Spanish conquistadors

Spanish conquistador, Pavilion of Navigation of Seville, Spain.

The term Spanish conquistadors refers generically to the Spanish soldiers and explorers who, from the end of the 15th century and during the 16th century, conquered and settled large expanses of territory in America and the Philippines, incorporating them into the dominions of the Spanish Monarchy. The exploration and conquest of America took place during the so-called Age of Discovery, which followed the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

The Spanish conquest of America

Main article: Conquest of America

Founding of Santiago de Nueva Extremadura, present-day Santiago de Chile, by the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia.

The chroniclers of the time usually describe the Conquest of America as a heroic epic. The extent of the territories it covered and the short span of time in which it took place have no parallel in the history of European conquests. Other chronicles, such as the testimonies of the indigenous peoples and of some Spanish friars, have presented the Conquest of America as a morally questionable event.

Although the Spanish conquest of America had undeniably material motivations, one of the great objectives of the Spanish monarchs was the evangelization of the indigenous peoples of America. In that sense it was very different from other European conquests in that it incorporated, for the first time in history, legislation for the protection of the indigenous peoples. On June 20, 1500, Queen Isabella the Catholic issued a Royal Provision prohibiting the enslavement of the natives in the New World and recognizing them as subjects of the Crown. The Laws of Burgos of 1512 reaffirmed the status of the natives as free men, with the express prohibition of their being exploited, without prejudice to the obligation to work on behalf of the Crown as its subjects. Later the New Laws of 1542 were promulgated, a set of Leyes y ordenanzas nuevamente hechas por su Majestad para la gobernación de las Indias y buen tratamiento y conservación de los Indios (Laws and ordinances newly made by His Majesty for the government of the Indies and the good treatment and preservation of the Indians) that revised the encomienda system, granting a series of rights to the indigenous inhabitants in order to improve their living conditions.

First-hand testimonies

Historians of different origins and periods have praised or criticized the Conquest of America depending on their point of view. Only on rare occasions has the Conquest been described with a reasonably neutral vision, mainly due to certain political agendas serving various interests. Thus, the Conquest has always been a recurring theme of the Black Legend for writers in the service of rival powers with the purpose of discrediting the Spanish Empire.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a first-hand witness, who wrote the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España as a detailed chronicle from the very perspective of the rank-and-file conquistador who took part in the expedition of Hernán Cortés, attempted to correct and complement the earlier historical narratives (such as that of Francisco López de Gómara), which he considered inaccurate for focusing excessively on Cortés and omitting the merits of the rest of the men.

Hernán Cortés himself, in his Letters of Relation addressed to Emperor Charles V, reflects the self-perception of the conquistador as a warrior who cannot retreat in the face of danger, a key feeling of his identity:

«I know well that strong men do not flee from danger, but rather rise to meet it. And if in any other matter you should need my help, know that as a loyal friend you will find it in me.»

Díaz del Castillo is categorical in stating that victory was impossible without the alliance of thousands of native warriors, mainly the Tlaxcaltecs, whom he describes as very brave and to whom he attributes an indispensable loyalty in the war. In that sense he wrote:

«...that in the great wars and battles that I have mentioned, the Tlaxcaltecs were always with us, and very brave, and they did great things, and killed many of the Mexicans [Mexica] before we had reached them.»

As for the enemies, the author justifies the military actions as legitimate in order to impose Christianity and, above all, to stop the practices of human sacrifice and anthropophagy, which he sees as the worst of cruelties. Summarizing the reason for their arrival among the peoples:

«...that we came to command them not to worship idols nor sacrifice men, nor eat their flesh, nor commit sodomy, nor do other abominations, and that they should believe in our Lord God.»

He also described the cruelty in battle and the motivation of their allies:

«...because if we were angered by the deaths and cruelties of the Mexicans who killed our soldiers, the Tlaxcaltecs and the rest of our friends and confederates never tired of doing them harm and killing them, because they held it as law to take vengeance on their enemies.»

