Chapter 16 Europe, 1500-1650: Expan sion, Reformation, and Religious Wars 461

Protestantism was not the only reform movement voyages of the Portuguese and Spanish in the fifteenth century,
to grow out of the grievances and reforms of the Late commercial supremacy progressively shifted from the Mediter-
M iddle Ages. Within the church itself a reform was ranean and Baltic seas to the Atlantic seaboard, setting the
emerging that would give birth to nevv religious or- stage for global expansion (see Map 16-1 on page 464).
ders, rebut Protestantism , and win back a great
many of its converts. The Portuguese Chart the Course
As different groups identified their political and
Seventy-s even years before C olumbus, Prince Henry "the
social goals with either Protestantism or Catholi-
Naviga tor" (1394-1406 ), ruler of a strong and united Por-
cism, 100 years of bloody opposition between tugal, captured the Wes t Afric an M u slim city of Ceuta at
Protestants and Catholics darkened the second half the rnouth of the Mediterran ean Sea. There began the Por-
of the sixteenth century and the first half of the sev- tugu ese exploration of the Afric an coast, first in search of
enteenth. The political conflict that had previously Guinea gold and slave s, and by cen tury's end a sea route to
been confined to central Europe and a struggle for As ia's spic e m arkets (see C hapter 14 ). Topping the list of
Lutheran rights and freedoms then shifted to west- spic es were p epper and cloves as th ey both preserved and
ern Europe-to France, the Netherlands, England, enhanced the dull die t of most E uropean s. Initially the
and Scotland-and became a struggle for Calvinist catch of raiders, Afric an slaves were taken by Portuguese
recognition. In France, Calvinists fought Catholic traders in direct exch anges with tribal chiefs, who swapped
their captured en emies for horse s, corn, and finish ed
rulers for the right to form their ovm communities,
goods (cloth and bras sware) . Over the second h alf of the
practice their chosen religion openly, and exclude
fifteenth century, Portugu ese ship s delivered 150,000
from their lands those they deemed heretical. Dur-
slaves to E urop e.
ing the Thirty Years' War ( 1618-1648), international Before there was a sea route to the O rient, spices were
armies of varying religious persuasions clashed in obtained through the Venetians, who bought or bartered
central and northern Europe. By 1649 English Puri- them from Eas tern M uslim merchants . The Portuguese beat
tans had overthrown the Stuart monarchy and the this Ven e tian- Mam eluk (Turkis h ) monop oly by going
Anglican Church.
For Europe the late fifteenth and the sixteenth
centuries were years of unprecedented territorial ex-
pansion. Permanent colonies were established in
the Americas, and the exploitation of the New
World's human and mineral resources had begun.
Imported American gold and silver spurred scien-
tific invention and a ne,v weapons industry. The
new bullion helped create an international traffic in
African slaves as rival tribes sold their captives to
the Portuguese. Slaves came in ever-increasing
numbers to \,vork the mines and the plantations of
the New World as replacements for faltering Amer-
ican natives. ■

The Discovery of a New World

The discovery of the Americas dramatically expanded the hori-
zons of Europeans, both geographically and intellectually
Knowledge of the New World's inhabitants and exploitation of
its mineral and human wealth set new cultural and economic
{(• - [Hear the Audio forc es in motion throughout wes tern
Christopher Columbus in old age (d . 1506) by Sebastiano de! Piombo.
at [Link] Europe. Beginning with the successful ················································ ·········································· ······································
European Expansion
The Europeans turned to the Atlantic as a only strengthened with the rise of the Ottomans. A wealth-
result of its weakness in the East where ier, more self-confident Europe, now recovered from the
the Muslims dominated. However, a recov- great plague-induced population decline of the fourteenth
ering Europe was now able to compete century-its taste for Asian spices long since whetted during
for access to valuable goods in eastern the Crusades-was ready to take those spices at their
markets by navigating the high seas. In sources.
Europe
the late fifteenth and the si xteenth cen- For much the same reasons (trade and self-aggrandize-
turies, Europeans sailed far from their,own shores to Africa, ment), voyages of exploration also set forth from Ming
Southern and Eastern Asia, and the New World of the Amer- China-especially between 1405 and 1433-reaching India,
icas. From Japan to Peru, they directly confronted civiliza- the Arabian Gulf, and East Africa. Had those voyages been fol-
tions other than their own and that of Islam, with which they lowed up, they might have prevented Europeans from estab-
already had contact in the form of trade and, more often, by lishing a presence in the Indian Ocean. But the Chinese now
force of arms. A major motivation for the voyages, which faced both serious pressures on their northern and western
began with a reconnaissance of the West African coast, was borders and the problem of administrating a vast, multicul-
to circumvent the Muslim monopoly on the movement of tural empire stretching into Central Asia, where non-Chinese
spices from the Indian Ocean ·into Europe, a grip that had rivals had to be kept under control. Moreover, the dominant

