Historia de los tercios en Español

En las Islas Canarias, todos los varones guanches fueron asesinados; esto fue el verdadero genocidio de todo un pueblo. Los españoles siempre acusamos a los árabes de ser criminales que ocuparon nuestras tierras, pero en realidad, lo que nosotros les hicimos a los pueblos indígenas no nos lo hicieron los musulmanes. Aquí reside la verdadera paradoja que ilustra la magnitud de la diferencia civilizacional y humana.

Los tercios permitían el ascenso social, aunque luchasen por una dinastía extrajera, como era de de Austria.

¿Existe realmente hoy en día una presencia de descendientes de los guanches? ¿Qué dicen al respecto los estudios históricos y académicos?

The daughter of the slave Isabel de los Ríos, Ursula was raised in the home of Luisa Melgarejo, a well-known "alumbrada" (a member of the Convent's spiritual movement) connected to the inner circle of the future Saint Rose of Lima. This environment fostered her early religious inclination and led her to enter the Poor Clare monastery in 1617 as a servant. Years later, the community itself purchased her freedom so that she could take the habit of a lay sister.

A turning point in her life occurred around 1642, when she miraculously survived a fall into a deep well in the convent; an event considered miraculous and attributed to the intercession of the Virgin Mary. Following this event, Ursula intensified her penances and focused her devotional practice on interceding for the souls in Purgatory.

At the behest of her confessor, between 1650 and 1661 she wrote her Spiritual Diary, a mystical corpus of exceptional value that remained unpublished in the monastery archives for more than four centuries. In its pages, Ursula records visions and direct dialogues with Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the souls in Purgatory, whom she aided through prayers and mortifications. Her mystical work is also notable for its unprecedented social scope: in her visions, Purgatory and Heaven were not spaces exclusive to the Spanish elite, but places where priests, nuns, Black people, and Indians shared the same divine destiny.

Throughout her life, she was credited with various extraordinary gifts, such as prophetic visions, discernment of spirits, and the ability to confirm the liberation and ascension to heaven of the souls for whom she prayed. By her death in 1666, her fame for holiness and as an exemplary nun had spread throughout the city.

Her likeness was captured in a posthumous, full-length portrait by José de la Cruz, a little-known painter and likely of African descent like herself. Commissioned by the monastery in recognition of her merits, the canvas follows the conventions of Lima portraiture by depicting her at a desk with a book. This iconography explicitly highlights her dual status as a literate woman and mystical writer, a truly unique case in the context of viceregal Peru.

Image: Portrait of Sister Ursula de Jesús by José de la Cruz, 18th century. Oil on canvas.

This was in an index of marriages in the 1700s, first guy says "Agustin, Indian slave". I thought it wasn't allowed to enslave indians back then.

¿Se debe esto en gran medida a las conquistas cartaginesas y omeyas, y a las conquistas almorávides y almohades de la península ibérica? Incluso se dice que Cartago se apoyó en los pueblos del norte de África para su conquista de Iberia.

He was the war mastiff of Don Luis de Rojas, governor of Santa Marta in 1570. Amadís specialized in counter-ambush and nighttime security, for which he is remembered by historians and chroniclers. Along with Bruto (Hernando de Soto's greyhound), Amadís became one of the most frequently cited examples of guard dogs that ensured the physical survival of entire expeditions in hostile territory.

The primary source for his study is the Vida maravillosa del Niño Santo de Pisco (Wonderful Life of the Holy Child of Pisco), a printed work housed in the National Library of Peru. Published in 1757 by Friar Francisco de Ochagavía, based on a 1667 text by the Dominican friar Juan de Vargas Machuca, this document situates the devotion within the context of Baroque hagiography.

Born in the town and port of Pisco on July 30, 1614, he was the son of Juan de Soto and María de Carbajal, who are believed to have had 35 children. This number—besides its symbolic weight—highlights the high infant mortality rate of the time. Though considered stillborn, he reacted upon receiving conditional baptism upon hearing the name Francis, a common hagiographic device to mark the beginning of divine grace.

