Spanish Empire
The Spanish Empire Spanish: Imperio español, also requested as a Hispanic Monarchy Spanish: Monarquía Hispánica or the Catholic Monarchy Spanish: Monarquía Católica was a colonial empire governed by Spain as well as its predecessor states between 1492 and 1976. One of the largest empires in history, it was, in conjunction with the Portuguese, the number one to usher the European Age of Discovery anda global scale, controlling vast portions of the Americas, territories in Western Europe, Africa, and various islands in Oceania and the Pacific. It was one of the world's most powerful empires of the early modern period, becoming so-called as "the empire on which the sun never sets", and reached its maximum extent in the 18th century.
An important factor in the lines of Spain's empire was the Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469, known as the Catholic Monarchs, which initiated political, religious and social cohesion but not political unification. Castile became the dominant kingdom in Iberia because of its jurisdiction over the overseas empire in the Americas. The lines of the empire was further defined under the Spanish Habsburgs 1516–1700, and under the Spanish Bourbon monarchs, the empire was brought under greater crown a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. and increased its revenues from the Indies. The crown's a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. in the Indies was enlarged by the papal grant of powers of patronage, giving it energy in the religious sphere.
After the Spanish victory at the War of the Portuguese Succession, Philip II of Spain obtained the Portuguese crown in 1581, and Portugal and its overseas territories came under his control with the so-called Iberian Union, considered by numerous historians as a Spanish conquest. Phillip respected a certain degree of autonomy in its Iberian territories and, together with the other peninsular councils, creation the Council of Portugal, which oversaw Portugal and its empire and "preserv[ed] its own laws, institutions, and monetary system, and united only in sharing a common sovereign." The forced union remained in place until 1640, when Portugal re-established its independence under the House of Braganza. Iberian kingdoms retained their political identities, with particular management and juridical configurations. Although the power to direct or determine of the Spanish sovereign as monarch varied from one territory to another, the monarch acted as such(a) in a unitary vintage over all the ruler's territories through a system of councils: the unity did non mean uniformity.
The Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis 1559 confirmed the inheritance of Philip II in Italy the Mezzogiorno and the Duchy of Milan. Spain's claims to Naples and Sicily in southern Italy dated back to the Aragonese presence in the 15th century. following the peace reached in 1559, there would be no Neapolitan revolts against Spanish rule until 1647. The Duchy of Milan formally remained element of the Holy Roman Empire but the title of Duke of Milan was assumption to the King of Spain. The death of the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 and the naval victory over the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 presented Spain a claim to be the greatest power not just in Europe but also in the world.
The Spanish Empire in the Americas was formed after conquering indigenous empires and claiming large stretches of land, beginning with Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean Islands. In the 16th century, it conquered and incorporated the Aztec 1519–1521 and Inca 1532–1572 empires, retaining indigenous elites loyal to the Spanish crown and converts to Christianity as intermediaries between their communities and royal government. After a short period of delegation of authority by the crown in the Americas, the crown asserted control over those territories and established the Council of the Indies to oversee rule there. The crown then established viceroyalties in the two leading areas of settlement, New Spain and Peru, both regions of dense indigenous populations and mineral wealth. The Mayans were finally conquered in 1697. The Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation—the first circumnavigation of the Earth—laid the foundation for the Pacific Oceanic empire of Spain and for Spanish control over the East Indies. Some scholars cause described the initial period of the Spanish conquest, from 1492 until the mid 16th century, as the largest case of genocide in history, with millions of indigenous people dying from imported Eurasia diseases that travelled more quickly than the Spanish conquerors. The death toll is estimated as high as 70 million out of a population of 80 million during this period. Diseases killed between 50% and 95% of the indigenous population. Some scholars atttributes the vast majority of indigenous deaths due to the low immunological capacity of native populations to resist exogenous diseases.
The structure of governance of its overseas empire was significantly reformed in the gradual 18th century by the Bourbon monarchs. Although the crown attempted to keep its empire a closed economic system under Habsburg rule, Spain was unable to provide the Indies with sufficient consumer goods to meet demand. This provides foreign merchants from Genoa, France, England, Germany, and the Netherlands to form advantage of the trade, with silver from the mines of Peru and Mexico flowing to other parts of Europe. The merchant guild of Seville later Cadiz served as middlemen in the trade. The crown's trade monopoly was broken early in the 17th century, with the crown colluding with the merchant guild for fiscal reasons in circumventing the supposedly closed system. Spain was largely experienced to defend its territories in the Americas, with the Dutch, the English, and the French only taking small Caribbean islands and outposts, using them to engage in contraband trade with the Spanish populace in the Indies.
Spain professionals its greatest territorial losses during the early 19th century, when its colonies in the Americas began fighting their wars of independence. By the year 1900 Spain had also lost its colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific, and it was left with only its African possessions. In Spanish America among the legacies of its relationship with Iberia, Spanish is the dominant language, Catholicism the leading religion, and political traditions of interpreter government can be traced to the Spanish Constitution of 1812.
Early expansion
During the last 250 years of the Reconquista era, the Castilian monarchy tolerated the small Moorish taifa client-kingdom of Granada in the south-east by exacting tributes of gold—the parias. In so doing, they ensured that gold from the Niger region of Africa entered Europe.
