Pre-Columbus Iberia
The centuries-long Christian military campaign to retake the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule.
What is the Reconquista?
A small, maneuverable Portuguese ship featuring triangular (lateen) sails that allowed sailors to sail against the wind.
What is a caravel?
This island group was named after the Portuguese word for "timber," which was its first major export.
What is Madeira?
The geographic region where the Taíno people primarily lived prior to European arrival.
What is the Caribbean (or the Greater Antilles)?
The global transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and human populations between the Old World and the New World following 1492
Columbian Exchange
The North African Muslims who crossed into Iberia and ruled much of the peninsula beginning in the year 711.
Who are the Moors?
The Portuguese prince who established a center for navigation at Sagres and sponsored voyages down the African coast.
Who is Prince Henry the Navigator?
The Indigenous people who originally inhabited the Canary Islands before European conquest.
Who are the Guanches?
Community leaders and chiefs in Taíno society were called by this title.
What are caciques?
Name TWO crops that originated in the Americas and traveled to Europe/Africa as part of the exchange
potatoes, tomatoes, maize (corn), cassava, or tobacco
The two Spanish monarchs who completed the Reconquista, expelled non-Catholics, and financed Columbus’s 1492 voyage.
Who are Ferdinand and Isabella?
In 1434, this mariner became the first known European to sail past the feared Cape Bojador and return safely.
Who is Gil Eanes?
Portuguese ships returning from West Africa had to sail northwest toward this island group in order to catch the westerly winds home.
What are the Azores?
The Spanish priest who famously documented and condemned the cruel treatment and enslavement of the Taíno people by Spanish colonists.
Who is Bartolomé de las Casas?
Historian John Wills argues that the "Columbian Exchange" should instead be called this term because benefits flowed mostly to Europe while the Americas lost resources and population.
Columbian Extraction
Historians use this term to describe how centuries of reconquest in Iberia fused religious zeal, military conquest, and royal power.
What is a "crusading mentality"?
Fortified Portuguese trading posts established along the West African coast to trade goods rather than conduct armed raids
What are feitorias (or factories)?
The labor-intensive cash crop that transformed Madeira and the Canary Islands, creating a massive demand for enslaved labor.
What is sugar?
The fate of the 39 men Columbus left behind at the settlement of La Navidad on Hispaniola.
they were killed by the Taíno (and their fort was burned)
According to historian Charles Mann, this was the primary cause of the catastrophic loss of up to 95% of the Indigenous American population post-1492
epidemic Old World diseases (such as smallpox)
Name TWO reasons why 15th-century European monarchs were desperate to find a direct sea route to Asia.
What are: gaining wealth from silks/spices, bypassing the Venetian-Arab trade monopoly, or spreading Christianity?
Portuguese or Cape Verdean traders who settled among coastal African communities, married locally, and helped create a blended trade culture.
Who are the lançados?
Name TWO reasons why the Canary Islands are considered a "prototype" for later European colonization in the Americas.
the enslavement/genocide of Indigenous peoples, the introduction of sugar/livestock, deforestation, or serving as the final stopover for Atlantic crossings
Name TWO ways the Taíno actively resisted Spanish occupation and rule.
armed attacks/destroying La Navidad, forming alliances among caciques, destroying their own crops to starve the Spanish, or escaping into the mountains?
Educator Bill Bigelow uses this term to describe the erasure of the Taíno people and their suffering from school curricula and historical memory
curricular genocide