1504-1548
When Europeans encountered the Americas, it challenged ancient certainties about the world, while new views of the heavens challenged the idea of an Earth-centered universe.
As the grip of Europe’s long isolation continued to loosen, an influx of goods and ideas amplified more liberal cultural trends. Humanism, in contrast to scholasticism, sought not only to create a familiarity with rediscovered classical sources, but to do so among the laity. By expanding a body of work that had been the purview of clerics—a narrow group committed to preserving it for circumscribed ends—the humanists focused their efforts on creating a new kind of civil society, one where education was a basis for general engagement with the world and no longer limited to professional training for doctors, jurists, and theologians. As a movement, humanism had provided an essential precondition for the emergence of mechanical print by developing demand for published works, along with the spices and silks that were staples of Oriental trade.
In 1453 the Ottoman Empire seized Constantinople, depriving Venice of its access to the East, and reversing the balance of trade on which Venetian power depended. For European economies dependent on Venetian traders, the event was both a crisis and a catalyst. Portugal and Spain, particularly, felt compelled to establish their own trade routes with the Orient, seeking to bypass Ottoman control of essential land-routes by sailing around the southern tip of Africa, and—if possible—Westward across the Atlantic.
Ptolemaic maps suggested this was a viable possibility, especially after centuries of compounded errors in the supporting data had shrunk the presumed scale of the world to a fraction of its actual size. The eventual circumnavigation by Magellan’s expedition (1519–22), revealed a world vastly bigger than the one suggested to Europeans by their study of classical antiquity. To cartographers—and everyone depending on their work—it became clear that operating at this scale would require far more data than the ancients could provide, and that the data would need to be gathered and organized in equally contemporary ways.
