The Age of
Exploration
A century and a half during which European sails — and almost no one else's at this scale — joined the hemispheres of the world.
1450 — 1650 · Lisbon · Seville · Nanjing · Mexico-Tenochtitlan · Goa · Manila
Contents
- Cover & argument
- Contents
- Why the fifteenth century
- Henry the Navigator & Portugal
- Bartolomeu Dias & the Cape
- Vasco da Gama to Calicut
- Christopher Columbus, four voyages
- Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494
- Cortés & the fall of Tenochtitlan
- Pizarro & the Inca
- Magellan and the world's first circumnavigation
- Zheng He's seven voyages
- The Columbian Exchange
- The Atlantic slave trade
- Drake, Hudson, Frobisher
- Legacy & reckoning
- Read & watch
Why the Fifteenth Century
The Atlantic-facing European kingdoms had long been the periphery of the great Eurasian trade economy. Spices, silks, porcelain, and sugar passed through Constantinople and Cairo; Italian middlemen — Venetian and Genoese — took the profits; and the Iberian crowns paid in silver to remain peripheral. After the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453, the eastern caravan routes became more expensive and less reliable. The choice was to pay more, or to sail.
Other preconditions were technological. The lateen-rigged caravel, evolved from Arab and Mediterranean designs, could sail close to the wind and so make headway in the variable Atlantic. The astrolabe and quadrant — borrowed from Arab navigation — let a captain calculate latitude. The compass, originally Chinese, had been in Mediterranean use for two centuries. Portolan charts, built up coast by coast since the late thirteenth century, mapped what was already known.
Then there was money. The royal patrons of the early voyages — João II of Portugal, Isabella and Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon — could fund expeditions partly because the recently consolidated crowns had taxable populations and an interest in projecting power outward rather than inward. The Reconquista of Iberia ended at Granada in January 1492; eight months later, Columbus sailed.
Finally, there was ideology. The bull Romanus Pontifex (1455) had granted Portugal the right to "reduce to perpetual servitude" any Saracens, pagans, or other non-Christians along the African coast. Crusade, evangelism, and gold all pointed in the same direction. The boats followed.
Henry the Navigator
Prince Henry of Portugal — a third son who never went to sea — funded a generation of voyages from his court at Sagres on the southwest coast of the Algarve. His captains crept down the African coast, passing Cape Bojador in 1434 (which superstition had held to be the limit of the navigable world), reaching the Senegal River by 1444, and the Gulf of Guinea by 1471. Each voyage was a new precedent for the next.
The economic logic was straightforward: gold from West African mines, ivory, and — from very early on — captive Africans, sold as slaves into Iberian and Mediterranean markets. The Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Azores, and São Tomé were colonised and turned into sugar plantations using forced labour. The model — sugar plus slaves plus a captive monoculture — was the prototype that the Caribbean would adopt a century later.
Dias rounds the Cape
In December 1487 Bartolomeu Dias sailed from Lisbon with two caravels and a supply ship.
A storm in January 1488 blew Dias's expedition south of latitudes any European had recorded. When the weather cleared, the African coast lay to the north — they had rounded the southern tip of the continent without sighting it. Dias turned eastward, then northward, confirming an open sea route. He named the southern promontory the Cape of Storms; on his return King João renamed it the Cape of Good Hope, because the news it brought was that the Indian Ocean could be reached by sea.
Portugal sat on this discovery for nearly a decade. João II died in 1495; his successor Manuel I commissioned a follow-up under Vasco da Gama, who left Lisbon in July 1497 with four ships, swung wide into the South Atlantic on a vast counterclockwise arc to catch the trade winds, and rounded the Cape on 22 November. Da Gama reached Calicut on the Malabar coast in May 1498. The samudri raja received him politely, found the gifts inadequate, and the trading was thin. But the route was there. Within fifteen years Portuguese cannons commanded Hormuz, Goa, and Malacca, and the Indian Ocean's old, peaceable trading order was changed forever.
Vasco da Gama
"We come in search of Christians and spices."— a Portuguese sailor, asked at Calicut why they had come (Roteiro of Vasco da Gama)
The first quote and the second priorities are essentially the whole policy. Pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger were worth, in Lisbon, between five and a thousand times what they cost in Asia. Da Gama lost two of his four ships and more than half his crew on the round trip, and still made his investors a profit of 6,000 percent.
His second voyage, in 1502, was punitive: Portuguese cannons sank an unarmed Mecca pilgrim ship with several hundred passengers including women and children, and bombarded Calicut. The pattern that the Estado da Índia would maintain for a century — armed convoys, fortresses at chokepoints, demand for tribute, no compunction about violence — was set on his second visit.
