The role of Catholicism in the voyages of Portugal and Spain was twofold:
1. The Catholic faith united the Portuguese and Spanish nations, overthrowing the Muslim Moors, and Catholicism became the state religion;
2. In order to convert the Muslims and other infidels to Catholicism, Portugal and Spain began to spread Catholicism through the voyages.
See the following information for details:
Episode 1: The Age of the Seas
Episode 1: The Age of the Seas
Conquest began with conquest. For more than two thousand years, from the 11th century B.C. to the 11th century A.D., warfare raged on the Iberian Peninsula, a land that was conquered by the Romans, the Germans and the Moors. Just like a bullfighter, the people who lived on this land never stopped fighting against the invaders, and to this day, we can still clearly feel the thrill-seeking, adventurous spirit that seems to be ingrained in their genes.
For more than 2,000 years, tears, pain and sacrifices have been exchanged for precious freedom.
In 1143 A.D., Portugal, an independent monarchy, emerged from the war to recover its territory and was recognized by the Pope as the first united nation-state to emerge on the European continent.
Interview: Portuguese historian J. H. Sarraiva
The 12th and 13th centuries were characterized by the fact that Portugal was not a feudal and divided state, but rather a kingdom of the people, whose king was supported not only by the nobility, that is, his vassals, but also by the people.
The strong kingship gave the Portuguese a strong sense of national belonging, but there was still a long way to go to realize the strength of the country. Portugal has less than 100,000 square kilometers of development space, resources are very scarce, the eastern neighbor of the continuous war, and constantly disturbed by this barren land, after the independence of the Kingdom of Portugal after two centuries, but also is still in crisis, stormy.
How long could this pioneering nation-state last? What will a strong monarchy bring it? Where is the future of the Portuguese nation? People who have always fished close to the sea have to look to the Atlantic Ocean, known as the "Green Sea of Death".
This ship-shaped monument was built by the Portuguese government in 1960 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the death of "Enrique the Navigator", and the front of the monument reads: "Dedicated to Enrique and the heroes of the discovery of the sea route". It was the Maritime Route that lifted Portugal out of poverty and backwardness, and it was under Henrique's leadership that Portugal launched its journey to conquer the sea.
Enrique was born in 1394, the third son of King Jo?o I of Portugal.
At that time, Europe was emerging from the obscurantist Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, which had its beginnings in Italy, was gradually starting a prairie fire, with the ideas of science and humanities illuminating the European sky little by little.
When Prince Enrique was 12 years old, in 1406, the publication of a book that had been dusty for more than 1,200 years sparked a revolution in geographic knowledge and concepts: the Guide to Geography, the work of the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy.
Interview: Jorge Luis Magalhaes, former president of the Portuguese Commission for the Commemoration of the Navigation
The book, like many other works by Greek scholars, was for a time forgotten by the world at the time. In between, in Asia, the book was not forgotten. In Western Europe, on the other hand, it was not noticed in Italy until 1406, and was printed and published from the end of the 15th century before it was more widely circulated.
While Ptolemy's map of the world is riddled with fallacies from today's point of view - for example, Africa and Antarctica are right next to each other, the world is a vast ocean except for Europe, Asia and Africa, and there are no plants or animals living at the equator - at the time, it still provided a lot of more reliable geographic information than the fanciful myths and apocryphal travelogues.
Was the world really the way Ptolemy depicted it? Was the Atlantic really unnavigable? Huge question marks tormented the continent and burned Prince Enrique, who was obsessed with geography and navigational strategy.
Meanwhile, a sudden turn of events brought Portugal back to the forefront of history, and it was these peppercorns, unassuming as they may seem today, that were the protagonists in the prying of history.
Today, even Europeans themselves find it hard to understand how their ancestors came to rely so heavily on the spice!
Interview: Carlos Malamud, researcher at the Royal Spanish Institute for International Strategic Studies
At that time, in the 14th and 15th centuries, the method of preserving food relied mainly on spices, because there were no refrigerators. So there was an urgent need for spices in Europe, and the price of spices reached unprecedented heights in the European market.
But the lucrative spice trade was first monopolized by Arab merchants, and then the trade routes were blocked by the sudden rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Europe was desperate to get out of the mess, and both sacred religion and secular commerce hoped to find strong measures to reverse the situation. After military breakouts on land failed, restless Europeans began to seek a way out at sea.
How could Europeans succeed?
Sagrish, a small fishing village at the southernmost tip of Portugal, remains inhospitable to this day.
