521 Oiitlvics of Europeafi History The dis- coveries of the Portu- guese in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries The spice trade About the year 13 18 Venice and Genoa opened up direct communication by sea with the towns of the Netherlands. Their fleets, which touched at the port of Lisbon, aroused the commercial enterprise of the Portuguese, who soon began to undertake extended maritime expeditions. By the middle of the fourteenth century they had discovered the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. Before this time no one had ven- tured along the coast of Africa beyond the arid region of Sahara. The country was forbidding, there were no ports, and mariners were, moreover, discouraged by the general belief that the torrid region was uninhabitable. In 1445, however, some adventurous sailors came within sight of a headland beyond the desert and, struck by its luxuriant growth' of tropical trees, they called it Cape Verde (the green cape). Its discovery put an end once for all to the idea that there w^ere only parched deserts to the south. For a generation longer the Portuguese continued to venture farther and farther along the coast, in the hope of finding it coming to an end, so that they might make their way by sea to India. At last, in i486, Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Twelve years later (1498) Vasco da Gama, spurred on by Columbus's great discovery, after sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and northward beyond Zanzibar, aided by an Arab pilot, steered straight across the Indian Ocean and reached Calicut, in Hindustan, by sea. Vasco da Gama and his fellow adventurers were looked upon with natural suspicion by the Mohammedan spice merchants, who knew very well that their object was to establish direct trade between the Spice Islands (Moluccas) and western Europe. Hitherto the Mohammedans had had the monopoly of the spice trade between the Moluccas and the eastern ports of the Med- iterranean, where the products were handed over to Italian mer- chants. The Mohammedans were unable, however, to prevent the Portuguese from concluding treaties with the Indian princes and establishing trading stations at Goa and elsewhere. In 1 5 1 2
