*With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, as well as other disruption of trade routes brought about by the Black Death and the disintegration of the Mongol Empire in Asia, European trade with the far east was cut off, depriving Europe of access to luxuries they had come to appreciate following the Crusades:  spices, silks, tea, and other commodities, particularly spices from the Spice Islands (or East Indies).

*The loss of these trade routes was a severe blow to the Italian city-states, but an opportunity for other countries.  The first country to seek an alternate route to the Orient was Portugal.

*In the early 1400s, Prince Henry (later called the Navigator for his sponsorship of voyages of exploration), the third son of King John I of Portugal began encouraging (and funding) expeditions to find resources and people to convert to Christianity in Africa and the Atlantic Ocean and to expand Portugal's power and prestige—for God, Gold, and Glory.  He was partly inspired by Mediaeval legends of a Christian king in Africa known as Prester John, whom he thought might be a valuable ally.

*Henry's men never found Prester John, but they did the discover the Azores and the Madeira Islands (which Portugal still owns), claimed ports in Africa, and became engaged in the slave trade.  Eventually, his expeditions allowed Portugal to begin importing gold from West Africa, the first time Europeans had seen land south of the Sahara.

*Henry died in 1460, too soon to see his nation's greatest triumph:  in 1497-98, Vasco de Gama charted a sea route from Portugal to India. 

*In 1510, Portugal claimed the Indian territory of Goa, and controlled it (and other small ports) until 1961.  Portugal would go on to establish colonies in East Timor (until 1975), in Macau, China (until 1999), in Africa (Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Cape Verde, until 1974-75), and in Brazil.  Their was the first global empire, and thus far the longest lasting.  This success inspired other countries.

*In 1492 the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella completed the reconquista, driving the Moors from Granada, after a struggle of 760 years.  The Spanish, though, were hardly going to stop there.  With zealous armies they moved into northern Africa, but they also had time for other undertakings.

*The fall of Granada did not just allow Spain to unify all the Iberian peninsula (except Portugal) and to build a very strong nation-state using the Inquisition as a tool of the state.  The wealth seized during the conquest of the city allowed the Spanish government to sponsor not just military expeditions into Africa but also to gamble on the plans of Christopher Columbus.

*Most educated Europeans knew that the world was round, but its precise circumference was unknown.  There were two widely-known conjectures:  about 25,000 miles or about 15,700 miles.  Both figures came from the ancient Greeks, and most Europeans believed the larger figure.  They were correct.  Columbus, however, had convinced  himself that the Earth was not much more than 15,000 miles around, and that most of that was land.  This meant that Asia could be reached by sailing across the Atlantic using ships that existed at the time.

*Hoping to spread Catholicism, to find greater wealth, and to promote its national honour, Spain granted Columbus three ships and gave him permission to gather a crew and sail into the unknown.

*After nearly exhausing all his provisions, Columbus sighted land on 12 October, 1492.  He landed in the Caribbean, probably in the Bahamas, explored some of the Islands (he believed Cuba was Japan), and, convinced he had found the East Indies, called the local people Indians, resupplied, and went home in 1493.  He was named Admiral of the Ocean Sea, made three more voyages to the new world, and died in 1506, still convinced that he had found Asia.

*By 1493 Portugal had explored most of Africa's west coast and Spain had just discovered a new continent.  With the entire world to pick from, the two Iberian kingdoms decided to share.  To do so fairly, they asked the most important man in the world to divide the globe.

*In 1494, Pope Alexander VI devised the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal.  Spain got all of the Americas except Brazil (an odd coincidence, as Brazil had not yet been discovered) and Portugal got all of Africa and most of Asia (although Spain later sneaked in and colonised the Philippines).

*Unfortunately, as the new continents of America (named for Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer of South America's coast) were more fully explored, they turned out to be, in certain ways, a great disappointment:  the world's biggest speed bump, keeping Europeans from sailing directly to Asia.  Consequently, the next few centuries would be spent trying to find an all-water route to Asia.