Nevertheless, the conquistador does not try to conceal the abuses and criticizes the injustices committed by some leaders, laments the great mortality and the suffering of the natives, and even openly condemns acts such as the execution of Cuauhtémoc, who he considered died «very unjustly»:

«And this [death of Cuauhtémoc] was very unjustly given, and it seemed wrong to all of us who were going, because no cause was found for it. And Cuauhtémoc himself, before they hanged him, said to Cortés: Ah, Captain Cortés! For days I had understood this end, and I knew of your false promises...»

Francisco de Aguilar, one of the first conquistadors, who later became a Dominican friar, describes the events in his Relación breve de la Conquista de la Nueva España, reiterating one of the justifications of the Conquest: the abolition of ritual practices considered aberrant:

«[Cortés] gave them [the caciques] to understand that we were vassals of a great lord, who was the Emperor Don Carlos, who had sent us to those parts to remove the idolatry and sins that those natives practiced...»

On how the conquistadors conducted themselves on the battlefield he wrote:

“Our people fought with such fury and rage that it seemed that none of them cared for his life; and the Indians said that we had hearts of stone.”

Factors that favored the Spanish conquest

The morion was the archetypal helmet of the Spanish conquistador. This is a morion made of iron

The Spanish Reconquista

The historians John H. Elliot and Francisco Morales Padrón emphasize the little regard the conquistadors had for their own lives when undertaking their military campaigns and the conviction they had in their success. After the eight centuries of Christian Reconquista of the Muslim territories in Spain, the Spanish had forged a knightly morale in pursuit of a transcendental mission.

Before entering combat with his 177 men against the 40,000 Incas of Cajamarca, the conquistador Pizarro said:

Have courage and valor, all of you, to do what I expect of you and what all good Spaniards must do, and do not be alarmed by the multitude they say the enemy has, nor by the small number in which we Christians find ourselves. For even if we were fewer and the opposing enemy were more numerous, the help of God is greater still, and in the hour of need He helps and favors His own to confound and humble the pride of the infidels and bring them to the knowledge of our Holy Faith.

The writer Juan Sánchez Galera mentions that the Spanish were also imbued with the European Renaissance culture, which portrays man as a being who bears values and is capable of deciding his own destiny. This vision is contrary to materialism, where each person is worth what he has and not what he is as a person.

Religion

Francisco Morales Padrón highlights spirituality. The cultures of the Americans, like that of the Spanish, were deeply theocentric. In that case, what was fundamental was not who had more or fewer men but whom Heaven favored more. And it is a fact that the Spanish gave the natives the impression that the Christian god was on their side, and many natives lost their reasons to keep fighting.

The Aztec religion was fatalistic. The gods were habitually worshipped to prevent them from becoming enraged and the world from ceasing to function. To avoid these catastrophes, human sacrifices were made to the gods. In Tenochtitlán alone more than 20,000 human sacrifices were carried out annually. In 1521, after the conquest of the city by Hernán Cortés, 140,000 human heads were found piled up in a heap of offerings. The heart was taken out of the victim of the human sacrifice, the walls of the temple were smeared with his blood, and his corpse was thrown down the pyramid to be eaten by those present. Religious cannibalism was so widespread that anthropological studies have shown that part of the protein diet of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlán came from it.

Furthermore, among the natives there were mythologies, often common to different peoples, that agreed that one day people with white skin and beards would appear from the other side of the sea on floating houses, who would put an end to their old cultures and create a new and superior one. Among the Aztecs this myth was related to Quetzalcóatl, among the Incas to Viracocha, and for the Muiscas it was related to Bochica. Other peoples supposed that the Spanish, like their horses, were immortal.

The Spanish then waged a religious war, convincing the natives that their god was true and that the gods they worshipped were nothing more than stone figures. They also explained to them that they would be better off living as Catholics than continuing to maintain their traditional beliefs. Cortés would climb the temples in front of the Aztecs and destroy the altars with a hammer, and he went on destroying all the statues of the cities through which he advanced, showing that this had no divine consequence of any kind. In the same way, Pizarro destroyed the sanctuary of Pachacámac. When Hernán Cortés set out to visit the great temple of Huichilobos, several days after his arrival in Tenochtitlan, the Emperor Moctezuma was waiting for him at the very top of the pyramid. The Emperor offered him a group of priests to carry him on their shoulders, but Cortés refused and climbed the 114 steps on foot with his companions. When Moctezuma said to him "Lord, you must be tired, after climbing this great temple of ours", Cortés answered "Neither I nor those who come with me tire of anything".

