Seville

Assembled from 19 blocks · 1 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. The improbable capital of the Atlantic trade: a river port some eighty kilometres up the Guadalquivir from the sea, chosen over the coastal harbours precisely because a river gives a crown control that an open roadstead does not. Every ship of the carrera de Indias had to clear through Seville, every cargo was registered there, and the monopoly gave the city the wealth that built its cathedral tower into a skyline and drew merchants, bankers and printers from across Europe. It also created the archive: the registers, licences, cargo manifests, lawsuits and correspondence generated by an administered monopoly are now the Archivo General de Indias, which is why the economic history of the Spanish Atlantic can be written in far more detail than that of most contemporary trades. Silting of the river and the growing size of ships eventually made the upriver passage impractical and the monopoly was transferred to Cádiz in the eighteenth century.
3. Knowledge
4. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
5. Seville
6. Connections
7. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
8. Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), Seville
9. The Casa de Contratación is established at Seville
10. The Atlantic wind and current system
11. Volta do mar (the return by sea)
12. Seville
13. Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), Seville
14. The Columbian Exchange
15. Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas
16. The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the ocean
17. The Casa de Contratación is established at Seville
18. Evidence
19. The documentary basis for the administered structure of the Atlantic trade: licensing, registration, taxation of bullion and the examination of pilots. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session, and cited deliberately at the level of the FONDS rather than of any document, because no legajo or bundle reference could be checked and inventing one would be exactly the failure this pack is written to avoid.