At the end of the XVth century, Western Europe was slowly pulling out of the Middle Ages. The shoulder yoke, stern rudder and compass were already improving land and sea transportation. Africa's West Coast was being re-discovered by Portuguese seafarers. Indeed, the infamous African slave trade had begun, in the Year of Our Lord 1441, with an expedition sent by Prince Henry the Navigator.
Up to then, Europe's main route for importing exotic products -- principally silk and spices -- had been overland, from China and India through Central Asia, Turkey, Byzantium and ultimately the merchant city-states of Italy. But in 1453, the Turkish army of Sultan Mehmet II took Byzantium by storm. This key city was forever lost to Western Europe. It became, and still is, the main city of Turkey. The doorway to Asia was slammed shut.
The Portuguese then endeavored to round the huge African continent. But a middle-aged Genoese pilot, Christopher Columbus, conceived the project of reaching Asia by sailing straight out into the Atlantic Ocean -- westward into the unknown. In his native city of Italy, nobody would support, let alone finance, such a crackpot enterprise. But King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella the Catholic, sovereigns of newly independent Spain, accepted to help him launch a modest expedition. The conquest and destruction of the New World's original civilizations had begun.
Early in the morning of December 6, 1492, the Arawak people of Haiti saw three strangely shaped vessels full of ghostly white, bearded men, on the waters of what is now known as St. Nicholas Bay. When the bearded ghosts came ashore, no one could understand their barbarous language -- Spanish. But ghosts or not, they were guests, and had to be welcomed.
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