According to Portuguese chronicles, in the 15th century, under the auspices of Prince Henrique, it was once home to the first national school of navigation in the history of mankind, and there was once an observatory and a library built for navigation, a lighthouse that was built in the 15th century, and which has weathered the storms and winds of the past for nearly six hundred years and still stands proudly.
Interview: Natalia Correia Guedes, Professor of Religion in Portugal
According to the historical records of the time, and in particular those of the biographer Fernand Lopes, Prince Don Henrique was a very discreet and decisive man, who knew exactly what he needed, and who was good at getting along with the excellent staff he had around him.
There is no way of knowing whether the ancient-looking Prince Enrique was tolerant because he was eloquent, or whether he was eloquent because he was tolerant. Italians, Arabs, Jews, Moors, experts and scholars of different races and even faiths, gathered under his command. They improved the Chinese compass, only equipped with a four-cornered sails of the traditional European ships, transformed into equipped with two or three large triangular sails of the multi-masted fast sailing ships, it is these more than 20 meters long, 60 to 80 tons of triangular sailing ship finally achieved the ambition of the Portuguese explorers; they also set up a committee composed of mathematicians, the theory of mathematics, astronomy applied to the navigation, so that navigation has become a real science. a true science.
Interview: Portuguese historian J. H. Sarraiva
Sailing discoveries were first made in Portugal as a national program, a national program, a program presided over by a prince. This made the great Portuguese maritime discoveries not like those isolated expeditions undertaken by merchants for trade, but a planned and systematically organized mission and strategy over two centuries.
Through more than two decades of theoretical and practical exploration, the original mysterious and daunting Atlantic Ocean gradually revealed some patterns. The Portuguese finally set out south.
Each of the guests to visit Portugal, Cape Roca is the inevitable choice, this is Europe's "end of the world", is the voyage of the sailors of the last memory of the land.
Just as we enter the fall, the cold sea winds are already blowing the tourists can not stand!
For thousands of years, this monolith sticking out into the sea was like a lonely old man, helplessly watching over the rough Atlantic Ocean and the nightmare of Europe. Until the 16th century, Portugal's greatest ever poet Cam?es in the fight against the sea in the journey to create the epic poem "Song of the Portuguese", Cape Roca only swept away the past desolate, lost gloom, a leap and become the fulcrum of the Europeans to open up the new world.
"The land ends here, the sea begins here." (caption)
Day by day, year by year, some returned, some disappeared.
In 1443 A.D., under the command of Prince Enrique, Portuguese navigators from Cape Roca crossed Cape Bojador on the West African coast. Until then, this was the end of the known world.
Prince Henrique and his fleet had been struggling for 21 years for this day.
The Portuguese's two or three sailing ships were minuscule compared to the mixed fleet of China's Zheng He, but with an adventurous nature, a thirst for riches, and a powerful religious zeal, the Portuguese finally broke through the mental and physical limits of medieval European seafaring.
Interview: Luiz Adam da Fonseca, Vice-Rector of the University of Porto, Portugal
As overseas expansion continued, more and more sea areas were reached, and a new understanding of the "great ocean," today's Atlantic Ocean, developed, which used to be thought of as the "great ocean" of the past. "What was once thought to be just a narrow strip of ocean along the coast was now realized to be much larger than they had imagined, extending infinitely to the south and west at the same time.
As the Portuguese made their way south along the west coast of Africa, a steady stream of gold, ivory, and African pepper poured into Lisbon, filling the Portuguese treasury.
Fortunately, in the Portuguese fanfare of ocean exploration and profit from nearly a century, the rest of Europe is still in the closed medieval struggle:
England and France has not yet formed a unified nation-state, the war between the aristocrats;
Germany on the land of the large and small hundreds of states in the far-from-nowhere game;
German land in the games;
Italian city-states were enjoying the last good times brought about by traditional trade;
and Portugal's neighbor, Spain, was still fighting to regain its land.
By 1460, the west coast of Africa, mapped by Portugal, had reached 4,000 kilometers. It was in this year that Enrique died, and the lifelong unmarried saint who had spent 45 years in Sagrish asceticism returned to his parents.
While Enrico never sailed in his life, he deserves the title of "navigator" because all the great discoveries of European navigation began with the voyages he organized and carried out throughout his life.
July 1487 AD, 27 years after the death of Enrique, King Jo?o II, the successor of the Portuguese navigation business, sent Diaz with three sailing ships to continue along the Atlantic Ocean south.