Weaponry

At his printing press in Frankfurt, the Protestant engraver from Flanders Theodor de Bry published engravings of Spaniards committing atrocities in America. The Spanish are often shown with arquebuses facing natives who were practically unarmed and at the mercy of those atrocities. However, most of the American continent was conquered with only 16 arquebuses: 13 carried by the troops of Hernán Cortés and 3 carried by the troops of Pizarro when he entered Cajamarca.

Arquebus in a museum.

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German arquebus.

The Spanish carried few firearms. Above all they had hand-to-hand weapons such as swords, daggers, lances and halberds. Arquebuses could not be made by a good blacksmith; rather, they came from an industry and were expensive to produce, so most of the settlers could not afford them. Spanish soldiers did have firearms, but they were in Europe earning a good wage and very few wanted to leave everything to go to the New World. The Spaniards who did bring arquebuses soon realized that they were completely ineffective against the natives, because these attacked by surprise and firearms required several minutes before firing the first shot, since although loading the ball and cleaning the barrel could take only 30 seconds, the match had to be lit. To light the match each time one wanted to fire, one first needed something with fire, and there were no matches at the time, so fire had to be made with stones to light a cord with which to keep lighting the match. It was this process of obtaining fire before the first shot that delayed the process by several minutes. The arquebus was a somewhat heavy weapon, and for that reason a pole a meter and a half long, called a fork, was sometimes used to rest it on. Once the arquebus was loaded, on top of the fork and ready to fire, the men commended themselves to Saint Barbara so that the powder would not be damp, something common in the old black powders with a large quantity of salts in their composition.

Firearms were effective in the European battles of the 16th century, where two compact armies faced each other in open field. In the time it took a Spaniard to prepare to fire the first shot, a native could shoot 20 arrows, and for all the reasons stated, they were neither abundant nor of much help in the conquest.

A weapon that was quite common among Spanish soldiers was the crossbow. This weapon was invented in the Roman Empire and perfected in the Middle Ages. On the European battlefields of the first half of the 16th century it was very common among Spanish soldiers. However, it was not very frequent among the Spanish in America either, because although it could be made by a good craftsman and was always ready for the first shot, in battles at short distances and in skirmishes it was not considered so useful.

A weapon that was present in America was the falconet, a bronze cannon that was normally fixed on the sterncastle of ships and that was sometimes dismounted from the ship and loaded on the back of a mule or of a person and unloaded for use. These cannons fired iron balls of about 3 centimeters in caliber. They were used successfully and effectively by Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlán and by Pizarro in Cajamarca. Sometimes the Spanish replaced the iron ball with a good handful of arquebus balls. They were useful for firing at groups of Indians. In the count that Cortés made in Cozumel he had four falconets, and Pizarro had one falconet in Cajamarca.

However, the factors that were truly decisive were swords, lances, pikes, axes, daggers, knives, bows, crossbows, the cuirass, the dog and the horse. The cuirass gave the soldier security in hand-to-hand combat.

Although the natives did not know iron or steel, they had great skill in working stone, especially agate and obsidian. An agate-tipped arrow could pierce a conquistador's cuirass at less than 30 meters. They made the edges of their wooden swords with embedded flakes of obsidian and flint, and these, according to the chronicles, could cut off a mule's head with a single stroke. Instead of cuirasses, they protected themselves with "escaupiles", which, as Hernando Colón describes, were quilted cotton breastplates. The refined textile technology of the Andean civilizations, which allowed fabrics of up to 500 threads per inch structured in successive layers, enabled them to develop efficient armor of quilted fabric (the escaupil) that was eventually adopted by the Spanish, who abandoned their metal helmets and cuirasses, since these were not suitable for tropical climates, both because of the heat they gave their wearers and because of the corrosion they suffered.

The main weapon of the Andean armies was the sling, made of fabric, with which they hurled stones heated red-hot, wrapped in cotton and pitch. Using these weapons the Quechuas devastated Cuzco, occupied by the Spanish in 1536.

