Chapter 14: European Exploration and Conquest

World Contacts before Columbus

The Trade World of the Indian Ocean

• The Indian Ocean was the center of the Afroeurasian trade world. Its location made it a crossroads for exchange among China, India, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.

• Merchants congregated in a series of cosmopolitan port cities strung around the Indian Ocean. Most of these cities had some form of autonomous selfgovernment.

• The Mongol emperors opened the doors of China to the West, encouraging Europeans like the Venetian trader and explorer Marco Polo to do business there.

• China also took the lead in exploration, sending Admiral Zheng He’s fleet along the trade web as far west as Egypt.

• From 1405 to 1433, each of his seven expeditions involved hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men.

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

The Trading States of Africa

• By 1450 Africa had a few large empires along with hundreds of smaller states.

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

• 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 Ghana.

• Nations inland that sat astride the north-south caravan routes grew wealthy from this trade.

• In the midthirteenth century the kingdom of Mali emerged as an important player on the overland trade route, gaining prestige from its ruler Mansa Musa’s fabulous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324/25.

• Gold was one important object of trade; slaves were another.

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

• Legends about Africa played an important role in Europeans’ imagination of the outside world.

The Ottoman and Persian Empires

• The Middle East 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.

• The Persians’ Shi’ite Muslim faith clashed with the Ottomans’ adherence to Sunnism.

• Economically, the two competed for control over western trade routes to the East. Under Sultan Mohammed II (r. 1451–1481), the Ottomans captured Europe’s largest city, Constantinople, in May 1453.

• Ottoman expansion frightened Europeans.

• The Ottoman armies seemed invincible and the empire’s desire for expansion limitless.

• With trade routes to the East dominated by the Ottomans, Europeans wished to find new trade routes free of Ottoman control.

Genoese and Venetian Middlemen

• Compared to the riches and vibrancy of the East, Europe constituted a minor outpost of the world trading system.

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

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

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

• Venice’s ancient rival was Genoa. In the wake of the Crusades, Genoa dominated the northern route to Asia through the Black Sea.

• In the fifteenth century, 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.

• A major element of Italian trade was slavery. Merchants purchased slaves, many of whom were fellow Christians, in the Balkans.

• The men were sold to Egypt for the sultan’s army or sent to work as agricultural laborers in the Mediterranean.

• Italian experience in colonial administration, slaving, and international trade served as a model for the Iberian states as they pushed European expansion to new heights.

• Mariners, merchants, and financiers from Venice and Genoa— most notably Christopher Columbus— played a crucial role in bringing the fruits of this experience to the Iberian Peninsula and to the New World.

The European Voyages of Discovery

Causes of European Expansion

• European expansion had multiple causes. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe was experiencing a revival of population and economic activity after the lows of the Black Death.

• Introduced into western Europe by the Crusaders in the twelfth century, pepper, nutmeg, ginger, mace, cinnamon, and cloves added flavor and variety to the monotonous European diet.

• Religious fervor was another important catalyst for expansion. The passion and energy ignited by the Christian reconquista (reconquest) of the Iberian Peninsula encouraged the Portuguese and Spanish to continue the Christian crusade.

• Combined with eagerness to earn profits and to spread Christianity was the desire for glory and the urge to chart new waters.

• Individual explorers combined these motivations in unique ways.

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

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

• The bluntest of the Spanish conquistadors, Hernando Cortés, announced as he prepared to conquer Mexico, “I have come to win gold, not to plow the fields like a peasant.”

• After the reconquista, young men of the Spanish upper classes found their economic and political opportunities greatly limited.

• Their voyages were made possible by the growth of government power.

• The Spanish monarchy was stronger than before and in a position to support foreign ventures.

• Ordinary sailors were ill paid, and life at sea meant danger, overcrowding, and hunger.

• For months at a time, 100 to 120 people lived and worked in a space of 1,600 to 2,000 square feet.

• Men chose to join these miserable crews to escape poverty at home, to continue a family trade, or to find better lives as illegal immigrants in the colonies.

