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Suma De Geographia
''Suma de Geographia'' ( ''Suma de Geografía''; ) is a Spanish book on cosmography, geography, and maritime navigation written by Martín Fernández de Enciso and published in 1519 in Seville. ''Suma'' is deemed the first Rutter (nautical), pilot's manual to comprehensively describe the New World as then understood by the Spanish and Portuguese. It is further noted as the first appearance in print of the Spanish ''requerimiento'', and as a seminal work in Spanish navigational guides of Age of Discovery, the period. Background Martín Fernández de Enciso is thought to have begun writing his ''Suma de Geographia'' in Spain by at least 1518. Enciso was granted a printing patent for ''Suma'' in Zaragoza on 5 September 1518. The work was first published in Seville in mid-to-late 1519 by Jacobo Cromberger. A revised edition was published in Seville in 1530 by Juan Cromberger, and later first reprinted posthumously in Seville in 1546 by Andrés de Burgos. A English edition, ''A ...
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Martín Fernández De Enciso
Martín Fernández de Enciso ( 1470 – 1528) was a Spanish lawyer, colonial official and geographer. He was intrumental in the colonization of the Isthmus of Darien, one of Spain's earliest attempts to occupy the mainland of the Americas. His successful advocacy for the rights of the Crown in the Indies led to the publication of the proclamation known as the ''Requerimiento'' in 1513. In 1519 he published ''Suma de Geografía'', the first Spanish-language account of the New World. Biography Very little is known about the early life of Enciso. He was born about 1470 in Seville and probably studied law. By 1508 he had a thriving legal practice in Santo Domingo, the capital of the first Spanish colony in the Americas. Gold mining was the primary activity in the colony and Enciso made his fortune from the frequent litigation in the industry. He was instrumental in colonising the Isthmus of Darien.
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Hernández De Córdoba Expedition
The Hernández de Córdoba expedition was a 1517 Spanish maritime expedition to the Yucatán Peninsula led by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba. The enterprise proved disastrous and little profitable for the Spaniards, with half of them fatally wounded, the rest grievously injured, and all in all, very little gold to show for their troubles. It was nonetheless deemed an immediate and exciting success, having brought back news of vast lands inhabited by a rich and civilised people, namely, the Maya civilisation. The expedition is popularly credited as the first non-Amerindian contact with the Maya, and first non-Amerindian discovery of the Peninsula, though both these achievements are disputed in scholarly literature. It is deemed the opening campaign of the Spanish conquest of the Maya, and one of the precursor expeditions which led to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Prelude By the mid-1510s, Spanish settlements in the New World dotted only a few of the Antil ...
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Río De La Plata
The Río de la Plata (, "river of silver"), also called the River Plate or La Plata River in English, is the estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay River and the Paraná River at Punta Gorda. It empties into the Atlantic Ocean and forms a funnel-shaped indentation on the southeastern coastline of South America. Depending on the geographer, the Río de la Plata may be considered a river, an estuary, a gulf, or a marginal sea. If considered a river, it is the widest in the world, with a maximum width of . The river is about long and widens from about at its source to about at its mouth. It forms part of the border between Argentina and Uruguay. The name Río de la Plata is also used to refer to the populations along the estuary, especially the main port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where Ríoplatense Spanish is spoken and tango culture developed. The coasts of the river are the most densely-populated areas of Uruguay and Argentina. Geography The Rí ...
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Antilles
The Antilles (; gcf, label=Antillean Creole, Antiy; es, Antillas; french: Antilles; nl, Antillen; ht, Antiy; pap, Antias; Jamaican Patois: ''Antiliiz'') is an archipelago bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the south and west, the Gulf of Mexico to the northwest, and the Atlantic Ocean to the north and east. The Antillean islands are divided into two smaller groupings: the Greater Antilles and the Lesser Antilles. The Greater Antilles includes the larger islands of the Cayman Islands, Cuba, Hispaniola (subdivided into the nations of the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. The Lesser Antilles contains the northerly Leeward Islands and the southeasterly Windward Islands as well as the Leeward Antilles just north of Venezuela. The Lucayan Archipelago (consisting of The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands), though a part of the West Indies, is generally not included among the Antillean islands. Geographically, the Antillean islands are generally cons ...
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Spanish Colonization Of The Americas
Spain began colonization of the Americas, colonizing the Americas under the Crown of Castile and was spearheaded by the Spanish . The Americas were invaded and incorporated into the Spanish Empire, with the exception of Colonial Brazil, Brazil, British America, and some small regions of South America and the Caribbean. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. The main motivations for colonial expansion were profit through Exploitation colonialism, resource extraction and the Catholicization, spread of Catholicism by converting Indigenous peoples of the Americas, indigenous peoples. Beginning with Columbus's first voyage to the Caribbean and gaining control over more territory for over three centuries, the Spanish Empire would expand across the Spanish West Indies, Caribbean Islands, half of South America, most of Central America and much of North America. It is estimated that during the colonial period (1492–1832), a total of 1.86&n ...
