The Tartar Moment

In 1644, the world’s wealthiest, most populous, and arguably best-armed state collapsed catastrophically. The Ming empire was conquered by the Manchus, a Tartar population from northeast Asia, who established the Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty. This “Tartar moment” sent shockwaves well beyond the bounds of the new Qing empire. News of the Ming’s fall reverberated across stormy oceans and frozen steppes, rapidly reaching European cities. Prior to the Manchus’ victory, Europeans largely imagined China to be an ancient, politically stable, and culturally static society. As this book shows, the Tartar War shattered such preconceptions. For Europeans, the Tartars transformed China from a passive relic of antiquity into a dynamic, history-making actor on a global stage. The war brought the once-faraway realm squarely into contemporary debates about geopolitics and the nature of civilizational change. The Tartar Moment argues that the crises surrounding the Manchu conquest made China matter immensely to Europeans for around a century.

The book’s first chapter argues that Martino Martini became the most successful European interpreter of China because he was uniquely qualified to recognize the significance of its crises. This skill stemmed from the fact that he too came from a place that was in deep turmoil. Throughout his life, Martini survived—and, indeed, thrived—in moments of crisis by radically reinventing himself during shifts in the balance of power. He switched from the Ming to the Qing; betrayed the Portuguese for the Dutch; and, as a writer, jumped between Catholic and Protestant publishers. Yet, his ability to deftly adopt such drastically conflicting personae has an untold history of its own. Martini’s hometown of Trento, itself starkly marked by past crises, was characterized by its liminality, bridging disparate cultural, linguistic, and religious worlds. Chapter 1 situates Martini’s skills in navigating difficult cultural and political terrain across a crisis-stricken Eurasia in the context of his Tridentine identity. It explores several critical, formative episodes in Martini’s life and explains the supreme importance he attached to astronomy as a tool of cross-cultural communication. The chapter embeds Martini’s activities and writings within the lively historiography on China’s place in the global history of science. It argues that crises are what triggered actors to turn to unfamiliar cultures of knowledge in the early modern world, driving the period’s dramatic transformations in the sciences.

Chapter 2 contends that the Manchu conquest of China made Europeans radically re-evaluate their military might in the wake of the gunpowder-driven Military Revolution of the sixteenth century. News of the cavalry-led Tartar victory over the cannon-backed Ming suddenly made Europeans see nomadism, and ostensibly nomadic Tartars, as an existential threat to civilization. “Masters of War” opens with a critical moment in the Ming-Qing war, where mounted Tartars, armed only with scimitars, bows, and arrows, conquered the Ming metropolis of Liaoyang, which was defended by guns. The episode, first presented to European audiences in Martini’s De Bello Tartarico Historia (1654), informed plays, poems, and romances about the Tartars’ heroic feat, and generated much reflection about the war’s consequences for Europe’s security. The missionary’s account contravened Francis Bacon’s well-known dictum that gunpowder had catapulted humankind into a new, transformed age. Thus, drawing attention to nomadic Manchu battle tactics, Martini spurred a substantial rethinking of European assumptions about the superiority of gunpowder in warfare.

The Tartar War led to a re-articulation and reaffirmation of the role of the Heavenly realm in governing Chinese society and conferring legitimacy onto emperors. In turn, as this chapter reveals, these same Chinese astral cultures of crisis transformed European understandings of politics, astronomy, and the past. “From Antiquarianism to Astronomy” argues that Chinese astronomical chronology, as learned by Martini during the Tartar War, enabled Enlightenment scholars to write, for the first time, histories of humankind divorced from Biblical narratives. In his chronicle of ancient Chinese history, Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima, Martini provocatively asserted that on the basis of China’s astronomical records, he became convinced that the Middle Kingdom had been “populated before the Flood.” In doing so, the missionary challenged both the primacy of Biblical history and the flourishing practice of antiquarianism, rooted in the analysis of material artifacts. “From Antiquarianism to Astronomy” demonstrates the remarkable influence of Martini’s scholarship in Enlightenment Europe. Indeed, as it shows, even Voltaire based his revisionist world history of humankind upon Martini’s Chinese astronomical chronology. Thus, Chapter 3 argues, geopolitical events in seventeenth-century China had a marked effect on the ways of understanding politics and the past in eighteenth-century Europe.

If Chinese astral sciences helped rewrite astronomical chronology and Biblical histories in Europe, they also offered answers to the continent’s agricultural woes in an age plagued by devastating famines. “Soils, Stars, and Statecraft” argues that following devastating grain crises, European monarchs appropriated Chinese soil-ploughing rituals in the hope of replicating China’s agricultural abundance. The late Ming was plagued by persistent grain shortages and frequent famines. In this troubled context, the scholar-official Xu Guangqi compiled the Nongzheng quanshu, a treatise on agricultural administration that urged the Ming government to cultivate a harmonious relationship with Heaven and Earth to restore China’s bygone splendor. By the time Martini got to China in the 1640s, Xu’s ambitious project had been abandoned. Nevertheless, the missionary’s Novus Atlas Sinensis painted a picture of an agriculturally bountiful post-war empire. Indeed, Martini described China as the place where “nature has collected all that which exists elsewhere.” Bringing the Novus Atlas Sinensis into dialogue with Xu’s Nongzheng quanshu, Chapter 4 shows that Martini explained China’s natural abundance by linking the emperor’s moral virtue to a clement climate. As it reveals, over the course of the following century, European reformers treated this ideology, which entwined social activity and natural phenomena, as a model to rebuild their own states following the devastation of the Seven Years’ War. 

As we have seen, the Tartar moment transformed European cultures of warfare, and understandings of the heavens, human history, and the earth’s products. Chapter 5 shows that it also made Europeans redraw their maps of the world, in the first major reconfiguration of the globe after the discovery of America in 1492. “Assaying the Globe” argues that Martini’s Novus Atlas Sinensis—part of the largest and most expensive atlas printed in the seventeenth century—transformed European understandings of geography. As the chapter demonstrates, the Tartar War made China appear culturally and climatically similar to Europe. In turn, the Novus Atlas Sinensis—arguably the most authoritative source on Chinese geography in Europe until the nineteenth century—envisioned China and Europe as kindred spirits in a starkly heterogeneous and rapidly changing world.

The Tartar Moment concludes by arguing that the globalization of Chinese cultures of knowledge was shaped by individual actors’ creative responses to major environmental and geopolitical crises. Contributing to contemporary debates in the history of science, the conclusion explains that catastrophic times and uncertainty about the future created fruitful conditions for cross-cultural epistemic exchanges. Such moments, it argues, spurred actors to look in unexpected places for political and epistemic resources to solve locally-relevant problems. The conclusion thus advocates an urgent rethinking of the nature of cross-cultural encounters in the history of science, emphasizing the importance of crises as generators of new, hybrid cultures of knowledge.