From the Maghgreb to the Moluccas, 1415-1521

The great Portuguese jesuit, Padre Antonio Vieira, whose life roughly coincided with the seventeenth century, proudly boasted that the history of the Portuguese discoveries and conquests had silenced all other forms of story-telling in the world of Renaissance Europe. This was a palpable exaggeration; but his simultaneous claim that the Portuguese, with their discoveries of new seas, new lands and new peoples, had revealed the extent of the World for the first time to its own inhabitants was true enough.

True enough, that is, if we include the parallel achievements of the Spaniards as pioneers of the overseas expansion of Europe. For taken in conjunction, the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery form one of the watersheds of History, comparable to the twentieth-century conquest of Space. Only after the Portuguese had rounded the southernmost tip of Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean and reached the Spice Islands of Indonesia, and the Spaniards had attained the same goal a few years later by way of Patagonia and the Pacific, could mankind become fully conscious of its relative unity and diversity.