• The people who stayed at home had a powerful impact on the process.

• Royal ministers and factions at court influenced monarchs to provide or deny support for exploration.

• The small number of people who could read served as a rapt audience for tales of fantastic places and unknown peoples.

Technology and the Rise of Exploration

• Technological developments in shipbuilding, weaponry, and navigation also paved the way for European expansion.

• Since ancient times, most seagoing vessels had been narrow, open boats called galleys, propelled largely by slaves or convicts manning the oars.

• The need for sturdier craft, as well as population losses caused by the Black Death, forced the development of a new style of ship that would not require much manpower to sail.

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

• Great strides in cartography and navigational aids were also made during this period.

• Around 1410 Arab scholars reintroduced Europeans to Ptolemy’s Geography.

• Written in the second century c.e. by a Hellenized Egyptian, the work synthesized the geographical knowledge of the classical world.

• Ptolemy’s 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.

• The magnetic compass enabled sailors to determine their direction and position at sea.

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

• Like the astrolabe, much of the new technology that Europeans used on their voyages was borrowed from the East.

The Portuguese Overseas Empire

• In the early phases of Portuguese exploration, Prince Henry (1394–1460), a younger son of the king, played a leading role.

• The objectives of Portuguese exploration policy included military glory; the conversion of Muslims; and a quest to find gold, slaves, and an overseas route to the spice markets of India.

• The Portuguese next established trading posts and forts on the gold-rich Guinea coast and penetrated into the African continent all the way to Timbuktu.

• By 1500 Portugal controlled the flow of African gold to Europe.

• The golden century of Portuguese prosperity had begun.

• The Portuguese then pushed farther south down the west coast of Africa.

• In 1487 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip, but storms and a threatened mutiny forced him to turn back.

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

• Muslim-controlled port city-states had long controlled the rich spice trade of the Indian Ocean, and they did not surrender their dominance willingly.

• In March 1493, between the voyages of Diaz 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.

The Problem of Christopher Colombus

• 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.

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

• Columbus was also a deeply religious man. He had witnessed the Spanish conquest of Granada and shared fully in the religious and nationalistic fervor surrounding that event.

• Columbus wanted to find a direct ocean trading route to Asia.

• Rejected for funding by the Portuguese in 1483 and by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1486, the project finally won the backing of the Spanish monarchy in 1492.

• Columbus’s small fleet left Spain on August 3, 1492.

• He landed in the Bahamas, which he christened San Salvador, on October 12, 1492. Columbus believed he had found some small islands off the east coast of Japan.

• Scholars have identified the inhabitants of the islands as the Taino people, speakers of the Arawak language, who inhabited Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic) and other islands in the Caribbean.

• The landing party found only small villages. Confronted with this disappointment, Columbus apparently gave up on his aim to meet the Great Khan.

• Over the next decades, the Spanish would follow a policy of conquest and colonization in the New World, rather than one of exchange with equals (as envisaged for the Mongol khan).

• On his second voyage, Columbus forcibly subjugated the island of Hispaniola and enslaved its indigenous peoples.

• Columbus was very much a man of his times. To the end of his life in 1506, he believed that he had found small islands off the coast of Asia.

Later Explorers

• The Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci(1454–1512) realized what Columbus had not.

• To settle competing claims to the Atlantic discoveries, Spain and Portugal turned to Pope Alexander VI.

• The resulting Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 gave Spain everything to the west of an imaginary line drawn down the Atlantic and Portugal everything to the east.

• The search for profits determined the direction of Spanish exploration.

• With insignificant profits from the Caribbean compared to the enormous riches that the Portuguese were reaping in Asia, Spain renewed the search for a western passage to Asia.

• Terrible storms, disease, starvation, and violence devastated the expedition.

• This voyage revolutionized Europeans’ understanding of the world by demonstrating the vastness of the Pacific.

• Spain’s European rivals also set sail across the Atlantic during the early days of exploration in search of a northwest passage to the Indies.

