Publisher's Synopsis
How two worlds became one.
In this book, you will understand how Christopher Columbus proposed something new: reaching the riches of the East Indies by sailing west from Europe. The rulers of Spain agreed to support his risky venture, and he sailed off in 1492. He unexpectedly ran into two continents nobody in Europe knew about. He didn't discover the continents; that had been done centuries before.
Discover how the Old World of Eurasia and Africa began a monumentally important exchange of people, ideas, crops, animals, and diseases that changed history and humanity forever. This extended stitching together of the two hemispheres is called the Columbian Exchange.
You'll be fascinated by how Europeans did not know if the fifty million indigenous Americans were human and how a pope issued a proclamation in 1534 that the American native peoples actually had souls.
You'll learn how the initial contacts led to one of the greatest catastrophes in all of human history and how smallpox enabled Cortes and the Spanish to conquer the Aztec Empire, which was bigger than Spain.
In this captivating read, you will learn about the following:
- Japanese samurai who guarded silver shipments in Mexico in the 1600s;
- Catarina de San Juan, who began life as a Muslim girl in India and ended as a popular saint in Mexico;
- The immense amount of silver from Peru and Mexico, which fueled Spain's Golden Century and led to repeated bankruptcy;
- American chili peppers giving some heat to cuisines from Hungary to Korea;
- Crops domesticated by indigenous Americans enabling China to double its population;
- Disease from the Americas making millions of Europeans miserable, including Henry VIII, Casanova, Ivan the Terrible, and Beethoven;
- The annual Manila Galleons from Acapulco to the Philippines creating the first global economy;
- How Potosi, the richest silver mine in the world, became the biggest and most violent city in the Spanish Empire;
- Rootstock from American grapes saving the French wine industry;
- And so much more!
