has been long known, and in 1960 Norwegian archaeologist Helge Ingstaad found an eleventh- or twelfth-century Norse occupation site at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland. Since then, other probable Norse artifacts have been retrieved from Labrador at similar latitudes. No artifactual evidence has been found that verifies voyages farther south, although it is conceivable that some of the early Norse voyagers traveled down as far as the St. Lawrence basin. We just don't know.
Ultimately, the extent of Norse explorations is of minimal historical consequence, since their discovery had little impact on European or American cultures. Medieval Europe at the time of the Norse discovery was simply too fragmented, too decentralized, and too conservative to take advantage of the exploits of the Vikings. Historically, it was not until the fifteenth century that western Europe was ready to expand outward, to probe beyond the limits of the known world. In contrast to the Norse landfall, the second discovery of the New World by Columbus was an epochal event, launching both Europe and America into a new age.
The age of exploration capped a period of vigorous political consolidation and modernization in Europe during which emerging nation states like Spain, Portugal, France, and England centralized political authority, reduced the power of the Church and the rural nobility, and developed bureaucracies capable of sustaining national programs. If the creation of powerful nation-states established the context for the age of exploration, the religious crusades of the late Middle Ages provided a motive. The great crusades of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian peninsula, and the long struggle with the Ottoman Turks in northern and central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gave intense religious import to the fifteenth-century exploration of the New World and the Far East.
A second motive, often inextricably entwined with the first, was the desire for commercial expansion and economic gain. Europeans had long known of the riches in the Far East, and their appetites were whetted by trading that developed out of the Crusades and by reports brought back by Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, and others in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The century following the last Crusades brought expanding commercial networks throughout Europe and into Asia. In the mid-fourteenth century, however, Islamic and other anti-Western empires arose in the Near and Far East and gradually consolidated their hold on the eastern Mediterranean. Although trade with the East continued, Islamic influence increased the already considerable risk to the Europeans of overland trade. The great overland caravan routes declined, forcing traders to sea-borne routes, where numerous Muslim intermediaries gouged them at ports along the way. Faced with rising prices, higher risks, and dwindling supplies of oriental goods, Europeans began searching for new routes to the East.
A third development necessary to the fifteenth-century explorations was a series of advances in ship design and navigation that made long, open-water voyaging possible. The vessels used by the explorers combined features of two earlier types of crafts, one from the North Atlantic and the other used by Mediterranean and southern European sailors. Neither by itself was satisfactory for transoceanic exploration. The North Atlantic vessel, a tubby, thick, high-sided craft designed for rough seas, featured a single mast with a large square sail. Although fairly stable in open seas, it was unsuitable for coastal navigation. The Mediterranean craft was sleeker but less ocean-worthy. Its highly maneuverable lateen sail and fore-and-aft rigging were perfectly adapted to the Mediterranean coasting trade but performed poorly in the open sea. The explorers' vessels were ingenious composites of the two, borrowing the heavy structure, decking, and seaworthiness of the North Atlantic type and incorporating some of the sleekness of the 