Columbus reaches the Americas
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In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed from Palos in Spain with three ships and reached an island in the Bahamas on 12 October, opening sustained European contact with the Americas. A Genoese in the service of Isabella I of Castile, he believed he could reach Asia by sailing west; the Portuguese had shown that Africa could be rounded, but the westward distance seemed shorter than it is. He made four voyages, touching Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and the Central American coast, and died still convinced he had reached the islands off Asia. The papal bull Inter caetera and the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the newly found lands between Spain and Portugal. The consequences were immense and catastrophic for the indigenous peoples: the Taíno population of Hispaniola was devastated by violence, forced labour and above all by smallpox, measles and other Old World diseases to which they had no immunity. Crops and animals crossed the Atlantic in both directions, horses, cattle, wheat and sugarcane going one way and maize, potatoes, tomatoes and cacao the other, in the exchange the historian Alfred Crosby named the Columbian Exchange. Silver from American mines later financed Habsburg wars and fed the Chinese economy, binding the continents into a single world system.