• Early French exploration of the Atlantic was equally frustrating.

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

• Fishing vessels salted the catch on board and brought it back to Europe, where a thriving market for fish was created by the Catholic prohibition on eating meat on Fridays and during Lent.

Spanish Conquest in the World

• 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 Hernando Cortés (1485–1547).

• Accompanied by six hundred men, sixteen horses, and ten cannon, Cortés was to launch the conquest of the Mexica Empire.

• The Mexica Empire was ruled by Montezuma II (r. 1502–1520) from his capital at Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City.

• Cortés landed on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico on April 21, 1519. The Spanish camp was soon visited by delegations of unarmed Mexica leaders bearing lavish gifts and news of their great emperor.

• Cortés quickly forged an alliance with the Tlaxcalas (Tlah-scalas) and other subject kingdoms, which chafed under the tribute demanded by the Mexica.

• Montezuma refrained from attacking the Spaniards as they advanced toward his capital and welcomed Cortés and his men into Tenochtitlán.

• In May 1520 Spanish forces massacred Mexica warriors dancing at an indigenous festival.

• This act provoked an uprising within Tenochtitlán, during which Montezuma was killed.

• More surprising than the defeat of the Mexica was the fall of the remote Inca Empire.

• Perched more than 9,800 feet above sea level, the Incas were isolated from North American indigenous cultures and knew nothing of the Mexica civilization or its collapse.

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

• Like Montezuma in Mexico, Atahualpa was aware of the Spaniards’ movements.

• He sent envoys to invite the Spanish to meet him in the provincial town of Cajamarca.

• As with the Mexica, decades of violence and resistance followed the defeat of the Incan capital.

• Struggles also broke out among the Spanish for the spoils of empire.

Early French and English Settlement in the New World

• For over a hundred years, the Spanish and the Portuguese dominated settlement in the New World.

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

• Settlement on the coast of New England was undertaken for different reasons.

• There, radical Protestants sought to escape Anglican repression in England and begin new lives.

• Whereas the Spanish conquered indigenous empires and established large-scale dominance over Mexico and Peru, English settlements merely hugged the Atlantic coastline.

• 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. Ville-Marie, latter-day Montreal, was founded in 1642.

• French explorer René-Robert Cavelier LaSalle descended the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, opening the way for French occupation of Louisiana.

• While establishing their foothold in the north, the French slowly acquired new territories in the West Indies, including Cayenne (1604), St. Christophe (1625), Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue (1697) on the western side of the island of Hispaniola.

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

The Impact of Conquest

Colonial Administration

• Spanish conquistadors had claimed the lands they had “discovered” for the Spanish crown. As the wealth of the new territories became apparent, the Spanish government acted to impose its authority and remove that of the original conquerors.

• The crown divided its New World possessions into two viceroyalties, or administrative divisions: New Spain, with the capital at Mexico City, and Peru, with the capital at Lima.

• Within each territory, the viceroy, or imperial governor, exercised broad military and civil authority as the direct representative of Spain.

• The Portuguese adopted similar patterns of rule, with India House in Lisbon functioning much like the Spanish House of Trade and royal representatives overseeing its possessions in West Africa and Asia.

• Like their European neighbors, France and England initially entrusted their overseas colonies to individual explorers and monopoly trading companies.

• England’s colonies followed a distinctive path. Drawing on English traditions of representative government, its colonists established their own proudly autonomous assemblies to regulate local affairs.

• Up to the mid-eighteenth century, the Crown found little reason to dispute colonial liberties in the north, but it did acquire greater control over the wealthy plantation colonies of the Caribbean and tobacco-rich Virginia.

Impact of European Settlement on Indigenous People

• Before Columbus’s arrival, the Americas were inhabited by thousands of groups of indigenous peoples, each with distinct cultures and languages.

• Although historians continue to debate the numbers, the best estimate is that in 1492 the peoples of the Americas numbered around 50 million.

• Their lives were radically transformed by the arrival of Europeans. In the sixteenth century perhaps two hundred thousand Spaniards immigrated to the New World.

