World History Journal WEEK 2
Cooper2021
WorldintheMakingAGlobalHistoryVolumeTwoSince1300-127-164.pdf
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16
The Rise of an Atlantic World 1450–1600
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World in the Making Painted on calfskins, portolan (“port finder”) charts were used by mariners in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic beginning in the late fourteenth century. A fter Columbus’s momentous transatlantic voyage in 1492, portolan charts began to depict new European discoveries in the A mericas with great accuracy. This 1500 map by Juan de la Cosa, who sailed with Columbus, is the earliest such chart.
Guns, Sails, and Compasses: Europeans Venture Abroad
FOCUS Why and how did Europeans begin to cross unknown seas in the fifteenth century?
New Crossroads, First Encounters: The European Voyages of Discovery, 1492–1521
FOCUS What were the main sources of conflict between Europeans and native Americans in the first decades after contact?
Spanish Conquests in the Americas, 1519–1600
FOCUS What factors enabled the Spanish to conquer the Aztec and Inca Empires?
A New Empire in the Americas: New Spain and Peru, 1535–1600
FOCUS Why was the discovery of silver in Spanish America so important in the course of world history?
Brazil by Accident: The Portuguese in the Americas, 1500–1600
FOCUS How and why did early Portuguese Brazil develop differently from Spanish America?
COUNTERPOINT: The Mapuche of Chile: Native America’s Indomitable State
FOCUS How did the Mapuche of Chile manage to resist European conquest?
backstory By the mid-1400s, some 60 million people
inhabited the Americas, about half of them
subjects of the Aztec and Inca Empires (see
Chapter 15). These empires relied on far-
flung tribute networks and drew from diverse
cultural traditions even as they spread their
own religious practices and imperial lan-
guages. Outside the Aztec and Inca realms,
smaller states and chiefdoms occupied much
of the hemisphere. Conflict between groups,
whether in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, or eastern
North America, was frequent.
The inhabitants of western Eurasia and
North Africa were slowly recovering from the
Black Death of 1347–1350 (see Chapter 14).
Weakened nobilities and rebounding popu-
lations stimulated trade, political consolida-
tion, and the adoption of new technologies for
war and transport. The long-distance trade in
luxury goods also recovered, but by the early
1400s the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the
eastern Mediterranean intensified competi-
tion and limited western European access to
overland routes such as the Silk Road.
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Malintzin (mah-LEEN-tseen) was only a girl when she was traded away around 1510 to serve a noble family in what is today the state of Tabasco, Mexico. She herself was a noble, a native speaker of the Aztec language, Nahuatl (NAH-watt). Malintzin’s new masters were Chontal Maya speakers, and soon she learned this language.
Throughout Malintzin’s servitude in Tabasco, stories circulated there and in the neighboring Yucatan peninsula of bearded strangers. One day in the year 1519, vessels filled with such men arrived in Tabasco. The Tabascans attacked a party that came ashore, but they were defeated. In exchange for peace, they offered the strang- ers gold and feather work, and also several servant girls, among them Malintzin. W hen asked through an interpreter where the gold had come from, the Tabascans said “Mexico.”
The strangers’ interpreter was a Spanish castaway, Jerόnimo de Aguilar, who had lived several years in the Yucatan, recently ransomed by his countrymen. Aguilar soon discovered that Malintzin knew the language of Aztec Mexico. The strangers’ leader, Hernando Cortés, took a special interest in her for this reason, but he also considered her the most beautiful and intelligent of the captives.
Twice given away now, Malintzin joined the foreigners in their floating homes. Heading west, they reached an island where Cortés ordered a party ashore to make contact with villagers and, through them, to speak with traveling Aztec representa- tives. Only Nahuatl was spoken.
Suddenly the bilingual Malintzin was thrust into a role of global significance. She passed along in Nahuatl the words Aguilar gave her in Chontal Mayan. Then she did the reverse when the Aztec ambassadors replied. Aguilar made sense of the Mayan replies for Cortés, who was already planning a march on the Aztec capital. From here until the end of the conquest campaigns in 1521, Malintzin served as Cortés’s key to Aztec Mexico.
