A lunatic!
In the 14th century, an Italian madman wrote a book about what he saw during his travels in China and India, he saw endless gold and silver, spices, huge commercial cities, ornate court buildings, and after returning home, he wrote a book, which was regarded as a "madman's diary" by Europeans at that time, and he himself was regarded as a neurosis. This "Diary of a Madman" has been made into an American drama, in which the heroine is the Chinese actor Zhu Zhu, who is called a thousand-year-old beauty by Westerners, and first appreciates zhu Zhu's beauty.
Millennium beauty Zhu Zhu
Zhu Zhu drift is not beautiful? I think it's pretty, don't like it, don't spray, everyone has a number in mind. The American drama she played was called "Marco Polo", and the protagonist of the story was the Italian neurotic, and the book he wrote was called "Mark. Why did a neurotic patient later become a hero?
There's a reason Europeans say he's a neurotic, because the world wasn't connected at the time, and ancient China and India were too far away for Europeans to see with their own eyes, Mark. Polo can't take it seriously no matter how good it is. He was said to be a hero, but then the Europeans really went to India and China and discovered the richness and richness of the two countries. However, Europeans who wanted to go to China and India could not go by land, because the land route was cut off by the Ottoman Empire, and they took the sea route.
Europeans are in desperate need of a large number of spices, that is, peppercorns, why are peppercorns so important to Europeans? In the era without refrigerators, peppercorns were an indispensable condiment for Europeans, and medieval Europeans used to slaughter a large number of livestock before winter and make pickled products such as ham, after losing spices, these pickled products could not be preserved for a long time, and the taste was greatly reduced. After losing the spices, a large number of meat products cannot be pickled, not only the taste is not good, but also easy to rot, not easy to preserve for a long time.
Pepper tree
"Mark. Polo's Travels showed the Europeans the way, and since traffic was blocked and there was no way to get spices from the Arab countries, they went by sea to China and India in the East. The sea is very afraid of the early Western countries, the world in their minds only asia, Europe and Africa three continents, the rest are all vast seas, go to the sea, basically seek their own death, but there is no way, in order to basically survive and obtain profits, they have to do this.
Three robbers!
The first to do this was Portugal, and the leading big brother was Prince Enrique of Portugal. The prince and a group of scholars improved the Chinese compass, transforming the traditional European sea vessel with only one quadrilate into a multi-masted fast sailing ship with two or three spinnakers, a dhow more than 20 meters long and weighing 60 to 80 tons. Generation after generation, the Portuguese followed the west coast of Africa all the way south.
Statue of Prince Henrique
In 1460 Dias led three sailing ships south along the Atlantic Ocean, and half a year later, the fleet suddenly encountered a rare storm, and after passively drifting southeast for 13 days and nights, unexpectedly bypassed the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese were more convinced that they could reach India by going further east, and they finally succeeded, establishing more than 50 strongholds from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, monopolizing the merchant shipping routes half the world, and in the first five years of the early 16th century, Portugal's spice trading volume rose rapidly from £220,000 to £2.3 million, becoming the number one maritime trade power at the time.
A madman was right, and the later Queen of Spain, Isabelle, drew a pie for Columbus, gave him three broken ships, and told him to try west along the Atlantic Ocean to reach India and China. As a reward, Columbus received one-tenth and was exempt from all wealth and goods acquired in the discovery land, and for ships that later sailed to this territory, Columbus received one-eighth of his profits. Columbus first reached the Bahamas in North America, where the Americas were almost desolate, and later found a large amount of gold, from 1502 to 1660, Spain received eighteen thousand six hundred tons of silver and two hundred tons of gold from the Americas, the Americas is still the world's largest silver mining site.
Columbus
Portugal and Spain's fortunes, with naked robbery is the most appropriate description, with a large amount of gold and silver to enhance their military strength, and then use strong military strength to force other countries to sign trade agreements in their favor, at that time the Americas except Brazil are almost all Spanish territory, and the East except China, almost all portuguese territory, the Portuguese also robbed China of Macao region, occupied Brazil.
Perhaps accustomed to lying down and making money, so easily and pleasantly made by barbaric force, the rulers of Portugal and Spain, squandering the wealth they had stolen from all over the world, did not use it to develop their own industry, leading to the later Dutch coming to the fore. If Portugal and Spain were two bandits with no technical content at all, then the Netherlands could be called a bandit with a little brain.
In 1602, the Netherlands established an unprecedented economic organization, the Dutch United East India Company, Dutch merchants in order to open up routes to the East and the Americas, they decided to raise their own ocean routes, the Netherlands United East India Company raised about 6.5 million guilders from the whole Dutch, about 3 million euros. At that time, the Dutch government converted some rights that only the state could have, equivalent to twenty-five thousand guilders, into the Indian Company, which greatly increased the authority and credibility of the East India Company, and the Dutch government gave the Dutch East India Company the right to negotiate a treaty and start a war.
Dutch East India Company
In just five years since the East India Company was founded, it has sent 50 merchant fleets overseas each year, more than the combined fleets of Spain and Portugal. The Dutch established the world's first set of financial systems, established the world's first stock exchange, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, in 1609 established the Bank of Amsterdam, they organically unified the bank, stock exchange and credit, as well as limited liability companies into an interconnected financial and commercial system, this advanced mode of operation helped the Netherlands to extend the trade tentacles longer than Portugal and Spain, by the middle of the 17th century, the Dutch global commercial hegemony, has been firmly established, The East India Company already had fifteen thousand branches, accounting for half of the world's total trade, and the Dutch population was just over 1 million in the 17th century, and the merchant fleet at that time was as many as 16,000 ships.
In the middle of the 17th century, merchant ships flying the Dutch tricolor flag cruised above the world's five oceans, occupied Taiwan in East Asia, and monopolized Japan's foreign trade; in Southeast Asia they turned Indonesia into their own colony and established the first colonial stronghold, Batavia City, which formed the prototype of today's Jakarta; in Africa, they seized the cape of good hope, the fortress of the new route from Portugal; in Oceania, named a country New Zealand after a dutch province; and in South America, they occupied Brazil At the mouth of the Hudson River on the North American continent, the Dutch East India Company built New Amsterdam, or New York.
The tricolor of the Dutch East India Company
The early European powers reached the consensus that whoever controlled the seas controlled trade, whoever controlled trade controlled the world's wealth, and whoever controlled the world's wealth controlled the world. The earliest Portugal and Spain carved up the world's navigation rights, and later the Netherlands came to the top and became the new sea hegemons, these three robbers played with the early world trade order, although it was very short, but also fully demonstrated the idea of getting rich, bold, and taking bigger steps, which was an excellent spirit of adventure.