Norway became virtually a province of Denmark, and the Norwegian nobles were driven into exile or killed. The country remained attached to the Danish Crown until the present century.
SECTION II.—MODERN HISTORY.
INTRODUCTION.
As an introduction to the history of the Modern Age, we shall give a brief account of the voyages and geographical discoveries of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan, and of the beginning of European conquests and settlements in the New World, inasmuch as these great events lie at the opening of the era and form the prelude of its story.
DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD BY COLUMBUS (1492).—Christopher Columbus was one of those Genoese navigators who, when Genoa's Asiatic lines of trade were broken by the irruption of the Turks (see p. 467), conceived the idea of reaching India by an ocean route. While others were endeavoring to reach that country by sailing around the southern point of Africa, he proposed the bolder plan of reaching this eastern land by sailing directly westward. The sphericity of the earth was a doctrine held by many at that day; but the theory was not in harmony with the religious ideas of the time, and so it was not prudent for one to publish too openly one's belief in the notion.
[Illustration: COLUMBUS. (After the Yanez Portrait in the Madrid
Library.)]
In his endeavors to secure a patron for his enterprise, Columbus met at first with repeated repulse and disappointment. At last, however, he gained the ear of Queen Isabella of Spain; a little fleet was fitted out for the explorer,—and the New World was found.
Columbus never received a fitting reward for the great service he had rendered mankind. Even the continent to which he had shown the way, instead of being called after him as a perpetual memorial, was named from a Florentine navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, whose chief claim to this distinction was his having published the first account of the new lands.
[Illustration: THE OCEAN AND ISLANDS BETWEEN WESTERN EUROPE AND EASTERN
ASIA. From the Globe of Martin Behaim, 1492. (Cathaja—China; Cipango =
Japan.)]
THE VOYAGE OF VASCO DA GAMA (1497-1498).—The favorable position of Portugal upon the Atlantic seaboard naturally led her sovereigns to conceive the idea of competing with the Italian cities for the trade of the East Indies, by opening up an ocean route to those lands. During all the latter part of the fifteenth century Portuguese sailors were year after year penetrating a little farther into the mysterious tropical seas, and exploring new reaches of the western coast of Africa.