After the long period of crisis that characterized the end of the Middle Ages, Europe, from the mid-fifteenth century, showed a remarkable dynamism. The population began to increase, the lands were put back into cultivation, the trade routes experienced the heyday of yesteryear.
Always setting sail in search of expensive spices and gold, European navigators pushed ever further out into the ocean. Two inventions dominated the progress of technology: the printing of Gutenberg, and the artillery.
In relation to all this, economic wealth and discovery of the world, advent of a new humanism and artistic flourishing, the date of 1492 it was not entirely a surprise.
However, the new islands he encountered Christopher Columbus they were going to reveal themselves as the first port of call of an immense and unsuspected continent; and the Spaniards would bring to him their spirit of evangelizing crusaders and voracious conquerors.
“Renaissance”, “16th century revolution”, “explosion of the sixteenth”, such expressions indicate the subjective admiration that posterity experienced for a time that knew Charles V and Jacob Fugger, Michelangelo, Erasmus, and Copernicus, Luther and Ignatius of Loyola at the same time. From 1492the European expansion stands out in two revealing aspects:
A new conception of man
The anthropocentrism It was the new way of perceiving man, as the center of “Creation”, but also free, powerful, and intelligent. The strategic princes, the humanists, the merchants, the artists, become the ideal of human.
This new notion transforms the relationship with God, now it can be reached through knowledge, beauty and honor. The Church responds to these changes with the Lutheran Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
A new vision of the world
After Colon, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan, the shape of the Earth is revealed. It was also time to review the cosmology, suggesting that the center of the universe was not the Earth, but the Sun; that would be the work of Copernicus.
Shortly before the end of the century, people began to reflect, very precariously, on the fact that beyond the seas, in the continents newly discovered, there were cultures that were not European, and civilizations oldest and empires as organized as those of Europe.
Sources: Levinas, M.: The Images of the Universe, Buenos Aires. / Venard, M.: The Beginnings of the Modern World, XVI and XVII centuries, The World and its History, Argos. /