COMUNICATION

The European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation presented the book Carlos V y el mar: el viaje de circunnavegación de Magallanes_Elcano y la era de las especias in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. This publication, included in the book collection “Entre dos mundos: América y Europa desde Extremadura”, gathers the contributions made in the homonymous Campus Yuste summer course, which was held in 2020. (16/02/2022)

During the presentation, the director of Yuste Foundation, Juan Carlos Moreno, assured that “in order to build the future, the past must be looked at without resentment” and claimed that it “lives up to the deserved memory of our ancestors”, a memory, he added, that is to “emerge without antagonism, because history must be known and studied, and if it is to be judged, we must first put ourselves in the shoes of those we are going to judge”.

In this sense, he pointed out that one of Yuste Foundation’s aims is to “go into our past without resentment, with objectivity, without having the need to bless everything that was done, but without letting ourselves be overwhelmed by interested and distorted versions”.

Juan Carlos Moreno pointed out that the reading of this book leads us to appreciate the feat of the first circumnavigation in its rightful measure, an endeavour “halfway between glory and business”. This publication analyses the relationship of Charles V and the sea; he sailed the Mediterranean eight times and the Spanish Ocean on four occasions, as he wrote in his last days. The sea that united and at the same time separated his vast territories and that provided so much glory to him through the first circumnavigation, “so it would not be exaggerated to say that Charles was the emperor of the sea in the first half of the 16^th century”, he added.

Juan Carlos also recalled one of the ideas included in the book, which was drawn up by the president of Puerta de América Foundation, Juan Antonio Manzano, who attended the presentation, pointing out that Charles V saw the impetus that the Moluccas business could give to Spain’s maritime superiority, not only because of what it could obtain directly from it, but because it could enable him to coordinate trade with the East through his American possessions.

With the congress held in Yuste and with the publication of this book, Yuste Foundation commemorates the V Centenary of the first round the world trip, “one of the stellar events in the history of humanity”, as Moreno has defined it, which laid the foundations of a globalisation in which East and West ceased to be isolated worlds and began a process of commercial and cultural exchanges that transformed the conception of the world in subsequent centuries.

Carlos V y el mar: el viaje de circunnavegación de Magallanes_Elcano y la era de las especias includes the speeches given during the homonymous online summer course held at the Royal Monastery of Yuste that was part of the 2020 Campus Yuste edition. Yuste Foundation’s idea, together with the University of Extremadura, was to reflect in the course on the relation with the imperial policy of the emperor by articulating a transversal discourse linking the fundamental aspects of the development of the Imperium Mundi, that the emperor worked hard to make operational during his years of government, in three complementary scenarios – the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean and the South Sea or the Pacific Ocean – where Christianity, understood as a socio-political structure based on Christian principles, was severely questioned.

The Professor of American History of the Complutense University of Madrid, Rosa María Martínez de Codes, and the Emeritus Professor of Latin Philology of the University of Extremadura, César Chaparro Gómez, were the directors of this course and have now been responsible for coordinating the publication. This book compiles the works presented by specialists such as Rosa María Martínez de Codes, Jaime Contreras Contreras, Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra, José Emilio Sola Castaño, Ludolf Pelizaeus, Guadalupe Fernández Morente, Carlos Martínez Shaw, Nikita Harwich Vallenilla, César Chaparro Gómez, María Belén Bañas Llanos, Miguel Ángel Lama, Juan Antonio Manzano Pérez and Rosa Perales Piqueres.

This work is available to everyone via the link: https:///www.fundacionyuste.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Carlos-V-y-el-mar__.pdf. For further information, as well as to purchase the different publications of Yuste Foundation, those interested can contact libros@fundacionyuste.org