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From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Spanish shipping, and the mariners employed therein, functioned in a global oceanic context that included the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the South China Sea. During the period in which Habsburg kings ruled Portugal as well as Spain – from 1580 to 1640 – that context also included the Indian Ocean. Trade and defence for both of the Iberian empires required ships, mariners, merchants, soldiers, bureaucrats, and civilian purveyors of food and equipment in staggering numbers. Mariners of all ranks might serve in a variety of venues in the course of their lives at sea, and they might alternate between mercantile or military fleets, and sailing vessels or galleys. Maritime bureaucrats might serve on land or sea, as the occasion demanded, and soldiers might serve on sailing ships or galleys as well as on land. To demonstrate the wide variety of Spanish maritime service, this chapter will begin with a brief discussion of the fluctuating demand for ships and men during the early modern period. Then it will turn to wages, individual career trajectories and venues for maritime labour, focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 The combined labour of tens of thousands of individuals on land and sea played a crucial role in developing, maintaining and defending the Spanish empire.2

The Virgin of the Seafarers(1531–36) by Alejo Fernández was designed as the central panel of an altarpiece for the chapel in the House of Trade’s Hall of Audiences in Seville. Little attention has been paid to the central panel and almost none to the four side panels, yet they are crucial to our understanding of how the Spanish monarchy defined its mission overseas. The iconography of the altarpiece as a whole made visible Spain’s self-image as the creator and guarantor of a militant, evangelical Christian empire, dedicated to spreading the Gospel as well as fomenting trade and colonization.

Summary The paucity of sources for some aspects of Columbus's early life is especially acute for the years he spent in Portugal from the mid-1470s until about 1485. Nonetheless, by searching through every available source and secondary study, it is possible to patch bits of information together into a plausible scenario. Quite likely members of his wife's family and their political allies at the Portuguese court helped secure Columbus an audience with the Portuguese king Joao? and possibly aided his later efforts to secure an audience with the Spanish monarchs Fernando and Isabel. Even for topics so well-studied as the life and deeds of Christopher Columbus, a fresh look at standard sources can yield surprising results. Despite received wisdom, (1) the portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo in the Metropolitan Museum in New York does not depict Columbus; (2) the notion that Columbus kept a false log to fool the crew on his 1492 voyage is most likely a fantasy based on a misunderstanding of the log; and (3) Col...

After Primo's dictatorship ended in January 1930, the king asked General Damaso Berenguer to form a new government, based on the constitution of 1876, in an attempt to reestablish the constitutional monarchy. Berenguer had served as the military high commissioner at the time of the disastrous battle of Anual in 1921. His appointment to head the government signaled the king's continuing support for the army, but it can hardly have inspired confidence in the country as a whole. In a play on words that is typical of Spanish political humor, Berenguer's government was dubbed the “dictablanda” or “soft dictatorship,” as opposed to the hard dictatorship ( dictadura/dicta-dura ) under Primo. Berenguer lasted just over a year in office, during which the republican opposition organized support. In the Pact of San Sebastian in August 1930, republican leaders joined with Catalan nationalists and the Socialist Party (PSOE) to plan a provisional government after the ouster of the monarchy. Military leaders sympathetic to the republican cause staged an uprising in Jaca (Aragon) in December 1930. After forces loyal to King Alfonso put down the rising, the king ordered its leaders executed, creating martyrs – military martyrs – for the republican opposition. The king dismissed General Berenguer in February 1931 and replaced him with Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar, no doubt hoping that the navy leadership would prove more steadfast than the army had been. Aznar called elections for municipal officials on April 12, 1931 – the first elections under the 1876 constitution since 1923. In Spain's largest cities, republican candidates won a majority of the votes, although their victory was not a landslide. Nonetheless, the king knew all too well what the vote portended. Joyous republicans took to the streets to celebrate the victory, and their leaders proclaimed Spain a republic on April 14, announcing a provisional government under the leadership of Niceto Alcala Zamora. When army leaders made clear that they would no longer support King Alfonso, on the night of April 14 he simply left Spain without abdicating, as his grandmother Isabel II had done in 1868. Queen Victoria Eugenia also went into exile – separately from her husband. Their marriage had become increasingly strained over the years, not least because of the king's numerous extramarital affairs.

