EUROPE ON THE BRINK OF CHANGE

The story of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas might be said to have begun as far back as the Crusades. A series of military conflicts waged between Christians and Muslims after Muslim rulers had gained control over the Holy Land, the Crusades brought Europeans into closer contact with the Middle East. Religious zeal inspired many of the knights who volunteered to fight on behalf of Christendom. Adventure, the chance to win land and titles, and the Church’s promise of wholesale forgiveness of sins also motivated many. The battle for the Holy Lands did not conclude until the Crusaders lost their Mediterranean stronghold at Acre (in present-day Israel) in 1291 and the last of the Christians left the area a few years later.

This map of the early Crusades, from the collection of the Norman B. Levanthal Map Center, shows the extent of the contested region in the east and the routes of the crusading armies from Europe.

Although the Crusaders did not ultimately succeed in their goals, the experience of the Crusades had profound effects, both positive and negative. On the negative side, the wide-scale persecution of Jews began. Christians classed them with the infidel Muslims and labeled them “the killers of Christ.” In the coming centuries, kings either expelled Jews from their kingdoms or forced them to pay heavy tributes for the privilege of remaining. Muslim-Christian hatred also festered, and intolerance grew.

On the positive side, maritime trade between East and West expanded. As Crusaders experienced the feel of silk, the taste of spices, and the utility of porcelain, desire for these products created new markets for merchants. In particular, the Adriatic port city of Venice prospered enormously from trade with Islamic merchants. From the days of the early adventurer Marco Polo, Venetian sailors had traveled to ports on the Black Sea and established their own colonies along the Mediterranean Coast. From there, they gained overland access to goods from the East, traded hundreds of miles along routes collectively known as the Silk Road. But transporting goods along the old Silk Road was costly, slow, and unprofitable. Muslim middlemen collected taxes as the goods changed hands. Robbers waited to ambush the treasure-laden caravans. A direct water route to the East, cutting out the land portion of the trip, would allow European merchants to maximize returns. In addition to seeking a water passage to the wealthy cities in the East, sailors wanted to find a route to the exotic and wealthy Spice Islands in modern-day Indonesia and the East Indies, whose location was kept secret by Muslim rulers. Longtime rivals of Venice, the merchants of Genoa and Florence also looked to expand their commercial interests.

PORTUGUESE EXPLORATION

Located on the Iberian Peninsula of southwestern Europe, Portugal, with its port city of Lisbon, soon became the center for merchants desiring to undercut the Venetians’ hold on trade. With a population of about one million and supported by its ruler Prince Henry, whom historians call “the Navigator,” this independent kingdom fostered exploration of and trade with western Africa. Skilled shipbuilders and navigators who took advantage of maps from all over Europe, Portuguese sailors used triangular sails and built lighter vessels called caravels that could sail down the African coast on longer ocean voyages. Portuguese mariners also began to use the astrolabe, a tool to calculate latitude, that allowed for more precise navigation on the open seas.

Motivated by economic as well as religious goals, the Portuguese established forts along the Atlantic coast of Africa during the fifteenth century. Their trading posts there generated new profits that funded further trade and further colonization. By the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese mariner Vasco de Gama leapfrogged his way southward and around the southern tip of Africa to reach the Indian Ocean. From there he followed the winds to India and lucrative Asian markets. Meanwhile, the vagaries of ocean currents and the limits of the day’s technology forced other Portuguese, as well as Spanish, mariners to sail west into the open sea before cutting back east to Africa. So doing, the Portuguese and Spanish stumbled upon several islands off the Atlantic coast of Europe and Africa, including the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands. Although small and little known to Americans today, these islands became training grounds for the later colonization of the New World, particularly the cultivation of sugar.

Originally grown in Asia, sugar had become a popular, widely profitable luxury item consumed by the wealthy nobility of Europe by the fifteenth century. But it had proven difficult to cultivate in Europe. It required tropical temperatures, daily rainfall, unique soil conditions, and a fourteen-month growing season. With the Atlantic Islands, the Portuguese found new land to support sugar production. New patterns of human and ecological destruction followed. Isolated from the mainlands of Europe and Africa for millennia, most of the islands’ natives either perished or were enslaved after Europeans arrived. Those who were enslaved were used to cultivate the difficult, labor-intensive sugar crops. But their small numbers proved inadequate to meet the labor demand. Having recently established good relations with powerful African rulers from the Kongo, Ndongo, and Songhai, Portuguese merchants looked to fill the gap with slaves from Africa. Slavery had long existed among African societies, often as a consequence of war or debt. Typically, African servants became a part of the extended tribal family. Responding to Portuguese requests, African leaders soon traded war captives—who by custom forfeited their freedom in battle—for Portuguese guns, iron, and manufactured goods. The Portuguese then exported these African captives to their Atlantic islands. Thus were born the first Atlantic plantations. In time, much of the Atlantic World would become a gargantuan sugar-plantation complex in which Africans labored to produce the highly profitable commodity for European consumers.

Elmina Castle

In 1482, Portuguese traders built Elmina Castle (also called São Jorge da Mina, or Saint George’s of the Mine) in present-day Ghana, on the west coast of Africa. A fortified trading post, it had mounted cannons facing out to sea, not inland toward continental Africa; the Portuguese had greater fear of a naval attack from other Europeans than of a land attack from Africans. Portuguese traders soon began to settle around the fort and established the town of Elmina.