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Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area and the seventh most populous. Its capital is Brasília, and its most populous city is São Paulo. The federation is composed of the union of the 26 states and the Federal District. It is the largest country to have Portuguese as an official language and the only one in the Americas; one of the most multicultural and ethnically diverse nations, due to over a century of mass immigration from around the world; and the most populous Roman Catholic-majority country. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east, Brazil has a coastline of . It borders all other countries and territories in South America except Ecuador and Chile and covers roughly half of the continent's land area. Its Amazon basin includes a vast tropical forest, ho ...
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Portuguese Colonization Of The Americas
Portuguese colonization of the Americas () constituted territories in the Americas belonging to the Kingdom of Portugal. Portugal was the leading country in the European exploration of the world in the 15th century. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided the Earth outside Europe into Castilian and Portuguese global territorial hemispheres for exclusive conquest and colonization. Portugal colonized parts of South America (Brazil, Colónia do Sacramento, Uruguay, Guanare, Venezuela), but also made some unsuccessful attempts to colonize North America (Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia in Canada). Settlements in North America Based on the terms defined in the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese Crown claimed it had territorial rights in the area visited by the explorer John Cabot in 1497 and 1498 on behalf of the Crown of England. To that end, in 1499 and 1500, the Portuguese mariner João Fernandes Lavrador visited the northeast Atlantic coast and Greenland, whi ...
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Polaris
Polaris is a star in the northern circumpolar constellation of Ursa Minor. It is designated α Ursae Minoris ( Latinized to ''Alpha Ursae Minoris'') and is commonly called the North Star or Pole Star. With an apparent magnitude that fluctuates around 1.98, it is the brightest star in the constellation and is readily visible to the naked eye at night. The position of the star lies less than 1° away from the north celestial pole, making it the current northern pole star. The stable position of the star in the Northern Sky makes it useful for navigation. As the closest Cepheid variable its distance is used as part of the cosmic distance ladder. The revised ''Hipparcos'' stellar parallax gives a distance to Polaris of about , while the successor mission ''Gaia'' gives a distance of about . Calculations by other methods vary widely. Although appearing to the naked eye as a single point of light, Polaris is a triple star system, composed of the primary, a yellow super ...
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Astrolabe
An astrolabe ( grc, ἀστρολάβος ; ar, ٱلأَسْطُرلاب ; persian, ستاره‌یاب ) is an ancient astronomical instrument that was a handheld model of the universe. Its various functions also make it an elaborate inclinometer and an analog calculation device capable of working out several kinds of problems in astronomy. In its simplest form it is a metal disc with a pattern of wires, cutouts, and perforations that allows a user to calculate astronomical positions precisely. Historically used by astronomers, it is able to measure the altitude above the horizon of a celestial body, day or night; it can be used to identify stars or planets, to determine local latitude given local time (and vice versa), to survey, or to triangulate. It was used in classical antiquity, the Islamic Golden Age, the European Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery for all these purposes. The astrolabe's importance comes not only from the early developments into the study of ast ...
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Quadrant (instrument)
A quadrant is an instrument used to measure angles up to 90°. Different versions of this instrument could be used to calculate various readings, such as longitude, latitude, and time of day. Its earliest recorded usage was in ancient India in Rigvedic times by Rishi Atri to observe a solar eclipse. It was then proposed by Ptolemy as a better kind of astrolabe. Several different variations of the instrument were later produced by medieval Muslim astronomers. Mural quadrants were important astronomical instruments in 18th-century European observatories, establishing a use for positional astronomy. Etymology The term ''quadrant'', meaning one fourth, refers to the fact that early versions of the instrument were derived from astrolabes. The quadrant condensed the workings of the astrolabe into an area one fourth the size of the astrolabe face; it was essentially a quarter of an astrolabe. History During Rigvedic times in ancient India, quadrants called 'Tureeyam's were use ...
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Solar Declination
The position of the Sun in the sky is a function of both the time and the geographic location of observation on Earth's surface. As Earth orbits the Sun over the course of a year, the Sun appears to move with respect to the fixed stars on the celestial sphere, along a circular path called the ecliptic. Earth's rotation about its axis causes diurnal motion, so that the Sun appears to move across the sky in a Sun path that depends on the observer's geographic latitude. The time when the Sun transits the observer's meridian depends on the geographic longitude. To find the Sun's position for a given location at a given time, one may therefore proceed in three steps as follows: # calculate the Sun's position in the ecliptic coordinate system, # convert to the equatorial coordinate system, and # convert to the horizontal coordinate system, for the observer's local time and location. This is the coordinate system normally used to calculate the position of the Sun in terms of solar z ...
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Johannes De Sacrobosco
Johannes de Sacrobosco, also written Ioannes de Sacro Bosco, later called John of Holywood or John of Holybush ( 1195 – 1256), was a scholar, monk, and astronomer who taught at the University of Paris. He wrote a short introduction to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Judging from the number of manuscript copies that survive today, for the next 400 years it became the most widely read book on that subject. He also wrote a short textbook which was widely read and influential in Europe during the later medieval centuries as an introduction to astronomy. In his longest book, on the computation of the date of Easter, Sacrobosco correctly described the defects of the then-used Julian calendar, and recommended a solution similar to the modern Gregorian calendar three centuries before its implementation. Very little is known about the education and biography of Sacrobosco. For one thing, his year of death has been guessed at 1236, 1244, and 1256, each of which is plausible and ...
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