2. The Grande Tour: Europe The world of 1492 comprised a host of disparate societies with leaders of varying abilities. In the country we call today as Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile saw their dynamic marriage yield the beginning of a united peninsula when Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, fell after a ten-year campaign. They availed themselves of Italian financial backing in launching their program of exploration. In Rome in 1492, Alexander VI, the notorious Borgia pope from Aragon, was beginning his reign.
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5. The destruction of Mayan culture prevents us from learning of their society's intellectual accomplishments.
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7. The Great Traditions Four major forms of civilization flourished in the broad landmass of Eurasia. All four great centers of civilization had elaborate bureaucratic structures, significant cities, iron implements, writing, and a high technology. Elsewhere – in southeast Asia, in the African empires, and in the great civilizations of the Americas – "high" culture was confined to temple-palace complexes standing amidst peasant villages. Hunter-gatherer groups and stable agrarian tribes occupied Australia, much of the Americas, the interior of Africa, the Pacific islands, and the Arctic coastline.
8. The European Challenge By maintaining contact with each other, societies in the ecumeneenjoyed an enormous head start over portions of the world that were relatively isolated. Western Europe made better use of these contacts than did any other part of Eurasia. The Portuguese (rather than the Spanish) ruling house made the first moves in the early 1400s to break out of Europe's isolation. But in his moralizing, Castro missed the point that the southern and western Europeans were motivated to undertake exploration by an early form of capitalism today often called "commercial capitalism" to distinguish it from later industrial capitalism. All these commercial factors were closely allied with an expansionistic Christianity that cast a spiritual veil over the mundane financial details. The Nina and the Pintawere agile caravels; the Santa Maria, a lumbering carrack, hit a reef and sank on Christmas eve in 1492. Human beings never needed an excuse to be intolerant; history records endless struggles over language, territory, and religion.
