ABSTRACT
The discovery of America is linked to a number of great European movements: the decline of feudalism and the rise of the nation-state; the rapid growth of the merchant class and international trade. The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus resulted from the search for an all-water route to the East. That search was promoted by the monarchs of Portugal and Spain in an effort to break the Italian-Arab monopoly of European trade with the East. From its primary base on Hispaniola the Spanish conquest of the Americas branched out to the other great Antilles and simultaneously sent out weak offshoots to the coasts of South and Central America. Amerigo Vespucci’s theory that the land mass said b, Columbus to be part of Asia was really a new continent gained wide though not universal approoal in the decade after 1502.
