Spanish History Test 2 - Catholic Monarchs

Abraham Zacut

Published Perpetual Almanac, 1496 Zagut was a Sephardi Jewish astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, rabbi and historian who served as Royal Astronomer in the 15th century to King John II of Portugal. The Arabs had continued the Greek tradition of astronomical study, and this knowledge was still present in medieval Iberia. King Alfonso X of Castile (1252-1284) asked a team of astronomers in his court to prepare an almanac of the position of the heavenly bodies, and in the University of Salamanca the Jew Abraham Zacut published a Perpetual Almanac in 1496, which was also in Columbus' library.

Juana la Beltraneja

Queen consort of Portugal, 1475-1477 Regarding the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, the ricos hombres of Catile wanted to the Castilian crown to remain weak. As a result, they came to support the daughter of Enrique IV of Castile, Juana la Beltraneja, whom in 1465 they had excluded formt he inheritance on the grounds that she was not really the daughter of the king but rather the product of an illicet liaison between the queen and the king's favorite.

Boabdil

Sultan of Granada until 1492 Ferdinand of Aragon exploited the divisions that existed in the ruling family of Granada, and a civil war broke out, in which Boabdil was captured by Ferdinand. In exchange for his freedom, he made a secret deal with Ferdinand, but this accord was broken when Boabdil's nemesis became a vassal of Ferdinand. In January, 1492, Boabdil surrendered the final part of al-Andalus to the Catholic monarchs, ending the seige of Granada.

Ibn Battuta

1304-1369 Ibn Battuta was an explorer of Berber descent, who is widely recognised as one of the greatest travelers of all time. He is known for his extensive travels, accounts of which were published in the Rihla (lit. "Journey"). Over a period of thirty years, Ibn Battuta visited most of the known Islamic world as well as many non-Muslim lands. His journeys included trips to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa and Eastern Europe, and to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China.

Abraham Cresques

1325-1387 In 1375, Abraham Cresques issued an Atlas in the Balearic Island of Majorca, and his son was hired by Henry the Navigator when he was working hon his plans to explore the west coast of Africa. Abraham Cresques was a 14th-century Jewish cartographer from Palma, Majorca (then part of the Crown of Aragon). In collaboration with his son, Jehuda Cresques, Cresques is credited with the authorship of the celebrated Catalan Atlas of 1375.

Act of Resumption

1480 At the meeting of the Cortes of Castile in Toledo in 1480, the Catholic Monarchs won the approval of the Act of Resumption, a law that forced the ricos hombres to turn over to the crown one half of assets they had usurped between 1464 and 1480. The Act of Resumption would allow Ferdinand and Isabella to directly appoint bureaucrats, rather than letting the independent and erratic nobles rule. The Royal Council would control both a royal army and manage tax disputes, which would place nobles more securely under the control of the Crown.

Sentence of Guadalupe

1486 King Ferdinand of Aragon initiated a series of institutional changes in Catalonia to restore order in that important area of Spain. The Sentencia de Guadalupe, a document designed to regulate relations between Catalan peasants and their lords freed the remença peasants who had been tied to the land in medieval times, especially after the Black Plague. It also abolished the "six evil customs," which were common abuses by the lords against their peasants, and it made the peasants small landowners in everything but the name.

Treaty of Tordesillas

1494 The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed at Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, and authenticated at Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Portugal and the Crown of Castile, along a meridian 370 leagues[note 1] west of the Cape Verde islands, off the west coast of Africa. This line of demarcation was about halfway between the Cape Verde islands (already Portuguese) and the islands entered by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage (claimed for Castile and León), named in the treaty as Cipangu and Antilia (Cuba and Hispaniola). The lands to the east would belong to Portugal and the lands to the west to Castile. The treaty was signed by Spain, 2 July 1494 and by Portugal, 5 September 1494. The other side of the world would be divided a few decades later by the Treaty of Zaragoza or Saragossa, signed on 22 April 1529, which specified the antimeridian to the line of demarcation specified in the Treaty of Tordesillas. Originals of both treaties are kept at the Archivo General de Indias in Spain and at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Portugal.[6] This treaty worked fairly well as between Spain and Portugal, despite considerable ignorance as to the geography of the New World, but it omitted all of the other European powers. Those countries generally ignored the treaty, particularly those that became Protestant after the Reformation.

Battle of Diu

1509 The Battle of Diu, sometimes referred to as the Second Battle of Chaul, was a naval battle fought on 3 February 1509 in the Arabian Sea, near the port of Diu, India, between the Portuguese Empire and a joint fleet of the Sultan of Gujarat, the Mamlûk Burji Sultanate of Egypt, the Zamorin of Calicut with support of Ottomans, the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The Portuguese victory was critical: the Mamluks and Arabs retreated, easing the Portuguese strategy of controlling the Indian Ocean to route trade down the Cape of Good Hope, circumventing the traditional spice route controlled by the Arabs and the Venetians through the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. After the battle, Portugal rapidly captured key ports in the Indian Ocean like Goa, Ceylon, Malacca and Ormuz, crippling the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and the Gujarat Sultanate, greatly assisting the growth of the Portuguese Empire and establishing its trade dominance for almost a century, until it was lost during the Dutch-Portuguese War and the Battle of Swally won by the British East India Company in 1612. It marks the beginning of European colonialism in Asia. It also marks the spillover of the Christian-Islamic power struggle, in and around the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East, into the Indian Ocean, which was the most important region for international trade at the time.

