The world: 1490s

1490–1499

Events in this period 3

1. 1492 · North America · Exploration

   Columbus reaches the Americas

   Between 1492 and 1504, the Italian explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus led four transatlantic maritime expeditions to the Americas in the name of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. These voyages led to Europeans learning about the New World and were an early breakthrough in the period known in Europe as the Age of Exploration, which saw the colonization of the Americas, a related biological exchange, and the beginning of trans-Atlantic trade. These events, the effects and consequences of which persist to the present, are often cited as the beginning of the modern era.

2. 1497 – 1499 · India · Exploration

   Portuguese discovery of the sea route to India

   The Portuguese discovery of the sea route to India was the first recorded trip directly from Europe to the Indian subcontinent, via the Cape of Good Hope. Under the command of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, it was undertaken during the reign of King Manuel in 1497–1499. It is one of the most important events of the Age of Discovery and the Portuguese Empire, and it initiated the Portuguese maritime trade on the Malabar Coast and other parts of the Indian Ocean, the military presence and settlements of the Portuguese in Goa and Bombay.

3. 1494 · Europe · Politics

   Treaty of Tordesillas

   The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in Tordesillas, Spain, on 7 June 1494, and ratified in Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between the Kingdom of Portugal and the Crown of Castile, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. That line of demarcation was about halfway between Cape Verde and the islands visited by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage, thought then to be Cipangu and Antillia, but in fact Cuba and Hispaniola; the treaty itself does not mention Cipangu nor Antillia.

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Still under way

• Sengoku period1467 – 1615

Around the same time

• Hundred Years' War1337 – 1453
• Creation of Hangul (Hunminjeongeum)1443
• Printing pressc. 1450
• Fall of Constantinople1453
• Ninety-five Theses1517
• Magellan expedition1519 – 1522
• Wars of the Roses1455 – 1487
• Bartolomeu Dias1488
• Pedro Álvares Cabral1500
• Fall of Tenochtitlan1521
• Founding of the Mughal Empire1526
• Battle of Cajamarca1532

Other maps for this period

• War mapsSengoku period
• War mapsItalian Wars
• Epidemics mapSweating sickness