Casa de Contratacion Founded

1503

Queen Isabella founded the Casa de Contratacion in Seville to regulate Spanish trade with the Americas. Every ship, cargo, and sailor had to pass through its bureaucracy. The institution would accumulate the greatest store of cartographic information in sixteenth-century Europe, jealously guarded from foreign spies and rivals. Its requirement that all returning ships pass through Seville made that city sixteenth-century Europe's richest and busiest port.