Population Essay of Europe and Africa

According to document 2, 5, 8, and 9 the impact of disease, slave-trade, and war were several of the contributing factors to the shift of population throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. A chronicle kept by the Cakchiquel Mayas recorded the results of a European disease that afflicted the Mayan people of the 1500’s. The previous isolation of Europeans away from the Americas caused European disease to spread more rapidly throughout the Native People they came in contact with. Without any prior exposure to these germs and diseases the Mayans died by the thousands with no fight or moral to live on. Sons died with their fathers and their mothers, and grandsons with their grandpas. Mostly everyone was wiped out. This caused massive loss in population for all the native tribes affected by the European spread of disease eventually probably leading to their extinction. The author of this passage was trying to leave a message and a legacy to be lived on throughout the generations to come. He wanted his descendants to know and be warned of what had happened there. A letter from King Affonso of Angola written to the king of Portugal in 1562 told of the massive loss of people in Angola and other African cultures and societies. Merchants with ambitious and selfish motives were coming to take their sons for profits without any sense of moral. The request of King Afonso was that Portugal would not send their slavers and assist them in the survival of their people. While many Africans were affected harshly with the depletion of population, money, and individual rights, others gained many riches and grew in population, forming the dominant empires of that era. It would be helpful to have the point of view from Africans and European societies who were benefiting from this seemingly horrible market of buying and selling people to fully comprehend what was going on for both groups of people and the negative and positive affects for both sides. In the essays of Michel de Montaigne,