6. Conquests

Author(s):  
Matthew Restall ◽  
Amara Solari

“Conquests” gives a history of the Spanish invasions of late Postclassic Maya states in the sixteenth century. Whether these invasions could be called conquests at all is debatable. These incursions were protracted and incomplete. The fragmentary, plural nature of Maya city-states made conquest a challenge. Spanish conquistadors only managed to establish colonies with the aid of former Aztec warriors and other Mesoamerican allies. Historically, the Maya had disappeared into the rainforest to escape undesirable political or environmental situations and continued to use tactical migration as another form of resistance. Their susceptibility to New World diseases such as typhus, measles, smallpox, and influenza decimated the Maya population.

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
Yarí Pérez Marín

This section reflects on the cross-fertilisation between science, medicine, literature and art in the consolidation of New World identity and discourse, beyond the sixteenth century. It invites readers to consider towering figures in the cultural history of colonial Latin America, such as writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, polymath Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and painter Miguel Cabrera, discussing some of their connections to earlier texts on anatomy and physiology. The epilogue makes a case for redefining the medical texts studied in Marvels of Medicine as early matrixes of colonial rhetoric, scientific and literary objects that charted a course for future colonial subjects’ sense of identity in relation to the larger context of global knowledge production.


Author(s):  
Bianca Batista ◽  
Luiz Montez

This study’s aim is to analyze the discursive construction of Brazil in the chronicle of Pero Gândavo, História da Província Santa Cruz que Vulgarmente Chamamos Brasil (1576) and in the travel collection of Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Trafqques of the English Nation (1589-1600). Printed books played a crucial role during the sixteenth century once the editors built a history of the new-found lands in accordance with their reigns’ economic and ideological interests. For Gândavo, the chronicle assured the Portuguese possession over Brazil whereas for Richard Hakluyt, the travel collection denied Iberians’ kings sovereignty over the New World and extolled the English maritime enterprise in the Americas, especially in the lands not effectively colonized by the Iberians. We suggest that the printed book was a stage in which the European countries struggled for the riches of Americas.


1962 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Pike

The turning point in the history of the Genoese merchants in Spain was the discovery of America and the subsequent opening of trading relations with the new continent. From then on, their ascent to economic predominance in Spain paralleled that nation's emergence as the dominant power of the sixteenth-century world. Fortune gave Spain two empires simultaneously, one in the Old World, the other in the New. Spain's unpreparedness for imperial responsibilities, particularly in the economic sphere, was the springboard for Genoese advancement. Strengthening and enlarging their colony in Seville —after 1503 the “door and port of the Indies” —the Genoese prepared to move across the Atlantic in the wake of Columbus.


Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith

This chapter turns to the history of the race concept. It considers the early development of thinking about human diversity and human origins in the context of the Renaissance. In important respects, later reflections in European philosophy echo debates that played out a century earlier within the Ibero-American world, largely as a result of the fact that the Iberians were the earliest Europeans to have significant encounters with non-European peoples in the modern era. The chapter focuses on those sixteenth-century engagements with the novissima americana, the latest news from the Americas, that dealt with the question of the origins and nature of biological kinds in the New World, and particularly with the origins and nature of New World peoples.


1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville Chittick

This article, based on a critical examination of the Pate Chronicle in the light of archaeological and external historical evidence bearing on the subject, presents a case for a revision of the early history of the town. It maintains that Pate was the latest of the settlements to rise to importance in the region, being of little importance before the sixteenth century, and preceded by other city-statés, the earliest of which was Manda. The origins of Pate do not go back before the fourteenth century; the first dynasty there, the Batawi, was ruling up to around the seventeenth century, after which the Nabahani took over the sultanate.


