Portuguese Diplomacy in Asia in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Overview

Itinerario ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-37
Author(s):  
Zoltán Biedermann
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Small Country ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Portuguese Empire

Scattered as it was over thousands of miles of African and Asian coastline, the Portuguese empire in the East had a peculiar shape when compared to the Spanish one in the New World. As one author of the early seventeenth century put it, ‘the king our lord does not have more than twenty leagues of land in all Asia, from Macao to the Cape of Good Hope’. Portugal was a small country with a population of one and a half million people, and it is no surprise that the Portuguese presence in Asia - a ‘network’ rather than an ‘empire’, as some authors claim - had to rely heavily on diplomacy. The wholesale ‘conquest’ (conquista) of the East was perceived as a theoretical right of the Portuguese crown, but in practice most relations with Eastern polities rested on a complex set of negotiated links of ‘friendship’ (amizade) or indirect submission (uassalagem).

Travel

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
New World ◽  
Margery Kempe ◽  
The Reformation

Advances in technology had dramatically improved mapping and navigational possibilities that made travel within Europe easier, more comfortable, and more feasible. In the early seventeenth century, writers such as Fynes Moryson, Thomas Coryat, and William Lithgow began to provide accounts of their extensive travels. However, the ethnological models that were used by Europeans in the sixteenth century were hardly modern. While the discovery of the New World showed the scope and diversity of the known universe, it also encouraged a heightened xenophobia and racism. There are also other more practical considerations implying that change was not as rapid as might be expected. This article examines travel in the context of cultural history and how the Reformation became a key impediment to travel. It looks at travelers who were prepared to go beyond what was generally expected or even acceptable despite the obvious dangers and discomforts, focusing on the experiences of Margery Kempe and William Lithgow.

Ambassadors and Administrators: The Role of Clerics in Early French Colonies in Guiana

Itinerario ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-277
Author(s):  
Gayle K. Brunelle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Precious Metals ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
Fierce Competition

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

The Scientific Revolution Really Occurred

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM R. SHEA
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
New World ◽  
World View ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

The importance of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has been queried in recent years and this paper attempts to show why the notion is still essential to a proper understanding of the twin advance in scientific conceptualization and factual discovery that began in the sixteenth century and led through such figures as Galileo to the new world view of Isaac Newton. The significance of the scholastic tradition, hermeticism and alchemy is not denied, but the major breakthrough that catapulted Europe into the modern age was the outcome of new conceptual tools and a fresh outlook on nature.

The Introduction and Spread of Maize in Africa

1965 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin P. Miracle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
New World ◽  
Coastal Regions ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Economic Motives

Linguistic evidence strongly suggests that maize penetrated the interior of tropical Africa from the coastal regions, but the timing and mode of its introduction cannot be established. The commonly repeated assertion that the Portuguese brought maize to tropical Africa from the New World cannot be documented at this juncture, although they seem certainly to have had economic motives for doing so.Maize was probably introduced to tropical Africa at more than one point and at different times. Maize was widely grown along the coast from the River Gambia to Sâo Tomé, around the mouth of the River Congo, and possibly in Ethiopia, in the sixteenth century. There is reference to it in all these places, in Zanzibar, and around the mouth of the River Ruvuma in the seventeenth century; and it was not only mentioned but described as an important foodstuff and a major provision for slave ships between Liberia and the Niger Delta during the same century.Much less information is available for the interior, but it clearly seems to have been unknown in Uganda as late as 1861. Until well within the present century, it was neither a major export nor a mainstay of the diet in most of eastern and central tropical Africa, the bulk of the areas where it is now of major importance.

