Imagine a world without pepper, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg, or chiles, in which only herbs and a few spices like caraway were available to season food! Given such a bland diet, how much would you be willing to pay for a little cinnamon? In the late Middle Ages, Europeans were fascinated with the idea of Asia and its wealth. During the Middle Ages, though, trade and travel between Europe and Asia stopped almost entirely.
The Crusades, in which Europeans fought to retake the Holy Land from Muslims, brought them into contact with eastern cultures for the first time in centuries. They wanted spices, silks, jewels, gold, and other luxury goods from China, India, and the East Indies -- the islands southeast of the Asian continent, including the modern nation of Indonesia. But east Asia lay thousands of miles away, across vast deserts and the Himalaya Mountains, and the road from Europe to China was controlled by foreign rulers and by middlemen who charged money to pass the goods along.
As a result, by the time spices and other goods reached Europe, they were extremely expensive. Portugal, which had completed its own Reconquest in the thirteenth century, was the first European nation to try to trade directly with Asia. In Bartolomeu Dias sailed all the way around the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, proving that there was an ocean route around the continent. In , Vasco da Gama followed Dias' route, then sailed north and east to India -- opening up the riches of Asia to Portugal.
In , Christopher Columbus, a sailor from Genoa then an independent city-state in northern Italy , convinced Isabella and Ferdinand to finance a voyage across the Atlantic to Asia.
Although it was widely accepted in Europe by this time that the earth was round, scholars disagreed about the size of the globe. Columbus argued that the riches of China and the East Indies lay only 2, miles to the west of Spain -- making the Atlantic Ocean about the width of the Mediterranean Sea -- but most others said it was much farther. Finally, the new monarchs of reconquered Spain, eager for new sources of wealth and opportunities to spread Christianity, decided to give him a chance.
They named him governor of any new lands he discovered and promised him a ten percent share in their wealth, sent him to sea -- and, quite possibly, expected never to see him again. Columbus was wrong, of course -- bold enough to sail thousands of miles into uncharted waters, but completely mistaken in his geography. Asia lies more than 12, miles west of Europe, and had the Americas not been waiting in the middle, Columbus would never have reached land.
He reached the Bahamas instead, more or less where he thought the East Indies should have been, and after three more voyages to the Caribbean and the coast of South America he died in still believing he had been exploring mainland Asia. But Columbus' incredible and lucky mistake turned out to be one of the most important events in the history of human civilization.
The world's two great land masses -- North and South America in the western hemisphere and Europe, Asia, and Africa in the eastern hemisphere -- had been isolated from each other for 10, years. In the hundreds of thousands of years before that, the two halves of the world had evolved different animals, plants, and microbes.
Over the millenia , the human inhabitants of the "old" and "new" worlds developed vastly different cultures, languages, and religions; they found different ways of adapting to their different envinronments; and their bodies over hundreds of generations became resistant to the diseases of their different worlds.
When the two great land masses were rejoined by European exploration, the resulting exchange of people, crops, animals, ideas, and diseases -- called the "Columbian exchange" -- changed both worlds forever. But they didn't stay long, and they didn't spread word of their discovery in Europe.
There are also theories that Chinese explorers found the west coast of North America sometime before Columbus' journey, but if the stories are true, the Chinese, like the Vikings, returned home without making an impact on either continent.
Immediately, the Spanish set about conquering the world they had discovered. Within a hundred years this small European nation had claimed the better part of two continents. They relied on a combination of military superiority, occasional diplomacy , luck -- and their greatest ally, disease. Then, convinced that the peoples of the Americas were uncivilized heathens, they set about destroying much of what they found.
This painting depicts Columbus' arrival in the New World. Columbus easily dominated the peoples of the Caribbean, who were for the most part friendly and peaceful. They practiced advanced agriculture, traded extensively among the islands, and had a great deal of leisure time.
Columbus, believing he was off the coast of India, called them "Indians" and hoped they would be faithful subjects of Ferdinand and Isabella. But faithful subjects, to Columbus, would convert to Christianity and grow crops that would make money for Europeans. In his journal, he wrote,.
It seemed to me that they were a people who were very poor in everything. They go as naked as their mothers bore them, even the women, though I only saw one girl, and she was very young. All those I did see were young men, none of them more than thirty years old They do not carry arms and do not know of them, because I showed them some swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves out of ignorance They ought to make good slaves for they are of quick intelligence, since I notice that they are quick to repeat what is said to them, and I believe that they could very easily become Chirstians, for it seemed to me that they had no religion of their own.
