Luisito rosario biography of christopher columbus for kids

Between and , Italian explorer Christopher Columbus led four Spanish transatlantic maritime expeditions of discovery to the Americas. These voyages led to the widespread knowledge of the New World. This breakthrough inaugurated the period known as the Age of Discovery , which saw the colonization of the Americas , a related biological exchange , and trans-Atlantic trade.

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These events, the effects and consequences of which persist to the present, are often cited as the beginning of the modern era. Born in the Republic of Genoa , Columbus was a navigator who sailed for the Crown of Castile a predecessor to the modern Kingdom of Spain in search of a westward route to the Indies , thought to be the East Asian source of spices and other precious oriental goods obtainable only through arduous overland routes.

Columbus was partly inspired by 13th-century Italian explorer Marco Polo in his ambition to explore Asia and never admitted his failure in this, incessantly claiming and pointing to supposed evidence that he had reached the East Indies. Ever since, the Bahamas as well as the islands of the Caribbean have been referred to as the West Indies.

At the time of Columbus's voyages, the Americas were inhabited by Indigenous Americans.

Between 20, and 50, Taino (Arawak) Indians inhabited the island when Christopher Columbus arrived there in Columbus claimed Puerto Rico for Spain.

Soon after first contact, Eurasian diseases such as smallpox began to devastate the indigenous populations. Columbus participated in the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas , brutally treating and enslaving the natives in the range of thousands. Columbus died in , and the next year, the Americas were named after Amerigo Vespucci , who realized that these continents were a unique landmass.

The search for a westward route to Asia was completed in , when another Spanish voyage, the Magellan-Elcano expedition sailed across the Pacific Ocean and reached Southeast Asia , before returning to Europe and completing the first circumnavigation of the world. Many Europeans of Columbus's day assumed that a single, uninterrupted ocean surrounded Europe and Asia, although Norse explorers had colonized areas of North America beginning with Greenland c.

The Norse maintained a presence in North America for hundreds of years, but contacts between their North American settlements and Europe had all but ceased by the early 15th century. Until the midth century, Europe enjoyed a safe land passage to China and India —sources of valued goods such as silk , spices , and opiates—under the hegemony of the Mongol Empire the Pax Mongolica , or Mongol Peace.

Portugal was the main European power interested in pursuing trade routes overseas, with the neighboring kingdom of Castile —predecessor to Spain —having been somewhat slower to begin exploring the Atlantic because of the land area it had to reconquer from the Moors during the Reconquista. This remained unchanged until the late 15th century, following the dynastic union by marriage of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon together known as the Catholic Monarchs of Spain in , and the completion of the Reconquista in , when the joint rulers conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada , which had been providing Castile with African goods through tribute.