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. Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXFcGj_CsmY