God willing, when I come to leave I will bring six of them to Your Highnesses so that they may learn to speak To a European, a "civilized" person was someone who lived in a house, ate his meals at a table -- and, certainly, wore full clothes! These nearly naked people with no understanding of metal weapons must have seemed incredibly primitive to Columbus and his men -- like something, perhaps, out of the Garden of Eden.
If the people of the "Indies" were so poor and uncivilized, Columbus believed he had every right to take their land and make them into "servants.
Columbus' legacy is a complicated one. Smallpox was endemic to Europe and Asia -- it was common there, and over thousands of generations people had built up a resistance to it.
Even so, it was a fast-spreading, deadly disease. As late as the eighteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Europeans died of smallpox each year. With the native population gone, the Spanish began to import slaves from Africa to grow their sugar cane -- beginning an institution that would create misery and profit in the Americas for almost years. This map shows the extent of the Aztec empire before its conquest by the Spanish. Within two years his conquistadores , conquerors, had won control of the Aztec kingdom that spanned most of present-day Mexico and Central America.
The Aztec empire, unlike the small tribes that dotted the Caribbean -- and more than a little like Spain -- was a complex state built on military conquest.
It seems incredible that so few men could conquer so great an empire, but its centralized authority -- its vast territory was ruled by one man from a single city -- actually made it easier to conquer. Once the capital was taken and the emperor captured, the entire empire fell under Spanish control.
Of course, the conquistadores had other advantages -- some of them accidental. By , nearly all of Iberia was back under Christian rule, with the exception of the Muslim kingdom of Granada—the only independent Muslim realm in Spain that would last until Despite the decline in Muslim-controlled kingdoms, it is important to note the lasting effects exerted on the peninsula by Muslims in technology, culture, and society.
It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and to replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was under Papal control. People who converted to Catholicism were not subject to expulsion, but between and hundreds of those who had converted conversos and moriscos were accused of secretly practicing their original religion crypto-Judaism or crypto-Islam and arrested, imprisoned, interrogated under torture, and in some cases burned to death, in both Castile and Aragon.
In the monarchs issued a decree of expulsion of Jews, known formally as the Alhambra Decree, which gave Jews in Spain four months to either convert to Catholicism or leave Spain. Later in , Ferdinand issued a letter addressed to the Jews who had left Castile and Aragon, inviting them back to Spain if they had become Christians.
The Inquisition was not definitively abolished until , during the reign of Isabella II, after a period of declining influence in the preceding century. Most of the descendants of the Muslims who submitted to conversion to Christianity rather than exile during the early periods of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, the Moriscos, were later expelled from Spain after serious social upheaval, when the Inquisition was at its height.
The expulsions were carried out more severely in eastern Spain Valencia and Aragon due to local animosity towards Muslims and Moriscos perceived as economic rivals; local workers saw them as cheap labor undermining their bargaining position with the landlords. Those that the Spanish Inquisition found to be secretly practicing Islam or Judaism were executed, imprisoned, or expelled.
Although the period of rule by the Visigothic Kingdom c. The Councils of Toledo debated creed and liturgy in orthodox Catholicism, and the Council of Lerida in constrained the clergy and extended the power of law over them under the blessings of Rome.
In , the Visigothic king at Toledo, Reccared, converted to Catholicism and launched a movement in Spain to unify the various religious doctrines that existed in the land.
This put an end to dissension on the question of Arianism. The period of Reconquista and the Spanish Inquisition that followed turned Catholicism into the dominant religion of Spain, which has shaped the development of the Spanish state and national identity. Skip to main content. Search for:. I can tell you that it was really good experience. I wish I had been able to stay there much longer. Being in Spain, in Granada makes you speak Spanish from the first moment you are there.
I took intensive Spanish courses People is what makes difference and The classes were very funny. During the course, we learned Spanish through games, excursions etc. The teachers are very profesional, they are very good with students and Be in Granada and know the Alhambre were realizations of my dream, but not as important as the fact of passing 2 offical exams one about business and one about tourism.
After I finished my degree in Hispanish Philology in Barcelona, I decided to specialize myself in teaching Spanish as a foreign language. The school was very good. I have met a lot of sympathic people again, teachers and students, in a nice environment. I also worked a lot and I think that I made a lot of progress. I started with speaking a little bit of Spanish for the first time. Not only because of the beautiful memories of Granada and Andalusia in general , but also because of the friendly atmosphere off the school.
As you see, I am writing from Istanbul to tell you something. I went to Granada to learn Spanish one year ago. I liked it a lot Granada is a cheap and small city. It is really a city for students. The persons who work at the school are very interested in the students.
They listen to your problems and solve them very fast. At one time, the water heater
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