Chapter 17 Section 1 Guided Reading and Review Spain and Portugal

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I. Introduction
II. The First Americans
III. European Expansion
IV. Spanish Exploration and Conquest
V. Conclusion
VI. Chief Sources
VII. Reference Material

I. Introduction

Europeans called the Americas "the New World." Merely for the millions of Native Americans they encountered, information technology was anything but. Humans accept lived in the Americas for over ten 1000 years. Dynamic and diverse, they spoke hundreds of languages and created thousands of distinct cultures. Native Americans built settled communities and followed seasonal migration patterns, maintained peace through alliances and warred with their neighbors, and developed cocky-sufficient economies and maintained vast merchandise networks. They cultivated distinct art forms and spiritual values. Kinship ties knit their communities together. But the arrival of Europeans and the resulting global commutation of people, animals, plants, and microbes—what scholars benignly call the Columbian Exchange—bridged more than than ten grand years of geographic separation, inaugurated centuries of violence, unleashed the greatest biological terror the world had always seen, and revolutionized the history of the world. It began ane of the most consequential developments in all of man history and the first affiliate in the long American yawp.

II. The Start Americans

American history begins with the first Americans. But where do their stories offset? Native Americans passed stories down through the millennia that tell of their creation and reveal the contours of Indigenous belief. The Salinan people of nowadays-twenty-four hour period California, for instance, tell of a bald eagle that formed the first man out of clay and the first adult female out of a feather.¹ Co-ordinate to a Lenape tradition, the globe was made when Sky Woman roughshod into a watery world and, with the help of muskrat and beaver, landed safely on a turtle'south back, thus creating Turtle Island, or North America. A Choctaw tradition locates southeastern peoples' beginnings within the great Mother Mound earthwork, Nunih Waya, in the lower Mississippi Valley.² Nahua people trace their ancestry to the identify of the Seven Caves, from which their ancestors emerged before they migrated to what is at present central Mexico.^three America's Ethnic peoples have passed down many accounts of their origins, written and oral, which share creation and migration histories.

Archaeologists and anthropologists, meanwhile, focus on migration histories. Studying artifacts, bones, and genetic signatures, these scholars have pieced together a narrative that claims that the Americas were once a "new world" for Native Americans as well.

The concluding global ice age trapped much of the world's water in enormous continental glaciers. Twenty k years ago, water ice sheets, some a mile thick, extended across North America as far southward every bit modern-twenty-four hour period Illinois. With so much of the world's water captured in these massive water ice sheets, global ocean levels were much lower, and a state bridge continued Asia and North America across the Bering Strait. Between twelve and twenty thousand years ago, Native ancestors crossed the ice, waters, and exposed lands between the continents of Asia and America. These mobile hunter-gatherers traveled in small bands, exploiting vegetable, animal, and marine resources into the Beringian tundra at the northwestern border of North America. Deoxyribonucleic acid bear witness suggests that these ancestors paused—for perhaps fifteen m years—in the expansive region between Asia and America.⁴ Other ancestors crossed the seas and voyaged along the Pacific coast, traveling along riverways and settling where local ecosystems permitted.⁵ Glacial sheets receded around fourteen 1000 years ago, opening a corridor to warmer climates and new resource. Some ancestral communities migrated south and east. Bear witness found at Monte Verde, a site in mod-twenty-four hour period Republic of chile, suggests that homo activity began there at least 14,500 years agone. Similar testify hints at human settlement in the Florida panhandle and in Central Texas at the same time.⁶ On many points, archaeological and traditional knowledge sources converge: the dental, archaeological, linguistic, oral, ecological, and genetic evidence illustrates a smashing deal of diversity, with numerous groups settling and migrating over thousands of years, potentially from many different points of origin.^vii Whether emerging from the earth, water, or sky; being made by a creator; or migrating to their homelands, modern Native American communities recount histories in America that appointment long before man memory.

In the Northwest, Native groups exploited the great salmon-filled rivers. On the plains and prairie lands, hunting communities followed bison herds and moved co-ordinate to seasonal patterns. In mountains, prairies, deserts, and forests, the cultures and ways of life of paleo-era ancestors were every bit varied as the geography. These groups spoke hundreds of languages and adopted distinct cultural practices. Rich and various diets fueled massive population growth across the continent.

Agriculture arose erstwhile between nine thousand and v m years agone, almost simultaneously in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Mesoamericans in modern-day United mexican states and Key America relied on domesticated maize (corn) to develop the hemisphere'due south first settled population effectually 1200 BCE.⁸ Corn was high in caloric content, easily dried and stored, and, in Mesoamerica's warm and fertile Gulf Coast, could sometimes be harvested twice in a year. Corn—every bit well equally other Mesoamerican crops—spread across Due north America and continues to agree an important spiritual and cultural place in many Native communities.

Prehistoric Settlement in Warren County, Mississippi. Mural by Robert Dafford, depicting the Kings Crossing archaeological site as it may have appeared in 1000 CE. Vicksburg Riverfront Murals.

Agriculture flourished in the fertile river valleys between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, an surface area known as the Eastern Woodlands. There, three crops in particular—corn, beans, and squash, known every bit the Three Sisters—provided nutritional needs necessary to sustain cities and civilizations. In Woodland areas from the Peachy Lakes and the Mississippi River to the Atlantic declension, Native communities managed their forest resources by burning underbrush to create vast parklike hunting grounds and to clear the footing for planting the Three Sisters. Many groups used shifting tillage, in which farmers cut the forest, burned the undergrowth, and then planted seeds in the nutrient-rich ashes. When ingather yields began to decline, farmers moved to some other field and allowed the land to recover and the forest to regrow before over again cutting the forest, burning the undergrowth, and restarting the cycle. This technique was peculiarly useful in areas with difficult soil. In the fertile regions of the Eastern Woodlands, Native American farmers engaged in permanent, intensive agronomics using hand tools. The rich soil and use of mitt tools enabled effective and sustainable farming practices, producing loftier yields without overburdening the soil.⁹ Typically in Woodland communities, women practiced agriculture while men hunted and fished.

