Try to answer the following questions in each of your journal entries:
The journal entry is strictly based on the materials provided below.
LECTURE 3/ 4/ 5 AND chapter 16 in the book
- What interested you the most in the week’s course content? Why?
- What about the concepts discussed this week? (use the syllabus, course schedule, to see each week’s concepts). Did they help you understand the historical process better, or not? How come? Comment on at least one concept and related event/process discussed in the textbook or lectures.
- What event, concept, or historical process remained unclear to you? Why?
- How do you evaluate your learning process about world history so far?
Please answer each questions RESPECTIVELY.
750 WORDS
How to Read Primary
Sources?
(and a comment about the related assignments)
History 111 – World History since 1500
Spring 2022
Jorge Minella ([email protected])
Reading Primary
Sources
“Stuff” produced in the past by
people from the past.
Tell things from the past.
How to read? What to ask?
Historical imagination, study,
some common sense.
The Primary Source Assignments
Four sets of historical documents.
Assignments.
Collective annotation on Perusall.
Final essay about one of the sets.
How historians work.
Autonomy.
PAPER
Purpose of the primary source’s author.
Argument and strategy.
Presuppositions and values.
Epistemology.
Relate to Other texts.
Collective Annotation –
Perusall
- How to Read Primary Sources?�(and a comment about the related assignments)
- Reading Primary Sources
- The Primary Source Assignments
- PAPER
- Collective Annotation – Perusall
Iberian Societies and
Expansion
History 111 – World History since 1500
Spring 2022
Jorge Minella ([email protected])
Introduction – Lecture Parts
Portugal and Spain.
Maritime expansion.
Accumulate wealth.
Gain power against rivals.
Spread Christianity.
Route to Asia.
Atlantic World.
Spain and Portugal, 15th century
Urban centers.
Estate society. (low social mobility)
Commoners (peasants, artisans, professionals).
Clergy.
Nobility.
God-parentage and patron-client relations essential to
maintenance of the social fabric.
Iberian Reconquista
Medieval Iberia.
711-1492, intermittent conflict between
Christians and Muslims.
“Plunder mentality,” territorial conquest.
Rise of Christian religious intolerance.
Caliphate of Córdoba, c.
1000 ce.
Maritime Expansion
Europe and the
Greater Mediterranean
1453, still showing the
Kingdom of Granada, in
southern Iberia.
Ottomans in Turkey and the
Balkans.
Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt
and the Middle East.
New routes to Asia: silk,
spices, dyes, luxury goods.
Portuguese Maritime Expansion – 15th and
16th centuries
Portuguese Maritime Expansion
Trade – gold, spices, slaves.
Lisbon – cosmopolitan city, experienced merchants.
Geography – position and favorable currents.
Politics – early state formation; most of society benefitted.
Cross-Cultural
Seafaring Expertise
Ship-building and operation
techniques from the Arabs
and Northern Europeans.
Navigation instruments
perfected from Chinese
and Arab technologies.
Guns: China and the
Ottomans.
Portuguese carracks. Painting
attributed to Gregório Lopes or
Cornelis Antoniszoon, c. 1540
Concluding Remarks
Expansion started from Portugal and Spain.
Wealth, power, Christianity.
Expansion shaped by previous experiences.
Eventually resulted in the colonization of the Americas.
- Iberian Societies and Expansion�
- Introduction – Lecture Parts
- Spain and Portugal, 15th century
- Iberian Reconquista
- Maritime Expansion
- Europe and the Greater Mediterranean
- Portuguese Maritime Expansion – 15th and 16th centuries
- Portuguese Maritime Expansion
- Cross-Cultural Seafaring Expertise
- Concluding Remarks
Conquest and Early
Colonization of the Americas
History 111 – World History since 1500
Spring 2022
Jorge Minella ([email protected])
Introduction –
Colonialism
Spanish and Portuguese maritime
expansion.
Toward Asia.
Main goal: trade.
But colonization in America later.
Colonialism.
Transfer of population to a new
territory;
To live as permanent settlers;
While maintaining political
allegiance to their country of
origin.
Spanish Galleon. Fragment of A Naval Encounter between Dutch
and Spanish Warships, Cornelis Verbeeck’s oil on panel, c.
1618/1620.
15th Century Side-Effects of Exploration
The Spanish in the Canary Islands, 1430s.
Enslavement of locals.
Sugar plantations.
The Portuguese in São Tomé, 1480s.
Uninhabited island.
Import of enslaved Africans.
Sugar plantations.
Testing models of colonization.
First Contact and Conflicts in
the Caribbean
MAP 16.2 European Voyages of Discovery, c.
1420–1600. Textbook page 575.