The natives had more military potential than might be supposed. The wars against the Mapuches, in present-day Chile, cost 30,000 Spanish casualties in the first century of conquest.

The horse and other animals

The cavalry charge had been a military technique since the times of Alexander the Great. The horse also made it possible to gallop into the mass of the enemy, dealing blows and causing a great number of casualties. On the other hand, the horse provided great ease of maneuver and movement to withdraw after the charge. Cortés had 16 horses in Cozumel and Pizarro had 67 horses in Cajamarca.

The introduction of the horse by the Spanish allowed them in some cases to move quickly and launch rapid attacks. However, in mountainous and jungle areas, the Spanish proved less technologically adapted than the indigenous cultures, which used the llama and special techniques to build roads and bridges adapted to that type of terrain. In some cases the native peoples, mainly in North America, Araucanía, the pampa and Patagonia, appropriated the horse and developed training and riding techniques, and it became a decisive factor in repelling the conquistadors. The Spanish also used dogs of war to track and attack natives and slaves in the jungle and in the forests.

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  The Spanish conquistador Pedro de Candía firing a matchlock arquebus
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  The use of horses was completely unknown to the American Indians. Purebred Spanish horses are, moreover, internationally recognized for their excellence
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  Mural depicting a ship's moorings, a matchlock musket (an evolution of the arquebus), a Spanish Captain and veins of pure gold. Pavilion of Navigation, Seville, Spain.
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  Rapiers of Toledo steel. The classic morion is also in the display case. Museum of Popular Arts and Customs, Seville

Technology

The Aztecs and the Incas were technologically more backward than the Spanish. They knew the wheel but did not know practical ways to use it; likewise they did not have the knowledge to create metal alloys, although they had good communication networks and were skilled in lithic manufactures and in noble metals. Nor did they know sail navigation.

Knowledge of metal was applied mainly to the making of religious, artistic and symbolic objects, as well as everyday household utensils. Only the Quechuas and the Purépechas made copper and bronze weapons, but these did not reach the edge and hardness of iron or steel.

Human resources

Hernán Cortés, with 508 men, conquered Tenochtitlán, a city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, capital of the Aztec Empire, which had 10 million people. Francisco Pizarro had only 177 men when he won the battle of Cajamarca against 40,000 Incas, an important city of the Inca Empire, which had 16 million inhabitants. Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada conquered New Granada with fewer than 700 soldiers. Pedro de Valdivia began the occupation of Chile with 12 men and finished it with some 150. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored and laid the foundations for the peaceful conquest of the entire South of the present-day United States with only 2 companions.

On the other hand, the native civilizations had the numerical advantage, although the disunity and enmities among the indigenous peoples played in favor of the Spanish. In every case the indigenous nations the Spanish sought to conquer outnumbered them: on average, peninsular Spaniards never exceeded 2% of the population of America. However, it was common for the Spanish conquistadors to make alliances to form large armies. The army with which Hernán Cortés attacked Tenochtitlán was made up of 200,000 soldiers, of whom less than 1% were Spaniards. However, at the tactical level the Spanish were far superior to the Aztecs and Incas. While the natives tried to capture prisoners to sacrifice to their gods for a ritual purpose, the Spanish usually killed the enemy in hand-to-hand combat for a strategic purpose, which, combined with their more effective weaponry, caused great mortality among the Indians.

Another fundamental factor was the ability of the conquistadors to ally themselves with indigenous peoples by taking advantage of the existing enmity between some peoples, either supporting one of the sides in a civil war, as in the case of the Inca Empire, or allying themselves with the groups subjugated by the kingdom they sought to conquer, as was the case of the Aztec Empire.

The discontent of the peripheral indigenous populations subjugated by the city-states, and the conviction that the Spanish way of life was better than the one they had had until then, disposed those populations to join the Spanish. In some cases more than 90% of the troops the Spanish had were American natives. Among other cases, Cortés had the help of the Totonacs, of Cempoal and of the Tlaxcaltecs, while Núñez de Balboa had 12 great caciques, among whom were Dabaibe, Careta, Cheru, Nacarao and Micoya. Pedro de Heredia conquered Colombia with the help of the cacique Hinaldo. In the conquest of Peru, Pizarro had the help of the huancos. Before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro the Incas were already in a civil war. For the conquest of the Río de la Plata the help of the Guaraníes was obtained.

