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.