nd made conquest sure, yet the Spaniards were not
sailors. It was to Italy, the home of commerce, that they turned for
their captains and their pilots. Columbus, the Genoese, had discovered
the islands along the coast. England, wishing to have a share in this
world of wonders, sent a Venetian mariner, John Cabot; and he and his son
sailed along our northern mainland in English ships.[17] Columbus touched
the coast of South America in 1498.[18] A Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci,
was the first to cruise far along this southern coast, probably in 1499,
and it was his name which Europe gave to the new lands.[19]

Following the discovery came settlement, warfare with the unhappy
Indians, a fierce and frantic search for gold. It was while engaged in
this work that Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama, saw the vast
waters of the Pacific, and riding out into them upon his warhorse took
possession, in the name of Spain, of the largest ocean of the globe.[20]
Men recognized at last that these were not the Asiatic shores, but a
wholly new continent which they had found.

RELIGIOUS CHANGES

Let us pause to recapitulate the wonders which this age of the
Renaissance had seen--a new world of Africa discovered in the South, a
new world of America in the West, the rise of Spain, the conquest of the
last of the western Saracens at Granada and the rise of the Turks in the
East, the rise of Russia, the downfall of the last vestige of the ancient
empire of Rome, the last expiring effort of feudalism in Charles the
Bold, and of errant knighthood in Maximilian; the beginning of modern
statecraft in Louis XI of France, Henry VII of England, and Ferdinand the
Wise of Spain; the spread of printing and with it the spread of thought
and knowledge among the masses; and, sometimes accounted greatest of all,
came the wonderful awakening of art in Italy. We have traced the early
part of this under the Medici and Pope Nicholas. Lorenzo de'Medici was
the centre of its later development.[21] From his court went forth that
galaxy of artists which the world of art unites in calling the unequalled
masters of all ages--Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and a host of
others.[22]

Unfortunately in Italy at least the great movement in art and literature
took an antireligious, sometimes an antipatriotic, tone. Lorenzo was
openly defiant and scornful of the teachings of the Church, and after his
death a French king, Charles VIII, was able to enter Italy and march