The Fall of Constantinople & the Start of European Exploration: A New World to Discover, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Fall of Constantinople & the Start of European Exploration: A New World to Discover e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! The Age of Discovery Age of Discovery is a period that goes from 15th to 18th century, and it’s marked by geographical discoveries. During this time the borders of the old world widen. There is no old world only anymore but there is also a new world to be explored and discovered. The beginning of the Age of Discovery generally also marks the end of the Middle Ages and generally we use the date 1492, that is the year when America was discovered, to mark that. But the discovery of America is not itself the beginning of the age of discovery and the end of Middle Ages, it is a consequence of another event, that is the Fall of Constantinople (1453). Constantinople was a very important city for several reasons: 1) its position, that means that there was a bridge between Europe and Asia; 2) its triangular shape with a deep water port made it ideal for trade and defense, that were two very important thing at the time. Constantinople had a legendary reputation, and it was the center of the Byzantine Empire for centuries. In 1453 the Ottoman Empire attacked and conquered the city of Constantinople. The fall of the city marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and the crowning of the Ottoman Empire, that will last many centuries, until 1922. This event was very important and the news about that spread in Europe very quickly. The fall of Constantinople was a very violent event and a pivotal moment in the minds of European people. The fall of Constantinople was important also for commercial and political reasons because since now the ottoman empire was controlling Constantinople. It meant that European powers had to find other paths to trade with Eurasian powers, so they couldn’t pass through the Mediterranean anymore, but they had to find new routes. And this is why many explores started to travel in search for other ways to reach Asia, and among them was Cristoforo Colombo. But the first explores came from the Iberian Peninsula, so Spain and Portugal. It’s interesting to know that they didn’t came from there because they were rich countries, but for the opposite reason. Spain and Portugal were poor countries and they thought that by expanding they would get more gold, more wealth and they could become wealthy again. Portugal started to encourage explorations, the study of geography, navigation… . They started to explore the Mediterranean southern and then they went south towards the Atlantic coast of Africa and there they expected to find wealth. In fact, in the past Africa was not a poor country. It was rich in food, gold, and slaves. They proceeded downwards all along the coast of Africa and there they started to kidnap people, but they also established a rout trade all around African coast. Several European men partnered with African women, because they were traders and the main force behind local markets, and they could provide essential connection to the trade network. This is because many Portuguese explores were poor and on the other hand several African women were quite rich and successful and to them Portuguese explorers represented new markets and access to new goods. Important dates in the history of Portuguese Empire: 1488 Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered in the Indian Ocean. 1498 Vasco de Gama reached India. There he founded an high developed commerce with trading coast round by experienced merchants. Spain was the main rival of Portugal, but it didn’t expand towards Africa. It expanded towards America, the new world, and in 1492 Cristoforo Colombo arrived to the Caribbean Islands and there, with his crew he founded traces of gold and people to enslave. America represented a new world in different ways: it was something unknown, that meant that there was the possibility to find wealth. They lived in hope to find wealth and gold just around the corner, just by exploring it. But it was a new and unknown world in the sense that at first it wasn’t easy for colonizers to adjust to the natural and to the climate conditions of America because they didn’t know how nature and how climate and seasons worked. So at the beginning they askes for the help of native people and thanks to their help they managed to establish a sugar plantation in the Caribbean. Whitin a century, just one century, because of violence, enslavement and European diseases, such as smallpox and measles, 90% of the indigenous of American population died, because they didn’t have the antibodies to fight European diseases, so the result was that the Spanish had troubles with the sugar production in the Caribbean because there were no more people to enslave and to use in sugar production and at the end the plantation was taken by the British. 1519-22 Ferdinand Magellan’s Spanish ships circumnavigated the globe. It’s a crucial event because it opened not only one single territory to exploration, but the hole world, and it opened the world to global transportation, exchange, settlements, but also to global slavery, welfare, pandemics, and conquests. We noticed that there are differences between the Portuguese Empire and the Spanish Empire. The Portuguese Empire extended only along the coast, so they just founded some ports, that functioned as bases for their trades, so basically, they colonized only the African coast. This is because the Portuguese Empire at the beginning was a Trading empire, so the main aim of the trading empire was to control trade routes and nothing else. On the other hand, the Spanish Empire was a Colonial empire, based on colonies. It means that instead of controlling just the trade routes, so just the coast, the empire controlled the land itself and also the people who lived there. And here the relationship between colonizer and colonized became very important, because from the perspective of the colonizer the new lands were existed just for the wealth and enrichment of the colonizers. The same went for the colonized. They were there to be enslaved and to be used to enrich their motherland. Much of the wealth from the empire was originated by using not only the lands, but also human beings who were envisioned as property. On the other hand, from the perspective of indigenous people, living in colonized communities, meant that they were subject to impoverishment, the lost of land for use, the lost of life and also the loss of all religions and