Name: The Age of Exploration: Crash Course European History #4
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T06:10:12.000Z
Duration: 15 min 40 s
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Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

So, remember back in May of 1453 when the Ottomans smashed the thick walls of Constantinople,

captured the city, and beheaded the Byzantine emperor?

You probably don't remember May of 1453, come to think of it, but you remember learning

It was a bit of a footnote in our first episode, but you never know when the footnotes are

going to be very important, but that one really did change the world.

With the Ottomans now also controlling much of southeastern Europe, they established a

navy, which they used in the Black, Adriatic, and other seas in the region.

Ottoman domination meant that European kingdoms and empires needed to find different paths

to Afroeurasian trading routes--which ultimately helped spark the voyages of explorers from

INTRO So we've talked already in this series about

the importance of shifting perspective when looking at history, and today we're going

to ask you to shift perspective several times, but let's begin with the perspective of

In the fifteenth century, Portugal was poor, and it became more so as the Ottomans contested

But luckily for Portugal, the fourth son of their king was Prince Henry, who came to be

called The Navigator because he funded and encouraged exploration, the study of navigation,

and the development of new tools to aid in navigation.

The Portuguese began to increase their travels along the Mediterranean's southern shore.

And by the mid-15th century, they were venturing southward along the Atlantic coast of Africa,

In those days, Africa was rich in food, salt, gold, and slaves.

Mansa Musa, the Malian king who made a spectacular hajj to Mecca in 1324-1325, was legendary

He had an entourage of 60,000 people including 12,000 slaves and huge quantities of gold.

He seemed like the model of what the Portuguese hoped to become by traveling to Africa: that

In this pursuit of food, slaves, and gold, the Portuguese gradually made their way down

the African coast, locating island clusters like the Canaries.

And they kidnapped local people to sell into European slave markets and began dotting the

coast with stone fortresses that doubled as trading stations.

And there, many European men partnered with African women and started families.

These women were often themselves traders and would be crucial for all European nations;

because they were the main force behind local markets and regional trade networks, and they

Again, most of the Portuguese explorers were poor, and many of these female traders were

From their perspective, Portuguese traders offered them access to new markets and access

I know we're all very accustomed to thinking of Europe as rich and Africa as poor, but

that frame is both relatively new and way too essentializing--the truth as always resists

So in 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, or, as it was called at the

And then the Portuguese ventured further afield into the Indian Ocean.

When we talk about explorers and exploring, we often conjure up images of intrepid groups

wearing hats trekking through empty lands in search of hidden treasures, but that was

certainly not the reality when, for instance, Vasco De Gama reached India in 1498 and found

a highly developed Indian Ocean commerce with trading posts run by sophisticated Muslim

Da Gama's instincts were to menace and fight them and he did.

And when the Portuguese reached Southeast Asia and China, they found a cornucopia of

goods that Europeans came to crave and about whose production they hadn't the slightest

knowledge: colorful, washable cottons, and finely crafted porcelain, also tea.

Oh, Stan informs me that coffee also isn't from Europe.

By the seventeenth century, the Portuguese were importing millions of pieces of porcelain

into Europe along with lots of delicious spices.

And spices were not only important for flavouring, but also for food preservation.

Which I suppose is a kind of flavouring if you like your food not-mouldy tasting.

The Portuguese “empire” was, at first anyway, a trading empire,

with small and agile ships known as caravels patrolling ports and collecting large fees.

The wealth would be extracted from controlling shipping and trading routes,

as the Ottomans were doing in the eastern Mediterranean.

In contrast, the Spanish empire, which began in 1492 with the exploratory voyages of Genoese

ship captain Christopher Columbus, was based on colonies--

that is, rather than controlling trade routes, the empire would control the land itself and

the people who lived there, and extract wealth from them to enrich the

Columbus was a student of geography and maps and he'd lobbied the Portuguese king to

But when that didn't go to plan, he headed for Spain to petition its devoutly Catholic

rulers, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand

These two monarchs were finishing up the drive to expel Muslims from Spain

and to force Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity.

The motto of the Iberian pathfinders—God, gold, and glory—perfectly described their

Hopping the islands along the African coast and using the trade winds,

Columbus's ships made it to the Caribbean islands,

and his crews, which tellingly included both clergy and bankers,

found signs of gold but not great quantities of it.

However, they did find people to enslave, and because no one knew the size or shape

of the Americas, there was the perpetual hope that gold or

other riches might lie just on the other side of this river,

So I want to stop here to shift perspective: From the perspective of European explorers,

these lands were new, and potentially very lucrative, and the colonization model that

Spain adopted, and that Portugal began using in Brazil, and that the rest of Europe's

empires would eventually use, was built on the idea that colonies existed for the benefit

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The Age of Exploration: Crash Course European History #4

perspective

eventually

extremely

present