The year 1503 saw a decline in the profits of the Venetian merchants trading in spices.  In 1504, when the Venetian galleys arrived at the end of their annual voyage to the port of Alexandria in Egypt they found not a single sack of pepper waiting for them.  Thus, by 1503,  in a surprisingly few years, the opening up of a sea route to the Indies by the Portuguese had broken the Venetian monopoly of European trade.   Antwerp, with its masses of unskilled labour, buiding upon the long- established sucess of the Flemish merchants of Bruges, had now become the centre of the entire international economy.  Luxury, capital, and industrial activity, paticularly from the  Empires of the Middle East, all began to blossom together with ideas of the Italian Renaissance in the lands bordering the North Ssa.

The foundations of this increased economic activity and the fruits that fell into the hands of the Flemish merchant families were the Europeans who sailed to the Indies.  There they created coastal settlements from which to explore the local natural resources and quayside warehouses were established to support the rapidly growing trade with Europe.  In 27 September 1503 the Portugues laid the foundations of a timber fortress in Cochin (Ernakulam) South India to protect their "feitoria" (warehouse) . This was the first permanent European trading colony in the East Indies established with the consent of  the Rajah  of Cochin. From here the Portuguese exported large volumes of spices, particularly pepper

In 1503, the fourth voyage of Columbus to the West Indies was becoming a disaster.  For most of the year he was marooned on the island of Jamaica which he had discovered on his second voyage.  Nevertheless, although he failed to find a new route to Asia, Columbus made the lands and peoples of the western hemisphere known to Europeans, setting in motion a chain of events that altered human history on a global scale.