Age of Discovery Trivia
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109 free Age of Discovery trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Age of Discovery trivia quiz covers two centuries of European exploration, from the Portuguese capture of Ceuta in 1415 to Tasman's circuit of Australia, plus the Chinese treasure fleets that preceded them. The easy questions handle the basics: Columbus's landfall, Magellan's Pacific, Balboa's crossing of Panama, the Columbian exchange and the ships that made it all possible. From there it moves through Prince Henry's captains, the Cape of Good Hope, da Gama's arrival at Calicut, the Treaty of Tordesillas and the race for the Spice Islands. The harder half is for history buffs: papal bulls, the Almanac Perpetuum, Pero da Covilhã's secret overland mission, the antimeridian dispute at Badajoz, Urdaneta's return route across the Pacific, Barentsz's Arctic winter, and Yermak's push into Siberia. If you have done our explorers or Christopher Columbus quizzes, this is the wider picture. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry on the Age of Discovery before publishing, and dates follow that account.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which queen agreed in 1492 to back Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic?
Isabella of Castile
Isabella of Castile. Columbus was already riding away from her court when he was called back: a royal treasurer, Luis de Santángel, had talked her round.
Q 02Which great city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, a blow to Christian Europe?
Constantinople
Constantinople. Its ancient walls gave way after a siege of nearly two months, battered by a bombardment that included a giant cannon cast by a foreign gunfounder named Urban.
Q 03On the three-masted full-rigged ships of the era, the rear mast carried which triangular sail?
Lateen
Lateen. Combining it with square sails on the other two masts produced the full-rigged ship, the ocean-going design that carried Europe's explorers around the world.
Q 04Which Ming admiral led seven treasure-fleet expeditions across the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433?
Zheng He
Zheng He. He began as a prisoner: captured as a boy when Ming armies took Yunnan, he was castrated and put into army service, then rose at court to command the fleets.
Q 05In 1414, which African animal was presented to China's Ming emperor as a mythical qilin?
Giraffe
Giraffe. The match outlived the Ming court: kirin, the Japanese form of qilin, is still the everyday Japanese word for a giraffe.
Q 06Which Italian city-state held a near-monopoly on Europe's spice trade with the Middle East in the 15th century?
Venice
Venice. Its merchants made huge profits reselling spices to the rest of Europe, and breaking that hold was a prime reason explorers went looking for new sea routes.
Q 07Which North African city did Portugal capture in 1415, the first step in its overseas expansion?
Ceuta
Ceuta. Portugal took it in a surprise attack in which the young Prince Henry won his spurs, yet the city later passed to Spain and is still a Spanish enclave in Africa.
Q 08Prince Henry hoped to find allies in the legendary Christian kingdom of which figure?
Prester John
Prester John. The legend first placed his realm in Asia, where travellers such as Marco Polo reported it; only later did the search turn to Africa.
Q 09Which Atlantic archipelago did Prince Henry's captains claim for Portugal around 1420 and turn into a thriving colony?
Madeira
Madeira. It was the most successful colony planted by Prince Henry, whose nickname 'the Navigator' is a foreign invention: he never sailed on a voyage of exploration himself.
Q 10Which feared African headland did Gil Eanes finally pass in 1434, dispelling myths of the world's edge?
Bojador
Bojador. A dozen years of attempts had failed, and Eanes himself turned back in 1433; sent out again by Prince Henry, he rounded the cape the following year.
Q 11Which light Iberian ship type became the workhorse of 15th-century Portuguese voyages down the African coast?
The caravel
The caravel. Its edge was speed and an unusual ability to sail to windward, and two of the three ships Columbus took across the Atlantic in 1492 were caravels.
Q 12Abraham Zacuto's astronomical tables, printed in 1496, let Portuguese pilots calculate what at sea?
Latitude
Latitude. Vasco da Gama's ships carried Zacuto's tables and his new astrolabe to India, but working out longitude stayed beyond sailors for centuries more.
Q 13A 1455 papal bull backed Portugal's policy of 'mare clausum' in the Atlantic, a Latin phrase meaning what?
Closed sea
Q 21Which Spanish-born pope drew a pole-to-pole line through the Atlantic in 1493, granting Spain the lands to its west?