In modern Mexican mythology Malintzin, or Malinche (mah-LEEN-cheh), is regarded as a traitor, a collaborator, even a harlot. But these characterizations are anachronistic and unfair. Malintzin was not seen as a traitor in her own day, even by the Aztecs. In their paintings of the conquest, early Nahuatl-speaking artists often placed Malintzin at the center, poised and confident.
But why had Europeans like Cortés suddenly arrived in Malintzin’s world? In part it was because wealth-seeking Iberians (inhabitants of the peninsula occupied by Spain and Portugal) had long begun charting the Atlantic. Over time they
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T h e Ri s e o f a n At l a n t i c Wo r l d 145 0 –16 0 0
developed the technologies needed to navigate open seas, exploring first the west coast of Africa and then crossing the ocean itself. Flush with capital, Italian bankers helped fund these enterprises.
The resulting Iberian encounter with the Americas was an accident of monumental significance. In quest of legendary Asian riches, Christopher Columbus and his successors landed instead in the previously isolated regions they called the New World. It was new to them, of course, but not so to native Americans like Malintzin. Cultural misunderstandings, political divisions among indigenous peoples, and European firearms aided conquest and settlement, but germs made the biggest difference.
These germs were part of what historian Alfred Crosby dubbed “the Columbian Exchange,” the first major biological relinking of the earth since the continents had drifted apart in prehistoric times. Although Europeans brought deadly diseases to the Americas, they also brought animals for transport, plowing, and consumption. Another effect of this global exchange was rapid population growth in parts of the world where American crops such as potatoes and maize took root. European expansion made the Atlantic a global crossroads, the center of a new pattern of ex- change affecting the entire world.
Finally, we should not make the mistake of assuming that Europeans met no signifi- cant resistance in the Americas. As we shall see in the Counterpoint that concludes this chapter, one group of native Americans who successfully fought off European conquest, in part by adopting the horse and turning it against their oppressors, were the Mapuche of Chile.
1. What were the main
biological and environ-
mental consequences of
European expansion to
the Atlantic after 1492?
2. What roles did misun-
derstanding and chance
play in the conquests of
the Aztecs and Incas?
3. How did Eurasian
demand for silver and
sugar help bring about
the creation of a linked
Atlantic world?
OVERVIEW QUESTIONS
The major global development in this chapter: European expansion across the Atlantic and its profound consequences for societies and cultures worldwide.
As you read, consider:
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Guns, Sails, and Compasses: Europeans Venture Abroad
FOCUS Why and how did europeans begin to cross unknown seas in the fifteenth century?
Nordic and southern European mariners had long been venturing out to sea, test- ing winds and currents as they founded colonies and connected markets. Some shared information, but as in the Mediterranean, colonizing distant lands was a competitive process. In the fifteenth century tiny Portugal forged the world’s first truly global maritime empire. Neighboring Spain followed, spurred on by Christo- pher Columbus and a crusading spirit.
Motives for Exploration Early modern Europeans sought to accumulate wealth, gain power against their rivals, and spread Christianity. Commerce was a core motive for expansion, as European merchants found themselves starved for gold and silver, which they needed to purchase Asian spices, silks, gems, and other luxuries. In part because of Europe’s relative poverty, ambitious monarchs and princes adopted violent means to extend their dominions overseas and to increase their tax and tribute incomes. Finally, Europe’s many Christian missionaries hoped to spread their religion throughout the globe. These motives would shape encounters between Europeans and native Americans.
“Gold is most excellent,” wrote Christopher Columbus in a letter to the king and queen of Spain. “Gold constitutes treasure, and anyone who has it can do whatever he likes in the world.”1 Columbus was a native of the Italian city-state of Genoa, and Genoese merchants had long traded for gold in North A frica. A frican gold lubricated Mediterranean and European trade, but population growth, com- mercial expansion, and competition among Christian and Islamic states strained supplies. It was thus the well-placed Portuguese, who established a North A frican foothold in Morocco in 1415, who first sought direct access to A frican gold (see Map 16.2, pages 576–577).
Italian merchants made some of their greatest profits on spices. Since most spices came from the tropical margins of Asia, they rose considerably in value as they passed through the hands of mostly Islamic middlemen in the Indian Ocean and eastern Mediterranean. Indian pepper and Indonesian nutmeg were but a few of the many desired condiments that Portuguese and other European merchants
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hoped to purchase more cheaply by sailing directly to the source. This entailed either circumnavigating A frica or finding a western passage to the Pacific.
