Before 1492 Italy had no tomatoes, Ireland no potatoes, Switzerland no cocoa, and Thailand and India no chilli peppers.

1492

All of them came from the Americas after Columbus.

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The event

• Columbus reaches the Americas1492 · Guanahani. Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain in search of a western route to Asia, landed on the Bahamian island of Guanahani on 12 October 1492. It began lasting contact between the Old and New Worlds, transforming both hemispheres.

15th century

More amazing facts

• 1492 1492: Granada fell in January, Columbus reached the Americas in October, and in November the Ensisheim meteorite fell in Alsace — one of Europe's oldest witnessed falls.
• 1492 The oldest surviving globe was made in 1492, and America is not on it. Martin Behaim finished his "Erdapfel" in Nuremberg before Columbus returned; between Europe and Asia it shows only ocean and islands.
• 1492 Columbus's critics were right — about size, not shape.
• 1492 · 1828 The idea that medieval people believed in a flat Earth is a 19th-century invention, popularised among others by Washington Irving's romanticised 1828 biography of Columbus.
• 1494 · 1497 Ivan III's law code (1497) appeared three years after Spain and Portugal divided the world between them at Tordesillas.
• 1494 Leonardo da Vinci's maths teacher is the "father of accounting". In 1494 Luca Pacioli was the first to describe double-entry bookkeeping in a printed book — the debit-and-credit system still used today.

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