Gold, glory, and the gospel

the long version

A lively, colorful account of the adventures of Spanish, Portuguese, and English explorers emphasizes their diverse and seemingly contradictory motives. In the late fifteenth century Europe was astir with dreams of discovery that would shortly transform the world. It was an age of intense intellectual curiosity, of questioning, testing, and the balancing of conflicting motivations. The author, a distinguished Renaissance historian, has sorted out the contradictory motives and behavior of the European explorers and exploiters in this Golden Age, looking at the lands they discovered, sometimes conquered, and often bloodied- Africa, India, Mexico, Central and South America. He describes in dramatic detail the extraordinary feats and strange attitudes of the Renaissance conquerers and explorers as he traces the course of Europe's expansion overseas from the era of Columbus to the early seventeenth century. -- from Book Jacket.