From Settlement to Superpower From Settlement to Superpower

On the 12th of October 1492, Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World and forever altered the course of history. He had struggled long and hard to get where he did – for years he had been mocked by scholars, spurned by kings, and frustrated by the interminable turning of the gears of royal bureaucracy. At every step he experienced new disappointments, encountered new obstacles, but with a tenacity that cannot fail to inspire he kept on pushing and lobbying for his grand idea. The final challenge he faced was the voyage itself – an undertaking that required not only skilled seamanship, but also perseverance and fortitude.

Columbus has gained immortality for his discovery of the New World, but while many focus on his moment of greatest triumph, few notice the years of toil and frustration that led up to his celebrated voyage of 1492. A nameless mariner from Genoa, Columbus endured years of mockery and disappointment before he got the chance to set into motion his great plan for opening an Atlantic trade route to Asia.



Link to Episode on HistoryCourses with transcript:

https://historycourses.com/topic/episode-5-enterprise-of-the-indies/

Intrigue, civil war, exploration, and discovery - all that and more is included in this episode, which covers the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, the War of the Castilian Succession, and the separate paths taken by the Castilians and Portuguese during the latter half of the 15th century.

The story of the Age of Discovery traditionally begins in 1415, when the Portuguese captured the Moroccan city of Ceuta in a stunning lightning assault. Among those who made their names that day was Prince Henry of Portugal, a young, brash, and zealous prince. Over the next 45 years his restless nature would place him at the vanguard of both glory and catastrophe. When all is said and done, however, it was Prince Henry, known to posterity as Prince Henry 'the Navigator', who laid the foundation for Portugal's 500-year-long empire and more importantly, pushed Western Europe into a new era.

While we are accustomed to associate the Age of Discovery with the New World and the Far East, the dawn of that age began with significantly less ambitious voyages down the coast of Africa. In this episode we go over the various voyages down the coast of Africa from antiquity through the dawn of the fifteenth century, culminating in Jean de Bethencourt's invasion of the three Canarian islands of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and El Hierro.

In this episode we talk a bit about the impetus for the birth of the age of exploration. The more famous impetus was the desire to open a direct sea route to India to compensate for the collapse of the Silk Road, but the earlier, and lesser-known impetus, was the desire to discover the fabled Rio de Oro, or River of Gold - the source of the fabled gold fields of Western Africa.