Overview
When Columbus stumbled upon the “New World”
in 1492, he unwittingly initiated one of the most profound transformations
in world history – a transformation that continues to shape the
world in which we live today. One of the most important early phases
of this transformation, was the so-called Spanish “conquest”
of the New World, and the creation of the Spanish colonial empire. For
within a few short decades of Columbus’ arrival on Caribbean shores,
the Spanish created one of the most formidable empires in European history
by conquering and colonizing vast stretches of the Americas. By 1550,
Spain dominated the lands and peoples around the Caribbean, and deep
into both North and South America: a domain more than ten times larger
than Spain itself. The approximately twenty million or more Indians
they encountered dwarfed the seven million Spaniards at home. In extent
and population, and cultural diversity, the Spanish empire in the Americas
exceeded even the ancient Roman, previously the standard of imperial
power.
Since the conquest, historians have puzzled over one
question in particular. How did so few Spanish manage to conquer such
a huge territory and so many people? Even today, the answers to this
question are varied, contested, and are highly dependent on the perspective
one takes. But most historians agree that the Spanish were able to impose
themselves so fully and quickly because of a combination of a number
of factors, which included their recent history, military and naval
technology, alliance-making skills, and perhaps most importantly, introduced
European diseases which killed hundreds of thousands of indigenous people
who had never been exposed to virus-born killers like small pox. When
examining these factors, many historians look closely at the Spanish
conquest of the Aztecs, in what today is Mexico. Here, too, existing
weaknesses inherent in what was effectively a pre-existing empire helped
topple the Aztecs, and bring the Spanish to rule.
One model of conquest was established when Columbus,
who returned to the West Indies the year after his famous first voyage,
this time with seventeen ships, 1200 men, sugarcane plants, and much
livestock. The Spanish had high hopes that the new colony would feed
itself, and recoup the costs by sending hides, gold, sugar, and slaves
to Spain. But at Hispaniola, Columbus discovered that the local Taino
peoples had become involved in a dispute with the men he had left behind,
and had killed the 39 men he had left behind the year before. Columbus
immediately used this as a pretext to wage a war of conquest. Employing
the military advantages of horses, trained dogs, gunpowder and steel,
Columbus killed and captured hundreds of Indians on Hispaniola and adjoining
islands. In 1495, he shipped 550 natives to Spain for sale to help pay
for his expedition. Most natives, however, ended up as slaves on colonial
plantations, or remained “free” as long as they paid in
a yearly quota of tribute – usually gold. Though Columbus’
slaughter and enslavement of Indians troubled the Spanish King and Queen,
their declaration in 1500 that the Indians were “free and not
subject to servitude” kept a loophole open for Spanish colonizers
to legally enslave any Indians taken in so-called “just-wars”
– which colonists characterised as any violence they conducted
against resisting natives.
After the subjugation of the Taino in and around Hispaniola,
and following the same model, the Spanish invaded other parts of the
Americas with amazing speed, as their growing shipping, cargoes, and
colonists connected the European and the American shores of the Atlantic.
In 1508 alone - so, only about 16 years after Columbus first stumbled
upon the Americas - 45 vessels crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean
islands, bringing settlers and supplies. They also, of course, brought
the seeds of the ecological destruction of the Indies, too, sometimes
literally. They introduced new crops, especially sugarcane, and new
animals, including cattle, mules, sheep, horses, and pigs, and remade
the already fertile environment that Columbus described. Settlement
and the taming of the land was seen as essential to a good conquest.
And conquest was seen as an essential pre-requisite to conversion of
the natives. The conquest of nature and the domination of natives, then,
worked reciprocally.
But the ships also brought more conquistadors, as Spanish
encounters with indigenous peoples on the Caribbean islands quickly
turned into a general entrada (invasion). The conquistador expeditions
were private enterprises generally led by Spanish gentry. These men
obtained a licence from the crown, which reserved a fifth of all the
plunder and sovereign jurisdiction over any conquered lands to itself.
Known as an adelantado, the holder of a crown licence recruited and
financed his own expedition, with the help of investors who expected
their share in the loot, and rank and file soldiers and officers alike
all fought for a share in any profits they might find.