• After assisting in the conquest of the Mexica and the Incas, these men carved out vast estates called haciendas in temperate grazing areas and imported Spanish livestock.

• The Spanish quickly established the encomienda system, in which the Crown granted the conquerors the right to employ groups of Native Americans as laborers or to demand tribute from them in exchange for providing food and shelter.

• The new conditions and hardships imposed by conquest and colonization resulted in enormous native population losses. The major cause of death was disease.

• The Franciscan Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474– 1566) was one of the most outspoken critics of Spanish brutality against indigenous people.

• Las Casas and other missionaries asserted that the Indians had human rights, and through their persistent pressure the Spanish emperor Charles V abolished the worst abuses of the encomienda system in 1531.

• Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit missionaries who accompanied the conquistadors and other European settlers played an important role in converting indigenous peoples to Christianity, teaching them European methods of agriculture, and instilling loyalty to their colonial masters.

• Missionaries’ success in conversion varied over time and space.

• In Central and South America, large-scale conversion forged enduring Catholic cultures in Portuguese and Spanish colonies.

• Rather than a straightforward imposition of Christianity, conversion entailed a complex process of cultural exchange.

• The pattern of devastating disease and population loss occurred everywhere Europeans settled. The best estimate of native population loss is a decline from roughly 50 million people in 1492 to around 9 million by 1700.

• For colonial administrators, the main problem posed by the astronomically high death rate was the loss of a subjugated labor force to work the mines and sugar plantations.

Life in the Colonies

• Many factors helped to shape life in European colonies, including geographical location, religion, indigenous cultures and practices, patterns of European settlement, and the cultural attitudes and official policies of the European nations that claimed them as empire.

• Women played a crucial role in the creation of new identities and the continuation of old ones.

• The first explorers formed unions with native women, through coercion or choice, and relied on them as translators and guides and to form alliances with indigenous powers.

• It was not just the availability of Englishwomen that prevented Englishmen from forming unions with indigenous women.

• English cultural attitudes drew strict boundaries between “civilized” and “savage,” and even settlements of Christianized native peoples were segregated from the English.

• Most women who crossed the Atlantic were Africans, constituting four-fifths of the female newcomers before 1800.

• The mixing of indigenous peoples with Europeans and Africans created whole new populations and ethnicities and complex self-identities.

• With its immense slave-based plantation agriculture system, large indigenous population, and relatively low Portuguese immigration, Brazil developed a particularly complex racial and ethnic mosaic.

The 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 Columbian exchange.

• European immigrants to the Americas wanted a familiar diet, so they searched for climatic zones favorable to those crops.

• Apart from wild turkeys and game, Native Americans had no animals for food.

• Moreover, they did not domesticate animals for travel or use as beasts of burden, except for alpacas and llamas in the Inca Empire.

• Disease brought by European people and animals was perhaps the most important form of exchange

• The world after Columbus was thus unified by disease as well as by trade and colonization.

Europe and the World After Columbus

Sugar and Slavery

• Throughout the Middle Ages slavery was deeply entrenched in the Mediterranean, but it was not based on race; many slaves were white.

• While the first slaves were simply seized by small raiding parties, Portuguese merchants soon found that it was easier to trade with local leaders, who were accustomed to dealing in slaves captured through warfare with neighboring powers.

• In this stage of European expansion, the history of slavery became intertwined with the history of sugar.

• Originally sugar was an expensive luxury that only the very affluent could afford, but population increases and monetary expansion in the fifteenth century led to increasing demand.

• Sugar was a particularly difficult and demanding crop to produce for profit. Seed-stems were planted by hand, thousands to the acres.

• Sugar gave New World slavery its distinctive shape.

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

• European sailors found the Atlantic passage cramped and uncomfortable, but conditions for enslaved Africans were lethal.

• Before 1700, when slavers decided it was better business to improve conditions, some 20 percent of slaves died on the voyage

• In total, scholars estimate that European traders embarked over 10 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic from 1518 to 1800 (of whom roughly 8.5 million disembarked), with the peak of the trade occurring in the eighteenth century.

