How European sailors — motivated by spice, gold, and religion — connected the world's continents for the first time.
Stop 01 · c. 1400
A World Still Unconnected
In 1400 the Americas and Australia were unknown to Europeans, and most of Africa's coast south of the Sahara was uncharted. Pepper, cinnamon and other Asian spices, prized for cooking, medicine and perfume, reached Europe through a long chain of middlemen. Muslim merchants shipped them from Indian ports such as Calicut to Hormuz or Jeddah; overland routes carried them through the lands of Egypt's Mamluks to the Mediterranean; and Venice and Genoa sold them on across Europe. Every link raised the price, and Europeans wanted a sea route of their own. The leading naval power was Ming China: between 1405 and 1433 Admiral Zheng He led seven great fleets as far as Calicut, Hormuz and East Africa.
Painting of the Yongle Emperor, dated to the Ming dynasty (National Palace Museum)Unknown author · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
On the map
Spices by sea and land, Calicut to Venice · Voyage
In 1400 the Americas and Australia were unknown to Europeans, and most of Africa's coast south of the Sahara was uncharted. Pepper, cinnamon and other Asian spices, prized for cooking, medicine and perfume, reached Europe through a long chain of middlemen. Muslim merchants shipped them from Indian ports such as Calicut to Hormuz or Jeddah; overland routes carried them through the lands of Egypt's Mamluks to the Mediterranean; and Venice and Genoa sold them on across Europe. Every link raised the price, and Europeans wanted a sea route of their own. The leading naval power was Ming China: between 1405 and 1433 Admiral Zheng He led seven great fleets as far as Calicut, Hormuz and East Africa.
Portugal's push south began with war. In August 1415 a Portuguese fleet seized Ceuta, a Muslim port facing Gibraltar, and Prince Henry, a younger son of King John I, learned from prisoners there of caravans carrying West African gold across the Sahara. As governor of the wealthy Order of Christ he sponsored voyages from Lagos, mostly in small, nimble caravels. His captains settled Madeira from 1420 and reached the Azores. Cape Bojador, long the limit of European knowledge, defeated them for more than a decade until Gil Eanes sailed past it in 1434. Raiding followed: in 1444 a fleet returned to Lagos with 235 enslaved Africans. By Henry's death in 1460, his captains had reached the Cape Verde Islands.
Bartolomeu Dias left Lisbon in 1487 with three ships; whether by storm or design he swung far out to sea, and in February 1488 landed at Mossel Bay, beyond Africa's southern tip. His officers insisted on turning back; homeward bound, he sighted the cape later named Good Hope. Vasco da Gama followed in July 1497 with four ships and about 170 men. At Malindi he hired a Gujarati pilot who knew the monsoon winds, and on 20 May 1498 he reached Calicut. Only about 55 men came home, but Portugal now had its own sea route to the spice markets, bypassing the Middle Eastern and Venetian middlemen. By 1511 it held Goa and Malacca.
Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator, believed Asia lay only a short sail west. Portugal turned him down, but Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain backed him. He left Palos on 3 August 1492 with the Santa María, Pinta and Niña, and on 12 October landed on an island its Lucayan people called Guanahani, probably today's San Salvador in the Bahamas. Believing he was in Asia, he sailed on to Cuba and Hispaniola, where the Santa María was wrecked, and took Taíno captives back to Spain. He had found lands unknown to Europeans, apart from a short-lived Norse camp in Newfoundland 500 years earlier. Within decades, the Aztec and Inca empires would be conquered and their silver would flow to Spain.
The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on 7 June 1494, divided the world between Spain and Portugal along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. The eastern bulge of South America, later Brazil, fell on Portugal's side: Pedro Álvares Cabral, bound for India, landed there in April 1500. The rest of the Americas fell to Spain. Seeking the Spice Islands, Ferdinand Magellan, sailing for Spain in 1519, found a strait at South America's tip, crossed the Pacific in 98 days and was killed at Mactan in the Philippines; only 18 men returned to Spain aboard the Victoria in 1522. In 1529 a second treaty divided Asia. No one asked the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa or Asia.
Spanish conquest of the mainland came fast. In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed on the Gulf coast of Mexico with about 630 men and won allies among peoples who resented Aztec rule, above all the Tlaxcalans. He entered Tenochtitlan in November 1519. Driven out the next year, he returned with tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, and after a siege worsened by famine and smallpox the city fell on 13 August 1521. In Peru, Francisco Pizarro found the Inca Empire exhausted by a civil war between the brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa. With 168 soldiers he seized Atahualpa at Cajamarca in November 1532, collected a huge ransom in gold and silver, then had him executed in July 1533.
BattlesTenochtitlan falls, 13 August 1521 · Cajamarca: Atahualpa seized, 16 November 1532
Silver tied the new empires together. In 1545 an immense deposit was found in the Cerro Rico above Potosí, in today's Bolivia, and it became Spain's main source of silver. Indigenous men bore the cost: under the mita labour draft some 13,000 were conscripted each year, and many died from falls, cold and mercury poisoning. In 1565 the friar and navigator Andrés de Urdaneta found a way back east across the Pacific, and in 1571 the Spanish established Manila. For 250 years galleons carried American silver from Acapulco to Manila, where merchants from China's Fujian coast traded silk, porcelain and spices for it. Economic shocks from that silver are counted among the causes of the Ming dynasty's fall.
By 1600 the Columbian exchange, the transfer of crops, animals, diseases and people between the hemispheres, was reshaping every inhabited continent. Maize, potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, tobacco and chilli peppers spread from the Americas, while wheat, rice, sugar cane, horses and other livestock crossed the other way; in time potatoes and maize would transform European diets. Gravest were Old World diseases such as smallpox and measles: over the following century and more the Indigenous population of the Americas fell by an estimated 80 to 95 per cent, and Caribbean peoples were nearly wiped out. From 1525 enslaved Africans were shipped directly across the Atlantic. About 12.75 million were embarked before the trade ended; up to 2 million died at sea.