Spanish and Portuguese Expansion and the Conquest of the Americas

that is the sound of a Sufi dhikr kadia in Cape Town, South Africa, and if you have heard my lectures on Islam, you may remember what a Sufi dhikr is. This is a historian explaining that a historian tells you why everything you know is wrong. These lectures are on SoundCloud iTunes Stitcher YouTube and other platforms, if you have topics or questions you would like to hear please comment or email me at historian splaining at gmail.com and if you can contribute anything to keep them posted please go to my page from patreon. The link will be in the description, so last time I talked about the creation of powerful consolidated royal states in Spain and Portugal in the 14s and 1500s and a little about what ultimately became of them after 1600, well, these same ones two countries are also the ones that Maybe you know who first launched the centuries-long European project of overseas exploration, colonization and

conquest

and I'm going to talk about that today starting first with Portugal because that's where this process really began, it was Portugal and it started like many of these historical events.

The developments I've talked about started in a really unexpected and unpredictable way, it was largely an accidental development and the people who launched it didn't really have the kind of mindset we might expect today, they weren't weed visionaries even really of the discovery per se, those things were mainly accidental, their objective was actually to maintain certain commercial and diplomatic relations that had already existed before and that were challenged and threatened mainly by the advance of the Ottoman Turks and, most importantly, the

conquest

Turk of Constantinople. In 1453, as you may remember when I talked about the Middle Ages, Constantinople was both the main window and gateway for Europeans to trade, travel and communicate with the rest of Eurasia, including the Islamic world, the south and the East Asia.

It was also the main stronghold. protect Europe from the growing power of these Islamic states, so when the Ottoman Turks began to conquer large parts of the Byzantine Empire and eventually Constantinople, this really threatened to completely isolate it from its sources of Asian products such as spices, silks, porcelain, etc. It also threatened the possibility that if this trade continued it would enrich and empower the Ottoman Empire which could then further threaten the further western conquests of Europe, so the Ottomans really presented a huge dilemma for all of Europe and it came to pass that first Portugal and then in Spain took advantage of this crisis in a different way and, in doing so, mainly hoped to maintain and restore the relations that they already knew before, but to do so in a way that simply bypassed Constantinople and also hoped to continue the great crusade project that had faded into the background after about 1300, but to which in their hearts and minds Europeans still remained very attached, so the initial wave of European overseas colonization and conquest really began as a continuation of compromises, hopes and aspirations of the medieval Crusades.

It didn't start out as some kind of scientific empirical utilitarian project to create new sources of wealth, it was more about continuing what they already knew, keeping what they already knew, okay, so first I'm going to talk a little bit about Portugal, so that Portugal really became the first maritime empire created by Christians or Europeans outside the Mediterranean, so there were already maritime empires like Genoa, Barcelona and, more particularly, Venice in the Mediterranean basin, something that if you knew the technologies, the trade routes had deep roots dating back to the Romans or possibly even before the ancient world, the Portuguese were, as I said last time, a fairly small and isolated kingdom on the western coast of Iberia that was formed from the small states crossed.

Well, states are organized mainly by Christian knights who take territory little by little. A far cry from the Muslim Moors who ruled most of Iberia in the early Middle Ages, Portugal was the first to strive to avoid trade with the Muslims. Well, they still saw themselves in the 13th and 1400s as a crusader state. Many of their leaders, administrators, military commanders came. of the surviving crusader orders as the order of Christ in the order of ease and the last thing they wanted to do was enrich their Islamic opponents and yet that is what happened every time Europeans, including Portuguese subjects, went and they exchanged it for gold, salt and other goods. in North Africa okay, so the Portuguese were the first to look for a way to establish their own trade connections to acquire the goods they wanted not only from Asia but first from Africa, especially the gold that came mainly from West Africa through of the caravan trade routes. to the Sahara and eventually to the Islamic cities of North Africa, so once the Portuguese completed their reconquest, as they saw it, of the entire western coast of Iberia and basically had no more territory to take back from the Muslims, turned their attention across the sea. to North Africa and the African continent in 1415, the Portuguese crown, at the insistence of the princes and some other powerful advisors and courtiers of the Portuguese court, launched a massive maritime invasion of the city of Ceuta on the northern coast of Morocco, They say Utah was a port. city ​​that was an important outlet for the trade of African products, especially gold, so the hope of the Portuguese court was to be able to capture, say, Utah and thus redirect this trade of gold, salt and other products into its own hands and away of the Moorish Islamic capture. of Ceuta was a success although at enormous cost, well there was a tremendous loss of life, it was enormously expensive to launch this Seabourn operation and the Moorish States in Morocco did not just sit back and accept the capture of Ceuta, they counterattacked anyway. the possible ways.

There may have been further expeditions and battles along the North African coast and one of the princes of the Portuguese royal family was captured in one of these later battles. The Moors tried to trade with him in exchange for returning the Utah Sea to them. The Portuguese refused. This trade and the Prince ended up dying in prison, so the Portuguese actually suffered great losses, both material and symbolic, as the price for capturing and holding the Utah Sea, so although it was a successful attack, it ended up not being a auspicious beginning of this Portuguese project of continuing the reconquest across the sea towards Africa two other important facts about the Utah Sea one is that the objective of the Portuguese hope to redirect African trade directly into their own hands ended up failing because it is not It is surprising that the more they simply redirected that trade in African products to other ports that they still had and that is why very little of that wealth ended up reaching the Portuguese channels.

Well, finally, another important fact to note about Utah and the capture of CO2 in 1415 is the fact that, as I said, he said that princes participated and one of them was the third youngest son of King John the first to be He was called Enrique or Enrique in Portuguese, so he was called by his domo title Henrique or Prince Enrique and later was renamed Prince Enrique the Navigator, okay, that's not what he was called at the time or in his life, but that is the title assigned to him by history and Prince Henry was a great enthusiast of this expedition to see Utah and, for greater hope, greater plan. to extend the reconquest: further east, towards North Africa, he participated in the capture of Sita, but ended up playing only a very secondary role in a kind of minor peripheral engagement, he did not participate in the main action against the city and was very Disappointed by this, he felt that in some ways he had failed to make his mark and show his worth as a fighter and this is part of the reason why he remained very passionate about continuing the Portuguese conquests in North Africa.

