Be the first person to circumnavigate the globe. A posthumous celebration was held in Spain in 1522 to honor Ferdinand Magellan's feat. Hulton Archive/Getty Images The Age of Exploration quickly lent itself to an age of colonialism. Europe's nations sailed to ancient and new lands and ...
Upon his return to Venice, Polo was imprisoned in Genoa alongside the writer Rustichello da Pisa. The result of their encounter wasIl milione(“The Million”) or ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’, which described his voyage to and experiences in Asia. Polo was not the first European to reach C...
Christopher Columbus is the default example, an Italian who famously “sailed the ocean blue” in 1492, on the first of four major voyages for the Spanish crown. Beyond Columbus, “explorers” who introduced the possibilities of American riches, lands and people to their royal patrons (and even...
had sailed west and found some islands that he was convinced were the easternmost fringe of the Indies. A few years before that, the Portuguese had had a breakthrough in the other direction: Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese nobleman and captain, had finally proven ...