ABSTRACT
The story of America has many beginnings, some of them centuries apart. October 12, 1492, the day a Genoese ship-captain named Christopher Columbus discovered a land Europeans didn’t know existed, is one beginning, but neither the first nor the last. Columbus himself would have claimed it all began in the thirteenth century when a Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, travelled to the Chinese court of Kublai Khan. 1415 is another date with which the story could begin: the fall that year of the Muslim stronghold of Ceuta in North-West Africa to the Portuguese, followed by the decision to hold the captured territory as a colony, was the first instance of a European state’s territorial expansion; and it launched the western empire of which the Americas became the major outpost. The taking of Ceuta set off a series of competitive ventures among which Columbus’s attempt to find a sea-route to Asia was only one. In Ceuta, the king of Portugal was seeking the key to the Mediterranean; the Spanish sponsored Columbus hoping to best the Portuguese with a key to the Atlantic.
