Why Did Western Europe Explore and Colonize?

Western Europe—beginning in the 15th century—succeeded in spreading its people, languages, and cultures across a greater expanse than any region in history. But why exactly did Western Europeans explore and colonize to such an extent?

Having the capability to explore and colonize doesn’t adequately explain why nations do it. The Chinese for millennia had the means to accomplish similar feats but never did. What the Romans lacked in technology they could have invented if the demand for greater maritime exploration existed at the time. But neither they nor the Chinese felt the need to devote their resources to sea exploration as the Western Europeans did in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The development of space exploration provides insight. Time and resources are scarce, and if given the choice, people would prefer to spend them in safe investments. Man would arguably have never reached the moon without the Cold War, which created the conditions necessary to devote time and resources to the task. In this instance, the threat of mutually-assured destruction spurred the United States to beat the Soviet Union in the space race.

A careful look at Western Europeans’ motives for venturing beyond their known habitations in the Age of Discovery (ca. 1400-1650) provides a similar pattern. The centuries-long struggle between Christianity and Islam was the cold war of the Middle Ages. Because nuclear weapons didn’t exist, neither side was averse to turning this struggle hot—resource permitting. But after seven centuries of continual warfare, Islam and Christianity had fought each other to a stalemate.

Beyond struggling for territory, the struggle between the peoples of these religions centered on trade. Whoever controlled trade routes held the advantage. Furthermore, trading with those of the opposing religion enriched the enemy and allowed him to conquer one’s fellow believers. This and the expense and personal danger in trading in the other’s lands created incentives to limit trade with the other religion as much as possible.

Before the Age of Discovery, trade favored the Islamic world because it had direct access to every known continent on earth. It’s little wonder, then, that the Islamic world thrived economically and culturally more than Western Europe until at least the 14th century. 

European Christians relied on Muslim middlemen for trade for sub-Saharan African goods like gold and ivory. For goods from the Far East, like spices, they relied on the Byzantine Empire’s holding out against Muslim conquests. But relying on middlemen—even Christian ones—made trade expensive and kept luxury goods out of the hands of everyone except the elite.

Although all of non-Ottoman Europe benefited immensely from the Age of Discovery, Europeans owe their world conquest primarily to the Portuguese and Spanish. It was these peoples who created the first post-Roman, intercontinental, European empires. Their success irreversibly gave them the advantage over their Islamic rivals and created the incentive for other European nations to challenge their supremacy.

Unifications and Reconquistas

In the early 8th century, the Muslim Moors from North Africa conquered most of Iberia, nearly pushing the Latin-speaking Christians out of the peninsula. Over the following 750 years, these Christians consolidated into kingdoms and slowly reconquered the peninsula. Defeating the Moors and unifying their linguistic regions marked a prerequisite to Portuguese and Spanish empires.

The Portuguese gained the advantage. They completed their Reconquista in the middle of the 13th century, when they drove the Moors out of the Algarve region. They, thereby, united their people into a single kingdom more than two centuries before the Spanish.

Only in 1469 did Castille and Aragon unite through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille. In 1492, their armies conquered Granada—the last remaining Muslim stronghold on the peninsula. With the completion of their reconquest and nation-state the Spanish too could focus on building an overseas empire.

Prince Henry the Navigator

Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460)—more than any single individual—drove the Age of Exploration by financing explorations and spurring his sailors to conquer their fears of the unknown. 

In 1415, Henry, his father, and brothers took the city of Ceuta along the North African coast, known as “the key of the whole Mediterranean.” They captured this city for three reasons:

1. To keep the Castilians from gaining a foothold in Africa
2. To prevent Muslim raids on Algarve, and
3. To dominate the Saharan trade routes.

They accomplished this in one day with 50,000 men in 200 ships—quite the impressive expeditionary force for the era.

Henry’s father, King John I, sent outcasts to colonize Ceuta rather than banish them to Castile—as had previously been the practice. This established a colonization policy that Europeans would follow for centuries—sending undesirables to foreign colonies to both rid the homeland of them and spare regular troops from defending new territories.