Six months after the voyage, the fleet suddenly encountered a rare storm, in the storm wrapped, passive to the southeast drifting 13 days and nights, Diaz ordered the fleet to turn north, then, he accidentally found: the fleet has rounded the southernmost tip of Africa. In honor of this legendary experience, Diaz named the cape "Cape Storm".
But Jo?o II solemnly changed the name to the Cape of Good Hope. Now, with a little more effort, the Portuguese could reach the coveted Orient. The routes were about to be opened, and the spice trade, which meant wealth, would soon be in Portuguese hands.
However, it was at this time that Portugal encountered a formidable opponent, the newly unified neighboring Spain. So what would the Spanish compete with Portugal on?
Granada is the most Islamic city in Spain today, and the Alhambra, a classic of Islamic architecture, is still elegant and dignified after centuries of fire and military suffering.
It was here that the final battle of the Spanish Restoration Movement was fought more than 500 years ago, when in the spring of 1490, Spain's Queen Isabel besieged Granada with an army of 100,000 men.
Interview: Spanish military historian Julio Pe?aranda Alvar
The rebuilding of the Kingdom of Spain owes much to the war to recover the lost territories, which lasted for eight full centuries. By the 15th century, the Kingdom of Granada was under the rule of the Moors, Muslim followers.
In this stone castle opposite Granada, Queen Isabel herself supervised the battle. The queen, who was usually white and bathed and dressed four times a day, had stunned European royalty with her beauty. But this time she swore an oath: she would not take off her robe until she had captured Granada.
On January 2, 1492, the Moors abandoned the city and surrendered to a fierce attack by Spanish troops. The eight-century-long war was over. Queen Isabel kissed the soil of Granada and entered the Alhambra with her husband, King Fernande.
And just as the unification of Spain was being completed, history sent Spain a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Among the procession that entered Granada with the queen was a Genoese man waiting to be summoned by the queen, the man who would become famous as Christopher Columbus.
From the doctrine of the earth's circle, which was already widespread at the time, Columbus got the idea that he could reach the east even by going west. Columbus believed that his voyage program could soon bring Europeans to the East, but for the previous six years, Columbus had suffered a cold reception in Portugal.
Interview: vice-president of the Gutiérrez-Meliado Institute in Spain
Fernande Américo Guervo Arango
Jo?o II did not accept Columbus's advice because Portugal's seafaring strategy was mainly to cross the Cape of Good Hope, pass through Africa and then eastward, seeking new shipping routes to reach Asia so that it could trade with India.
Portuguese experts with extensive knowledge of navigation believed that the actual distance traveled west to reach the Orient would far exceed Columbus's prediction. But it was this correct judgment of the Portuguese experts that cost the Kingdom of Portugal a historic opportunity.
In January 1492, Queen Isabel, who had just completed her unification, summoned Columbus for the third time.
Portugal's rapid rise by sea power made the whole of Europe red with envy, but the lack of financial, material and human resources deterred all the kings, nobles and merchants. The ambitious Queen Isabel, who had spent 23 years creating a united Spain, now set out to become the chief patron of Spanish oceanic exploration.
Interview: Sonia Alda Mejías, professor at the Gutiérrez Meliado Institute in Spain
Only a united country would have had the strength and determination to finance such a great voyage as Columbus', which was a great demonstration of the strength and determination of the European feudal powers of the time.
The negotiations between Columbus and the Spanish crown went on for three months.
Born into a family of cloth merchants, Columbus had been exposed to the commercial practice of haggling since he was a child, and his eight years of sailing in Portugal gave him a reason to raise the price, which Columbus justifiably sought to secure for himself.
And the queen didn't see anything wrong with sitting down with a commoner to discuss the distribution of benefits.
Interview: Carlos Martínez Shaw, professor at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Spain
The occupation of the colonies was done by the explorers, but it was based on contracts and treaties with the Crown, as if it were a chorus in which the leader was the lead singer, and the colonies that were given to them were colonized by the explorers but the sovereignty of the colonies belonged to the Crown.
An agreement was signed on April 17, 1492, and the will of the nation and the wishes of the navigators were finally united.
Columbus was appointed commander-in-chief of the discovery, and was to receive one-tenth of all the wealth and merchandise derived from the discovery, free of all taxes; and for subsequent ships sailing to this possession, Columbus was to receive one-eighth of their profits.
On August 3, with a warrant of appointment as Grand Marshal of the Navy from the Queen, Columbus mounted the deck and gave orders to sail to the three sailing ships that the Queen had financed him with.
Westward. And west again. The schooners sailed into the bowels of the Atlantic.
