Yes. And the same reason as trade the millennium prior. The land route’s were cut off. By the Persians for the Romans and the Turks for the Portuguese/Spanish.
The Turks and their Venetian trade partners who monopolized the carrying trade in the Eastern Mediterranean.
I think it was Daniel Boorstin in The Discoverers who went over the whole spice trade motivation. The intermediary domains - by land or by sea - were well aware of the value of the spice trades and derived a great deal of profit and taxes from it. As a result they were very jealously guarding their sections of the routes east and generally did not tolerate merchants and adventurers crossing their domains to try and eliminate the middleman - since that was them. So not many Europeans got to travel to the Indian ocean or across Asia. I doubt the vagaries of Indian ocean weather were that well known in the Mediterranean.
This all changed with Genghis Kahn. he conquered the expanse from China to the Mediterranean and opened up the entire empire to travel. This is how merchant explorers like Marco Polo and his family could visit China and explore its wonders, and then return. After about 150 years that empire crumbled, and the routes all closed up again. But - Europeans now had more information about the source of these valuable spices and the general layout of much of Asia. They proceeded to explore new ways to reach those fabulous “Spice Islands” of the Indies - Indonesia - by routes that bypassed the realms they had not long ago crusaded against and where they were persona non grata, and further intermediate kingdoms.
Take a look at this 1491 map>
Notice how far off the coast Japan is.
Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain on August 3, 1492, hoping to find a trade route to Asia. After spending more than two months at sea, Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas. But the Italian explorer thought he had reached Japan, the land of gold – because that’s what the map he was using as a reference was telling him.
Writings by Columbus’s son Ferdinand indicate that the explorer had expected to find Japan where Martellus depicted it, and with the same orientation, far off the Asian coast, and with its main axis running north and south. No other surviving maps from the period show Japan with that configuration, says Van Duzer.
In addition, the journal of one of Columbus’s crewmembers, who believed the expedition was sailing along island chains in southern Asia, describes the region much as it is depicted in the Martellus map.
Revealing the map’s faded details provides a more complete picture of Columbus’s perception of geography, notes the historian.
That was the best world map of it’s time.
Again - this is very confusing for me. Didn’t St Bartholomew and then St Thomas visit India in 52 AD ? What are these crusades, you are referring to ?
The route to China lay along the silk roads - typically, through the Middle east and along the sea route to India and points southwest; the Silk Road (route for trading silk and spices) went via central Asian kingdoms and into China north of the Himalayas - but to get there, traders went through the Ottoman empire (Turkey). The way through therefore started with a number of Muslim kingdoms and empires. After the Christians attacked the Holy land multiple times from about 1100AD to 1300AD, needless to say the Christian traders were no welcome to travel through the land; Genghis opened up the travel right after that, but when his empire crumbled a century later (After Marco Polo), the Muslim world slammed the door closed to Christian travelers.
Needless to say, by 1350AD the Muslims had forgotten about Sts. Bart and Tom, the Roman Empire delegation to the Chinese court, etc. - and didn’t care anyway.
I was quite surprised to learn that at the Battle of Diu, a significant amount of the Allied fleet was Venetian.
As Wikipedia suggests, the Turks and the Venetians had come to an understanding to share/divide the spice trade. Venice dominated the eastern Mediterranean with its navy. The Portuguese were going to bypass their lucrative trade by using the Cape of Good Hope. So the Venetians did the same as I mentioned the more easterly Muslim kingdoms did, try to monopolize their leg of the trade by eliminating competition. In this, they had the same interest as Turkey and Arabia.
At the time, one ship full of spices in Europe could apparently leave all involved set for life. The existing traders had a lot to lose if they were bypassed.
Venetian-supplied ships at any rate. Venice’s economy was dependent on the Muslim overland/sea trade to Asia - before the Ottomans it had been the Mamluk state in Egypt. For the Venetians Portuguese penetration of India and the Red Sea was far more of an existential threat than the stagnant Mamluk state, itself not a major naval power.
The Ottomans emergence as a major and predatory naval power was on one hand very bad for Venice (they ended up in quite a few mostly lost wars over the centuries that slowly eroded their possessions in the Aegean), but once the Mamluks were displaced they simply had no choice but to come to some agreement. But they were always looking for a way to balance or counter Ottoman predation at the same time. Which led to other diplomatic weirdness like in one moment fighting on the same side with a coalition that included the Knights of St. John and in the next being to subjected to piracy from the Knights as they raided Venetian shipping in the name of crusading against the Turks.