Holding Ceuta, however, proved costly and the Muslims rerouted the Saharan trade to other cities. The Portuguese soon found the city more of a liability. John wanted to abandon it, but Henry advocated continuing to hold it while exploring the African coast to find the gold’s source.

A few years after taking Ceuta, the Portuguese colonized the uninhabited Madeira Islands. In the late 1420s or early 1430s, they landed in the uninhabited Azores, nearly 750 miles from the Portuguese coast.

They tried to conquer some of the Canaries, but were repulsed by the natives. This provoked strong protests by Castile. The Castilians claimed ownership of all the Canaries—even those in which no Spaniard had set foot.

In 1420, Henry was placed at the head of the Order of Christ, a military successor to the Portuguese Knights Templar. This provided him an additional source of income to fund maritime explorations along the African coast. 

After urging his sailors for 12 years to venture beyond Cape Bojador, and after 15 failed ventures, Gil Eanes—a squire in Henry’s household—succeeded in 1434. Although he didn’t travel far, he was hailed as a hero. Beyond the superstition of what lay beyond the cape, the winds and shallow waters made navigation nearly impossible past that point. Many medieval navigators had sailed further south never to return. 

The following year, Eanes returned with Afonso Badaia in ships small enough for rowing. They discovered no occupied lands, however.

The Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara gives five reasons for Henry’s persistence in pushing exploration of the African coast: 

1. To gain knowledge of the lands that lay beyond Cape Bojador
2. To find profitable trade for Porgutal
3. To find how far the Moors’ strength reached
4. To find other Christians to help in the fight against the Muslims
5. To save souls by spreading the Christian faith

Azurara also credits astrology as a sixth motivation for leading Henry to believe he was destined to explore.

In 1440, Henry commissioned two caravels—the first time the caravel ship is known to have been used in exploration—south of Cape Bojador. The expedition rendered nothing, but Henry sent another the following year under a young captain, Antão Gonçalves. He was joined by Nuno Tristão of Henry’s household, who had orders “to go as far as possible.”

Henry wanted them to capture some of the natives and return them to Portugal to learn of the peoples who inhabited the region. This they accomplished, Gonçalves returned to Portugal, and Tristão continued, reaching Cape Blanco (Mauritania)—the furthest any Europeans are known to have traveled until then down the African coast.

In 1445, Dinis Dias sailed past the desert and discovered Cap-Vert—the westernmost point of Africa—which the Portuguese named “Green Cape” because of its lush vegetation. He and his crew attempted to land but were repulsed by the natives.

The following year, Henry sent a large fleet of caravels led by Dias to explore the Senegal River, which he believed was the western mouth of the Nile.

The 15th century Venetian chronicler recorded their impressions of the people of the West African coast.

It appears to me a very marvelous thing that beyond the [Senegal] River, all men are very tall, black and big; their bodies well-formed; and the whole country green, full of trees, and fertile; while on this side [of the Senegal], the men are brownish, small, lean, ill-nourished, and small in stature; the country sterile and arid.

The Portuguese established a trading post north of the river, on the island of Arguim, in 1448. this allowed them to provision ships to go further and allowed them to discover the Cape Verde Archipelago in 1455 on a return voyage to Portugal.

Henry died in 1460, but Portugal continued its exploration of the West African coast. The Portuguese had conquered Ceuta to secure Portugal’s safety from Moorish raiders and to seize the trade routes to sub-Saharan Africa. Owning the port city accomplished the first goal. When it failed in the second, Henry decided to bypass the Moors altogether and find the direct source of African gold.

The Portuguese reached the Gold Coast shortly after Henry’s death and were able to finally cut out the Muslim middleman for the coveted resource. This direct trade greatly weakened the North African states, who had to rely on overland travel by camel, but enriched Portugal and allowed it to afford to expand its empire.

Bypassing the Ottoman Empire

When the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 it threatened European trade with the Far East for spices. School textbooks tend to exaggerate the importance of this event as the end-all-be-all of European exploration. But Western European sailing and war technology already exceeded that of the rest of the world, and as previously noted, Portugal was already expanding into the Atlantic and down the coast of Africa.

