conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire. The dwindling Byzantine Empire came to an end when the Ottomans breached Constantinople’s ancient land wall after besieging the city for 55 days. Mehmed surrounded Constantinople from land and sea while employing cannon to maintain a constant barrage of the city’s formidable walls. The fall of the city removed what was once a powerful defense for Christian Europe against Muslim invasion, allowing for uninterrupted Ottoman expansion into eastern Europe. https://www.britannica.com/event/Fall-of-Constantinople-1453

Many nations were looking for goods such as silver and gold, but one of the biggest reasons for exploration was the desire to find a new route for the spice and silk trades. When the Ottoman Empire took control of Constantinople in 1453, it blocked European access to the area, severely limiting trade. In addition, it also blocked access to North Africa and the Red Sea, two very important trade routes to the Far East. The first of the journeys associated with the Age of Discovery were conducted by the Portuguese. Although the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, and others had been plying the Mediterranean for generations, most sailors kept well within sight of land or traveled known routes between ports. Prince Henry the Navigator changed that, encouraging explorers to sail beyond the mapped routes and discover new trade routes to West Africa. Portuguese explorers discovered the Madeira Islands in 1419 and the Azores in 1427. Over the coming decades, they would push farther south along the African coast, reaching the coast of present-day Senegal by the 1440s and the Cape of Good Hope by 1490. Less than a decade later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama would follow this route all the way to India. https://www.thoughtco.com/age-of-exploration-1435006

PUMPKIN SPICE LATTE

Also now: Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, Iced Pumpkin Cream Chai, Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino, Iced Pumpkin Cream Shaken Espresso, Pumpkin Spice Chai, and Pumpkin Cream Matcha.

Most Europeans entered the tropics in a political and social climate of colonization and exploitation (of people, their culture, and natural resources).
That shapes their perceptions of both tropical environments and the people they encountered.
These people wrote home about what they saw, and brought things back with them.
These stories percolate through society and are reflected back by authors and artists for consumption by the public.
This reinforces and helps perpetuate the first perceptions (and misconceptions).

Historians generally recognize three motives for European exploration and colonization in the New World: God, gold, and glory.

On October 12, 1492, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus made landfall in what is now the Bahamas. Columbus and his ships landed on an island that the native Lucayan people called Guanahani. Columbus renamed it San Salvador. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/columbus-makes-landfall-caribbean

On 4 May 1493, two months after Columbus’s arrival, the Catholic Monarchs received a bull (Inter caetera) from Pope Alexander VI stating that all lands west and south of a pole-to-pole line 100 leagues west and south of the Azores or the Cape Verde Islands should belong to Castille and, later, all mainlands and islands then belonging to India. It did not mention Portugal, which could not claim newly discovered lands east of the line. King John II of Portugal was not pleased with the arrangement, feeling that it gave him far too little land—preventing him from reaching India, his main goal. He then negotiated directly with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to move the line west, and allowing him to claim newly discovered lands east of it.[99]

An agreement was reached in 1494, with the Treaty of Tordesillas that divided the world between the two powers. In this treaty the Portuguese received everything outside Europe east of a line that ran 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands (already Portuguese), and the islands discovered by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage (claimed for Castile), named in the treaty as Cipangu and Antilia (Cuba and Hispaniola). This gave them control over Africa, Asia and eastern South America (Brazil). The Spanish (Castile) received everything west of this line. At the time of negotiation, the treaty split the known world of Atlantic islands roughly in half, with the dividing line about halfway between Portuguese Cape Verde and the Spanish discoveries in the Caribbean.

Willem Piso Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648)

summarizing research by Georg Marcgraf

Cochin is the central part of present-day Kerala state, India.

From the 16th century on, an unusual form of medical cannibalism became widespread in several European countries, for which thousands of Egyptian mummies were ground up and sold as medicine. Powdered human mummies – called mummia – were thought to stop internal bleeding and have other healing properties. The practice developed into a widespread business that flourished until the early 18th century. The demand was much higher than the supply of ancient mummies, leading to much of the offered “mummia” being counterfeit, made from recent Egyptian or European corpses – often from the gallows – instead. In a few cases, mummia was still offered in medical catalogues in the early 20th century.

In medieval European medicine, mūmiyā “bitumen” was transliterated into Latin as mumia meaning both “a bituminous medicine from Persia” and “mummy”. Merchants in apothecaries dispensed expensive mummia bitumen, which was thought to be an effective cure-all for many ailments. It was also used as an aphrodisiac.

It led to a huge black market for human bodies, whiuch resulted in digging up bodies from local graves to make fake mummies.

This continued all the way thorugh the Victorian era!!

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2101801/

Bigger Picture #1:

Faith

And that’s why…

Looks just like…

And also…

Bigger Picture #2:

Money & Power

Bigger Picture #3:

Culture (Clash)

As the Vehicle of Durga: The tiger features in the myths and legends of different cultures throughout India – the best known of which is probably as one of Durga’s vahan (vehicle). Goddess Durga is the principal Hindu warrior goddess who embodies supreme divine feminine energy (Shakti

vahan (mont)

The Viceroy and Vicereine: George Nathaniel Curzon served as the Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905. His wife, Mary Curzon (an American heiress), held the highest official title available to a woman in the Indian Empire.

Big Game Hunting: Tiger hunting (shikar) was a common display of status, power, and masculinity among British imperial administrators and the English upper class during the Raj.

Ecological Impact: These organized hunts by colonial elites, alongside massive habitat alterations like clearing native forests for timber plantations, severely depleted South Asian wildlife populations over the decades