ACTIVIDADES

CHARLES V AND THE SEA: THE MAGELLAN-ELCANO CIRCUMNAVIGATION VOYAGE AND THE SPICE ERA

Online, from 21 to 25 September 2020

With the arrival of sailors of Turkish-Ottoman origin in the western Mediterranean, the pace of history changed and Charles V began a great marine policy. Plunder became professionalised through these sailors, who settled in cities that made this exercise the main source of income. The situation led the emperor to begin to rearm the fleets, increase the number of troops and attack the ports in the hands of the corsairs captained by Barbarossa in the 1530s to contain the Ottoman advances in the Mediterranean.

Carlos V supported a commercial and scientific expedition to the Spice Islands a decade before, opening a new route that allowed him to cross the Atlantic and America and reach Maluco. It was the first circumnavigation, the only one for decades, that laid the foundations of a globalisation where East and West ceased to be isolated worlds to initiate a process of commercial, scientific and cultural exchanges that transformed the world outlook in the following centuries and that involved a real revolution and a geopolitical vision of the world completely different from that known until then, key to understanding the world we live in today.

The courses will online from 16:00h. to 19:30h. (Madrid-CET)