Before Columbus Sailed, Spain and Portugal Had Already Rehearsed | Before and After 1492, Part 1

How did a few hundred men bring down two of the biggest empires in the world? Part of the answer starts in Europe, long before 1492. Part 1 of Before and After 1492 follows the surrender of Granada and the promises Spain broke, the rise of "purity of blood," Portugal's decades on the Atlantic and the African coast, the conquest of the Canary Islands, the spice trade, and the contract that sent Columbus west. Part 2 crosses the ocean. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open: Cajamarca, 1532 2:20 Part One · 1. A promise in Granada 4:57 2. Who belongs 7:45 3. Portugal goes first 10:27 4. The rehearsal: the Canary Islands 13:46 5. The destination was Asia 15:32 6. The man with the plan 22:52 Where we go next 23:38 Credits and sources CORRECTIONS: At 12:25: The royal order freeing the women and children captured on La Gomera came on 27 August 1490, two years after the 1488 revolt, not the next year. PRIMARY SOURCES Capitulaciones del Reino de Granada, 25 November 1491. Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/18631/38 (later copy). Edict of Expulsion of the Jews (the Alhambra Decree), signed by Ferdinand and Isabella, 31 March 1492. Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Chronica do descobrimento e conquista de Guiné, edition of 1841. Eugene IV, Sicut Dudum, 13 January 1435. Nicholas V, Romanus Pontifex, 8 January 1455. Latin text in F. G. Davenport, European Treaties, 1917. Castilian royal orders on enslaved Canary Islanders, 1478 and 1490, in E. Aznar Vallejo, Documentos canarios en el Registro General del Sello, 1981. A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497-1499, trans. E. G. Ravenstein, 1898. Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, 17 April 1492. Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Real Cancillería, Registro 3569, fols. 135v-136v. Christopher Columbus, journal of the first voyage, 1492-1493, in the transcription of Bartolomé de las Casas. HISTORIANS Carlos de Ayala Martínez, "¿Reconquista o reconquistas? La legitimación de la guerra santa peninsular," 2020. Martín F. Ríos Saloma, "Usos políticos e historiográficos del concepto de Reconquista," 2011. María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford University Press, 2008. Sidney M. Greenfield, "Madeira and the Beginnings of New World Sugar Cane Cultivation and Plantation Slavery." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 536-552. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492. 1987. Stefan K. Stantchev, Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (1381-1517). Oxford University Press, 2025. Washington Irving, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1828, the biography behind the flat-earth myth. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Praeger, 1991. ARCHIVAL FILM AND IMAGES La vida de Cristóbal Colón y su descubrimiento de América (1916), dir. Gérard Bourgeois. Public domain, digitally restored. Christopher Columbus (1910), Gaumont. Library of Congress. President Ronald Reagan, remarks at a ceremony for a statue of Christopher Columbus, 8 October 1984. Reagan Library. The White House: President Barack Obama, remarks on energy, Largo, Maryland, 15 March 2012; Cabinet meeting, 9 October 2025; President Donald Trump, Columbus Day celebration, 2026. Images from museums, libraries, archives and Wikimedia Commons under the licenses shown on screen. The full list of 76 image credits is in the end credits. Map data: Natural Earth. Terrain: Mapzen. Inca Empire base map adapted from EArnold12, CC BY-SA 4.0. Written and presented by Jonathan Miljus. #history #1492 #ChristopherColumbus