The Atlantic Islands and the Development of Southern Castile at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

The role played by the Atlantic islands in Castile's conquest and rapid mise en valeur of her territories in America is well known, as is the importance of foreign influences on the conquest and settlement of the Canary Islands themselves.1 Little attention, however, has been paid to the business community of Southern Castile, which provided the economic base for these achievements. The enterprises to Gran Canaria, La Palma, and Tenerife (hereafter, the Enterprises to the Islands) are here chosen, not because these were the first Atlantic islands to fall to Castile (Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and Hierro had been acquired between 1402 and 1405, and long since assimilated into the mainland economy), but because they form a microcosm whose interconnections make for convenient study. The Enterprises to the Islands must have seemed, in many ways, familiar to fifteenth-century Castilians, even to have an air of dejd vu. Seven centuries of Reconquista, even with long intervals of uneasy peace, had accustomed the population to a fluid, ever-expanding frontier, and the incorporation of new territory into the realm. The Enterprises, however, differed from the Reconquista in two fundamental ways: first, they were seaborne operations and, second, from an economic point of view, the Islands were virgin territory. A seaborne operation so far beyond the continental land mass, though not entirely without precedent in the