the ancient Greeks some men had known in theory that the world was round and global. Now in the sixteenth century navigations were to prove it so. The story goes back a long way. In medieval times travellers from Europe had turned their steps to the East, their imagination fired with tales of fabulous kingdoms and wealth lying in regions which had seen the birth of man—stories of the realm of Prester John, variously placed between Central Asia and the modern Abyssinia, and the later, more practical account of the travels of Marco Polo from Venice to China. But Asia too was marching against the West. At one moment it had seemed as if all Europe would succumb to a terrible menace looming up from the East. Heathen Mongol hordes from the heart of Asia, formidable horsemen armed with bows, had rapidly swept over Russia, Poland, Hungary, and in 1241 inflicted simultaneous crushing defeats upon the Germans near Breslau and upon European chivalry near Budapest. Germany and Austria at least lay at their mercy. Providentially in this year the Great Khan died in Mongolia; the Mongol leaders hastened back the thousands of miles to Karakorum, their capital, to elect his successor, and Western Europe escaped. Throughout the Middle Ages there had been unceasing battle between Christian and infidel on the borders of Eastern and Southern Europe. The people of the frontiers lived in constant terror, the infidel steadily advanced, and in 1453 Constantinople had been captured by the Ottoman Turks. Dangers of the gravest kind now jarred and threatened the wealth and economy of Christian Europe. The destruction of the Byzantine Empire and the Turkish occupation of Asia Minor imperilled the land route to the East. The road which had nourished the towns and cities of the Mediterranean and founded the fortunes and the greatness of the Genoese and the Venetians was barred. The turmoil spread eastwards, and though the Turks wanted to preserve their trade with Europe for the sake of the tolls they levied, commerce and travel became more and more unsafe.
Italian geographers and navigators had for some time been trying to find a new sea-route to the Orient which would be unhampered by the infidel, but although they had much experience of shipbuilding and navigation from the busy traffic of the Eastern Mediterranean they lacked the capital resources for the hazard of oceanic exploration. Portugal was the first to discover a new path. Helped by English Crusaders, she had achieved her independence in the twelfth century, gradually expelled the Moors from her mainland, and now reached out to the African coastline. Prince Henry the Navigator, grandson of John of Gaunt, had initiated a number of enterprises. Exploring began from Lisbon. All through the later fifteenth century Portuguese mariners had been pushing down the west coast of Africa, seeking for gold and slaves, slowly extending the bounds of the known world, till, in 1487, Bartholomew Diaz rounded the great promontory that marked the end of the African continent. He called it “the Cape of Storms”, but the King of Portugal with true insight renamed it “the Cape of Good Hope”. The hope was justified; in 1498 Vasco da Gama dropped anchor in the harbour of Calicut; the sea-route was open to the wealth of India and the Farther East.
An event of greater moment for the future of the world was meanwhile taking shape in the mind of a Genoese named Christopher Columbus. Brooding over the dreamlike maps of his fellow-countrymen, he conceived a plan for sailing due west into the Atlantic beyond the known islands in search of yet another route to the East. He married the daughter of a Portuguese sailor who had served with the Navigator, and from his father-in-law’s papers he learnt of the great oceanic ventures. In 1486 he sent his brother Bartholomew to seek English backing for the enterprise. Bartholomew was captured by pirates off the French coast, and when he finally arrived in England and won the notice of Henry Tudor, the new King, it was too late. Christopher however had gathered the support of the joint Spanish sovereigns, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, and under their patronage in 1492 he set sail into the unknown from Palos, in Andalusia. After a voyage of three months he made landfall in one of the islands of the Bahamas. Unwittingly he had discovered, not a new route to the East, but a new continent in the West, soon to be called America. It was nearly a hundred years before England began to exert her potential sea-power. Her achievements during this period were by comparison meagre. The merchants of Bristol tried to seek a north-west passage beyond the Atlantic to the Far East, but they had little success or encouragement. Their colleagues in London and Eastern England were more concerned with the solid profits from trade with the Netherlands. Henry Tudor however appreciated private enterprise provided it did not involve him in disputes with Spain. He financed an expedition by John Cabot, who was a Genoese like Columbus and lived in Bristol. In 1497 Cabot struck land near Cape Breton Island. But there was little prospect of trade, and an immense forbidding continent seemed to block further advance. On a second voyage Cabot sailed down the coast of America in the direction of Florida, but this was too near the region of Spanish efforts. Upon Cabot’s death the cautious Henry abandoned his Atlantic enterprise.
