Empire and hinterland in lower Central America

The European discovery of a separate and distinctive ‘new’ world was an event of cosmic proportion not only because of the enormous social, political and economic expansion potential for the developing nation-states of the European peninsula; discovery of this distant realm also required significant reconstruction of basic European cosmography. In the centuries prior to the Age of Discovery, Europe, focussing on Rome and Byzantium, had balanced its own geo-political centricity with cosmological interpretations of mystically paradisiacal or demonic distant lands generally situated to the East, places filled with exotic creatures and things, some dangerous while others constituted kingly riches. A new era began when the ocean to the west, long regarded as a restrictive barrier, became a possible route, a direction, which could lead to the exotica of the East. Realization that this western direction led instead to distinctive new western lands, new places, re-ordered the European cosmological paradigm (Helms 1988: chapter 6).