Christopher Columbus: The Circumstances of His Era

            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.

            It was during this era of exploration during the late 1400s, that Christopher Columbus developed and executed his plan of sailing west in hope of reaching China and the Indies by a more direct route than by sailing around Africa.