Announcements

30 April 2008

• Please turn in one-page essays now.

• Final Exam = Monday, 5/19 @ 8:30a.m.

• Exact format to be determined…

• All rewrites, extra credit, etc. must be submitted by

Monday, May 5th.

• For this Fri., read Wiesner, Chap. 11 on “Mental World of

Columbus”
• N.B. Document 15 (Columbus’ letter) is quite long; and the whole
chapter is longer than usual.
 Age of Exploration, 1450-1550
Allegorical
engraving
showing
Vespucci
"disembarking
in the New
World." The
background
shows the
often-illustrated
cannibal
account; the
foreground
shows
Vespucci,
astrolabe in
hand,
confronting
"America" in her
hammock.

Theodore Galle
after Jan van der
Street, "The Arrival
of Vespucci in the
New World", c.
1600
 Agenda:
Europeans & the World
• Pre-Columbian knowledge of the world
– Classical sources, Muslim sources, Christian sources (cf.
Wiesner, chap. 11)

• Portuguese Exploration
• Spanish Exploration
– Columbus, Cortes, Pizzarro, et al.

• The New World

– “Columbian Exchange”
 European knowledge of the
world very limited before c.
1300
• Trade with China dates back to the Roman
Empire
– Marco Polo traveled to China 1271-92
• Trade with India also ancient (via Venice)
• Long connections with North Africa, but very
little knowledge of Africa beyond the Sahara
• Almost no knowledge of Scandinavian
voyages to Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland
(Canada)
The World Known by Europe, ca. 1500
Ptolemaic World Map (1486)
Classical & Medieval Maps
• A stylized
medieval map
(T&O)
• Jerusalem @
center, God
above
• Intended to
display
Scriptural
understanding
of the earth
The World Beyond Christendom
• Sir John Mandeville
(Noble, p. 432)
• Marco Polo
• Francesco Pegalotti
 Portuguese Explorers
1350-1515
• Prince Henry “the
Navigator” (d. 1460)
• Africa, Azores,
Madiera islands
• Navigational
innovations
– Astrolabe, caravel,
lateen sails
Navigational Innovations
Caravel
 The European
Age of Exploration
• The goal: get to the Indies and control the
flow of trade goods from there
– circumnavigate Africa
– Cape of Good Hope rounded by Bartolomeo
Diaz in 1487 under the sponsorship of the
Portuguese crown
– in 1497, Vasco da Gama reached the coast of
India, and returned with cargo worth sixty
times the cost of the voyage
What’s the
problem??

See
Noble,
p. 435
 Vasco da
Gama
• The first European to reach
India by sea, da Gama
established Portuguese
naval and commercial power
in the Indian Ocean.

The Pierpont Morgan Library /Art Resource, NY

 Portuguese in India

• In the sixteenth century Portuguese men moved to the Indian Ocean

basin to work as administrators and traders. This Indo-Portuguese
drawing from about 1540 shows a Portuguese man speaking to an
Indian woman, perhaps making a proposal of marriage. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome
 Spanish Explorers
1492-1532
• Christopher Columbus

• Hernan Cortes

• Ferdinand Magellan

• Francisco Pizzarro
Christopher • Although his legacy has
been the focus
Columbus • of great debate and
contention,
• Christopher Columbus
remains the most
• influential and
recognizable explorer of
• Europe's Age of
Exploration.

Snark / Art Resource, NY

 Columbus’ approach
• Go to China and India by going west
• geographical theory based on myth and
faulty science
– Fictional accounts
• Polo & Mandeville
– Renaissance rediscovery of ancient
geographical treatises
• Ptolemy (2nd c. AD, Egypt)

• Flat-earth theory disbelieved by most

educated people, incl. Columbus
Pre-Columbian map of the world
Genoese sea-map (portolano),
1457
Columbus’ (imagined) World
Columbus’ World, corrected
 The Americas and Early European
Exploration

The Americas and Early European Exploration

The several voyages across the Atlantic led by Columbus explored the Caribbean basin and set
the stage for Spanish conquest of many American societies, most notably of the Aztec and Inca
empires.
 • ‘View Show' to view and
zoom map

World Exploration, 1492-1535

• The voyages of Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan charted the major
sea-lanes that became essential for communication, trade, and warfare
for the next three hundred years.
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
 Why 1492?
• Renaissance optimism & wealth
• Humanist curiosity
• Technology improvements in navigation &
military hardware
• Success of Reconquista vs. Moors
• $$ now available
• Divine right of conquest
Waldseemuller’s map of the world,
1507
 Cantino Map

• The Cantino Map was named for the agent secretly commissioned to design it in
Lisbon for the Duke of Ferrara, an avid Italian map collector. It reveals such a good
knowledge of the African continent, of the islands of the West Indies, and of the
shoreline of present-day Venezuela, Guiana, and Brazil that modern scholars
suspect there may have been clandestine voyages to the Americas shortly after
Columbus's. Biblioteca Estense, Modena
a map of the world, 1570
 Columbus’ successors

• Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1522)

• 15,000 miles, 3 years, lost 96% of his crew
• Straits of Magellan, & discovery of China
 The conquest of the Americas
• Arawak peoples of Hispaniola
– Approx. 3 million in 1492; none by 1555
• Aztec Empire
– Defeated by Hernan Cortes and a few
hundred Spanish soldiers, 1521
• Incan Empire
– Defeated by Francesco Pizarro and 168
Spanish soldiers, 1532
Invasion of Hernan Cortes vs. Atzec Empire

See maps in Noble, pp. 445-446

Tenochtitlan
Tlaxcalans receive Cortes
The battle for Tenochtitlan, 1521
Francisco Pizarro’s invasion of the Incan Empire
Images of the New World
Images of the New World
 Why were the Europeans
successful?
• brutality
• superior military technology (guns)
• the horse
• introduction of other livestock, which went
wild and provided ready food stock
• Disease (smallpox, measles, syphillis)
• Different conceptions of warfare
• Religious awe (initially)
 Primary Sources
for understanding the “Columbian Exchange”

• Columbus’ letter to Ferdinand & Isabella

• Bartolome de las Casas, History of the
Indies
• Nahuatl accounts of the invasion
• Images in Noble, pp. 443, 451, 454
• Wiesner, ch. 11