1492 – 1519: Castilian
Disappointment, Caribbean
Disaster
Cultural Clash.
How to obtain wealth?
Conquer land and people.
Indigenous enslavement.
Encomienda.
Forced conversion to Christianism.
Encomienda
System of coerced labor.
Native communities allocated to Spanish encomendero.
Who could exploit native labor and demand tribute.
Goods.
Agricultural surpluses.
Gold and silver.
Caribbean
Catastrophe
Catastrophic model.
Needed extreme violence.
Eventually undermined Spanish goals.
Lack of labor force.
90% of Caribbean Natives died in less than a
century.
Mostly disease.
Overwork and enslavement.
Forced dislocations.
Violence and killings.
Different colonial models.
Part of the Codex Kingsborough (c. 1550), an indigenous
Mexican complaint against an abusive encomendero
The Fall of the Aztec and
Inca Empires
Conquistador
Companies
Private expeditions
authorized by the
Crown.
Higher rank
commoners.
Conquest as
opportunity.
Bounty.
Encomiendas.
Noble titles.
Early 20th century depiction of Diego de Almagro’s conquistador company. Expedición de
Almagro a Chile. Fray Pedro Subercaseaux, c. 1900.
Fall of the Aztec
Rival native groups
joined conquistadors.
Emperor Moctezuma
II held hostage and
killed.
Disease.
Depiction of Cortes’ conquistador band and Tlaxcalan allies. Codex
Azcatitlan, mid-16th to mid 17th centuries.
Fall of the Inca
Civil war.
Atahualpa vs. Huascar.
Deception and treachery.
Atahualpa captured and killed.
Despite immense wealth given
to conquistadors.
Early 17th century representation of Atahualpa and
Pizarro’s meeting. Poma de Ayala, Nueva Crónica y Buen
Gobierno, 1615.
What Explains
Conquest
Effects of disease (smallpox, mainly).
Circumstances and timing.
Resentment against the Aztec led to
native allies.
Inca in civil war.
Spanish tactic of seizing and killing the
leadership proved effective.
20th century artwork depicting the
transformation of Tenochtilan into Mexico
City. Roberto Cueva del Río, 1986.
The Portuguese Coastal
Colony
First Decades:
Brazilwood Trade
Wealth?
Trade with Tupis.
Brazilwood for tools
and trinkets.
Portuguese focused
on Asia.
Map of Brazil in the Miller Atlas, 1519.
Brazilwood trees represented.
1530s – Change to
Captaincies
Promote colonization.
Assigned to “Donatary Captains” as
possessions.
Most failed.
Lack of resources or interest.
Poorly informed decisions.
Indigenous resistance against forced labor.
Lack of royal oversight and support.
Governorate
General and
Sugar
1549 – formation of the Governorate
General, based in Salvador, Bahia.
Pernambuco.
Sugar.
Large landed property.
African captives.
Model: plantations in Atlantic Islands.
Late Colonization of the Interior
No precious metals until late 17th century.
Profitable sugar production on coastal areas.
Fierce indigenous groups.
No wealthy native empires.
Bandeirantes, 17th century.
Local Realities and Global
Importance: Silver and the
Columbian Exchange
The Columbian
Exchange
Alfred Crosby (1972)
“the massive interoceanic transfer of
animals (including humans), plants,
and diseases” started after 1492.
Global change, impact in everyday life.
Intentional exchanges.
Unintentional exchanges.
Global Impact of
Spanish American Silver
Unprecedent amount of
silver into the market.
Global trade boost.
Facilitated wage labor.
Funded wars.
Local Impact of Spanish American Silver
Spanish investment in the mines.
Enslaved Africans working in the mints and refineries.
Natives subjected to draft labor to work underground.
Mita and Repartimiento: harsh rotational labor draft imposed to the
indigenous communities.
Local Impact –
Potosí
10,000 mita laborers.
Brutal labor regime.
Formed a large urban
center.
Driving force of Spanish
South America’s colonial
economy.
Silver to Castile.
Mining in Potosí, an
engraving from Theodoor
de Bry in Historia Americae
sive Novi Orbis, 1596.
Recap
The Caribbean and the encomienda.
Conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires.
Brazil’s different path.
Columbian Exchange and silver mining.
