Rivals on the World Stage

When the news reached Venice that Vasco da Gama had made it all the way to India and back by ship, the Venetians knew that their monopoly on selling luxury goods from Asia was over. The task of breaking the news to the Doge of Venice fell to Piero Pasqualigo, the Venetian diplomat stationed in Lisbon. Throughout the 1400s, European states like Portugal, Castile, and Venice were locked in a battle for trade dominance. Venice guarded its Mediterranean strongholds (meaning), Castile and Portugal looked outward to the uncharted Atlantic. With every new island that Portugal claimed, its neighbor Castile looked for ways to increase its own regional and global influence. This decades-long competition for trade ignited an age of discovery that permanently shifted the global balance of power from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. In this episode, we look at how these power struggles played out.