Columbus
Cristoforo Colombo of Genoa was a self-taught Atlantic mariner with a wrong theory of the earth's circumference. He believed Asia could be reached by sailing west from Europe, in less than 4,000 nautical miles. The Portuguese, who had better data, refused to fund him. The Catholic monarchs, having just taken Granada and looking for a counter-Portugal advantage, did. He sailed from Palos on 3 August 1492 with three ships — the Santa María, the Niña, the Pinta — and 90 men.
On 12 October 1492 a lookout on the Pinta sighted land in what is now the Bahamas. Columbus called the people he met "Indians" because he believed he was off the coast of India. He never lost the belief; even after three more voyages — to the Caribbean, to the South American mainland, and along the coast of Central America — he died in Valladolid in 1506 still convinced he had found Asia. The continents he had reached were named after another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, whose 1502 letters argued (correctly) that this was a new land.
The first encounter was, briefly, peaceful. Columbus founded a settlement on Hispaniola; on his second voyage in 1493 he returned with seventeen ships and 1,200 settlers, and the colonisation of the Americas began in earnest. Within fifty years the Taíno population of Hispaniola — perhaps 250,000 to several million in 1492 — was effectively extinct, killed by smallpox, forced labour in the mines, and the breakdown of indigenous food production. The Caribbean would be repopulated, in stages, by African slaves.
A Line Down the Atlantic
The papal bull Inter Caetera (May 1493) had granted Spain rights to all lands more than 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. Portugal protested. The Treaty of Tordesillas (June 1494) shifted the line to 370 leagues west, which — as it turned out, though no one knew this in 1494 — gave Portugal the as-yet-undiscovered eastern bulge of South America. When Pedro Álvares Cabral made landfall there in 1500 on his way to India, he claimed it for Portugal, and Brazil entered the western imagination as an extension of the Portuguese empire. The treaty also assigned the Pacific basin to Spain, which is why the Philippines were Spanish for three and a half centuries.
Cortés
Hernán Cortés landed at what would become Veracruz in April 1519 with about 500 men, sixteen horses, and a few small cannons. The Mexica (Aztec) empire that he confronted, ruled from Tenochtitlan by Moctezuma II, controlled some five million people across central Mexico. Cortés's advantages were small but decisive: gunpowder, steel armour and swords, horses, and — most importantly — the resentment of subject peoples whom the Mexica had conquered or taxed. The Tlaxcalan alliance gave Cortés tens of thousands of additional warriors.
Tenochtitlan, the largest city in the Americas with perhaps 200,000 inhabitants — twice the size of contemporary Paris — was built on an island in Lake Texcoco, connected to the mainland by causeways and engineering of staggering sophistication. The Spaniards entered as guests in November 1519. Within months they had taken Moctezuma hostage. After a confused massacre and uprising in 1520 (the Noche Triste), Cortés returned with reinforcements and besieged the city; it fell on 13 August 1521. Smallpox, which had reached the city in 1520, did much of the killing.
Pizarro
Francisco Pizarro, a distant cousin of Cortés, attempted the conquest of the Inca with even smaller numbers — about 168 men — and almost identical methods. He arrived in November 1532 in the middle of an Inca civil war between the brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar. Pizarro met Atahualpa at Cajamarca on 16 November, attacked his unarmed entourage, captured the emperor, took an enormous gold and silver ransom, and then executed him anyway in July 1533. The capital, Cuzco, fell that November.
The Spanish New World was, within a single generation of Columbus, the largest empire on earth. Its silver mines — Potosí in Upper Peru, opened in 1545, was for centuries the world's largest source of silver — funded Spain, paid for European wars, and arrived in such quantities at Chinese ports via the Manila galleons that the Ming and Qing economies were measurably reshaped by them. The Spanish silver real became, briefly, a global reserve currency.
Magellan & the First Circumnavigation
Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese captain in Spanish service, left Seville in September 1519 with five ships and 270 men to find a westward route to the Spice Islands. He found the strait that bears his name in October 1520 — a 600 km labyrinth at the southern tip of South America — and crossed the Pacific in 99 days, three of his men dying of scurvy on the way. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines on 27 April 1521, intervening in a local conflict on the island of Mactan. His Basque navigator, Juan Sebastián Elcano, took command of the surviving ship the Victoria and brought 18 men back to Seville on 6 September 1522, the first humans to sail around the world.
The voyage proved the size of the Pacific (vastly larger than anyone had estimated), proved the indivisible roundness of the earth in a practical sense, and established that the Spice Islands lay on the Spanish side of an extended Tordesillas line — though Spain ultimately sold its claim to Portugal in 1529 because it could not defend it.
