The turn of the 1500s was an absolutely wild time for the cartography industry, and, of course,
also the sailing industry, food import business, aspiring Empire-Builders, and basically anything
that stood to profit from the realization that there was about twice as much globe as previously
imagined. Sure, people had known the world was round for literally millennia, but what shocked
them was learning there was stuff over there. Between the fully-accidental discovery of a
(nominally) “new” continent and the realization that one could bypass Ottoman toll-booths by
taking the scenic route to India, the world suddenly became very much larger but also vastly
more accessible. There is plenty to be said about the Conquistadorks and all the transcontinental
trade routes that got going in the 1500s, but my goal today is to rewind to where the
Age of Exploration started, and look at how the kingdoms of Iberia laid the groundwork for this
worldwide wayfaring by bopping around in their Atlantic backyards. SO, to see how the Azores,
Madeira, & Canaries launched Spain and Portugal into worldwide power, Let’s do some History!
Okay so I know I just said “Spain” like literally six seconds ago, but that’s not actually correct.
In the 1400s Iberia was home to four separate states: the Christian Kingdoms of Portugal,
Castile, and Aragon, with the Muslim Emirate of Granada at the southern tip of the peninsula.
And this was all a fairly recent development, because most of the Medieval period had it the
other way around, with powerful and prosperous Muslim states in Al-Andalus presiding over an
ethnically-diverse and multireligious society during the Golden Age of Islam. That’s a lot of
fancy words to basically say “It was cool” but, I mean, yeah, it was VERY cool. And even their
Christian adversaries recognized that. Despite fighting centuries of wars against the Muslim
states to conquer the peninsula, they borrowed heavily from the culture and scholarship of their
newly-incorporated domains. Al-Andalus was part of a vast, transcontinental society that shared
notes on topics like astronomy, cartography, and navigation, which would become invaluable
to Iberia’s new Christian landlords. But while Aragon, Castile, and Portugal were rich in the
culture and smartbois they inherited, they burned a lot of money on armies to get to that point,
and as a result they were in the doubly-unpleasant position of being
isolated at the southwest edge of the Christian world and quite handily cashflow-negative.
So with Mediterranean trade routes bottlenecked by Venetian, Ottoman, & Mamluk middlemen, the
Iberians had to get a little creative. Although Castile might have looked to be in the strongest
spot, with coastlines on both seas and by far the biggest land to draw from, they were spread pretty
thin, and had three actively-hostile frontiers to deal with. Aragon was arguably better-situated,
with mountains guarding the land and a wide open coast that reached out to their chain
of islands. They still had to suffer exorbitant Venetian markups if they wanted anything from
beyond Sicily, but hey, half the Mediterranean is not bad. Then there’s Portugal, who, on paper,
really didn’t come out of the Reconquista so hot, but, they turned this objectively
suboptimal situation to their advantage by working with what they had. In this case, the Atlantic.
Several different factors worked together to draw Portugal out to sea. In typical Renaissance
and Medieval Muslim fashion, they saw scientific inquiry and natural exploration as a celebration
of God’s world, and with so many secondhand accounts of magnificent lands just beyond the
straits of Gibraltar, it was an easy sell. But this high-minded curiosity paired with a hefty
Christian zeal to Convert And Conquer which came pre-packaged in a history of multicentury
crusading. All of these traits were embodied in one Prince Henry “The Navigator”, younger brother
to King Edward, and the architect of Portugal’s naval power. His epithet is a little erroneous
since he personally never sailed out of line of sight of Iberia, BUT, his generous patronage of
maritime R&D gave Portuguese sailors the tools, ships, and skills to succeed out in the ocean.
Henry was able to do this in part because he was a royal but also because he was the GrandMaster of
the Order of Christ, which, you may wish to note, Is Literally The Templars. The original group was
abolished by the Pope and some fire in 1312, but in 1319 Portugal’s King Denis reconstituted them
as The Order of Christ, to thank the knights who helped in the Reconquista. So Henry had the
additional motive of taking the Crusade across the straits of Gibraltar, to campaign against
Islam in Morocco and beyond. Specifically, he wanted to investigate Africa to find the mythical
kingdom of Prester John, with whom he hoped to, I guess, outflank the Muslims? and, eh—look, Prester
John is one of those things that’s everything and nothing at once, and the mystique of “A Long-Lost
Christian Kingdom Beyond The Muslim World” is vague enough to let anything be Prester John
if you cherry-pick and squint. It’s Portugal’s version of the El Dorado goose-chase except if you
drop the fantasy parts then it does actually exist and It’s Just Called Ethiopia! *Sigh* My friends,
I have gone off-topic. Let us correct this error by jumping into the ocean.
SO, Portugal’s first foray was local, capturing the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415,
but soon Portugal found the island of Madeira and discovered the Azores archipelago. Rediscovered is
probably a better word, because medieval maps did feature island chains approximating the Azores,
so there’s the non-zero chance that Scandinavian and/or Andalusian and/or Genoese sailors had
spotted them first. As far as Portugal was concerned: nobody lived there — it’s free real
estate. Early settlement began in the 20s and 30s, but colonization ramped up substantially
in the middle of the century. More than being some neat little spots of land to claim, Madeira
and the Azores soon revealed their usefulness as waystations to the rest of the Atlantic, and for
growing cash crops, once they had a large enough labor-force. Portugal wasted absolutely zero time
in writing the gut-punchingly grotesque playbook of colonization: importing slaves from the west
coast of Africa to irrigate, farm, harvest, and refine sugarcane. It took a couple decades
for Portugal to realize what exactly the Islands could be used for, but once they did, Oh Boy. The
crucial piece of this profit-puzzle was definitely the slaves, because it’s only after Portugal
sailed down the African coast and bought slaves that they could suddenly staff all these colonies.
