice, but a practice which we saw in the first volume of this Greatest Story to be a very ancient and universal one, of sacrificing human victims, with the idea that the blood received into the ground would dispose the Earth deity to grant them good harvests.

[Sidenote: Egypt and Mexico]

These are ideas and practices which must recall very strikingly much of what we know about the religion of the ancient Egyptians; and in Peru, particularly, were found other practices which might be thought to point to Egypt as their source. Is it at all possible that they really may have come thence? There is a theory about man's story in the world which would answer "yes," and it is a theory which seems to be gaining adherents.

According to this theory, explorers, belonging to the date of the ancient sun-worship in Egypt, pushed out from that country adventurously in search of certain definite objects. Chief among those objects were gold and pearls. And they were sought and prized not only because of their rarity and beauty, but far more because they were considered to have certain magical qualities, to be great "life-givers." The theory then is that the explorers--who were {18} sun-worshippers, who offered human sacrifices, made stone-works, understood irrigation and were distinguished by other practices and beliefs--travelled widely in search for these "life-givers." Traces of their sojourn, it is claimed, are to be found in India, in the chain of islands which is called Indonesia, thence onwards through other islands of the Pacific, until finally we find them on the American continent, in Mexico and Peru, and in various places in North America. Their traces are in the north of Europe also. These traces consist chiefly in large stone works. One or other, and in some places many, of the distinctive elements of the civilisation and religion of ancient Egypt are to be found among the peoples who live where the ancient stone works are. Very commonly they have the belief that there was once among them a ruling family who were "children of the sun," whose forefather actually was the sun himself, to whom, according to some legends, they would return at death. It was the belief that the Spaniards were the sun children, or sun-gods, come again, which greatly assisted them in their conquest of Mexico, and perhaps of Peru also. In the latter country there still existed, at the time of its conquest, the custom common among some of the Pharaohs of Egypt, for the ruler to take his own sister for his queen. Besides its interest, this is a theory which gives a plausible account of facts, such as the stone working and the widely spread belief in the sun children, which are otherwise very difficult to explain. But it is not to be taken as proved, nor even as generally accepted.

In Peru, exceptionally, the Spaniards found a distinct race, the Incas, supposed to be descended from the sun, still ruling, and ruling with a singular benevolence. But throughout the whole of the rest of the continent, North and South, the natives had {19} made very little progress along any lines of civilisation. Here and there was some cultivation, chiefly of the Indian corn; but generally the people were hunters, going nearly naked in the warmer regions, clad in the skins of beasts in the colder climates, poorly armed with bows and arrows.

Thus obscure and scanty is the story of this great newly found world of the Spaniards. In the East, on the other hand, were lands whose stories dated, with actual records, thousands of years back. There was one, that wonderland of China, with earliest annals between two and three thousand years before Christ--by no means the oldest annals of humanity, but incomparably older than those of any other empire that still exists.

[Sidenote: The permanence of China]

That has been the chief wonder of the Chinese Empire, its permanence. And it is wonder that only grows, the more we realise the nature of that empire and the principles by which the society which has held it so long together has been guided. Again and again conquerors have forced their way in upon it from the north--rude, uncivilised tribes invading a highly civilised land. Again and again the chiefs of the invaders have established themselves on the throne of China. They and their sons for many generations have governed the land. But the country generally, with its vast extent and its large population, has gone on its way very little troubled by the change of rulers. Those military conquerors have in fact been themselves conquered by the higher civilisation in which they have found themselves.

The Chinese themselves appear to have come into the country from the west. Although they always have been a people who held soldiers and the military caste in very low esteem, they gradually pushed out the original natives until their empire had boundaries even more extensive than its present wide limits. {20} It is one of the many wonders of this most singular nation, that though it relied so little on force of arms it gained a very marked respect from all the other peoples of the East.

[Sidenote: Confucius]

Since the empire grew to be so vast, it is not surprising that the great men far from the centre became very independent, so that the social conditions in the sixth century before Christ have been likened to those feudal conditions which we saw prevailing in Europe at a much later date. Chinese rulers of provinces have been written of as "feudal dukes." And just at that time, when the country was in the disturbed state which such conditions made inevitable, there arose two great teachers of whom the younger, Confucius, exercised a very extraordinary influence over all China, an influence that has force even to-day.