The arrival of the Spaniards in the New World, and their discovery of precious metals, had led them into wordy conflict with the Portuguese. As one of the motives of both countries was the spreading of the Christian faith into undiscovered heathen lands they appealed to the Pope, in whose hands the gift of new countries was at this time conceived to lie. By a series of Bulls in the 1490’s the Borgia Pope Alexander VI drew a line across the world dividing the Spanish and Portuguese spheres. This remarkable dispensation stimulated the conclusion of a treaty between Spain and Portugal. A north–south line 370 leagues west of the Azores was agreed upon, and the Portuguese felt entitled to occupy Brazil. Although the Portuguese were first in the field of oceanic adventure their country was too small to sustain such efforts. It is said that half the population of Portugal died in trying to hold their overseas possessions. Spain soon overtook them. In the year of Columbus’s first voyage, Granada, the only Moorish city which survived on Spanish soil, had fallen to the last great Crusading army of the Middle Ages. Henceforward the Spaniards were free to turn their energies to the New World. In less than a generation a Portuguese captain, in Spanish pay, Magellan, set out on the voyage to South America and across the Pacific that was to take his ship round the globe. Magellan was killed in the Philippines, but his chief officer brought his ship home round the Cape of Good Hope. The scattered civilisations of the world were being drawn together, and the new discoveries were to give the little kingdom in the northern sea a fresh importance. Here was to be the successor both of Portugal and Spain, though the time for entering into the inheritance was not yet. But already the spices of the East were travelling by sea to the European market at Antwerp. The whole course of trade was shifted and revolutionised. The overland route languished; the primacy of the Italian cities was eclipsed by North-West Europe; and the future lay not in the Mediterranean, but on the shores of the Atlantic, where the new Powers, England, France, and Holland, had ports and harbours which gave easy access to the oceans.
The wealth of the New World soon affected the old order in Europe. In the first half of the sixteenth century Cortes overcame the Aztec empire of Mexico and Pizarro conquered the Incas of Peru. The vast mineral treasures of these lands now began to pour across the Atlantic. By channels which multiplied gold and silver flowed into Europe. So did new commodities, tobacco, potatoes, and American sugar. The old continent to which these new riches came was itself undergoing a transformation. After a long halt its population was again growing and production on the farms and in the workshops was expanding. There was a widespread demand for more money to pay for new expeditions, new buildings, new enterprises, and new methods of government. The manipulation of finance was little understood either by rulers or by the mass of the people, and the first recourse of impoverished princes was to debase their currency. Prices therefore rose sharply, and when Luther posted his theses at Wittenberg the value of money was already rapidly falling. Under the impulse of American silver there now swept across the Continent a series of inflationary waves unparalleled until the twentieth century. The old world of landlords and peasants found it harder to carry on, and throughout Europe a new force gathered influence and honour with the overlords and began to exert its power. For merchants, traders, and bankers it was an age of opportunity. Most famous among them perhaps was the Fugger family of Germany, who gained a graceful reputation by placing their immense wealth at the service of Renaissance art. On their financial resourcefulness both Popes and Emperors at one time depended.
As ever in times of rapid inflation, there was much hardship and many difficulties in adjustment. But a strong sensation of new growth and well-being abounded, and ultimately every class benefited by the general amelioration. For a world which, a century before, had lost perhaps a third of its population by the Black Death there was a wonderful stimulus of mind and