*The Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama sailed around Africa to India, but another Portuguese explorer (sailing on behalf of Spain) named Ferdinand Magellan, went the other way.

*From 1519 to 1522, his expedition sailed around South America (through the Strait of Magellan), to the Philippines (where Magellan was killed, which did not prevent the Spanish from going back and claiming the islands later), around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and ultimately back to Spain after almost exactly 3 years.  The 18 sailors to survive became the first men to circumnavigate the globe.

*Although the Americas were a navigational problem in certain ways, as the Spanish explored them, they discovered new peoples and new sources of wealth.

*The American Indians in Central and South America, unlike those of North America, had created several large and powerful empires prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1492(the pre-Columbian period).

*Southern Mexico and Central America were dominated by the Maya, who had a network of independent city-states that covered the Yucatan and much of southern Central America between 250 AD and about 900 AD, when, for reasons yet unknown (possibly warfare, possibly drought, possibly soil depletion), they abandoned many of their cities, including all those in the southern part of their lands.  Some northern Mayan cities survived longer, but often made war on one another, with a particularly destructive rebellion in 1450, and the Mayan culture was very weak when the Spanish finally arrived (although many Mayan people remain in Mexico, and many still speak Mayan languages).  Like many pre-Columbian Indian nations, the Mayans practised human sacrifice.

*The Aztecs were the dominant empire of what is now southern central Mexico, with their capital at what is now Mexico City.  Beginning around 1300, they began to conquer and subdue their neighbours, eventually conquering a large empire, in part because their religion required frequent human sacrifice, and people often preferred to sacrifice prisoners of war rather than local people.  They had a highly hierarchical society with a rigid class structure and a powerful military.  When the Spanish arrived, they were initially welcomed as possible gods or emissaries of the god Quetzalcoatl.  In 1521, the Spanish, under Hernando Cortez, arrived, allied with a subject tribe that wanted to be free of their Aztec rulers, took over Tenochtitlan, and made war with their guns against bows and arrows.  They also brought smallpox, which the Indians had never encountered, and to which they had no immunity—throughout the Americas, between 30 and 90% of all the Indians died of European diseases).  The Aztecs were rapidly defeated.

*The Aztecs, incidentally, introduced the Spanish (and thus Europe) to corn, the tomato, and chocolate, while they received a new religion, horses, the wheel, other modern technologies, and deadly diseases.  This is known as the Columbian Exchange.

*The major empire of South America was that of the Inca, in the Andes, in what is now Peru, and parts of Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador.  The Inca domesticated the llama, built roads across their Empire, created impressive irrigation systems, and built a vast empire while peacefully assimilating the empires around them.  They did this partly through the mita system of taxation which required labour rather than money be paid.  However, the empire did not last long.  It was created in 1438, and continually expanded, in part because Inca religious practises required that while a dead emperor’s oldest son got the title of emperor, all the wealth from the dead emperor’s lands went to the other descendents to take care of them and to take care of their father in the afterlife, so the new emperor had to expand the kingdom to get his own land for wealth.  The Inca also offered human sacrifices, although not as much as the Aztec did.  The Inca were conquered by Francisco Pizarro in 1532.  Legend has it that the Inca cursed their old capital of Cuzco, so that the Spanish could not have children there.  This is why the capital was moved to Lima.  There may be some truth to this—Cuzco is not on the altiplano, but it is close, and is very high, and the lower oxygen results in lower birth rates in general, especially in those unaccustomed to it (like Europeans).  The Spanish took the place of the Inca emperors for most of the Empire, and kept the mita system in place for their own use.  The Catholic Church used the main Incan languages (Quechua and Aymara) to spread the gospel in South America, and this is one reason that some Incan languages survive today.

*The Spanish came to the New World for God, Gold, and Glory, and they got it all.