directly to the source by sea. Overland routes to India and • H Read the Document The Portuguese concentrated
C hina h ad become too difficult and unprofitable by the fif- Duarte Barbosas to Africa India
their explorations on the Indian
at [Link]
teenth century. The route by sea posed different obstacles Ocean. In their wake, the Spanish
and risks: fear of the unknown , making the first voyages of turned out into the Atlantic Ocean in search of a shorter
exploration slow and tentative. Venturing down the African route to the East Indies by sailing due West. But rather than
coast, Portuguese square riggers were turned out into the beating the Portuguese to Asia, Columbus instead discov-
deep ocean by cape after cape, and the farther out they ered the Americas.
sailed to round them, the greater the sailors' fear that they
would not return home. The Spanish Voyages of Christopher
In addition to spice markets, the voyages sought allies Columbus
against western Europe's archenemies, the M uslims . In
1455 , a very self-interested pope gave the Portuguese ex- T hirty-three days after departing the Canary Islands , on Oc-
plorers virtual carte blanche from the coast of Guinea to tober 12, 1492, Columbus landed in San Salvador (Watlings
the Indies, granting them all the spoils of war: land, goods, Island) in the eastern Bahamas. Thinking h e was in the East
and slaves . The church expec ted mass conversions in the Indies, he mistook his first landfall as an outer island of
wake of conquest, a Christian coup as well as mercantile Japan. The error was understandable given the information
advantage . he relied on: Marco Polo's thirteenth-century account of his
Bartholomew Dias pioneered the eastern Portuguese years in China and Nuremberg mapmaker Martin Behaim's
Empire after safely rounding the Cape of Good Hope at spherical map of the presumed world. That map showed
the tip of Africa in 1487. A decade later, in 1498, Vasco da nothing but ocean between the west coast of Europe and
Gama stood on the shores of India. When he returned to th e east coast of Asia, with Cipangu, or Japan, in between
Portugal, he carried a cargo · worth sixty times the cost of (see Map 16-2 on page 465).
the voyage. Later, the Portuguese established successful Naked and extremely friendly natives met Columbus
colonies in Goa and Calcutta, whence they successfully and his crew on the beaches of the New \iVorld. T h ey
challenged the Arabs and the Venetians for control of the were Taina Indians, who spoke a variant of a language
European spic e trade. known as Arawak. Believing the island on which he

462
Neo-Confucian . philosophy espoused by the scholar- China was not_ bound to a particular religion. The Japanese,
bureaucrats in the imperial court disdained merchants and too, were admirers of the Jesuits, who arrived in Japan with
commerce, extolling instead a peasant agrarian economy. the Portuguese in 1543. The admiration was mutual, leading
These factors led the Chinese to turn inward and aban- to 300,000 Christian converts by 1600. Tolerance of Christian-
don overseas trade and exploration precisely at the moment ity did not last as long in Japan as in Ch ina. Hideyoshi, in his
when Europeans were exploring the coast of Africa on their drive for internal unity, banned Christianity in the late six-
way to the Indian Ocean . It was a fateful choice because it teenth century. Nonetheless, China and Japan, as well as
meant that the Asian power best able to resist the establish- many Islamic societies, induding the Ottoma~s · and the
ment of European commercial and colonial empires in the .In- Mughals, demonstrated more tolerance for foreign rel igions,
dian Ocean had abdicated that role, leaving a vacuum of such as Christianity, than did the West for Islam or for Asian
power for Europeans to fill. Still, Chinese merchants contin- religious traditions.
ued to ply ocean trade routes and settle as far from home as
the Philippines and, in later centuries, the west coasts of
North and South America. Wherever there was commerce in Focus Questions
Chinese goods, there were Chinese merchants, albeit now ■ Why did Europeans launch voyages of exploration in the
operating without support from their government. fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? What role did the
Although parallels may be drawn between the court cul- Crusades and the rise of the Ottoman Empire play in this
ture of the Forbidden Palace in Beijing and that of King Louis enterprise?
XIV in seventeenth-century France, the Chinese government, ■ Why did the Chinese voyages of exploration under the
with its philosophy of Confucianism, remained more unified Ming come to a halt? What were the consequences for
and patriarchal than its counterparts in the West. At first the world history?
Chinese tolerated other religions, warmly embracing Jesuit ■ What was the biological impact of the European discov-
missionaries, doing so in part because political power in ery of America?

• :-IBead the Document

landed to be the East Indies,
Columbus Journal and Letter
countries to undertake colonial ventures. The wealth ex-
at [Link] Columbus called the natives Indi- tracted from its American possessions financed Spain's
ans. The natives' generosity amazed Columbus, as they commanding role in the sixteenth century, while fueling a
freely gave his men all the corn and yams they desired, European-wide economic expansion.
along with sexual favors. "They never say no," Columbus European expansion also had a profound biological im-
marveled, as he observed how easily they could be en- pact. Europeans introduced numerous species of fruits, veg-
slaved by the Spanish. etables, and animals from · Europe into the Americas, and
On the heels of Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci vice versa. European expansion also led to a spread of Euro-
( 14 51-1512), after whom America is named, and Ferdinand pean diseases. Vast numbers of indigenous American peo-
Magellan (1480-1521) carefully explored the coastline of ples died from measles and smallpox, which broke out in
South America. Their travels proved that the new lands massive epidemics among populations with no natural or
discovered by Columbus were not the outermost territory of acquired immunity. (See the discussion of the "Columbian
the Far East, but an entirely unknown continent that Exchange" in Chapter 17 .)
opened on the still greater Pacific Ocean. The voyages al~o began a long period of conquest
during which native populations were also devastated by
warfare and slave labor. In both South and North Amer-
Impact on Europe and America
ica, Spanish rule left a lasting footprint of Roman
Columbus's first voyage marked the beginning of more than Catholicism, economic dependency, and hierarchical so-
three centuries of Spanish conquest, exploitation, and cial structure.
administration of a vast American Erripire. What began as
voyages of discovery became expeditions of conquest similar ·································································································• ,•··
to the warfare Christian Aragon and Castile waged against
The Reformation
Islamic Moors. The Reformation was a sixteenth-century religious move-
The voyages to the New World had important conse- ment that sought to reform the church. It led to the estab-
quences for both Europe and America. They created Eu- lishment of Protestantism and the religious division of
rope's largest trading bloc and spurred other European Western Christendom.

463