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NOTE: The page of suggestions about preparation for the FIRST EXAMINATION on Wednesday, 29 September, will be available today by 3:30 pm.

Common intentions: trading-post implantations; religious reform and the friars

Reading: Bakewell, chs. 4 & 5; Elliott, ch. II, pts. 2-5.

  1. What were the motives, nature, and short-term significance of the major Iberian military and commercial expeditions to Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries?
  2. What factors made attractive to Europeans the consumption of commodities of Asian and Sub-Saharan African origin?
  3. What sources of information did Iberian intellectuals and political leaders have about the nature of the world outside of the Mediterranean, Western Europe, and its adjacent seas?
  4. Why have the European sources on the Portuguese role in Asia been more systematically used than the African and Asian sources?
  5. Why were Castilian and Portuguese peoples the ones to make the first effective European penetration of the Americas?
  6. Why was the initial intention of the Castilians and Portuguese, including Columbus and his followers, to implant overseas trading-posts?
  7. What factors contributed to the importance given in Castilian and Portuguese overseas ventures to the spread of Christianity?
  8. Why were the Castilians and Portuguese at first unable to derive much economic benefit from their Caribbean and South American territories?
  9. Why was so much control over Church administration in the non-European territories of Castile and Portugal given to members of monastic orders (Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and, later, Jesuits)?
  10. What motivated young men to join mendicant orders and undertake difficult missionary enterprises far from Europe?
  11. Why did the introduction of new disease microorganisms in the Americas after 1492 have such devastating demographic and social effects on American Indian populations?
  12. What impact did the Castilian conquests in the Americas have on the roles and conception of women in the social and cultural environments of the various American regions?
  13. If trade were indeed stigmatized by the governing elite of Castile and Portugal, as is often alleged in textbooks, why did so many wealthy Iberians, including aristocrats, quickly take advantage of the available investment opportunities?
  14. Why did some Castilians who went to the Americas protest the exploitation of the conquered indigenous peoples?
  15. Why did Castilian Extremadura become a major source of the few European immigrants to the Americas in the early sixteenth century?
  16. Why did the European pig adapt so well in the Americas?
  17. Why did such a high percentage of early European immigrants to the greater Caribbean region die within a year of their arrival?
  18. Why did the ruthless exploitation of indigenous labor by men like Pedrarias (Pedro Arias de Avila) become the norm among early Castilian settlers and officials in the Americas rather than the more benevolent policies of Vasco Núñez de Balboa?
  19. Why were Castilians always quick to set up, through proper legal documents, a municipality when they moved into a region like Hispaniola?

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J. B. Owens
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Revised:  22 September 1999


URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/reading.09.html