ВАГОВІ СИСТЕМИ ІСПАНІЇ, ПОРТУГАЛІЇ І КРАЇН ЛАТИНСЬКОЇ АМЕРИКИ

Abstract

During the centuries of being part of the Roman Empire, the population of the Iberian Peninsula adopted the Latin language, the Roman state religion, and the achievements of Roman material and spiritual culture. The Roman state system of monetary and weight measures operated in the territory of Roman Spain. The conquest of Spain in the V century by the Visigoths did not lead to changes in the material and spiritual culture of the local Romanized population. On the basis of this culture, the civilizations of the modern countries located on the Iberian Peninsula – Spain and Portugal – were later formed. At the beginning of the VIII century, Spain was conquered by the Arabs. In the territory of the Iberian Peninsula, they created their own state – the Córdoba Caliphate. Arabs and North African Berbers, who later came to be known by the general name Moors, conquered almost all of Spain, except for the northern mountainous regions. In the north of Spain in the IX–XI centuries, Christian kingdoms arose – Castile, Leon, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal. Christian kingdoms in the VIII century began the Reconquest – the reconquest of the Iberian territory from the Arabs. It ended in 1492 when the troops of Castile and Aragon conquered the Emirate of Granada – the last state of the Arabs in Spain. During the Reconquista, four Christian kingdoms united into the modern state of Spain. Portugal remained independent. During the period from the VIII to the XV centuries, in the territory of the Iberian Peninsula there was a mutual influence of the cultures of the West and the East. It touched all spheres of life, in particular the economy and the monetary and weight system. The monetary weight of the Moors was borrowed from Spain and Portugal. In turn, the structure of the systems of weight measures of Spain and Portugal was created on the model of the measures of Ancient Rome and the measures of the countries of medieval Western Europe. However, the norm of the mass of units of these systems was influenced by Arab weight measures. In the XVI–XVII centuries, the era of Great Geographical Discoveries, in which Spain and Portugal played a leading role, began. Numerous Spanish and Portuguese colonies were established in the territory of North and South America, Africa, and Asia, where metropolitan weights were used for centuries. For a long time in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, which later became independent states, weight measures gradually changed and acquired local characteristics. This process conti­nued until the introduction of the international metric system in their territory.