Enrique, like the other princes, was the son as I said of King John I of Portugal and his wife the English Princess Philippa of Lancaster now, sometimes, in retrospect, historians, especially British historians, have liked to say aha , you see, he was half English, which is why he ended up becoming so interested in sailing. and sailing because England is a seafaring country, well this is apparently not true. I mean it just wasn't a factor. You know that England at that time was not really a seafaring country yet, and his mother Philippa's education of him was not that significant. because it had something to do with sailing, but because she was descended from English crusader heroes like Richard the Lionheart and others, and he was raised largely on stories of the crusaders and their chivalry and heroism, also from his father's side, Do you remember his father John? the former was originally the commander of the order of the V, the most important crusader shovel recorder in Portugal, so from both sides he remembered the crusades in search of bears of one kind or another and Prince Henry really wanted to see himself himself as a man of the last days. crusader who would take up the cause of recovering Jerusalem and saw the attack on, say, Utah and subsequent expeditions to other cities such as Tangier, he saw them as the initial stages of a project to reconquer eastwards through North Africa and eventually reach to the Holy Land. and Jerusalem is fine, so in a sense, partly as a sort of consolation prize for his marginal role in Sea Utah and his frustration with the expense and difficulty and slowness of this campaign in North Africa, the king appointed Dom Henrique commander of the Order of Christ, which was another important crusader order in Portugal, which was the successor to the Knights Templar and, you may remember, the Knights Templar were suppressed and destroyed in the year 1300, but Portugal is one from those kingdoms where the crown simply disbanded the Templars and then transferred their money. its properties and its members even in another order that simply continued the Templar tradition only under a different name, so as commander of the Order of Christ Henry became in a sense the successor of the standard bearer of the Templar legacy, he was also named After his brother became king, he was appointed governor of the Algarve and the Algarve is the southernmost region of the southern coast of Portugal that faces North Africa and the Atlantic and once he took over as governor of the Algarve, the crown was granted to him. royal participation in all profits from foreign trade is fine, so clearly the crown was somewhat sympathetic to Henry's vision and his aspirations to launch new crusades in North Africa and the Algarve was the natural place to organize and launch such missions and trade between the homeland. and overseas territories and foreign lands would be a way to finance this project, so they may have been understanding, but in a sense they were also entrusting the job to Prince Henry to find ways to raise funds and launch the project. expeditions Enrique took over a small abandoned town on the Algarve coast, which was mostly a fairly poor fishing region, possibly the most isolated corner of this isolated kingdom of Portugal, it was largely a fishing region of small towns and villages, but Enrique took charge of an abandoned town. called Tear Sanibel and basically rebuilt and renovated it as a royal residence and in a sense as a sort of headquarters for his own foreign trade and crusade project. ter salable has been in some sense romanticized and exaggerated over the years; sometimes people like to think.

Considering it as a kind of great almost university of maritime navigation where the great sailors, cartographers and astronomers met and an observatory was built, etc., according to archeology it seems that this is not true; It was simply a royal residence where sometimes the princes, their officials, their treasurers and occasionally cartographers were brought and where the prince dispensed patronage, but foreign missions were launched mainly from cities, you know, from ports that were equipped, for what once was at Tufts at a dance instead of launching directly into expeditions. towards North Africa, which was clearly his aspiration, instead he began investing money and personnel strategically in small voyages along the western Atlantic coast of Africa.

Well, not east towards the Holy Land, but further south, basically in the opposite direction, along the Atlantic coast, why? By doing this well, the Portuguese knew enough to know that the lucrative goods such as salt and especially gold that came to these Islamic cities in North Africa came from some distant countries further south in Africa and the Portuguese fishermen had down the coast of Africa as close as possible or which is a little beyond the borders of present-day Morocco, they did not know what lay beyond Cape Bahador and many ofThey believed it was impossible to go any further because if you burned yourself, you would simply get too close to the Sun, the heat would be too intense, so for hundreds of years they had been content simply to trade through North Africa, but Manrique determined that It seems worth the risk to send expeditions further south.

There were three basic hopes that Dom Enrique had in mind that prompted him to finance these trips beyond Capo Hador to see what they found further down the continent. One was, as I already hinted, the hope of directly contacting the sources of these goods such as gold and another was the hope of possibly traveling around Africa and then moving east and making direct contact with Asia, or the Indies, as They thought about it, this was a bigger long-term goal that would fulfill this ultimate hope of establishing direct trade with the Indies that would elude the entire Islamic world, including the Turks, okay, so this wasn't so much of a goal initially because When these voyages began in the fourteen decades and 20s after Ceuta, Constantinople was not yet in Turkish hands, so this became a more important goal later in Henry's life in Rome.

The third purpose of these trips, which I have already talked about in my lecture on the Late Middle Ages, so I may be repeating some things, but it is worth repeating. The third serious objective of Henry's travels along the African coast was the hope of eventually being able to circumvent Africa, reach East Africa or the East Indies, and establish contact with Prester John. The voyages moved further towards the coast, repeatedly sending messages to emissaries and searching for any signs or information about Prester John and who Prester John was. Well, Prester John is a possibly real, possibly purely legendary figure, who Europeans believed in and who appears for the first time in written records. around the year 1200 and they believed that this person they called Prester John was a Christian king who ruled a large Christian kingdom somewhere east of Jerusalem.

Well, it's possible that this legend was based in some way on Ethiopia, which is a large Christian kingdom in the East in the Eastern Horn of Africa, which roughly speaking you know is east of Jerusalem, although it is south, it may In the 1400s, many Europeans hoped to eventually communicate with Prester John, make an alliance with him and therefore launched a pincer attack against the Muslim rulers of Jerusalem. Well, they launched a new crusade together with this ally who could attack. and capturing Jerusalem with a double attack from both sides, so in general we know that Henry expected him to launch these voyages not as a way to find trade or find land to colonize for himself or just for the sake of it. of power or wealth, but as a means to launch a crusade campaign, that was the purpose.

Well, what made these voyages possible was the use of new technologies and navigation techniques that had rarely been used before by Europeans. First, you know, the most important thing was a new type of vessel called a caravel which was based to some extent on the Paquette ships and small sailing ships of the Middle East, so the most experienced and skilled maritime traders at that time were mainly Arabs. who traded in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and managed much of the trade between India, the Middle East and Europe. In comparison, the Europeans had some decent sailboats.

You know, the Vikings and others had been pretty good sailors, but not to the same level as the Arabs. Europeans used a lot of human powered galleys, you know, galley slaves who rowed with oars, sometimes they also used square rigged sails, okay, simple rectangular sails set on masts that could catch the wind very strongly, this was good if you had favorable winds in the direction you wanted, would take you. Move very quickly if there was a storm or a strong gale, you had to lower them or the winds could destroy your masts. Also square rigs, you know, they are simple, they face forward and if the wind is not in the direction you are facing. you want, there's not much you can do, you're basically stuck or you have to row, on the contrary, the small maneuverable Arabian sailing ships used lateen sails, okay, triangular, small triangular sails that were rigged to be maneuverable back and forth and from side to side, the lateen sails. you could control more precisely and you could turn through the wind, meaning that even if the wind was in the opposite direction to where you wanted to go, you could maneuver and weave and loop in such a way that you still made progress and again even in storms. or difficult, erratic or strong winds the lateen sails could be controlled, so the caravel was a new style of sailing ship that looked a bit like these Arabian ships, but made much greater use of the square rig and was combined with sails lateens so that Yes they were still quite small, they were smaller than the Roman or Venetian war galleys, but they managed to strategically combine square rigs and lateen sails so that they could move very quickly in favorable winds but also have control and turn against the wind and really You needed a caravel like this for these long voyages up the coast of Africa because if you were going to go those long distances and then come back, you would probably have opposite wind conditions when you were going down compared to when you were coming back, so these are the long voyages to these unknown territories.

