Trade expansion first extended merely to the exchange of goods between adjacent regions--for example, wool from England to Flanders and woolens from Flanders to England. By the14th century, Europeans were trading indirectly with countries as far away as India, China, and the Spice Islands. Italians, especially Venetians, sent fleets to ports of the eastern Mediterranean. Here they secured spices, gems, drugs, silks, embroideries, and fine fabrics from age-old Oriental workshops. These goods, collected in Oriental markets, bazaars, and fairs, were carried westward by successive groups of merchants either overland in caravans or by sea to the Isthmus of Suez or partly by land and partly by water by way of the Persian Gulf and the Tigris-Euphrates river valleys.
In the 14th century the writings of Ptolemy had suggested that an explorer could reach India by sailing, westward. Columbus had a copy of Ptolemy's geography, and many other navigators believed that the Earth was a sphere. Before Columbus tried to - carry out the idea of sailing westward to India, the Portuguese took the lead in Western explorations (See Henry the Navigator, America). Early in the I 5th century, they occupied several of the Western islands, advanced beyond the Sahara, and opened up the slave trade. They employed many Italians, who were skilled in shipbuilding, mapmaking, the use of the compass, and the art of navigation. They seemed on the point of breaking up the monopoly of the Italian cities in the Far Eastern trade, for they gradually extended their influence southward along the islands and the mainland till by 1488 Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Some explorers, including Columbus, still believed that the simplest way to reach India was by sailing directly westward. When Columbus return from,his- voyage of 1492, it was thought that he had discovered, not a new world, but a new route to the old world of Eastern Asia. (Columbus found the Bahamas and thought it was India. ie. How we get Indians.) The Potuguese redoubled their efforts, and in 1498 Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa.
The immediate results of the great discoveries included the breakdown of Italian and German trade; the transfer of trading centers, wealth, and power to the Atlantic seaboard; the rise of Portuguese and Spanish empires; and the almost unbelievable stirring up of the sluggish minds and ambitions of Western Europeans. Out of the twofold stimulus of the recovery of ancient culture and the discovery of the nature and limits of the world's geography came most of the distinctive ways of thought and of life that make the modern age different from earlier ages.
The Slave Trade
1. Heaviest as American colonies developed.
2. Africans captured them first, then traded them to Europeans to run gun powder etc..
3. 1/3 of all slaves died before ever getting to the horrible conditions on the ships.
4. The slaves were used for heavy labor. ie. Cotton, and gold mines