Chapter I The Background and the Discovery
The fifteenth century witnessed the culmination of the Renaissance, the rise of the Turkish Empire, the shifting of the commercial center from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the discovery of America and the opening of the Cape route to India. Portugal and Spain started on their careers as great commercial and colonizing nations, the former destined for a time to control the commerce of the Far East, the other to possess more than half of the Americas and to dominate the Pacific.