About This Lesson
This DBQ has students read documents about 5 explorers of the Late Middle Ages - Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, Christopher Columbus, and Vasco da Gama. The essay task is to explain the motives of the explorers (wealth, religion, and/or nationalism) and then explain the impacts of their travels. It requires students to draw inferences and use outside knowledge, as the documents do not tell the whole story behind each explorer.