They required a ship like the caravel. Over time, these Portuguese voyages even more than learned and mapped the coast of Africa, most importantly, they learned and began to map the winds and ocean currents of the Atlantic. Ok, and they started to discover that if you just used the wind to move as fast as possible, you could travel near the coast of Africa and then when you were done and wanted to return, you could sail out into the open Atlantic and catch the ocean currents and the wind. . Currents moving in the opposite direction would catch the drift of the North Atlantic or the Gulf Stream, as Americans would call it, and use it to turn back and then return to Portugal.

Well, then they really became the first open ocean long-distance sailors. Well, they would go. hundreds, even thousands of miles from land, knowing that the right currents existed to take them back at the right time and this process of going into the ocean was called Volta dumar, ok, the Portuguese phrase bull Volta Dimauro return or loop of the sea, so around 1450 these voyages had managed to reach what we would call without Goll and Gambia in that area began to trade more directly for gold closer to the source in which the sources were further down in Ghana in that area or what we would now call Ghana, they had reached as far as Senegal, they traded for gold, other African products, they brought in textiles, wine, firearms, things like this, they also started acquiring slaves from 1444, some of these Portuguese.

In reality, the voyages sent teams to the mainland to basically capture people you know, fight small battles and skirmishes, take prisoners, and bring them back to Portugal to sell them as slaves. Not surprisingly, this was a very disturbing and disturbing process for many of the people who took it. part in it and for many of the people in Portugal who witnessed the sale of these slaves, partly in response to this, the Portuguese government and Prince Henry changed their policy and these voyages began with captives who were already in captivity in many of African cities along the upper coast of Guinea, so there could be debtor slaves, prisoners of war, people who were held captive for whatever reason and the Portuguese began to purchase some of these captives, taking them back to Portugal and thus stimulating growing slavery. trade in Africa, so this was the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade.

These voyages were again encouraged by Lee after 1453, once the Turks captured Constantinople the impetus for the project of finding a trade route to the east really intensified now, you may know that if you did this Volta Dumar down the coast From Africa and then westwards into the Atlantic, you were bound to encounter other lands and these voyages began a series of discoveries of islands in the Atlantic, some inhabited, most of them uninhabited, which provided the first terrain. For overseas colonization by Europeans again outside the Mediterranean, Portuguese travelers found Madeira in 1419 very early. Madeira was soon colonized and cultivated by Portuguese settlers.

They discovered the Azores in 1427, a kind of series of rugged islands further away, almost in the middle. of the Atlantic and Cape Verde in 1454, okay, so another chain of islands closer to the coast of West Africa, not far from Senegal and Sierra Leone, they also tried to claim and colonize the Canary Islands and some, as you know, Prince Henry He claimed that the Portuguese had already found the Canary Islands much earlier in the 14th century, but Castile contested this claim and the Castilians ended up winning a sort of power struggle for control of the Canary Islands and in which the Castilian conquistadors also They enslaved and eventually annihilated most of the inhabitants.

Gwanghae indigenous people in the Canary Islands, so the Canary Islands were unusual because they were already inhabited. These other islands had previously been unknown to humans. The Portuguese settlers in the course of the 15th century, as I said, settled on these islands and began to grow wine on many of them. especially Madeira and then also sugar, so sugar cane had been grown for centuries on large plantations worked by serfs or slaves in places in the Mediterranean like Sicily, in the 15th century the Portuguese transferred, you know, they planted sugar cane and transferred many of these cultivation techniques to these Atlantic countries. islands and began to use greater economies of scale, quickly establishing very large plantations, moving large numbers of servants and workers and eventually African slaves to these large sugar plantations, establishing new technologies such as sugar cane presses and boiling ovens cane juice and cane syrup. on the plantations themselves and this type of new mass sugar cultivation and processing system has been called the sugar complex.

Well, this sugar complex was mainly invented by the Portuguese in these islands, especially in Cape Verde, and then developed in more distant islands. Along the coast of Africa, such as South Tomei, which is near the equator south of West Africa, also from 1434 they began to colonize mainland Africa, usually in very small ways, establishing small forts to trade gold, salt and Slaves, sometimes with the permission of local African rulers, sometimes with threats and coercion, began to establish a kind of fortified trading posts that would form the first footholds of sorts for larger conquests in Africa. Dom Henrique died in 1460, but these voyages continued, you know, when he died. he probably he had reached as far as Sierra Leone and reports from the states, kingdoms and cities in that area were being sent to Portugal after his death, they continued and the crown continued with this long-term project of moving and colonizing the Atlantic. finally he went to Angola and in 1498 he finally rounded the southern tip of Africa and entered the Indian Ocean.

The Portuguese explorer Bartolomeo Díaz was the first to pass what they called the Cape of Good Hope, which he considered to be a kind of final tip of Africa and a few years later Vasco da Gama successfully crossed the southern tip of Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean and reached Callicut in India, so finally in 1500 the Portuguese had made this dream of reaching Asia and opening commercial and diplomatic relations with Asia come true. He continued this strategy of founding small fortified outposts they called factories along the East African coast in places like Zanzibar and India and eventually establishing their main and powerful outpost at Goa in India.

The Portuguese naval commander Afonso de Albuquerque made very effective use of these Portuguese ships. techniques and also gunpowder artillery and basically intruded into sea routes and territories that had previously been the province of Arab and Indian traders and when he encountered resistance, he simply crushed the opposition and won a series of dramatic naval victories, including that of DU in 1509, where he destroyed a combined Egyptian and Gujarati naval fleet that had joined together to try to block these Portuguese traders and explorers and defend their claim to these sea routes, so with the victory at DU in 1509, the path was basically leftcleared for the Portuguese to claim. and capture more cities as a lair in Arabia and even quickly continued further east to Malacca in what is now Malaysia Macau which they claimed as another outpost and eventually reached Japan and founded a trading post that would eventually grow into the city of Nagasaki, so in no more than sixty years after the death of Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese had created a huge trading empire across Africa and South Asia and as far as Japan.

Time reasonably seemed like a crazy chimera. It established the Portuguese as the leading naval and mercantile power in all of Afroeurasia and they used strategies to establish this enormously powerful Empire using really minimal manpower. Portugal was a small kingdom with a limited population, not very. Much of it was available to be mobilized overseas in the way that would be seen in other countries like England and they basically had to stretch their resources as far as they could and they did so largely by limiting their conquests to small defensible strategic points contained within. along coasts and establishing as much as they could friendly relations with the surrounding land powers, establishing friendly trading relations with the emperors of China and Japan, with the Mughal rulers and local governors around India and rulers in Africa such as the king of the Congo, all of this created alliances, often mutually beneficial alliances with the Portuguese and this is what allowed such a small country with such limited population and resources as Portugal to create this incredible series of outposts that made it possible for a Portuguese ship to travel from Europe through Africa. and around Asia to Japan without having to dock in a foreign port, plus another unexpected encounter extended the Portuguese Empire in a different direction in a way they never intended.

In 1500, Portuguese sailor Cabral was sailing along the coast of Africa with the intention of going around Africa and continuing towards the Indian Ocean, but he ended up being blown too far off course, far west, into the ocean, and accidentally landed on a very distant land. to the west that no European had ever encountered. Before landing he was able to make some rudimentary communication with the indigenous people there and soon the Portuguese called this land Brazil because of the Brazilian wood trees that grew there, the Portuguese would colonize Brazil and it would become actually in the biggest place.