Writing

Jared Diamond explains that the Spanish deceptions into which Atahualpa and Moctezuma fell were due to the fact that the Spanish belonged to a literate society which, thanks to writing, had at its disposal an enormous corpus of knowledge about human behavior and history.

Diseases

Authors such as Jared Diamond summarize the causes of Pizarro's victory (the paradigm of the Spanish conquest) as «military technology based on guns and steel and horses, infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia, European maritime technology, the centralized political organization of European states, and writing».

The American writer Charles Mann says that Spain «would not have defeated the (Aztec) Empire if, while Cortés was building the boats, Tenochtitlán had not been ravaged by smallpox in the same pandemic that later devastated Tahuantinsuyu. The great city lost at least a third of its population as a result of the epidemic, including Cuitlahuac». Nevertheless, before the smallpox epidemic reached Tenochtitlán, the Aztecs and their allies were defeated at the Battle of Otumba by a contingent of Spaniards and Amerindian allies far inferior in number and in lamentable physical condition after suffering the defeat of the Noche Triste.

Something similar happened with the Inca Empire, defeated by Francisco Pizarro in 1531. The first smallpox epidemic was in 1525 and killed, among others, the Emperor Huayna Cápac, father of Atahualpa. New smallpox epidemics broke out in 1533, 1535, 1558 and 1565, as well as typhus in 1546, influenza in 1558, diphtheria in 1614 and measles in 1618. Dobyns estimated that 90% of the population of the Inca Empire died in those epidemics.

However, there may also have been diseases native to America that reduced the population. A study by the personal physician of Philip II of Spain, Francisco Hernández de Toledo, who performed autopsies, speaks of an epidemic of 1576. In some people there was gangrene in the body, and blood came out of the victims' ears. Hernández knew smallpox and typhus, and when he arrived in the New World he learned that this disease was none of the European diseases. Drawings made by the Aztecs themselves reveal the symptoms this disease produced, which the Aztecs themselves called cocoliztli. In 1545 and the following years 15 million people died, and in 1570 2 million died, which may correspond to two epidemics. Before those times there were long periods of drought followed by heavy rains, which indicates that this may have been the condition that allowed that virus to thrive in mouse populations and mutate to be transmitted to humans. That disease did not do much harm to the Spanish, claiming victims above all among the priests, who were always very close to the natives.

Just as many Indians perished from diseases brought by the Spanish, tropical diseases such as "barquía" or "modorra" came to cause the death of between 30% and 50% of some Spanish expeditions.

Demography

The decisive factor in the defeat of the American civilizations was the fall of their leaders and emperors, although the demographic collapse possibly played some role. Among researchers and social sectors there is no consensus on the causes of that collapse, some attributing it to genocide, others to the introduction of new diseases, and a third group to a combination of both causes. The North American researcher H. F. Dobyns has calculated that 95% of the total population of America died in the first 130 years after the arrival of Columbus. For their part, Cook and Borak, of the University of Berkeley, established after decades of research that the population in Mexico decreased from 25.2 million in 1518 to 700 thousand people in 1623, less than 3% of the original population. In 1492 Spain and Portugal together did not exceed 10 million people.

There is no consensus in considering that the demographic collapse of the original population of America was the main cause of its military defeat. Each case was particular. However, Steven Katz has said in this regard:

It is very probably the greatest demographic disaster in history: the depopulation of the New World, with all its terror, with all its death.

However, there was never any will on the part of the Spanish to carry out a total extermination of the indigenous population; rather, what they initially sought was to subjugate the population in order to exploit the resources and its labor. So it was at least until the promulgation of the Laws of Burgos and the rest of the derecho indiano, which showed a serious concern on the part of the Crown to protect the subjugated natives from abuses.