Joseph Bonaparte was arguably the best of the Bonaparte clan, and Napoleon undoubtedly hoped that the Spanish people would accept him as a welcome replacement for the feckless Bourbons. He was wrong. By the time that Joseph arrived at the frontier, a spontaneous revolt against the French invasion had already begun. The rising began in Madrid on May 2, in reaction to news that the royal family had left for France. General Murat put down a riot in the Puerta del Sol quickly and brutally, using the Mameluke cavalry that Napoleon had recruited in Egypt. Given the long Spanish history of conflict with Muslim forces, the sight of turbaned horsemen charging a crowd of men and women in the heart of Madrid had a shocking effect. The next day, Murat's soldiers executed the supposed leaders of the riot on the hill of Principe Pio, at the western edge of Madrid near the royal palace. Various Spanish artists would paint their interpretations of those two actions, but the versions that history remembers are two arresting canvases by Goya, which capture the events in all their horror. In The Charge of the Mamelukes on the 2nd of May , the mad look on the face of the horseman in the center of the composition, and the tangle of bloodied bodies and enraged citizens in front of him, evoke the violent movement, confusion, and savagery of the confrontation. By contrast, the composition of The Executions on the Hill of Principe Pio on the 3rd of May is eerily still, as a terrified man in a white shirt raises his arms in surrender, while a contingent of faceless uniformed French soldiers aim their weapons at him in perfect formation. The viewer is left to complete the action, imagining the white shirt splattered in blood and the man collapsing in death to join the bodies of comrades who have fallen all around him. In all, some 400 Spaniards were killed in those two days, and the stunning news spread to all corners of the country in record time. Although Murat thought he had ended the rebellion by his swift actions and exemplary punishments, in fact he had ensured fierce resistance to the French occupation would continue.

The fall of the Visigothic monarchy marked the beginning of the Islamic phase of Spain's history. From 711 to 1492, Muslims controlled varying portions of Iberia, and their long presence had a profound influence on Spanish culture long after they lost political control. From their origins in the Arabian Peninsula during the time of the prophet Muḥammad ( c . 570–632), the Muslims spread quickly and widely throughout the Middle East and across North Africa. They conquered cities as they went, fighting when they had to and making deals with local authorities when they could. People who came under Muslim authority had the option of converting to Islam, but they did not have to do so to live peaceably under their new overlords. Christians and Jews, considered “People of the Book” or fellow monotheists, could retain their religion and customs if they refrained from proselytizing, if they paid special taxes, and if they agreed to political restrictions preventing them from having authority over Muslims. The historical sources, both Christian and Muslim, for the end of the Visigothic monarchy and the conquest and establishment of Islamic Spain are not abundant and come from later periods. Contemporary accounts are not available, and later ones are contradictory and contain legendary accretions. Nonetheless, scholars generally agree on the main outlines of the early years of Muslim consolidation in Spain.

Few things changed in the immediate aftermath of the Bourbon restoration of 1975. Most of the political figures who had served in the last years of the Franco regime continued to serve under King Juan Carlos, including Carlos Arias Navarro, the prime minister. The continuity dismayed Spaniards and outsiders hoping for dramatic change, but it provided stability and reassurance for Spaniards who feared change and the disruption it might bring. Newspapers and magazines debated the future of Spain in serious articles and political cartoons alike. The new daily newspaper El Pais began as a voice for change, strongly allied to the still clandestine Socialist Party but aiming to provide analysis rather than polemic. Farther to the left, the weekly magazine Cambio16 emerged as a harsher critic of the government and its continuity with the Franco regime. Beneath the surface, however, the king and his close advisers prepared to transform Spanish political life. Inadvertently, the assassins of Admiral Carrero Blanco in 1973 had made a transition toward democracy easier, removing a powerful opponent of change. One of the first indications of that transformation occurred seven months after Juan Carlos came to the throne. Carlos Arias met with the king on July 1, 1976, at the latter's request, and resigned as prime minister after the meeting. Arias had taken on a difficult and thankless task two and a half years earlier and had presided over the administration during a crucial period.

