Governmental auction of the right to collect taxes in a district, market, or mine. The tax farmer advanced these taxes to the treasury and retained a commission.
Dramatic representation of the trial, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ; passion plays are still an integral part of Holy Week in many Catholic countries today.
From Greek maurus ("dark"); Castilian term referring to North Africans and to Muslims under Spanish rule.
Infantry soldiers recruited among the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire and paid from the central treasury.
Ever since the early 1100s, the papacy encouraged the formation of monastic fighting orders, such as the Hospitalers and Templars, to combat the Muslims in the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem; similar Reconquista orders, such as the Order of Santiago and the Order of Christ, emerged in Iberia to eliminate Muslim rule.
In the context of this chapter, Muslim or Christian pirates who boarded ships, confiscated the cargoes, and held the crews and travelers for ransom; they were nominally under the authority of the Ottoman sultan or the pope in Rome but operated independently.
In Greek, "uncovering" or "revelation"—that is, the unveiling of events at the end of history, before God's judgment; during the 1400s, expectation of the imminence of Christ's Second Coming, with precursors paving the way.
The levy on boys in the Ottoman Empire; that is, the obligation of the Christian population to contribute adolescent males to the military and administrative classes.
Form of economic organization in which mutual obligations are settled through monetary exchanges; in contrast, a system of land grants, with its rents from peasants, obliges the landholders to provide military service, without payment, to the grantee (sultan or king).
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