How big was the European world of 1550? Here we have some evidence of the great transformation that had come over Europe. The traders, adventurers and explorers of the Atlantic seaboard had immeasurably extended the horizons of a late sixteenth-century European. The brief and fragmentary mediaeval contacts between Europe and Asia were replaced in the Renaissance epoch by direct, extensive and profitable contacts between the traders of Europe and the Asian monarchies. While Portugal was reaping a rich harvest from the spice trade in the East Indies, the Spaniards in America had begun to consolidate an empire which in territory and in mineral wealth exceeded that of every other European power.

Between the Portuguese and Spanish enterprises there had always been bitter rivalry, which asserted itself not only in an exclusive control of their respective empires, but also in the control of information. Before about 1550 the Portuguese exercised strict control over the circulation of printed literature concerning their territories in Asia, in order to preserve the security that surrounded their monopoly of the spice trade. The Spaniards were not so secretive, partly because there seemed less danger of foreign intrusion into America, partly because the controversies surrounding the methods of conquest required public airing, otherwise, as the contemporary historian Antonio de Herrera said, 'the reputation of Spain would fall rapidly, for foreign and enemy nations would say that small credence could be placed in the words of her rulers, since their subjects were not allowed to speak freely'. The desire to curtail information, a desire common to most states at this time, crumbled before a growing curiosity on the part of the public, and increased activity on the part of the printing press.

Not the least amazing feature of the expansion of Europe was the conquest of distance. A casual look at the map, at the distances covered by the ships trading to Asia round the Cape, the voyages made by the English settlers to North America, the territory traversed by Francis Xavier or by Pizarro, might lead to the suspicion that technological progress had made it all possible, and had reduced the space-time ratio. Yet, for all the revolutionary progress in nautical science, time was barely attacked. Ships and land vehicles had to wait as before on wind and weather, and the endurance of man alone was a decisive factor in the conquest of distance. Even the best transport was subject to the caprice of the elements: why else should the norm of the overland postal service between Lisbon and Danzig at the end of the sixteenth century vary from fifty-three to one hundred and thirty-two days?

Clocks, like the precise regulation of time, were a relative novelty in 1550. The population still took its division of the hours and minutes from the Church. The day was measured by liturgical hours, church bells tolled the passing of its constituent units, and smaller divisions of time were commonly expressed in terms of Aves or Paternosters. In such a culture civil time and ecclesiastical time were inseparable, and it was one of the virtues of the post-Reformation era that it helped to distinguish between the two. Protestantism liberated time from its clerical dress, and clocks came in to secularise it completely. By the end of the sixteenth century the clock industry was booming, particularly when the clockmakers from Catholic countries fled as refugees to Protestant states. In 1515 there were no clockmakers in Geneva, after 1550 they came as refugees from France, and by 1600 the city had twenty-   five to thirty master clockmakers and an unknown number of apprentices. The European world remained essentially independent of any attempt to rationalise time. Clocks and watches were the preserve of a minority. The working population still ruled itself by the hours of daylight, by the bells and by the seasons. It was usual to work only by daylight, so that a winter working day was usually shorter than a summer working day by at least two hours, and wages were consequently less.

The first results of observational science emerged from the studies of astronomy and human anatomy. Merchants and financiers soon realized that investing in science could be a profitable business. In 1519 the German humanist Ulrich von Hutton wrote a treatise on guaiacum, a new wonder drug from the Americas that was believed to cure syphilis. Dedicating his book to the Archbishop of Mainz, Hutton wrote, 'I hope that Your Eminence has escaped the pox but should you catch it (Heaven forbid but you can never tell) I would be glad to treat and heal you'.