Elmina Castle on the west coast of Ghana was used as a holding pen for slaves before they were brought across the Atlantic and sold. Originally built by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, it appears in this image as it was in the 1660s, after being seized by Dutch slave traders in 1637.

Although the Portuguese originally used the fort primarily for trading gold, by the sixteenth century they had shifted their focus. The dungeon of the fort now served as a holding pen for African slaves from the interior of the continent, while on the upper floors Portuguese traders ate, slept, and prayed in a chapel. Slaves lived in the dungeon for weeks or months until ships arrived to transport them to Europe or the Americas. For them, the dungeon of Elmina was their last sight of their home country.

SPANISH EXPLORATION AND COLUMBUS’S VOYAGE

The history of Spanish exploration begins with the history of Spain itself. During the fifteenth century, Spain hoped to gain an advantage over Portugal, its rival on the Iberian Peninsula. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469 unified Catholic Spain and began the process of building a nation that could compete for worldwide power. Since the 700s, much of Spain had been under Islamic rule, and King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, arch-defenders of the Catholic Church against Islam, were determined to defeat the Muslims in Granada, the last Islamic stronghold on the fringes of Europe. In 1492, they completed the Reconquista: the centuries-long Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The Reconquista marked another step forward in the process of making Spain an imperial power, and Ferdinand and Isabella were now ready to look further afield.

Their goals were to expand Catholicism and to gain a commercial advantage over Portugal. To those ends, Ferdinand and Isabella sponsored extensive Atlantic exploration. Spain’s most famous explorer, Christopher Columbus, was actually from Genoa, Italy. He believed that, using calculations based on other mariners’ journeys, he could chart a westward route to India, which could be used to expand European trade and spread Christianity. Starting in 1485, he approached Genoese, Venetian, Portuguese, English, and Spanish monarchs, asking for ships and funding to explore this westward route. All those he petitioned—including Ferdinand and Isabella at first—rebuffed him; their nautical experts all concurred that Columbus’s estimates of the width of the Atlantic Ocean were far too low. However, after three years of entreaties, and, more important, the completion of the Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to finance Columbus’s expedition in 1492, supplying him with three ships: the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The Spanish monarchs knew that Portuguese mariners had reached the southern tip of Africa and sailed the Indian Ocean. They understood that the Portuguese would soon reach Asia and, in this competitive race to reach the Far East, the Spanish rulers decided to act.

This sixteenth-century map shows the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic). Note the various fanciful elements, such as the large-scale ships and sea creatures, and consider what the creator of this map hoped to convey. In addition to navigation, what purpose would such a map have served?

Columbus held erroneous views that shaped his thinking about what he would encounter as he sailed west. He believed the earth to be much smaller than its actual size and, since he did not know of the existence of the Americas, he fully expected to land in Asia. On October 12, 1492, however, he made landfall on an island in the Bahamas. He then sailed to an island he named Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti). Believing he had landed in the East Indies, Columbus called the native Taínos he found there “Indios,” giving rise to the term “Indian” for any native people of the New World. Upon Columbus’s return to Spain, the Spanish crown bestowed on him the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and named him governor and viceroy of the lands he had discovered. As a devoted Catholic, Columbus had agreed with Ferdinand and Isabella prior to sailing west that part of the expected wealth from his voyage would be used to continue the fight against Islam.

Columbus sailed in three caravels such as these. The Santa Maria, his largest, was only 58 feet long.

Columbus’s 1493 letter—or probanza de mérito (proof of merit)—describing his “discovery” of a New World did much to inspire excitement in Europe. Probanzas de méritos were reports and letters written by Spaniards in the New World to the Spanish crown, designed to win royal patronage. Today they highlight the difficult task of historical work; while the letters are primary sources, historians need to understand the context and the culture in which the conquistadors, as the Spanish adventurers came to be called, wrote them and distinguish their bias and subjective nature. While they are filled with distortions and fabrications, probanzas de méritos are still useful in illustrating the expectation of wealth among the explorers as well as their view that native peoples would not pose a serious obstacle to colonization.

In 1493, Columbus sent two copies of a probanza de mérito to the Spanish king and queen and their minister of finance, Luis de Santángel. Santángel had supported Columbus’s voyage, helping him to obtain funding from Ferdinand and Isabella. Copies of the letter were soon circulating all over Europe, spreading news of the wondrous new land that Columbus had “discovered.” Columbus would make three more voyages over the next decade, establishing Spain’s first settlement in the New World on the island of Hispaniola. Many other Europeans followed in Columbus’s footsteps, drawn by dreams of winning wealth by sailing west. Another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, sailing for the Portuguese crown, explored the South American coastline between 1499 and 1502. Unlike Columbus, he realized that the Americas were not part of Asia but lands unknown to Europeans. Vespucci’s widely published accounts of his voyages fueled speculation and intense interest in the New World among Europeans. Among those who read Vespucci’s reports was the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller. Using the explorer’s first name as a label for the new landmass, Waldseemuller attached “America” to his map of the New World in 1507, and the name stuck.

This 1502 map, known as the Cantino World Map, depicts the cartographer’s interpretation of the world in light of recent discoveries. The map shows areas of Portuguese and Spanish exploration, the two nations’ claims under the Treaty of Tordesillas, and a variety of flora, fauna, figures, and structures. What does it reveal about the state of geographical knowledge, as well as European perceptions of the New World, at the beginning of the sixteenth century?