14. Transmitting Knowledge; Navigating a New World
5 items in collection

In the fifteenth century, the rulers of Portugal and Spain were the leading sponsors of seagoing exploration. Prompted by the closure of the Silk Road passages following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, both kingdoms employed Italian merchant navigators as well as their own subjects to undertake far-flung ocean journeys. The Portuguese, already heavily invested in the trade of goods and people in West Africa, pioneered the eastward route to Asia. Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), a Genoese mariner in the service of Spain’s Catholic Monarchs, initially believed he had discovered a westward passage to the Far East upon landing in the Antilles; the error took several decades to rectify fully, and the belief persisted among some Jewish scholars that the peoples encountered were members of one of the lost tribes of Israel. Columbus’s widely-printed letter announcing his discoveries is an excellent example of the technology’s use for spreading information rapidly across Europe. And yet, the continuous stream of new cartographic information relayed by European navigators made the laborious production of printed world maps futile. Accordingly, manual mapmaking workshops continued their activity well into the sixteenth century. Technologies that allowed for accurate navigation were continuously being enhanced. Astrolabes and quadrants, Hellenic inventions further developed by Muslim scholars, necessitated special manuals on their proper use. Beginning with Marco Polo in the thirteenth century and continuing through Columbus’s reports, there existed a long tradition of providing detailed accounts of notable voyages, a number of which are exhibited here.