He expounded sage maxims for man's conduct towards his fellow-men, maxims not necessarily of his own invention but taken from wise men before him. "Do good," he enjoined, "not only to those who do good to you, but to those who do you injury." It had been said even before him. But to "do unto others as you would they should do unto you" may be taken as the principal basis of his own teaching, and the Christian goes no further, in respect of man's "duty to his neighbour." But about man's duty towards God Confucius had nothing to say. Obedience and piety of the son towards the father were, according to him, "the beginning of virtue, that which distinguishes man from the brutes."

And this relation and piety he conceived ought to prevail all through the State. The Emperor ought to act as the father of his people, and the people ought to be obedient to him, like his sons. But he naïvely qualified this, in a way calculated to prevent the Emperor's acting as a tyrannical parent, by saying {21} that he forfeited his claim on this obedience if he governed wrongly.

Confucius never claimed, as did Mahomet, for instance, to be divinely inspired. He came as a mere man, preaching unselfishness and filial piety and the duty of obedience and the beauty of goodness. Those to whom he preached accepted his words, and certainly in some large measure formed their conduct accordingly. It was a sermon advocating peace in a country distracted by disturbances; and its ultimate effect is that the Chinese even to-day are a peace-loving nation. For all that, the great empire has been the scene of very frequent war, both by invaders from without and rebels within; but unhappily that is the state which has been usual throughout man's history everywhere.

Confucius put the highest value on education. In the second century B.C. competitive examinations began to be held for selecting ministers to posts in the Government--a curiously democratic measure, and perhaps possible in no other country than China. Some of the scientific inventions, which have made much difference in the story of the West, were known in China far earlier than elsewhere--the power and use of gunpowder, for instance, and the art and craft of printing. China discovered them early; but after their first discovery she did not develop them at all, as did the Western nations when they relearned them or took them from her.

It was in the third century B.C. that one of the world's wonders, the Great Wall of China, was built--running west from the sea to a length of a thousand and four hundred miles, and going over mountain and valley without deviation. Its purpose was to act as a barrier, easy of defence, against the wild tribes that pressed in from the north. The Emperor under whom this mighty, though not wholly effective, obstacle {22} was raised, was powerful enough to put down most of the feudal dukes, and, much as the feudal dukes and lords in Europe were replaced by the king's official tax collectors, so in China, Viceroys of provinces, appointed by the Emperor, took the place of the dukes. The Viceroys also were not always obedient to the central power, but on the whole the change made for peace within the empire.

Confucianism then, as the doctrine of that great teacher was called, was not a religion, but merely a system for the ordinance of man's life on earth, without reference to a God; but about the same time as Confucius, Buddha lived and founded the religion of Buddhism in India; and in the first century A.D. Buddhist missionaries came to China. It is to this influence that the pagoda-shaped temples are due which are a prominent feature in Chinese scenery, for it was in this form that the Buddhist temples were roofed. The new religion gained numerous converts, and its monasteries are many in China to this day; but it really seems to have made but little difference in the lives of the people--for two reasons. First because the Chinese are least ready to change their way of life of any people in the world, and secondly because the unselfishness, which is the leading principle in the religion of Buddha, had been already preached as a leading principle in the maxims of Confucius and of wise men of China before him.

The general story of China nevertheless continues to be the story of dissensions within the empire and of uncivilised tribes threatening its borders on the north and west. Among these we may notice that there were Huns, akin to those who threatened, and from time to time overran, parts of Europe also.

[Sidenote: The Nestorians]

Christianity was brought into the country probably in the sixth century, by members of a Christian sect called Nestorians, after a certain bishop Nestorius, {23} their founder. His doctrine respecting the divine and human natures of Christ was condemned as unorthodox both by the Church of Rome and also by the head of the Eastern Church, at Constantinople. The sect had its headquarters in Syria, and was dispersed by order of the Eastern Emperor. The result was that its members travelled and settled in Central and Eastern Asia. They were Asiatics and found themselves among peoples well disposed towards them. By this violent dispersal of them the Emperor helped their doctrines to prevail as he never could have helped their prevalence by his greatest favours. Incidentally, one of the results of his action was that silkworms, as we are told, were first carried to the West by some of the Nestorians returning from the far East--the ancient land whence silk had been brought for many centuries.

Mahommedanism was introduced not very long after, and the most interesting point to note about these successively introduced religions is that all seem to have been permitted and even encouraged with equal favour, or with equal indifference, by the Chinese rulers. This was in strict accord with the counsel of the sage Confucius, whose expressed opinion was that the ruler should interfere as little as might be with the life of his people. And that life was still principally influenced by the doctrines of Confucius, no matter what religions were brought in.