Agronomics immune for dramatic social change, simply for some, information technology likewise may take accompanied a decline in health. Assay of remains reveals that societies transitioning to agronomics often experienced weaker bones and teeth.¹⁰ Merely despite these possible declines, agriculture brought important benefits. Farmers could produce more food than hunters, enabling some members of the community to pursue other skills. Religious leaders, skilled soldiers, and artists could devote their energy to activities other than food product.

North America's Indigenous peoples shared some broad traits. Spiritual practices, understandings of property, and kinship networks differed markedly from European arrangements. Most Native Americans did non neatly distinguish betwixt the natural and the supernatural. Spiritual power permeated their world and was both tangible and attainable. Information technology could exist appealed to and harnessed. Kinship bound most Native North American people together. Nearly people lived in small communities tied past kinship networks. Many Native cultures understood ancestry as matrilineal: family and association identity proceeded along the female person line, through mothers and daughters, rather than fathers and sons. Fathers, for instance, often joined mothers' extended families, and sometimes fifty-fifty a mother'due south brothers took a more than direct role in kid-raising than biological fathers. Therefore, mothers often wielded enormous influence at local levels, and men'due south identities and influence oft depended on their relationships to women. Native American culture, meanwhile, generally afforded greater sexual and marital freedom than European cultures.^eleven Women, for instance, often chose their husbands, and divorce ofttimes was a relatively elementary and straightforward process. Moreover, virtually Native peoples' notions of property rights differed markedly from those of Europeans. Native Americans generally felt a personal buying of tools, weapons, or other items that were actively used, and this same dominion applied to state and crops. Groups and individuals exploited particular pieces of state and used violence or negotiation to exclude others. But the right to the use of country did not imply the correct to its permanent possession.

Native Americans had many ways of communicating, including graphic ones, and some of these artistic and communicative technologies are still used today. For example, Algonquian-speaking Ojibwes used birch-bark scrolls to record medical treatments, recipes, songs, stories, and more. Other Eastern Woodland peoples wove establish fibers, embroidered skins with porcupine quills, and modeled the earth to make sites of complex ceremonial meaning. On the Plains, artisans wove buffalo hair and painted on buffalo skins; in the Pacific Northwest, afterwards the arrival of Europeans, weavers wove goat hair into soft textiles with particular patterns. Maya, Zapotec, and Nahua ancestors in Mesoamerica painted their histories on establish-derived textiles and carved them into stone. In the Andes, Inca recorders noted information in the form of knotted strings, or khipu.¹²

Two thousand years agone, some of the largest culture groups in North America were the Puebloan groups, centered in the current-day Greater Southwest (the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico), the Mississippian groups located along the Dandy River and its tributaries, and the Mesoamerican groups of the areas now known as central Mexico and the Yucatán. Previous developments in agricultural engineering science enabled the explosive growth of the large early societies, such as that at Tenochtitlán in the Valley of Mexico, Cahokia along the Mississippi River, and in the desert oasis areas of the Greater Southwest.

Native peoples in the Southwest began constructing these highly defensible cliff dwellings in 1190 CE and connected expanding and refurbishing them until 1260 CE before abandoning them around 1300 CE. Andreas F. Borchert, Mesa Verde National Park Cliff Palace. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Akin iii.0 Germany.

Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico was abode to bequeathed Puebloan peoples between 900 and 1300 CE. As many every bit fifteen thousand individuals lived in the Chaco Canyon complex in present-day New Mexico.^xiii Sophisticated agronomical practices, extensive trading networks, and even the domestication of animals like turkeys immune the population to swell. Massive residential structures, built from sandstone blocks and lumber carried across neat distances, housed hundreds of Puebloan people. One building, Pueblo Bonito, stretched over two acres and rose five stories. Its six hundred rooms were decorated with copper bells, turquoise decorations, and bright macaws.¹⁴ Homes like those at Pueblo Bonito included a pocket-size dugout room, or kiva, which played an of import part in a variety of ceremonies and served as an important center for Puebloan life and culture. Puebloan spirituality was tied both to the world and the heavens, as generations carefully charted the stars and designed homes in line with the path of the sun and moon.^xv

The Puebloan people of Chaco Canyon faced several ecological challenges, including deforestation and overirrigation, which ultimately caused the customs to collapse and its people to disperse to smaller settlements. An extreme fifty-year drought began in 1130. Shortly thereafter, Chaco Canyon was deserted. New groups, including the Apache and Navajo, entered the vacated territory and adopted several Puebloan community. The same drought that plagued the Pueblo as well likely afflicted the Mississippian peoples of the American Midwest and South. The Mississippians developed i of the largest civilizations north of modern-day Mexico. Roughly one thousand years ago, the largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, located simply eastward of modern-solar day St. Louis, peaked at a population of between 10 one thousand and thirty thousand. It rivaled gimmicky European cities in size. No city due north of modern Mexico, in fact, would match Cahokia's peak population levels until after the American Revolution. The city itself spanned two thousand acres and centered on Monks Mound, a large earthen colina that rose ten stories and was larger at its base than the pyramids of Arab republic of egypt. As with many of the peoples who lived in the Woodlands, life and decease in Cahokia were linked to the motility of the stars, sun, and moon, and their ceremonial earthwork structures reflect these important structuring forces.

Cahokia was politically organized around chiefdoms, a hierarchical, clan-based arrangement that gave leaders both secular and sacred authorisation. The size of the city and the extent of its influence suggest that the city relied on a number of lesser chiefdoms under the authority of a paramount leader. Social stratification was partly preserved through frequent warfare. State of war captives were enslaved, and these captives formed an important function of the economy in the North American Southeast. Native American slavery was not based on holding people equally property. Instead, Native Americans understood the enslaved as people who lacked kinship networks. Slavery, then, was not always a permanent status. Very oftentimes, a formerly enslaved person could become a fully integrated member of the community. Adoption or marriage could enable an enslaved person to enter a kinship network and join the customs. Slavery and captive trading became an important fashion that many Native communities regrew and gained or maintained power.

