Spanish Empire: Did you mean...?

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...

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...

Spain’s rapid expansion into South America followed the consolidation of its Caribbean footholds by 1512, marking a decisive shift from exploration to imperial conquest. Under the reign of Ferdinand...

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...

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 Mauryan Empire (322 BCE - 185 BCE) supplanted the earlier Magadha Kingdom to assume power over large tracts of eastern and northern India. At its height, the empire stretched over parts of modern Iran and almost the entire...

An illustration showing the torture of indigenous American peoples by Spanish conquistadors. From the 1552 edition of A Very Brief Recital of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas which was a...