Spanish Silver and its Economic Effects

• The sixteenth century has often been called Spain’s golden century, but silver mined in the Americas was the true source of Spain’s wealth.

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

• Prices rose most steeply before 1565, but bullion imports reached their peak between 1580 and 1620.

• Several times between 1557 and 1647, Spain’s King Philip II and his successors wrote off the state debt, thereby undermining confidence in the government and leaving the economy in shambles.

• As Philip II paid his armies and foreign debts with silver bullion, Spanish inflation was transmitted to the rest of Europe.

• In many ways, though, it was not Spain but China that controlled the world trade in silver.

• The Chinese demanded silver for their products and for the payment of imperial taxes.

The Birth of the Global Economy

• With the Europeans’ discovery of the Americas and their exploration of the Pacific, the entire world was linked for the first time in history by seaborne trade.

• The Portuguese were the first worldwide traders. In the sixteenth century they controlled the sea route to India.

• Coming to empire a few decades later than the Portuguese, the Spanish were determined to claim their place in world trade.

• The Spanish Empire in the New World was basically a land empire, but across the Pacific the Spaniards built a seaborne empire centered at Manila in the Philippines.

• In the late sixteenth century the Protestant Dutch were engaged in a long war of independence from their Spanish Catholic overlords.

• The Dutch set their sights on gaining direct access to and control of the Indonesian sources of spices.

• Not content with challenging the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch also aspired to a role in the Americas. Founded in 1621, when the Dutch were at war with the Spanish, the Dutch West India Company aggressively sought to open trade with North and South America and capture Spanish territories there.

• Dutch efforts to colonize North America were less successful.

• The colony of New Netherland, governed from New Amsterdam (modern-day New York City), was hampered by lack of settlement and weak governance and was easily captured by the British in 1664.

Changing Attitudes and Beliefs

New Ideas About Race

• At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, most Europeans would have thought of Africans, if they thought of them at all, as savages because of their eating habits, morals, clothing, and social customs and as barbarians because of their language and methods of war.

• As Europeans turned to Africa for new sources of slaves, they drew on and developed ideas about Africans’ primitiveness and barbarity to defend slavery and even argue that enslavement benefited Africans by bringing the light of Christianity to heathen peoples.

• Over time, the institution of slavery fostered a new level of racial inequality.

• In contrast to peasants, Jews, and the Irish, Africans gradually became seen as utterly distinct from and wholly inferior to Europeans.

• Support for this belief went back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s argument that some people are naturally destined for slavery and to biblical associations between darkness and sin.

• After 1700 the emergence of new methods of observing and describing nature led to the use of science to define race.

• Biblical justifications for inequality thereby gave way to supposedly scientific ones.

Michel de Montaigne and Cultural Curiosity

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

• Decades of religious fanaticism, bringing civil anarchy and war, led some Catholics and Protestants to doubt that any one faith contained absolute truth.

• Montaigne developed a new literary genre, the essay— from the French essayer, meaning “to test or try”— to express his ideas.

• Published in 1580, Montaigne’s Essays consisted of short reflections drawing on his extensive reading in ancient texts, his experience as a government official, and his own moral judgment.

• Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” reveals the impact of overseas discoveries on one thoughtful European.

William Shakespeare and His Influence

• In addition to the essay as a literary genre, the period fostered remarkable creativity in other branches of literature.

• England— especially in the latter part of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and in the first years of her successor, James I (r. 1603–1625)— witnessed remarkable literary expression.

• Like Montaigne’s essays, Shakespeare’s work reveals the impact of the new discoveries and contacts of his day. The title character of Othello is described as a “Moor of Venice.”

• Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, also highlights the issue of race and race relations.

• The plot involves the stranding on an island of sorcerer Prospero and his daughter Miranda.

• Shakespeare’s work shows us one of the finest minds of the age grasping to come to terms with the racial and religious complexities around him.