The power of imagination

«I am assured that there is another island larger than the aforementioned Spagnuola. It has hairless inhabitants, and above all the others it especially abounds in gold. I bring with me men from this island and from the others I have visited who will bear witness to what I said". Thus wrote Christopher Columbus, admiral of the ocean fleet, to the sovereigns of Spain from Lisbon on March 14, 1493. He had just finished his first voyage which had landed him on what he believed to be the coasts of the East. Columbus somehow had to take his time and justify the scarce amount of gold found to his royal patrons. In reality, from the admiral's travels, the sovereigns really expected to obtain large quantities of precious metals to replenish the royal coffers severely tested by the reconquista which ended the previous year (January 1492). The search for gold and precious metals is in fact a relevant cause of the great ocean voyages between the end of the 15th and 16th centuries. In those years the Europeans, Portuguese and Spanish in the lead, began to systematically sail out of the Mediterranean to look for alternative routes to the East. The Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had reshuffled the cards and closed the land route to European merchants. Only the Venetians continued their trade undisturbed. But for Portugal and Spain it was necessary to open new scenarios. Since the early fifteenth century, the Lusitanians had begun to prepare themselves for ocean navigation thanks to the extraordinary intuitions of King Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) and the first explorations of Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde.

We are talking about an extraordinary era in which men explore unknown seas and lands in a continuous interaction between knowledge and imagination. In the 16th century, Europeans knew relatively little about the world around them. The travel reports of great merchants such as Marco Polo helped. But they were often partial and incomplete: where knowledge did not arrive, imagination was used. Precisely from the analysis of dreams and fantastic representations of Europeans we can obtain valuable information on the imagination of men between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age. First of all, it should be remembered that the Europeans knew nothing of the American continent (the voyages of the Vikings had remained without actual consequences); of Africa they knew only the northern coasts, while black Africa was unknown as the Islamic world prevented its knowledge and, in any case, aroused little interest. They knew the Orient quite well even if they imagined that the gates of paradise were located at its extreme borders. This territory was considered full of extraordinary riches, abundant in food, with mountains of gold, pearls and precious stones. A land where strife and rivalry were absent, entirely and serenely dominated by peaceful, wise and tolerant rulers. Not to be overlooked is the belief that they were inhabited by extraordinary and magical beings and that many of the inhabitants of the East lived in shameless nudity.

These dreams can be read as a hilarious pastime, but – in reality – they are extraordinary documents that help us understand what our ancestors really thought. As long as you flip them. The imagination is also an escape from the harsh reality these men were faced with. Europeans dreamed of wealth because in Europe most of the population was poor, suffering from hunger due to frequent famines and growing demand. They longed for peace and tolerance because they lived in the constant company of war, were always divided, fought each other for political reasons, were persecuted and persecuted for religious reasons. Finally, many dreamed of a society in which new social conventions were created and the inequality between rich and poor, between powerful and oppressed disappeared. Thus, in this way, the imagination became an extraordinary engine to move Europeans from the already then old continent and seek new worlds: the imagination could do more than knowledge.


Renato Bonomo
NP April 2023