Civilitzacions

Around the year 1000, the daughter of Eric the Red, Freydis Eriksdottir, heads southwest. In 1492, Columbus does not discover America. In 1531, the Incas invaded Europe. What was it, under what conditions might it have been? The Indians lacked only three things to successfully oppose the conquerors. Give them the horse, the iron, and antibodies, and the whole story of the world would have been different. Civilizations is the novel of this hypothesis: Atahualpa lands in the Europe of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. And what do you find there? The Spanish Inquisition, Luther's Reformation, incipient capitalism. The prodigy of the printing press and its talking leaves. Monarchies exhausted by endless wars, under constant threat from the Turks. A sea infested with pirates. A continent torn apart by religious and dynastic disputes. But, above all, a humiliated, hungry people, on the brink of revolt, Jews of Toledo, Muslims of Granada, German peasants: Atahualpa will know how to make them all very valuable allies, and reading Machiavelli will have been very useful to learn to swim in the murky waters of conspiracies among the powerful across the continent. From Cusco to Aachen, through Lisbon, Toledo, Granada, Seville, Florence, and even the Battle of Lepanto, here is the story of globalization in reverse, as, in fact, was very little so that it was.