Computer-generated image of Cahokia. A walled center city and a series of small huts, lakes, and rivers surround.

An artist's rendering of Cahokia as it may have appeared in 1150 CE. Prepared by Bill Isminger and Marking Esarey with artwork past Greg Harlin. From the Cahokia Mounds Land Historic Site.

Around 1050, Cahokia experienced what 1 archaeologist has chosen a "large bang," which included "a near instantaneous and pervasive shift in all things political, social, and ideological."^sixteen The population grew well-nigh 500 percentage in only one generation, and new people groups were absorbed into the city and its supporting communities. By 1300, the one time-powerful city had undergone a series of strains that led to collapse. Scholars previously pointed to ecological disaster or slow depopulation through emigration, simply new research instead emphasizes mounting warfare, or internal political tensions. Ecology explanations suggest that population growth placed likewise great a burden on the arable land. Others suggest that the demand for fuel and building materials led to deforestation, erosion, and perhaps an extended drought. Recent evidence, including defensive stockades, suggests that political turmoil amongst the ruling elite and threats from external enemies may explain the terminate of the one time-bully civilisation.¹⁷

North American communities were continued past kin, politics, and culture and sustained by long-distance trading routes. The Mississippi River served as an important merchandise artery, but all of the continent's waterways were vital to transportation and communication. Cahokia became a key trading eye partly considering of its position near the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers. These rivers created networks that stretched from the Great Lakes to the American Southeast. Archaeologists can identify materials, like seashells, that traveled over a thousand miles to accomplish the center of this civilisation. At least three,500 years agone, the customs at what is now Poverty Point, Louisiana, had access to copper from present-24-hour interval Canada and flintstone from mod-twenty-four hours Indiana. Sheets of mica found at the sacred Serpent Mound site near the Ohio River came from the Allegheny Mountains, and obsidian from nearby earthworks came from Mexico. Turquoise from the Greater Southwest was used at Teotihuacan 1200 years agone.

In the Eastern Woodlands, many Native American societies lived in smaller, dispersed communities to take advantage of rich soils and abundant rivers and streams. The Lenapes, too known every bit Delawares, farmed the bottomlands throughout the Hudson and Delaware River watersheds in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Their hundreds of settlements, stretching from southern Massachusetts through Delaware, were loosely bound together past political, social, and spiritual connections.

Dispersed and relatively independent, Lenape communities were bound together past oral histories, ceremonial traditions, consensus-based political organisation, kinship networks, and a shared clan system. Kinship tied the diverse Lenape communities and clans together, and society was organized along matrilineal lines. Marriage occurred between clans, and a husband joined the association of his married woman. Lenape women wielded authority over marriages, households, and agricultural output and may even take played a significant part in determining the selection of leaders, called sachems. Dispersed dominance, minor settlements, and kin-based organization contributed to the long-lasting stability and resilience of Lenape communities.¹⁸ 1 or more than sachems governed Lenape communities by the consent of their people. Lenape sachems acquired their potency by demonstrating wisdom and experience. This differed from the hierarchical organisation of many Mississippian cultures. Large gatherings did exist, notwithstanding, every bit dispersed communities and their leaders gathered for ceremonial purposes or to brand big decisions. Sachems spoke for their people in larger councils that included men, women, and elders. The Lenapes experienced occasional tensions with other Ethnic groups similar the Iroquois to the north or the Susquehannock to the southward, but the lack of defensive fortifications near Lenape communities convinced archaeologists that the Lenapes avoided large-calibration warfare.

The connected longevity of Lenape societies, which began centuries before European contact, was likewise due to their skills as farmers and fishers. Along with the Iii Sisters, Lenape women planted tobacco, sunflowers, and gourds. They harvested fruits and nuts from trees and cultivated numerous medicinal plants, which they used with neat proficiency. The Lenapes organized their communities to have advantage of growing seasons and the migration patterns of animals and fowl that were a part of their nutrition. During planting and harvesting seasons, Lenapes gathered in larger groups to coordinate their labor and accept reward of local abundance. As proficient fishers, they organized seasonal fish camps to net shellfish and catch shad. Lenapes wove nets, baskets, mats, and a variety of household materials from the rushes found along the streams, rivers, and coasts. They made their homes in some of the virtually fertile and abundant lands in the Eastern Woodlands and used their skills to create a stable and prosperous civilisation. The first Dutch and Swedish settlers who encountered the Lenapes in the seventeenth century recognized Lenape prosperity and speedily sought their friendship. Their lives came to depend on it.

In the Pacific Northwest, the Kwakwaka'wakw, Tlingits, Haidas, and hundreds of other peoples, speaking dozens of languages, thrived in a land with a moderate climate, lush forests, and many rivers. The peoples of this region depended on salmon for survival and valued it accordingly. Images of salmon decorated totem poles, baskets, canoes, oars, and other tools. The fish was treated with spiritual respect and its image represented prosperity, life, and renewal. Sustainable harvesting practices ensured the survival of salmon populations. The Coast Salish people and several others celebrated the First Salmon Anniversary when the outset migrating salmon was spotted each season. Elders closely observed the size of the salmon run and delayed harvesting to ensure that a sufficient number survived to spawn and return in the future.¹⁹ Men commonly used nets, hooks, and other small tools to capture salmon every bit they migrated upriver to spawn. Massive cedar canoes, as long as l feet and carrying as many every bit twenty men, also enabled extensive line-fishing expeditions in the Pacific Bounding main, where skilled fishermen defenseless halibut, sturgeon, and other fish, sometimes hauling thousands of pounds in a single canoe.²⁰

Nutrient surpluses enabled significant population growth, and the Pacific Northwest became i of the most densely populated regions of N America. The combination of population density and surplus nutrient created a unique social organization centered on elaborate feasts, chosen potlatches. These potlatches celebrated births and weddings and determined social status. The party lasted for days and hosts demonstrated their wealth and power by entertaining guests with food, artwork, and performances. The more the hosts gave away, the more prestige and power they had within the group. Some men saved for decades to host an extravagant potlatch that would in turn requite him greater respect and ability within the community.