*The Catholic Church came with Spain, and converted the Indians of Central and South America to Roman Catholicism, often by force and slavery, but effectively nonetheless (although some elements of native religions and African religions were transferred into Latin American Catholicism, with many old gods finding a new form in one saint or another).  Paraguay was for centuries a colony of the Jesuit Order as much as it was of Spain.

*There was glory in the New World, too, for those who would win it.  Latin America was divided, eventually, into Viceroyalties, governed by Viceroys (in place of the King).  The major ones were New Spain (Mexico and the rest of Central America), New Granada (Ecuador and Columbia), Peru (Peru and Chile), La Plata (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and parts of Bolivia), and Brazil.

*Most of Spanish America was granted to the conquistadors (conquerors) as encomiendas and haciendas.  Encominedas were cities that belonged completely to their owner, and whose people could be used as he pleased.  Haciendas were vast estates, often the size of modern provinces; again, the inhabitants were under the control of the hacendo (owner (also known as the padron)), who had the power of life and death over them.  These could be run as farms, but were mostly used as ranches, and were not very economically efficient—they only meant to be self-sufficient, and to produce enough money to buy the owner some luxuries for showing off to the other hacendos.  In short, only a few people owned almost all the land in Central and South America, and they were immensely powerful.

*To work these farms, and their mines, the Spanish enslaved the Indians, and also imported many African slaves to Central and South America, and especially to the Caribbean.

*The Spaniards also found gold, or at least silver, beyond their wildest dreams.  The greatest mine in the world was at Potosi, in modern Bolivia.  Worked by thousands of Indian slaves (under a relic of the mita system), it turned out more silver than the world had ever before seen.  The mine was opened about 1545, and remained valuable until the early 1800s.  The area still produces some tin, but the silver is mostly used up.  Mexico also had a tremendous mine at Zacatecas.  The silver of Peru (in which Potosi was located) and New Spain was famous around the world, and made Spain fabulously wealthy, before destroying the economy due to inflation.

*The silver was minted into pesos, each worth eight reales (royals).  The pesos were also called dollars (which is where the US dollar gets its name), and were often cut up to make change.  They were usually cut into eight pieces, or bits, which is why a quarter is still sometimes called two bits.

*Spain's new-found wealth was both a blessing and a curse.

*In the 1500s, Spain was the wealthiest country in Europe.  In 1519, King Charles V of Spain was elected Holy Roman Emperor, giving him nominal control of most of Central Europe.  His family, the Hapsburgs, also owned the Netherlands (including Belgium), southern Italy, and parts of what is now France and northern Italy.  He and his son, Philip II, used the wealth of the New World to make Spain a world power. 

*They fought against the Ottoman Turks, winning (along with Italian and French allies, collectively called the Holy League) a major victory at the Battle of Lepanto (off western Greece) in 1571.  This was the last major battle ever fought entirely between rowed vessels (as opposed to sailing ships or motorised vessels).  However, six Holy League ships did carry large cannon.  The Europeans also had heavily armoured soldiers, which still mattered in an age where rowing ships clashed with each other rather than primarily shooting from a distance.  Almost all of the Ottoman fleet was destroyed and most of their experienced sailors was drowned. 

*This was the first major victory Christian forces had won against the Ottoman navy since the fall of Constantinople, and it gave Europe hope that the Turks might be stopped and even turned back on land.  Had the Holy League stuck together, they might have pushed the Turks back and possibly even re-taken Constantinople.  However, they soon turned against one another and the victory was not as total as it might have been.  Nonetheless, it is often viewed as one of the great turning point of European history, one that, had it gone the other way, might have seen the Turkish conquest of most of southern and eastern Europe through control of the Mediterranean.

*However, Spain's wealth would also lead to problems.  A great influx of silver from the colonies obviated the need to develop a strong industrial base or merchant class.  Likewise, it led to massive inflation, so that Spain's domestic economy stagnated and became dependent on colonial wealth.  Furthermore, despite Spain's victory over the Turks at Lepanto, they faced increased dissent and rebellion in their European possessions that not even their wealth and military might could completely crush.