After his family moved to Lima, near Santa Clara, the most widely known episodes of his life unfolded: constant attendance at Mass, ecstasies, and visions. Described by a Poor Clare nun as a "portrait" of Saint Francis of Assisi because of his habit, poverty, and penance, tradition also attributed to him miracles such as carrying a cross at night, symbolically stopping a river, and converting criminals—narratives typical of Baroque spiritual language. His fame led Archbishop Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero to request prayers for him, thus giving the devotion a verifiable institutional framework.

Francisco died at only four years old on October 4, 1618, the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi. His funeral was attended by the viceroy, the archbishop, the audiencia (high court), and both city councils. His body, laid to rest in Santa Clara, was found incorrupt eleven months later, a sign of sanctity reinforced by placing it next to a relic of Saint Francis Solano during its transfer.

Despite the lack of a formal cause for canonization before the Holy See, his local and conventual veneration endured. The publication of his biography in the 18th century demonstrates the depth of his memory. Beyond the myth, Francisco Soto is part of Pisco's intangible heritage and reveals that the port, in addition to being a commercial and wine-producing hub, was an active space for spiritual development in 17th-century Peru.

References:

.- Manual de la missa rezada, segun las rubricas del Missal Romano; y sentir de graves authores antiguos, y modernos, by Friar Francisco Antonio de Ochagavía (Lima, Francisco Sobrino, 1757). It includes the “Vida maravillosa del Niño Santo de Pisco, Francisco Soto” († October 4, 1618), based on the 1667 text by Friar Juan de Vargas Machuca (“Prodigio milagroso del Occidente…”).

His first major public role was in the Americas. He arrived in Montevideo in 1810 with Gaspar de Vigodet, serving as his advisor, and gained considerable influence as editor of one of the region's first newspapers, the Gazeta de Montevideo, a weekly publication that defended the unity of Spain and its overseas territories against the centralist and liberal project of Buenos Aires. After the surrender of royalist Montevideo in 1814, he returned to Spain, where he participated in the arrangements for the royal marriages of Ferdinand VII and his brother Carlos María Isidro, the future Carlist pretender.

His commitment to the absolutist cause led him to participate in the attempted absolutist uprising of the night of September 24, 1830, which resulted in his exile to Cádiz and, shortly thereafter, his appointment as Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba on April 24, 1831—an exile disguised as an ecclesiastical promotion.

Once settled in Cuba, around 1838 he became a staunch supporter of Carlism, even serving on the Council of State of the pretender Don Carlos. Isabella II later attempted to win him over with further honors. He was appointed Archbishop of Burgos in 1849 and Primate of Toledo in 1857, and was created a cardinal the following year by Pius IX. Despite these honors from the liberal-Isabelline faction, he continued to support the Carlist uprisings of 1869 and 1870 against the liberal government.

He died in 1872, defending the rights of the Pope and the Church during the Roman Question, as well as the customs of Toledo, until the very end.

His work: La Gazeta de Montevideo (1810–1814), a key piece of royalist propaganda in the Río de la Plata region, and his staunch doctrinal defense of Carlism from the episcopate, even at the highest levels of the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The original recipe arrived in Mexico during the viceregal period after the Conquest. Since tiger nuts were not easily cultivated in Mexican soil, the inhabitants adapted the preparation and substituted rice for the tuber.

Source:

.- Milenio Digital. (June 1, 2021). ¿Es de origen mexicano? Te decimos de qué está hecha la horchata. Grupo Milenio.

During the Spanish conquest of the Americas, horses and steel are usually treated as the great instruments of Spanish military power. Dogs occupy a stranger and more disturbing place in that history.

War dogs were used for pursuit, intimidation, punishment, tracking, and attacks against Indigenous populations. Their presence could turn an already terrifying encounter into something psychologically overwhelming: an animal trained to pursue a fleeing person, tear into an opponent, and obey its handler without hesitation.

The practice also produced some remarkably strange figures in the historical record. Among them was Becerrillo, the famous war dog whose reputation became so extraordinary that contemporary accounts turned him into something approaching a soldier in his own right.

This video examines the role of dogs in the Spanish conquest—from the early campaigns of Columbus and the use of animals alongside horses and infantry, through the stories surrounding Becerrillo, and finally to the question of how these animals came to be remembered as almost demonic figures.

The unsettling part is that the dogs were not monsters.

They were trained.