European overseas colony in the world in the fifteens and 1600s again, this was unexpected and unintentional, so in this way we could say that in a sense Cabral discovered America, you know he was not the first to discover it in the sense that there were already millions of people there, but he found something that no previous European had had. Now you could say that's okay, well, even that's not true because you know that if Columbus had not landed safely, it is true that eight years earlier, another Italian sailor under the employment of In fact, Castile had managed to land on the islands of the Caribbean before Cabral landed in Brazil, but that was a totally separate development that could be said in a certain sense counterfactually if Columbus had not existed.

Cabral would still have landed in Brazil; In other words, the Portuguese were on their way to discovering basically all the major landmasses around the world, regardless of Columbus's dome. Henry's dream of launching a large-scale expedition to the Holy Land never came true, of course, so the central idea that had motivated this Portuguese

expansion

from the beginning never got off the ground; However, there was in a sense, you could say, a kind of consolation prize where the extensive Portuguese outposts in Africa and Asia ended up becoming the first important base for Christian evangelization in those lands, particularly certain early Jesuit missionaries.

They used the Portuguese colonies as their base and one in particular became especially famous, Francis Xavier, now called Saint Francis Xavier, who was a Basque priest from Navarre, the Basque Country, who joined and was one of the members. original founders of the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits in the early 16th century and the Jesuit says I'll probably talk about them later, they saw themselves as a kind of spiritual crusaders who continued the crusader tradition in a spiritual field of action. more than military and the Jesuit order basically assigned Frances Savior to go overseas to these Portuguese outposts and start spreading the Catholic faith to these pagan peoples that you already know, as they saw them.

Francis Xavier traveled throughout Africa, Asia, particularly India and Southeast Asia. You know, different and unimaginable distances for a priest. I mean, think about the priests you know in Europe who were used to being assigned to a parish and staying there for decades until they died. Xavier was sort of the first Christian priest to sail the sea routes and become sort of a spiritual crusader spiritual conqueror. You could say that he learned several languages. He adopted different customs, different clothing to adapt to the different societies he encountered and tried to appeal to them on their own terms to hear and accept the Christian message.

He eventually died on an island off the coast of China where he was being held. quarantine waiting to, hopefully, cross over and enter the Empire of China and, as such, was the first Catholic priest to set foot on Chinese territory, although he ultimately stopped short of setting foot on the mainland and starting a beachhead. for Western Christianity. in life, but after his death he was followed by others like Matteo Ricci, so in the life of Francis Xavier we can see a kind of strange and distorted form, a kind of alternative continuation of the crusade of the When Francis Xavier died, another Empire was also spreading around the world and almost came full circle reaching Asia.

He arrived shortly after and that Empire, as I've already mentioned, was the Spanish Empire, which began strictly as an effort of the crown of Castile, so I've already talked about Columbus. I gave a lecture a while back in time for Columbus Day last year about Columbus, so I won't go into the gory details of Columbus again, but basically you might remember that Spain faced a new dilemma in 1492, so Spain liked it. Portugal emerged from the Crusader States of the Reconquista and the last Islamic State left to conquer was Granada, which eventually fell to the Spanish Christian forces in early 1492 and once they captured Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella were faced with a dilemma. something similar to the dilemma. of the Muslim generals and rulers who followed the death of Muhammad, so there is a similar crisis when you organize a society around a great leader, a vision or a mission and then you have completed it, either the leader dies or you conquer it is completed and then what do you do with all these people that you have organized, mobilized and armed to promote that mission?

You are in serious danger that these groups that you have united around this cause will simply collapse or melt or may fragment and start fighting each other, so Fernando and Isabel's solution was, on the one hand, one of their strategies was to extend sponsorship: that kind of crazy Italian sailor Columbus who claimed he could sail to Asia by heading west, okay? At that moment and I think, you know how strange this was, you know that the Portuguese were already taking enormous risks and crossing borders just by sailing out into the ocean with the confidence that you're going to return to Europe, so Columbus did it.

Claiming that he could sail around the world across the entire ocean and reach East Asia and in this way defeat the Portuguese who were still trying to reach the coast of Africa and reach Asia, so Isabel extended her patronage and support of Columbus and again I won't go into the gory details, but Columbus's four voyages to the Americas sparked a rapid and often brutal conquest of the Caribbean basin. Well, Cuba Hispaniola, the other Caribbean islands and places along the mainland coast of Central America. Colombia Venezuela this often involved, you know, raids and looting of indigenous societies, terrorist violence, particularly against the elites and leaders of these various societies, the creation of small fortified outposts very similar to the Portuguese, but which they did not know how to establish relations of coexistence with the native peoples as the Portuguese tended to do, but rather threats of subjugation and, finally, after 1500, the initial steps to transfer that sugar complex I spoke of to the Caribbean, bringing sugar cane and other products tropical crops and creating large-scale farms, what we would call plantations using forced labor of various types to grow these tropical crops, especially sugar cane, and come to process them.

The Spanish incursion into America immediately sparked a dispute specifically with Portugal. Columbus had tried to obtain Portuguese sponsorship for his plan to sail west, but Portugal had repeatedly appealed. As early as 1493, the Portuguese discovered that Castile had sponsored this voyage and that it had had some success and had actually discovered a land far to the west that could be attacked and plundered for various goods and the Portuguese were upset that they had already acquired a kind of patent from the Pope that said that any land they discovered in the ocean or on the African coast beyond Cape Bahador basically belonged to Portugal to trade and colonize as they chose, so, in their opinion, these previously unknown lands.

A and westward were within their competence and the trade and profits from them should belong to Portugal, so they opposed it and managed to get an audience with the Pope, and the Pope mediated and sealed the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which effectively drew an imaginary line. along a certain line of longitude across the Atlantic Ocean and divided the world and said that everything east of this line is sort of easy prey for the Portuguese to trade and colonize and, if they can, conquer and evangelize, while everything to the west would belong to the Spanish right, so this was a satisfactory resolution at least for the moment for both parties.

A precedent has now been established that allows the Spanish to conquer and colonize America and the Portuguese to colonize Asia. Now it happens. that, on the one hand, if that line could be continued south across the Atlantic, it actually reaches the eastern edge of South America and a large part of what we now know as Brazil juts out to the east of that line, so which made it very timely. When Cabral landed in Brazil by accident in 1500, it was land that extended far enough east that the Portuguese could begin trading and colonizing Brazil without violating the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Now the Spanish got revenge on them years later when they managed to start sending voyages starting with Magellan across the Pacific and get to Asia because they discovered that if you extend that line around the world on the other side, you cut off large chunks of East Asia and Southeast Asia that then fall on the Spanish side. and this was the legal justification for the Spanish to begin to colonize the Philippines properly and although this colony of the Philippines, as I mentioned before, was named after the Spanish king Philip II, so the Treaty of Tordesillas, you know, is an incredible act of arrogance, where you know, this little clique of Europeans from the Iberian Peninsula and the Pope together, you know, basically divided the world in two and divided it between these two countries that had previously been quite small peripheral poor countries, but it ended up having consequences really huge.

