In order to
understand why Christopher Columbus made his famous journey to the Americas,
one must know what was occurring in Europe at that time.
From 1095 until 1291, Europeans were
engaged in a series of crusades with the intent of liberating Jerusalem from
Muslim rule. These crusades failed to
permanently remove the Muslims from the
city, but they did expose the people of Europe to luxuries, such as silk and spices,
which were common place throughout much of Asia, but up until that time, were
unknown in Europe. These products soon
came into demand in Europe, not only as luxuries, but as necessities.
Eastern products reached Europe
either by an overland route across Asia or by a water route through the Indian
Ocean along the southern coast of Asia, both of which eventually reached the eastern
Mediterranean where they were purchased by Italian merchants who transported
them by ship to cities such as Florence, Genoa, and Venice. From Italy they were carried across the Alps
to the rest of Europe. While the Mongol
Empire ruled much of Asia, the overland route remained relatively safe. However, when the city of Constantinople fell
to the Turks in 1453, this trade was disrupted.
European products were also of a lower quality and therefore undesirable
to those in the east, from whom came the luxuries that the Europeans sought. For this reason, Asian merchants were paid in
gold, which caused a gradual depression in Europe as the amount of money was depleted
over time.
In order to reduce the high cost of
Eastern goods, the people of Europe sought to bypass the Italian merchants and
Asian traders by seeking a direct route to China and the Indies. In his account of his travels to China, Marco
Polo asserted that these lands could be reached by sea, and it was for such a
route that the Europeans began to search.
The ability to explore far from European shores was made possible with
the introduction of navigational instruments such as the compass and the
astrolabe and improvements in the field of cartography. Portugal had recently developed the caravel,
a ship so designed that it could sail into the wind, and it was this country
that first made the effort to search for a new route to the East.
It was Prince Henry, The Navigator,
son of King John I of Portugal, who was an early promoter of the exploration of
the African coast in the hopes of finding the southern tip of the continent and
thereby sailing into the Indian Ocean and ultimately reaching the Indies. Henry did not live to see the success of his
efforts, as he died in 1460. It was not
until 1487 that a Portuguese sailor, Bartholomew Diaz, finally rounded the Cape
of Good Hope, and then in 1498, another explorer, Vasco Da Gama, reached India.
