The Oxford History of the World by Fernández-Armesto Felipe;

Author:Fernández-Armesto, Felipe; [Fernández-Armesto, Felipe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Environment, economics, and expansion from the West

In the century following the plague pandemic and the Ming voyages, Europeans set in motion a series of maritime expeditions, smaller in size than those of the Ming but of more lasting importance in expanding global connections. Additionally, Europeans caused the unintended spread of contagious diseases that wiped out much of the native population of the Americas, which is discussed in the next section. While superficially similar, these two sets of parallel events from East and West were inherently different in their motives, circumstances, and consequences.

The Christian West had a long history of indirect connections to the riches of the East. As discussed, Venice and Genoa had pioneered trading connections to the Indian Ocean through Muslim merchants in North Africa and the Middle East. Northern Italian merchants had also extended trading connections across the Alps to the Netherlands, and the Hanseatic League had extended ties to German and Russian areas. The pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century and the conquests of Ottoman expansion in the fifteenth century had frayed these connections, but the commercial networks were rebuilt after the crisis eased. As a result, most Venetian and Genoese merchants had no interest in discovering new sea routes. Even if they had, the galley ships of the Mediterranean were ill suited to the stormier challenges of the Atlantic.

Instead, the impulse to seek new maritime routes came from the Iberian kingdoms of southwestern Europe whose commercial connections to the East were weaker than the Italians’. Equally important was the fact that Iberian Christians’ long struggles to free themselves from Muslim domination made them disinclined to make alliances with Muslims. Rather, the crusades to recapture lands had ingrained an abiding anti-Islamic mentality. For Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon, married in 1469, crusading in Iberia lasted until 1492 when Grenada, the last Muslim-ruled state, fell to their troops. After completing their own re-conquest in 1250, the Portuguese had extended their crusading to Islamic North Africa. When the Muslim kingdom of Morocco was weak, a Portuguese force was able to seize the rich port of Ceuta in 1415.

The leader of the attack on Ceuta, Prince Henry (1394–1460), the third son of the king of Portugal, must have learned that the port’s wealth was due to the gold that came to it from across the Sahara. His patronage of subsequent explorations down the coast of Africa, which earned him the title of Henry the Navigator, seems also to have had non-commercial motives. Contemporary accounts assign high-minded motives to these efforts, echoing the Ming motives behind the voyages of Zheng He. Writing shortly after Henry’s death in 1460, his official biographer listed first among Prince Henry’s motives intellectual curiosity about what lay beyond North Africa, followed by personal ambitions, and a series of religiously informed reasons: establishing contact with existing African Christians and making new African converts, both of whom might be valuable allies in continuing the campaigns against Muslim hegemony.

To finance this colonization scheme, Prince Henry was

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