Spanish conquests in the Caribbean and in Central and South America were like
the Portuguese conquests in the Indian Ocean area in many ways. They were quick
and ruthless, depended on military technology, and took advantage of hostilities
that already existed among different groups of native peoples. The Spanish, and
later other groups of Europeans, had one weapon in the Americas that the Portuguese
did not have in Africa and Asia, however – germs. Tropical diseases kept Europeans
out of the interior of sub-Saharan Africa until the development of modern
medicines to prevent and combat them, but the picture was different in the Americas,
where the impact of European voyages was devastating, even for people who
never saw a ship or a soldier. Europeans brought with them diseases that were common
in Eurasia, such as measles, mumps, bubonic plague, influenza, and smallpox,
against which natives of the Americas had no resistance. These diseases spread
through the Caribbean islands, and then in the more densely populated areas of
Central and South America, killing more than 90 percent of the local population
in some places.
Once Europeans reached the mainland of Central and South America in the late
1490s and early 1500s, diseases often spread ahead of actual groups of explorers or
soldiers. For germs to be transmitted, only a few or even one native person had to
come into contact with a Spanish landing party and then return to their village,
spreading germs to other people as they did normal things like preparing food, carrying
children, or talking about what they had seen. People became sick and died
quickly, so that when European troops got to an area several weeks or months later,
they found people who were already weak and fewer in number. This dramatic drop
in population allowed the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the French, English, and
Dutch, to set up land-based empires, not simply a string of trading posts. Soldiers
and explorers were given positions as governors or royal offi cials, and settlers arrived
soon afterwards.
Both guns and germs were important in the European conquest of the two largest
New World empires, the Aztecs in central Mexico, and the Incas in the Andes. The
way these empires had grown before the Spanish landed also helps explain why small
European forces succeeded so easily. Both the Aztecs and the Incas built their empires
through military conquest in the fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries; their
neighbors resented their power and their demands for tribute, so they often helped the
Spanish or became their allies.
The Aztec Empire was founded by the Mexica people, who migrated into central
Mexico from the north around 1300, settling on the shores and islands of Lake Texcoco
in the central valley of Mexico. Here they built their capital city of Tenochtitlán, which
by 1500 was probably larger than any city in Europe except Istanbul. As they migrated,
the Aztecs conquered many neighboring tribes, and war came to be seen as a religious
duty. The Aztecs believed that the all-important sun god Huitzilopochtli demanded
the sacrifi ce of captured warriors and other youthful victims to maintain his energy, so
that crops would grow and life continue. Because of this, Aztec warriors took prisoners
instead of killing defeated soldiers, and demanded that conquered tribes pay tribute
and supply additional people for ritual sacrifi ce.
In the Andes, the Inca Empire fi rst grew up around Lake Titicaca, and in the fi fteenth
century expanded its territory; by 1520 it stretched for 3,000 miles along the west
coast of South America. Like the Aztecs, the Incas associated themselves with the sun
god, whom they called Inti, though Inti did not require human sacrifi ce. They saw their
emperor, also known as the Inca, as the link between people on earth and the sun in
the sky. The Incas demanded tribute and taxes from the groups they conquered in the
form of crops and forced labor (termed the m’ita system). One of the most important
tasks throughout the Inca Empire was building and maintaining an extensive system
of roads and bridges, along which were special huts for runners who carried oral messages
to the runner in the next hut, a sort of pony express on foot. This system allowed
news to travel about 150 miles a day, but it would also allow infectious diseases to be
carried just as swiftly.
In the decades after Columbus’s fi rst voyage, Spanish settlements in the New
World were limited to islands in the Caribbean, though explorers went back and
forth to the American mainland several times. Spanish horses and Spanish soldiers
gradually grew more accustomed to tropical climates, and in 1519 Hernando Cortés
(1485–1547) led a group of 600 men and several hundred horses to the Mexican coast.
He made allies among the Tlaxcalan and other native peoples who opposed the Aztecs,
particularly after he used cannon to bombard the villages of those who did not
side with him. By the time he reached Tenochtitlán, he had several thousand troops.
The Aztec emperor Moctezuma let Cortés and his followers into the city, but, like the
Portuguese in China, the Spanish behaved badly to their hosts, and they were thrown
out in a bloody battle. They left behind an invisible enemy, however, in the form
of smallpox germs, and many people sickened and died. Cortés gained more allies
from among the Aztecs’ enemies, and after a long battle took Tenochtitlán from the
weakened Aztec forces. He and his allies then fought Aztec armies in other areas, and
by 1521 he had taken permanent control of the whole empire. He shipped Aztec art
back to Europe, where it was seen and appreciated by Renaissance artists, including
Albrecht Dürer.
