On September 20, 1519, a fleet of five ships under the command of Ferdinand Magellan set out from the Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Nearly three years later, a single vessel returned home, having successfully circumnavigated the globe. This achievement had come at a high cost. Four ships had been lost, and only eighteen men, from an original complement of two hundred and sixty-five, staved off scurvy, starvation, and stormy seas to complete the journey. Magellan himself had died in a battle with inhabitants of the Philippines. But the survivors of Magellan’s voyage had become the first true world travelers.  In contrast to Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, and earlier adventurers who confined their primarily overland treks to Eurasia and Africa, Magellan’s transoceanic passage connected these worlds with those that had been apart—the Americas.

The voyages of Magellan and other European mariners did more than create contacts among cultures across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. They also altered the economic and political relationships among all worlds. Crucial to this reconfiguring was the unexpected "discovery" of what European explorers proclaimed to be the "New World." Finding the Americas was not what Christopher Columbus had in mind when he headed west across the Atlantic. In his wake, however, Europeans set out to pray for and prey on the peoples of the Americas. In the conquest and colonization of the Americas, Europeans also drew heavily on connections with West Africa. During the sixteenth century, through trade in agricultural products and precious metals that were increasingly extracted from the Americas by African laborers, European merchants became more prominent participants in the vibrant commercial circuits of Eurasia.

By no means did this greater prominence translate immediately into imperial dominance for Europeans in Asia. Through the sixteenth century, the mightiest Asian empires—the Ming in China, the Mughal on the South Asian subcontinent, and the Ottoman straddling West Asia, North Africa, and southeastern Europe—maintained their economic prowess and retained control over all but small pockets of their expansive realms. Still, by 1600, the impact of the European conquest and colonization of the Americas was being felt around the globe, tipping the balance of military and economic power in Eurasia from east to west.

Chapter Objectives

•	To explain the growth of contact between different parts of the globe in an age of exploration, mercantile trade, and colonization
•	To identify the impact of the discovery of the New World
•	To maintain that the Islamic and East Asian empires remained dominant, even as European ties to Asia began to strengthen