Terms of 1500s (Spanish and Christopher Columbus)

Plague Accelerants

Climate, Trade, and Transportation

European Renaissance

A time of great creativity and intellectual exploration where people looked back to the ancient world for inspiration and pushed boundaries in many fields

Humanism

Celebrated human beings, their minds and bodies, as the wretched, sinful creatures they were portrayed as by the church. Thus, much of the artwork focused on the beauty of the human form

Isabella of Castile

She was headstrong and managed to reject multiple marriages arranged by her brother, the king of Castile in Spain. Instead, she eloped and married King Ferdinand of Aragon. This union of two chief principalities formed the beginning of modern SPAIN

Reconquista

The spanish “reconquest” and expulsion or conversion of Muslims and Jews in the liberian peninsula was completed at the Battle of Granada in 1491. King Ferdinand led the military, but Queen Isabella was the diplomat and the brains behind the unification of Spain via her marriage to Ferdinand, the Reconquista, and the initial Spanish missions of exploration and conquest in the western hemisphere after 1492

Inquisition

An effort launched in 1478 to maintain Catholic purity in the face of “proto-protestants” and Jews and Muslims who had claimed to have converted. It was a brutal system of torture and execution overseen by Dominican friar Tomas de Torquemada

The Spanish Conquistadors

Followed Columbus’s path but with better knowledge, better resources, and sometimes with even clearer intent to exploit the land and the people. minor Spanish noblemen who led small armies on missions of conquest in the New World

St. Augustine, Florida

Is the oldest continuously-existing European city in the U.S.

Hernan Cortes

Arrived in what is now Mexico in 1519 with 600 men and conquered hundreds of thousands of Aztecs within three years

Factors in Spanish Defeat of the Aztecs

Firearms

Horses

Alliances

Decapitation Method

Disease (THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR)

Iconography

Catholicism uses physical objects in its rituals, statues, and paintings in a way that was shunned by Protestants as idolatry. But natives in America were used to using objects - “icons” - in their religions