Intricately carved masks, similar the Crooked Beak of Sky Mask, used natural elements such equally animals to correspond supernatural forces during ceremonial dances and festivals. Nineteenth-century kleptomaniacal nib of sky mask from the Kwakwaka'wakw. Wikimedia. Creative Eatables Attribution iii.0 Unported.

Many peoples of the Pacific Northwest built elaborate plank houses out of the region's abundant cedar trees. The v-hundred-foot-long Suquamish Oleman House (or Erstwhile Homo House), for instance, rested on the banks of Puget Sound.²¹ Behemothic cedar trees were as well carved and painted in the shape of animals or other figures to tell stories and express identities. These totem poles became the near recognizable artistic grade of the Pacific Northwest, but people also carved masks and other wooden items, such as hand drums and rattles, out of the region's great trees.

Despite commonalities, Native cultures varied greatly. The New World was marked by diversity and dissimilarity. By the time Europeans were poised to cross the Atlantic, Native Americans spoke hundreds of languages and lived in keeping with the hemisphere's many climates. Some lived in cities, others in small bands. Some migrated seasonally; others settled permanently. All Native peoples had long histories and well-formed, unique cultures that adult over millennia. But the arrival of Europeans inverse everything.

Three. European Expansion

Scandinavian seafarers reached the New World long before Columbus. At their meridian they sailed as far eastward every bit Constantinople and raided settlements as far s as North Africa. They established limited colonies in Republic of iceland and Greenland and, around the year 1000, Leif Erikson reached Newfoundland in present-twenty-four hours Canada. But the Norse colony failed. Culturally and geographically isolated, the Norse were driven back to the body of water by some combination of limited resource, inhospitable weather, food shortages, and Native resistance.

Then, centuries before Columbus, the Crusades linked Europe with the wealth, power, and noesis of Asia. Europeans rediscovered or adopted Greek, Roman, and Muslim cognition. The hemispheric dissemination of goods and knowledge not only sparked the Renaissance only fueled long-term European expansion. Asian goods flooded European markets, creating a need for new commodities. This merchandise created vast new wealth, and Europeans battled one another for trade supremacy.

European nation-states consolidated nether the authority of powerful kings. A series of military conflicts betwixt England and French republic—the Hundred Years' War—accelerated nationalism and cultivated the fiscal and military administration necessary to maintain nation-states. In Spain, the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile consolidated the two near powerful kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula. The Crusades had never concluded in Iberia: the Spanish crown concluded centuries of intermittent warfare—the Reconquista—by expelling Muslim Moors and Iberian Jews from the Iberian peninsula in 1492, just as Christopher Columbus sailed west. With new power, these new nations—and their newly empowered monarchs—yearned to admission the wealth of Asia.

Seafaring Italian traders allowable the Mediterranean and controlled merchandise with Asia. Spain and Portugal, at the edges of Europe, relied on middlemen and paid college prices for Asian appurtenances. They sought a more than direct route. And and then they looked to the Atlantic. Portugal invested heavily in exploration. From his estate on the Sagres Peninsula of Portugal, a rich sailing port, Prince Henry the Navigator (Infante Henry, Duke of Viseu) invested in research and technology and underwrote many technological breakthroughs. His investments bore fruit. In the fifteenth century, Portuguese sailors perfected the astrolabe, a tool to calculate breadth, and the caravel, a ship well suited for ocean exploration. Both were technological breakthroughs. The astrolabe allowed for precise navigation, and the caravel, unlike more common vessels designed for trading on the relatively placid Mediterranean, was a rugged ship with a deep draft capable of making lengthy voyages on the open bounding main and, every bit of import, carrying large amounts of cargo while doing so.

Engraving of sixteenth-century Lisbon from Civitatis Orbis Terrarum, "The Cities of the Globe," ed. Georg Braun (Cologne: 1572). Wikimedia.

Blending economic and religious motivations, the Portuguese established forts along the Atlantic coast of Africa during the fifteenth century, inaugurating centuries of European colonization there. Portuguese trading posts generated new profits that funded further trade and further colonization. Trading posts spread across the vast coastline of Africa, and by the end of the fifteenth century, Vasco da Gama leapfrogged his manner around the coasts of Africa to reach India and other lucrative Asian markets.

The vagaries of bounding main currents and the limits of contemporary engineering science forced Iberian sailors to sail westward into the open sea before cutting dorsum e to Africa. So doing, the Spanish and Portuguese stumbled on several islands off the coast of Europe and Africa, including the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands. They became grooming grounds for the afterwards colonization of the Americas and saw the first large-scale cultivation of sugar by enslaved laborers.

Sugar was originally grown in Asia but became a pop, widely profitable luxury item consumed by the nobility of Europe. The Portuguese learned the carbohydrate-growing process from Mediterranean plantations started past Muslims, using imported enslaved labor from southern Russia and Islamic countries. Carbohydrate was a hard crop. It required tropical temperatures, daily rainfall, unique soil conditions, and a xiv-month growing flavour. But on the newly discovered, mostly uninhabited Atlantic islands, the Portuguese had found new, defensible state to support sugar production. New patterns of human being and ecological destruction followed. Isolated from the mainlands of Europe and Africa for millennia, Canary Island natives—known as the Guanches—were enslaved or perished soon later Europeans arrived. This demographic disaster presaged the demographic results for the Native American populations upon the arrival of the Castilian.

