1. The Age of Exploration
On the Brink of a New World

3. The Motives
 Economic Motives
– Desire to find new areas for trade
– Break existing monopolies

4. The Motives
 Religious Zeal
– Spain and Portugal heavily
defined by religion, want to
spread Christianity
– “With the divine power of the
true God, they would work
miracles”

5. The Motives
 Fantastic Lands
– The Travels of John Mandeville
– Marco Polo’s Travels
– The search for Prester John

6. The Means
 Maps
– Portolani = more useful than T in O Map,
fairly accurate
– The further from the known world, the
more fantastic maps got
– Ptolemy grossly underestimated the size
of the Earth

8. The Means
 Ships and Sailing
– Importation of technology from China like
the axial rudder
– Lateen Sail
– Astrolabe and Sextant

10. Prince Henry the Navigator
 1419 founds school
for Navigators in
Portugal
 Funds Portuguese
expeditions down
the African Coast

13. Portuguese Maritime
Empire
 1419: Prince Henry founds school of
navigation
 1441: reach thee Senegal River just
north of Cape Verde
 1471: discover gold in western Africa
(Gold Coast)
 1488: Bartholomew Dias rounds Cape
of Good Hope

14. Portuguese Maritime
Empire
 1498: Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut
and announces that he has come to
find Christians and spices
 1509: Portuguese armada defeats joint
Turkish and Indian fleet
 1510: establish land base in Bombay

18. The Search for Spice
 1511: Albuquerque gains control of
Malacca, ending Arab dominance of
spice trade and creating a good
launching point for expeditions to
China and Japan
 The battle was short and bloody.

19. “To enhance the terror of his
name he always separated Arabs
from the other inhabitants of the
city, and cut off the right hand of
every man, and the noses and
ears of every woman.”

21. Voyages to the New
World
 Columbus

22. Voyages of the New
World
 New Voyages
– John Cabot explores the coast of New
England for Henry VII of England
– South America accidentally discovered by
Pedro Cabral of Portugal in 1500
– Amerigo Vespucci wrote a series of letters
on the geography of the new world 
Americas

24. Food for Thought…
 What makes the New World a new
world?
 How does that show the bias of
European explorers?

25. Spain builds an Empire
 Cortez’s conquest of the Aztec and
Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca lead to
a large land based empire in central
and south America
 By the late 1600s, only 5% of Latin
America’s native population was still
alive

27. Administering the
Spanish Empire
 Queen Isabella declared natives to be
subjects of Spain
 Established encomienda system:
Conquering Spaniards gain the right to
collect tribute and use natives as slave
laborers

28. Administering the
Spanish Empire
 Bartolome de Las
Casa champions
the rights of
natives
 Spanish gov’t
abolishes
encomienda
system

29. Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts
there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved
like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that
had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have
behaved in no other way during the past forty years,
down to the present time, for they are still acting like
ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing,
and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the
strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never
seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this
Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a
population that I estimated to be more than three
million), has now a population of barely two hundred
persons.
~Bartolomeo de Las Casas

30. Administering the
Spanish Empire
 Spain developed the Viceroy system to
oversee the large empire
 Viceroy’s were the king’s
representatives in the new world
 Audiencias were advisory groups that
often acted as judicial bodies

31. The Pope and the New
World
 Papal Bull: Inter Caetera divides the
world in half
 Treaty of Tordesillas moves line of
demarcation to give Portugal access to
Brazil
 Spain exercised extensive control over
the new world

33. The Pope and the New
World
 Missionaries like the Dominicans and
Jesuits worked to Christianize the
native populations
 Conquistadors were often under strict
orders to try to convert before fighting
 Mass conversion of Indians led to
strong establishment of Catholicism in
the New World

34. New Rivals in the World
Arena
 By the 1600s, northern European
nations like Britain, France, and the
Netherlands were engaged in overseas
exploration
 Hope to remove Portuguese and
Spanish naval and trade dominance
 Hope to wind north east and north
west passages to the Indies

35. New Rivals in the World
Arena
 Britain establishes colonies along
eastern seaboard of North America
 French establish trading posts along
the Mississippi and Great Lakes
 Dutch focus most colonial efforts on
Asia
 None of these countries is focused on
creating a large land empire… yet.

36. Britain and the
Netherlands
 Trade and Exploration controlled by
privately operated joint-stock
companies
 How does the contract signed by
Henry Hudson differ from earlier
contracts?

38. Effects of Exploration and
Colonization
 The Atlantic Slave Trade
 European dominance over Indian
Ocean trade
 British and French inroads into India

39. The West in Southeast
Asia
 Portugal establishes a large empire,
but is to small to maintain it
 Combined Christian forces defeat
Ottoman Empire in Battle of Lepanto,
win dominance over Indian Ocean
trade

40.  “My country, oh my country. Too
heavy is the task that has been laid on
you shoulders. Day after day I watch
ships leaving your shores filled always
with the bravest men. And too many
do not return… Who then is left to till
the fields, to harvest the grapes, to
keep the enemy on our frontier at
bay?”

41. The West in Southeast
Asia
 Spain enters the region when Magellan
lands in the Philippines
 Becomes a major base for Spanish
trade in the region

42. The West in Southeast
Asia
 The Dutch establish a fort in Java in
1619
 Dutch East India Co. begins building
pepper plantations
 By the late 1700s, the Dutch
controlled most of Indonesia

43. The West in India
 Mughal empire in a state of decline
 1601 Queen Elizabeth charters the
British East India Co.
 By 1650 British control major port in
Calcutta

45. The West in India
 Dutch and French also try to establish
ports
 Sir Robert Clive wins victories making
Britain dominant power in India

46. China
 In 1433, The Ming Dynasty recalls the
Treasure Fleet of Zheng He and turns
inward
 1514 Portuguese land on Chinese
coast, begin trading
 China controls favorable balance of
trade exporting far more than they
import

48. China
 China’s unwillingness to deal with
western “barbarians” ultimately winds
up hurting them. By the 19th century,
China will be unable to compete
militarily with the west.

49. Japan
 Tokogawa Shogunate at first is willing
to trade with westerners
 After a while they fear damage to their
culture and isolate
 After isolation, trade is limited to
Hirado and Nagasaki with the Dutch

50. Japan

51. The West Indies
 Britain holds Barbados, Jamaica, and
Bermuda
 France controls St. Dominique,
Martinique, and Guadolupe
 Establish plantations similar to
Portugal’s in Brazil focusing on
tobacco, cotton, coffee and sugar (all
in very high demand in Europe)

54. What have you learned?
 How did the motives differ between the
Iberian kingdoms and the nation states of
Northern Europe?
 What areas were explored by each nation
state?
 How did the Age of Discovery relate to the
questioning spirit of the Renaissance?
 What were the long term effects of
Discovery?