In addition to reaping plunder and slaves, the victorious
commanders obtained tribute paid annually by conquered Indian villages.
Grants known as encomiendas endowed the holder, or encomendero with
a share in the forced labour and annual produce of the inhabitants of
several Indian pueblos (or villages). Of course, as quasi-feudal lords,
encomenderos were supposed to defend the inhabitants against other Indians,
and to promote their conversion to Christianity by supporting a priest
and building a church.
Developed in the course of the brutal reconquista of
Spain from the occupying Moors, and evolved during Spanish efforts in
the Canary Islands, such a system hardly encouraged peaceful encounters
with natives in the Americas. Indeed, conquistadors regarded plunder,
slaves, and tribute as the just desserts for their efforts in forcing
pagans to accept Christianity and Spanish rule. After all, the conquistadors
did scrupulously adhere to the Spanish law of conquest by reading the
requerimiento, which ordered defiant Indians to immediately accept Spanish
rule and Christian conversion, or face punishment in a “just war”.
The requerimiento announced that “The resultant deaths and damages
shall be your fault, and not the monarch’s or mine or the soldiers”.
Attending witnesses and a notary usually certified in writing that the
requerimiento had been read and ignored by the usually uncomprehending
Indians, thus justifying the death and destruction that so often followed.
The system, too, encouraged a never-ending cycle of entradas,
as ambitious subordinates, anxious to secure their own encomienda, pushed
Spanish conquest throughout the West Indies at a really remarkable pace.
In 1508, for example, Ponce de Leon led Spanish troops into Puerto Rico,
slaughtering the Taino there. Cuba fell in 1511, as did Jamaica. Even
this early in the process, the brutality of the conquistadors –
Panfilo de Narvaez, the sacker of Jamaica, later wrote that the did
not remember how much blood they had spilled in terrorising the natives
– was so appalling that the Dominican missionaries began to complain
in earnest to the royal authorities about their countrymen’s barbarism.
The most famous of these entradas, of course, was Hernan
Cortés’ venture against the Aztecs in central Mexico. As
Taino numbers dwindled in the Caribbean, the Spanish desperately needed
replacements to work their new gold mines, cattle ranches, and sugar
plantations – fuel, as it were, for their growing colonial fires.
Raids on the American mainland and throughout the islands thus became
common, and more wide-ranging, devastating native villages around the
Gulf of Mexico from Venezuela to Florida and up the Atlantic coast as
far as present-day South Carolina. From their captives, the Spanish
learned of the rich and populous Aztec empire in central Mexico, which
had cities with stone temples and palaces and an immense population.
Allured by reports of great wealth, the Spanish under Hernan Cortés
launched an expedition of six hundred armed volunteers from Cuba to
the coast of Mexico, and then into the interior, in 1519. Winning important
support from the peoples that the Aztecs in turn had subordinated, Cortés
somehow bluffed his way into the heart of the city and became Moctezuma’s
honoured guests. Impressed rather than overawed by the wealth of the
city, Cortés launched a bloody siege that began with the seizure
and eventual death of Moctezuma, the Aztec ruler. The Spanish were at
first turfed out of the city by fierce resistance, by they returned
with reinforcements of Spanish troops and many indigenous allies. By
August 1521, the Spanish and their native allies had reduced the city
to a bloody rubble and a systematic campaign of terror, in which Aztec
nobles and priests were thrown to the war dogs to be torn apart, allowed
Cortés to establish himself as the new Governor of Mexico, and
become the wealthiest man in Spain by the time of his death in 1547.
Cortés’ stunning victory only spurred others
to attempt to emulate him. The next thirty years in particular saw a
series of rather stunning conquests that gave Spain its great American
empire on the mainland by 1550. During the 1530s, for example, Francisco
Pizarro with a mere 180 men conquered the Inca empire of Peru, practising
a ruthless brutality that might have put even Cortés to shame.