Thus went the story of China through century after century, with violent dissensions, yet never dissensions deep enough or wide enough to create a real change in an empire so vast and in a people so unwilling to change. We have to picture them living chiefly along the river banks, cultivating the rice which was their principal food, and with unwearied patience and industry making their silk, from the cocoons spun by the caterpillars, their beautiful porcelain, their lacquered {24} furniture and vessels, their ivory carvings, and so on.

And then, towards the end of the twelfth century, began to rise to great power in Asia a people called the Mongols. Huns, Tartars, and Mongols we have to look on as closely related; and to some degree the last two names are interchangeable. They were divided into tribes under the rule of chieftains called Khans; and over the whole was a chosen ruler named the Khakan--the Khan of Khans. Their numbers grew. They led the pastoral life. As conquerors they were as ruthless as the Huns from whom they were descended, and at length, under the famous Kublai Khan, they possessed by far the greater portion of Asia and Europe as far as the boundaries of Poland. Before the end of the thirteenth century Kublai Khan, with his palace at Peking, dominated the whole of China, and a vast portion of the earth's surface besides. It was to his court that the famous Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, made his way. He lived there no less than seventeen years in all, and probably at no other time was it so easy for a western traveller to go to China overland, because at no other time has there been a single power which could ensure his safety on so long a journey through lands in possession of such lawless people.

On land, Kublai and his Mongols were irresistible, but they failed entirely by sea in two expeditions sent out to attempt the conquest of Japan.

Kublai's successors had little of what must have been his very extraordinary genius, both for government and war. In the middle of the fourteenth century a Buddhist monk headed a revolution in China which was completely successful, and ended with the expulsion of the Mongol conquerors and the establishment of the monk on the throne as Emperor, the first of the great Ming dynasty which lasted till {25} 1626. It was the last native dynasty to rule in China, for in that year, 1626, the Manchus came in as conquerors, and are there still.

The first of the Mings not only drove the Mongols out of China, but defeated their principal armies so decisively that it was the beginning of the end of their power in other parts of Asia and in Europe. The tribes broke away from their dependence on the Khakan, or central ruler, and with that loss of union their military predominance was lost and they ceased to take nearly so large a part in our story.

[Sidenote: Japan]

In striking contrast with China, Japan is a land of no ancient story, and of recent civilisation. It was not until near the end of the third century A.D. that Chinese writing and letters were brought into the islands. They were brought in from the independent kingdom of Korea which we may see on the map running down southward from Manchuria, that northern province from which the Manchus came to conquer China. It shows how little we really know of Japanese history, that though there is a legend that Korea was conquered by Japan about the beginning of the third century, modern historians are in much doubt whether any such conquest actually occurred. It was, at all events, but temporary, and Korea soon regained independence. Its fortunes, or misfortunes, however, play a very small part in this Greatest Story.

Thus Chinese civilisation came to Japan, and was followed by Buddhism replacing the ancient religion of Shinto in which ancestor worship was the principal element.

Buddhism was essentially a religion of peace, and all the teaching of Chinese civilisation was opposed to war. The Chinese held the profession of arms, the military caste, in the lowest esteem. Therefore {26} it is very singular that Japan, in spite of Buddhism and of this Chinese civilisation, gave highest possible honour to her soldiers. The Japanese had the greatest reverence for their aristocracy, moreover---for their highly born--and the real government was in the hands of one or other of the noble families. The country was distracted for years and years by perpetual fighting between two of these great families and their followers. It is a story which may recall our Wars of the Roses.

The conclusion of that long conflict was brought about in what certainly was the greatest of naval battles ever fought up to that time in any Asiatic sea. It is called the Battle of Dannoura and its date is 1188. More than a thousand junks, as the native vessels are still called, took part in it, and by the slaughter, both in the actual fighting and afterwards, the defeated clan was all but wiped out of existence.

It was cruel work, but it opened the way for a period of comparative peace. The mode of government was reformed. There was the Mikado, the Emperor, by whom all power was supposed to be wielded, and there was also an official called the Shogun, the head of the army. Perhaps we may best designate his powers by calling him Commander-in-Chief. But his authority was far more independent than that of our highest military officer. For centuries the Shogun appears as the real power in the land, although in theory his power is derived from the Mikado.

After the victorious repulse of the great Kublai Khan, above mentioned, the Daimios, as the great nobles were called, again became powerful and turbulent and the condition of the country when the Portuguese first visited it, in the early years of the sixteenth century, seems to have been not very unlike {27} that of Europe in the worst days of the fighting among the feudal barons.

