Why Explore?
Gold, God, and Glory summarize European motivations for exploration. This one represents spreading Christianity.
What is God?
The origins of the compass, gunpowder, and sternpost rudder in this country challenge the claim that European exploration depended entirely on European inventions.
What is China?
Columbus dramatically underestimated this, helping convince him that sailing west to Asia would be practical.
What is the distance from Europe to Asia across the Atlantic?
These two American staple crops expanded European food supplies and eventually helped support population growth.
What are potatoes and maize (corn)?
Overseas expansion gradually shifted Europe’s economic center away from Mediterranean cities and toward states bordering this ocean.
What is the Atlantic Ocean?
Explorers sought this financial backing from monarchs because ships, crews, and supplies made ocean voyages extremely expensive.
What is royal/ state sponsorship?
This navigational instrument helped sailors determine direction.
What is the compass?
Alongside epidemic disease, these forces—many drawn from peoples who resented Aztec rule—help explain Cortés’s victory despite his small Spanish army.
Who are Indigenous allies?
European demand for this commodity encouraged labor-intensive plantations, helping drive the expansion of enslaved African labor in Brazil and the Caribbean.
What is sugar?
When food prices rose faster than wages, workers experienced a decline in this—the amount their money could buy.
What is purchasing power?
Rather than inventing international trade, Europeans sought greater access to this older commercial network linking three continents.
Afro-Eurasian/ Indian Ocean trade network?
Mounted on ships, these weapons allowed Europeans to bombard coastal defenses and use force to gain access to ports and trade routes.
What are cannons?
This 1494 agreement divided overseas claims between Spain and Portugal.
What is the Treaty of Tordesillas?
The spread of Old World diseases helped produce a decline in this, making European conquest easier.
What is Indigenous demographic (or population) collapse?
This economic approach encouraged governments to promote commerce and acquire colonies to strengthen the state.
What is mercantilism?
European monarchs used this religious goal both to fulfill a perceived Christian obligation and to justify the subjugation of Indigenous peoples.
What is conversion to Christianity?
This instrument helped sailors estimate latitude using the position of the sun or stars.
What is the astrolabe?
Unlike Spain’s large territorial colonies, Portugal’s African and Asian holdings generally followed this model, centered on coastal forts and strategic sea routes.
What is a trading-post empire?
This term describes the movement of plants, animals, diseases, people, and cultural practices between the hemispheres after 1492.
What is the Columbian Exchange?
Population growth and an expanding money supply, including American silver, contributed to this prolonged period of rising European prices.
What is the Price Revolution?
Completed in Spain with the conquest of Granada in 1492, this centuries-long process helped shape the religious motivations of Iberian overseas expansion.
What is the Reconquista?
This triangular sail helped ships maneuver against unfavorable winds by tacking.
What is the lateen sail?
This Portuguese navigator reached India in 1498 after sailing around Africa.
Who is Vasco da Gama?
This term names the forced Atlantic voyage of enslaved Africans to the Americas.
What is the Middle Passage?
Founded in 1602, this company combined private investment, government privileges, and military force to challenge Portuguese commerce in Asia.
What is the Dutch East India Company (VOC)?