You know, by stimulating and managing European

expansion

and conquest around the world. Well, then, what did the Spanish do after the Treaty of Tordesillas? Well, as I said, there was this initial Caribbean phase of conquest, frequent mass murder, and eventually colonization and cultivation in the Caribbean. Caribbean and in 1517 this campaign began to extend beyond the Caribbean to the continent of the Americas, which is where the truly great, powerful and rich civilizations were located. Well, the main ones, as I mentioned before being in Mexico, especially the Central Valley of Mexico and Peru. in the Andes, well, these are the two main imperial centers of the Americas, the Spanish were able to conquer with surprising speed and efficiency large sections of the American continent, including those two main empires in Mexico and Peru.

I'm going to talk about how that happened. was developed, but first I'll talk about why it was possible. Well, the Spanish conquering adventurers who in Spanish are called conquistadors were mainly a kind of heterogeneous bands of privately organized adventurers, many of them veterans of the war against Granada who later the victory that Granada had had nothing to do with themselves and, therefore,This was not because they were more numerous. They weren't, they were usually wildly outnumbered by the indigenous states and empires they attacked, they weren't necessarily particularly intelligent, you know, they were as intelligent as generals and experienced warriors usually are, they didn't necessarily have superior knowledge and they did.

They had it. some superior technology, but not as massively superior as you might think and not in the way you might think, first of all, firearms played very little role in the Spanish conquests in the Americas, as you know, weapons Fire at that time tended to be if they were powerful like a cannon. they tended to be very heavy, difficult to move, you know, if you were a conquistador and you ventured into the mountainous continent of the Americas, there was no way you would bother dragging, you know, heavy cannons with you, oh, you know , up and down roads and mountain slopes. so they were basically irrelevant, handheld firearms at the time were mainly old muskets, particularly harquebuses, which could sometimes be useful in the right situations, but again they were very large and heavy, they tended to be unreliable, not They fired reliably, they couldn't aim, they just exploded in a general direction and in all sorts of ways, they weren't really useful in a close battle, especially when you were fighting in close quarters and were outnumbered, so fire were generally not important.

The crucial advantages that the Spanish had. They had when they began venturing into the continent of the Americas, they were correct navigation technology, the ability to appear and also retreat quickly, move up and down the coasts, even more than that, horses, well, there was no domesticated pack animals that could be ridden in the Americas. There were no horses or similar animals, so being able to suddenly, you know, ride and charge forward at high speed, fight from a higher vantage point, was a huge advantage for the conquistadors and technologically even more important than horses. They finally went. steel weapons well, there were no very large iron deposits accessible for these empires in the Americas they tended to only have bronze weapons well, so technologically speaking they were still in the Bronze Age well, the strongest weapons they had were usually axes Made of bronze tipped with obsidian, which was sharp enough to cut and hac much more effectively than bronze, in comparison, the Europeans had steel weapons that could be extremely powerful and heavy and could also be sharpened to a very sharp edge. sharp, so steel battle axes are steel.

The swords were really, you know, they really surpassed the bronze weapons, like those of the Aztecs. So these technological advantages were very significant, but actually the main reason, even beyond the technological differences, the main reason that the Spanish were able to conquer was actually disease, so I think I mentioned this. I talked about this in my lecture on Columbus. As soon as Columbus landed, waves of epidemics broke out among the Americans and these epidemics continued and intensified as the Europeans penetrated. Deeper into the Americas, the Europeans came from a society in a civilization where large numbers of millions of human beings had lived. in close communion with animals, pigs, chickens, cattle, horses, etc., and where pathogens of various types could develop among humans and among these animals and then spread and moved repeatedly back and forth throughout Eurasia and Africa.

Well, so when these Europeans showed up in the Americas, they were covered in pathogens that Americans hadn't been exposed to. In comparison, Americans tended to live in more isolated areas and were much further away. fewer domesticated animals, so their immune systems had no resistance to diseases such as typhus and influenza and, most especially, smallpox, a very deadly, rapidly spreading collective disease that had simply never existed in the Americas and, in By comparison, they didn't have as many pathogens to fight. Moving back to the pianos eventually some new diseases like syphilis would return from America to Europe, but they were not as fast moving and deadly as the type of hosts they know, the army of deadly viruses and bacteria that the Europeans brought with them. with them to America, so as the Europeans found new societies, they quickly became ill, losing population and particularly losing combatants.

Well, this indeed paved the way for an easy, totally unexpected, involuntary and uncontrolled European conquest. Finally, the Spanish were able to make many of their conquests remarkably quickly and effectively due to strategic alliances with indigenous peoples. Okay, these were not unified societies when I entered Mexico, but there were many divisions, rivalries, enmities that already existed among the American Indians. You know this, like I said, this is a continent with a history as complex and tumultuous as Europe or Asia, so you know, there was no sense that Americans were a unified people who had to confront this new invader, but rather that The Europeans took advantage of existing enmities and diplomatically and strategically took control of many of these societies OK, so these are the factors at play that made this kind of rapid and surprising wave of conquest possible, but that being said, someone still had to do it. and the particular individuals who appeared in the scene and the form.

If they did, it would have tremendous reverberant effects, which is why the first important conquistador to appear on the American continent was Hernán Cortés. Okay, he wasn't the first to land on the continent. He was not the first to even land specifically in Mexico, but he was the first to seize the advantage and make great conquests. Hernán Cortés was a minor noble from the interior Extremadura area of ​​Castile, so it was this land that had been excavated by the Reconquista that had this long crusading heritage of the Reconquista. and that he had a great largely vestigial nobility that descended from these Crusader Knights, so again you know that Cortez is a perfect example of this kind of residual nobility that is basically looking for something to do with themselves and this is the kind of background that Many of them came from the conquistadors and had a lot of that kind of aggressive, fearless crusading mentality that had been instilled in many of these Spanish and Portuguese nobles.

Cortés led an expedition from the Caribbean to the mainland of Mexico in 1519 and after landing in Mexico, near what is now Veracruz, they obtained information about the existence of a large empire with large cities somewhere in the interior, so Cortes burned all of his landing ships and determined that this team of a few hundred adventurers should go inland and attempt to conquer this Empire. It was an incredibly unrealistic ambitious plan, but he wanted to be sure that there was no way for his men to give up and return, so he destroyed his fleet and began advancing inland towards this inner empire.

On the way they came across a town. They called the Tush Kala into a kingdom called Kaltaka and quickly made a provisional alliance with the Talaash Kala and this was very important because the Latasha Kala were a kind of local power of their own that only a few decades before had been conquered and subjugated by the Aztecs, so they didn't have a great love for the Aztecs and they were reduced to a sort of client state or protectorate position of the Aztec empire and they saw these Europeans unexpectedly appear on the scene as a possible opportunity and they made an alliance and gave Cortés 20 slave girls as a kind of diplomatic gift sealing this new relationship and remember, as I said before, there was a very sophisticated and elaborate system of diplomatic discourse and gift exchange and giving that regulated the relationships between these different American peoples, okay and so .

