Age of Exploration

7th Grade Zoom Meeting at 9am

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Nearly everyone recognizes the year 1492 for the noteworthy achievement of a sailor named Christopher Columbus. But before we get to the fateful journey of that Genoese merchant, we must look at what brought the leaders of Spain to the point that they were willing to send out an exploration of the vast, uncharted ocean.

Why Explore?

To understand what drove them to this point, we have to remember that Europe had been embroiled in an ideological war with the Muslims for centuries since the days of Charles “the Hammer” Martel and his grandson Charlemagne, in the 8th century, who had fought the Muslim hordes out of France all while building up a romantic notion of Chivalry. Then came the beginning of the Crusades in 1096 when it was fashionable to dream of stealing back the Holy Lands from the grips of savages.

Much of the wealth and knowledge of the Byzantine Empire began to flee to Europe beginning after the Fourth Crusade in 1204 Constantinople was sacked by rogue mercenary crusaders. Things only got worse for the Byzantines who held on until 1453 when the Ottoman Turks took control of Constantinople.

Most of Europe hated the Muslim heathens and they did not even want to conduct trade with them if they could help it. But if you look at the map above, you can see that all the traditional trade routes over land and even by the Mediterranean Sea were controlled by Muslim forces. And in those days, western Europeans had developed tastes for eastern goods such as spices, silk, and incense.

Portugal Leads the Way

In steps a young man of 24-years-old by the name of Henry. He was the third son of King John of Portugal, and he had a dream of Portugal as a great Naval power who would find an alternate route to the East on the sea. Though he rarely left Portugal, history refers to him as Prince Henry the Navigator.

In 1418, Prince Henry founded a navigational institute at Sagres on the southwestern-most point of Portugal. The institute was a 15th-century research and development facility, which included libraries, an astronomical observatory, shipbuilding facilities, a chapel, and housing for staff. The institute was designed to teach navigational techniques to Portuguese sailors, to collect and disseminate geographical information about the world, to invent and improve navigational and seafaring equipment, and to sponsor expeditions.

At Sagres, they invented a new type of ship, called a caravel. It was fast and was much more maneuverable than prior types of boats, and though they were small, they were quite functional. In fact, two of Christopher Columbus’ ships, the Nina and the Pinta, were caravels.

Prince Henry sought to increase navigational knowledge along the western coast of Africa, to find a water route to Asia, to increase trade opportunities for Portugal, to find gold to fund further exploration, to spread Christianity around the world, to defeat Muslims, and perhaps even to find Prester John, a legendary wealthy priest-king thought to reside somewhere in Africa or Asia.

Prince Henry sent 15 expeditions, beginning in 1424, to navigate the mysterious coast of Africa, this quest for treasure led the explorers to walk a dark path and begin the African slave trade in the 1440s. In 1460, Prince Henry the Navigator died, but the institute’s expeditions continued to venture south with Bartholomew Diaz finally rounding the southern tip of Africa in 1488.

King John II of Portugal called it the Cape of Good Hope. Once around the Cape, the Portuguese sailors would be introduced to a world of trade they had never dreamed of. They soon found out that African, Muslim, Indian, and Southeast Asian ships had been trading on the waters of the Indian Ocean for around seven hundred years already. If you want to learn more about this Indian Ocean Trade Network, I highly suggest that you Google the Chinese explorer Zheng He.

In just 10 short years, the Portuguese would extend their trade route from the tip of Africa all the way to Calicut, India and Vasco de Gama would become known as the first European to sail to India in 1498. It is important to recognize that as a good Catholic state, everywhere that these explorers stepped foot, missionaries mostly Jesuit, Benedictine, and Franciscan Monks monks were ready to convert the heathens that they found, even if some of them had already been Christian for over a thousand years before they ever got there.

Spain Joins the Race

In the early 1400s, Spain didn’t even exist yet. You had two kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula along with the Kingdom of Portugal. Those were the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. These two began the process of unification with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469. Fresh off a victory over the North African Muslims who still had a small foothold on the peninsula in Grenada in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to fund the exploration efforts of a young sailor from Genoa in northern Italy.

His name, of course, was Christopher Columbus. And no, he didn’t think the earth was flat. He wasn’t worried about falling off the edge. Way back to the Greeks in the 6th century BC, Pythagoras had figured out that the earth was round.

He also didn’t discover or ever set foot anywhere near what we now know as America. However, he did change the world because he created world trade simply by accidentally connecting the known and the unknown worlds and this introduction would change everything for better or for worse. We call this the Columbian Exchange.

He had the idea that, since the earth is round, if you set out into the Atlantic and sail due east for a few days you would sail directly into Southeast Asia or what he knew as the Indies. He didn’t know that the Vikings had already discovered a whole new landmass 500 years earlier.

His hope was to beat the Portuguese in their race to get to the East over water and develop trade relations that would eliminate the need for costly and dangerous overland trade routes. This was the 15th-century version of the Space Race.

Columbus made his first journey in 1492, but instead of reaching his intended destination, Columbus found the island of San Salvador in what is known today as the Bahamas. He also explored the island of Hispaniola, home of modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Until his death, he claimed to have landed in Asia, even though most navigators knew he didn’t. On his subsequent voyages, he went farther south, to Central and South America.

As you might imagine, this discovery made everyone quickly set their sights on this new land. This created a conflict between Spain and Portugal over the newly claimed lands. Portugal wanted in on the action, and since they were both Catholic nations, they both went running to the Pope to solve this issue and he did.

In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas created a line of demarcation officially dividing the world in half. The early date of this Treaty shows that they had no real clue what they were dividing up, because Portugal came away with the very eastern tip of South America and Spain gained authority over everything else. This is why in South America, Brazilians speak Portuguese, but most of the rest of the continent speaks Spanish.

Why do we celebrate Columbus?

This begs the question, why does the United States celebrate this guy? He thought he found a nifty new route to Asia, he didn’t open up the North American continent. Who did that? Amazingly, there was another Italian guy named John Cabot (technically Giovanni Caboto) who convinced Henry VII of England to fund his exploration of the Atlantic in a more northerly route. He “discovered” Newfoundland (get it New Found Land) in England’s name around 1497 and paved the way for England’s colonization of most of North America.

So why don’t we go out and buy new mattresses at discount prices on Cabot’s day like they do in Canada? That has more to do with 19th-century politics than the actual achievements of these explorers. In the 1790s, when the young United States was deciding on a capitol, the District or Territory of Columbia (named after Columbus) was already a popular name. This is because the early United States was fighting with England, not Spain. So the American colonialists turned to Columbus as their hero, not England’s Cabot. Therefore, we have the capital, Washington, D.C. (that’s District of Columbia, not District of Cabot).

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