World History: Columbus and the Age of Discovery (Jewel Case)

Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History. So, remember back in May of 1453 when the Ottomans smashed the thick walls of Constantinople, captured the city, and beheaded the Byzantine emperor? You probably don’t remember May of 1453, come to think of it, but you remember learning about it. It was a bit of a footnote in our first episode, but you never know when the footnotes are going to be very important, but that one really did change the world. With the Ottomans now also controlling much of southeastern Europe, they established a navy, which they used in the Black, Adriatic, and other seas in the region. Ottoman domination meant that European kingdoms and empires needed to find different paths to Afroeurasian trading routes--which ultimately helped spark the voyages of explorers from the Iberian peninsula. INTRO So we’ve talked already in this series about the import