Santa Hermandad

12th century + Santa Hermandad, literally "holy brotherhood" in Spanish, was a type of military peacekeeping association of armed individuals, which became characteristic of municipal life in medieval Spain, especially in Castile. As medieval kings of León, Castile, and Aragon were often unable to maintain public peace, protective municipal leagues began to emerge in the twelfth century against bandits and other rural criminals, as well as against the lawless nobility or mobilized to support a claimant to the crown. These organizations were individually temporary, but became a long standing fixture of Spain. The Catholic kings proposed the renewal of th Santa Hermandad to act as highway patrols and anti-brigand forces, bringing thieves, murderers, and arsonists to mutilation or death. They adapted the existing form of the hermandad to the purpose of creating a general police force under the direction of officials appointed by themselves, and endowed with large powers of summary jurisdiction, even in capital cases. The rough and ready justice of the Santa Hermandades became famous for brutality.

Adelantado

Adelantado (Spanish pronunciation: [aðelanˈtaðo]) was a title held by Spanish nobles in service of their respective kings during the Middle Ages. It was later used as a military title held by some Spanish conquistadores of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Adelantados were granted directly by the Monarch the right to become governors and justices of a specific region, which they were charged with conquering, in exchange for funding and organizing the initial explorations, settlements and pacification of the target area on behalf of the Crown of Castile. These areas were usually outside the jurisdiction of an existing audiencia or viceroy, and adelantados were authorized to communicate directly with the Council of the Indies. In 1482 when the Catholic monarchs sent Alfonso Fernandez de Lugo on an expedition to subjugate the population of Grand Canary Island and to confirm Castile's claim to that archipelago, the provisions for the expedition had certain similarities to expeditions launched during the Reconquista: Fernandez de Lugo would become the adelantado (governor of a border area) and land would be distributed to his men in a repartimiento.

Letrados

At the 1480 meeting of the Cortes of Catalan in which the Catholic Monarchs got the Observança, they also refurbished the Royal Council, which is sometimes also called the COuncil of Castile. One goal of this reform was to exclude the grandees from membership in the council. In order to achieve such a goal, the new law specified that the Council of Castile would include one clergyman, three knights, and eight or nine letrados (lawyers trained at the University of Salamanca or in another university). The letrados became indispencable in government as more and more of the government's transactions and decisions were written down. In this regard, Ferdinand mayhav eintroduced into Castile a practice already common in the crown of Aragon

Moriscos

Expelled in early 17th century Moriscos were former Muslims who converted or were coerced into converting to Christianity, after Spain finally outlawed the open practice of Islam by its sizeable Mudejar population in the early 16th century. The Moriscos were subject to systematic expulsions from Spain's various kingdoms between 1609 and 1614, the most severe of which occurred in the eastern Kingdom of Valencia. The overall success of the expulsion is subject to academic debate, although the large majority of those which were permanently expelled settled on the western fringe of the Ottoman empire and the Kingdom of Morocco. The last mass prosecution against Moriscos for crypto-Islamic practices occurred in Granada in 1727, with most of those convicted receiving relatively light sentences. From then on, indigenous Islam is considered to have been effectively extinguished in Spain.

Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros

Monk, Q. Isabella's confessor 1492+ IN 1499 the Franciscan Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, who became the Queen Isabella's confessor after Hernando de Talavera was named Archbishop fo Granada in 1492 visited Granada with Ferdinand and Isabella. jiminez de Cisneros repudiated the tolerant religious policies of Hernando de Talavera, alleging that not enough Muslims had converted through peaceful methods.

Prester John

Prester John is a legendary Christian patriarch and king popular in European chronicles and tradition from the 12th through the 17th century. He was said to rule over a "Nestorian" (Church of the East) Christian nation lost amid the Muslims and pagans of the Orient, in which the Patriarch of the Saint Thomas Christians resided. The accounts are varied collections of medieval popular fantasy, depicting Prester John as a descendant of the Three Magi, ruling a kingdom full of riches, marvels, and strange creatures. At first, Prester John was imagined to reside in India; tales of the Nestorian Christians' evangelistic success there and of Thomas the Apostle's subcontinental travels as documented in works like the Acts of Thomas probably provided the first seeds of the legend. After the coming of the Mongols to the Western world, accounts placed the king in Central Asia, and eventually Portuguese explorers convinced themselves that they had found him in Ethiopia, which had been officially Christian since the 4th century. Prester John's kingdom was thus the object of a quest, firing the imaginations of generations of adventurers, but remaining out of reach. He was a symbol to European Christians of the Church's universality, transcending culture and geography to encompass all humanity, in a time when ethnic and inter-religious tension made such a vision seem distant.

