according to the American historian Alan Mikhail, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire disrupted trade routes with the Far East, and this compelled Spanish and Portuguese adventurers to seek out new ways to reach the Indies.[48] It isn’t a coincidence that two decades after the Genovese trading colony of Kaffa fell to the Ottomans, Christopher Columbus—himself a Genovese sailor—reached North America. What is more, according to Mikhail the colonization of the Americas was a response to the realization that the Holy Land was irretrievably lost.
