Western Civilization.p

(Jacob Rumans) #1
The Renaissance: Political Renewal and Intellectual Change 237

pogroms and a wave of forced conversions between
1390 and 1450. Many of these conversions were
thought to be false, and the Spanish Inquisition, an or-
ganization wholly unrelated to the Papal Inquisition,
was founded early in Ferdinand and Isabella’s reign to
root out conversoswho had presumably returned to the
faith of their ancestors. Large numbers of converts were
executed or forced to do penance during the 1480s,
and their property was confiscated to help finance the
Granadan war. The Inquisition, as a church court, had
jurisdiction over only those who had been baptized.
The Jews who had escaped forced conversion were
comparatively few and usually poor, but even a small
minority was seen as a threat to the faith of the conver-
sos.Those who still refused conversion were at last ex-
pelled. Some fled to Portugal, only to be expelled by
the Portuguese as well in 1496. Others went to North


Africa or found refuge within the Turkish Empire, while
a few eventually settled in the growing commercial
cities of the Low Countries.
The war for Granada and the supplies of money
guaranteed by the perpetual taxes and cooperative leg-
islature of Castile enabled Ferdinand to create a formi-
dable army that was put to almost constant use in the
last years of the reign. Through bluff, diplomacy, and
hard fighting, he restored Cerdanya and Rosseló to
Cataluña and conquered the ancient kingdom of
Navarre. When Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in
1495, Ferdinand used his actions as a pretext to inter-
vene. This first phase of the Italian wars lasted until


  1. Under the command of Gonsalvo de Córdoba,
    “the Great Captain,” Spanish armies devised a new
    method of combining pikes with shot that defeated the
    French and their Swiss mercenaries and drove them


Ebro
R.

Danube
R.

Rhin
eR
.

Po R.

Euphrat
esR
.

Atlantic
Ocean

North
Sea

Mediterranean Sea

Black Sea

Dnie
perR
.

Adr
iati
cSe
a

Dublin

DENMARK

London
Calais

Cologne

Paris

Hamburg LübeckBrandenburg

Cracow

Buda Pest

Belgrade

Rome Naples

Venice
Genoa

Milan

Orléans

Poitiers

Lyons

Barcelona

Granada

Córdoba

Lisbon

Toledo

Tunis

Athens

Constantinople

Alexandria

Jerusalem

Smolensk

Azov

Moscow

Novgorod
Riga

Mainz Prague Kiev

Sardinia

Corsica

Sicily

Crete Cyprus

Pyrenees
Mts.

Al

ps

Mts.

TaurusMts.

HABSBURG
LANDS

SCOTLAND

IRELAND

NORWAY SWEDEN

PORTUGAL

ARAGON

NAVARRE

CASTILE

FRANCE
BURGUNDY

HOLY
ROMAN
EMPIRE

POLAND

TEUTONIC
ORDER

LITHUANIA

MOLDAVIA
HUNGARY

BULGARIA
SERBIA
MONTENEGRO
RUMELIA

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

MAMLUK SULTANATE

PAPAL
STATES

PRINCIPALITY
OF MOSCOW

BOHEMIA
CRIMEA

WALES

ENGLAND

Stockholm

HABSBURG
LANDS

Baleari

cIsla

nds

Carpathia
n
M
ts
.

Nuremberg

Florence

Augsburg Vienna

Oxford

Danzig

Edinburgh

DonR.

0 300 600 Miles

0 300 600 900 Kilometers

MAP 13.1
Europe in the Renaissance
Free download pdf