Spain, a global history

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From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy emerged as one of history's largest and most diverse political entities, spanning from the Castilian plateau to the Andes, and from cosmopolitan cities like Seville and Mexico City to San Francisco and Buenos Aires. Spain's influence during this period significantly shaped the emergence of our globalized world, not only economically—through the Hispano-American silver peso, arguably the first global currency—but also intellectually and artistically. Extraordinary cultural exchanges occurred throughout the Hispanic world. For instance, a descendant of Aztec nobility translated a Baroque play into Nahuatl for a mixed audience in Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest authored the first Western grammar of Chinese in Fuzhou; a Franciscan friar composed polyphonic music in Quechua for a church in Peru; and a diverse team of naturalists documented thousands of previously unknown plants and animals. Concurrently, members of the School of Salamanca were establishing modern international law and developing early theories of price, value, and money, while Cervantes wrote "Don Quixote," Velázquez painted "Las Meninas," and Goya explored the complexities of the European Enlightenment.