Portugal's would-be planters needed workers to cultivate the hard, labor-intensive crop. They first turned to the trade relationships that Portuguese merchants established with African city-states in Senegambia, forth the Gilded Coast, equally well equally the kingdoms of Republic of benin, Kongo, and Ndongo.²² The Portuguese turned to enslaved Africans from the mainland equally a labor source for these isle plantations. At the start of this Euroafrican slave-trading system, African leaders traded war captives—who by custom forfeited their freedom if captured during battle—for Portuguese guns, iron, and manufactured goods. It is important to notation that slaving in Africa, like slaving among Indigenous Americans, bore little resemblance to the chattel slavery of the antebellum The states.²³

From bases along the Atlantic coast, the Portuguese began purchasing enslaved people for export to the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Canaries, and the Cape Verdes to work the sugar fields. Thus, were built-in the first great Atlantic plantations. A few decades later, at the end of the xv^th century, the Portuguese plantation system developed on the island of São Tomé became a model for the plantation system as it was expanded beyond the Atlantic.

Past the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had established forts and colonies on islands and forth the rim of the Atlantic Body of water; other major European countries soon followed in step. An bearding cartographer created this map known as the Cantino Map, the primeval known map of European exploration in the New World, to depict these holdings and argue for the greatness of his native Portugal. Cantino planisphere (1502), Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Italy. Wikimedia.

Kingdom of spain, too, stood on the cutting edge of maritime technology. Spanish sailors had go masters of the caravels. As Portugal consolidated control over African trading networks and the complex eastbound sea route to Asia, Spain yearned for its own path to empire. Christopher Columbus, a skilled Italian-born crewman who had studied under Portuguese navigators, promised but that opportunity.

Educated Asians and Europeans of the fifteenth century knew the earth was circular. They also knew that while it was therefore technically possible to reach Asia past sailing west from Europe—thereby avoiding Italian or Portuguese middlemen—the earth's vast size would doom even the greatest caravels to starvation and thirst long earlier they e'er reached their destination. But Columbus underestimated the size of the globe by a full two thirds and therefore believed it was possible. After unsuccessfully shopping his proposed trek in several European courts, he convinced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Kingdom of spain to provide him 3 small ships, which set sheet in 1492. Columbus was both confoundingly wrong about the size of the earth and spectacularly lucky that two large continents lurked in his path. On October 12, 1492, after 2 months at sea, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María and their ninety men landed in the modern-solar day Commonwealth of the bahamas.

The Indigenous Arawaks, or Taíno, populated the Caribbean islands. They fished and grew corn, yams, and cassava. Columbus described them as innocents. "They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor the sins of murder or theft," he reported to the Spanish crown. "Your highness may believe that in all the world at that place can be no better people. . . . They love their neighbors as themselves, and their speech is the sweetest and gentlest in the world, and e'er with a smiling." Simply Columbus had come up for wealth and he could find little. The Arawaks, nevertheless, wore small gold ornaments. Columbus left thirty-nine Spaniards at a military fort on Hispaniola to find and secure the source of the gilt while he returned to Kingdom of spain, with a dozen captured and branded Arawaks. Columbus arrived to great acclaim and quickly worked to outfit a return voyage. Spain's New World motives were clear from the beginning. If outfitted for a render voyage, Columbus promised the Spanish crown gold and enslaved laborers. Columbus reported, "With l men they tin can all be subjugated and fabricated to do what is required of them."²⁴

Columbus was outfitted with seventeen ships and over i k men to render to the West Indies (Columbus made four voyages to the New Earth). However believing he had landed in the E Indies, he promised to reward Isabella and Ferdinand's investment. But when fabric wealth proved deadening in coming, the Spanish embarked on a vicious campaign to extract every possible ounce of wealth from the Caribbean. The Spanish decimated the Arawaks. Bartolomé de Las Casas traveled to the New Earth in 1502 and later wrote, "I saw with these Eyes of mine the Spaniards for no other reason, simply only to gratify their encarmine mindedness, cut off the Hands, Noses, and Ears, both of Indians and Indianesses."²⁵ When the enslaved laborers exhausted the islands' meager gold reserves, the Spaniards forced them to labor on their huge new estates, the encomiendas. Las Casas described European barbarities in cruel detail. By presuming the natives had no humanity, the Spaniards utterly abased theirs. Casual violence and dehumanizing exploitation ravaged the Arawaks. The Indigenous population complanate. Within a few generations the whole island of Hispaniola had been depopulated and a whole people exterminated. Historians' estimates of the island's pre-contact population range from fewer than one meg to as many as viii meg (Las Casas estimated it at iii meg). In a few short years, they were gone. "Who in future generations will believe this?" Las Casas wondered. "I myself writing information technology as a knowledgeable bystander can hardly believe it."

Despite the diversity of Native populations and the existence of several strong empires, Native Americans were wholly unprepared for the arrival of Europeans. Biological science magnified European cruelties. Cutting off from the Quondam World, its domesticated animals, and its immunological history, Native Americans lived free from the terrible diseases that ravaged populations in Asia, Europe and Africa. But their blessing now became a expletive. Native Americans lacked the immunities that Europeans and Africans had adult over centuries of deadly epidemics, and and so when Europeans arrived, carrying smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, measles, and hepatitis, plagues decimated Native communities.²⁶ Many died in war and slavery, but millions died in epidemics. All told, in fact, some scholars estimate that equally much every bit 90 pct of the population of the Americas perished inside the first century and a one-half of European contact.²⁷

Though ravaged by disease and warfare, Native Americans forged center grounds, resisted with violence, accommodated and adapted to the challenges of colonialism, and connected to shape the patterns of life throughout the New Globe for hundreds of years. But the Europeans kept coming.

IV. Spanish Exploration and Conquest

Equally news of the Spanish conquest spread, wealth-hungry Spaniards poured into the New World seeking land, gold, and titles. A New World empire spread from Spain's Caribbean foothold. Motives were plain: said one soldier, "we came here to serve God and the male monarch, and too to get rich."²⁸ Mercenaries joined the conquest and raced to capture the human being and material wealth of the New World.

