A good place to start the story of European exploration and discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is with the international fishing community at Newfoundland, a group of fisher-folk, mariners, and merchants who swarmed to fish the waters off the Grand Banks and to swap supplies and gossip at St. John's. The tales traded by these ordinary seamen and traders featured the exploits of "great men"—the Portuguese explorers of the coast of Africa and their charting of a new route to Asia; John Cabot and his effort to find a northwest passage to the Orient; and, of course, Christopher Columbus and his discovery of America. However, the expansion of European peoples and cultures during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries occurred not only as a result of the efforts of those adventurers but also because of gradual technological, religious, economic, and political changes that facilitated European nations' assumption of power, not only in the Americas but around the world.

Eurasia and Africa in the Fifteenth Century

At the beginning of this period, Western European kingdoms lived on the fringes of an international economy that revolved around China and, to a lesser extent, the Islamic kingdoms of the Near East. Europe suffered through food shortages, diseased populations, and a lack of centralized political power. Ironically, European fortunes began to improve after the Black Death of the 1340s and 1350s, which eased population pressure and food shortages. By the 1400s stronger political dynasties began to emerge across the continent, and a growing pool of capital inspired these monarchies to dream of expanding their power.

This expansion began with the successful voyages of the Portuguese into the Atlantic in the late 1300s, when they colonized the Canary Islands and, a few decades later, Madeira and the Azores. By the early 1400s, the Portuguese had become involved in the trade of African slaves in an effort to find cheap labor for the sugar plantations they established on the Atlantic islands. The Portuguese also initiated a trade with West Africa, where their white skins and technological achievements astonished sub-Saharan inhabitants who had never before encountered Europeans. Yet these West Africans proved to be formidable competitors willing to trade with Europeans but not to surrender their economic or political interests. Slaves became one of the most profitable commodities sold in these markets, although the trade remained small in scale compared to what was to come. By the end of the century, Portuguese explorers had rounded the tip of that continent and opened a direct commerce with India.

While the Portuguese dominated the trade routes to Africa and Asia, they were uninterested in financing the voyages of an Italian mariner named Christopher Columbus, who became convinced that the fastest route from Portugal to China lay west across the Atlantic Ocean. After a decade of rejection, Columbus took his idea to Spain.

Spain in the Americas

Although they rejected his pleas at first, eventually the Spanish monarchs agreed to fund Columbus's voyages, a decision that thrust them into the lead in exploring and colonizing the Americas. Columbus established a beachhead in the Caribbean, where hints of gold, a seemingly docile population, and a healthy climate led Spain to impose a brutal rule over the natives. From there, Spanish forces moved onto the mainland, where conquistadores such as Hernán Cortés and the Pizarro brothers supplanted the Aztecs and the Incas as the new overlords of the most densely populated regions of Central and South America. Divisions within Indian empires, superior Spanish military technology, and the devastation of native populations by European diseases made these Spanish conquests easier. Conquistador excursions into North America proved less fruitful, but these failures did little to deter the expansion of Spanish power.

Spanish monarchs soon replaced the conquistadors with an elaborate civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracy that asserted royal control over Spanish America. The empire that developed during the sixteenth century proved enormously profitable, especially after the discovery of silver. Yet for most of the sixteenth century Spain faced little competition for the riches of the new world, in part because of the religious upheaval in Europe caused by the Protestant Reformation.

Religious Reform Divides Europe

Inspired by the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Protestant reformers criticized the worldliness and corruption of the Roman Catholic church, as well as its failure to respond to the spiritual needs of ordinary Christians. Luther shifted the emphasis of Christianity away from actions and toward faith, arguing that salvation occurred not through good works but through divine grace alone. Calvin called on Christians to reshape society and government to conform with God's laws. In England, the Reformation began with King Henry VIII's more worldly desire to produce a male heir, but subsequent generations of English Protestants turned more radical. Their opposition to Catholicism led to England's sponsorship of its first expansionary efforts, a privately organized series of ventures to conquer and colonize Ireland.

England's Entry into America

Many veterans of the Irish campaigns subsequently turned their attention to North America in the 1570s and 1580s. At that time, the threat Spain posed to English economic and military security encouraged Elizabeth I to challenge Spain more aggressively, both within Europe and across the Atlantic. English merchants and gentlemen, in search of new markets and new land, lent increasing support to colonization schemes as well. Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and Walter Raleigh all tried and failed to plant colonies in America. But their efforts, as well as the younger Richard Hakluyt's energetic promotion of English colonization, paved the way for renewed English expansionism in the seventeenth century.