Connecting the Dots: From the Mythical East to the “Real Asia”

Authors

Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto, Universidade Nova de LisboaFollow

Abstract

Magellan opened a new connecting link among Europe, Asia, and America, paving the way for the formation of a global world. But it was also a point of arrival of a long process that went back to antiquity. For many centuries, Europe and Asia had a fragmentary and distorted image of each other. In Europe, confusing notions of “East,” “Asia,” or “India” crossed antiquity and the Middle Ages and mixed fabulous tales with real data about what was beyond the Persian Empire or, later, the Muslim world. The information circulated mainly through land trade routes. In the fifteenth century, Iberian geopolitics determined a new approach: to reach Asia directly by sea. It was the Portuguese who successfully achieved this goal, sailing eastward around Africa and reaching not Marco Polo’s mysterious “Cathay” but the real maritime Asia, putting a wide range of goods, trade routes, peoples, cultures, and civilizations within their range. In 1521, Magellan crossed an unknown ocean and reached Asia by sailing westward. The final dot of a secular process was finally connected. As the Italian Francesco Carletti noticed later, “We never heard of anyone sailing around the world in the ancient times as we do today, thanks to the value and virtue of the two crowns of Castile and Portugal [...]: one, sailing east, allows us to reach China and Japan; through the other, to the west, we reach the Philippine Islands [...] With these two ways, the two Crowns have drawn a circle around the world.”

Recommended Citation

Pinto, Paulo Jorge de Sousa (2025) "Connecting the Dots: From the Mythical East to the “Real Asia”," Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia: Vol. 12: No. 1, Article 2.
Available at: https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha/vol12/iss1/2