The Spanish managed labor relations through a legal system known as the encomienda, an exploitive feudal organization in which Spain tied Ethnic laborers to vast estates. In the encomienda, the Castilian crown granted a person not only land but a specified number of natives also. Encomenderos brutalized their laborers. Later Bartolomé de Las Casas published his incendiary business relationship of Spanish abuses (The Destruction of the Indies), Spanish authorities abolished the encomienda in 1542 and replaced information technology with the repartimiento. Intended as a milder organisation, the repartimiento nevertheless replicated many of the abuses of the older system, and the rapacious exploitation of the Native population continued equally Spain spread its empire over the Americas.

El Castillo (pyramidd of Kukulcán) in Chichén Itzá, photograph by Daniel Schwen, via Wikimedia Commons

El Castillo (pyramid of Kukulcán) in Chichén Itzá. Photo past Daniel Schwen. Wikimedia. Creative Eatables Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

As Spain's New World empire expanded, Spanish conquerors met the massive empires of Cardinal and S America, civilizations that dwarfed anything constitute in N America. In Central America the Maya built massive temples, sustained large populations, and synthetic a complex and long-lasting civilization with a written language, avant-garde mathematics, and stunningly accurate calendars. Just Maya civilization, although information technology had not disappeared, nevertheless collapsed before European arrival, likely because of droughts and unsustainable agricultural practices. But the eclipse of the Maya only heralded the later rising of the nearly powerful Native civilization ever seen in the Western Hemisphere: the Aztecs.

Militaristic migrants from northern United mexican states, the Aztecs moved southward into the Valley of Mexico, conquered their way to dominance, and congenital the largest empire in the New World. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico they found a sprawling civilization centered effectually Tenochtitlán, an awe-inspiring city built on a series of natural and man-fabricated islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco, located today within modern-solar day Mexico City. Tenochtitlán, founded in 1325, rivaled the world's largest cities in size and grandeur.²⁹

Much of the urban center was congenital on large artificial islands called chinampas, which the Aztecs constructed by dredging mud and rich sediment from the bottom of the lake and depositing it over time to course new landscapes. A massive pyramid temple, the Templo Mayor, was located at the metropolis center (its ruins can still be constitute in the centre of Mexico City). When the Spaniards arrived, they could scarcely believe what they saw: 70,000 buildings, housing perchance 200,000–250,000 people, all congenital on a lake and connected past causeways and canals. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a Spanish soldier, later recalled, "When nosotros saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry state, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments. . . . Some of our soldiers fifty-fifty asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream? . . . I exercise non know how to describe it, seeing things every bit we did that had never been heard of or seen earlier, not even dreamed virtually."^thirty

From their island city the Aztecs dominated an enormous swath of central and southern Mesoamerica. They ruled their empire through a decentralized network of bailiwick peoples that paid regular tribute—including everything from the most bones items, such every bit corn, beans, and other foodstuffs, to luxury goods such as jade, cacao, and gold—and provided troops for the empire. Only unrest festered beneath the Aztecs' royal power, and European conquerors lusted after its vast wealth.

This sixteenth-century map of Tenochtitlan shows the aesthetic beauty and advanced infrastructure of this swell Aztec urban center. Map, c. 1524, Wikimedia.

Hernán Cortés, an ambitious, thirty-iv-year-sometime Spaniard who had won riches in the conquest of Cuba, organized an invasion of United mexican states in 1519. Sailing with six hundred men, horses, and cannon, he landed on the coast of Mexico. Relying on a Native translator, whom he chosen Doña Marina, and whom Mexican sociology denounces as La Malinche, Cortés gathered information and allies in training for conquest. Through intrigue, brutality, and the exploitation of endemic political divisions, he enlisted the assist of thousands of Native allies, defeated Spanish rivals, and marched on Tenochtitlán.

Aztec dominance rested on fragile foundations and many of the region's semi-independent metropolis-states yearned to break from Aztec rule. Nearby kingdoms, including the Tarascans to the north and the remains of Maya metropolis-states on the Yucatán peninsula, chafed at Aztec power.

Through persuasion, the Spaniards entered Tenochtitlán peacefully. Cortés and so captured the emperor Montezuma and used him to gain control of the Aztecs' gold and silver reserves and their network of mines. Eventually, the Aztecs revolted. Montezuma was branded a traitor, and uprising ignited the urban center. Montezuma was killed along with a third of Cortés'due south men in la noche triste, the "night of sorrows." The Spanish fought through thousands of Ethnic insurgents and across canals to abscond the city, where they regrouped, enlisted more Native allies, captured Spanish reinforcements, and, in 1521, besieged the island city. The Spaniards' 80-five-day siege cut off food and fresh h2o. Smallpox ravaged the city. One Spanish observer said it "spread over the people equally peachy destruction. Some information technology covered on all parts—their faces, their heads, their breasts, and so on. There was great havoc. Very many died of it. . . . They could not move; they could non stir."³¹ Cortés, the Spaniards, and their Native allies so sacked the city. The temples were plundered and fifteen thousand died. After two years of disharmonize, a million-person-potent empire was toppled by disease, dissension, and a thousand European conquerors.

The Spanish relied on Ethnic allies. The Tlaxcala were among the most of import Castilian allies in their conquest. This sixteenth-century drawing depicts the Spanish and their Tlaxcalan allies fighting against the Purépecha. Wikimedia.