Portugal’s interest in exploring Africa started from their rivalry with Morocco and grew into a
desire to visit the lands of legendarily rich kings like Mansa Musa. And, as they might have
hoped, Portugal found itself very much the junior trading partner of the Mali empire. At first,
Portugal actually had a hard time getting Malian merchants to buy any of their junk. But even what
little they could take back was worth a lot more in Europe, and soon Portuguese traders were able
to do more substantive business and, of course, export more slaves. On the African side of things,
Portugal pushed ever-further southwards, taking Cape Verde in 1458 and reaching all
the way down to Namibia by 1486. As they built a chain of coastal and island forts,
they cut what on its own was an impossibly-long continental journey down into a series of small,
easy hops. Just two years later, in 1488, sailors rounded what they called “The Cape of Storms” and
made it to east Africa, which opened up to the Indian Ocean. The King was so delighted
that he renamed it the “Cape of Good Hope” to make the prospect of More Countless Riches For
Crown & Country look less like Certain Doom to the sailors who would actually be going there.
Back on the Atlantic side of things, the island colonies were farming so aggressively they nearly
destroyed their ecosystems, knocking the colonists back down to subsistence farming because the soil
was nutritionally broke. Luckily, they were still invaluable waystations to the African coast and,
after 1500, to Brazil. See, the sailors had figured out it was easier to pass the Cape
of, eh, Storms, if they sailed out west to catch the South Atlantic Wind Current, which
would comfortably carry them east across the cape. But as it happened, one ship’s journey slightly
too far west revealed a shiny new landmass that would be perfect for more exploitative
agriculture. Keen to replicate past successes on the Azores and Madeira without dallying on pesky
roadblocks like the environment AND SLAVERY, Brazil earned Portugal quite a pretty penny,
and the Atlantic Islands were both the springboard and the prototype that made it possible.
So with Portugal’s oceanic avenues wide open and money pouring in, let’s rewind slightly to see how
Castile was handling their Atlantic frontier in the 1400s. As it happens, slowly. Like we
said at the start, Castile had enough problems to handle just in Iberia, so aquatic exploration got
bumped down the To-Do list. Castile did send an expedition to the Canary Islands off the coast of
Morocco in 1402, but they delegated the job to some French Nobles. The colonized islands were
technically under the Crown of Castile, but in reality, they were private operations. Portugal
tried to muscle in on a few occasions without making and real progress, but no one could lay a
strong hold on all islands because the Canaries, unlike the Azores and Madeira, were inhabited.
Being rather close to the continent, these islands had been lived on for thousands of years, with
records tracing back to Rome, Numidia, Greece, and Carthage. Even in the medieval period, explorers
from North Africa, Iberia, and Italy had visited these islands and traded with their indigenous
Guanche people. Castile was just the first state to actually try and take it. This century-long
process rapidly accelerated after 1479, when king Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile
combined their domains into the new Kingdom of Spain. So, suddenly, the Crown had more resources
on hand and fewer problems to throw them at. That was good news for their conquest of the Canaries,
and also bad news for the native Guanches. Let’s not be surprised that Spain is a co-founder of the
Gross Colonial Conduct Club. So the crown spent the next two decades conquering the canaries,
and in 1492, they finally subdued their longtime rivals in Granada to complete their Reconquista.
With Iberia done, they set about catching up to Portugal’s maritime lead, and later that year they
sponsored the accidentally-world-changing voyage of the notorious Crisco Clambo,
who took a stopover in the Canaries on his way to find The Indies — nothing else, because if it
wasn’t The Indies that would mean his math was way off, and that would make him a doofus, which he
super definitely wasn’t. Sooo, must’ve just been the Indies guys, I don’t know what to tell you.
Anyway, I know you know the rest of that escapade, so let’s wrap our story here.
Despite the unassuming size of the Canaries, Azores, and Madeira, they played an outsized
role in launching Spain and Portugal from humble beginnings into imperial stardom.
They started the 1400s poor and isolated but wound up set to rule the damn world. In 1493,
a Papal treaty officially split the globe into The Spain Half and The Portugal Half. Of course,
as swiftly as they yoinked the world, they’d eventually lose it too. More
nations joined the contest in the 16 and 1700s, and bigger ships could just bypass the islands;
so even before the Spanish and Portuguese empires declined, the islands languished as backwaters.
That is, until certain 20th century events that I am woefully unqualified to explain. Still,
what I find most remarkable about this first chapter in long-distance seafaring is how
swiftly Spain and Portugal wrote the colonial playbook that other European empires would
follow — using coastal forts and island bases to break up long trips, cultivating cash-crops
with imported slave labor, and enslaving or destroying native populations, gang’s
all here in the 1400s. Quick, no one tell Spain what platinum looks like, it’ll be hilarious.
Thank you so much for watching! Leave it to me to tackle a period in history that’s strongly
associated with one very specific person and then fully refuse to even mention him by name.
Enough people have dunked on ol’ crisco clambo that I wouldn’t be adding anything new, so I
enjoyed taking a much more structural look at early Atlantic exploration. As always,
huge thanks to our patrons for supporting our channel, and I will see you all in the next video.