Between and , the Italian navigator and explorer Christopher Columbus [ a ] led four transatlantic maritime expeditions in the name of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain to the Caribbean and to Central and South America. These voyages led to the widespread knowledge of the New World. This breakthrough inaugurated the period known as the Age of Discovery , which saw the colonization of the Americas , a related biological exchange , and trans-Atlantic trade.
These events, the effects and consequences of which persist to the present, are often cited as the beginning of the modern era. Born in the Republic of Genoa , Columbus was a navigator who sailed in search of a westward route to India , China , Japan and the Spice Islands thought to be the East Asian source of spices and other precious oriental goods obtainable only through arduous overland routes. His initial belief that he had reached "the Indies" has resulted in the name " West Indies " being attached to the Bahamas and the islands of the Caribbean.
At the time of Columbus's voyages, the Americas were inhabited by Indigenous Americans , and Columbus later participated in the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
Columbus died in , and the next year, the New World was named "America" after Amerigo Vespucci , who realized that it was a unique landmass. The search for a westward route to Asia was completed in , when the Magellan expedition sailed across the Pacific Ocean and reached Southeast Asia , before returning to Europe and completing the first circumnavigation of the world. Many Europeans of Columbus's day assumed that a single, uninterrupted ocean surrounded Europe, Asia and Africa, although Norse explorers had colonized areas of North America beginning with Greenland c.
Until the midth century, Europe enjoyed a safe land passage to China and India —sources of valued goods such as silk , spices , and opiates —under the hegemony of the Mongol Empire the Pax Mongolica , or Mongol Peace. With the Fall of Constantinople to the Turkish Ottoman Empire in , European countries sought to compete with the Silk Road dominated by the gunpowder empires through expanded use of ocean voyages to scope out and establish new trade routes. Portugal was the main European power interested in pursuing trade routes overseas, with the neighboring kingdom of Castile —the predecessor to Spain —having been somewhat slower to begin exploring the Atlantic because of the land area it had to reconquer from the Moors during the Reconquista.