Farther due south, along the Andes Mountains in South America, the Quechuas, or Incas, managed a vast mountain empire. From their capital letter of Cuzco in the Andean highlands, through conquest and negotiation, the Incas built an empire that stretched effectually the western one-half of the South American continent from present day Ecuador to cardinal Chile and Argentine republic. They cut terraces into the sides of mountains to farm fertile soil, and by the 1400s they managed a thousand miles of Andean roads that tied together perchance twelve million people. But like the Aztecs, unrest between the Incas and conquered groups created tensions and left the empire vulnerable to invaders. Smallpox spread in accelerate of Spanish conquerors and hit the Incan empire in 1525. Epidemics ravaged the population, cutting the empire'due south population in one-half and killing the Incan emperor Huayna Capac and many members of his family. A bloody war of succession ensued. Inspired by Cortés's conquest of Mexico, Francisco Pizarro moved south and found an empire torn by chaos. With 168 men, he deceived Incan rulers, took control of the empire, and seized the capital city, Cuzco, in 1533. Disease, conquest, and slavery ravaged the remnants of the Incan empire.

After the conquests of Mexico and Peru, Spain settled into its new empire. A vast authoritative hierarchy governed the new holdings: royal appointees oversaw an enormous territory of landed estates, and Ethnic laborers and administrators regulated the extraction of gold and silver and oversaw their transport across the Atlantic in Castilian galleons. Meanwhile, Spanish migrants poured into the New World. During the sixteenth century solitary, 225,000 migrated, and 750,000 came during the entire three centuries of Spanish colonial dominion. Spaniards, oft single, young, and male, emigrated for the various promises of land, wealth, and social advancement. Laborers, craftsmen, soldiers, clerks, and priests all crossed the Atlantic in big numbers. Indigenous people, however, always outnumbered the Castilian, and the Spaniards, by both necessity and design, incorporated Native Americans into colonial life. This incorporation did not mean equality, withal.

An elaborate racial hierarchy marked Castilian life in the New Earth. Regularized in the mid-1600s just rooted in medieval practices, the Sistema de Castas organized individuals into various racial groups based on their supposed "purity of blood." Elaborate classifications became almost prerequisites for social and political advancement in Spanish colonial society. Peninsulares—Iberian-built-in Spaniards, or españoles—occupied the highest levels of assistants and acquired the greatest estates. Their descendants, New World-born Spaniards, or criollos, occupied the side by side rung and rivaled the peninsulares for wealth and opportunity. Mestizos—a term used to draw those of mixed Spanish and Indigenous heritage—followed.

Casta paintings illustrated the varying degrees of intermixture between colonial subjects, defining them for Spanish officials. Unknown artist, Las Castas, Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlan, Mexico. Wikimedia.

Like the French subsequently in Due north America, the Spanish tolerated and sometimes even supported interracial marriage. In that location were only too few Castilian women in the New World to support the natural growth of a purely Spanish population. The Catholic Church endorsed interracial marriage every bit a moral bulwark against bastardy and rape. Past 1600, mestizos fabricated up a large portion of the colonial population.³² By the early 1700s, more one 3rd of all marriages bridged the Spanish-Ethnic divide. Separated by wealth and influence from the peninsulares and criollos, mestizos typically occupied a middling social position in Spanish New Globe order. They were not quite Indios, or Indigenous people, merely their lack of limpieza de sangre, or "pure blood," removed them from the privileges of full-blooded Spaniards. Spanish fathers of sufficient wealth and influence might shield their mestizo children from racial prejudice, and a number of wealthy mestizos married españoles to "whiten" their family lines, just more often mestizos were bars to a middle station in the Spanish New World. Enslaved and Ethnic people occupied the everyman rungs of the social ladder.

Many manipulated the Sistema de Castas to proceeds advantages for themselves and their children. Mestizo mothers, for case, might insist that their mestizo daughters were really castizas, or quarter-Ethnic, who, if they married a Spaniard, could, in the eyes of the law, produce "pure" criollo children entitled to the full rights and opportunities of Castilian citizens. But "passing" was an choice only for the few. Instead, the massive Native populations within Kingdom of spain'southward New Globe Empire ensured a level of cultural and racial mixture—or mestizaje—unparalleled in British North America. Spanish Due north America wrought a hybrid civilisation that was neither fully Castilian nor fully Indigenous. The Castilian not only built Mexico City atop Tenochtitlán, simply food, linguistic communication, and families were also constructed on Ethnic foundations. In 1531, a poor Indigenous named Juan Diego reported that he was visited past the Virgin Mary, who came every bit a night-skinned Nahuatl-speaking Indigenous woman.³³ Reports of miracles spread across United mexican states and the Virgen de Guadalupe became a national icon for a new mestizo gild.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is perhaps the virtually culturally of import and extensively reproduced Mexican-Catholic image. In the iconic delineation, Mary stands atop the tilma (peasant cloak) of Juan Diego, on which co-ordinate to his story appeared the epitome of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Throughout Mexican history, the story and image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been a unifying national symbol. Mexican retablo of Our Lady of Guadalupe, 19th century, in El Paso Museum of Art. Wikimedia.

From Mexico, Spain expanded northward. Lured by the promises of gold and some other Tenochtitlán, Spanish expeditions scoured North America for some other wealthy Indigenous empire. Huge expeditions, resembling vast moving communities, equanimous of hundreds of soldiers, settlers, priests, and enslaved people, with enormous numbers of livestock, moved across the continent. Juan Ponce de León, the conquistador of Puerto Rico, landed in Florida in 1513 in search of wealth and enslaved laborers. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca joined the Narváez expedition to Florida a decade afterwards but was shipwrecked and forced to embark on a remarkable multiyear odyssey forth the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and Texas into Mexico. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and information technology remains the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the nowadays-day United States.

But without the rich aureate and silver mines of Mexico, the plantation-friendly climate of the Caribbean area, or the exploitive potential of large Indigenous empires, North America offered little incentive for Castilian officials. Still, Spanish expeditions combed North America. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado pillaged his mode across the Southwest. Hernando de Soto tortured and raped and enslaved his style across the Southeast. Soon Kingdom of spain had footholds—however tenuous—across much of the continent.

