of gold, a real need in Europe, slaves, and the legendary wealth of Africa, so far exploited only through middlemen on the North African coast. Religious motives were also important; the desire to convert pagans, to find out how far Muslim power extended, and perhaps to make contact with the legendary Christian king of the east, Prester John (as late as 1497 Vasco da Gama, on his epoch-making voyage to India round the Cape of Good Hope, took with him a letter to Prester John). There has been endless debate about which of these motives predominated, and the extent to which Prince Henry-- 'the Navigator'--the alleged intellectual mastermind of the Portuguese expansion, deserves any credit for it. But it seems that it was the amalgam of these motives that won royal support for such enterprises, at least initially; economic and religious arguments make a strong combination. In this the explorations were thoroughly 'medieval'. The element of curiosity grew as the operation developed its own momentum (and became self-financing), culminating in the truly longdistance enterprises. The boldness of Columbus's intentions, to discover a westward route to India, was of an altogether different dimension. Although he had a greatly distorted idea of the size of the globe, and thus quite underestimated what the journey might entail, what he was proposing still entailed a much larger step into the unknown. It was not surprising that the Portuguese turned him down. Their efforts had been based on step-by-step accumulation of knowledge and contacts on the West African coast; they had been unfortunate in the Atlantic (and had only recently lost the Canaries to Spain); and Columbus's expectation that they should pay for the expedition ran contrary to the whole tradition of Portuguese maritime activity. Although Columbus eventually sailed under Castilian patronage, the costs were borne by Genoese financiers.
The real significance of the discoveries was of course apparent only as they progressed, in the sixteenth century. But the explorations had already changed Europe's trade picture. Specifically, they had vital economic and then political consequences for the Mediterranean, as indeed, one could argue, they had been intended to have. This is a real sense in which
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