Year 1492 (MCDXCII) is a leap year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar.
The year 1492 marked a significant milestone in world history, with the beginning of the invasion and conquest of the "New World" of the Americas, and the "Old World" in Europe, as well as the unification of Spain, the end of Islamic rule in continental Europe, and the expulsion of the Jewish people from Spain.
Ajaccio is the capital and largest city of Corsica, France. It forms a French commune, prefecture of the department of Corse-du-Sud, and head office of the Collectivité territoriale de Corse (capital city of Corsica). It is also the largest settlement on the island. Ajaccio is located on the west coast of the island of Corsica, 210 nautical miles (390 km) southeast of Marseille.
The original city went into decline in the Middle Ages, but began to prosper again after the Genoese built a citadel in 1492, to the south of the earlier settlement. After the Corsican Republic was declared in 1755, the Genoese continued to hold several citadels, including Ajaccio, until the French took control of the island.
The caravel (Portuguese: caravela, IPA: [kɐɾɐˈvɛlɐ]) was a small sailing ship developed by Portugal. It could be rigged either entirely with lateen sails or with a combination of lateen and square sails. It was known for its agility and speed and its capacity for sailing windward (beating). Caravels were used by the Portuguese and, later, by the Spanish for the voyages of exploration during the 15th and 16th centuries, in the Age of Exploration.
The caravel is a poorly understood type of vessel. Though there are now some archaeologically investigated wrecks that are most likely caravels, information on this type is limited. We have a better understanding of the ships of the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity than we do of the caravel.
The Massacre of 1391, also known as the pogroms of 1391, refers to a murderous wave of mass violence committed against the Jews of Spain by the Catholic populace in the crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1391. It was one of the most lethal outbreaks of violence against Jews in medieval Spain, and in medieval European history. Anti-Jewish violence then continued throughout the "Reconquista", culminating in the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The first wave in 1391 marked the extreme of such violence.
Under duress, Jews began to convert en masse to Roman Catholicism across the Iberian Peninsula after the massacre, resulting in a substantial population of conversos known as Marranos. Catholics then began to accuse the conversos of secretly maintaining Jewish practices, and of thus undermining the newly united kingdom's nascent national identity. In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, which ordered the expulsion of Jews who had not converted to Catholicism. The resulting diaspora came to be known as the Sephardic Jews.