Alexander VI
Alexander VI. Born Rodrigo Borgia in Spain, he gave his homeland so much that Portugal's king refused the ruling and bargained with the Spanish crown directly.
Q 22Which Italian navigator, sailing from Bristol for Henry VII in 1497, reached North America?
John Cabot
John Cabot. He believed he had found the coast of Asia; he sailed again in 1498 with five ships, and what became of him and most of that fleet is still unknown.
Q 23Which region of Canada is said to be named after João Fernandes, an Azorean explorer of the North Atlantic around 1500?
Labrador
Closed sea. Rivals were to keep out of Portugal's waters, a claim the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius attacked in 1609 in Mare Liberum, his famous case for the freedom of the seas.
Q 14The Portuguese trading fort of Elmina, in a region rich in alluvial gold, is in which modern country?
Ghana
Ghana. The fort went up in 1482 to guard Portugal's gold trade, but it later became one of the main hubs of the Atlantic slave trade.
Q 15João de Barros wrote that Dias first named the Cape of Good Hope the Cape of what?
Storms
Storms. In Barros's telling it was the king who renamed it Good Hope, for the promise it held of a sea route to India.
Q 16The Portuguese spy Pero da Covilhã, sent overland in 1487, spent the rest of his life in which African kingdom?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia. The emperor treated him well but would not let him leave, and when a Portuguese embassy finally arrived decades later he was still there to act as its interpreter.
Q 17Columbus set sail on 3 August 1492 from which Spanish port?
Palos de la Frontera
Palos de la Frontera. It was the home port of the Pinzón brothers, shipowners who found the crews and captained two of the three ships themselves.
Q 18Columbus first took his westward plan to which king, who turned it down years before he sailed in 1492?
John II of Portugal
John II of Portugal. On the way home in 1493 a storm drove Columbus into Lisbon, so he had to report his success in person to the king who had turned him down.
Q 19Columbus's first New World settlement, La Navidad, was built with timbers from which ship, wrecked on Christmas Day 1492?
Santa María
Santa María. Columbus left 39 men in the fort and sailed home; when he came back the following year it had been burned down and every one of them was dead.
Q 20Which 1494 treaty drew a line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde to divide all newly found lands between two crowns?
Tordesillas
Tordesillas. The pope's first line ran only 100 leagues out; Portugal bargained it further west, far enough that the coast of Brazil, found six years later, fell on its side.
Labrador. Fernandes was a lavrador, a landholder, in the Azores, and early maps wrote that title across Greenland before the name drifted west to the Canadian coast.
Q 24Vasco da Gama reached which Indian port on 20 May 1498?
Calicut
Calicut. Da Gama's cheap trade goods, fine for West Africa, failed to impress its ruler, and he sailed home without the trade treaty he had come for.
Q 25Da Gama's voyage is romanticised in Os Lusíadas, an epic poem by which writer?
Luís de Camões
Luís de Camões. He knew those seas at first hand: he served for years in Portugal's eastern outposts and, tradition says, saved the manuscript from a shipwreck off the Mekong.
Q 26Which Portuguese commander, sailing for India in 1500, landed in Brazil and claimed it?
Pedro Álvares Cabral
Pedro Álvares Cabral. Taking the coast for an island, he claimed it, sent one ship home with the news and after only ten days sailed on for India.
Q 27Brazil takes its name from brazilwood, a tree that Portuguese traders shipped to Europe to make what?
Red dye
Red dye. The explorers christened the land for the Holy Cross, but within a decade maps were calling it the land of brazilwood, and the trade name won.
Q 28Which mapmaker's 1507 world map was the first to print the name 'America', in honour of Amerigo Vespucci?
Martin Waldseemüller
Martin Waldseemüller. He printed 1,000 copies of the huge woodcut map, yet only one is known to survive, now kept in the Library of Congress.
Q 29Afonso de Albuquerque captured which rich trading port for Portugal in 1511, the gateway to the Spice Islands?
Malacca
Malacca. Albuquerque wasted no time: he garrisoned the port and at once sent ships on to find where the spices grew, along with envoys to Siam.
Q 30The tiny Banda Islands, reached by the Portuguese in 1512, were then the world's only source of which spice?
Nutmeg
Nutmeg. The same tree gives mace as well, and a monopoly that valuable drew the Dutch and then the English into a long fight for the islands.