A Brief History of the Age of Exploration

The Age of Discovery(also known as the Age of Exploration) began in the late 14th century to the early 15th century and it lasted clear through the 17th century. It was the time in European history when the overseas exploration began to grow in population. For most Europeans, the Age of Discovery was a time when new lands were discovered. However, for many others, the Age of Discovery is remembered as the time when their lands were invaded and settled by the newcomers (Pariona).

The overseas travel, exploration, and discovery paved the way for trade between the old world, which is Europe, Asia, and Africa and the new world, Australia and the Americas . This trade brought the exchange of all sorts of things such new food, animals, and plants.It also made the people see the introduction of new human populations, and it also increased the trade and sale of slavery and the use of them also. The Age of Discovery made it easier for the people to trade but not only did the trade they also exchange some ideas and religions between the hemispheres, but not only did they learn new things from the other places but there was also some communicable diseases that spread throughout the people, which horribly reduced and, in some cases, completely wiped out some of the populations. Because of this historical period, the world maps are now available to this day. Although, this ended up increasing military conquest and resource exploitation. Christian missionaries were able to spread around the world during the Age of Discovery, making so Christianity become one of the most known religions in the world today (Pariona).

Before the Age of Discovery actually began, there were several people that started to travel over the sea, leaving some information behind them for their king each time they came back. The information was about other places that they haven’t been to before which ended up leading to the Age of Discovery after a while. Sometime around the 12th century. an Arab geographer created a map of the world for the king of Sicily. The geographer’s name was Al-Idrisi (which I have NO idea how to say, sooo). He got information from Norman explorers and Islamic merchants, creating the best and most correct world map of it’s time.The thing was that they hardly knew anything of the southern parts of the African continent, so it wasn’t added as a part of the map. This map provided inspiration to a lot of explorers back when it was made.From the late 13th century to early 15th century some explorers were traveling by land from to Eurasia and beyond that using trade routes from Eurasia to the Middle East to China. These trips were done by Italian traders, Christian missionaries, and Russian royalty. In the middle of the 14th century, a Moroccan scholar set out to several regions, such as West Africa, North Africa,the Horn of Africa, the Sahara desert, Southern and Eastern Europe, and also China. During the early 15th century, the Arab and Chinese traders were traveling along the Indian Ocean to India, Thailand, East Africa, Arabia, and also to Southeast Asia. When the Emperor of China died the new Emperor put an end to international exploration and trade. Several books were published about the traveling and all the undiscovered places (Pariona).

The reason for the age of Discovery to begin was because many of the nations were looking for silver and gold, but one of the biggest reasons for the age of Discovery was because they wanted to discover a new way to go for the spice and silk trade.When the Ottoman Empire took control of Constantinople in the 1450s, it blocked the European access to the area, limiting all trade. It also ended up blocking the access to North Africa and the Red Sea, two important trade routes to the Far East.The first journey of the age of Discovery was lead by the Portuguese.Even though the Portuguese, Spanish and others were tricking the Mediterranean for a long time most of the sailors were close enough to the land that they could be seen by the people on land or else they traveled down the known routes between the ports. Prince Henry was the one to change that by encouraging the other explorers to go farther out into the sea and explore and discover more trade routes to West Africa (Briney).

The Portuguese explorers were the ones to discover the Madeira Islands in the 1415-1419 and the Azores around the 1420s after a while they started to go farther out south and along the African coast were they found the present-day Senegal in the 1440s and the Cape of Good Hope in the 1490s (Briney).

During the time that the Portuguese were finding new sea routes along Africa, the Spanish also were wanting to find some new trade routes so that they could get to the Far East by taking different routes.Christopher Columbus was an Italian man who was working for the Spanish monarchy.Which he made his first journey in the 1490s while still working for the Spanish.At first he was making his way to India but instead of making it there he made to an island of San Salvador that is now known as the Bahamas to this day.He also was exploring the island Hispaniola that is now the home of the Haiti and Dominican Republic (Briney).

