5.2.1 The Rise of Maritime Nations

Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage did not represent the first contact between European explorers and Indigenous peoples on the North American continent. Through archaeological and historical research, historians can now date that contact to nearly five hundred years before Columbus reached his first stop in the Caribbean.

In the early 1000s, Leif Erikson, a Viking explorer living in Greenland, heard from fellow explorer Bjarni Herjólfsson that another land lay only a few hundred miles to the west. In a journey during which he was blown off course, Erikson found a land to the west that he called Vinland, for the grapes that grew near its shores. He stayed there only through the winter, never making direct contact with the Indigenous peoples and returning to Greenland in the spring. His brother Thorvald was the first to make contact, which ended in violent conflict and the deaths of several Native Americans and Thorvald himself. In a third exploration, men and women of Erikson’s family encountered the Indigenous people of Vinland again but maintained peace, creating a small but steady relationship with them based on trade (Figure 5.6).

The Viking explorers referred to these Indigenous peoples as Skraelings. Scholars are not sure which Indigenous group they belonged to, but twentieth-century archaeological digs in Nova Scotia have verified much of the information found in the Icelandic sagas of Vinland. In the 1960s, explorers Helge and Anne Ingstad discovered in Newfoundland, Canada, the buried ruins of a Viking camp from around the time of Erikson’s explorations, in a place called L’Anse aux Meadows. This find definitively proved at last that the Norse had traveled to the Americas before Columbus. Over the years, it has been suggested that other people besides the Vikings also discovered the Americas before Columbus, including Irish monks, African sailors, and Chinese members of Admiral Zheng He’s treasure fleet. There is no widely accepted proof of any of these voyages, however.

The settlements in Newfoundland never became permanent, likely because Indigenous groups developed an increasing hostility toward the often-violent Vikings. By the 1400s, the frontier colonies of Greenland populated by Norse peoples had also all but disappeared. But knowledge of a land farther west survived in the Norse sagas, and it is possible that it trickled across Europe into Italy and Spain and eventually into the mind of a young Christopher Columbus.

In the meantime, with the collapse of Constantinople and the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans in 1453, many Europeans felt a sense of doom. Not only had they lost a bastion of Christian power, but Muslims now controlled their tenuous overland connections to South and East Asia. As a result, they now had to go through Muslim intermediaries to purchase valuable spices such as cinnamon, pepper, cloves, and nutmeg that grew in only a few key locations. European nations, therefore, wanted to find an all-water passage to India and the chain of sparsely populated Indonesian islands known as the Spice Islands.

In the fifteenth century, Europe experienced a timely navigational revolution as a result of adopting new non-Western maritime technologies. In the first millennium CE, Arab sailors in the Middle East had created the lateen sail, a triangular sail that allowed ships to travel against the wind. The square European sail gave ships power, but the lateen sail increased their ability to maneuver. When Europeans combined the two kinds of sail on three-masted ships, they could navigate confidently in any direction. The sternpost rudder, created in China in the thirteenth century, also allowed for steering against the currents. For directional guidance, the ancient Greek astrolabe, which used constellations as a guide and enabled mariners to find their north–south position on the earth’s surface, came to Europe after being refined in the Middle East (Figure 5.7). The magnetic compass also came to Europe in the fifteenth century, making its way from China where it was guiding ships by 1100 CE. The adoption of these inventions allowed Europeans to abandon their long-standing practice of navigating by sailing along a coastline. Now they could venture into the open ocean, beyond sight of land.

However, technological advancements and a desire for expanded trade and territory could take explorers only so far without financial backing. The commercial empire that funded European overseas exploration began in the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages, but the investment system on which it was based did not originate there. This system, called commenda, established a sort of financial patronage by which investors funded merchants to expand their trading enterprises and earned a more extensive business network in the process. Like many of the technologies that drove European ships, the commenda was first developed by Muslim merchants.

By the late fifteenth century, Italian city-states were supporting a variety of small family-owned businesses and large companies. Capital was concentrated in land and commerce rather than in industrial pursuits, but credit was widely used. Across Europe, risk-sharing business ventures and joint investment schemes were already commonplace among merchants. Spain, which Muslim rulers had conquered and settled, had connections across the Mediterranean to Africa and the Middle East, while northern and central Europe wielded a sprawling maritime exchange across the North and Baltic Seas.

