Hello and welcome back to epochs. Last time I started telling the story all about Magellanan

Magellan's voyage around the world,

the first ever circumnavigation of the globe, if you believe the globe is indeed a sphere.

So, first, last week, I just talked about setting things up, really, and I'm going to continue

doing that this week, bringing in a few new characters.

One thing to say about this, if you're going to tell

the story in full detail as I do want to do, or sort of as much detail as possible, there's

actually loads and loads and loads of characters. Sometimes stories are like that. So I'm going to

try and keep it as simple as possible in a way. If I was to mention all the names of people that have any real relevance, there'd be too many.

And a lot of them are obviously Spanish and Portuguese names. Some of them are kind of similar.

So although I'm going to try and tell this story in quite a bit of detail, I will actually leave out some people if they're not vitally important.

Having said all that, there's a couple of characters I need to introduce before we go any

further.

And hopefully by the end of this episode, we will have actually set off across the ocean

sea, as they called it, the Atlantic Ocean by the end of this episode.

But still, there's a fair few quite important details that we need to talk about

before we actually set off with Magellan around the world.

So a couple of figures.

One royal and one not so royal.

The first one need to talk about is the king of Spain, or rather the King of Castile and Aragon

and Lyon, who goes on to become the Holy Roman Emperor, because this guy, Charles I of Spain,

he is the benefactor of the entire mission. If it weren't for his money and his patronage

...