We often speak of America as “unknown,” except to its own inhabitants, in the Middle Ages. But so, in a sense, was Europe, which hardly figured on the maps and in the calculations of the immensely richer, more populous, and technologically more advanced civilizations of maritime Asia. Some Europeans tried to make their fortunes as peddlers along the teeming trade routes of the Indian Ocean, but, in general, Christendom could look to the Orient only in covetousness or despair. Increasingly, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some communities along Europe’s western edge—mainly in Portugal and Spain, but also, to a lesser extent, in France, England, the Netherlands, and Denmark, turned to exploration of the Atlantic in a search for resourcesMore »
