Following his first voyage, Columbus was appointed Viceroy and Governor of the Indies under the terms of the Capitulations of Santa Fe. In practice, this primarily entailed the administration of the c ...
After continually lobbying at the Spanish court and two years of negotiations, he finally had success in January 1492. Ferdinand and Isabella had just conquered Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on ...
BackgroundUnder the Mongol Empire's hegemony over Asia (the Pax Mongolica, or Mongol peace), Europeans had long enjoyed a safe land passage, the Silk Road to India (the Indies, a far larger region tha ...
Terra Australis Ignota (Latin, "the unknown land of the south") was a hypothetical continent appearing on European maps from the 15th to the 18th centuries, with roots in a notion introduced by Aristo ...
In 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Malacca for Portugal, then the center of Asian trade. East of Malacca, Albuquerque sent several diplomatic missions: Duarte Fernandes as the first European env ...
The Portuguese began systematically exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa from 1418, under the sponsorship of Prince Henry. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias reached the Indian Ocean by this route. In 1492 the ...
The site now known as L'Anse aux Meadows was first recorded as Anse à la Médée ("the Médée's Cove") on a French nautical chart made in 1862. The toponym probably referred to a ship named after th ...
Sixteenth century Icelanders realised that the "New World" which European geographers were calling "America" was the land described in their Vinland Sagas. The Skálholt Map, drawn in 1570 or 1590 but ...
Wine-land The earliest etymology of "Vinland" is found in Adam of Bremen's 11th century Latin Descriptio insularum Aquilonis ("Description of the Northern Islands"): "Moreover, he has also reported on ...
Main article: History of Newfoundland and LabradorNewfoundland is the site of the only authenticated Norse (mostly Greenlandic Icelanders) settlement in North America. This archeological site was disc ...
The first inhabitants of Newfoundland were the Paleo-Eskimo, who have no known link to other groups in Newfoundland history. Little is known about them beyond archeological evidence of early settlemen ...
Leif was the son of Erik the Red and his wife Thjodhild, and the grandson of Thorvaldr ?svaldsson. His year of birth is most often given as c. 970 or c. 980. Though Leif's birthplace is not accounted ...
The romanticised idea of the Vikings constructed in scholarly and popular circles in northwestern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries was a potent one, and the figure of the Viking became a fa ...
Both archaeological finds and written sources testify to the fact that the Vikings set aside time for social and festive gatherings.Board games and dice games were played as a popular pastime, at all ...
The Old Norse feminine noun víking refers to an expedition overseas. It occurs in Viking Age runic inscriptions and in later medieval writings in set expressions such as the phrasal verb fara í vík ...