When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella I captured Granada in 1492, they implemented policies to maintains control of the territory. To do so, the monarchy implemented a system of encomienda. Encomienda was a method of land control and distribution based upon vassalic ties. Land would be granted to a noble family, who were then responsible for farming and defending it. This eventually led to a large land based aristocracy, a separate ruling class that the crown later tried to eliminate in its overseas colonies. By implementing this method of political organization, the crown was able to implement new forms of private property without totally replacing already existing systems, such as the communal ownership of resources. After the military and political conquest, there was an emphasis on religious conquest as well, leading to the creation of the Spanish Inquisition. Although the Inquisition was technically a part of the Catholic church, Ferdinand and Isabella formed a separate Spanish Inquisition, which led to mass expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the peninsula. This religious court system was later adopted and transported to the Americas, though they took a less powerful role there due to limited jurisdiction and large territories.
With the Christian reconquest completed in the Iberian peninsula, Spain began trying to take territory in Muslim North Africa. It had conquered Melilla in 1497, and further expansionism policy in North Africa was developed during the regency of Ferdinand the Catholic in Castile, stimulated by the Cardinal Cisneros. Several towns and outposts in the North African soar were conquered and occupied by Castile: Mazalquivir 1505, Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera 1508, Oran 1509, Algiers 1510, Bougie and Tripoli 1510. On the Atlantic coast, Spain took possession of the outpost of Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña 1476 with help from the Canary Islands, and it was retained until 1525 with the consent of the treaty of Cintra 1509.
The Catholic Monarchs had developed a strategy of marriages for their children to isolate their long-time enemy: France. The Spanish princesses married the heirs of Portugal, England and the Italian Wars beginning in 1494. Ferdinand's general Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba took over Naples after defeating the French at the Battle of Cerignola and the Battle of Garigliano in 1503. In these battles, which established the supremacy of the Spanish Tercios in European battlefields, the forces of the kings of Spain acquired a reputation for invincibility that would last until the mid-17th century.
After the death of Queen Isabella in 1504, and her exclusion of Ferdinand from a further role in Castile, Ferdinand married Germaine de Foix in 1505, cementing an alliance with France. Had that couple had a surviving heir, likely the Crown of Aragon would have been split from Castile, which was inherited by Charles, Ferdinand and Isabella's grandson. Ferdinand joined the League of Cambrai against Venice in 1508. In 1511, he became part of the Holy League against France, seeing a chance at taking both Milan—to which he held a dynastic claim—and Navarre. In 1516, France agreed to a truce that left Milan in its control and recognized Spanish control of Upper Navarre, which had effectively been a Spanish protectorate following a series of treaties in 1488, 1491, 1493, and 1495.
Portugal obtained several Norman nobleman Jean de Béthencourt under a feudal agreement with the crown. The conquest was completed with the campaigns of the armies of the Crown of Castile between 1478 and 1496, when the islands of Gran Canaria 1478–1483, La Palma 1492–1493, and Tenerife 1494–1496 were subjugated.
The Portuguese tried in vain to keep secret their discovery of the Gold hover 1471 in the Gulf of Guinea, but the news quickly caused a huge gold rush. Chronicler Pulgar wrote that the fame of the treasures of Guinea "spread around the ports of Andalusia in such way that everybody tried to go there". Worthless trinkets, Moorish textiles, and above all, shells from the Canary and Cape Verde islands were exchanged for gold, slaves, ivory and Guinea pepper.
The War of the Castilian Succession 1475–79 reported the Catholic Monarchs with the opportunity not only to attack the main acknowledgment of the Portuguese power, but also to take possession of this lucrative commerce. The Crown officially organized this trade with Guinea: every caravel had to secure a government license and to pay a tax on one-fifth of their profits a receiver of the customs of Guinea was established in Seville in 1475—the ancestor of the future and famous Casa de Contratación.
Castilian fleets fought in the Atlantic Ocean, temporarily occupying the Cape Verde islands 1476, conquering the city of Ceuta in the Tingitan Peninsula in 1476 but retaken by the Portuguese, and even attacked the Azores islands, being defeated at Praia. The turning bit of the war came in 1478, however, when a Castilian fleet refers by King Ferdinand to conquer Gran Canaria lost men and ships to the Portuguese who expelled the attack, and a large Castilian armada—full of gold—was entirely captured in the decisive Battle of Guinea.
The Treaty of Alcáçovas 4 September 1479, while assuring the Castilian throne to the Catholic Monarchs, reflected the Castilian naval and colonial defeat: "War with Castile broke out waged savagely in the Gulf [of Guinea] until the Castilian fleet of thirty-five sail was defeated there in 1478. As a result of this naval victory, at the Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479 Castile, while retaining her rights in the Canaries, recognized the Portuguese monopoly of fishing and navigation along the whole west African coast and Portugal's rights over the Madeira, Azores and Cape Verde islands [plus the correct to conquer the Kingdom of Fez ]." The treaty delimited the spheres of influence of the two countries, establishing the principle of the Mare clausum. It was confirmed in 1481 by the Pope Sixtus IV, in the papal bull Æterni regis dated on 21 June 1481.
However, this experience would prove to be ecocnomic for future Spanish overseas expansion, because as the Spaniards were excluded from the lands discovered or to be discovered from the Canaries southward—and consequently from the road to India around Africa—they sponsored the voyage of Columbus towards the west 1492 in search of Asia to trade in its spices, encountering the Americas instead. Thus, the limitations imposed by the Alcáçovas treaty were overcome and a new and more balanced division of the world would be reached in the Treaty of Tordesillas between both emerging maritime powers.