Spanish Empire: Did you mean...?

The cataclysmic end of the Roman Empire in the West has tended to mask the underlying features of continuity. The map of Europe in the year 500 would have been unrecognizable to anyone living a...

The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (Tordesilhas) was an agreement between the monarchs of Spain and Portugal to divide the world between them into two spheres of influence. The imaginary dividing line ran down the centre of the...

The Portuguese Empire was established from the 15th century and eventually stretched from the Americas to Japan. Very often a string of coastal trading centres with defensive fortifications, there were larger territorial colonies...

A detail of a 17th-century painting by Cornelis Verbeeck showing a Spanish galleon firing its cannons. In the complete painting, the ship is in combat with a Dutch vessel c. 1618 in an unknown location. (National Gallery...

A 1734 copper print of a Spanish galleon. The text reads: Por Golfos mas procelosos, con valor, aresto y zelo, hace gala de Neptuno, esta Nave con su vuelo. - "Through the worst stormy waters, with courage, purpose, and zeal...

The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492 to c. 1580) is an account written in 1568 of the early Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica, specifically the conquest of the Aztec civilization in Mexico from...

Spanning across three continents and holding dominance over the Black and Mediterranean Seas, the Ottoman Sultanate (1299-1922) was a global military superpower between the 15th and 17th centuries...

Adelantado was an office awarded by the Spanish Crown to conduct military campaigns in the medieval period but then repurposed during the Age of Exploration to grant an individual the right to privately fund expeditions of discovery...

How did a mere 167 Spaniards conquer an empire of 10 million people? The Spanish were outnumbered 200-to-1 yet they were able to seize the Inca capital, Cuzco, and dispose of the Inca ruler within...

The European colonization of the Americas was the process by which European settlers populated the regions of North, Central, South America, and the islands of the Caribbean. It is also recognized as the direct...