Slaves were also prized throughout the Mediterranean basin, and demand for them grew with the expansion of commercial agriculture and the rise of wealthy merchant families. Prices also rose as source regions near the Black Sea were cut off after 1453 by the Ottomans. As the word slave suggests, many captives came from the Slavic regions of eastern Europe. Others were prisoners of war. In part to meet growing Christian European demand, sub-Saharan A fricans were transported to North A frican ports by caravan. As with gold, southern European merchants sought captives by sailing directly to West A frica.
Sugar, another commodity in high demand in Europe, required large invest- ments in land, labor, and machinery. Produced mostly by enslaved workers on eastern Atlantic islands such as Portuguese Madeira by the mid-fifteenth century, cane sugar increasingly became common as both a sweetener and preservative. As sugar took the place of honey in Old World cuisines, few consumers pondered its growing connection to overseas enslavement. In time, European demand for sugar would lead to the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade and the forced migra- tion of millions of A fricans to the Americas.
Technologies of Exploration As they set sail for new horizons, Europeans employed innovations in three tech- nological spheres: gun making, shipbuilding, and navigation. First was firearms manufacture. Gunpowder, a Chinese invention, had been known since at least the ninth century C.E . Chinese artisans made rockets and bombs, but it was early modern Europeans who developed gunpowder and gun making to their greatest destructive effect.
Europeans had also borrowed Chinese papermaking and movable type technol- ogies, and by 1500 they published treatises detailing the casting and operation of cannon. Soon, crude handguns and later muskets transformed field warfare, first in Europe, then worldwide. As gun and powder technologies improved, contingents of musketeers replaced archers, crossbowmen, and other foot soldiers.
The second key technological leap was in ship construction. A lthough small, swift-sailing vessels traversed the medieval Mediterranean, long-distance car- riers were cumbersome and even dangerous when overloaded. The Roman-style galley was a fighting vessel propelled by captive oarsmen with occasional help from sails. Galleys functioned best where seas were calm, distances short, and prisoners plentiful. Something else was needed for the rougher waters and longer voyages common in the North Atlantic. Here, shipwrights combined more rigid North Sea
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hull designs and square sail rigs with some of the defen- sive features of the galley. They also borrowed the gal- ley’s triangular or lateen sails, which in turn had been adapted from the Arabian dhows (dowz) of the Indian Ocean.
The resulting hybrid vessels, including the caravel used by ocean-crossing mariners such as Columbus, proved greater than the sum of their parts. A lthough slow and unwieldy by modern standards, these late- fifteenth-century European ships were the world’s most durable and maneuverable means of heav y trans- port to date. Later modified into galleons, frigates, and clippers, they would serve as the basic models for virtu- ally all European carriers and warships until the advent of steam technology in the early nineteenth century.
European navigational innovations also propelled overseas expansion. Cosmographers believed the world to be spherical by Columbus’s time, but finding one’s way from port to port beyond sight of land was still a source of worry. One aid was the magnetic com- pass, like gunpowder and printing a fairly ancient Chi- nese invention developed in a novel way by Europeans. We know from travelers’ accounts that sailors in the Indian Ocean also used compasses, but rarely in com- bination with portolan (“port finder”) sea charts, which contained detailed compass bearings and harbor de- scriptions (see again the chapter-opening illustration). Charts and compasses together changed European navigators’ perceptions of what had formerly been trackless seas.
Another borrowed instrument, apparently Arabic in origin, was the astrolabe. A calculator of latitude (one’s location north or south of the equator), it proved even more critical for long-distance maritime travel than the compass. Precise knowledge of latitude was essential for early modern sailors in particular since longitude, a more complicated east–west calculation, was hard to determine until the mid-eighteenth century.
