European History

Faculty lecture##unit 1
Discovery of the New World
Impetus 促进；动力；冲力
Genghis Khan 成吉思汗 Temujin
Clan 宗族；部落；集团
Markup （利润）加价
Wipe out 消灭
Gunpowder 火药
Nutmeg 肉豆蔻
Clove 丁香
Degree 消化， 降级
Ferment 酵素；发酵；动乱
Rot 腐烂
Tap into 使用……以获得好结果
Postulate 假定，假设 n/v
Impoverished 穷困的，无力的，用尽了的
Smallpox 天花
The demand was inelastic 无弹性的，不能适应的，生硬的
He led the expansion of the Mongols outside of the sort of Eurasian 欧亚的，欧亚人的 steppe 大草原，
干草原 特征西伯利亚一带没有树木的大草原 lands into and in the process of creating the largest land-

based empire.
 1206 Mongols created a commodities 商品 superhighway that brought a variety of Asian
products to Europe and created European consumer demand.
 Asian trade terminated at Constantinople (the capital of the Byzantine Empire) where Italian
merchants collected the commodities and then distributed them to ports in Europe, from
which the commodities were then sold inland via the various trade fairs.
The spread of the bubonic plague in 1348,1349
In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. Constantinople which was renamed
Istanbul after it was conquered by the Turks
The amount of commodities on the market decline. And then the price of commodities that
were on the market began to rise. However, the demand for these commodities was still there.
There was no way to satisfy the demand. This was an exploration to try to find another route,
another sort of way of supplying the European markets with Asian commodities.
 Portuguese, employing Italian ship captains, systematically explored southward along the
African coast, not immediately find a route to Asia, but discovering humans to buy and sell
and commodities such as gold.
 Portuguese success prompted Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella to listen to the
proposal of the Italian ship captain, Christopher Columbus, that the best way to get to Asia
was to sail due west. Funded by the Spanish monarchs, Columbus set out across the Atlantic
in August 1492, coming ashore on one of the islands that make up Bahamas ten weeks later.
He was convinced he had reached India, hence his naming of the inhabitants as “Indians.”
 Columbus made 4 trips across the Atlantic. He never gave up on the idea that he had
discovered a sea route to Asia. HIs refusal to acknowledge his actual discovery created space
 for Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who made two trips across the Atlantic, to write
two popular travelogues describing what he claimed to be a “New World.” Cartographers
and other thinkers in Europe came to accept Vespucci as true discoverer of the New World
and named the what came to be recognized as two new continents “America” n his honor.
 Meanwhile Portuguese explorers continued to head south along the coast of Africa, reaching
the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and India itself in 1500. The commodities to which the
Portuguese gained access in Asia made the Portuguese extremely wealthy. The Asia trade
helps explained the lack of interest on the part of the Portuguese in contesting the Spanish
exploration of the New World, in particular, the slow manner in which the Portuguese
explored Brazil, the territory they claimed in the New World.
 Lacking the access to Asian markets and commodities promised Columbus , Spanish
adventurers (conquistadors) went in search of whatever exported commodities they could
claim. Spanish monarchs supported them in part because the monarchs could claim twenty
percent of the profit on anything brought back to Europe from the New World on Spanish
ships. With the money from the gold and silver discovered in the New World the Spanish
Monarchy established a control of politics in Europe that lasted to the 1650s. By that time,
other European states had also claimed territories in the New World. The wealth coming
from the New World (and Asia) prompted the reorientation of Europe’s economic life away
from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.