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Spanish Empire: Centuries
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After the fall of the Roman Empire the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Germanic tribes and one of the few Spanish words that were borrowed from their language was the word for goose, which is ganso (cf. German Gans). Much more influence on Spanish had Arabic which was brought to the peninsula by the Moors, an Islamic people from North Africa that invaded Iberia in 711 and conquered most of it. As a result of centuries of Moorish domination many words from Arabic, the language of Islam, are now used in Spanish. Many are easily recognizable because they start with al-, which is actually an Arabic article but was wrongly interpreted as a part of those words by the indigenous population (and probably by many of the Berber speaking Moorish conquerors as well). An example of an Arabic word in Spanish is almirante from amir-al-bahr ("prince of the sea"). This word ... entered other European languages (English: admiral, French: amiral).
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Since the Spanish Habsburg empire in Europe was governed on the Aragonese pluralistic principle, further councils were added to supervise its affairs. A Council of Italy was organized between 1555 and 1558, a Council of Portugal in 1580, a Council of Flanders in 1588, and finally, a separate Council of Finance in 1593, to try to bring order to the crown's highly complex and overburdened financial system. Smaller royal councils administered royal justice in Castile and the affairs of the Inquisition. The pluralistic conciliar system guaranteed considerable autonomy in the affairs of various regions of the empire and certain branches of government, but it ... discouraged cooperation and coordination in the whole. It resulted in the duplication and overlapping of functions and the entrenchment of vested interests that became increasingly pernicious during the seventeenth century.
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The Spanish empire in America was the first of the great seaborne empires of western Europe; it was for long the richest and the most formidable, the focus of envy, fear, and hatred. Its haphazard beginning dates from 1492; it was to last more than three hundred years before breaking up in the early nineteenth century in civil wars between rival generals and "liberators."
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Centuries