Little Venice (Venezuela)
As Little Venice (also Welser colony or Welser country ) indicates the geographical area in the modern state Venezuela , which Charles V the Welser had pledged 1528-1546. The Welser were a patrician family from Augsburg and Nuremberg. Little Venice represents the largest German contribution to the colonial development of America in the 16th century.
prehistory
In 1519 the Spanish King Karl I (later Emperor Karl V) took out large loans from the Augsburg trading houses Welser and Fugger for the election of Emperor in the Holy Roman Empire . Depending on the estimate, Charles V owed the Welsers between 143,000 and 158,000 guilders. Charles V was able to prevail against the French King Francis I , but the years passed without he had repaid even a small part of the loan. Thereupon Charles V offered the Welsern people a piece of the New World instead of the money. Charles V left them the province of Venezuela as a fief .
Treaty of Venezuela
Charles V and the Welser settled the terms of the agreements in the Treaty of Venezuela (actually Treaty of Madrid ) on March 27, 1528. The Welser were allowed to appoint governors and civil servants and were exempt from the salt tax and from all tariffs and port fees in the Spanish monopoly port of Seville . They were allowed to enslave enemy Indians (with prior warning) and import around 4,000 African slaves. The Welsers should have a 4% share in the profits of the entire company. The immigrants settled by the Welsers each received a piece of arable land.
The Welser had to found two cities and build three fortresses and also colonize them. The Spanish king received a tenth of the gold, silver or gemstone finds. Later this tax increased to a fifth.
The Chamber of Commerce ( Casa de la Contratación ) determined the boundaries of the Welser territory: Cape La Vela in the west and Cape Maracapana in the east . These two places are about 900 kilometers apart. The coastal strip (called “Pearl Coast”) and the islands belonging to it (with the exception of Aruba , Curaçao , Bonaire and the Islas de los Gigantes ) were also given to the Welsers for use. A southern border, however, was not established. One only wrote “de la una mar a la otra” (from one sea to the other). Probably meant the Caribbean ("Mar del Norte") and the sought-after Pacific South Sea ("Mar del Sur"). On a world map of the Welser from 1530 it is written that the Welser territory extends to the Strait of Magellan .
Colonization
In 1529, Ambrosius Ehinger , the first governor of Little Venice, came with 281 colonists to New Augsburg (Coro), the then provincial capital of Venezuela. Neu-Nürnberg (Maracaibo) was founded in the same year . Originally the plan was mainly to recoup Charles V's debts by selling gold, salt, slaves or precious wood, for example, but only the slave trade brought the desired profit. So the governors put more emphasis on the sale of slaves and acted more and more ruthlessly against the Indians. The Spanish population also felt exploited by the catfish. The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote: “ The Germans are worse than the wildest lions. Out of greed, these human devils act much more brutally than any of their predecessors. “The number of lawsuits at the Audiencia skyrocketed. In 1536, at the request of the Bishop of Coro, a commission of inquiry met to investigate the allegations of acts of violence against Spaniards and Indians. However, the then governor Georg Hohermuth undertook an expedition in search of Eldorado and his deputy Nikolaus Federmann was also not interested in questions of justice and also started an expedition in 1537.
Termination of the contract
In 1546 Charles V canceled the Venezuela Treaty. In his eyes, the Welser's colonial policy was a failure: the governors enriched themselves, food, horses and equipment still had to be delivered from the Caribbean because of the poor economy, New Nuremberg was in ruins, New Augsburg lost its capital city function, Juan de Carvajal took over government with forged papers, and Christianity was still completely unknown to most of the pagan Indians. Until 1556 Bartholomäus V. Welser litigated for his property claims in South America, but he finally lost Little Venice and Federmann's estate in Colombia.
Governors
| 1529-1530 | Ambrose von Ehinger known as Ambrosio Alfinger |
| 1530 | Hans Seissenhofer von Key (known as Juan Alemann or Juan 'EL Bueno' ) |
| 1531-1533 | Bartholomeus Sayler known as Bartolomé de Santillana |
| 1533 | Ambrose von Ehinger known as Ambrosio Alfinger |
| 1533-1535 | Nicolas Federmann the power of attorney over Venezuela. |
| 1535-1540 | Georg Hohermut von Speyer known as Jorge de Espira |
| 1540-1543 | Heinrich Remboldt |
| 1543-1544 | Philipp von Hutten known as Felipe de Utre ou Felipe de Hutten. |
| 1557 -? | Melchior Grübel |
See also
literature
- Rolf Walter : Los Alemanes en Venezuela y sus descendientes. Desde Colón hasta Guzmán Blanco. Asociación Cultural Humboldt, Caracas 1985, ISBN 980-265-171-0 .
- Rolf Walter: The dream of the Eldorado: The German Conquista in Venezuela in the 16th century (= writings on Latin America 3). Eberhard, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-926777-23-0 .
- Mark Häberlein, Johannes Burkhardt (Ed.): The Welser. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 978-3-05-003412-6 .
- The American Enterprises of the Augsburg Welsers, 1525–1547; Based on presentations by Hermann A. Schumacher. In: Deutsche Geographische Blätter, Volume 12. Bremen 1889, p. 5
- Franz Müller: The dream of a German Eldorado. In: Berliner Zeitung , May 4, 1996.
- Gottfried Kirchner : The death train of the lancers - German conquerors in South America. In: Hans Helmut Hillrichs (ed.): Terra X - From the steppes of the Mongols to the islands above the rainforest (expeditions into the unknown). Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-570-02275-7 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Welser Empire. In: What is what . 2006, archived from the original on October 22, 2013 ; accessed on September 8, 2019 .
- ↑ https://books.google.co.ve/books?id=mbNoDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=%22hans+seissenhoffer%22&source=bl&ots=oUrqxx5rWd&sig=ACfU3U1QflNBdu2pyLbmTHqh5ze6izN-7g&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjBno31o_jhAhUDVK0KHXWmA94Q6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q= % 22hans% 20seissenhoffer% 22 & f = false
- ↑ http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/35113/hans-seissehoffer
- ↑ http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/35116/bartolome-de-santillana
- ↑ https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/f/federmann.htm
- ↑ http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/9235/nicolaus-federmann
- ↑ http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/15628/jorge-hohermuth
- ↑ http://xn--sddeutsche-patrizier-pec.de/tng/getperson.php?personID=I6805&tree=patrizier
- ↑ https://gw.geneanet.org/aanitadelbosque?lang=en&n=grubel+factor+y+beneficiador+de+los+bienes+y+hacienda+de+los+welser&oc=0&p=melchor
- ↑ http://bibliofep.fundacionempresaspolar.org/_custom/static/cronologia_hv/zoom/s16/1557-1.html
- ↑ https://books.google.co.ve/books?id=xNYpAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22MELCHOR+GR%C3%9CBEL%22+ALCALDE&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22melchor+grubel+eran+alcaldes+ordinarias+%22
- ↑ https://books.google.co.ve/books?id=JSZZM-VygosC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=%22melchior+gr%C3%BCbel%22+alcalde&source=bl&ots=HXOFoWKljy&sig=ACfU3U26_X8weoj7DLb X & ved = 2ahUKEwjgjOPfydnpAhUtWN8KHRW_CHgQ6AEwAnoECAsQAQ # v = onepage & q =% 22melchior% 20gr% C3% BCbel% 22% 20alcalde & f = false
- ↑ The American Enterprises of the Augsburg Welsers, 1525–1547; Based on presentations by Hermann A. Schumacher. In: German Geographical Sheets. Volume 12. Bremen, 1889, p. 5 , accessed on September 8, 2019 (reproduced on archive.org).