Age of Discovery
On the 3rd of August 1492, Christopher Columbus departed from Palos de la Frontera, certain he could reach the Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic. He had pitched the same plan to King John II of Portugal in 1485 and again in 1488, and twice been turned away. The Catholic Monarchs of Spain, fresh from conquering the Moorish kingdom of Granada, took the gamble he was offering. What he found instead was a continent uncharted by Europeans, though the Norse had reached it five hundred years earlier. This is the Age of Discovery, a span from roughly the 15th to the 17th century when seafarers from Europe explored, colonized, and conquered regions across the globe. Why did it begin with Portugal inching down a hostile African coast rather than with a bold leap across an ocean? How did spices from the Far East become valuable enough to launch fleets, and what did a needle on a pivot have to do with any of it? And whose lands were these explorers actually claiming when they planted a flag and called it discovery?
"For all Europeans, the events of October 1492 constituted a 'discovery'. Something of which they had no prior knowledge had suddenly presented itself to their gaze." Anthony Pagden drew that statement from the work of Edmundo O'Gorman, and it captures a problem buried inside the period's own name. The word "discovery" descends from disco-operio, meaning to uncover, to reveal, to expose to the gaze. What was revealed had existed all along.
Edmundo O'Gorman argued the physical encounter mattered less than the European effort to fold this new knowledge into an existing worldview, a process he called "the invention of America". Few Europeans of the period actually used the word "invention" for what they were doing. The exception was Martin Waldseemüller, whose map first carried the word "America".
J. H. Parry preferred to call the era the Age of Reconnaissance. He saw it producing the first major victories of empirical inquiry over authority, the start of that close tie between science, technology, and everyday work he considered essential to the modern western world.
In 1823, the United States Supreme Court expounded a legal doctrine of discovery, drawing on the claim that European powers held a right to seize land during their explorations. Indigenous peoples have fundamentally challenged that idea, calling it forced and a denial of their presence on lands they already inhabited. Some scholars now prefer the term contact, as in first contact, naming the era the Age of Contact and describing it as an unfinished, diverse project rather than a finished triumph.
From the 8th century until the 15th, the Republic of Venice and its neighboring maritime republics held a monopoly on European trade with the Middle East. Spices, incense, herbs, drugs, and opium made these Mediterranean city-states phenomenally rich. Spices ranked among the most expensive and most demanded goods of the Middle Ages, used in medicine, religious rituals, cosmetics, perfumery, and as food additives and preservatives.
Muslim traders dominated the maritime routes of the Indian Ocean, drawing goods from the Far East and shipping them to ports in India, chiefly Calicut, then westward to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Jeddah in the Red Sea. From there, overland routes carried the cargo to the Mediterranean. As the Mongol states disintegrated, the routes through the Black Sea and through Armenia and Persia became blocked by wars and banditry.
Europe ran a constant deficit in silver and gold, because bullion only went out, spent on an eastern trade that was now being cut off. Several European mines were exhausted. The shortage drove the creation of a complex banking system to manage the risks of trade. The first state bank, the Banco di San Giorgio, was founded at Genoa in 1407.
Forced to reduce their activity in the Black Sea and at war with Venice, the Genoese turned to North African trade in wheat and olive oil and to a hunt for silver and gold. They established communities in Portugal, where their enterprise and financial expertise would soon underwrite a very different kind of venture down the coast of Africa.
Use of the compass for navigation in the Indian Ocean was first recorded in 1232; in Europe, the first mention came in 1180. The instrument was invented during the Chinese Han dynasty and used for navigation in China by the 11th century, then adopted by Arab traders in the Indian Ocean before spreading to Europe by the late 12th or early 13th century. Europeans used a "dry" compass, a needle on a pivot, and the compass card was their own invention.
Before the late 13th and early 14th centuries, northern European ships were typically clinker built, with a single mast and a square sail. Their Mediterranean counterparts had carvel hulls, one or more masts setting lateen sails, and quarter-rudders on the side of the hull. Trade, pilgrimage, and war brought ships from each tradition into the other's waters, and the features of each began to be copied.
