- astrolabe
- a device for navigation that used constellations as a guide and enabled mariners to find their north–south position on the earth’s surface
- chattel slavery
- a form of slavery in which one person is owned by another as a piece of property
- Christian humanism
- a movement, also known as northern Renaissance humanism, that stressed the study of the works of Greece and Rome and the early Christian fathers to awaken individual piety
- colonialism
- a practice in which one group of people attempts to establish control over another group, usually for purposes of economic exploitation
- Columbian Exchange
- the flow of plants, animals, and diseases between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres
- conquistadors
- Spanish explorers in the Americas during the Age of Exploration
- encomienda
- a system of coerced labor based on a grant by the Spanish Crown that entitled conquistadors to the labor of specified numbers of Indigenous people
- indentured servants
- people bound by a contract to work for someone for an agreed-upon number of years
- indulgences
- a way to reduce or cancel the time after death during which people needed to suffer in purgatory to atone for their sins before reaching heaven
- mercantilism
- an economic theory in which a nation’s power depended on the wealth it gained by exporting goods of greater value than it imported, and in which a gain for one nation was a loss for another
- Middle Passage
- the middle (or second) leg of the three-legged triangular trade that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas
- Treaty of Tordesillas
- a 1494 agreement awarding land to Portugal and Spain by dividing the Atlantic Ocean along a line one hundred leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa
- triangular trade
- the trade in goods and enslaved people that took place between the Americas, Europe, and West Africa from the late fifteenth through the early nineteenth centuries