Spain and Portugal were the main culprits in the gold hunt. Spain sent many ships (called Galleons) and men over to South and Central America to basically plunder as much gold from the Aztecs as they could. Later, they started to actually mine the gold from the ground.

     Pizzaro stumbled upon the Inca civilization in Peru and to his suprise found out that the Incas didn't use money at all, even though they happened to possess huge amounts of gold and silver everywhere! The Incas soon found out how much their gold and silver was worth, as the Spaniards started carting it off back to Spain.

     All of these expeditions to the New World required big sums of money themselves, to finance the building of ships and to hire the needed men to sail them. Most banks alone were not big enough to lend the money by themselves. This created a new way of lending money, where a group of rich private citizens would get together and invest in a particular project or expedition, then would split whatever money would come back by way of profit. This was the beginnings of how stocks and bonds work!

     As we'll see in the next era, all of this exploring and plundering, with ships filled up with gold and silver on the high seas and different countries trying to outwit each other, would lead to a bunch of big wars as each nation would start robbing the ships of their enemies. Piracy!

     Back in England, King Henry VIII was busy trying to raise money to fight many wars that were still plaguing his country. This was the around the time of the Protestant Reformation, where many groups were leaving the Roman Catholic Church and setting up their own churches. Henry discovered that the Catholic monasteries in Britain had been hoarding gold and other valuables for years and years. What do you think he did about that? Right, he took over the monasteries and seized their property!

Did You Know?

For a while during the 1500's, pepper was very expensive. In fact, in some places it was worth more than gold!