earlier, the Spartans apparently loved their horses more than their country—a telling symptom of the sickness that was draining the life of the famed city-state.
Looking at Sparta’s decline from this particular angle, I constructed a little data set to put into the forecasting program. It shows that the Gerousia and kings were committed to protecting Spartan security from the outset even if it meant personal sacrifices. I assumed that the Ephors started out favoring making money, as indeed it appears they did. The program shows, however, that they would quickly sacrifice their personal wealth (for instance, their horses) to protect Sparta. But what of the colonial commanders and the richest Spartiates, who remained in Sparta? They were the core of the army and the most important people deciding whether to provide their very best for the Spartan cause or for themselves (in horse terms, to use them for the cavalry or to use them for the races). The model shows them to be utterly impervious to pressure from their government, their kings, the Ephors, and the Gerousia. All the government’s checks and balances, all the history of Spartan devotion to the common good, all the threats of the moment couldn’t convince these citizens to do what was best for their country.
It seems that the society’s newfound wealth, and the shift in people’s values produced by that wealth, changed their behavior. Just as in the earlier discussion of Leopold in the Congo and in Belgium, Sparta’s changing conditions led to changed behavior that in turn changed the course of Sparta’s future. Had any smart Spartan looked at the data enough in advance, perhaps they would have seen the threat of collapse that their new “game” exposed them to, and maybe, just maybe, they would have thought more about the long term.
So it was that Sparta fell quickly from monumental power to weak and vulnerable backwater. There was nothing to be done to save Sparta according to the game model. The victory against Athens sowed the very seeds of Sparta’s destruction.
Can we see here a larger lesson to be learned about the risky game that empire expansion might generally entail? Might U.S. efforts to spread democracy, to overthrow “rogue” regimes, come back to bite us, creating the sort of greedy, self-centered egoism at the top that brought down Sparta, or might these efforts rein in the worst abuses suffered by hapless souls elsewhere at the hands of their own greedy, grasping governments? These are questions worth pondering. History certainly has much to teach us.
Sparta’s defeat revolutionized thinking in the Greek world and made possible the resurgence of Athens. The Athenians, with a more democratic—by the standards of the day—and therefore more accountable administration, were able to adjust to their earlier defeat. They could make changes that allowed them to bide their time, rebuild their strength, and reclaim Greek leadership when Sparta faltered. Sparta’s increasingly concentrated oligarchy left it with little to fall back on in the face of its unprecedented defeat. Maybe, then, we are all fortunate that Spartans loved their horses so much. Had they not, the early Greek experiment with democracy might have failed miserably, and this most beneficial form of government would have died so soon that no one would have thought to resurrect it a couple of millennia later.
Sparta’s love of horses reminds me that it is time to get back in the saddle again. You know—where a friend is a friend. I have in mind the friendship that Luis de Santangel—you’ll find out about him soon enough—owed to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and the consequences of that friendship for Christopher Columbus and even for those of you reading this book anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, the so-called new world. Santangel is the unsung hero of our next game. He reminds me of the French bankers we met in Game Theory 102. They, like Santangel, understood that demanding too much leads to nothing. Just as the French bankers put a merger together by agreeing to let the German executives remain in Heidelberg, Luis de Santangel figured out how to merge the interests of Spain’s monarchs with those of Columbus, to the benefit of both.
So let’s leap ahead now to the end of the fifteenth century. That time, the age of discovery, created another, new form of challenge to the dominant political order of the day. Whereas Sparta suffered from becoming rich, Spain suffered in comparison to its great-power neighbors like Portugal and the Catholic Church because it was poor. With Santangel’s help, Columbus would change all of that, at least for a century or so, but not before he would have to swallow some pretty bitter pills in order to make a deal.
WHY SPAIN “DISCOVERED” AMERICA
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I know, you already know that. It is curious, though, that most of us know very little about why Columbus, an Italian navigator recently employed by the Portuguese court, sailed under the Spanish flag. The story behind Ferdinand and Isabella’s decision to back Columbus’s journey rests on the thinnest of distinctions between rejection and acceptance. Surely had it not been for Columbus, someone else would have found the “new world,” but then the course of European and American history would have been radically different. There would have been no Spanish empire, no Spanish armada for the British to defeat, probably no Sir Walter Raleigh, no Monroe Doctrine, no Juan or Evita Peron, and who knows what else. (If you will allow me a little personal view on Colum-bus’s importance, probably without him there wouldn’t even be a Bueno de Mesquita family anymore. They were pretty prominent back then, operating within the Columbus family’s fiefdom of Jamaica as—of all things—pirates of the Caribbean.2)
Columbus first put forth his proposal—to find a westward passage to Asia—to the Portuguese crown, then the world’s greatest sea power. He would sail for Japan by going west from the Canary Islands. According to his reckoning, the distance to Asia was about 2,400 nautical miles. He did not think that a significant land mass was in the way of the passage, although he did expect to encounter some unknown islands. Columbus understood that there was a real risk that there would be no opportunity to get fresh water and food for his crew once they left the Canary Islands, but he did not view this as a severe problem. He believed his ships could carry enough food and fresh water for such a journey. He felt that he would have no trouble reaching his destination or returning safely. Columbus asked Prince Juan II of Portugal to fund his project—and was turned down flat.
Many factors worked against Columbus’s effort to sell his ideas to Portugal. Thanks to the vision of Prince Henry the Navigator, they already had lucrative trade routes and colonial expansion along the North African coast and as far away as the Azores, about 900 miles out in the deep water of the Atlantic Ocean. Additionally, at about the same time that Columbus made his offer, Bartholomew Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa, and therefore, implicitly, the passage up the eastern side of Africa and on to Asia. Dias was already under commission by the Portuguese government and had, by the late 1480s, discovered critical features of an eastward path to the Indies. The sea route he found offered ample opportunities for resupplying ships at coastal stations along the eastern shores of Africa. And finally, Portuguese scientists disagreed with Columbus’s estimate that the journey involved only 2,400 miles. They thought that the distance between Portugal and Japan going west was not much different from the distance between these two countries going east around the tip of Africa. They believed the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was about 10,000 miles (it is actually about 10,600 miles), plus the additional miles from Lisbon to the Canaries. This difference in estimates of the distance was crucial. From the Portuguese perspective, the probability that ships could reach Asia by sailing west was almost zero. No ship of the day was capable of a ten-thousand-mile journey without stopping in ports along the way for food and water. Quite simply, the Portuguese government believed that such a journey was doomed. There just wasn’t much in Columbus’s plan for the Portuguese.
Disappointed, Columbus sought support elsewhere. His brother, Bartholomew, tried to entice the kings of France and England, but they were tied up in domestic political problems at the time and showed no interest. Columbus approached the Spanish government in 1486. As with his brother’s efforts in France and England, Columbus found little to encourage him in Spain. The Spanish monarchy was too busy to pay much attention to Columbus. There was trouble with their Moorish neighbors and with the pope, especially since the Spaniards had backed the schismatic pope in Avignon.