Sometimes Columbus would lead three different voyages to the Caribbean to explore different parts of Cuba and the Central American coast.Meanwhile the portuguese reached the New World when the explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral started to explore Brazil, which ended up causing a conflict between Spain and Portugal over the new lands that they were claiming.In the end the results were the Treaty of Tordesillas officially divided the world in half around the 1490s (Briney).

The Portuguese are the ones who everyone thinks were the first to start the age of Discovery.Their exploration parties would travel down the west coast of Africa and they would end up making it to the Cape of Good Hope then they would go into the Indian Ocean in the 1480s.Around a decade or so later, a guy named Vasco de Gama ended up discovering the way to get around the Cape of Good Hope and to India, which ended up making the first route ever between Portugal and India. The Portuguese kept exploring and continued to Japan around the 1540s (Pariona).

Around the late 15th century, Spain started to become involved in the age of Discovery, wanting to overcome the monopoly Portugal that was held over the west African trade route.Christopher Columbus left Spain in 1492 with three different ships and they crossed the Atlantic Ocean. As i said before that his ship landed in the Canary Islands which is know the Bahamas. But, the thing was, was that he had thought that he had landed in the West Indies (Pariona).

At the beginning of the 1500’s the governments of different countries had people explore for a shorter route to the West Indies.Which lead to them finding the present-day Newfoundland in North America.People began to doubt about the new Atlantic path, they thought in which was leading them to Asia.The explorers began to learn a lot about the new lands that they were finding around 1513, the Pacific Ocean started to be reached by just crossing the Isthmus of Panama (Pariona).

With the people knowing that the Pacific Ocean is on the other side of the “Old World” and is on the side with the “New World” it made everyone have the desire to go out and explore it.In the middle of the 1515 and 1516 centuries the Spanish people started to go sailing out to the west coast of South America, during in which at the same time the Portuguese were off exploring the coast of Southeast Asia.Since they had started to explore the Pacific Ocean it caused others to start until everyone was traveling all over the world in 1519.Magellan was the Portuguese navigator who took off from Seville with five different ships with him, and went sailing out south going toward South America where he went navigating out around the southern tip which is known as Tierra del Fuego.They started to continue across the Pacific Ocean and ended up in the Spice Islands in around 1522 (Pariona).

The Age of Discovery has made one of the greatest impacts on global relations compared to mostly all of the other events that happened in the past.Because of The Age of Discovery they could trade a lot more stuff from a lot more places. It made so that there could be horses, cows, and sheep from Europe to the “New World” and things like tobacco, potatoes, corn, and cotton tho the “Old World” (Pariona).

The European forces came to control the large tracts of land and other places around the world, they were taking advantage of all of their made discoveries to colonize, settle, and to use all of the other new lands they come across.This ended up starting the Age of Imperialism, which was caused by the increase and demand of more slaves, commodities, and trade.Many of the places still left with a community or a kingdom were taken over by the European interests.This was the cause of language, cultural, and religious changes and also it caused a lot of killings and the removal of native people from their original home lands (Pariona).

At the time of The Age of Discovery, the slave trade started to grow a lot which had a huge impact on the economy and on society both.At the beginning of agricultural the crops were successful so that now some of the places are relying on introduced foods for diets.Most of the plants they grew helped with the increase of the population sizes in their new countries.The goods and commodities were not the only things that the would trade for during the time of the Age of Discovery. They would also trade things such as eachothers technology and their own cultures.This was around the time that all of the other countries began to acknowledge that there were more places than just that where they were living at the time.At first they only believed that what they had already found was all there was in the world, not until they actually got into the Age of Discovery.As time went on there began to be a big change in the things that they believed at that time.They would learn about other people’s cultures and their religions and stuff like that (Pariona).

The Age of Discovery ended in the 1700s.It ended after technological advancements and the increase of knowledge that made so that the people could travel on sea a lot easier (Briney). The Age of Discovery was just a lot of people traveling out to the sea to find new places for them to calme. The Age of Discovery is how we know about a lot of the world to this day. If not for The Age of Discovery it would have taken a lot longer for us to figure out half of the stuff we know about the world today. So the Age of Discovery was a point in history that changed the world into a better place than it was before. It let us have more technology and helped us learn about more cultures and religions. The Age of Discovery was a good thing that happened to this world.

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