Chapter 14: European Exploration and Conquest

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus

________ was a devout Christian who was increasingly haunted by messianic obsessions in the last years of his life.

Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci

The ________ (1454- 1512) realized what Columbus had not.

Lisbon

________ became the entrance port for Asian goods into Europe, but this was not accomplished without a fight.

Venetian merchants

________ specialized in goods like spices, silks, and carpets, which they obtained from middlemen in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor.

European involvement

________ in the Americas led to profound transformation of pre- existing indigenous societies and the rise of a transatlantic slave trade.

Ptolemys work

________ provided significant improvements over medieval cartography, clearly depicting the world as round and introducing the idea of latitude and longitude to plot position accurately.

Iberian Peninsula

The passion and energy ignited by the Christian reconquista (reconquest) of the ________ encouraged the Portuguese and Spanish to continue the Christian crusade.

Spanish invasion

At the time of the ________ the Inca Empire had been weakened by an epidemic of disease, possibly smallpox.

Middle East

The ________ served as an intermediary for trade between Asia, Africa, and Europe and was also an important supplier of goods for foreign exchange, especially silk and cotton.

Sultan Mohammed II

Under ________ (r. 1451- 1481), the Ottomans captured Europes largest city, Constantinople, in May 1453.

Genoese ambition

In his dream of a westward passage to the Indies, Columbus embodied a long- standing ________ to circumvent Venetian domination of eastward trade, which was now being claimed by the Portuguese.

fifteenth century

In the course of the ________, the Portuguese developed the caravel, a small, light, three- mast sailing ship.

Sugar

________ was a particularly difficult and demanding crop to produce for profit.

Columbuss arrival

Before ________, the Americas were inhabited by thousands of groups of indigenous peoples, each with distinct cultures and languages.

magnetic compass

The ________ enabled sailors to determine their direction and position at sea.

Cortés

________ landed on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico on April 21, 1519.

Mamluk Egyptian

From 1250 until its defeat by the Ottomans in 1517, the ________ empire was one of the most powerful on the continent.

Portuguese

When the ________ explorer Vasco da Gama reached the port of Calicut, India, in 1498 and a native asked what he wanted, he replied,"Christians and spices ..

English colony

The first ________ was founded at Roanoke (in what is now North Carolina) in 1585.

late sixteenth century

In the ________ the Protestant Dutch were engaged in a long war of independence from their Spanish Catholic overlords.

expensive luxury

Originally sugar was a(n) ________ that only the very affluent could afford, but population increases and monetary expansion in the fifteenth century led to increasing demand.

Ghana

In the fifteenth century most of the gold that reached Europe came from the western part of the Sudan region in West Africa and from the Akan peoples living near present- day ________.

Frenchman Jacques Cartier

Between 1534 and 1541 ________ made several voyages and explored the St. Lawrence region of Canada, searching for a passage to the wealth of Asia.

German metal

The Venetians exchanged Eastern luxury goods for European products they could trade abroad, including Spanish and English wool, ________ goods, Flemish textiles, and silk cloth made in their own manufactures with imported raw materials.

Venice

In 1304 ________ established formal relations with the sultan of Mamluk Egypt, opening operations in Cairo, the gateway to Asian trade.

Racism

________ was not the only possible reaction to the new worlds emerging in the sixteenth century.

1520

In May ________ Spanish forces massacred Mexica warriors dancing at an indigenous festival.

ancient Greeks

The astrolabe, an instrument invented by the ________ and perfected by Muslim navigators, was used to determine the altitude of the sun and other celestial bodies.

Mexica Empire

The ________ was ruled by Montezuma II (r. 1502- 1520) from his capital at Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City.

Montaigne

________ developed a new literary genre, the essay- from the French essayer, meaning "to test or try- "to express his ideas.

Columbus

________ himself, who spent a decade in Madeira, brought the first sugar plants to the New World.

Slavery

________ was practiced in Africa, as it was virtually everywhere else in the world, before the arrival of Europeans.

voyages of Diaz

In March 1493, between the ________ and da Gama, Spanish ships under a triumphant Genoese mariner named Christopher Columbus (1451- 1506), in the service of the Spanish crown, entered Lisbon harbor.

India

________ was an important contributor of goods to the world trading system; much of the worlds pepper was grown there, and Indian cotton textiles were highly prized.

Indian Ocean

The ________ was the center of the Afroeurasian trade world.

sixteenth century

The ________ has often been called Spains golden century, but silver mined in the Americas was the true source of Spains wealth.

Hernando Cortés

In 1519, the year Magellan departed on his worldwide expedition, the Spanish sent an exploratory expedition from their post in Cuba to the mainland under the command of the brash and determined conquistador ________ (1485- 1547)

French navigator

________ and explorer Samuel de Champlain founded the first permanent French settlement, at Quebec, in 1608, a year after the English founding of Jamestown.

Franciscan Bartolomé de Las Casas

The ________ (1474- 1566) was one of the most outspoken critics of Spanish brutality against indigenous people.

Columbian exchange

The migration of peoples to the New World led to an exchange of animals, plants, and disease, a complex process known as the ________.

fifteenth century

In the ________, with Venice claiming victory in the spice trade, the Genoese shifted focus from trade to finance and from the Black Sea to the western Mediterranean.

sixteenth century

In the ________ Spain experienced a steady population increase, creating a sharp rise in the demand for food and goods.

Christopher Columbus

________ is a controversial figure in history- glorified by some as a courageous explorer, vilified by others as a cruel exploiter of Native Americans.