Download The Iberian Wave of Exploration: The first European nations to

The Iberian Wave of Exploration:
 The first European nations to explore the wider Atlantic world were
Portugal and Spain.
 As a result, the first expeditions of the age of exploration are sometimes
referred to as the Iberian wave.
 Both the Portuguese and Spanish were on Europe’s Atlantic frontier.
 They were close to Africa and the islands off Africa’s coast.
 They had also gained a great deal of maritime experience in the
Mediterranean, thanks to trade and a long series of naval wars against the
Ottoman Turks.
 Broadly speaking, Portuguese and Spanish exploration during the 1400s and
early 1500s proceeded in two ways.
 First, the Portuguese attempted to reach the lands of the Far East by inching
their way down the coast of Africa, rounding the continent, then sailing
across the Indian Ocean to India and Southeast Asia.
 Second, and in the meantime, the Spanish – competing with the Portuguese –
attempted to find their own route to China and the Indies by sailing west,
around the world.
 Famously, the Spanish found the continents of North and South America
instead, as well as an ocean previously unknown to them: the Pacific.
 Quickly, the Spanish and Portuguese figured out the relationship between
the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
 That understanding gave them a basic knowledge of the world’s major
landmasses and bodies of water.
 By the 1250s, they had succeeded in sailing around the globe for the first time
in human history.
Henry the Navigator and Portugal’s Exploration of West Africa:
 The Portuguese began Europe’s age of exploration.
 This achievement was due mainly to the efforts of Prince Henry (1394 –
1460), known popularly as Henry the Navigator.
 Henry created a maritime center and navigation school at the port of Sagres.
 From there, he and the princes who followed him sent out many voyages to
the west and south, attempting to find a sea route to India and the Far East
that would enable them to bypass the traders of the Middle East.
 The Portuguese claimed several Atlantic island groups, including the
Madeiras and Azores.
 They also traveled down the western coast of Africa, conquering as well as
exploring.
 They seized the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1411.
 Soon afterward, they took the Cape Verde Islands.
 The Portuguese continued to expand along Africa’s western shore until 1488.
 That year, Bartolomeu Diaz reached the southernmost tip of Africa.
 This completed the first leg of the journey to India, and, in honor of this, the
Portuguese named the tip of Africa the Cape of Good Hope.
Spain, Christopher Columbus, and the “New World”:

In the meantime, the Spanish, distracted by the Reconquista, their war
against the Moors, had not been as quick as their Portuguese neighbors to
start exploring.
 Falling behind meant that, if the Spanish wanted their own sea route to the
Far East, they would have to try something completely different.
 The result was the famous voyage of the Italian captain Christopher
Columbus in 1492, sponsored by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
 What Columbus proposed to the Spanish government was to sail west in
order to reach China and India.
 The boldness of his idea lay not in the idea that the world was round, because
that was well known to most educated Europeans.
 What made his proposal striking were his beliefs that the world was small
enough and that the Atlantic was open enough that an expedition would be
able to sail from Spain to China or India without getting lost or running out
of food and water.
 Columbus set sail in August 1492, and his ships reached the islands of the
Caribbean on October 12, 1492.
 This European encounter with the “New World” – the continents of North
and South America – changed forever the history of the entire globe.
 Despite the fact that Columbus remained convinced all his life that he had
found the Indies (hence the mistaken term “Indians” for the Native
Americans), the Spanish and Portuguese realized almost immediately that
what Columbus had found were lands completely unknown to them.
(Columbus’s mistake is the main reason that the American continents are not
name after him, but after Amerigo Vespucci, who consciously mapped the
American coasts as new landmasses).
 The two countries turned to the pope to determine which of them would be
allowed to claim which parts of the New World.
 In lines of demarcation (the Treaty of Tordesillas) agreed to in 1493 and
1494, the pope gave jurisdiction of most of South America and all of North
America to the Spanish.
 The Portuguese received only Brazil.
The House of Wisdom:
 Great minds from many lands gathered at a Baghdad library called the
House of Wisdom, a center of learning during the Islamic Golden Age.
 Scholars in this booming city studied geography, astronomy and
mathematics-and made advances that are still relevant today.
 Islamic astronomers used a tool called an astrolabe as a guide to the sky. By
measuring the position of sun and stars, they could precisely tell the time of
day or night, or predict the moment when the sun would rise in the morning.
 To develop the astrolabe, Islamic scholars took a Greek idea, refined it and
added many new features to make it more versatile.
 A firm believer in logic and close observation, Al-Razi [a Muslim scholar of
medicine] wrote some 200 books, from a pamphlet on toothaches to a medical
handbook that was used in Europe for hundreds of years.
Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint
By Federico García Lorca
Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.
I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.
If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,
never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.