ABSTRACT
Drawn by tales of fabulous wealth in far-off lands, growing numbers of European explorers, traders, and conquerors ventured in to increasingly distant Atlantic waters in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. They contributed to one of the signal developments of the early modern period: the intensifying contact among parts of the world that had been largely separate. The following documents display three steps in this process: fantastic European representations of the Indies, the first encounter between Columbus and the peoples of the Americas, and the catastrophic effects of Old World diseases on New World communities. Venetian merchant Marco Polo journeyed through Asia from 1271 to 1295. The Travels of Marco Polo became enormously popular in late medieval Europe, shaping European ideas about East and South Asia and fueling Europe's desire to tap the region's vast wealth. This narrative of Columbus's famous 1492 voyage to the Americas comes from a digest of Columbus's logbook produced by historian Bartolom de las Casas.