Portuguese Exploration

In the late 1400s, both Portugal and Spain were emerging from centuries of rule by North African Muslim states. Portugal had become an independent country by the twelfth century (Figure 5.8). At the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was a small country with poor soil. However, it did have one advantage—a geographical location that lent itself to exploration, specifically down the African coastline and across the Atlantic. Portugal also had plenty of coves and natural harbors suited for shipping, and speedy crosswinds and currents that gave it a shipping superhighway of sorts between northern and southern Europe. Various nearby islands such as the Azores also teemed with untapped fishing potential.

In the 1340s, King Afonso IV of Portugal raised public funds to build a commercial fleet that by the fifteenth century had transformed the nation into a maritime power. In 1341, the Portuguese sailed to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic. This was only the beginning of their exploration and conquest. In 1415, John I, grandson of Afonso IV, dispatched Portuguese forces to capture the city of Ceuta in Morocco. John hoped that control of a port on the North African coast would open that continent to both conquest and trade. To further cement his control of the region, he requested papal recognition of his efforts. In April 1418, Pope Martin V granted the Portuguese king the right to all African lands taken from Muslim rulers.

Under John’s son Prince Henry, dubbed “the Navigator” by historians, Portuguese explorers claimed the Madeira Islands, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa. They also sailed down the western coast of Africa as far as today’s Sierra Leone. Eventually, Portuguese expeditions reached the southern tip of Africa, and in 1488, Bartolomeu Dias, who had participated in the Battle of Ceuta, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to reach the eastern side of the continent.

The Portuguese were driven by both religious fervor and a desire for wealth. Since the Middle Ages, they, like other Europeans, had been intrigued by stories of a lost Christian kingdom somewhere in Africa or Asia, ruled by a legendary king named Prester John (Figure 5.9). By the 1400s, they had come to believe his lands were located in Africa, and their hope of forming an alliance with him to defeat the forces of Islam helped motivate their exploration there.

The Portuguese also hoped to gain access to the wealth of Africa. As they moved southward along the continent’s coast, they established citadels on land leased from local rulers, like the fortress of Elmina, located on the coast of present-day Ghana. From there, they bartered for gold, ivory, and enslaved people. The first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in Portugal in 1441. To further its economic interests, Portugal also established relations with the African kingdoms of Benin and Kongo. Its connection to Kongo, in what is now Angola, was particularly close. Members of Kongo’s ruling family and nobility converted to Roman Catholicism and adopted Portuguese names. Kongo became an important source of enslaved laborers, and its kings readily assisted the Portuguese in taking captives from enemy tribes. The Portuguese claim to the riches of African trade was affirmed in 1455 in the Romanus Pontifex, a papal decree issued by Pope Nicholas V that granted Portugal exclusive rights to trade in Africa south of Cape Bojador, on the coast of Morocco. The interests of the Africans who controlled these lands were not considered.

Spanish Exploration

Despite the Romanus Pontifex, the Spanish monarchs Isabella I of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon were not willing to allow Portugal to take the lead in establishing maritime trade with places outside Europe. By 1492, the final Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula had been defeated, and, no longer worried about the threat posed by the Muslim presence, Isabella and Ferdinand could turn to matters beyond the peninsula. In 1486, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus approached them with a request for funds for exploration. Columbus proposed that he could reach Asia by sailing westward across the Atlantic Ocean. Eager to find an all-water route to Asia to compete with the Portuguese, Isabella and Ferdinand agreed to his request. Like the Portuguese monarchs, they were also dedicated to spreading Christianity and combating the spread of Islam. Indeed, they regarded themselves as Europe’s foremost defenders of Roman Catholicism.

On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Spain with three ships. After stopping briefly in the Canary Islands, he set off again on September 6. Five weeks later, he reached the Bahamas, which he believed were a part of Southeast Asia called the Indies. From there, he sailed to Cuba and an island Columbus named Hispaniola (meaning “little Spain”), the island now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Columbus made contact with the inhabitants of Hispaniola, whom he called “Indians.” Some welcomed the Europeans, who attempted to learn whether the inhabitants had gold, but one group, perhaps mistrusting the newcomers, engaged them in battle.