The result of that merging was the full-rigged ship: a carvel hull, a sternpost-hung pintle-and-gudgeon rudder, and three masts, the foremast and mainmast setting square sails and the mizzen a lateen. Alongside it sailed the caravel, carvel built with a sternpost-hung rudder, which could be fully lateen rigged or carry some square sails.
Very few wrecks from this era have been found and studied, so more is known about Roman and Greek ships of classical antiquity than about these. The caravel in particular remains poorly understood, despite the many replicas built of it. A distinct set of hull traits, the Iberian Atlantic shipbuilding tradition, has been identified from wrecks including the Molasses Reef wreck, the Highbourne Cay wreck, and the Red Bay wreck.
In 1415, the Portuguese conquered Ceuta in North Africa, aiming to control navigation of the African coast. Young prince Henry the Navigator grew aware of the profit in the trans-Saharan routes, where slave and gold trade had linked West Africa with the Mediterranean across the Western Sahara for centuries, controlled by the Moors. He wanted to know how far Muslim territory extended, to trade directly with West Africa by sea, to find the legendary Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to probe whether the Indies could be reached by water.
Madeira was reached in 1419 and the Azores in 1427; the explorer João Gonçalves Zarco established settlements on Madeira. Beyond Cape Non on the African coast lay the unknown, and nautical myths warned of monsters and an edge of the world. Starting in 1421, systematic sailing chipped away at the fear, and in 1434 one of Henry's captains, Gil Eanes, finally passed the difficult Cape Bojador.
From 1440, caravels were used extensively to explore the coast of Africa. The Portuguese navigated by the ephemerides, astronomical charts plotting the stars, which spread remarkably in the 15th century. In 1496 the Jewish astronomer and mathematician Abraham Zacuto published the Almanac Perpetuum, whose tables allowed mariners to calculate latitude. Exact longitude would elude them for centuries.
Progress came at roughly one degree a year. Senegal and the Cape Verde Peninsula were reached in 1445, and in 1446 Álvaro Fernandes pushed on almost as far as present-day Sierra Leone. In 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Romanus Pontifex, granting King Afonso V of Portugal all lands and seas discovered beyond Cape Bojador and declaring the Atlantic closed to other states.
In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa, which he named Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms, then sailed east as far as the mouth of the Great Fish River. He had proven the Indian Ocean was reachable from the Atlantic. King John II of Portugal renamed the headland the Cape of Good Hope, for the optimism it stirred, finally disproving the view held since Ptolemy that the Indian Ocean was landlocked.
In July 1497, a small fleet of four ships and about 170 men left Lisbon under Vasco da Gama. By December it passed the Great Fish River, where Dias had turned back, and sailed into waters unknown to Europeans. The Indian Ocean held three well-developed trade circuits; the one da Gama met linked Mogadishu, Aden, the Persian port of Hormuz, Cambay in northwestern India, and Calicut in the southwest.
On the 20th of May 1498, the fleet arrived at Calicut. Da Gama struggled to win favorable trading terms, because the goods he carried were of low value next to what was traded there. Two years and two days after departure, he and a surviving crew of 55 men returned to Portugal, the first to sail directly from Europe to India. His voyage was later romanticized in Os Lusíadas, an epic poem by the discovery-era traveler Luís de Camões, widely regarded as Portugal's greatest literary achievement.
The Portuguese pressed on. In 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Malacca, then the center of Asian trade, and from there sought the Spice Islands, the Banda group being the world's only source of nutmeg and cloves. An expedition under António de Abreu became the first Europeans to reach Banda in early 1512. In May 1513, Jorge Álvares reached China, and trade there opened over the following years.
On the 4th of May 1493, two months after Columbus returned, the Catholic Monarchs received the bull Inter caetera from Pope Alexander VI. It assigned to Castile all lands west and south of a line drawn 100 leagues west of the Azores or Cape Verde Islands, and never mentioned Portugal. King John II of Portugal was displeased, feeling the arrangement gave him too little land and blocked his path to India.
John negotiated directly with Ferdinand and Isabella to push the line westward. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world between the two crowns along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. Portugal took everything outside Europe east of it, including Africa, Asia, and eastern South America; Spain took everything to the west.
