Lecture 1:

15th Century Europe & Initial

Exploration

Outline

Western Europe’s Transformation from Political and Cultural Backwater

Going South or West to Get to the East The Peoples of the Central American “New

World” Columbus and Spanish Exploration to 1519 Conclusions

Western Europe’s

Transformation Provincialism and removal

from classical Mediterranean world• Poverty and political

impotence• The Crusades

The Renaissance• Renewed trade and scientific

knowledge• Strengthening of state power

The problem of severed trade networks, cont.• The Ottoman capture of

Constantinople, 1453• Italian emphasis on North

Africa

Hard Times in Early Middle Ages W. Europe

The Black Death’s Progress

Renewed Difficulties

in Late Middle Ages

From the Toggenburg Bible, 1411

Late Medieval/Renaissance

Trade Routes Among the Cities

Trade/Exploration in the Late Renaissance

Going South or West to Get to the

East

The reconquista in Portugal and contact w/ sub-Saharan Africa• Prince Henry

the Navigator• Madeira and the

Azores; sugar and slaves

The Spanish reconquista and further expansion• Ferdinand II of

Aragon and Isabella I of Castille

• The Portuguese head start: Pope Nicholas V and the 1455 grant of areas beyond Cape Bojador

The Reconquista

The Peoples of the “New World”

The Mayan classical (~AD 250-900) and post-classical (900-1492) periods• Modern-day Central

America north to the Yucatán Peninsula

• Sophisticated cultural life and trade networks

• Emergence of Toltecs as cultural heirs

The Aztec ascendance• 13th century

wanderers on fringes of Toltec society

• Establishment of Tenochtitlan and regional dominance by 1427 Mayan ruins, Tikal, Guatemala

A Representation of Tenochtitlan

Columbus & Spanish

Exploration to 1519

Columbus as product of the Renaissance age• Vast experience

with Mediterranean trade routes

• Self-education and immersion in contemporary science and geography

Columbus’s theory on the size of the Atlantic and appeals to the monarchs• The four voyages,

1492-1504: much land, little wealth

• Initial legacies: the Treaty of Tordesillas and royal ambivalence

Columbus’s missing continents

Columbus’s Voyages

An 1893 Representation of Columbus’s Feat

Conclusions The discovery of the “New World” sprang from the Crusades

and the accompanying Western European interest in eastern Mediterranean knowledge and wealth associated with the classical Silk Road trading routes to India and China. Once this access was cut off by the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the Europeans had to find a side or back door.

While the Crusades failed to dislodge Islam in the Middle East, they succeeded in reclaiming the Iberian Peninsula for Catholicism. The reconquista thus set the stage for the twin aims of the Catholic colonial and imperial enterprise: the establishment of lucrative trade routes and settlements; and the conversion of any non-Christian peoples to add greater glory to the monarchy.

For the Spanish enterprise, however, the first twenty years of exploration failed to live up to expectations, as it appeared that the “New World” was simply a vast landmass of primitive and destitute peoples with little to offer to the empire.