Background and Life in Europe
Vasco de Quiroga was born into a noble family in Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Castile. His family was of Galician origin. His brother Álvaro became the father of Gaspar de Quiroga y Vela, later Cardenal of Toledo. Traditionally his birth year has been given as 1470, because of a tradition that he was 95 at his year of death. Recent biographers prefer the later date around 1478, because of evidence from Quiroga's own hand that he was 60 in 1538.
De Quiroga studied law and later theology. He studied canon law, probably in Valladolid. He worked as a letrado - a royal jurist in southern Spain and as a judge in Oran in Algeria from ca. 1520 - 1526. In North Africa he oversaw cases of corruption and disputes between the locals and the Spanish conquistadors. Returning from Africa he stayed a while with the royal court, where documents have him in 1528. He certainly had powerful connections such as a friendship with Juan Bernal Díaz de Luco who was a member of the Council of the Indies, and with the Cardinal of Toledo Juan Tavera. This was probably the reason that he was offered a position as oídor (judge) in the second Audiencia of New Spain when the Council of Indies had to dismiss the first in 1530. The president of this second Audiencia was Bishop Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, and the other members were Quiroga, Juan de Salmerón, Alonso de Maldonado and Francisco Ceinos. They began governing in Mexico City in 1531.
Read more about this topic: Vasco De Quiroga
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background, life and/or europe:
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.”
—Carolyn Heilbrun (b. 1926)
“The people of Western Europe are facing this summer a series of tragic dilemmas. Of the hopes that dazzled the last twenty years that some political movement might tend to the betterment of the human lot, little remains above ground but the tattered slogans of the past.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)