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The Middle East and the Age of Discovery:
Historian and Arabist Paul Lunde, author of the whole of this issue of Aramco World, is a frequent contributor to the magazine with some 50 articles to his credit over the past two decades, including special multi-article sections on Arabic-language printing and the history of the Silk Roads. His immediate research for this issue was carried out in Seville, Rome, London and Cambridge, and he wrote from his base in Seville’s Barrio de Santa Cruz, a stone’s throw from the city’s cathedral — once a mosque — and from the Alcázares Reales, the Moorish palace complex that remains today one of the residences of Spain’s Christian kings.
It was, of course, from Portugal and Spain, and particularly from Seville, that the voyages of the westward Age of Discovery set out, but the intellectual spark that set off those world-changing ventures had been kindled long before and far to the east of the Iberian Peninsula. French economist and historian Jacques Attali, in his provocative book 1492, describes that year as the beginning of the modern era, and so it was. But the hinge on which history turned was forged by the technical and philosophical achievements of the Muslim civilizations of previous centuries. This issue is about those achievements and their effects as the new era swung open — as well as about the Middle East’s widening view of the New World.
American Silver, Ottoman Decline
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