Between 1492 and 1504, the Italian explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus led four Spanish transatlantic maritime expeditions in the name of the Catholic Monarchs to the Americas. These voyages led to Europeans learning about the New World. This was an early breakthrough in the period known in Europe as the Age of Exploration, which saw the colonization of the Americas, a related biological exchange, and trans-Atlantic trade. These events, the effects and consequences of which persist to the present, are often cited as the beginning of the modern era.