- Conquest and Early Colonization of the Americas
- Introduction – Colonialism
- 15th Century Side-Effects of Exploration
- First Contact and Conflicts in the Caribbean
- Número do slide 5
- 1492 – 1519: Castilian Disappointment, Caribbean Disaster
- Encomienda
- Caribbean Catastrophe
- The Fall of the Aztec and Inca Empires
- Conquistador Companies
- Fall of the Aztec
- Fall of the Inca
- What Explains Conquest
- The Portuguese Coastal Colony
- First Decades: Brazilwood Trade
- 1530s – Change to Captaincies
- Governorate General and Sugar
- Late Colonization of the Interior
- Local Realities and Global Importance: Silver and the Columbian Exchange
- The Columbian Exchange
- Global Impact of Spanish American Silver
- Local Impact of Spanish American Silver
- Local Impact – Potosí
- Recap
smi49245_ch16_566-603 566 07/13/18 01:22 PM
16
The Rise of an Atlantic World
1450–1600
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World in the Making Painted on calfskins,
portolan (“port finder”) charts were used by mariners
in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic beginning
in the late fourteenth century. A fter Columbus’s
momentous transatlantic voyage in 1492, portolan
charts began to depict new European discoveries in
the A mericas with great accuracy. This 1500 map by
Juan de la Cosa, who sailed with Columbus, is the
earliest such chart.
Guns, Sails, and Compasses: Europeans
Venture Abroad
FOCUS Why and how did Europeans begin to
cross unknown seas in the fifteenth century?
New Crossroads, First Encounters: The
European Voyages of Discovery, 1492–1521
FOCUS What were the main sources of conflict
between Europeans and native Americans in
the first decades after contact?
Spanish Conquests in the Americas,
1519–1600
FOCUS What factors enabled the Spanish to
conquer the Aztec and Inca Empires?
A New Empire in the Americas: New
Spain and Peru, 1535–1600
FOCUS Why was the discovery of silver in
Spanish America so important in the course of
world history?
Brazil by Accident: The Portuguese in the
Americas, 1500–1600
FOCUS How and why did early Portuguese Brazil
develop differently from Spanish America?
COUNTERPOINT: The Mapuche of Chile:
Native America’s Indomitable State
FOCUS How did the Mapuche of Chile manage
to resist European conquest?
backstory
By the mid-1400s, some 60 million people
inhabited the Americas, about half of them
subjects of the Aztec and Inca Empires (see
Chapter 15). These empires relied on far-
flung tribute networks and drew from diverse
cultural traditions even as they spread their
own religious practices and imperial lan-
guages. Outside the Aztec and Inca realms,
smaller states and chiefdoms occupied much
of the hemisphere. Conflict between groups,
whether in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, or eastern
North America, was frequent.
The inhabitants of western Eurasia and
North Africa were slowly recovering from the
Black Death of 1347–1350 (see Chapter 14).
Weakened nobilities and rebounding popu-
lations stimulated trade, political consolida-
tion, and the adoption of new technologies for
war and transport. The long-distance trade in
luxury goods also recovered, but by the early
1400s the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the
eastern Mediterranean intensified competi-
tion and limited western European access to
overland routes such as the Silk Road.
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Malintzin (mah-LEEN-tseen) was only a girl when she was traded away around
1510 to serve a noble family in what is today the state of Tabasco, Mexico. She
herself was a noble, a native speaker of the Aztec language, Nahuatl (NAH-watt).
Malintzin’s new masters were Chontal Maya speakers, and soon she learned this
language.
Throughout Malintzin’s servitude in Tabasco, stories circulated there and in the
neighboring Yucatan peninsula of bearded strangers. One day in the year 1519,
vessels filled with such men arrived in Tabasco. The Tabascans attacked a party that
came ashore, but they were defeated. In exchange for peace, they offered the strang-
ers gold and feather work, and also several servant girls, among them Malintzin.
W hen asked through an interpreter where the gold had come from, the Tabascans
said “Mexico.”
The strangers’ interpreter was a Spanish castaway, Jerόnimo de Aguilar, who had
lived several years in the Yucatan, recently ransomed by his countrymen. Aguilar
soon discovered that Malintzin knew the language of Aztec Mexico. The strangers’
leader, Hernando Cortés, took a special interest in her for this reason, but he also
considered her the most beautiful and intelligent of the captives.
Twice given away now, Malintzin joined the foreigners in their floating homes.
Heading west, they reached an island where Cortés ordered a party ashore to make
contact with villagers and, through them, to speak with traveling Aztec representa-
tives. Only Nahuatl was spoken.
Suddenly the bilingual Malintzin was thrust into a role of global significance. She
passed along in Nahuatl the words Aguilar gave her in Chontal Mayan. Then she did
the reverse when the Aztec ambassadors replied. Aguilar made sense of the Mayan
replies for Cortés, who was already planning a march on the Aztec capital. From
here until the end of the conquest campaigns in 1521, Malintzin served as Cortés’s
key to Aztec Mexico.
