Well hey there and welcome back to Heimler's History. Now in the last video we talked about all the different peoples that lived in the Americas before the Europeans arrived, and in this video all those people about to meet Whitey. So if you're ready to get them brain cows milked, I stand at the ready to milk them.
Let's get to it. So basically in this video we're going to talk about why European states started exploring the Americas, and we'll talk about what happened when they finally did. So why did the Europeans want to go exploring anyway? Well for one, the population was starting to rebound after the devastation of the Black Plague.
Also, individual European states were experiencing a political unification which resulted in centralized governments led by powerful monarchs. And agricultural and commercial profits gave rise to a wealthy upper class that wanted to scratch their itch for luxury goods imported from Asia. And it was that last one that really created the impulse for exploration. And since you're all good students of world history, I assume what you're thinking is, well, why didn't they just utilize all the existing land-based trading routes that stretched across all of Afro-Eurasia? Excellent question!
During the 14th and 15th centuries, those land-based trade routes were largely controlled by The Europeans were unable to establish an exchange of goods with Asia on their own terms, so that made the Europeans want to find a water-based route to Asia so that they could get their trade off. And the first major player in this respect was Portugal. Our buddy Prince Henry the Navigator decided to attempt to find a passage to Asia via the Atlantic Ocean, but not by sailing out into the ocean. He just wanted to go around Africa. And that's exactly what his fleet did.
Portugal established what's known as a trading post empire all along the African coast and eventually found their way to dominance in the lucrative Indian Ocean trade. And they were able to do this because they harnessed maritime technology in new ways. For example, they made use of trading ships called caravels, which were nimble and dedicated only to trade as opposed to war. They also used updated maritime charts and astronomical tables to help with planning their routes. They improved their navigation with borrowed technology like the astrolabe and the sternpost rudder.
In lay terms, they made good boat and sailed real good. But seeing how profitable While Portugal's trade was becoming, Spain wanted a piece of that juicy economic pie too. So the monarchs of Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand, after having united Spain under the Catholic-Christian banner and after the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, got in the game as well, but with an additional motive, spreading Christianity. And after they had established trading posts in Africa and India and Asia, a scrappy Italian sailor by the name of Christopher Columbus came to Ferdinand and Isabella seeking a sponsorship to try to find a route to Asia by sailing west.
Oh, and obviously he wanted to prove that the earth was round because that's what That definitely wasn't an established fact for like 1700 years since the ancient Greeks. Anyway, Ferdinand and Isabella thought this was a pretty good idea since Portugal basically controlled the African routes and the Italian city-states controlled the Mediterranean routes, and so in 1492 Columbus set sail west across the Atlantic and a few months later he ran into a continent that nobody knew was there except for the Vikings. Anyway, Columbus landed in what he thought was the East Indies, but what was actually the Caribbean, specifically the island of San Salvador. And because he thought this was the Indies, he called the inhabitants of the island of Now, those inhabitants were hospitable to Columbus and his crew, and they helped the Spaniards explore the islands, but they made the huge mistake of wearing gold jewelry, because when Columbus saw that, he was like, they rich. So long story short, Columbus sailed back to Spain with samples of all this gold jewelry and a few of the natives whom he had enslaved and informed everyone that there was more for the taking.
And so more Spaniards set out to explore the Caribbean and South America, and I'll tell you more about that in another video. Now it had become clear within about a decade that Columbus had not in fact discovered a sea-based route to Asia, but that was neither here nor there. There, because when Columbus set foot on San Salvador, it set off a process that would change the world in drastic ways in something that became known as the Columbian Exchange.
But we'll have to wait for that story in the next video. Alright, that's what you need to know about Unit 1, Topic 3 of AP U.S. History. If you think I make good video like the Portuguese make good boat, then go ahead and subscribe and I'll keep making videos for you.
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