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In 1492, as Christopher Columbus
regaled the Spanish court with tales of
primitive islands brimming with gold
and, as he said in his original letter to the king,
inhabitants who “might conceive affection for
usand, more than that, become Christians,”
he had no idea that the world he had stum-
bled across in his quest to reach Asia was as
complex as the continent from which he had
set forth. The societies of the Western Hemi-
sphere were as varied as the highly structured
Aztec Empire Hernán Cortés would soon find
dominating Mexico and the primitive tribes
with whom Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
would soon wander naked along the Texas
coast. The peaceful Taino people who greeted
Columbus had little knowledge of weaponry,
while the powerful Inca empire of Peru—
larger than the empire of Spain—would soon
be shaken by a civil war as bloody as the dev-
astating European feudal and religious con-
flicts of the same era. Although the Maya
culture of Central America had passed its
prime, the Maya’s mathematical genius and
architectural achievements rivaled those of
any world culture.
EUROPEANS TAKE
TO THE SEA
While Columbus was wrong to assume that he
had discovered an uncomplicated paradise, at
that moment in world history a combination
of politics, religion, and technology increased
the chance that ships flying flags of Spanish
royalty would be the first to open a busy route
between Europe and the Americas.
The Vikings had come to North America in
the 11th century, but their primary mission
was not exploration, their contact with Native
peoples of the Americas had no impact, and
the fact that they had been to the Americas
was not known beyond their homelands (for
full coverage of this, see the Exploration in the
World of the Middle Agesvolume).
In 1492 no other region of the world was as
actively engaged in exploration by sea as were
the powers along Europe’s Mediterranean
coast. China, whose skilled mariners and
sturdy ships had journeyed to Arabia and the
coast of East Africa, had withdrawn from long-
distance voyaging by imperial order in the
early 1400s. Arab mariners had settled into a10
The World in 1492
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