Increasing interest in geographical discovery and maritime enterprise in the fourteenth and the fifteenth century.—Awakened interest in globe construction.—Martin Behaim and his globe of the year 1492.—The Laon globe.—Christopher and Bartholomew Columbus and their interest in globes.—John Cabot and his globe.—Globes of Johannes Stöffler.—Conrad Celtes and his part in arousing an interest in globes. The fourteenth century witnessed among the peoples of Italy and of the Iberian coast regions a rapidly rising interest in maritime enterprise. The expansion of Europe, which for two centuries had been overland and eastward, was now becoming oceanic, with an outlook southward and westward into the Atlantic. In the fifteenth century, under the inspiration of Prince Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese were feeling their way down the coast of Africa, adding year by year to their knowledge of hitherto unknown lands;[97] the Atlantic island groups, one by one, were discovered or rediscovered,[98] and in 1487 Bartholomew Diaz turned the Cape of Good Hope and opened a new way to the Indies of the East.[99] Through all these enterprises a new and vigorous stimulus was given to interest in geographical studies, just as an awakening had followed the disclosure of the riches of the East by Carpini, Rubruquis, and especially by Marco Polo in the earlier post-crusading years.[100] Out of this lively interest in all that pertained to the expansion of knowledge concerning the various regions of the earth came a desire for better map making,[101] and attention was again intelligently directed to the construction of terrestrial globes on which to represent the most recently discovered seas, islands, and continental coasts.