1877 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 267-297
Author(s):  
Sydney Robjohns

The mariners of the sixteenth century are no exception to the rule that the biography of great men illustrates the period in which they lived. Francesco Pizarro might have been a cowherd at Seville for ever, instead of a viceroy at Lima, for any value attaching to his biography to the student of European politics; but he and Cortez, Cartier, Hawkins, Drake, and many another, marked an epoch in the history of maritime adventure, namely, the period which witnessed the union of science and enterprise—a union enabling the sailor to navigate his bark into the wide and unknown seas, where no landmark points the course—a union which gave to civilisation another world. The Phoenician groping his way, hugging the land along the shores of Africa and Spain, and shooting across the channel, with the sun and stars alone to steer by, until he touched the lonely but rich shores of the Cassiterides, was a mariner of equal daring with those who, westward ho! set sail for the Spanish Main; but, with an increase of knowledge, there had been discovered a new world—a world that, without the sensitive needle, and the discovery of the fact that it was ever true to its magnetic principle, true as the star to which the sailor from Tyre had in his day attached his faith —and for the subduing of that world it was necessary there should be a new departure, not in enterprise, for that was conspicuous in the earth's central sea, but a union of scientific knowledge with the enterprise and energy common to all young nations—at least to all nations which have made their mark in the world, and left the impress of their life upon time's honourable records.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 107-125
Author(s):  
Saul Guerrero

Abstract In the sixteenth century the Spanish Empire would find itself owner and conqueror of the largest deposits of primary silver and mercury in the world, a geopolitical conjunction which would lead to the use of mercury at an industrial scale in the production of plata de azogue (silver by mercury) from silver sulfide deposits found in the Americas. Thus, two refining processes, the millennia-old two-stage smelting process based on lead and high temperatures, and the upstart based on mercury sine igne (without fire), came to share in nearly equal parts the aggregate global production of silver from the sixteenth to the final decade of the nineteenth century. These processes relied on the extensive use of two of the heavy metals most toxic to humans, and their anthropogenic emissions to the environment have caused impacts lasting over subsequent centuries. However, the successful use of haifuki-hō (smelting-cupellation process) in Japan to produce silver from silver sulfide ores with 0.2 percent silver content demonstrates that the extensive use of mercury by Spanish refiners in the New World was not the consequence of the geochemistry or silver content of the ores.


Author(s):  
Jamie McKinstry

Jamie McKinstry examines the early modern history of anatomical dissection as an exploratory process of formalising knowledge and of encountering the unexpected within. The sixteenth-century journey inside the body has parallels, McKinstry argues, with the contemporaneous exploration of the New World and in Donne’s poetry he sees reflected a linked throwing-off of ignorance and an embracing of new physical metaphors.


1986 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Edward T. Gargan

C. S. Lewis. (he brilliant and graceful historian of sixteenth-century English literature, summarizing the impact on Europe of the discovery of America, observed: “The existence of America was one of the greatest disappointments in the history of Europe.” Lewis was referring to Europe’s unfulfilled expectations that the winds and currents of the Atlantic would bring her bankers, merchants, soldiers, and priests to the Orient. This disillusionment was, however, less significant than other negative reactions that accompanied Columbus’s news. Renaissance Europe was forced, not without reluctance, to rethink its own place in history, its philosophy, theology, anthropology, linguistic theories, geographic knowledge. When the Renaissance got down to the task of comprehending the explosive announcement, and Europe’s writers, commentators, and observers employed what John H. Elliott has called a “selective eye” and not Ruskin’s “innocent eye.” From this vision classical antiquity, Christian tradition, humanist aspirations, and the politics of Europe determined what would be seen when Europe encountered the New World; what would be admitted into the collective consciousness of scholars, clerics, popes, adventurers, and poets. Pride, the not so hidden inflexibility at the heart of Renaissance civilization, framed and fixed what America would be permitted to mean.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Nieto

The Iberian conquest of the Atlantic at the beginning of the sixteenth century had a notable impact on the formation of the new world order in which Christian Europe claimed control over most a considerable part of the planet. This was possible thanks to the confluence of different and inseparable factors: the development of new technical capacities and favorable geographical conditions in which to navigate the great oceans; the Christian mandate to extend the faith; the need for new trade routes; and an imperial organization aspiring to global dominance. The author explores new methods for approaching old historiographical problems of the Renaissance — such as the discovery and conquest of America, the birth of modern science, and the problem of Eurocentrism — now in reference to actors and regions scarcely visible in the complex history of modern Europe: the ships, the wind, the navigators, their instruments, their gods, saints, and demons.


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