To reduce the crew's fear of being too far from land, Columbus secretly adjusted his tallying tools to understate the number of miles sailed each day. But even so, after two months, the flotilla, which had come to nothing, was still on the verge of collapse.
On Oct. 10, a restless and enraged crew claimed that continuing westward would lead to rebellion. After a heated argument, Columbus proposed that the fleet return after three more days of travel, if there was no land in sight after three days.
Interview: Carlos Martinez Shaw, lead professor at Spain's National University of Distance Learning
He was undoubtedly very wise to do so, for only three days after this disturbance, the sailors who had opposed him shouted from the mast, "Land!" The date was October 12, 1492.
Heroes were born at this moment!
The land that Columbus and his crew saw was the Bahamas, which today lie in North America, and from that day on, the severed world began to connect.
While Columbus believed to his dying day that he had reached India, in fact he had reached neither China nor India, but a new continent that Europeans had never known.
Because of Columbus's miscalculation, the natives of this land were given a name that had nothing to do with them -- the Indians -- and to this day we feel as if they were distant relatives in Asia.
The year Columbus set out, the earliest globe ever made was completed, and on this globe, the American continent was still a sea.
News of the Spanish success shook all of Europe. That day - Oct. 12 - was later designated as Spain's national day.
The welcome was enthusiastic, Queen Isabel made good on all the material and moral rewards she had promised Columbus, and Columbus, surrounded by six Indians, waved a colorful parrot in the air.
But it was not Queen Isabel of Spain who first saw Columbus' triumph, but King Jo?o II of Portugal, who had rejected him, and who first arrived in Lisbon on his return voyage, where he was received by Jo?o II.
Jo?o II, half-convinced, brought a bowl of dried beans and asked the Indians Columbus brought with him to lay out the New World on a table. This geography game later left him secretly beating his chest, "O short-sighted man, why did I let such an important event slip by?"
All is irrevocably lost, the unknown world has only just surfaced at sea level, and the competition is already before two neighboring seafaring powers - who will have the right to discover the world of the future?
Interview: Portuguese historian J. H. Sarraiva
In those days, theories about the sea held that it was not open, and it was believed that the sea belonged to its discoverer, which was undoubtedly the Portuguese.
After nearly a year of negotiations, on June 7, 1494, under the auspices of the Pope, Portugal and Spain signed a treaty in this small town outside Lisbon: to draw a line on the earth and cut it in half like a watermelon. Portugal took the East, and Spain took the Americas in its arms.
The oil painting of the time shows that the bargaining was intense, but in fact the precise calculations don't make much sense, because neither the Portuguese nor the Spanish had just had a little contact with the continents beyond Europe, and no one yet knew exactly how big the planet was.
Interview: Isidro Sepulveda Mu?oz, President of the Instituto Gutiérrez-Meliado, Spain
The significance of this treaty in Western civilization was that it set a precedent for the great powers to divide up the colonies, a trend that would later culminate in the Treaty of Berlin, where the nations of Europe sat down together to divide up all of the world's places, both known and unknown, and to create the The present-day world pattern took shape. We can say that the beginning of the global expansion of the western world began with this treaty.
The rules of the game were set, and it was a matter of who could move faster.
In May 1498, after four years of life-and-death trials, a fleet of ships led by Portuguese navigator da Gama finally arrived at the Indian port of Calicut, the very place where Zheng He had demonstrated the heavenly virtues when he sailed to the West seventy years earlier.
Unlike Zheng He, the Portuguese brought more than friendly greetings this time; when asked by the Indians the purpose of their arrival, da Gama replied curtly, "Christians, spices." This is exactly the purpose that Portugal has been diligently seeking, and after nearly a century of difficult exploration, Prince Enrique's wish finally became a reality, and the accumulation of decades of knowledge and courage by European navigators began to be transformed into dazzling wealth.
Faced with Portugal's success in the East, Spain set out again.
On September 20, 1519, Magellan, another navigator left out in the cold by Portugal, set off with five ships and 265 crew members on the first voyage around the globe in human history.
It was undoubtedly an epochal feat, comparable in significance even to man's leaving the Earth to reach the moon, the difference being that when American astronaut Neil Armstrong took that step cautiously, he knew that at least seven hundred million people around the world were cheering him on.
But Magellan 450 years ago was not so lucky. After 1,080 days and nights and 17,000 kilometers of sailing, it was in this magnificent church on Sept. 5, 1521, that 18 survivors of the circumnavigation of the globe held lit candles in their hands and prayed for the brave men and women who had died on the great voyage of epic proportions, including their ship's captain, Magellan, who was killed in the Philippines.