In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral, leading a fleet of thirteen ships and about 1500 men toward India, swung westward in the Atlantic during a wide volta do mar and struck the Brazilian coast. On the 21st of April a mountain was sighted and named Monte Pascoal, and on the 22nd Cabral landed. Believing he had found an island east of the Tordesillas line, he named it Ilha de Vera Cruz and claimed it for Portugal. He was the first captain to touch four continents, connecting Europe, Africa, the New World, and Asia in a single expedition.
The naming of two whole continents fell to a man who never commanded a fleet of his own. Amerigo Vespucci sailed as an observer on voyages to the east coast of South America. Two accounts attributed to him, published between 1502 and 1504, argued the new lands were not the Indies but a New World, the Mundus novus. In 1507 the cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann named the Americas after him.
On the 10th of August 1519, five ships departed from Seville: the caravel flagship Trinidad under Ferdinand Magellan, and the carracks San Antonio, Concepcion, Santiago, and Victoria. About 237 European men aimed to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west, to claim them under Spain's sphere by the studies of the Faleiro brothers. Magellan was a Portuguese navigator who had sailed for Portugal in India until 1513, and he had stayed in contact with Francisco Serrão, living among the islands he now hoped to reach.
Starting on the 21st of October, the fleet navigated the 373-mile Strait of Magellan, entering the ocean on the 28th of November. Magellan named it Mar Pacífico for its calm waters. After crossing the Pacific, he was killed in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines, and Juan Sebastián Elcano took command, reaching the Spice Islands in 1521.
On the 6th of September 1522, the Victoria returned to Spain and completed the first circumnavigation of the globe. Of the original crew, only 18 men finished the voyage. Antonio Pigafetta, a Venetian scholar, kept the detailed journal that remains a key record of it.
The route proved no real rival to the Portuguese path around Africa, since the strait lay too far south and the Pacific was too vast to cross in a single trip from Spain. Yet the knowledge endured. Later Spanish expeditions used it to open trade between Acapulco in New Spain and Manila in the Philippines. The hard problem of the return route, sailing eastward back across the Pacific, was solved at last by Andrés de Urdaneta in 1565, the same year the Manila galleon trade began its long run that would last until 1815.
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Common questions
What was the Age of Discovery?
The Age of Discovery, also called the Age of Exploration, was a period from roughly the 15th to the 17th century when seafarers from European countries explored, colonized, and conquered regions across the globe. It connected previously isolated parts of the world and laid the groundwork for globalization.
When did the Age of Discovery begin?
The Age of Discovery is dated to around 1418, when the Portuguese began systematically exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa under the sponsorship of Prince Henry the Navigator. It overlapped with the early modern period and the Age of Sail and ran into the 17th century.
Who reached India by sea during the Age of Discovery?
Vasco da Gama reached India by sea, arriving at Calicut on the 20th of May 1498 after sailing around Africa. His fleet of four ships and about 170 men had left Lisbon in July 1497, and he returned to Portugal two years and two days after departure with 55 surviving men.
How was the world divided between Spain and Portugal in the Age of Discovery?
The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided the world between Portugal and Spain along a line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. Portugal gained Africa, Asia, and eastern South America, including Brazil, while Spain received everything west of the line.
Who completed the first circumnavigation of the globe?
The first circumnavigation of the globe was completed when the ship Victoria returned to Spain on the 6th of September 1522. Ferdinand Magellan led the expedition until he was killed in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines, and Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the voyage. Only 18 of the original crew finished it.
Why did Europeans seek new sea routes during the Age of Discovery?
Europeans sought new sea routes largely to reach the valuable spice trade of Asia directly, bypassing the monopoly held by Venice and Muslim traders over Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean routes. Spices were among the most expensive goods of the Middle Ages, used in medicine, religious rituals, cosmetics, perfumery, and as food preservatives.
What technologies made the Age of Discovery possible?
Two key technologies were the magnetic compass and advances in ship design. The compass, invented during the Chinese Han dynasty, reached Europe by the late 12th or early 13th century, and the merging of northern European and Mediterranean shipbuilding traditions produced the full-rigged ship and the caravel.
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