The fall of Constantinople did, however, create more urgent demand for maritime exploration to gain direct access to the “spice islands” of the East. By taking the former Byzantine capital, the Ottomans sealed the access point for Europeans to buy Eastern luxuries and caused their prices to rise.

To bypass the vast Ottoman Empire, however, required breaking travel barriers that even the Romans had never attempted, such as sailing around Africa or sailing west to go east.

Portuguese sailor Bartholomew Dias sailed around the Horn of Africa in 1488. He wanted to continue to India, but his crew insisted he return to Portugal. Vasco da Gama reached India in 1497 and again in 1502, establishing trading posts in Zanzibar and Malindi (Kenya).

The Arabs, Persians, and Egyptians sought to expel the unwelcome explorers from encroaching on their trade in the Indian Ocean. Through a series of battles, the Portuguese defeated much larger navies through superior technology and the superb generalship of Afonso de Albuquerque. By the 1510s, Portugal became the most powerful empire in the world and was able to wage proxy wars in East Africa against the Ottomans.

Spain lagged behind Portugal in building an empire because it developed as a nation-state much later. Although Castilian subjects discovered and colonized the Canary Islands in the early 15th century, the crown didn’t seize them and subjugate the natives until late in the century.

The Florentine astronomer Paolo Toscanelli developed the idea of sailing west to reach the Far East a couple of decades after the fall of Constantinople. He found no success in getting sponsorship for such a voyage, but his belief entered into the ecosystem of Southern European sailors and influenced Christopher Columbus. Columbus, however, also found continual rejection from Portugal, Genoa, Venice, Spain—and even England—where he sent his brother to ask King Henry VII for support.

But heady from the triumph over Granada in 1492—which completed Spain’s Reconquista—Ferdinand convinced Isabella to grant Columbus his request. Although they were late to the party, within half a century, the Spanish surpassed the Portuguese in lands, wealth, and military power.

. . . .

Western Europeans didn’t risk their lives and fortunes to build empires, enlarge their nations, or spread their cultures and Christianity. These represented side benefits to their main goal, which was bypassing the Islamic world to trade directly with sub-Saharan Africa and the Far East.

Although historians extend the Age of Discovery into the early 17th century and add other Western European powers as participants, Europe owes its hegemony to the Portuguese and Spanish.

In Portugal’s national epic, The Lusiads, Luis Vas de Camoes writes:

What are the adventures of an old, fabulous hero’s arrival in Britain, what are Greece and Latium in arms for a woman compared to this! Troy is in ashes, and even the Roman Empire is no more. But the effect of the voyages, adventures, and bravery of the hero of the Lusiad will be felt and beheld, and perhaps increase in importance, while the world shall remain.

Portugal gained an advantage over its Christian rivals by completing its reconquista two centuries before the Spanish and uniting its people into one nation-state. While European language groups were divided into small kingdoms and experienced frequent civil wars of succession when they weren’t fighting Muslims, the Portuguese prospered and developed their shipping.

The caravel marks the most effective technological improvement during this era. This gave the Portuguese unrivaled maneuverability at sea against Africans, Indians, Arabs, Persians, Egyptians, and Turks. 

But besides the technological superiority of the Portuguese, their success in bypassing Saharan middlemen to trade directly with sub-Saharan Africans enriched them enough to continue to invest in maritime exploration.  

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople created a greater sense of urgency to find a direct trade route to the Far East. Just as Henry the Navigator funded explorations to cut out the Moorish middlemen of North Africa, both Portugal and Spain were willing to invest vast sums to cut out the middlemen to trade directly with the Far East. 

The advantage Muslims previously held by controlling most key trade routes now favored Western Europeans. The Atlantic Ocean no longer represented the end of the known world but became the world’s most lucrative trade route. 

In the end, the Age of Exploration and subsequent European colonization was simply the result of the Christian world’s triumph over Islam. By bypassing the Muslim world in trade, Western Europe turned the Middle East into a backwater and enriched itself like no civilization in world history.