4.1: Prelude to European Exploration and Conquest

In the 15th century, the long expansion of European power began. Why was it Europe that took over the Americas rather than Persia, the Ottoman Empire, India, or China?

Poverty was one issue. Whereas the intra-Asian trade routes linking China, Korea, Japan, the islands of the western Pacific, Southeast Asia, and India ensured that Asian states enjoyed access to wealth and luxury goods, Europeans had to rely on the hugely expensive long-distance trade between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to access goods that they could not produce themselves.

The demand for trade was limitless in European society. Stretching all the way back to Roman times, luxury goods from south and east Asia were sought-after commodities. Spices were worth far more than their weight in gold, and Chinese goods like porcelain and silk were also highly prized. Enterprising merchants positioned themselves somewhere along the Indian Ocean trade routes or the famous Silk Road between Europe and China. However, the distances covered were so vast that it was very difficult and perilous to take part in mercantile ventures. Thus, Isabella of Spain was not alone in funding explorers who sought to reach the east via easier routes when she hired Columbus.

When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman in 1453, the traditional trade routes to Asia were disrupted, particularly as the Turks started taking over the Venetian maritime empire. Likewise, Europeans had long traded with Muslim merchants in North Africa for gold, ivory, and spices, and they longed to cut out the middlemen and get to the sources farther south. Simply put, the Ottomans directly controlled a major link in the East- est trade axis, deriving profits that Europeans desired for their own.

In addition, the crusading tradition, especially that inspired by the Reconquest of Spain and Portugal, served as an inspiration for European explorers. The Reconquest was completed in 1492, the same year that Columbus sailed in search of a western route to Asia. Indeed, many of the Spanish conquistadors (conquerors) who invaded South and Central America had acquired military experience from what they considered to be the holy wars against the Muslim inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula. That crusading ideology was easily adapted for the purposes of conquering vast American territories and forcibly converting the indigenous American inhabitants to Christianity.

Europeans were able to access wealth due to technological advances. Until about 1400, Europeans had no ships capable of sailing across an entire ocean. (The Viking longboats of the Middle Ages were an exception, but they were no longer in use by the Renaissance era.) Further, European understanding of geography and navigation was extremely primitive. However, from about 1420 on, maritime technology improved dramatically and it became feasible to launch voyages that could cross the entire Atlantic Ocean with a reasonable degree of certainty that they would succeed.

The key was the invention of the caravel, a new kind of ship that was able to sail both with the wind and against lateral winds. As long as the wind was not blowing in the opposite direction one wanted to travel in, it was possible to keep moving in the right direction. Reasonably effective compasses and a device to measure latitude called the astrolabe came into European hands from the Middle East around 1400.

Figure 6.0.1: Nineteenth-century drawing of a Portuguese caravel based on the designs used during the early Portuguese expeditions of the fifteenth century.

Despite those advances, the European grasp of geography remained very shaky. As of 1400, Europeans had terribly imprecise knowledge about the rest of the world. They did not know anything about the Americas, and tended to confuse “India,” “Cathay,” and “Japan” with “Asia” itself. They had a vague notion that all of Asia was ruled by Khans, in part because of the Venetian merchant Marco Polo’s famous account of his travels from the 13th century. Still yet, many people believed that monsters occupied the interiors of Africa and Asia. Besides Polo, no Europeans had ever made the trek to the far east and returned to tell the tale.