In modern Mexican mythology Malintzin, or Malinche (mah-LEEN-cheh), is
regarded as a traitor, a collaborator, even a harlot. But these characterizations are
anachronistic and unfair. Malintzin was not seen as a traitor in her own day, even by
the Aztecs. In their paintings of the conquest, early Nahuatl-speaking artists often
placed Malintzin at the center, poised and confident.
But why had Europeans like Cortés suddenly arrived in Malintzin’s world? In part
it was because wealth-seeking Iberians (inhabitants of the peninsula occupied
by Spain and Portugal) had long begun charting the Atlantic. Over time they
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T h e Ri s e o f a n At l a n t i c Wo r l d 145 0 –16 0 0
developed the technologies needed to navigate open seas, exploring first the west
coast of Africa and then crossing the ocean itself. Flush with capital, Italian bankers
helped fund these enterprises.
The resulting Iberian encounter with the Americas was an accident of monumental
significance. In quest of legendary Asian riches, Christopher Columbus and his
successors landed instead in the previously isolated regions they called the New
World. It was new to them, of course, but not so to native Americans like Malintzin.
Cultural misunderstandings, political divisions among indigenous peoples, and
European firearms aided conquest and settlement, but germs made the biggest
difference.
These germs were part of what historian Alfred Crosby dubbed “the Columbian
Exchange,” the first major biological relinking of the earth since the continents had
drifted apart in prehistoric times. Although Europeans brought deadly diseases to
the Americas, they also brought animals for transport, plowing, and consumption.
Another effect of this global exchange was rapid population growth in parts of
the world where American crops such as potatoes and maize took root. European
expansion made the Atlantic a global crossroads, the center of a new pattern of ex-
change affecting the entire world.
Finally, we should not make the mistake of assuming that Europeans met no signifi-
cant resistance in the Americas. As we shall see in the Counterpoint that concludes
this chapter, one group of native Americans who successfully fought off European
conquest, in part by adopting the horse and turning it against their oppressors, were
the Mapuche of Chile.
1. What were the main
biological and environ-
mental consequences of
European expansion to
the Atlantic after 1492?
2. What roles did misun-
derstanding and chance
play in the conquests of
the Aztecs and Incas?
3. How did Eurasian
demand for silver and
sugar help bring about
the creation of a linked
Atlantic world?
OVERVIEW QUESTIONS
The major global development in this chapter: European expansion across the
Atlantic and its profound consequences for societies and cultures worldwide.
As you read, consider:
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Guns, Sails, and Compasses: Europeans
Venture Abroad
FOCUS Why and how did europeans begin to cross unknown
seas in the fifteenth century?
Nordic and southern European mariners had long been venturing out to sea, test-
ing winds and currents as they founded colonies and connected markets. Some
shared information, but as in the Mediterranean, colonizing distant lands was a
competitive process. In the fifteenth century tiny Portugal forged the world’s first
truly global maritime empire. Neighboring Spain followed, spurred on by Christo-
pher Columbus and a crusading spirit.
Motives for Exploration
Early modern Europeans sought to accumulate wealth, gain power against their
rivals, and spread Christianity. Commerce was a core motive for expansion, as
European merchants found themselves starved for gold and silver, which they
needed to purchase Asian spices, silks, gems, and other luxuries. In part because of
Europe’s relative poverty, ambitious monarchs and princes adopted violent means
to extend their dominions overseas and to increase their tax and tribute incomes.
Finally, Europe’s many Christian missionaries hoped to spread their religion
throughout the globe. These motives would shape encounters between Europeans
and native Americans.
“Gold is most excellent,” wrote Christopher Columbus in a letter to the king
and queen of Spain. “Gold constitutes treasure, and anyone who has it can do
whatever he likes in the world.”1 Columbus was a native of the Italian city-state of
Genoa, and Genoese merchants had long traded for gold in North A frica. A frican
gold lubricated Mediterranean and European trade, but population growth, com-
mercial expansion, and competition among Christian and Islamic states strained
supplies. It was thus the well-placed Portuguese, who established a North A frican
foothold in Morocco in 1415, who first sought direct access to A frican gold (see
Map 16.2, pages 576–577).
Italian merchants made some of their greatest profits on spices. Since most
spices came from the tropical margins of Asia, they rose considerably in value as
they passed through the hands of mostly Islamic middlemen in the Indian Ocean
and eastern Mediterranean. Indian pepper and Indonesian nutmeg were but a few
of the many desired condiments that Portuguese and other European merchants
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hoped to purchase more cheaply by sailing directly to the source. This entailed
either circumnavigating A frica or finding a western passage to the Pacific.
