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60 free Age of Discovery trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01The Age of Discovery is also commonly known by what other name?
The Age of Exploration
It overlapped with the Age of Sail and ran from roughly the early 15th to the 17th century.
Q 02Which two countries led the first wave of overseas colonisation in the 15th and 16th centuries?
Spain and Portugal
The English, French and Dutch joined later.
Q 03The magnetic compass used by European navigators was originally invented during which Chinese dynasty?
Han
It was in use for navigation in China by the 11th century and reached Europe by the late 12th or early 13th century.
Q 04The full-rigged ship of the era combined a carvel hull with how many masts?
Three
The fore and main masts set square sails while the mizzen carried a lateen sail.
Q 05Which Ming admiral led seven treasure-fleet expeditions across the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433?
Zheng He
His largest 'treasure ships' may have measured 121 metres, and the fleets brought back giraffes, zebras and ostriches.
Q 06What was the name of the Ming isolationist policy that ended China's long-distance voyages?
Haijin
The Xuande Emperor even suppressed much of the information about the voyages.
Q 07Which Italian city-state near-monopolised European trade with the Middle East from the 8th to 15th century?
Venice
The spice trade made these Mediterranean republics phenomenally rich, which is what the Atlantic powers hoped to bypass.
Q 08Which North African city did Portugal conquer in 1415, often taken as the start of the era?
Ceuta
Young Prince Henry the Navigator became aware there of the profits of the trans-Saharan trade routes.
Q 09Prince Henry hoped to find allies in the legendary Christian kingdom of which figure?
Prester John
His other aims were to bypass Muslim-controlled routes and to probe whether the Indies could be reached by sea.
Q 10Which Atlantic archipelago did the Portuguese reach in 1419, before the Azores in 1427?
Madeira
João Gonçalves Zarco led the expedition that established settlements there.
Q 11Which feared African headland did Gil Eanes finally pass in 1434, dispelling myths of the world's edge?
Bojador
Sailing beyond it had begun systematically in 1421 under Henry's sponsorship.
Q 12From 1440, which shallow-draft Iberian ship type became the workhorse of voyages down the African coast?
The caravel
Its lateen rig was poor downwind, which is why Columbus re-rigged the Niña with square sails.
Q 13Which Jewish astronomer's 1496 Almanac Perpetuum gave Portuguese navigators latitude tables?
Abraham Zacuto
Exact longitude, by contrast, remained beyond mariners for centuries.
Q 21The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas drew its dividing line how many leagues west of the Cape Verde islands?
370
The pope's earlier line had been 100 leagues; John II negotiated it westward, which later gave Portugal a claim to Brazil.
Q 22Which pope issued the 1493 bull Inter caetera dividing new lands between Castile and Portugal?
Alexander VI
He was Rodrigo Borgia, and the bull did not even mention Portugal.
Q 23Which Italian navigator, sailing from Bristol for Henry VII in 1497, reached North America?
John Cabot
He hoped a northerly crossing would make the route to the 'West Indies' shorter.
Q 14Which 1455 papal bull granted the King of Portugal all lands discovered beyond Cape Bojador?
Romanus Pontifex
It initiated a 'mare clausum' policy declaring the Atlantic closed to other states.
Q 15The Portuguese trading fort of Elmina, in a region rich in alluvial gold, is in which modern country?
Ghana
The area came to be called the Gold Coast.
Q 16Bartolomeu Dias originally gave what name to the southern tip of Africa when he rounded it in 1488?
Storms
King John II renamed it the Cape of Good Hope in his optimism about a sea route to India.
Q 17Who was sent overland in secret to Ethiopia to gather intelligence on the Red Sea and East African coast?
Pero da Covilhã
His reports suggested a sea route to the Indies would soon be found.
Q 18Columbus set sail on 3 August 1492 from which Spanish port?
Palos de la Frontera
Land was sighted on 12 October, an island he named San Salvador in what he took to be the East Indies.
Q 19Columbus first presented his westward project to which king, who rejected it in both 1485 and 1488?
John II of Portugal
The king's experts thought his 2,400-mile estimate for the distance to Asia was far too low.
Q 20How many men did Columbus leave behind at La Navidad, the settlement he founded in what is now Haiti?
39
He also kidnapped between 10 and 25 natives, of whom only seven or eight reached Spain alive.
Q 24Labrador is named after which Portuguese explorer, who sighted it in 1499?
João Fernandes Lavrador
The Corte-Real brothers explored Greenland and Newfoundland between 1499 and 1502.
Q 25Vasco da Gama reached which Indian port on 20 May 1498?
Calicut
He returned to Portugal two years and two days after leaving with just 55 surviving men.
Q 26Da Gama's voyage is romanticised in Os Lusíadas, an epic poem by which writer?
Luís de Camões
It is widely regarded as Portugal's greatest literary achievement.
Q 27Which Portuguese commander, sailing for India in 1500, landed in Brazil and claimed it?
Pedro Álvares Cabral
He believed it was an island and named it Ilha de Vera Cruz.
Q 28Cabral is described as the first captain to touch how many continents?
Four
His voyage connected Europe, Africa, the New World and Asia in a single expedition.
Q 29The Americas were named in 1507 by which cartographers, after Amerigo Vespucci?
Waldseemüller and Ringmann
Vespucci's published accounts had argued the new lands were a 'Mundus novus', not the Indies.
Q 30Afonso de Albuquerque conquered which city, then the centre of Asian trade, for Portugal in 1511?
Malacca
From there he sent the first European envoy to Siam and an expedition to the Spice Islands.