V. Conclusion

The "discovery" of America unleashed horrors. Europeans embarked on a debauching path of death and destructive exploitation that wrought murder and greed and slavery. Merely disease was deadlier than any weapon in the European arsenal. Information technology unleashed death on a calibration never before seen in human history. Estimates of the population of pre-Columbian America range wildly. Some argue for equally much as 100 one thousand thousand, some as low every bit 2 one thousand thousand. In 1983, Henry Dobyns put the number at 18 million. Whatever the precise estimates, about all scholars tell of the utter devastation wrought by European illness. Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years post-obit European contact, 95 percentage of Native Americans perished.³⁴ (At its worst, Europe's Black Expiry peaked at death rates of 35 percent. Nothing else in history rivals the American demographic disaster.) A ten-thousand-year history of disease hit the New World in an instant. Smallpox, typhus, bubonic plague, flu, mumps, measles: pandemics ravaged populations up and downwardly the continents. Wave later moving ridge of illness crashed relentlessly. Disease flung whole communities into chaos. Others it destroyed completely.

Disease was just the near terrible in a cross-hemispheric exchange of violence, culture, merchandise, and peoples—the then-called Columbian Commutation—that followed in Columbus's wake. Global diets, for example, were transformed. The Americas' calorie-rich crops revolutionized Old World agriculture and spawned a worldwide population blast. Many modern associations betwixt food and geography are by products of the Columbian Commutation: potatoes in Ireland, tomatoes in Italy, chocolate in Switzerland, peppers in Thailand, and oranges in Florida are all manifestations of the new global substitution. Europeans, for their office, introduced their domesticated animals to the New Globe. Pigs ran rampant through the Americas, transforming the landscape every bit they spread throughout both continents. Horses spread as well, transforming the Native American cultures who adapted to the newly introduced creature. Partly from trade, partly from the remnants of failed European expeditions, and partly from theft, Indigenous people acquired horses and transformed Native American life in the vast Due north American plains.

The Europeans' arrival bridged ii worlds and ten thousand years of history largely separated from each other since the closing of the Bering Strait. Both sides of the world had been transformed. And neither would ever again exist the same.

Six. Main Sources

ane. Native American cosmos stories

These two Native American creation stories are among thousands of accounts for the origins of the world. The Salinian and Cherokee, from what we now call California and the American southeast respectively, both exhibit the common Native American tendency to locate spiritual power in the natural world. For both Native Americans and Europeans, the collision of 2 continents challenged sometime ideas and created new ones also.

ii. Journal of Christopher Columbus, 1492

Kickoff encounters between Europeans and Native Americans were dramatic events. In this account, we encounter the assumptions and intentions of Christopher Columbus, as he immediately began assessing the potential of these people to serve European economic interests. He also predicted easy success for missionaries seeking to convert these people to Christianity.

3. An Aztec account of the Spanish attack

This source aggregates a number of early on written reports past Aztec authors describing the devastation of Tenochtitlan at the hands of a coalition of Spanish and Ethnic armies. This collection of sources was assembled past Miguel Leon Portilla, a Mexican anthropologist.

4. Bartolomé de las Casas describes the exploitation of Ethnic people, 1542

Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican priest, wrote direct to the King of Spain hoping for new laws to prevent the fell exploitation of Native Americans. Las Casas'southward writings rapidly spread around Europe and were used as humanitarian justification for other European nations to challenge Spain's colonial empire with their own schemes of conquest and colonization.

5. Thomas Morton reflects on Native Americans in New England, 1637

Thomas Morton both admired and condemned aspects of Native American culture. In his descriptions, nosotros can find non only information about the people he is describing simply too a window into the concerns of Englishmen like Morton who could use descriptions of Native Americans equally a means of criticizing English culture.

six. The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe

Cuauhtlatoatzin was one of the first Aztec men to convert to Christianity after the Spanish invasion. Renamed every bit Juan Diego, he soon thereafter reported an appearance of the Virgin Mary chosen the Virgin of Guadalupe. This apparition became an of import symbol for a new native Christianity. These excerpts are translated from an account first published in Nahuatl past Luis Lasso de la Vega in 1649.

7. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca travels through North America, 1542

Castilian explorer, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, traveled beyond the Gulf South, from Florida to Mexico. As he traveled, Cabeza de Vaca developed a reputation every bit a organized religion healer. In his account he claimed several instances of performing miracles, illustrating his spiritual beliefs likewise every bit offer a rare, if perchance unreliable, glimpse at the life of Native Americans in the surface area.

8. Photograph of Cliff Palace

Native peoples in the Southwest began amalgam these highly defensible cliff dwellings in 1190 CE and continued expanding and refurbishing them until 1260 CE before abandoning them around 1300 CE. Changing climatic conditions resulted in an increased competition for resources that led some groups to ally with their neighbors for both protection and subsistence. The circular rooms in the foreground were called kivas and had ceremonial and religious importance for the inhabitants. Cliff Palace had 23 kivas and 150 rooms housing a population of approximately 100 people; the number of rooms and large population has led scholars to believe that this complex may accept been the middle of a larger polity that included surrounding communities.

9. Casta painting

The elaborate Sistema de Castas revealed one of the less-discussed effects of Castilian conquest: sexual liaisons and their progeny. Casta paintings illustrated the varying degrees of intermixture between colonial subjects, defining them for Spanish officials. Race was less fixed in the Castilian colonies, as some individuals, through legal action or colonial service, "changed" their race in the colonial records. Though this particular epitome does non, some casta paintings attributed item behaviors to unlike groups, demonstrating how class and race were intertwined.

Vii. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, with content contributions by Fifty. D. Burnett, Michelle Cassidy, Kathryn Green, D. Andrew Johnson, Joseph Locke, Dawn Marsh, Christen Mucher, Cameron Shriver, Ben Wright, and Garrett Wright.

Recommended citation: L. D. Burnett et al., "The New World," in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Chapter 17 Section 1 Guided Reading and Review Spain and Portugal

I. Introduction

II. The Start Americans

Three. European Expansion

IV. Spanish Exploration and Conquest

V. Conclusion

Six. Main Sources

Vii. Reference Material

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