What was the primary reason for Christopher Columbus's voyage?

Question

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Answer 1

Money. He was trying to find a better trade route to Asia.
It just happened that there were these other continents in the way...

Answer 2

While on a voyage for Spain in search of a direct sea route from Europe to Asia, Christopher Columbus unintentionally discovered the Americas

Answer 3

To sail to India. He believed going across the ocean would be a shorter route. Because he thought the earth was much smaller than it is.
The Church (Rome) had split the ocean to belong to two nations. the Portuguesee and the Europeans. The Portugues had the rights to everything under the 35 parallel and the north had the rights to everything above. This meant that the Spanish could not sail below the 35, so this made travel to India extremely long. The dutch had made a route thru the Arctic waters, but it was a difficult route.
So Columbus convinced he could make the queen rich by opening the route to India across the ocean.

Answer 4

"Christian Europe (EAST) had long enjoyed safe passage to India and China—sources of valued goods such as silk and spices—under the hegemony of the Mongol Empire (the Pax Mongolica, or "Mongol peace"). In 1507, the region was blockaded by the Portuguese in an effort to discourage trade along the old route and encourage trade around Africa. The chinese also promoted the establishment of trading posts and later colonies along the African coast. Columbus had a different idea. By the 1480s, he had developed a plan to travel to the Indies (then construed roughly as all of south and east Asia) by instead sailing directly WEST across the "Ocean Sea" (the Atlantic)..."

He did not know about America, he did not know about a new land or new territory for Spain. He wanted to find a new trade route to get to Asia goind west instead going east.

Answer 5

Columbus spent some of his early years at his father's trade of weaving and later became a sailor on the Mediterranean. Shipwrecked near the Portuguese coast in 1476, he made his way to Lisbon, where his younger brother, Bartholomew, an expert chart maker, lived. Columbus, too, became a chart maker for a brief time in that great maritime center during the golden era of Portuguese exploration. Engaged as a sugar buyer in the Portuguese islands off Africa (the Azores, Cape Verde, and Madeira) by a Genoese mercantile firm, he met pilots and navigators who believed in the existence of islands farther west. It was at this time that he made his last visit to his native city, but he always remained a Genoese, never becoming a naturalized citizen of any other country. Returning to Lisbon, he married (1479?) the well-born Dona Filipa Perestrello e Moniz.

By the time he was 31 or 32, Columbus had become a master mariner in the Portuguese merchant service. It is thought by some that he was greatly influenced by his brother, Bartholomew, who may have accompanied Bartholomew Diaz on his voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, and by Martín Alonso Pinzón, the pilot who commanded the Pinta on the first voyage. Columbus was but one among many who believed one could reach land by sailing west. His uniqueness lay rather in the persistence of his dream and his determination to realize this "Enterprise of the Indies," as he called his plan. Seeking support for it, he was repeatedly rebuffed, first at the court of John II of Portugal and then at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Finally, after eight years of supplication by Columbus, the Spanish monarchs, having conquered Granada, decided to risk the enterprise.

Answer 6

The silk road, the trade route from western Europe to Asia, was not only dangerous but the muslims who controlled it were collecting larger and larger tolls on the caravans passing over it.

Europe needed a trade route to Asia that didn't go East over the Silk Road but West, by water.

Columbus made the trip to find a route to Asia for the purpose of trade and the profits that could come from such a venture. He was not looking for the North and South American Continents because those didn't show on the maps that existed at the time and he didn't know they were. there. When he finally touched land he thought he had reached India and that is why the indigenous people were called "Indians" in his reports back to Spain.

Answer 7

To find a shorter route to the east indies. As Portugal already had the route around the tip of South Africa, Spain had to find another way of getting there.

It was all about getting spices to Europe. In an age when food went bad, at least spices would make spoiled food taste better.

Answer 8

Christopher Columbus develop right into a self taught guy who sought experience & glory.Believing in prophecies he develop into confident that his destiny lay in discovering the path to the east (the Indes) by crusing westwards.

Answer 9

Because he wrecked a ship and as a captain he had to repay back the value of the ship to the owner or go to jail; so he went to Spain in exile to escape the justice ( he never went back to Italy).
Because of the race to India for the spices, Spain's king offered a chance to make his country reacher in competition with England.
Those explorers were the real "pirates" and I'm not joking.....

Answer 10

To get to the East Indies by going West since he believed the earth was round.