Evangelization in the conquest

The Alexandrine bull of 1493 meant papal recognition of the ownership of the newly discovered lands by the Kings of Spain, subject to the conversion of the Indians to Christianity. In Europe a conception of the Indians as genus angelicum or "angelic people" was created. After the first voyages some Indians were brought to Spain, and their slender build, their simple ways of life and their apparent naivety made everyone think that in America there would be a swift civilization and evangelization. In Spain an idealized and sweet conception of the Indians began to be created based on this first impression.

Of course, nothing from the first moment suggested the violent customs of those Indians, who were also immersed in wars in America and who habitually carried out practices such as cannibalism. In fact, by 1512 the Spanish had only been able to settle in the islands of the Caribbean due to indigenous bellicosity.

Ferdinand the Catholic commissioned a theological and legal study from the Dominican Matías de Paz and the jurist Juan López de Palacios, who concluded that it is unlawful to wage war on the Indians to force them to convert, but that such a war may be just if the caciques and chiefs forbid the free conversion of their subjects, or if war is needed to overturn inhuman customs when they refused to abandon them. Twenty years later Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto would reach the same conclusions.

As the conquest advanced, the Indians gradually abandoned their old customs and conversions to Christianity began, although war was resorted to quite often without, in the judgment of some, this being necessary. For this reason, a Royal Order of 1526 provided that any military expedition must be accompanied by authorized clergymen to prevent abuse. By 1549 the continent was already considered practically pacified, and the rest of the work was considered to correspond almost exclusively to the missionaries.

Francisco de Vitoria, of the University of Salamanca, developed legal and theological theories on the rights of the person, being a firm defender of the rights of the Indians. In 1573 Philip II prohibited armed conquest in America, and civilization was entrusted to friars and teachers.

The division of America among the European nations

Spanish colonization of America

The European colonization of America began at the end of the 15th century after Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492 under the patronage of the Catholic Monarchs. From then on, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire and the Dutch Empire conquered and colonized the continent, the Spanish being the most extensive empire.

The Spanish Empire was the first to carry out the conquest, and it settled mainly in North America, Central America and the Andean area of South America (the Aztec and Inca empires, respectively). Spain was soon joined by Portugal, which claimed territorial rights over Brazil by virtue of the Treaty of Alcáçovas, the Alexandrine Bulls and the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Spain was the power that imposed the greatest colonial presence in America. It took possession by force of the two great empires existing in America at that time. Spain took over the entire West Coast of North America up to the Strait of Georgia, the Rocky Mountains and the Florida Peninsula, in addition to all of Central America, the Caribbean and South America, with the exception of an Atlantic coastal area that later became Brazil and the Guianas. In this expansion the Spanish Empire would defeat the Aztec Empire and the Inca Empire, in addition to giving battle to and dominating territories of various American tribes.

England established thirteen colonies on the East Coast of North America and in a good part of Canada, in addition to conquering some Caribbean islands from Spain, such as Jamaica.

France occupied present-day French Guiana in South America (still under its rule), Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico, some Caribbean islands, and the Canadian region of Quebec. In the 18th century the Spanish would cede to France the western half of Hispaniola; present-day Haiti.

The Netherlands established colonies in North America (New Amsterdam, which would later become New York), the north of South America (Dutch Guiana, today Suriname) and some settlements on Caribbean islands (Netherlands Antilles and Aruba).

Differences between the Spanish conquistadors and the Anglo-Saxon conquest

The English conquest began a century later than the Spanish one. In the 17th century the powerful musket and the flintlock represented a great improvement in firearms, from which the English benefited.

The Anglo-Saxon conquerors fought with a 2-to-1 advantage to occupy North America in 200 years, and the Spanish conquistadors subjugated by force three times as much territory in four times less time and with a numerical inferiority of 300 to 1, although in the conquest of New Spain they always had a very large number of indigenous allies who, in some particular cases such as the siege of Tenochtitlán, reached 100,000 allies, according to Hernán Cortés himself.