Patronato Real

The Patronato (literally: "Patronage") system in Spain (and a similar padroado system in Portugal) was the expression of royal patronage controlling major appointments of Church officials and the management of Church revenues, under terms of concordats with the Holy See. The resulting structure of royal power and ecclesiastical privileges, was formative in the Spanish colonial empire. It resulted in a characteristic constant intermingling of trade, politics, and religion.[1] The counterweight to the patronato system was provided by Jesuit missions, whose allegiance lay with the hierarchy of their Order, directly responsible to the Pope. The beneficiaries of the Portuguese padroado opposed the authority of the vicars apostolic in the Asian missions. In the successor states to the colonial empires, the conservative Establishment of Church and ruling class continues to be referred to as the patronato. The Patronato Real that these kingdoms were given orver newly discovered territories by the Papacy allowed them to have the missionary rights in the new territories. The kings received exclusive riths to evangelize new lands discovered by Columbus and others in 1493, and in1508 Julius II granted the patronato real to Ferdinand. As a result, the Spanish crown obtained the right to select all the missionaries and fill all the ecclesiastical posts that would develop in the New World without any imput by the Papcy.

Repartimiento

The Repartimiento was a colonial forced labor party imposed upon the indigenous population of Spanish America and the Philippines. In concept it was similar to other tribute-labor systems, such as the mita of the Inca Empire or the corvée of Ancien Régime France: the natives were forced to do low-paid or unpaid labor for a certain number of weeks or months each year on Spanish-owned farms, mines, workshops (obrajes), and public projects. With the New Laws of 1542, the repartimiento was instated to substitute the encomienda system that had come to be seen as abusive and promoting unethical behavior. The repartimiento was not slavery, in that the worker is not owned outright—being free in various respects other than in the dispensation of his or her labor—and the work was intermittent. It however, created slavery-like conditions in certain areas, most notoriously in silver mines of 16th century Peru. In the first decades of the colonization of the Caribbean the word was used for the institution that became the encomienda, which can cause confusion. The repartimiento, for the most part, replaced the encomienda of throughout the Viceroyalty of New Spain by the beginning of the 17th century.[2] In Peru encomiendas lasted longer, and the Quechua word mita frequently was used for repartimiento. There were instances when both systems (repartimiento and encomienda) coexisted. In practice, a conquistador, or later a Spanish settler or official, would be given and supervised a number of indigenous workers, who would labor in farms or mines, or in the case of the Philippines might also be assigned to the ship yards constructing the Manila galleons.

Caravel

developed by 1440 A caravel is a small, highly maneuverable sailing ship developed in the 15th century by the Portuguese to explore along the West African coast and into the Atlantic Ocean. The lateen sails gave her speed and the capacity for sailing to windward (beating). Caravels were used by the Portuguese for the oceanic exploration voyages during the 15th and 16th centuries in the Age of Discovery. Caravels were perhaps the first boats that relied only on sails and no longer used oarsmen. The Portugese also put artillery at a lower level in their caravels. As a result, the Portugese fleet was able to destroy a Muslim fleet off the coast of India in 1508 at the Battle of Dieu.

Canary Islands

discovered, 1339 In 1339 Lanzarotto Malocallo, another Genoese explorer in the employ of Castile, discovered teh Canary Ilands and claimed them for Castile. The famous Italian writer, Boccaccio, commented on this discovery in one of his writings and described the inhabitants of those islands in detail. Portugal repreatedly tried to wrest the Canaries from Castile in the 15th century but without success.

Observança

latter half of 15th century King Ferdinand of Aragon initiated a series of institutional changes in Catalonia to restore order in that important area of Spain. At the meeting of the Cortes of Catalan in 1480, Ferdinand issued a document called the Observança, in which he pledged to accept the constitutional limitations on royal power and pointed out the measure that the Generalitat could take should he abuse those powers.

Hernando de Talavera

monk, late 15th century Hernando de Talavera, a Hieronynmite friar, confessor of Isabella, and now Archbishop of Granada was one of the men chosen by Ferdinand to govern the newly conquered Granada. He admired Islamic culture and the good works of some Muslims and oppowed the use of force in order to compel Muslims to become Christians. Instead, he encouraged Catholic priests in Granada to learn Arabic, become familiarwith the culture of the population there, and minister to the needs of the population of Granada. Unfortunately, however, few clergymen followed this advice, and the ruling elite of Granada adopted harsher measures by the end of 1492.

Tanto monta, monta tanto

motto regarding the Catholic monarchs Elliott attributed the success of the Catholic Kings to their ''working partnership unique in the annals of monarchy.'' The Spanish phrase used to describe this partnership, "tanto monta, monta tanto Isabel como Fernando," which roughly can be translated as "Isabella and Ferdinand are equally significant," expresses not only their equality but also the wilingness of Isabella to give more authority to Ferdinand in Castile, even though she was the proprietary monarch in that kingdom.