The light of the 18 candles was so faint, but it illuminated the course of human civilization!
What now unfolded before the eyes of Western Europeans was no longer a quarter of a hemisphere, but the whole earth.
The earth spun fast, cartographers toiled night and day and still could not satisfy the demand for revised maps, which were taken when wet and uncolored, and the new routes opened up by the navigators became Europe's chains of control over the world.
Under the fierce attack of strong ships and cannons, one after another strategic points of maritime transportation became the possession of Portugal, it is using more than 50 strongholds from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, Portugal monopolized half of the world's merchant shipping routes. In the first five years of the early 16th century, Portugal's spice trade from 220,000 pounds rose rapidly to 2.3 million pounds, becoming the first power of maritime trade at the time.
In contrast to Portugal's gains in the East, Spain's plundering of the American continent was more direct.
According to statistics, from 1502 to 1660, Spain got 18,600 tons of registered silver and 200 tons of registered gold from the Americas, and by the end of the 16th century, 83% of the world's total gold and silver production was occupied by Spain.
Along with European expansion came the lament of the two great centers of civilization in the Americas. By 1570, war massacres and epidemics from Europe had reduced the population of the Mexican region from 25 million to 2.65 million, and that of Peru from 9 million to 1.3 million. The continent's native Indians have declined dramatically by 90 percent since then.
Interview: professor Antonio Manuel Espa?a Ousimen, University of Nova Lisboa, Portugal
When the royal houses of Portugal and Spain united, it was during the reigns of either Philip I of Portugal or Philip II of Spain, and it is said that the sun never set on the kingdom of Philip, because the Portuguese and Spanish kings reached the whole world , from Mexico to the Philippines, China, India and Africa.
In Europe, Spain ruled nearly half of the Catholic world; in Asia, it conquered the Philippines; and the Americas, with the exception of Brazil, were owned by Spain. Portugal's colonies spread over Africa, Brazil, and the islands of the Atlantic Rim and Indian Ocean routes.
Will the mythical miracle of the Iberian Peninsula come and go like the mythological stories that see no end, and are indistinct?
This is the only square in Madrid that bears the name of a country, and a monument to Cervantes, the writer and pride of Spain, stands in the center, where everyone who approaches Cervantes can't help but touch Don Quixote on his skinny horse and his servant Sancho, who is right behind him.
Interview: Isidro Sepúlveda Mu?oz, President of the Instituto Gutiérrez Meliado, Spain
Cervantes published many books during his lifetime, and his plays were a big hit at the time, but he lived in poverty in his old age, and none of the great men he knew gave him enough to live on, to the point that he died still very poor. .
The fate of Cervantes reflects, consciously or unconsciously, the rise and fall of the Iberian Peninsula.
Backed by powerful kings and fervent religious beliefs, the Iberian Peninsula conquered the seas and gained the world. But the wealth that came in like a tidal wave was used almost exclusively to prop up wars fought for religious beliefs and for colonial expansion, and not for the development of commerce and industry that could truly enrich the country. The powerful princes and nobles did not want to see the development of industry and commerce lead to the rise of new powers, and they even absurdly drove tens of thousands of foreigners engaged in industry and commerce, away from their own land.
Interview: Carlos Martínez Shaw, professor at Spain's National University of Distance Learning
Spain grew accustomed to not investing in its own industry, but instead turned to buying expensive goods from abroad, and as time went on, domestic industry shrank, while the currency depreciated sharply, and people were still addicted to consumption.
Interview: Jorge Luis Magalhaes, former President of the Portuguese Nautical Memorial Commission
We know that it is very possible for an institution to "die" because of its inability to make changes. I also know that this was the case during the colonial expansion of Portugal and Spain, where the inability to make changes led to their demise.
The sun is setting slowly at Cabo da Roca, the last of the European continent.
By the second half of the 16th century, the Iberian Peninsula, once home to untold amounts of gold and silver and an immensely powerful state apparatus, was beginning to take its curtain call in a world show. The wealth that had flowed in like water flowed away again like water, leaving no decent industry, nor did the common people even acquire decent clothing, food, shelter, or transportation, except for a lavish social climate.
Perhaps Don Quixote, who indulged in the dream of medieval heroes, did not understand till his death that his shield covered an old world, and his spear pierced a new one, whose end could only be the ever-repeating helplessness and failure!
The first great drama on the stage of world history came to a tragic end. In the next scene, which country, clad in the haze of the new world, will appear on the stage