Slaves were also prized throughout the Mediterranean basin, and demand for
them grew with the expansion of commercial agriculture and the rise of wealthy
merchant families. Prices also rose as source regions near the Black Sea were cut off
after 1453 by the Ottomans. As the word slave suggests, many captives came from
the Slavic regions of eastern Europe. Others were prisoners of war. In part to meet
growing Christian European demand, sub-Saharan A fricans were transported
to North A frican ports by caravan. As with gold, southern European merchants
sought captives by sailing directly to West A frica.
Sugar, another commodity in high demand in Europe, required large invest-
ments in land, labor, and machinery. Produced mostly by enslaved workers on
eastern Atlantic islands such as Portuguese Madeira by the mid-fifteenth century,
cane sugar increasingly became common as both a sweetener and preservative. As
sugar took the place of honey in Old World cuisines, few consumers pondered its
growing connection to overseas enslavement. In time, European demand for sugar
would lead to the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade and the forced migra-
tion of millions of A fricans to the Americas.
Technologies of Exploration
As they set sail for new horizons, Europeans employed innovations in three tech-
nological spheres: gun making, shipbuilding, and navigation. First was firearms
manufacture. Gunpowder, a Chinese invention, had been known since at least
the ninth century C.E . Chinese artisans made rockets and bombs, but it was early
modern Europeans who developed gunpowder and gun making to their greatest
destructive effect.
Europeans had also borrowed Chinese papermaking and movable type technol-
ogies, and by 1500 they published treatises detailing the casting and operation of
cannon. Soon, crude handguns and later muskets transformed field warfare, first in
Europe, then worldwide. As gun and powder technologies improved, contingents
of musketeers replaced archers, crossbowmen, and other foot soldiers.
The second key technological leap was in ship construction. A lthough small,
swift-sailing vessels traversed the medieval Mediterranean, long-distance car-
riers were cumbersome and even dangerous when overloaded. The Roman-style
galley was a fighting vessel propelled by captive oarsmen with occasional help from
sails. Galleys functioned best where seas were calm, distances short, and prisoners
plentiful. Something else was needed for the rougher waters and longer voyages
common in the North Atlantic. Here, shipwrights combined more rigid North Sea
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hull designs and square sail rigs with some of the defen-
sive features of the galley. They also borrowed the gal-
ley’s triangular or lateen sails, which in turn had been
adapted from the Arabian dhows (dowz) of the Indian
Ocean.
The resulting hybrid vessels, including the caravel
used by ocean-crossing mariners such as Columbus,
proved greater than the sum of their parts. A lthough
slow and unwieldy by modern standards, these
late- fifteenth-century European ships were the world’s
most durable and maneuverable means of heav y trans-
port to date. Later modified into galleons, frigates, and
clippers, they would serve as the basic models for virtu-
ally all European carriers and warships until the advent
of steam technology in the early nineteenth century.
European navigational innovations also propelled
overseas expansion. Cosmographers believed the
world to be spherical by Columbus’s time, but finding
one’s way from port to port beyond sight of land was
still a source of worry. One aid was the magnetic com-
pass, like gunpowder and printing a fairly ancient Chi-
nese invention developed in a novel way by Europeans.
We know from travelers’ accounts that sailors in the
Indian Ocean also used compasses, but rarely in com-
bination with portolan (“port finder”) sea charts, which
contained detailed compass bearings and harbor de-
scriptions (see again the chapter-opening illustration).
Charts and compasses together changed European
navigators’ perceptions of what had formerly been
trackless seas.
Another borrowed instrument, apparently Arabic in
origin, was the astrolabe. A calculator of latitude (one’s
location north or south of the equator), it proved even
more critical for long-distance maritime travel than the
compass. Precise knowledge of latitude was essential
for early modern sailors in particular since longitude,
a more complicated east–west calculation, was hard to
determine until the mid-eighteenth century.
Portuguese Ship The Portuguese were the
first Europeans to develop ocean-going ships
for extended, return voyages. Initially they
combined rigid hull designs from the Atlantic with
maneuverable triangular sails of A rabic origin to
build caravels, but these small vessels had limited
cargo space and were vulnerable to attack. This
evocative image from a contemporary manuscript
shows Vasco da Gama’s flagship, the St. Gabriel,
on its way to India in 1497–1498 with every stitch
of canvas out. For such long trips the Portuguese
chose to sacrifice the maneuverability of the caravel
in favor of maximizing sail surface and relying on
trade winds. The resulting ships, which could carry
up to 1200 tons of cargo and were built like floating
fortresses, are known as “carracks.” Portugal’s
national symbol until recent times, the red cross
of the Order of Christ, identified such ships as
Portuguese. (The A rt A rchive/Science Academy Lisbon/
Gianni Dagli Orti.)
