Chapter 1- Key Terms Flashcards
Tenochtitlán
The capital city of the Aztec Empire. The city was built on marshy islands on the western side of Tetzcoco, which is the site of present-day Mexico City.
Aztec
Mesoamerican people who were conquered by the Spanish under Hernán Cortés.
People they conquered were slaves.
Killed the strongest conquered warrior.
Drank their blood and cut out their hearts, believed to be the source or their strength.
Great League of Peace
An alliance of the Iroquois tribes that used their combined strength to pressure European to work with them in the fur trade and to wage war across what is today eastern North America.
Caravel
A fifteen-century European ship capable of long-distance travel.
Reconquista
The “reconquest” of Spain from the Moors completed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
Conquistadores
Spanish term for “conquerors”, applied to Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who conquered lands held by indigenous peoples in central and southern America as well as the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
Columbian Exchange
The transatlantic flow of goods and people that began with Columbus’s voyages in 1492.
Creoles
Persons born in the New World of European ancestry.
Hacienda
Large-scale farm in the Spanish New World empire worked by Indian laborers.
Mestizos
Spanish word for Persons of mixed Native American and European ancestry.
Bartolomé de Las Casas
A Catholic missionary who renounced the Spanish Practice of coercively converting Indian and advocated their better treatment. In 1552, he wrote “A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies”, which described the Spanish’s cruel treatment of the Indians.
Repartimiento System
Spanish labor system under which Indians were legally free and able to earn wages but were also required to perform a fixed amount of labor yearly. Replaced the encomienda system.
Black Legend
Idea that the Spanish New World empire was more oppressive toward the Indians than other European empires; was used as a justification for English imperial expansion.
Pueblo Revolt
Uprising in 1680 in which Pueblo Indians temporarily drove Spanish colonist out of modern-day New Mexico.
Indentured Servants
Settlers who signed on for a temporary period of servitude to a master in exchange for passage to the New World; Virginia and Pennsylvania were largely peopled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by English and German indentured servants.