Then, during the 1540s, Spanish forces gradually and painfully subdued
the Mayan peoples of Central America, as we’ll see in our readings
for this Thursday’s tutorial. From these mainland bases, the Spanish
then pushed their frontiers even further – to northern Mexico,
and what is now California and the southwest of the US, and south into
what is now Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, and beyond.
As mentioned above, the Spanish were able to achieve
these remarkable victories via a deadly combination of forces. They
utilised superior technology, for example. Though Cortés and
his 600 men only had 13 unwieldy arquebuses, they used them for their
shock value; they also had steel-edged swords, pikes and crossbows,
and even horses and mastiffs – all of which the Spaniards used
to optimal effect in terrorising natives. They also employed a ruthless
divide and rule policy in making alliances with local native groups
that worked for Cortés, and against the Aztecs and other predominant
groups.
This latter policy points to internal factors that contributed
to the downfall of the large Aztec and Inca empires especially. For
in important ways, the Spanish really only managed to insert themselves
at the top of the existing imperial hierarchy – and they took
full advantage of the divisions within these indigenous societies. Though
colonial officials usually eliminated the political pretensions of both
the Aztec and Inca royal lineages, the Spaniards (who were of course
committed to the rightfulness of strict social hierarchies) continued
to honour the social status and property that pertained to previously
elevated indigenous classes by recognising the native royal families
as “natural lords” who were worthy of respect. A fair number
of conquistadores and early settlers even married into these families
and benefited from the rank and wealth attached to these lineages. Even
the emperor Moctezuma’s daughter, Dona Isabel Moctezuma, took
advantage of this recognition, and several of the resulting mixed Indian-Spanish
lineages that arose ultimately gained noble titles awarded by the Spanish
crown, and a few even relocated to Spain itself, where they were accepted
into the more elevated ranks of society.
Though such examples were relatively rare, certainly
there were far more examples of local caciques – or ethnic and
local rulers – who made deals with the colonists and authorities
and benefited from their Spanish connections even while their subjects
suffered from increasingly harsh demands. Though some caciques sought
to protect their own peoples, over the decades, many of these caciques
became increasingly acculturated to Spanish ways, and some even married
Spanish or casta women without threat to their political standing. The
Spanish encouraged such mixing and acculturation in an effort to mould
a favoured ruling class who would be obedient to the Spanish. So, some
members of the local nobility were allowed to wear European clothes
and adopt some prestige symbols of the dominant culture – like
riding a horse, carrying a sword, or using an arquebus. Caciques originally
sought to straddle the cultural gap between their own and the European
world, but over time, they really became, willingly or not, agents of
the Spanish in making their people produce goods or labour. But as they
did so, and as they became more hispanicised, historians have usually
argued that they gradually lost the respect of their indigenous communities
and increasingly lost authority over them. But even in this regard,
one recent scholar, Robert Haskett, has argued in a fascinating article
on the town of Cuernavaca, south of the valley of Mexico, that hispanicised
indigenous elites actually helped mediate the intrusion of alien goods
and strategies, protecting themselves and their culture from even greater
disruption. The important point to remember is that Spanish, like most
other European powers later, needed indigenous help in the “conquest”
of America.
Finally, the biggest advantage the Spanish had lay in
the form of unseen microbes, that carried diseases to the indigenous
peoples that they had never been exposed to previously. Even by 1494,
a Spaniard reckoned that as many as 50,000 Taino had died in and around
Hispaniola, and within 20 years, their population had dwindled from
300,000, to 33,000 by 1510, and to a mere 500 by 1548. Such depopulations
bolstered the confidence of the conquerors, and completely demoralised
the Indians. Bernal Diaz wrote of the sack of the Aztecs, that “When
the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians
smallpox, and there was great pestilence in the city.” Diseases
played an often overlooked but crucial role in the “conquest”
of the Americas. Indeed, only very recently, have historians realised
the extent of the “profound dislocations in population and in
economic life caused by smallpox, measles, and similar maladies can
scarcely be overestimated.” New studies suggest that up to perhaps
90% of many indigenous populations were wiped out by newly introduced
European diseases within the first decades after contact.Significantly,
though historians have often emphasised the speed of the Spanish conquest
of the mainland, they have less often noted the successful resistance
of other indigenous groups. Indeed, in some sense, the Spanish could
be said to have failed in the Caribbean. Here, they managed to conquer
the larger islands (with considerable local help), but the more militaristic
inhabitants of the southern and eastern Caribbean – like the Kulinago
of the Lesser Antilles, and the Carib and Arawak of the mainland of
Venezuela and the Guianas – not only proved capable of resisting
Spanish attempts to attack their homes but managed to actually raid
and harass Spanish possessions in the Caribbean throughout the sixteenth
and even seventeenth centuries. The people of the eastern Caribbean
basin possessed sufficient naval technology to defeat Spanish ships,
and they actually took ships on the high seas. The French, Dutch, and
English who eventually settled in the West Indies and the mainland were
also forced into first a co-dominion and then a long-lasting military
struggle with these peoples, which was only really decided by the superior
numeric strength of the settlers.