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Thus armed with an impressive ensemble of
borrowed and modified tools, weapons, and sail-
ing vessels, Europeans were poised to venture
out into unknown worlds. Add the recent devel-
opment of the printing press, and they were also
able to publicize their journeys in new if not alto-
gether honest ways.
Portugal Takes the Lead
W hy did tiny Portugal, one of Europe’s least
populated kingdoms, lead the way in overseas
expansion? A look at key factors helps solve this
puzzle. First, Portugal was an ancient maritime
crossroads straddling two commercial spheres,
the Mediterranean and northeast Atlantic (see
Map 16.1). Coastal shipping had grown effi-
cient while overland transport remained slow
and costly. Well before 1400, merchants from
as far away as Venice and Stockholm put in at
Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, to break up their
journeys. Commercial competition was fos-
tered by Portugal’s kings, and along with money
and goods, important shipbuilding and sailing
knowledge was exchanged. Capital, in the form
of money, ships, and goods, accumulated in the
hands of merchant clans, many of them foreign.
Other factors besides accumulating capital
pushed the Portuguese abroad. By the 1430s, fish-
ermen regularly ventured far out into the Atlantic
in pursuit of better catches. Moreover, arable land
in Portugal became scarce as populations grew,
rendering overseas colonization more attractive.
A lso, religious and strategic concerns drove Por-
tuguese nobles to capture the Islamic port city
of Ceuta (SYOO-tah), on Morocco’s Mediter-
ranean coast, in 1415. Thus, the push of limited
resources at home and the pull of opportunities
abroad stimulated Portuguese expansion.
0º
20
ºW
20
ºE
20ºS
20ºN
40ºN
Equator
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Ca
pricorn
P
rim
e
M
e
rid
ian
0
0 500 Kilometers
500 Miles
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
Mediterranean Sea
Gulf of Guinea
Cape of
Good Hope
Cape
Verde Is.
(Port.)
Azore
(Port.)
Madeira Is.
(Port.)
Sicily
Canary Is.
(Sp.)
Principe I.
(Port.)
São Tomé
(Port.)
da Gam
a, 1497–1498
To India
D
ias, 1487–1488
Lake
Chad
Senegal R.
Gambia R.
Ben
ue
R.
Co
ng
o
R.
Orange R.
BENIN
KONGO
SONGHAI
WOLOF
MOROCCO
PORTUGAL SPAIN
Genoa
Venice
Granada
Lisbon
Seville
Ceuta
Sugar Plantation
�e East Atlantic, c. 1500
WEST AFRICA
CENTRAL
AFRICA
MAP 16.1 The East Atlantic, c. 1500 The Portuguese
were the first Europeans to seek a sea route to Asia, and
they did so by mak ing their way south along the Atlantic
coast of A frica. The diseases of tropical A frica limited
Portuguese colonization to a few fortified enclaves, but
they established lucrative settlement colonies in the
eastern Atlantic island chains of the A zores, Madeiras,
and Cape Verdes, along with the wet tropical island of
São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea. By 1500 the Portuguese
had discovered that the fastest way to round the tip of
A frica was to follow the prevailing winds and currents
that swept to the west of the A frican coast before turning
southeast.
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With support from ambitious nobles such as Prince Henry “the Navigator”
(1394–1460), Portuguese and foreign investors pooled capital and invested it in new
technologies to create a network of settlement colonies and feitorias (fay-toe-R EE-
ahs), or fortified trading posts. Some invested in overseas plantations in the eastern
Atlantic and Mediterranean, others in the gold and slave trades of West Africa.
The Portuguese soon learned to navigate the West A frican coast. By 1430 they
had come upon the Azores and Madeiras, uninhabited island chains in the east-
ern Atlantic (see again Map 16.1). With incentives from the Crown and Italian
merchant investment, Portuguese settlers colonized and farmed these islands.
The Canaries, farther south, were different. These rugged volcanic islands posed
distinct political and moral challenges from their inhabitants: chiefdoms de-
scended from pre-Islamic Moroccan immigrants. “They go about naked with-
out any clothes,” wrote one Portuguese chronicler, “and have little shame at it;
for they make a mockery of clothes, saying they are but sacks in which men put
themselves.”2
W hat was to be done? Should the inhabitants of the Canary Islands be con-
quered and their lands taken over by Europeans, and if so, by what right, and by
whom? The presence of indigenous Canarians in fact spurred competition among
European adventurers, including Spanish missionaries and French and Portuguese
nobles. Spanish nobles under Isabella and Ferdinand ultimately won title to the is-
lands. The Guanches (H WA N-chehs), as the Europeans called the largest group of
native inhabitants, faced annihilation. Survivors were enslaved and made to work
on sugar plantations. In many ways, the Canarian experience foretold Iberian, and
more generally European, actions in the Americas. W hen they stood in the way of
European ambitions, the interests of indigenous peoples counted for little.