About ten years later, the Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro ( 1478?–1541) conquered
the Inca Empire. Pizarro had become rich after settling in Panama City,
where he heard stories of a fabulous empire somewhere to the south. He organized
several expeditions to search for this empire, and in 1532 captured one of the Inca
leaders, Atahualpa (1500?–33), and killed thousands of Incas. Pizarro had even fewer
men than Cortés, but the Spanish took the Incas by surprise in this attack. The
Incas themselves were not united, as the powerful emperor Huayna Capac (ruled
1493–1525) had recently died in a plague – perhaps one that came to America with
the Spanish – and not all Incas backed Atahualpa. Atahualpa paid a huge ransom for
his release, but the Spanish killed him anyway. Pizarro founded the city of Lima as
Peru’s capital, and the Spanish used this as a base for the exploration and conquest
of most of South America. King Charles I of Spain made Pizarro governor of Peru,
but he was killed a few years later by another Spanish explorer who wanted to be
governor.
King Charles I – the same King Charles who became the German emperor, listened
to Luther, and sent Magellan – also made Cortés governor of Mexico, which was renamed
New Spain. In both Peru and Mexico, the Spanish founded new towns, built
Christian churches, and set up agricultural plantations like those in the Caribbean.
Spanish conquerors and settlers were given large estates and rights to the labor of native
people through an encomienda system modeled on that fi rst established in the
Caribbean. Along with ministering to immigrants, Spanish clergy began preaching to
the local residents, fi rst in Spanish, which few people understood, and then in the languages
spoken in the Americas as the missionaries learned them. They set up missions
away from the new Spanish towns and from existing Indian villages, trying to convert
native people to Christianity and to teach them European ways; these missions took
people away from their own culture, but also protected them from plantation owners
who wanted to enslave them.
The discovery of silver mines in northern Mexico and in the Andes Mountains of
Peru speeded up the pace of conquest. As we discussed in chapter 6 , though merchants
and bankers in Europe and Asia sometimes used paper forms of money for complex
business transactions, most buying and selling was done in coins, and most of these
were silver, which people also used to pay their taxes. More silver meant more coins
available, and also more taxes for the government, which taxed both mining and trade.
The Spanish government saw the silver mines as a great opportunity, and gave the
rights to mine silver to private investors in exchange for 20 percent of the silver they
mined. Mine owners brought in managers with experience of mining in Europe, together
with machinery and materials for smelting silver ore to make it pure, and imported
goods so they could live like the elites of Europe; they organized the mines as
capitalist enterprises, just as mines were organized in Europe. The government wanted
to make sure this silver got back to Europe, so they built forts, encouraged the construction
of sturdier ships and better weapons, and hired soldiers. In the Andes, they
adapted and expanded the Inca system of forced labor, drafting Indians through the
encomienda system to mine and transport silver from the unbelievably rich mines at
Potosí. The Indians were also forced to mine mercury, which was needed to extract the
silver from silver ore but is highly poisonous. Mission priests sometimes objected to
these harsh demands, but the government replaced them with priests who were more
willing to follow orders.
The Spanish government could do nothing about the spread of germs, however.
Dangerous conditions in the mines and poisoning from the mercury used to smelt
silver combined with disease to kill people even faster. Especially in the Andes, people
fl ed to remote villages rather than work in mines, and there were never enough Spanish
troops to force their return. The Spanish brought in African slaves from their Caribbean
colonies, for they would not have local family connections and so would fi nd it
harder to run away, but they also died in great numbers. The mine owners responded
to problems in fi nding and keeping workers by trying new types of more effi cient machinery,
and eventually by providing wages and improved working conditions. The
forced labor of native people survived in some areas until the eighteenth century, however,
and the enslavement of Africans even longer.
Spanish offi cials had originally imagined that their colonies in Central and South
America would contain separate communities of Europeans and Indians, and a hundred
years after conquest this was true to some degree. By about 1600 there were perhaps
200,000 people in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies who were, or pretended
to be, of purely European ancestry. They lived in cities, wore clothing made of English
wool or Chinese silk, ate from Dutch dishes, drank sweet Portuguese wine, and worshipped
in churches designed by Italian architects. This European minority held the
positions of power in the government, church, and private business. Away from the
cities, there were millions of people of purely Indian ancestry living in villages, hunting
or raising the same animals and growing the same crops they had for centuries.
This was especially true in areas such as the Amazon River basin where there were no
precious metals and there was no possibility of growing sugar. European diseases had
killed people even in the remotest areas, but offi cials or soldiers rarely traveled in these
areas, and even missionaries were very few.
The number of European women who migrated to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies
was much smaller than the number of men, however, so this separation between
Native Americans and Europeans was impossible to maintain. European men entered
into relationships with indigenous women, and a mixed society developed, especially
in and around mining towns and the new cities. African slaves and their children added
to this mixture, so that increasing numbers of people in Central and South America
were of mixed race, termed castas or mestizos . Spanish and Portuguese authorities, and
the Catholic Church, were forced to develop policies and institutions to regulate a society
very different from the one they had envisioned, a process we will discuss in more
detail in chapter 13 .
World History
