Trade and Navigation Between Spain and the Indies: In the Time of the Hapsburgs (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

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Excerpt from Trade and Navigation Between Spain and the Indies: In the Time of the Hapsburgs

It is an historical commonplace that with the discovery of the western hemisphere and of the Portuguese route to the East, European trade expanded from a continental and Mediterranean into a world commerce. The mapping of new sea routes revolutionized the conditions of mercantile traffic. Till then coasting and overland trade had predominated; about Europe galleys and clumsy sailing barges of a hundred tons or less were generally sufficient to meet the demands of the contemporary merchant. But from the end of the fifteenth century ocean trade assumed the first place, and galleons and carracks challenged the secrets of the outer seas. The shores of the Atlantic became the centre of international exchange, and the commercial hegemony of Europe passed from the cities of Renaissance Italy to the maritime states in the west. With the capture of Constantinople, moreover, and the destruction of the Mamelukes in Egypt, the Ottoman Turks were masters of all the routes to India. The explorations of the Portuguese freed Europe from this thralldom to the Infidel, and the discoveries of the Spaniards revealed a new world with riches undreamed of in the countinghouses of Venice. In Spain and Portugal suddenly flowered the age of their greatest material prosperity, and the powerful influence they exerted in the sixteenth century on the political fortunes of Europe was in no small measure made possible by their conquests in the eastern and the western Indies.

In the two centuries before Columbus, the lack of precious metals to meet the requirements of an expanding mercantile activity came to be felt with increasing severity. The production of bullion in the few mines worked in Europe was small and uncertain. A variety of circumstances, such as trade with Asia, the transforming of gold and silver into plate and jewels, and the accumulation of ecclesiastical treasure, had so…

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