Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

By the time the Tudors took to the waves, much of the world was already mapped out by Europeans.

So what was left for Tudor explorers to uncover?

And should we even call them explorers at all? In this Everything You Wanted to Know episode,

historian Jerry Broughton tackles these thorny questions, as well as delving into the murky motivations of some of the greatest names of the age,

and unpicking England's complex relationship with Spain.

Jerry spoke to Kev Lothchen.

We're talking about Tudor era explorers today,

and I wonder if we could start by having kind of situators,

not just when we are, but also where, which kind of countries are sending

explorers out into the world and where do they hope they're going?

It's a good question, because one of the problems here is to use the word explorers, because

yes, the Tudors are moving outwards from England, but we should remember that even by the 1490s, when really

this story starts, so actually under Henry the 7th, the first great, what we might call Tudor

explorer, is neither a Tudor nor is he an explorer. He's John Cabot, who's actually an Italian,

he's Venetian, who comes to work as a kind of hired gun, hired sailors as it were,

for Henry the 7th.

But the fact is that really even from that early on, the Tudors know that the world is

expanding in terms of European terms, the Portuguese and the Spanish, we've had Columbus,

who's got to the Americas in 1492.

The Portuguese have got round the Cape of Good Hope in 488.

DeGamma's got to India by 1497.

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