A lways in search of gold, which the eastern Atlantic islands lacked, and spurred
on by Prince Henry, the Portuguese in 1444 reached the mouth of the Senegal
R iver. Here the Portuguese traded warhorses for gold dust with representatives of
the Muslim Wolof kingdoms. They also traded, and on a few occasions raided, for
slaves. The victims of these 1440s raids and exchanges were the first A fricans to
be shipped en masse across Atlantic waters. Most ended up in the households and
workshops of Lisbon.
The Portuguese reached the kingdom of Benin in the 1480s, when they also
began settling the offshore islands of Príncipe and São Tomé. Some captives from
Benin were forced to plant and refine sugar on São Tomé. The slave-staffed sugar
plantation, which would define life in much of the American tropics from the fif-
teenth to nineteenth centuries, found a prototype here off central A frica just before
Columbus’s famous voyages.
feitoria A Portuguese
overseas trading post,
usually fortified.
N e w C r o s s r o a d s, F i r s t En c o u n t e r s 575
smi49245_ch16_566-603 575 07/13/18 01:22 PM
By 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded A frica’s Cape of Good Hope, and ten years
later, Vasco da Gama became the first European to reach India by sea. W hen Chris-
topher Columbus proposed a westward route to “the Indies,” the Portuguese king,
on the advice of his cosmographers, declined. Columbus’s calculations were in
doubt, as was the need for an alternative. Once in the Indian Ocean, the Portu-
guese used their sturdy ships and superior firepower to capture more than a dozen
ports by 1510. The emphasis on ports reflected Portuguese ambitions. They sought
to dominate the existing maritime Asian trade, not to establish a colonial land
empire. Thus, as we shall see, Portuguese and Spanish expansion would take dif-
ferent forms.
New Crossroads, First Encounters: The
European Voyages of Discovery 1492–1521
FOCUS What were the main sources of conflict between europe-
ans and native americans in the first decades after contact?
Portugal’s Spanish neighbors were equally interested in overseas expansion, but by
Columbus’s time they lagged far behind. Like Portugal, Spain had competent sail-
ors and shipbuilders, and some families were tied to the early A frican trade. W hat
would distinguish Spain’s overseas enterprises from Portugal’s, however, was a
tendency to acquire large landmasses by force, colonize them with large numbers
of settlers, and force Catholicism on all inhabitants. In part this pattern derived
from the centuries-long Christian Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula that ended
with the defeat of the Muslim caliphate of Granada in January 1492. As if fated, it
was at Ferdinand and Isabella’s military encampment at Granada that Columbus
received his license to sail across the Atlantic.
Christopher Columbus in a New World
Christopher Columbus, born in Genoa in 1451, came of age in the profit-seeking
East Atlantic world centered on Lisbon. Columbus married Felipa de Perestrelo, a
Portuguese noblewoman, but did not settle down. Instead, he sailed on Portuguese
ships bound for West A frica, England, and even Iceland. He became obsessed with
sailing west to China and Japan, which he had read about in the account of Marco
Polo. Around 1485 Columbus left for Spain, where he eventually won the sponsor-
ship of Isabella and Ferdinand. By 1492 he was off to cross the Atlantic in search of
the successors of Qubilai K han, China’s famed thirteenth-century Mongol ruler.
576 CH A P T ER 16 T h e R is e o f a n aT l a n T i c W o R l d 14 5 0 –16 0 0
smi49245_ch16_566-603 576 07/31/18 08:30 PM
0º
90
ºW
60
ºW
30
ºW150
ºW
12
0º
W
30ºS
60ºS
30ºN
60ºN
0º
Equator
Arctic Circle
Tropic of Capricorn
P
ri
m
e
M
e
ri
d
ia
n
0
0 1600 Kilometers
1600 Miles
Haiti (Hispaniola)
Tierra del Fuego
Cape Horn
Boriquen
(Puerto Rico)
Cape Verde Is.
(Port.)
Canary Is.
(Sp.)
Madeira Is.
(Port.)
Azores
(Port.)