[Sidenote: India]

In that disordered condition we have to leave, for the time being, the story of the Yellow Race in the Farthest East, and pass to the story of India previous to the epoch-making voyage of da Gama.

In a former volume we noticed the "Indo-European" as one of the great human families. It is a word which indicates an immigration of a people from Central Asia into India and also into Europe. The kinship of Indians with Europeans is testified by the likeness of many words in the languages of both. Especially is this likeness apparent in the words which express simple things, conveying ideas which people would be likely to wish to communicate to each other in a primitive state of society.

The immigrants found a people in the land before them, and remnants of that people still remain. In India itself those survivors are called Dravidians, and the Tamils of Ceylon are probably of the same race.

The Indians or Hindus appear to have lived, from their first coming into the land that we call India, in village communities, each community independent of the rest and producing all that its members needed. It is very like the way in which we have seen that the Germanic or Gothic tribes lived.

What is unlike those tribes is the "caste" system which still prevails in India. Their highest "caste" was that of the Brahmans or priests who kept in their own families the many secrets of a mysterious religion. It consisted in "Nature worship," especially worship of the forces that produce human food, and more particularly worship of the sun. Our knowledge of it is derived from their sacred books, the Vedas and others. The Brahmans claimed that they were formed by the Creator of the world from his mouth; the {28} caste of soldiers, the military caste, from his arm; the farmer caste from his thigh, and the tillers of the soil from his feet. There were other castes. The divisions were so very rigid that it was unlawful and irreligious for one caste to do the work of another, to eat with another, or to inter-marry. The restrictions were many and severe, and are but little relaxed even now. They exist still as we find them laid down in a Brahmany code called "The Laws of Manu," which is supposed to date from the fifth century B.C.

[Sidenote: Buddha]

The institutions and manners of life in the East have been very slow to change, in comparison with the West, and it is likely that the life of these village communities continued for many centuries to be much as it had been when the immigrants first came down from the north to that valley of the Indus river which seems to have been their earliest place of settlement. And then, about 550 years before Christ, or a little earlier, was born a wonderful man Buddha, son of the Rajah of a small territory which is now Nepal. Here and there the headman of a village more powerful than those about him had begun to exercise some authority over more villages than one and to be called a rajah: and of one such Buddha was born.

[Illustration: STATUE OF BUDDHA.]

When he came to manhood he was struck by the misery of man's life in the world. It appeared to him that the first cause of all that misery was man's selfish wishes, and his desire for all kinds of pleasure. He arrived at the belief that if man could rid himself of these desires his misery would cease. One might think that if this were so the simple remedy for it all would be death. But that was no remedy in the eyes of Buddha, for he firmly believed that this life which we lead here is but one in a cycle, or succession, of lives which each soul has to live through. The only way then by which man's misery could be relieved {29} was that he should strive by all means to rid himself of his desires, to become, as it were, selfless, that is to say a creature not taking any satisfaction in gratifying his natural desires. And so convinced was this young prince, or rajah, that it was thus and thus only that man's grief could be assuaged, that he gave up his princely position, he left wife and child and all {30} his wealth and wandered in poverty about the world preaching this doctrine.

No doubt it was developed by his followers--for he quickly gained a numerous following--beyond his own first ideas. It taught that the final satisfaction and peace of the soul of man was only to be won, after many re-incarnations--that is to say, after living again and again on the earth in different human bodies--by being absorbed into some kind of universal or divine soul which was called Nirvana. In that state the individual self of each soul would be lost, at length, and it might know peace because all selfish desires had gone from it.

[Sidenote: Buddhism]

What he preached, then, was not quite unselfishness as we understand it; for our unselfishness seems to imply an active concern for the selves of other people. Buddha's idea was much more passive than active. We might better call it selflessness. His great thought was how to get rid of all self, both a man's own self and that of all others. He did, however, devote himself to what we may describe even in our sense as a perfectly unselfish life, for he not only denied himself all but the barest necessities, but went through northern India trying to save other men from what he considered, and pitied, as their misery, by explaining to them how he thought they might escape from it.

The theory of re-incarnation opened a way for the union of Buddhism with the older Brahmanism, for the priests taught that in Buddha himself was the incarnated soul of Vishnu, the supreme spirit of the Brahmans. So they taught, and who was there to contradict them?

