Age of Exploration

“You should know that the said King of Portugal has leased this island to Christians for ten years, so that no one can enter the bay to trade with the Arabs save those who hold the license. These Christians have dwellings on the island and factories where they buy and sell with the said Arabs who come to the coast to trade for merchandise of various kinds, such as woolen cloths, cotton, silver and coarse cloth, that is cloaks, carpets, and similar articles and above all grain, for they are always short of food. The Arabs give in exchange slaves whom the Arabs bring from the land of the Blacks, and gold dust. The King therefore caused a castle to be built on the island to protect this trade forever. For this reason, Portuguese caravels come and go all year long to this island.”

Alvise de Ca’da Mosto, Venetian merchant, describing the Portuguese island of Arguim off the west coast of Africa, 1454

The long-term economic effect in Europe of the establishment of trading networks and colonies such as the one described in the passage was

• the industrialization of Great Britain

• a shift in the center of economic power from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic states

• an increase in the cost of imported luxury goods

• the increased power of trading centers in the Italian city-states

“The expansion of Europe was an intensely nationalistic phenomenon. It was an aspect of the trend, most evident in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, toward the establishment of strong centralized authority in the ‘new monarchies,’ as they have been called, and the emergence of the nation-state. A policy of overseas expansion required a degree of internal stability and national consciousness that only a powerful central government could command.

Portugal achieved this position long before her eventual competitors, and under the leadership of the dynamic house of Aviz [the Portuguese ruling dynasty from 1385 to 1580] became a consolidated kingdom comparatively free from feudal divisions before the end of the fifteenth century. While Spain was still divided into a number of conflicting political jurisdictions, England and France were preoccupied in their own and each other’s affairs, and the Dutch were still an appendage of the [Habsburg] Empire, the Portuguese combined the advantages of their natural geographic situation with their political and economic stability to initiate the age of discovery.”

Richard B. Reed, historian, “The Expansion of Europe,” in The Meaning of the Renaissance and Reformation, 1974.

Which of the following general claims does the author make regarding the background of European overseas expansion?

• It was facilitated by states adopting a feudal governmental structure.

• It was a result of the growth of the Habsburg Empire.

• It was an outcome of the conflict between England and France.

• It emerged from the consolidation of central governments.