Under One (Inherited) Imperial Crown: The Tudor Origins of Britain and its Empire, 1603–1625

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-180
Author(s):  
Jessica S. Hower
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
New World ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
British History ◽  
Global Engagement ◽  
Popular Texts

This article investigates the existence in early Stuart Britain of a vibrant, conscious, and global imperial inheritance, as well as the meaning and significance of this legacy for British interactions with the wider world in the seventeenth century. It explores the ways in which a new, transnational and colonial approach to a still-stubbornly insular Tudor History unearths over a century of British experimentation from 1485 in Europe, the Isles, the Americas, Africa, and the East, mutually-reinforced by consolidation and identity-formation at home. I examine the tangible, enduring importance of these examples – that is, the continued relevance of ideology and practice forged in sixteenth-century interactions beyond England – to the subsequent development of Britain and its Empire. The New British History, New Imperial History, and Atlantic History have transformed and complicated our understanding of Britain and the connections between Britain and Empire. Yet these turns have had greater success in privileging the seventeenth century, the Isles, and Anglo-America, relegating Britain to latecomer status in the New World and elsewhere while reinforcing dynastic periodization and obscuring an essential basis of Jacobean and later global involvement. This article seeks to cross the historiographic divides between chronological boundaries, between Tudor and Stuart, insular and global, using 1603–1625 as a case study. With interests sparked, sustained, and legitimized by experience, British subjects active in Ireland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana in the first quarter of the new century carefully deployed, manipulated, even shucked elements of Tudor nation and empire. Continuity in personnel and the survival of popular texts merged with changes wrought by or circa the new dynasty, as Jacobean flatters and critics fashioned history to fit their ends. By recalling Tudor policy, they acknowledged and memorialized an extra-national past, perpetuating certain images, diction, objectives, and regions of interest across 1603 to influence Stuart global engagement. This paper demonstrates that we cannot understand the development of Britain in the transformative seventeenth century and beyond without looking back and overseas.

Questioning Thunderstones and Arrowheads: The Problem of Recognizing and Interpreting Stone Artifacts in the Seventeenth Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 482-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Goodrum
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
New World ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
Natural Phenomenon ◽  
Natural History Museums ◽  
European Contact ◽  
History Museums ◽  
Close Relationship

AbstractFlint arrowheads, spearheads, and axe heads made by prehistoric Europeans were generally considered before the eighteenth century to be a naturally produced stone that formed in storm clouds and fell with lightning. These stones were called ceraunia, or thunderstones, and it was not until the sixteenth century that their status as a natural phenomenon was challenged. During the seventeenth century natural historians and antiquaries began to suggest that these ceraunia were not thunderstones but ancient human artifacts. I argue that natural history museums, European contact with the stone-tool using peoples in the New World, and the close relationship between natural history and antiquarianism were critical to this reinterpretation of ceraunia. Once these objects were recognized to be ancient artifacts they could be used to investigate the earliest periods of human history from sources other than texts.

Academic Feud, Bloodfeud, and William Welwood: Legal Education in St Andrews, 1560–1611-Part I

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Joint Meeting ◽  
Academic Education

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.

The Civilian Contribution of the Spanish Royal Engineers, 1500–1800

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Buisseret
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Town Planning ◽  
Santiago De Cuba ◽  
Cartagena De Indias

Rather neglected until recently, Spanish military engineers now have been studied in detail revealing that the Habsburg and Bourbon kings, from small beginnings in the sixteenth century, sustained an exceptionally large number of military engineers in the 17th and 18th centuries – over 600 in Europe and over 100 in the New World. Trained in mathematics, surveying, architecture and cartography they built a limited number of great forts, usually to defend strategic ports like Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Portobelo, and Cartagena de Indias. However, fortification was hardly necessary in the major capitals far from coastlines so their greatest, most enduring, achievements lay in cartography, road and water engineering, town planning and architecture.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Lutherans and the Suffering of Christ

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Heal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Mining Region

Chapter 5 focuses on one particular type of Lutheran devotional image: the crucifix. It examines transformations in Lutheran Passion piety from the early Reformation to the era of Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), using this to illustrate the increasing significance accorded to images. Luther himself had condemned the excesses of late-medieval Passion piety, with its emphasis on compassion for Christ and the Virgin Mary, on physical pain and on tears. From the later sixteenth century onwards, however, Lutheran sermons, devotional literature, prayers and poetry described Christ’s suffering in increasingly graphic terms. Alongside this, late-medieval images of the Passion were restored and new images were produced. Drawing on case studies from the Erzgebirge, a prosperous mining region in southern Saxony, and Upper Lusatia, the chapter investigates the ways in which images of the Passion were used in Lutheran communities during the seventeenth century.

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