How significant was the role of religion in
driving the forces of exploration from Europe?

Religion seems to have played a fairly moderate role with regards to being a motivation for European exploration and Colonisation. It is clear there were other factors, perhaps more important than religion, that seemed to have been more of a motivation, for example advances in technology, ship building and also the desire to find new land to cultivate.

In the popular imagination of the explorers and adventurers of the Middle Ages, there were beliefs that ships who dared to travel too far into mysterious and uncharted seas might plunge over the boundary of the world or perish in the scorching seas of the torrid zone. Fears such as these acted as a deterrent to new exploration and discovery, and also rational and practical investigations. However some mythical fantasies, despite their unrealistic nature, seem to have taken a significant part in motivating some voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century, for example, the desire to find existence of Lost Islands, a continent of Atlantis in the Western Seas, and also legend of a powerful Christian king called Prester John, who was thought to be ruling somewhere beyond the Muslim lands in Africa or Asia.

Explanation:

polticians and sentates thought to annoucne the fialre of articles of confedartion by making a centralized nation as a hole