The Anglo-Saxon conquerors did not integrate the subjugated peoples into their society, limiting themselves to exterminating the local population in order to then occupy their territories, to which they transferred European ways of life in their entirety. The Spanish would form a new society in America through the fusion of European culture with the indigenous cultures, in a manner similar to the case of the Roman Empire. Anglo-Saxon colonization was made up of Protestant expatriates who were not tolerated by the Anglicans in Great Britain and who brought their customs and their women, so they marked out their possessions and then expelled the natives. By contrast, the Spanish did not create a society differentiated by race because hardly any women traveled to America in the early days. The Spanish united with indigenous women and baptized them, forming a mestizo people, although not peacefully, with cases of rape and forced marriages on the part of the Spanish.

In Australia it is estimated that there were one million Aborigines when the first English arrived, while in 1901 93,000 remained. The Aborigines of Tasmania had worse luck, as they were exterminated, partly by diseases, and also with a technique called the "black line", which consisted of a line of 2,200 soldiers covering the entire width of the island while firing at the Aborigines as they advanced. Until the 1960s it was well regarded and legal in Australia to take Aboriginal children to bring them home to work at domestic tasks if they were girls or to work in the fields if they were boys.

Gold

Re-creation of some silver ingots in a strongbox. Silver turned out to be the most abundant precious metal in America. Pavilion of Navigation of Seville.

The Spanish presence in America has often been associated with the conquistadors' search for gold. Certainly, the legends about the Seven Cities of Gold of Cíbola in North America and El Dorado in South America motivated some expeditions, such as those of Vázquez de Coronado and Francisco de Orellana. On December 9 of the year 2018.

Although the most frequent reality was much more prosaic, because the conquistadors sought not so much mythical golden cities as the conquest of lands that could bring them wealth: mining deposits, labor, fields... Christopher Columbus had already managed to find gold in Hispaniola and Central America, so the existence of gold was something confirmed. However, it would later be discovered that the most abundant precious metal in America was silver, and the Spanish extracted it for centuries from Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Chile.

From the end of the 15th century, the Spanish (above all Andalusians and Extremadurans), aware that the world was now larger, decided to emigrate to a place that would provide them with great prosperity. The gold nuggets that had arrived from the Caribbean were enough to encourage a "gold rush" that increased interest in going to the New World. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, said:

We came here to serve God and His Majesty, and also to obtain riches

Moreover, precious metals were not the only possible business in the New World. For example, the conquistador Juan Ponce de León managed to make a fortune trading in cassava bread.

See also

• List of Spanish conquistadors
• European colonization of America
• Conquest of Peru
• Conquest of Colombia
• Conquest of Mexico
• Conquest of Costa Rica
• Spanish expeditions
• Junta of Valladolid
• Mestizaje in America
• Reconquista (Hispanic America)

References

Bibliography

• Wood, Michael (2000). Conquistadores, Michael Wood. BBC Books. ISBN 9781448141500.
• Hammond, Innes (2002). Los Conquistadores. Penguin.
• Sánchez Galera, Juan and Jose María (2012). Vamos a Contar Mentiras (in español). Edaf.* Aram, Bethany (2007). Leyenda negra y leyendas doradas en la conquista de América: Pedrarias y Balboa (in español). Marcial Pons, Ediciones de Historia. Book online
• Maura, Juan Francisco (2005). Españolas de Ultramar en la historia y en la literatura (in español). Valencia: Universidad de Valencia. Book online
• Restall, Matthew and Fernández-Armesto, Felipe (2012). The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195392296.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Book online
• Katz, S. T. (1994–2003). The Holocaust in Historical Context (2 vol.). New York: Oxford Universtity Press.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
• Dobyns, H. F. (1983). Their number become thinned: Native American population dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville (Tenn.): University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 9780195092301.
• Mann, Charles (2006). 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Madrid: Taurus. ISBN 9780739464410.
• Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, T.I. (in español).
• Prescott, William H. (2004). Historia de la conquista de México (in español). Antonio Machado. ISBN 9788477742371.
• Thomas, Hugh (2000). La conquista de México (in español). Planeta. ISBN 9788408035145.
• John Charles Chasteen (2001). Born In Blood And Fire: A Concise History of Latin America. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0-393-97613-7.

External links

• Coloquios Históricos de Extremadura
• Los conquistadores españoles (website), by David Nievas.