had
established the fact that the earth was round and that the new lands
discovered by Columbus were not a part of the Indies but a separate
continent. From that time on, Spain and Portugal devoted all their
energies to the development of their Indian and American trade. To
prevent an armed conflict between the rivals, Pope Alexander VI (the
only avowed heathen who was ever elected to this most holy office)
had obligingly divided the world into two equal parts by a line
of demarcation which followed the 50th degree of longitude west of
Greenwich, the so-called division of Tordesillas of 1494. The Portuguese
were to establish their colonies to the east of this line, the Spaniards
were to have theirs to the west. This accounts for the fact that the
entire American continent with the exception of Brazil became Spanish
and that all of the Indies and most of Africa became Portuguese until
the English and the Dutch colonists (who had no respect for Papal
decisions) took these possessions away in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.

When news of the discovery of Columbus reached the Rialto of Venice, the
Wall street of the Middle Ages, there was a terrible panic. Stocks and
bonds went down 40 and 50 percent. After a short while, when it appeared
that Columbus had failed to find the road to Cathay, the Venetian
merchants recovered from their fright. But the voyages of da Gama and
Magellan proved the practical possibilities of an eastern water-route
to the Indies. Then the rulers of Genoa and Venice, the two great
commercial centres of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, began to be
sorry that they had refused to listen to Columbus. But it was too late.
Their Mediterranean became an inland sea. The overland trade to the
Indies and China dwindled to insignificant proportions. The old days of
Italian glory were gone. The Atlantic became the new centre of commerce
and therefore the centre of civilisation. It has remained so ever since.

See how strangely civilisation has progressed since those early days,
fifty centuries before, when the inhabitants of the Valley of the Nile
began to keep a written record of history, From the river Nile, it went
to Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. Then came the turn of Crete
and Greece and Rome. An inland sea became the centre of trade and the
cities along the Mediterranean were the home of art and science and
philosophy and learning. In the sixteenth century it moved westward onc