The administrative structure that the Catholic Monarchs implanted across the Atlantic Ocean laid the basis for the empire that Spain created in the sixteenth century. They improvised that structure from past precedents, responding to the changing situation as Spaniards explored the new lands across the sea. For several centuries Spain also held an empire in Europe, though Spaniards more often referred to the whole collection of diverse territories as a monarchy – lands ruled by a single person. Ironically, Spain's European empire was even more accidental than its American one – the product of bad luck more than conscious planning, as we have seen. Carlos I was proclaimed king of Spain in Brussels in 1516, ignoring traditions and prerogatives of the various Spanish kingdoms, and prepared to take up his inheritance. In Spain Cardinal Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, the driving force behind the reformation of the Spanish church and many aspects of the Spanish Renaissance, performed one last service for the crown by keeping the political situation stable until Carlos arrived, in 1517. Fernando's regency had allowed a generation of explorers to continue tracing the outlines of Castile's New World across the ocean, and Spanish settlers had founded colonies on Hispaniola, Cuba, and various small outposts of the mainland of Central and South America. Whether the embryonic empire would turn out to be profitable remained to be seen.

(1991). THE GALLEON SAN JOSE, TREASURE SHIP OF THE SPANISH INDIES. The Mariner's Mirror: Vol. 77, No. 4, pp. 355-363.

FOR HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP, 1992 represents an important anniversary-the quincentenary of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus from Spain to the Western Hemisphere. Columbus has long occupied an important position in the cultural tradition of the United States. Although he never saw the mainland of North America, one of the holidays in the national calendar commemorates his first landfall in the western hemisphere. Columbus Day originated as an Italian-American holiday, however, and continues to be identified more with Italy than with the voyage sponsored by Spain. At least forty-seven counties, cities, and towns in the United States, scattered among twenty-nine of the fifty states, are named for Columbus, along with numerous civic and cultural institutions. The placenames usually take the form of Columbus or Columbia, but they also include other variations, such as Columbiana in Alabama and Ohio, and Colon in Michigan.' The federal government of the United States has its seat in the District of Columbia, and the goddess "Columbia," a poetic invention of the late nineteenth century, was designed as a symbol of the United States.

(1987). SPANISH SHIP MEASUREMENTS RECONSIDERED: THE INSTRUCCION NAUTICA OF DIEGO GARCIA DE PALACIO (1587) The Mariner's Mirror: Vol. 73, No. 3, pp. 293-296.

INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE has fascinated historians of early modern Europe for generations, in part, at least, because there was a widespread conviction that commerce was the motor of economic change in Europe, contributing to its expansion and eventual domination of the rest of the world. More recently, historians of economy and society have turned to other areas of study, particularly to agriculture, demography, and the formation of social classes. Yet international commerce remains a crucial topic, and, despite all the work that has been done, there are still important gaps in our knowledge of commerce in general and of the ways in which merchants carried on their business. One gap involves the activities of Spanish merchants at home and abroad and their contributions to the development of mercantile capitalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In recent decades, exploitation of the archive of Sim6n Ruiz, the great sixteenth-century Castilian merchant, has done much to improve our knowledge of Spanish business affairs. Correspondence between Old Castile and Florence, Lisbon, Antwerp, and elsewhere by Ruiz and his associates provides ample testimony of the extension and importance of their interests.' Sim6n Ruiz was part of a network of Spanish merchants scattered through Europe whose activities predated the rise of Spanish political power and the acquisition of the American empire.2 Ruiz himself acted primarily as an importer of foreign manufactured goods to Spain. Inter

BECAUSE OF THEIR ABSORPTION in a narrowly defined Renaissance-Reformation, historians of early modern Europe long tended to focus on Italy, Germany, and England, to the neglect of France and particularly Spain. Partly for the same reason, the period 1400-1550 once received far more attention than did the next century and a half. More recently a growing interest in economic and social development, the consequence of contemporary problems of modernization and economic growth, has stimulated research in the period I550-I 700. No longer can that period be passed over as an unimportant transition between the Renaissance-Reformation and the Enlightenment, and no longer can Spain be safely ignored, since the early modern period spans the time of its greatest power and of its decline. Indeed, two major scholarly concerns-"the price revolution of the sixteenth century" and "the crisis of the seventeenth century "-fit the Spanish experience better than that of other areas.' As historians unravel the tangled story of Spain's fall from power, they are taking a fresh look at the revolt of the Netherlands, particularly in its economic implications. For eighty years (I568-I648) the revolt drained tax revenue from Castile and its American empire and weakened the fragile links