They give Cortés this set of 20 slaves and among them is a woman whom the Spaniards call marina but who was called by the indigenous people came to be called La Malinche and La Malinche apparently was a very ambitious woman and was a talented linguist and was able to She mastered the Spanish language very quickly and also other indigenous languages ​​throughout Mexico, so she began acting as Cortez's interpreter and soon after also as a diplomatic advisor and became his lover, and La Malinche was kind of a crucial early link. allowing the Spanish to maneuver effectively in this complicated political world of Mexico and since then it has also become a kind of symbol of the bond between Spain and Mexico and also of betrayal, really of disloyalty, so it is a kind of symbol loaded in Mexico, but not It seems that she was important in allowing the Spanish to insert themselves so quickly into the complicated political world of Mexico and the Aztec empire.

News of these strange foreigners landing and moving to Mexico soon reaches the imperial court in Tenochtitlan and Emperor Montezuma II basically gives orders that if anyone makes contact with these Europeans, they must take them directly to the capital so that the emperor can meet with them and assess who they are and what they are doing, so just a few months later, in 1519, Moctezuma and Cortés meet on a causeway in Lake Texcoco leading to the capital of Tenochtitlán, they exchange gifts. The Emperor gives Cortés a series of gifts including carved gold and silver diagrams of the Aztec calendar that was so symbolically important to them and makes a speech praising Cortés welcoming him to the capital and inviting him. he took it to the Imperial Palace and apparently in this speech, according to different sources, he says something to the effect that this palace belongs to you, we have been waiting for you, we are here to welcome you to your throne, now it seems that this speech did . but what exactly this means is hotly debated.

Well, the Europeans understood it to mean that Montezuma was basically handing over his empire to the Spanish, whom he recognized as a superior civilization. This was very convenient for Cortés because according to Spanish law these conquistadors had no rights. Claim control of American territory unless they were given permission unless indigenous rulers and leaders handed over sovereignty to them. This is part of the reason why the conquistadors and the Caribbean had gone around terrorizing and killing many of these leaders. It was a way to force them to hand over control to the Spanish and legitimize their conquests, so this was very diplomatically and legally convenient for Cortés that Moctezuma gave this speech basically offering him the throne and the palace; some later also included indigenous Mexican scholars in later years theorized that Moctezuma believed that Cortés was the reappearance of an Aztec god called Quetzalcoatl, who was a kind of serpent deity, a deity of wisdom, and these Mexican chronicles and increasingly written late in the 16th century they say that the Aztecs believed that this god had already appeared in the form of the last Toltec Emperor, so the Toltecs were the type of previous empire that had existed in Mexico before the Aztecs and they had a final Last Emperor Before the collapse of the Toltec Empire he had a name that sounded somewhat similar to Quetzalcoatl. so these Mexican chroniclers say that the Aztecs believed that this God had appeared in the form of this Last Emperor and would then reappear to recover the government of Mexico from the hands of the Aztecs and that is why Moctezuma thought that Cortés was the new incarnation of the new appearance . of this god came to take over Montezuma's rule now there is no archaeological or textual evidence of this myth before the conquest, okay, so it is very doubtful if this is true, we know that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl did not exist, who was very important , but we don't have any confirmation that they believed Quetzalcoatl had disappeared and would return or that they somehow thought the Europeans were Quetzalcoatl, all of that was retroactively claimed by Lee and it's very open to doubt whether that was true or whether it was invented again as some kind of justification for why Montezuma gave this speech and why the Spanish conquest occurred so quickly and easily.

Well, finally, if you talk to current scholars and if you put this speech by Moctezuma in the context of what we know about pre-Columbian America, chances are that the speech was simply a very formal diplomatic nicety, which was saying: We welcome you, we invite you to your throne and your palace, you know that this entire kingdom belongs to you, he was saying that to show extreme diplomatic courtesy and in a certain sense, to demonstrate his superiority, to show an exaggerated sense of security and condescension towards these foreigners who appear in theEmpire. Okay, similarly, if you look at Jung's Chinese travels, huh, they would just go to these foreign lands and just give gifts, well, it was a way of demonstrating China's supremacy and superiority, so really This speech by Moctezuma fits into what we know about the extremely formal type of polite diplomacy of the Americas at this time.

Well, then the small expeditionary force under Cortés accepts this invitation. they come back to the palace they stay there in the palace and after a certain number of months they start overstaying their welcome, okay, you know, you're not always supposed to accept these polite diplomatic offers, you know, that's the point. We're supposed to politely decline and say, "Oh, you've been very kind to us, but we can't impose any more on you." They stayed and continued to impose and this gradually created more irritation, especially among the imperial court and the high nobility. at the imperial court in Tenochtitlán, as more and more people began to suspect that these Spanish visitors were up to something they were up to, somehow they were up to no good, so finally, in the early 1520s, some of these imperial visitors The officials stood at attention and told the Emperor that you have to ask these guys to leave, so the Emperor, in a very polite diplomatic way, says: Well, you know, it would be good if you left soon.

You know people are getting impatient. Maybe you want to do it. go soon, so the Spanish take this as a cue to act quickly and what they end up doing is taking advantage of their presence inside the palace to basically take the emperor hostage, they move into the imperial barracks and take him hostage and they can do it. They know how to back up their threats with their superior weaponry, all they need is to control the Emperor himself and a small space around him and the Emperor is revered as a divine figure, so he is a very effective hostage if you can hold him and threaten him, you can do it.

He basically controls the entire Imperial Court, eventually the Emperor asks permission to leave the palace and go worship at one of the main temples in the capital city. Spanish escorts accompany him there and in this worship service we do not know exactly what happened. Different accounts conflict but somehow a fight breaks out between the type of noble warriors who attend this temple cult and the Spanish. It is possible that there will be a court according to the Spanish. What drove them was that they tried to intervene and stop a human sacrifice, which we do. I know it was in these Aztec temples, others said they started stealing people's gold jewelry, you know, but either thing is possible, but whatever the reason, a fight breaks out, the Spanish massacre and uses their superior weaponry and massacres much of the imperial court and recover Montezuma.

At the palace, the Spurs meet riots and outraged masses of soldiers and commoners begin to gather around the palace threatening to attack and the Spanish reportedly forced the Emperor to go out onto a balcony and try to calm the crowd and tell them to leave. they will disperse. goes wrong some people say that the crowd started throwing stones and darts at the Emperor, you know, furious with him for giving in to the Spanish captors, others say that he accidentally fell from the balcony or that he was pushed or thrown from the balcony or that They brought it. back to the palace but what happened shortly after the Emperor died and we don't know clearly if it was an accident or if the Spanish killed him intentionally or someone else killed him but the Emperor dies and it's not surprising that this only fuels still more flames there.

There are massive riots and attacks on the palace and the Spanish basically have to quietly leave the city and retreat, they flee the city and return to the tush Kalla, right there / Kalla received them and they can make a strategic strategy. agreement to counterattack and capture Tenochtitlán together, okay, that's their goal, okay, Talaash kala and Cortés's men return and counterattack in 1521 along with some other indigenous allies from all over central Mexico, they find the city almost completely Paralyzed by smallpox, she's fine. There have been waves of smallpox outbreaks, most of the Aztec army is now sick with smallpox, a large part has already died and only one quick attack is really needed to defeat the young Aztec emperor who had had to succeed the throne later. of Montezuma and his Both brothers died and can continue. control and residence in the palace.