Even in the mainland areas, the European conquest of
the Americas was far from complete. Outside the central areas of Mexico
and Peru, there were many who resisted European invasions, or yielded
only slowly. Ponce de Leon may have led a one-sided victory in Puerto
Rico, for example, but he was repelled by the indigenous inhabitants
of Florida, who chased him back out to sea and captured several of his
ships. The Araucanians of Chile, the Chichimecas of Mexico, and the
Tupinambá and Tapuya of Brazil gave ground to the Spanish and
Portuguese only very slowly, and even as late as 1700, many regions
in South America especially were either entirely in the hands of natives,
or were jointly ruled by Native Americans with European settlers in
an uneasy co-dominion.
In the end, the Spanish conquests have, of course, given
rise to the “Black Legend” – that the Spanish were
uniquely cruel and far more brutal and destructive than other Europeans
in their treatment of the Indians. In fact, the Black Legend arose when
other European countries – notably France, England and the Netherlands
(and the latter two, at least at the time they were pushing the Black
Legend, were notably Protestant, and only too happy to find fault with
Catholics) – were trying to find plunder and their own colonies
by robbing the Spanish. All 16th century European colonizers behaved
abominably towards the natives of the Americas when they could –
the Spanish simply had a head start, and greater opportunity to conquer
large numbers of Indians at a vulnerable moment.
Yet on the other side of the coin, and without “white-washing”
the Black Legend, Spain not only produced some of the most ruthless
conquerors, but also the earliest and most eloquent critics of colonial
violence in the guise of missionaries like Bartolomé de Las Casas.
Las Casas was originally a happy participant – an encomendero
- in the earlier entradas in Hispaniola. But upon hearing a sermon from
a Dominican friar in 1511 castigating his audience colonizers by asking
whether the Indians were not men, with souls like themselves, and whether
they ought to love them as they loved themselves, Las Casas renounced
his encomienda, entered the Dominican order, and became one of the most
outspoken and vociferous critics of the American conquest.
Of course, although they were less exploitative, the
friars and missionaries offered the Indians a demanding alternative
to subjugation: that they entirely surrender their traditional cultures
and adopt, instead, the strange and uncompromising ways and beliefs
of their conquerors. Priests oversaw the destruction of native temples,
prohibited most traditional dances, and obliged natives to build new
churches and adopt the rituals of the Catholic faith. Many Indians seemed
to adopt the new faith with some enthusiasm, but as we’ll see,
continued to venerate their old idols in secret.
One perhaps tragically ironic twist to the intervention
of Spanish missionaries came when they lobbied, successfully, for the
end of Indian slavery, they acquiesced in the importation of African
slaves to replace their labour. Beginning with a trickle into the Caribbean
islands in the 1510s, slaves, carried generally by the Portuguese into
Spanish colonies, flooded into Americas, especially with the opening
of gold mining in Mexico, Peru and Brazil, and later with the introduction
of large scale sugar production in Brazil, Mexico, and the Antilles.
By the end of the 16th century, an average of about 4000 enslaved Africans
were brought to the Americas, per year. In all, by the time slavery
was abolished in the Americas, the Spanish and Portuguese had imported
over 12 million enslaved people from Africa.