A teacher's job is to teach kids, HOW to think, not WHAT to think. Christopher Columbus was himself an immigrant, his wife didn't have the same nationality as him (and neither did his mistress) and he was motivated to seek a route to East Asia by the most catastrophic act of illegal immigration (i.e. invasion), that has happened to this day: - Columbus was born in Genoa (now Italy, but at that time its own republic) and migrated for work - He was married to a Portuguese woman and had an affair with a Spanish woman - He worked for the Catholic monarchs of Spain, who had just conquered back their homeland after centuries of it having been a Muslim colony - Europeans ONLY became interested in finding alternative routes to East Asia, because their natural land route (i.e. the main strand of the Silk Road, starting in Constantinople) had been cut off by the same Islamic expansion, that had also held Spain under foreign rule for about 8 centuries at that point The Silk Road had been a millennia old trade route between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. Chinese, Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and tons of other nations had established a trade system, that connected all three races and a variety of hundreds of cultures PEACEFULLY way before Jesus Christ was a thing. And it did benefit the Asians en route far more than the Europeans, as the Asians were usually the producers and sellers, while the Europeans were the buyers and consumers. This incredible cultural miracle was disrupted by the Islamic expansion (7th century-now), because of political changes, forced migration (non-Muslims literally fleeing through half of Eurasia to get away from Islamic rule, if they couldn't fight it) and economic war tactics. In 1453 (i.e. 39 years before Columbus sailed), Constantinople was conquered by Muslim Turks. To understand what a devastating blow this was to European civilisation and the trade system, that had previously connected 3 continents, you need to understand, that - Constantinople was a city built in the Greek colony of "Little Asia", which you may know as Turkey nowadays. Greeks started to settle there approx. 4.000 years ago, so in 1453, this peninsula had been theirs for about 3.500 years and they had developed it from scratch. The city of Troy was in this area (which makes the Trojans Greek colonists, who defended themselves against an attack from their own Greek motherland in the Trojan War). - When the Romans took over, they made Constantinople a very important city (because of its role in the Silk Road trade), that became their new capital, when Rome was destroyed in 476 AD. It's also known as Eastern Rome or Second Rome and stood for the unbroken tradition of Roman civilisation (753 BC, starting as a kingdom-1453 AD, falling as an empire = 2206 years). Constantinople's fall marked the true end of the Roman Empire and gave way to 500+ years of Ottoman (= Turkish) wars in the region, that went along with Islam conquering the European Balkan area and making it as far north as to Vienna, so Austrian, German and Polish knights had to stop it. The Islamisation of the Balkan still causes problems, but the most recent larger conflicts are the Yugoslavian wars from the 1990s on. It also came with a vast slave trade: The English word "slave" derives from Slav - because Muslim slave hunters in Eastern Europe and southern Russia kidnapped so many Slavic people that their name became a synonym for slaves! This could well have been the end of European civilisation. Cut off from the Silk Road, the Portuguese had already tried to find a sea route around Africa (because the Suez Canal wasn't a thing yet) before Columbus sailed, which kicked off the whole European Age of Exploration. The Spanish followed, then other European nations. So, to put this in perspective: Europeans would have stayed the eff at home and minded their own business, if Islam had left the Silk Road untouched and functional. It was the fall of Constantinople (as a part of aggressive illegal Turkish immigration), that caused the European Age of Exploration. You can thank Islam for Columbus; he didn't even know where exactly he was going and most definitely didn't plan to commit genocide, when he started in Spain. ------- When did the English monarchy go into debt with jewish usury?