Zheng He's Treasure Fleets
Eighty years before Columbus, the Yongle Emperor of Ming China dispatched a fleet under the eunuch admiral Zheng He, a Muslim from Yunnan, on the first of seven voyages that ranged from the South China Sea to the East African coast. The flagship of these fleets was, by every reasonable estimate, larger than any ship built in Europe before the nineteenth century — perhaps 120 metres in length, with up to nine masts. The fleets carried tens of thousands of men. They reached Java, Sumatra, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden, Mogadishu, and Malindi in present-day Kenya.
The voyages were not, in the European sense, expeditions of conquest or commerce; they were demonstrations of imperial reach and tributary diplomacy. After the seventh voyage in 1433 the new Xuande Emperor, advised by Confucian officials who distrusted the cost and the eunuchs who organised them, ended them. The shipyards were dismantled. China withdrew from the western Indian Ocean, and the Portuguese, when they arrived in 1498, found the door propped open. What world history might have looked like with a different Ming court decision is one of the genuinely consequential counterfactuals.
Old World ↔ New World
| To the Americas | To Eurasia & Africa |
|---|---|
| Wheat, barley, rice | Maize (corn) |
| Sugarcane (Caribbean revolution) | Potato (Irish, Russian, German staple) |
| Coffee (later) | Tomato (Italian cuisine impossible without) |
| Bananas, citrus, grapes, olives | Cassava, peanut, sweet potato |
| Horses, cattle, pigs, sheep | Turkey, llama (limited spread) |
| Honey bee | Tobacco |
| Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus | Syphilis (probably) |
| Iron tools, gunpowder, steel | Silver, gold (Potosí silver alone reshaped Eurasian economies) |
The Columbian Exchange — Alfred Crosby's 1972 term — is the deepest material consequence of the Age of Exploration. Diseases for which the Americas had no immunological history killed perhaps 80 to 90 percent of the indigenous population over the next century: a demographic catastrophe with no precedent in recorded history.
The Atlantic Slave Trade
The European demand for Caribbean and Brazilian sugar, and later cotton and tobacco, met an existing West African slave-trading apparatus and a coast politically organised so that a small number of European factors could bargain with kingdoms — Asante, Dahomey, Kongo, Oyo — that already practiced slavery. What had been a regional institution became, between roughly 1500 and 1867, the largest forced migration in human history. The most reliable databases now place the figure at about 12.5 million Africans embarked, of whom about 10.7 million survived the Atlantic crossing.
Conditions on the Middle Passage are documented in court records, ship logs, and the testimonies of survivors such as Olaudah Equiano. Mortality on the crossing averaged 15 to 20 percent. Brazil received the largest single share of enslaved Africans (about 4.9 million); the British and French Caribbean nearly as many; the British North American colonies (later the United States) received about 388,000, but their natural increase produced the largest slave population of any New World society by 1860.
The trade was integral to the Age of Exploration in a way that polite earlier histories preferred to deny. Without it, the sugar plantations of São Tomé, Madeira, Hispaniola, Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, Barbados, and Pernambuco — the principal source of profits from the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — would not have functioned. Reckoning honestly with the period requires holding the cartography and the chains together.
Drake · Hudson · Frobisher
England and the Netherlands entered the Atlantic system a century late, partly through legalised piracy. Francis Drake, employed by Elizabeth I, completed the second circumnavigation (1577–80) in the Golden Hind, raiding Spanish shipping along the way and returning with cargo worth roughly the entire annual royal income. The Spanish Armada (1588) was, in part, Philip II's attempt to silence such activity. After the Armada's defeat, the Dutch and English East India Companies (founded 1602 and 1600) industrialised what had been freelance plunder.
The northern voyages — Frobisher (1576) and Hudson (1609, 1610) seeking the Northwest Passage, the Russian probes into Siberia, the Dutch reaching Australia under Tasman in 1642 — kept extending the European map. By the mid-seventeenth century only Antarctica, the Pacific interior of the great oceans, and the Arctic ice north of 70° were genuinely unknown to the Europeans. The Age of Exploration grades, almost imperceptibly, into the Age of Empire.
After the Maps Were Drawn
The Age of Exploration, taken honestly, is the period in which the world became a single connected economic and biological system, dominated for the first three centuries of that system's existence by Atlantic European powers. Its consequences are not finished. The languages of the Americas (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French) are inherited from it; the populations that speak them are descended in large part from the people brought as enslaved labourers or as colonists. The wealth that funded the European industrial revolutions came partly from the colonial returns. The microbial homogenisation of the Old and New Worlds is irreversible.
The same period also produced the first sustained European critiques of empire — Bartolomé de las Casas writing on behalf of the Indians; Montaigne's "On Cannibals" using New World testimony to satirise European morals. The vocabulary in which the modern world argues about race, colonialism, and trade is largely formed in the wake of the caravels.
Where to go
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders · Charles Mann, 1491 & 1493 · Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade · Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange · Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World (Magellan).
↑ A useful overview. Watch on YouTube.