Leaving behind a handful of men to found a settlement on Hispaniola, Columbus and his crew departed for Europe, taking with them some Arawak people they had kidnapped. They arrived in Spain in 1493, with Columbus believing he had succeeded in reaching the Indies. He returned to the Americas three more times (Figure 5.10). On the third voyage, he explored the coast of Venezuela, which he was certain was part of the Asian mainland.

Soon, however, Europeans came to realize that the lands Columbus had found were new continents, which were then named the Americas after the Italian mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci, who accompanied later Spanish and Portuguese voyages to South America. This was the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas. Colonialism is a practice in which one group of people attempts to establish control over another, usually for purposes of economic exploitation. The lands in the Americas to which the Spanish, Portuguese, and other European nations laid claim in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were incorporated into the colonial empires these countries were beginning to build.

Columbus’s expeditions did not produce the riches the Spanish monarchs had hoped for. Nevertheless, Spain’s exploration of the new continents continued, led by conquistadors. Some of these explorers were nobles or had military training and had fought against the Muslims in Spain; others were landless and wished to improve their lot in life. One instrument by which the Spanish government compensated conquistadors was the encomienda, a hereditary grant that entitled the holder, called an encomendero, to the labor of a specified number of conquered people, or to a tribute of precious metals or agricultural produce. Although the Crown forbade the enslavement of Indigenous peoples, the encomienda system enabled their abuse at the hands of Spanish settlers who hoped to profit from their labor (Figure 5.11).

The great prizes the Spanish hoped to find were soon discovered in Mexico. In 1519, the conquistador Hernán Cortés landed at Potonchan on the Yucatán Peninsula and marched north to the interior of Mexico, where he encountered the powerful Aztec Empire. The wealth of the Aztecs and the sophistication of their capital city of Tenochtitlán dazzled the Spanish. At first the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II welcomed them and presented them with gifts. Cortés, however, took Moctezuma prisoner and used him as a puppet to attempt to control his people. Conflict erupted in 1520 when the Spanish killed participants in an Aztec religious ritual, and the residents of Tenochtitlán attacked the conquistadors. In the chaos Moctezuma II was killed, possibly by his own people who felt he had betrayed them, and the Spanish, facing destruction, fled Tenochtitlán for the nearby city of Tlaxcala, a rival of Tenochtitlán (Figure 5.12).

Cortés and his Tlaxcalan allies returned to Tenochtitlán in May 1521. By this time, the Aztecs were beginning to suffer from infectious diseases brought by the Spanish. Smallpox was a likely culprit, but other diseases may have been spreading as well. (For example, evidence exists that an outbreak of salmonella in 1540 also took many Aztec lives.) Badly weakened, the Aztecs could not defeat Cortés and his Indigenous allies. After a siege of three months, Tenochtitlán fell to the Spanish, who began converting the Aztecs to Christianity. Although some Aztecs converted voluntarily, many were forced. Aztec temples were destroyed, and Catholic Churches were built on top of them. The Spanish renamed Tenochtitlán Mexico City, and it became the capital of the colony of New Spain. The colony eventually provided Spanish monarchs with the wealth they craved in the form of rich silver deposits.

Cortés’s exploits in Mexico were soon matched by those of another Spanish adventurer, Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Inca Empire in South America. In January 1530, Pizarro sailed from the Canary Islands on an expedition to conquer Peru, which he had heard was rich in precious metals. His conquest had been authorized in 1529 by Queen Isabella of Portugal, the wife of Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who was also king of Spain. The Inca ruler had recently died of smallpox, and rival heirs to the throne were at war. Pizarro took advantage of the chaos and the fact that the Inca forces had been depleted by years of fighting. In 1532, he captured Atahualpa, one of the parties in the civil war; the following year, the Spanish executed him, despite his promises to fill an entire room with gold and two with silver if Pizarro set him free. Pizarro then seized control of Cuzco, the Inca capital. Peru, which like Mexico had extensive silver deposits, was reduced to a Spanish colony.