Cortés settles in with La Malinche, who is now his sort of unofficial concubine, and they begin to rule. A couple of things to note about this conquest of Tenochtitlán, one is that, like I said, it was actually done. made possible not only by superior weaponry but even more so by disease and it was a joint effort by the Spanish and their allies, most importantly the Talaash Kalla and the Tush Collar from their point of view did not see this as the Spanish conquest from Mexico. It was the conquest of Talaash Kalla. Well, these were the traditional enemies of the Aztecs who successfully counterattacked and took control of the Aztec capital with the help of their strange new allies from abroad.

The Spanish and the Tush Collar later assumed a joint cooperative government. Mexico and, unsurprisingly, there are decades after subsequent decades of friction and conflict between the Spanish and the sloppy Kalla as the Spanish take more and more advantage and somehow assert their dominance as major partners in this alliance, is well, but in reality it is for decades. It is very ambiguous and there is debate about exactly who is in charge and under what terms, but it is clear that the most powerful individual in the Empire now is Cortés, who has more or less unofficially assumed the imperial throne basically and will later be replaced by viceroys or viceroys. appointed from Castile, so once Cortes has control in Mexico, other visiting teams of conquistadors spread north and south in search of more cities and empires to conquer, some of them finding small colonies and outposts . but the one who is really lucky is Pizarro, so another similar type of group, barely trained, barely organized, of adventurers under the command of Francisco Pizarro ventures south through the Andes with information that there is a great empire powerful Peru-centered, like Cortés, they can obtain. a diplomatic meeting with the Emperor outside the capital of Cusco, so again it's almost a perfect echo of what happened in Mexico.

Now the Emperor at that time was Atahualpa and, out of the wild, I had very recently assumed power. You know, unlike Montezuma, he wasn't. an emperor who reigned for a long time, he was new, he had just come to power because he had won a power struggle, a civil war within the empire against a relative and that civil war had broken out due to a succession dispute after the previous emperor when the copic died of smallpox okay, so even before Pizarro appeared on the scene, smallpox had already preceded them, spreading through these dense populations in South America and reaching Cusco, where it killed much of the soldiers and a large part of the popular population, and the emperor wants to calm the pockets so that the Emperor.

The Empire is already weakened and suffering divisions even before Pizarro appears in 1530, they can arrange this meeting with Emperor Hawawa on the outskirts of Cuzco. Now the Emperor is no fool, he brings with him a huge contingent of thousands of warriors, you know, armed. to the teeth with weapons of bronze and obsidian and they carry him to the meeting on a tremendous raised stretcher carried by his servants, he is fine, so he does not walk out to an open field and shake her hand. It is heavily defended, however, the Spanish are able to get close enough to speak personally with the emperor in his litter and once they get that close they simply take out their steel weapons and begin attacking the Inca warriors in the counterattack, but their weapons are basically broken to pieces by these Spanish swords and battle axes, also by a A small visiting team on a nearby hillside fires some harquebuses at this crowd of Inca soldiers.

It's unclear if this makes much of a difference militarily. We don't know if anyone was hit, but the loud bangs you know probably added to the confusion and chaos. of the scene that the Spanish take advantage of to basically carry the Emperor's litter to the ground, where they then take him captive and flee, so, like Cortés' team did with Montezuma, they simply go directly to the divine figure of the Emperor, take him away. captive and they keep him hostage and the first thing they do is take him to a kind of remote mountain town where they hold him hostage and demand enormous amounts of gold and silver as ransom.

The Incas had to gather and melt enormous collections of gold and silver. sculptures sculpted gardens made of gold they melt them into ingots to give them to the captors holding walpa and then once the Spanish have this huge stash of gold and silver they just kill the Emperor anyway, okay then the Empire in This point has already gone through a damaging civil war due to a succession dispute when a Copic died and Pizarro establishes him as the new emperor, the new Sapa Inca is fine and basically takes the imperial throne and again, as with Cortés, it is then followed by appointed viceroys of Spain and if you look at Inca sources, Inca literature and art of later decades, the Incas basically considered these Spanish viceroys as a continuation of, you know, just a new imperial dynasty, from their point of view, the Inca Empire will not fall, it simply gained a new dynasty of rulers and you can even see paintings produced by Peruvian artists in the 17th century, where artists would paint portraits of the different Inca emperors throughout the centuries, up to and including Atahualpa, and then they would continue with the dynasty. portraits of the Spanish viceroys, simply, as they saw it, the Empire continued under a new government.

The Spanish, for their part, took advantage of the existing infrastructure of these empires. They took control of the capitals of Tenochtitlan and Cusco in some cases. They also create new capitals like Lima, which they build on the coast of Peru so that they have easier communication by sea and also a lower elevation, making it easier for Europeans to live in. It is difficult for many Europeans to climb to such extremely high altitudes. elevations in the Andes, so Lima becomes a kind of base camp for Spanish control of the Inca Empire and they use the resources, the money, the labor force of these empires to then continue their conquests beyond and use them. of horses and sailing ships makes it much easier for them to move longer distances and extend their control as far north as Mexico to what is now New Mexico through Central America over the Andes to Chile and Argentina to Venezuela and so on these empires expand under Spanish rule even as they are losing most of their population, then they create a hierarchy of officials that includes not only viceroys but also regional governors and smaller local managers, mayors call mayor, so they create a sort of pyramid of smaller regional officials and councils that ultimately report. to Spain and they hand out this new territory to the conquistadors, so these men who had gone and taken these great risks to conquer these unknown territories in the Americas now demand power and they want a reward and what is basically their Spanish policy. create some sort of smaller county-sized regions, allocate them to various days of the conquistadors, and give those conquistadors the right to demand certain forms of labor from the indigenous peoples living in those areas.

This is what's called the encomienda, all right, and if you had to eat, you might be able to demand that the natives of your domain come to work on your plantations or come to work on your minds for two months a year or three. months a year or demand that they contribute a certain number of servants or soldiers to your domain. At home, in one way or another, the work of these people could be claimed. This makes it possible for the Spanish to somehow boost their exploitation of the Americas, extracting gold and silver, growing sugar cane and other crops.

However, one of the main problems with The Eating Problem was the fact that the indigenous population was declining, right? These epidemics contain, when there was a very large gathering, you know, a growing city or a camp of indigenous people, smallpox would break out into other diseases and the population continued to decline now. I know that over time, between 1492 and about 1650, about 90% of the population died, okay, that's what went down, that didn't happen all at once, right, it happened gradually, it happened in waves and in the course of the 1,500 Spanish officials. I could see that this was what was happening and that the food system that often required brutal and very hard work on the part of the indigenous people and that took them out of their communities where they had food sources, put themin these work camps where they had poor living conditions. food shortages, many diseases, they could see that this was causing damage and that it was decimating the population even more, so over time these Spanish officials began to inform Spain that the food system had to change or it had to stop and that this control over labor was simply eliminating the population that was supposed to be doing the work and that over time it was simply going to depopulate the entire Empire, so these reports from Spanish officials about the conditions of the encomienda fueled a growing dispute and escalating conflict.

