Key developments of 1535

Photo of part of one of the dozen massive tapestries woven between 1549 and 1551 to memorialize and recreate Charles’s Conquest of Tunis. They hang until today in the Real Alcazar in Seville.

So 1535 CE was another busy year in the emergence of European-origined empires:

• Spanish conquistadores in “the New World” founded the settler-city today known as Lima, Peru and imprisoned the Inca leader they had installed as their puppet in the country just a year or so earlier.
• But in Yucatán, the fierce resistance of the Mayan Indigenes forced the Spanish to abandon their second attempt to subdue the peninsula. English-WP tells us that: “The Spanish engaged in a strategy of concentrating native populations in newly founded colonial towns [aka strategic hamlets, a tactic used as part of the Spaniards’ encomienda system of population control.]. Native resistance to the new nucleated settlements took the form of the flight into inaccessible regions such as the forest or joining neighbouring Maya groups that had not yet submitted to the Spanish… In 1535, peaceful attempts by the Franciscan Order to incorporate Yucatán into the Spanish Empire failed after a renewed Spanish military presence at Champotón forced the friars out.” There was also Spanish-introduced smallpox and other diseases… The whole of that long English-WP entry is worth reading.
• The European homelands continued to be roiled by serious religious rivalry between Catholics, Anabaptists, Lutherans, and other Protestants, which had continuing, large-scale political implications…
• In March, English forces in Ireland stormed Maynooth Castle where Irish nationalist hero Thomas Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare, known in Irish as Tomás an tSíoda (Silken Thomas), had been holed up with his anti-English followers since the previous year. (King Henry VIII’s defiance of papal authority was one of the contributing factors to the rebellion.) Fitzgerald was unable to win as much support as he had hoped for. He was captured and taken to London where he was executed in a very grisly way along with his five uncles. Historian G.G. Nichols wrote that the five uncles were “…draune from the Tower in to Tyborne, and there alle hongyd and hedded and quartered, save the Lord Thomas for he was but hongyd and hedded and his body buried at the Crost Freeres in the qwere…”
• In June, Spain’s King Charles V (aka the Holy Roman Emperor) destroyed the Ottoman fleet near Tunis and conquered the city in a naval battle described as the largest in scale since the Battle of Salamis. I’ve given more details of this very significant development here. But in 1535 it was also notable that the Ottomans built the walls around Jerusalem that remain to this day.

Originally published at https://justworldnews.org.