Key Terms

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