Why 1492?

''Do you want to get to know America? First things first; start with Europe.''

Well said. It seems relatively foolish to write about American history and not start with Europe and European events that culminated in Cristoforo Colombo's 1492 ten-week exploratory voyage.

Today I took a moment thinking ''why 1492?'' and then I simultaneously thought of an analogy: an apple on a branch of an apple tree, which has just accomplished what had to be accomplished, in this case turning into a newly shaped sketch of a small fruit after waiting for some weeks as a bud. Right now, this apple knows its purpose in life. All it needs to do is wait until it gets ready and ripe enough to fall. 1492. Time needed to pass for Europeans so that the day could have come, in which some true believers, followers, set out for Palestine hoping to find The Son of God's resting tomb and finally end up getting acquainted with Muslim traders and merchants.

Did I just say trader? Trade? That must have been due to the fact that I keep in mind a saying about Europeans: ''follow the money". Which is why, I assume Europeans kept on travelling overland to Far East back and forth looking forward to bringing money and goods, i.e. silk, cotton and of course spices, back to Europe.

Not before long, rich traders, afraid of ''unruly barons whose constant wars made travel unsafe and who levied expensive tolls on trade, had to make allies with feudal kings. The kings could use the money to build up armies and expand their territory for their ''nation-state'' to come.

It was only then that the newly born, strong and wealthy nations states could ''finance exploration''s in search of new lands.

There came the next delicate strike: invention of printing, that made it so much faster to spread the exciting incidents and descriptions of Colombo's first voyage throughout Europe and by which Europeans shook hand on never ''forgetting America for a second time.''

The last straw that broke the camel's back (!) was ''gunpowder'' that enabled Hernando Cortes and his some 600 men, who landed at Veracruz and marched to the Aztec capital, to drop the Aztec chief in total confidence. However, for what is worth, one must never forget Colombo's struggle in finding a sponsor whom Colombo was trying to make rich. And thank God for his false premise which was: ''a ship sailing west after a few weeks, should reach Asia and its riches.''

Lucky Isabella of Castile, newly wedded queen to Ferdinand of Aaragon, for trusting Colombo and providing him with the money and equipments for his voyage, for the profit of her blind faith and Colombo's being wrong made Spain the richest nation in Europe by handing it the monopoly of extracting ''almost 20000 tons of silver, 200 tons of gold'' and other products from its American colonies.

Putting Europe, which apparently made a great profit, aside, what happened to America's first settlers who put steps on northern lands of America thousands of years ago? The truth is what happened, happened unintentionally, at least at first! ''The Columbian exchange'' was something out of control right when neither Europeans nor Natives meant no harm. Being isolated from the rest of the universe for so long, Natives, whose bodies didn't seem to had had the immunity, encountering the simplest disease like smallpox, that were brought by Europeans, ended up dead in large scales. The diminishing of 25 million native inhabitants if Mexico to 2.5 million by the year 1600 proves the above mentioned statement.

Their culture, that had developed through time from nomadism, hunting and gathering, agriculture to settled communities and later on big cities with remarkable civilizations like that of the Inca's, which even had ''privileged classes'' and government, also came to an end by European invasions like the conquest of Mexico followed by the fall of the Mayas.