Untitled Flashcards Set

Between 1492 and 1504, Columbus made a total of four voyages to the Caribbean to claim land for Spain, and he even tried to build a permanent Spanish settler colony that he could rule as governor. In his quest to create an orderly settlement, he tried to convince those who accompanied him from Spain to build houses, plant crops, and cut logs for forts; but they, too, had come for gold. When the American Indians stopped trading willingly, Spaniards used force to demand riches, coercing as much gold as possible from the indigenous peoples in the Caribbean. On his final voyage, Columbus introduced the system of encomienda in the Caribbean, by which leading men, the encomenderos, received land and the unpaid labor from all Native Americans residing on it. The encomienda system spread widely and persisted as Spanish conquistadors made new efforts to locate gold and increase their wealth through whatever means they deemed necessary.By the time of Columbus’s death in 1506, the islands he had discovered were dissolving into chaos as traders and adventurers fought with Native Americans and one another over the spoils of conquest. Once Spanish explorers overpowered tribes like the Arawak and Taino in the Caribbean, they headed toward the mainland. They justified the brutal subjugation of American people and lands through European concepts of law and religion. As you read in the Thinking Historically exercise in Module 1.3, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issued a legal document in 1513 called the Requerimiento as the basis for Spanish interaction with American Indians. Conquistadors began to spread its message to groups such as the Maya, Tlaxcala, and Aztecs: The pope had granted Spanish monarchs the authority to claim lands and protect priests preaching the faith in the Americas — and if anyone resisted, they forfeited the protection of the crown and could be “justly” enslaved or killed.In 1519, as the Spanish invaded the mainland of present-day Mexico, a Native American girl named Malintzin was thrust into the center of this chaotic and violent world. She witnessed events that transformed not only her world but also the world at large. Malintzin, whose birth name is lost to history, lived in the rural area between the expanding kingdom of the Aztecs and the declining Mayan states of the Yucatán peninsula. Raised in a noble household, Malintzin was fluent in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. In 1515 or 1516, when she was between the ages of eight and twelve, she was either taken by or given to Aztec merchants, perhaps as a peace offering to stave off military attacks. She then entered a well-established slave trade, consisting mostly of women and girls, who were sent eastward to work in the expanding cotton fields or the households of slaveholders. During her captivity there, Malintzin learned the Mayan language. Although she could not have known it at the time, her circumstances would again change dramatically in just a few years’ time. In 1517, the Maya had driven Spanish adventurers from the banks of local rivers and were able to maintain control of their lands. But when the Spaniards returned in 1519, they defeated the Maya in battle. As a result, the Maya offered the Spaniards food, gold, and twenty enslaved women, including Malintzin. The Spanish leader, Hernán Cortés, baptized the enslaved women and assigned each of them Christian names, although the women did not consent to this ritual. Cortés then divided the women among his senior officers, giving Malintzin, named Doña Marina by Cortés, to the highest-ranking noble in his group. Already fluent in Nahuatl and Mayan, Malintzin soon learned Spanish. Within a matter of months, she became the Spaniards’ chief translator. When Diego de Velázquez, the Spanish governor of Cuba, granted Cortés the right to explore and trade along the coast of Central America, Malintzin had no choice but to go with him. Although Velázquez gave Cortés no direct authority to attack native peoples in the region or claim land for himself, the conquistador saw this expedition as an opportunity to amass great wealth. With Malintzin acting as a translator, Cortés forged alliances with local rulers willing to join in an attack against the Aztecs. From the perspective of local communities such as the Tlaxcala, Cortés’s presence offered an opportunity to strike back against the brutal Aztec regime.As Cortés moved into territories ruled by the Aztecs, his success depended on his ability to understand Aztec ways of thinking and to convince subjugated groups to fight against their oppressive rulers. Malintzin accompanied Cortés at every step, making diplomacy possible between the Spanish and leaders of native peoples ruled by the Aztec empire. Despite their assumption of cultural superiority, many Spaniards who accompanied Cortés were astonished by Aztec cities, canals, and temples, which rivaled those in Europe. Seeing these architectural wonders may have given some soldiers pause about trying to conquer the kingdom. But when the Aztec chief, Montezuma, presented Cortés with large quantities of precious objects including gold-encrusted jewelry as a peace offering, he unwittingly confirmed that the Aztecs had the vast wealth that the Spanish had come for.When Cortés and his men marched to Tenochtitlán in 1519, Montezuma was indecisive in his response. After an early effort to ambush the Spaniards failed, the Aztec leader allowed Cortés to march his men into the capital city, where they took Montezuma hostage. In response, Aztec warriors attacked the Spaniards, but Cortés