For the regulation of social life the maxims of Buddha are such as the highest Christian morality must approve. Hatred was to be conquered by love. Wives, children, and servants were to be treated with {31} wise kindness. After a while, as has happened with other religions, the followers of Buddhism split up into sects, and especially into what were called the Northern and the Southern Churches. Although it was in the north of India that Buddha had preached, it was there that his rules of life were modified and made less severe. The Southern Church observed them more strictly.

In the centuries that followed, the doctrines of Buddha won converts far beyond India itself--in Tibet in the north, in Burma and Siam in the east and south, and so to the Malay Peninsula and to the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Farther west it was carried down into Ceylon.

Whatever, we may think of the religion of Buddha, it is obvious that it was in no sense a "fighting religion." It did not inspire its followers to be soldiers. Perhaps this is the reason why the Hindus never seem to have been able to resist the incursions of warlike neighbours. In the fourth century B.C. came Alexander of Macedon and pushed his wonderful conquests into the very heart of India. His general, Seleucus, organised part of the conquered territory under his rule, but it made little lasting impression on the story of the country. About the middle of the second century A.D., the wild hordes of the Parthians, the people who gave such continual trouble to the mighty Roman Empire, swept into Northern India, and with them they brought Christianity. Christianity, too, came early to that Malabar coast where the Portuguese, more than a thousand years later, found the Moslems in full possession. But Christianity was not imposed by force.

Although many wars have been fought for Christianity, it would be no more right to speak of it, than of Buddhism itself, as a "fighting religion." Mahommedanism, on the contrary, has ever been the great fighting religion of the world.

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In the eighth century, while the Mahommedans in the West were making themselves dominant in Spain, other armies of the same faith went conquering eastwards through Central Asia to the very borders of China. They conquered, but they did not succeed in establishing any permanent empire. There was no power at their centre to control such an extent of the world's surface. The local princes became practically independent again. But in many parts the Mahommedan religion remained. It failed to make any impression in Tibet, where the Great Llama, as the chief of the Tibetan Buddhists was called, was ruler as well as high priest.

In India Mahommedanism established itself the more easily because Buddhism was by that time a waning force in many parts and was being re-absorbed by the older Brahmanism. Spread by its missionaries, called Mullahs, the new creed won its way right through the country to Siam, down the Malay Peninsula and into the islands of the archipelago. It penetrated southward also. We have noted that when the Portuguese came to the western shores of Southern India in 1500 or so they found Sultans, as the heads of Mahommedan states were called, in possession. To these seaports, however, and to the islands it is likely enough that the religion of Mahomet was brought by the Arab traders as much as or more than by any overland route.

Of the principalities which gained, or regained, independence after the flood of Moslem conquest had swept from West to East, that which became of greatest importance in the story was the kingdom of Afghanistan. It has been of importance by reason of its geographical position making it "the gate of India," as it has been called. It is the "gate" for such nations as Persia and Russia which might seek to enter India from the west and north.

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From the kingdom of Afghanistan itself a Moslem army swept again into India about the year A.D. 1000. A confederacy of Hindu princes assembled a force to oppose it, but it is said that this army was entirely demoralised by the sound--the first of its kind that they had heard--of a gun brought by the invaders. The rule of the Moslem Viceroys, under which a large portion of Northern India was administered as the result of this Afghan victory, seems to have been equitable and effective, and in the course of the four centuries that followed a great part of all India became Mahommedan.

[Sidenote: Timour, the Tartar]

At the end of that period appeared on the Indian scene the formidable figure of Timour, the Tartar, sometimes known as Tamerlane or Tambourlaine, meaning Tamer, or Timour, the Lame. He too was a Mahommedan, and doubtless was of the same stock as those Afghan rulers who claimed Turkish descent; but that distant relationship did not deter him from the invasion of India from the north. He won his way easily enough as far as Delhi, and there appears no reason why he should not have pushed his conquests as far south as he wished. He returned to his own country, however, and shortly afterwards went westward against the Ottoman Turks and very heavily defeated them at Angora, the new capital of modern Turkey.

But for the lack of ships, it seems certain that Timour, with his Tartar hordes, would have passed over into Europe--with what result on our story no one can say. But he had no means of crossing the Dardanelles, and once more he went back to his own country.

Rather more than a thousand years later one of his descendants again invaded India from the north, and made a beginning of that Mogul empire which was to become far more widely and firmly established, {34} under the great Akbar, towards the end of the sixteenth century.

Such, or somewhat such, are the main features of the stories of that new world in the West and that old world in the East which were opened up by the enterprise of Spain and Portugal about the year 1500.

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