The Fall of Granada and Iberian trade with the first peoples of ‘Carolina.’
Join our community of thought for a virtual conversation on The Fall of Granada & Iberian (more specifically, Spanish Empire) trade with the first people of what is now ‘South Carolina.’ The conversation will be an introduction, for some, to the connection between the transfer of power on the Iberian Peninsula after the Fall of the Emirate of Granada and the dawn of Anglo-European colonization efforts in the Americas.
We will be joined by Cambridge University Prof. Elizabeth Drayson and the Charleston Library Society Head Librarian Ms. Laura Mina. The goal of our program is to engage broader audiences of independent scholars in early American research at private libraries and museums across the country.
We see this conversation as a look at the cultural landscape implications of the Spanish Inquisition and how that impacted living traditions on the Iberian Peninsula as well as across the Americas.
Here is a bit of information on our speakers –
Prof. Elizabeth Drayson is the Lorna Close Fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of two texts that our community has read and discussed since 2020, The Moor’s Last Stand: How Seven Centuries of Muslim Rule in Spain Came to an End and Lost Paradise: The Story of Granada. Prof. Drayson will join us to share her understanding of the presence of Columbus during the final days of the Emirate of Granada’s fall and on the day of surrender to Christian forces.
The fall of Granada in 1492 triggered Spanish colonial expansion and is also important in the context of Christopher Columbus’s messianic aims for his voyages of discovery, which in turn established Spanish colonies in the Americas.
Ms. Laura Mina is the head librarian at the Charleston Library Society and a steward of the library’s “Finding Aid for Native American Resources.” In recent years there has been an uptick of interest in early American history that is beginning to bring more diverse audiences to legacy institutions in some of North America’s older port cities. The City of Charleston sits just about sixty (60) miles south of Winya Bay (a site of early Spanish Empire attempts at North American colonization by Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón).
The first enslaved African in what would become the present-day United States of America arrived on August 9, 1526, in Winyah Bay, when Ayllón brought 600 colonists to start a colony. The colonists kidnapped an area native, who is recorded as Francisco de Chicora, to serve as a translator before the Spanish court upon the group’s return to Europe.
The Sally Blagg Family Foundation is a faith-based family foundation that is based in the Saura Town Mountains of North Carolina. We support the curation of safe spaces for cultural exchange alongside our institutional partners; our programmatic goal is to expose the interdependent nature of American histories, inspiring the next generation of history writers.
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