and his men managed to fight their way out of Tenochtitlán. They suffered heavy losses and might have been crushed by their Aztec foes but for the alliances forged with native groups in the surrounding area. Given protection by Native American allies, the Spanish regrouped. The remaining Spanish soldiers and their allies returned to batter the Aztecs with a combination of cannons, steel weapons, horses, and trained dogs that won a final victory.It is important to note that the germs the Spanish soldiers carried with them played a large role in their subjugation of the Aztecs. Smallpox swept through Tenochtitlán in 1521, killing thousands and leaving Montezuma’s army dramatically weakened. This human catastrophe as much as military resources and strategies allowed Cortés to conquer the capital that year. He then claimed the entire region as New Spain and assigned soldiers to construct the Spanish capital of Mexico City at Tenochtitlán. Moreover, he extended Spanish rule over the native groups, including those that had allied with him. As news of Cortés’s victory spread, and as encomenderos grew extremely wealthy from the silver, gold, and other resources extracted from American lands through the forced labor of Native Americans and shipped across the Atlantic, other Spanish conquistadors sought glory in the Americas as well. Most importantly, in 1524 Francisco Pizarro conquered the vast Incan empire in present-day Peru. Once again, the Spaniards were helped by the spread of European diseases and non-Incan native peoples who had been ruled by the Incas. This victory ensured Spanish access to vast supplies of silver in Potosí (in present-day Bolivia) and the surrounding mountains. While the Spanish used enslaved Native Americans at Potosí, their conquests also ensured the spread of enslaved African labor from Caribbean plantations to mainland agriculture and mining projects. By 1535, Spain controlled the most densely populated regions of South America, which also contained the greatest mineral wealth.The Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, sought to incorporate the Americas into their empire as an engine to generate wealth for the crown. To do this, they took for themselves the quinto real (“royal fifth”) — that is, 20 percent of wealth produced in Spanish colonies. To secure this wealth, they divided colonial lands into viceroyalties, appointing governors called viceroys to ensure order. Moreover, they sent many political and military representatives, also royally appointed, to help govern locally. By the late sixteenth century, Spanish supremacy in the Americas and the wealth acquired there transformed the European economy. In Spain, these economic transformations enriched nobles with access to wealth drained from the Americas but produced hard times for peasants. The influx of silver, for instance, caused inflation that raised prices and impoverished peasants. Threatened by poverty and starvation, peasants joined King Philip II’s (reigned 1556–1598) military campaigns as soldiers and sailors. The king, a devout Catholic, claimed to be doing God’s work as Spain subdued parts of Italy and conquered Portugal, including the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Throughout the sixteenth century, Spain’s colonial projects also established a new social order in the regions they ruled. In colonial societies, people were mixing in various ways that brought Spaniards, Native Americans, and Africans into frequent contact. In feudal tradition, the Spanish crown demanded more tax, tribute, and labor from those ranked lower in social class. Through the mechanisms of a variety of labor systems, people of Native American and African ancestry owed work or tribute to Spanish colonial elites. To account for who owed how much, the Spanish wrote guidelines for taxation based on ethnicity, influenced by other factors such as education, to define classes in colonial society. From these defined expectations, a system emerged, which later hardened and formalized into the Spanish caste system. Even after independence, this hierarchical system was largely maintained. This system categorized people by the degrees of their racial ancestry into a social hierarchy, which ultimately shaped the future of societies throughout the Western Hemisphere. An individual’s place indicated how much labor or tax they owed. In theory, one’s racial ancestry determined one’s caste, but given the mixing of diverse people of the Atlantic World, both ancestry and skin color blurred. In practice, it also considered qualities such as education and wealth. For example, a darker-skinned educated landowner might be perceived as of higher class than a lighter-skinned landless craftsman. Passing into a higher caste meant lower taxes or escaping forced labor in addition to other social benefits. The caste system in descending order of rank included: those born in Spain called peninsulares (named for the Iberian peninsula, which contained the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal), people born of Spanish parents in the colonies called criollos (or creoles), and those sharing Spanish and Native American parentage called mestizos. The Spanish ranked mulattos, persons of mixed Spanish and African parentage, below mestizos, but placed Africans, negros, above indigenous Native Americans they called indios. The Spanish considered the indios child-like wards of Spanish elites in need of parenting to enforce civilized behavior. Similarly, the Spanish enforced a lower status on Africans through laws prohibiting them from many government positions and the priesthood.