Uprisings, rebellions, began to threaten Spain with such desolation as England had endured. But a higher Providence solved for Ferdinand his impossible problem: the age of maritime discovery began.[15]

THE ERA OF DISCOVERY

The Portuguese from their Atlantic seaboard had already begun to explore southward along the African coast. In 1402 they had settled the Canary Isles. In 1443 they reached southward beyond the sands of the Sahara and saw Cape Verd, discovered that Africa was not all burning desert, that heat would not forever increase as they went southward. In 1487 Bartholomew Diaz, after almost a year of sailing, reached the Cape of Good Hope, the southern point of the vast African continent; and in 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded the cape and sailed on to India[16]. He had found a way of bringing Indian spices, silks, and jewels to Europe, bringing them in quantities and without paying tribute to the Turks, without crossing the deadly deserts of Arabia. He had made his little country wealthy.

Meanwhile, stimulated by Portuguese success, the mariners of other nations began to brave the giant storms of the Atlantic. The Turks had made trade with the far East wellnigh impossible. Portugal was not the only land to seek a sea-route to India. Venice and Genoa saw before them the threat of ruin to their most profitable commerce. So we may even say that it was the Turks who set the Genoese captain Columbus to planning his great voyage; it was the conquest of the Moors that set Isabella free to listen to him, and offer her crown jewels for the expedition which should convert other heathen, establish other inquisitions; and it was the downfall of the Moors which left the Spanish warriors so eager to throng to adventure and warfare in the West, once Columbus had shown the way.

For a time the theatre of great events shifts to the new continent. The Portuguese explorers had doubled the size of the known world. The Spaniards doubled it again. But the credit must not be given wholly to Spain. Though it was the liberality of her monarchs which had made discovery possible, and though it was the daring of her warriors that laughed at danger and made conquest sure, yet the Spaniards were not sailors. It was to Italy, the home of commerce, that they turned for their captains and their pilots. Columbus, the Genoese, had discovered the islands along the coast. England, wishing to have a share in this world of wonders, sent a Venetian mariner, John Cabot; and he and his son sailed along our northern mainland in English ships.[17] Columbus touched the coast of South America in 1498.[18] A Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, was the first to cruise far along this southern coast, probably in 1499, and it was his name which Europe gave to the new lands.[19]

Following the discovery came settlement, warfare with the unhappy Indians, a fierce and frantic search for gold. It was while engaged in this work that Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama, saw the vast waters of the Pacific, and riding out into them upon his warhorse took possession, in the name of Spain, of the largest ocean of the globe.[20] Men recognized at last that these were not the Asiatic shores, but a wholly new continent which they had found.

RELIGIOUS CHANGES

Let us pause to recapitulate the wonders which this age of the Renaissance had seen—a new world of Africa discovered in the South, a new world of America in the West, the rise of Spain, the conquest of the last of the western Saracens at Granada and the rise of the Turks in the East, the rise of Russia, the downfall of the last vestige of the ancient empire of Rome, the last expiring effort of feudalism in Charles the Bold, and of errant knighthood in Maximilian; the beginning of modern statecraft in Louis XI of France, Henry VII of England, and Ferdinand the Wise of Spain; the spread of printing and with it the spread of thought and knowledge among the masses; and, sometimes accounted greatest of all, came the wonderful awakening of art in Italy. We have traced the early part of this under the Medici and Pope Nicholas. Lorenzo de'Medici was the centre of its later development.[21] From his court went forth that galaxy of artists which the world of art unites in calling the unequalled masters of all ages—Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and a host of others.[22]

Unfortunately in Italy at least the great movement in art and literature took an antireligious, sometimes an antipatriotic, tone. Lorenzo was openly defiant and scornful of the teachings of the Church, and after his death a French king, Charles VIII, was able to enter Italy and march from end to end of it without opposition. Religion seemed dying there, and love of country dead.

Florence underwent an extravagant though brief religious revival. The monk Savonarola preached against wickedness in high places, and thundered at the Florentines for their presumption and vanity. The impressionable people wept, they appointed a "day of vanities" and laid all their rich robes and jewels at Savonarola's feet. They made him ruler of the city. But, alas! they soon tired of his severities, sighed for their vanities back again, and at last burned the reformer at the stake.[23]

In Rome itself there arose popes, Lorenzo's followers, who preferred art to Christianity, or others like the terrible Alexander Borgia, who adopted the maxims of the new statecraft. Alexander, a worthy disciple of Louis XI, admired falsehood before truth, and sought to win his aims by poisoning his enemies. The career of his nephew Caesar Borgia has supplied history with its most awful picture of successful crime, and the book written in his praise by Macchiavelli has given us a new word for Satanic subtlety and treachery. We call it Macchiavellian. The rest of Europe shrank from Italy in fear, and named it "poisoning Italy."[24]

Against the spiritual dominance of such a land the world was surely ready for revolt. The mind of man, so long and slowly awakening, and at last so intensely roused, seeing great discoveries on every hand, was no longer to be controlled by authority. The time was ripe for the Reformation.

[FOR THE NEXT SECTION OF THIS GENERAL SURVEY SEE VOLUME IX]

[Footnote 1: See Origin and Progress of Printing, page 5.]

[Footnote 2: See Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance, vol. ix, p. 110.]

[Footnote 3: See Rebuilding of Rome by Nicholas V, page 46.]

[Footnote 4: See Mahomet II Takes Constantinople, page 55.]

[Footnote 5: See John Hunyady Repulses the Turks, page 30.]

[Footnote 6: See Ivan the Great Unites Russia, page 109.]

[Footnote 7: See Establishment of Swiss Independence, page 336.]

[Footnote 8: See Culmination of the Power of Burgundy, page 125.]

[Footnote 9: See Death of Charles the Bold, page 155.]

[Footnote 10: See Wars of the Roses, page 72.]

[Footnote 11: See Murder of the Princes in the Tower, page 192,]

[Footnote 12: See Conspiracy, Rebellion, and Execution of Perkin
Warbeck, page 250.]

[Footnote 13: See Conquest of Granada, page 202.]

[Footnote 14: See Inquisition Established in Spain, page 166.]

[Footnote 15: See Columbus Discovers America, page 224.]

[Footnote 16: See The Sea Route to India, page 299.]

[Footnote 17: See Discovery of the Mainland of North America by the
Cabots, page 282.]

[Footnote 18: See Columbus Discovers South America, page 323.]

[Footnote 19: See Amerigo Vespucci in America,