In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Spanish and Portuguese would begin a wave of European overseas expansion that would shape the modern world. This expansion was aimed toward the Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean instead of towards the East as most European expansion had been in the past. There were numerous reasons for this expansion and for when it took place. The initial reason was that the economy in Western Europe at the …showed first 75 words of 551 total…

…showed last 75 words of 551 total…a journey of this magnitude to be feasible. Spain and Portugal were the first two nations to begin exploring the Atlantic. The importance of Italian merchants had been effectively cut out of trade with the Far East. By the mid-seventeenth century, France, England and Holland would assume the lead in the Atlantic. Spain and Portugal would retain most of their possessions but would never be as powerful as they were in the fifteenth and sixteent