Within Spain over the legitimacy of Spanish rule in the Americas, not long after the Spanish landed in the Caribbean, certain Spanish colonizers began to raise objections and question how the Spanish were conquering their violent methods and whether they had any legitimate claim to any territory. territories in the Americas at all, this criticism began with the ecclesiastics and, more particularly, with the Dominican Order, and a crucial milestone was in 1511, when the chief Dominican priest of the Spanish colony in Hispaniola delivered a sermon in 1511 basically excoriating to the Spanish colonizers as conquerors. for violating you know all the sacred principles of Christianity, giving Christianity a bad name and simply committing the most serious mortal sins in their violent attacks against the indigenous peoples and also rejecting the idea that the Spanish could legitimately claim control of the territory through of violence and threats.

One of the conquistadors of the encomienda who was there in the church when Montesinos gave this sermon in 1511 was named Bartolomé de las Casas and las Casas was so impressed and moved by this sermon that he joined the priesthood, became a Dominican and basically took to Montesinos. The message of him and the houses was a very passionate missionary priest and he was vehement in propagating this message. He was also a talented writer and speaker and basically the sermons, pamphlets and reports sent by Montesinos and the houses to Spain helped stimulate the Burgos laws which were enacted by the Spanish crown in 1512 these Burgos laws basically put limits for the first time on The powers of the Spanish conquistadors and in the arrows of command, as the holders of encomienda rights were called, required them to provide a certain level of shelter, living conditions and food, limited the periods of work they could demand and gave certain protections for indigenous peoples.

These Burgos laws were basically unenforceable and were never enforced right there, no one had enough control over these armed adventurers and conquerors. to really limit the way they treated the indigenous people, this type of reign of terror basically continued for decades after knowing that the laws of Burgos were basically a dead letter, so this encourages Las Casas and his mission and write more reports, including a general report. history of the destruction of the Indies, which is a famous long report that catalogs the type of mass massacres during the time of the conquistadors, particularly in the Caribbean.

It is doubtful that this report was really completely accurate; is probably hugely exaggerated and at home makes the rhetorical maneuver of attributing all these mass deaths of Americans to Spanish right-wing violence rather than a disease, which was actually the main cause of death, was the majority of them who know that hundreds of thousands of people were dying en masse from diseases. Nobody, you know these Spaniards. with these types of muskets and swords they did not have the ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people at a time that was simply not militarily possible, but they were doing everything they could, which is why the houses are keeping this debate alive and putting pressure on the crown to promulgate a set of new laws in 1542, so almost thirty years after the laws of Burgos, the new laws were proclaimed, this is after the Spanish conquered the Aztecs and the Incas and they actually have a really empire significant that extends across most of America and has millions of indigenous people under its control, so the new laws put an end to the encomienda.

Basically they say that no one who currently owns it and in the commune of can pass it on to their heir, you know, once they die, it expires and all the indigenous people then. will move under the civilian control of the royally appointed government, so the new laws in effect put an expiration date on the entire system and the food system will naturally be in charge of the arrows that have become rich using labor indigenous in mines and plantations. They are outraged, many of them rebel and particularly a great rebellion breaks out in Peru and the arrows in command attack and kill the viceroy in 1546, so the death of the viceroy Blasco Núñez available in 1546 sends a message to the crown again that If they really try to control their own colonizers, their own subjects in the Overseas Empire, they will face intense and violent opposition, this only raises the stakes, but the houses and their allies do not give up and the King accepts. maintain in a debate on the way to eliminate a university city in Spain in 1550 where basically the houses, on the one hand, will debate against an opposing scholar, Sepúlveda, and the issue at hand would not only be food and control of work, but it would be Yes, the Spanish crown has the right to claim any type of territory or government in the Americas and at this point the houses have radicalized to the position that all conquests in the Americas are illegitimate and that the Spanish should withdraw in some way. and should try to missionize and convert the Native Americans, but had no power to govern them, let's say Vida, on the other side, argued that the Americans were natural slaves, that they were inherently less intelligent, that they had no legitimate right to govern themselves themselves. and the debate was inconclusive, the king was reportedly sympathetic to the Casas argument and basically wanted to issue new decrees that basically eliminated Spanish rule from most of their territory in the Americas or at least drastically reform it, but he had fear of more rebellions in the Americas. and possibly a rebellion within his own court in Spain, you know, saying what are you doing, you can't give up any of the greatest conquests that we've had, so basically the king doesn't make any decisions or make any decisions and instead , the new laws of 1542 remain. in place for these conquests in the Americas to know the new laws and the death of the Viceroy and the debate in Vidal, all of these things help to illustrate the overwhelming fact that Spain did not benefit from her conquests in the Americas.

Almost as much as you would think they should approve, much of the wealth and power actually went to these types of local warlords and arrows of command, it was extremely difficult for Spain to exert any control over what was happening and most part of the Empire. It was very difficult for them to extract wealth or taxes of any kind and bring them back to Spain. It was a really complicated and expensive project. The main benefit that the Empire obtained was in the form of gold and silver, especially silver, so the Incas had always extracted significant quantities of gold and silver in the Andes and not long after the conquest of Peru, adventurers were able to locate a huge deposit of silver on the mountain of potro seen in the andes in what is now bolivia and po2 Z, you know, it is a, it is a large mountain that is almost completely full of silver and once the

spanish

were able to take advantage of it and establish the proper camps and the right equipment to extract it, poachers quickly became the largest source of silver the world had ever seen, thousands of people were moved.

Thousands of indigenous and also African workers went to a new city to extract gold and silver. Huge profits were made and the crown basically followed the traditional Iberian policy of claiming one fifth of the newly extracted wealth for the crown, just as the Portuguese crown had done. He said that a fifth of the profits from foreign trade goes to Doe Manrique; In the same way, the Spanish crown claimed a fifth of the gold and silver that left Potosí. This extra time was funneled to collection points along the coast of South America, where it would then be loaded onto a treasure fleet once a year to cross the ocean to Spain and, as I said, this turned Spain into a Fabulously rich kingdom, it fed the enormous and extravagant royal courts of the Habsburgs, launched Spain to primacy in Europe, but the profits really could not.

Finally, as I said before, eventually the value of silver, you know, decreases and the real profit, the net profit that the Spanish crown can get from these treasure fleets, you know, dissipates and other powers can catch up to them, so that that is. the basic outline of the story of how Portugal and then Spain were able to become the first overseas imperial powers launched from the European continent was an unexpected development happened due to strange ideas strange risks assumed and many strategic subterfuges much betrayal and many strokes of luck that they ended up paving the way for the rise of these two empires, so thank you very much for listening to me again.

If you have questions or topics you want to hear about, email me at historian splaining at gmail.com or comment. I'm interested in what you're interested in and I'll probably post a little comment soon about the progress the podcast has been making and the listeners and audience it's gained and if you can contribute in any way, I have 19 patrons as of right now take a step forward and become a 22