Christopher Columbus discovered America
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Christopher Columbus was probably not the first to reach the shores of the American continent. There are documents and archaeological evidence that the Vikings had already arrived in North America centuries earlier.
When the Eastern Roman Empire fell in 1453, the Ottoman Empire took control of trade to the Indies, which was the name by which the Asian continent was known at the time.
A royal missionFollowing his father’s trading tradition, Columbus traveled to different countries. He learned classical languages (which enabled him to read ancient treatises in Greek and Latin) and studied geography.
Columbus thought that, if the Earth was spherical, he could reach Asia by sailing eastward. What he didn’t count on was that his calculations were incorrect: the Earth was much larger than he had predicted… and there was a whole new continent in between.
The new continent was named after another Italian explorer: Amerigo Vespuccio, who took part in several expeditions to America in the early 16th century. In his diaries, Vespuccio already wrote that these lands were not the Indies, but part of a new continent between Europe and Asia.
Discovery of America
The remaining theories of pre-Columbian contacts are highly speculative, and lack scientific consensus.[29][30] There has been speculation about a possible African origin of the Olmec people,[31][32] a hypothesis of racist origin[33][34] based on the supposed “negroid” features of some Olmec sculptures,[33] and later embraced by certain Afrocentrist currents. [35] Genetic evidence has shown that Olmec populations are not related to African populations,[36] and the supposed anthropological evidence has been described as based on “superficial judgments and erroneous conclusions. “[37] There has also been speculation of pre-Columbian contacts by Chinese,[38][39] Japanese,[40][41] Indian,[42] Phoenician,[43] Egyptian,[44] Roman,[45] Celtic,[46] Jewish,[47] Arab [48][49] navigators or explorers,[50] and African travelers from the Mali empire. None of these hypotheses has a scientific consensus, and they are usually considered as pseudo-archaeology and pseudo-history.[29][30]
October 12, 1492 discovery of america summary
Reconstruction of the itinerary of the first of the four voyages Columbus made to America, because the Indies were on the right but Columbus went the other way based on the data in the Diary attributed to Columbus.
Asia was the silk route. The most coveted product from Asia in the West was spices, for use in cooking, and they were extremely expensive. Christopher Columbus owned a copy of Marco Polo’s Voyages and had it full of annotations, especially the part about distances, products and riches of Asia.[2] However, cartographic knowledge about the Orient was extremely incomplete and some maps only reliably identified the Mediterranean area.[2] In the 15th century European cuisine consumed saffron, ginger, cinnamon and cloves. A pound of these products was sold in the Renaissance for several gold pesos.[3] The Asian islands were rich in saffron, ginger, cinnamon and cloves.
The Asian islands were rich in valuable spices needed by Europe, such as cloves and nutmeg, which were obtained from the Moluccas in the South Sea. The way to the Indies was a westward route through the European continent and then through the Middle East to India or China. The Ottoman Turks were gaining strength in Constantinople, and the greater their power in the Middle East, the more difficult and expensive it was to bring in Oriental products.[2] The Ottoman Turks were also becoming strong in Constantinople.
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Christopher Columbus never achieved his goal: to reach Asia through the route he did find and trade with its products. In the capitulations of Santa Fe he agreed with the Catholic Monarchs the benefits he would obtain from this trade as well as from the lands he discovered on his way to Asia.
They arrived at the height of Fort Navidad on November 27 and what was their surprise when they found out that it had been destroyed and burned and all its inhabitants killed. The Carib natives had attacked and killed them, leaving none alive. Terror gripped the entire expedition. Columbus had said that the natives of the island were peaceful and very docile and this proved the opposite. The colonists began to distrust Columbus. If he had lied to them about something like this, what other lies would he have told in Castile? This fact radically overturned Columbus’ plans because he was counting on the sailors to have found more riches, to have established relations with the natives and to have set up and built a good base where the new expeditionaries could be accommodated. But all this came to nothing. They had nothing, not even a place to colonize and settle.