Union and Exploration
The Reconquista allowed the Catholic Monarchs to divert their attention to exploration. In 1492, Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, a Valencian) formally approved the division of the unexplored world between kingdoms of what is today Spain and Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas, which the kingdoms signed one year later, moved the line of division westward and allowed Portugal to claim Brazil.
In 1492, when Cristopher Columbus brought 1,500 colonists with him on his second voyage, a royal administrator had already been appointed for what the Catholic kingdoms referred to as the Indies. The Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), established in 1524 acted as an advisory board on colonial affairs, and the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) regulated trade with the colonies. The newly established colonies were ruled under the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, today known as Spain.
New discoveries and conquests came in quick succession. Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the Pacific in 1513, and the survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition completed the circumnavigation of the globe in 1522.
Read more about this topic: Economic History Of Spain
Famous quotes containing the words union and/or exploration:
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.”
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