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Learn how the Portuguese sought to access commodities such as fabrics, spices, and gold, and how they dominated world trade for nearly 200 years. Explore their relationship with African societies, their technological and cultural advantages, and their role in the slave trade.
The documents show how the Portuguese tried to understand the societies with which they came into contact, and to reconcile their experience with the myths and legends inher-ited from classical and medieval learning.
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- Overview
- The Crusades: increased religious intolerance and forceful religious conversion
- The lure of gold: finding new routes to trade Eastern goods
- A thirst for glory: European competition for global dominance
- What do you think?
God, gold, and glory motivated European nations to explore and create colonies in the New World.
The year 622 brought a new challenge to Christianity. Near Mecca, Saudi Arabia, a prophet named Muhammad claimed he received a revelation that became a cornerstone of the Islamic faith. The Koran, which contained the revelations received by Muhammad, identified Jesus Christ not as God but as a prophet. Islam spread throughout the Middle East and into Europe until 732.
Soon thereafter, European Christians began the Crusades, a campaign of violence against Muslims to dominate the Holy Lands—an area that extended from modern-day Turkey in the north along the Mediterranean coast to the Sinai Peninsula—under Islamic control, partially in response to sustained Muslim control in Europe. The city of Jerusalem is a holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims; evidence exists that the three religions lived there in harmony for centuries. But in 1095, European Christians decided not only to reclaim the holy city from Muslim rulers but also to conquer the entire surrounding area.
Despite the consequent religious polarization, the Crusades dramatically increased maritime trade between the East and West. As Crusaders experienced the feel of silk, the taste of spices, and the utility of porcelain, desire for these products created new markets for merchants.
Merchants’ ships brought Europeans valuable goods, traveling between the port cities of western Europe and the East from the 10th century on along routes collectively labeled the Silk Road. However, transporting goods along the Silk Road was costly, slow, and unprofitable. Muslim middlemen collected taxes as the goods changed hands. Robbers waited to ambush treasure-laden caravans.
Competition between the Portuguese and the Spanish motivated both nations to colonize quickly and aggressively. Prince Henry the Navigator spearheaded Portugal’s exploration of Africa and the Atlantic in the 1400s. Portuguese sailors successfully navigated an eastward route to West Africa, where they established a trading foothold. Portugal then spread its empire down the western coast of Africa to the Congo, along the western coast of India, and eventually to Brazil and the Atlantic islands. Although the Portuguese did not rule over an immense landmass, their strategic holdings of islands and coastal ports gave them almost unrivaled control of nautical trade routes.
The travels of Portuguese traders to western Africa also acquainted the Portuguese with the African slave trade, already widely in practice in West Africa and funded by sugar production on the newly colonized Atlantic islands. Upon discovering the immense global market for sugar, the Portuguese began to trade enslaved people across the Atlantic to toil on the sugar plantations. The Portuguese fort Elmina Castle, located in modern-day Ghana, became more of a holding pen for enslaved Africans from the interior of the continent than a trading post, as the markets for slave labor in both Europe and then the New World boomed.
How did the Crusades influence European colonization projects?
Explain the relationship between religion, commerce, and conquest at the beginning of European exploration and colonization.
Imagine you are a European explorer in the 1400s. Do you think you would be most motivated by religious conversion, global market opportunities, or competition with other European nations? Why?
[Notes and attributions]
Father Teod ó sio da Veiga was the one who initiated regular mission establishments as far as Aiurim on the Rio Negro (1668 – 69). Difficulties with the Trinitarians, which impeded their expansion in Portugal in the 17th and 18th centuries, limited their recruitment of personnel for Brazil.
1 de jan. de 2009 · Abstract. This study looks at some of the works produced by Catholic missionaries in Africa from the pre-dawn of the Modern Era (Fall of Constantinople, 1453), in particular the Fall of Ceuta ...
By focusing on the role of the local elites in the build-up to Portuguese rule (it took almost a century after the first contact of 1506 for the Portuguese crown to devise a plan to conquer the island), I am not attempting to neutralize Portugal’s historical responsibility for atrocities committed against people and patrimony in Sri Lanka.
1 de jan. de 2004 · This artocle focusses on the religious encounter between Portuguese missionaries and the African societies in Southern Africa. It is argued that the crusading mentality embedded in mediaeval ...
