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Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, he enlarged the world of the Latin race and religion in a way almost comparable with the influences of Columbus's discovery of America on the Teutonic peoples and the scope of Protestantism. The rediscovery of the Old World was only second in importance to the discovery of the New World. In the fifteenth century the Turkish despotism sprawling over the wreck of the Byzantine Empire became a huge barrier between Asia and Europe, which shut off the West from intercourse with the East by the old overland road. What was then needed was the reverse of the policy of later Europe in its construction of the Suez Canal—a route to India that would avoid the Ottoman territory. Columbus had set out to find this route by circumnavigating the globe, when he stumbled on a new continent half-way round, and so surprised everybody by making a much more important discovery. Vasco de Gama attained the Genoese enthusiast's object in another and more effective way. He reached Asia by sailing round Africa. The immediate result was the establishment of the Portuguese dominions in India.

The Portuguese on their arrival in India found a Christian Church oppressed by Mussulman tyranny, which