Guanahani
(San Salvador)
Cuba
Pizarro
1531–1533
Coronado
1540–1542
Cabeza de Vaca
1528–1536
Cortés
1519–1521
Solís
1515–1516
Vesp
ucci
149
9–15
00
Columbus 1492
–1493
O rellana 15 41– 154
2
Magellan 1519–1521
Cabral 1500
da Gama 1497–1498
Dias 1487–1488
D
rake 1580
B�ZIL
WOLOF
SONGHAI
BENIN
KONGO
ANGOLA
MOROCCO
PORTUGAL SPAIN
CARIB
TAINO
TUPI
MAPUCHE
NORTH
AMERICA
A F R I C A
SOUTH
AMERICA
Gulf of
Mexico
Caribbean
Sea
Strait of
Magellan
Tre
aty o
f To
rd
e
sillas, 1
4
9
4
PACIFIC
OCEAN
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
A nd
es M
ts.
R
ock
y
M
ts.
P
a
t
a
g
o
n
i a
Cuzco Salvador
Bogotá
Ceuta
Timbuktu Gao
Paris
London
Niani
SevilleLisbon
Tenochtitlán
(Mexico City)
Cajamarca
Quito
Rio de la
Plata
MAP 16.2 European Voyages of Discovery, c. 1420–1600 In a remarkably short time, the
Portuguese and Spanish went from exploring the eastern Atlantic to circumnavigating the globe.
Christopher Columbus’s first Spanish-sponsored voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s
Portuguese-sponsored trip to India in 1497–1498 heightened the competition, and by 1519 Ferdinand
90ºE
60ºE
30ºE
150ºE
120ºE
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
International Date Line
Sumatra
Java
Borneo
Mariana Is.Philippine Is.
(Sp.)
Guam
Sebu
M
aluccas
Madagascar
del C
ano (a
�er M
agella
n’s De
ath) 1
521–1
522
Drak
e 157
7–15
80
Ca
bra
l 1
50
0
da G
ama
149
7–1
498
JAPAN
MING
EMPIRE
MUGHAL
EMPIRE
SAFAVID
EMPIRE
O�OMAN
EMPIRE
KONGO
ANGOLA
Portuguese explorers
Spanish explorers
Spanish conquistadors
English explorers
French explorers
Portuguese claims
Spanish claims
European Voyages of Discovery, c. 1420–1600
European claims, c. 1600
A F R I C A
AUSTRALIA
South
China
Sea
Arabian
Sea
Bay of
Bengal
PACIFIC
OCEAN
INDIAN
OCEAN
Goa
(Port.)
Macao
(Port.)
Nagasaki
(Port.)
Guagzhou
Melaka
Diu
(Port.)
Muscat
Hormuz
Constantinople
Calicut
Mozambique
Mombassa
Bombay
N e w C r o s s r o a d s, F i r s t En c o u n t e r s 577
smi49245_ch16_566-603 577 07/13/18 01:22 PM
0º
90
ºW
60
ºW
30
ºW150
ºW
12
0º
W
30ºS
60ºS
30ºN
60ºN
0º
Equator
Arctic Circle
Tropic of Capricorn
P
ri
m
e
M
e
ri
d
ia
n
0
0 1600 Kilometers
1600 Miles
Haiti (Hispaniola)
Tierra del Fuego
Cape Horn
Boriquen
(Puerto Rico)
Cape Verde Is.
(Port.)
Canary Is.
(Sp.)
Madeira Is.
(Port.)
Azores
(Port.)
Guanahani
(San Salvador)
Cuba
Pizarro
1531–1533
Coronado
1540–1542
Cabeza de Vaca
1528–1536
Coetés
1519–1521
Solís
1515–1516
Vesp
ucci
149
9–15
00
Columbus 1492
–1493
O rellana 15 41– 154
2
Magellan 1519–1521
Cabral 1500
da Gama 1497–1498
Dias 1487–1488
D
rake 1580
B�ZIL
WOLOF
SONGHAI
BENIN
KONGO
ANGOLA
MAROCCO
PORTUGAL SPAIN
CARIB
TAINO
TUPI
MAPUCHE
NORTH
AMERICA
A F R I C A
SOUTH
AMERICA
Gulf of
Mexico
Caribbean
Sea
Strait of
Magellan
Tre
aty o
f To
rd
e
sillas, 1
4
9
4
PACIFIC
OCEAN
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
A nd
es M
ts.
R
ock
y
M
ts.
P
a
t
a
g
o
n
i a
Cuzco Salvador
Bogotá
Ceuta
Timbuktu Gao
Paris
London
Niani
SevilleLisbon
Tenochtitlán
(Mexico City)
Cajamarca
Quito
Rio de la
Plata
90ºE
60ºE
30ºE
150ºE
120ºE
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
International Date Line
Sumatra
Java
Borneo
Mariana Is.Philippine Is.
(Sp.)
Guam
Sebu
M
aluccas
Madagascar
del C
ano (a
�er M
agella
n’s De
ath) 1
521–1
522
Drak
e 157
7–15
80
Ca
bra
l 1
50
0
da G
ama
149
…