In the next chapter, we will turn to the Americas and their discovery by Europeans. The backstory for this discovery and colonization is the _Reconquista_, a centuries-long effort by the Portuguese and Spanish to push the Muslims they called Moors back to Africa. The Umayyad Caliphate had taken over most of the Iberian Peninsula beginning in 711. The _Reconquista_ begun in response by Christian nobles in northern Spain took about 800 years to complete. ![[Stationary_Ship_(5977153683).jpg]] *Prince Henry the Navigator at the head of the Monument to Discovery in Lisbon, Portugal* The Portuguese Christians “reconquered” more quickly, because Portugal does not extend as far into the south and the Spanish had to contend with the fortified cities of Seville and Granada to their south. Portugal captured Ceuta, a Moroccan fortress in North Africa in 1415, which gave them control over the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic. After a brief but successful war with Castile, the main kingdom in central Spain, Portugal then turned its attention to exploring and acquiring territory along the coast of Africa in the 1430s and 1440s under the direction of Prince Henry the Navigator (Henry’s older brother Edward became King when their father died of the plague). The Portuguese began their mercantile empire while the Spanish were still fighting Muslims. ![[Portuguese_discoveries_and_explorationsV2en.png]] *Portuguese territories and trade routes* Portuguese mariners, following the route established by Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco de Gama in 1488 and 1497, began sailing to Asia around southern Africa. They established colonies in Angola and Mozambique and took advantage of a slave-trading network that had provided possibly 10 million captives for Muslim slave auctions from the 9th century to the twentieth. Portuguese control of the African coast was one of the reasons the royal court in Lisbon later showed little interest in Columbus’s proposal to sail west across the Atlantic to India; it is also why the Spanish were eager to take Columbus up on his plan in search of a route to Asia. We will return to Spain’s interest in Columbus in the next chapter. ----- Next: [[3.16 - Africa]] Back: [[3.14 - Economies]]