Exploring the New World

European Exploration and Colonization

• Ottomans' capture of Constantinople in 1453 forced European kingdoms and empires to find new paths to Afroeurasian trading routes.
• Prince Henry of Portugal, known as The Navigator, funded and encouraged exploration, navigation study, and development of new tools.
• Portuguese explored the southern shore of the Mediterranean and ventured southward along the Atlantic coast of Africa.
• Portuguese traders kidnapped local people to sell into European slave markets and built stone fortresses that doubled as trading stations.
• European men partnered with African women who were traders and provided connections to trade.
• The Portuguese encountered a highly developed Indian Ocean commerce with trading posts run by sophisticated Muslim merchants and fought them to menace them.
• The Spanish empire was based on colonies, controlling the land and the people who lived there, and extracting wealth from them.
• Columbus, a student of geography and maps, found signs of gold but not great quantities of it, but he found people to enslave.
• The Spanish could now stock their new world settlements with Chinese and Indian luxuries by crossing the Pacific.
• Hernan Cortés came in contact with indigenous people, starting battles and forging alliances, and eventually reached the center of the Aztec empire at Tenochtitlan.
• Francisco Pizarro saw the superb textiles and silver and gold objects crafted by the Incas and relied on help from rival indigenous communities to take control.
• Violence, enslavement, and European diseases led to the death of perhaps as much as ninety percent of the indigenous American population.

Test your knowledge on the European Exploration and Colonization period with this quiz. From Prince Henry of Portugal's navigation study to Columbus' search for gold and the Spanish empire's colonization, this quiz covers the key events that shaped the era. Learn about the Portuguese's trading stations and slave markets in Africa, their encounters with sophisticated Muslim merchants, and the Spanish's conquest of the Aztecs and Incas. Discover the impact of violence, enslavement, and European diseases on the indigenous American population.