The Inca did not passively accept Spanish rule. Under the leader Manco Inca, about 100,000 Incas lay siege to Cuzco in 1536. They lacked the gunpowder weapons of the Spanish, however, and could not drive the Europeans out. The Spanish divided the Inca Empire into four regions, each with a Spanish governor, and Pizarro was given the territory that corresponds to the modern country of Peru.

The Treaty of Tordesillas

Word of Columbus’s discoveries on behalf of the Spanish alarmed and angered the Portuguese. Under the terms of the 1479 Treaty of Alcáçovas, Portugal had renounced any claim to the Spanish throne and granted Spain control of the Canary Islands. In exchange, Portugal received the coast of Guinea in Africa, which was rich in gold, and all islands in the Atlantic south of the Canaries. This included not only those territories Portugal already controlled (Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde) but also any that might be discovered in the future. In 1481, the pope also issued a decree that granted Portugal territories in the Atlantic.

Spain’s claim to the Caribbean islands Columbus had explored thus seemed to violate both the treaty and the pope’s decree. The Portuguese king announced his intention to send an armed fleet to take control of them. Unable to challenge Portugal’s dominance at sea, Isabella and Ferdinand asked Pope Alexander VI to intercede. The pope, who was Spanish, decreed that all lands belonged to Spain that fell west of a line drawn one hundred leagues west of any of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.

Portugal accordingly began negotiations with Spain, which consented to move the line dividing Spanish from Portuguese possessions farther to the west. The new line cut across the eastern bulge of the South American continent (now part of Brazil) but left the rest of the Americas to Spain. This agreement, the Treaty of Tordesillas, was signed in 1494 and endorsed in 1506 by a decree of Pope Julius II (Figure 5.13). Thus, when the explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on the eastern coast of South America in 1500, he was able to claim it for Portugal.

By the time Cabral made landfall in Brazil in 1500, Portuguese sailors had already rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of southern Africa and sailed up that continent’s eastern coast and on to India. Hoping to lay claim to the riches of Asia, Spain then argued that the line dividing the Atlantic continued to the other side of the globe, bisecting the Pacific and giving the Spanish the right to territories in Asia as well. Portugal objected and turned to the Vatican again for help. In 1514, Pope Leo X declared that the line described in the Treaty of Tordesillas allocated territories in the Atlantic but not the Pacific. Spain had no claim to the lands of Asia.

Spain renewed its argument in 1522 when an expeditionary fleet that had been captained by Ferdinand Magellan returned to Europe after circumnavigating the globe. Magellan had been in the employ of Spain when he found a means of reaching Asia by sailing around the southern tip of South America. The expedition had reached the Maluku Islands (or the Moluccas, in modern Indonesia), the source of valuable spices, and Spain wished to claim this territory, which Portugal had already explored in 1512. To settle their claims to the islands, in 1529 Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Zaragoza, dividing the Pacific Ocean between them. The treaty awarded the Maluku Islands to Portugal with the understanding that should Spain wish to claim them it could, but it would have to compensate Portugal for its loss. Spain did not have the money to do so, and this fact, along with a convenient marriage of the Spanish and Portuguese kings to one another’s sisters, led Spain to abandon its claim to the Malukus.

In the treaties of Zaragoza and Tordesillas, two of the world’s nations divided the globe between them, never questioning their right to do so and turning repeatedly to the pope to give God’s sanction to their claims. Unsurprisingly, however, the world’s other nations ignored both treaties. England and the Netherlands, which had become Protestant nations during the Reformation, felt no need to abide by papal decrees, nor did France, though it remained Roman Catholic. As the French king Francis I explained, “The sun shines for me as it does for others.” As the fortunes of Spain and Portugal declined in the seventeenth century, England, France, and the Netherlands claimed territory in Asia and the Americas and established their own trading posts on the African coast. Spain and Portugal also failed to acknowledge the rights of the Indigenous peoples in the lands they claimed. Indeed, many Europeans believed that by conquering the inhabitants of the Americas and giving them no choice but to convert to Christianity, they were saving their souls.