History of Spain and Portugal: The Last Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery.

 

History of Spain and Portugal: The Last Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery.

 

Today, Sunday, December 18, in this episode of Happy and Healthy and in which in Qatar the soccer teams of the Argentine Republic and France take the pulse and measure strength in the context of the World Cup, I want to share two videos and two academic articles on the Portuguese and Spanish empires in the 15th and 16th centuries, a few days before my latest book, under review, will be available to all of you through Amazon.

When you have as many expansionist powers as the European continent did during the early modern and colonial eras, it can become difficult to maintain a peaceful, easy-flowing system. With limited land available and everyone wants a piece of all of it, how were these ambitious nations meant to split it all up without going to war? Negotiation was always an option, but of course, it was much easier said than done. Still, two nations in particular actually did broker a deal, peacefully, for the division of unconquered land. And this was no small deal either - it was not simply a distribution of one or two territories. Instead, these nations, Portugal and Spain, planned to rule the New World - together…

The first video tells us about the history of the Empire of Portugal, https://youtu.be/TyPXV9StXaU. From Romans to Explorers to today. How did Portugal and Spain Plan to "Conquer" the World? https://youtu.be/CgDvfB7KLSA.

This second video helps us understand the main argument of my book (The Lineage of the Portuguese Conquerors of the 16th-century: Long-Term Genealogical Research from the Late Antiquity to the Contemporary Age by Rafael Alberto Vilagut), in which I tell you about the descendants that the Portuguese conquerors who worked with Vazquez de Coronado in the conquest, pacification, and population of the Province of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, during the height of the Spanish Empire that came to rule completely the entire Iberian peninsula.

The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 deftly divided the right of possession of newly discovered lands outside of Europe between Spain and Portugal along a line to the west of the Cape Verde Islands. The Treaty of Zaragoza 1529 would extend it into the Pacific long it's antemeridian, thereby, allowing Spanish vessels definitive protected entrance into the Asia trade which the Portuguese had previously entered by rounding Africa and crossing the Indian Ocean, according to Andrés Reséndez, "Conquering the Pacific: An Unkown Mariner and the final Voyage of the Age of Discovery by Michael Toth".

Reséndez ambitiously seeks to not only restore the rightful place of Arellano, Martin, and San Lucas alongside their more lauded compatriots but provides an overview of the wider history leading up to the Spanish "conquering" of the Pacific.

Regarding new perspectives of the Portuguese empire's history, gender discrimination has been pointed out as a determining factor behind the long-run divergence in incomes of Southern vis-à-vis Northwestern Europe. In this research, Nuno Palma et al show that women in Portugal were not historically more discriminated against than those in other parts of Western Europe, including England and the Netherlands. We rely on a new dataset of thousands of observations from archival sources covering six centuries, and we complement it with a qualitative discussion of comparative social norms. Compared with Northwestern Europe, women in Portugal faced similar gender wage gaps, married at similar ages, and did not face more restrictions on labor market participation. Consequently, other factors must have been responsible for the Little Divergence of Western European income (2022 by Nuno Palma, et al).

Related episode, "A new ebook, The Lineage of the Portuguese Conquerors of the 16th century" by Rafael Alberto Vilagut. December 10, 2022, blog Happy and Healthy (Feliz y Saludable), http://felizysaludable.blogspot.com

San Jose Costa Rica Sunday, December 18, 2022, alberto.doer@gmail.com.