Portuguese Ship The Portuguese were the first Europeans to develop ocean-going ships for extended, return voyages. Initially they combined rigid hull designs from the Atlantic with maneuverable triangular sails of A rabic origin to build caravels, but these small vessels had limited cargo space and were vulnerable to attack. This evocative image from a contemporary manuscript shows Vasco da Gama’s flagship, the St. Gabriel, on its way to India in 1497–1498 with every stitch of canvas out. For such long trips the Portuguese chose to sacrifice the maneuverability of the caravel in favor of maximizing sail surface and relying on trade winds. The resulting ships, which could carry up to 1200 tons of cargo and were built like floating fortresses, are known as “carracks.” Portugal’s national symbol until recent times, the red cross of the Order of Christ, identified such ships as Portuguese. (The A rt A rchive/Science Academy Lisbon/ Gianni Dagli Orti.)
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Thus armed with an impressive ensemble of borrowed and modified tools, weapons, and sail- ing vessels, Europeans were poised to venture out into unknown worlds. Add the recent devel- opment of the printing press, and they were also able to publicize their journeys in new if not alto- gether honest ways.
Portugal Takes the Lead W hy did tiny Portugal, one of Europe’s least populated kingdoms, lead the way in overseas expansion? A look at key factors helps solve this puzzle. First, Portugal was an ancient maritime crossroads straddling two commercial spheres, the Mediterranean and northeast Atlantic (see Map 16.1). Coastal shipping had grown effi- cient while overland transport remained slow and costly. Well before 1400, merchants from as far away as Venice and Stockholm put in at Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, to break up their journeys. Commercial competition was fos- tered by Portugal’s kings, and along with money and goods, important shipbuilding and sailing knowledge was exchanged. Capital, in the form of money, ships, and goods, accumulated in the hands of merchant clans, many of them foreign.
Other factors besides accumulating capital pushed the Portuguese abroad. By the 1430s, fish- ermen regularly ventured far out into the Atlantic in pursuit of better catches. Moreover, arable land in Portugal became scarce as populations grew, rendering overseas colonization more attractive. A lso, religious and strategic concerns drove Por- tuguese nobles to capture the Islamic port city of Ceuta (SYOO-tah), on Morocco’s Mediter- ranean coast, in 1415. Thus, the push of limited resources at home and the pull of opportunities abroad stimulated Portuguese expansion.
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da Gam a, 1497–1498
To India
D ias, 1487–1488
Lake Chad
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Genoa Venice
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�e East Atlantic, c. 1500
WEST AFRICA
CENTRAL AFRICA
MAP 16.1 The East Atlantic, c. 1500 The Portuguese were the first Europeans to seek a sea route to Asia, and they did so by mak ing their way south along the Atlantic coast of A frica. The diseases of tropical A frica limited Portuguese colonization to a few fortified enclaves, but they established lucrative settlement colonies in the eastern Atlantic island chains of the A zores, Madeiras, and Cape Verdes, along with the wet tropical island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea. By 1500 the Portuguese had discovered that the fastest way to round the tip of A frica was to follow the prevailing winds and currents that swept to the west of the A frican coast before turning southeast.
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With support from ambitious nobles such as Prince Henry “the Navigator” (1394–1460), Portuguese and foreign investors pooled capital and invested it in new technologies to create a network of settlement colonies and feitorias (fay-toe-R EE- ahs), or fortified trading posts. Some invested in overseas plantations in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, others in the gold and slave trades of West Africa.
The Portuguese soon learned to navigate the West A frican coast. By 1430 they had come upon the Azores and Madeiras, uninhabited island chains in the east- ern Atlantic (see again Map 16.1). With incentives from the Crown and Italian merchant investment, Portuguese settlers colonized and farmed these islands. The Canaries, farther south, were different. These rugged volcanic islands posed distinct political and moral challenges from their inhabitants: chiefdoms de- scended from pre-Islamic Moroccan immigrants. “They go about naked with- out any clothes,” wrote one Portuguese chronicler, “and have little shame at it; for they make a mockery of clothes, saying they are but sacks in which men put themselves.”2
W hat was to be done? Should the inhabitants of the Canary Islands be con- quered and their lands taken over by Europeans, and if so, by what right, and by whom? The presence of indigenous Canarians in fact spurred competition among European adventurers, including Spanish missionaries and French and Portuguese nobles. Spanish nobles under Isabella and Ferdinand ultimately won title to the is- lands. The Guanches (H WA N-chehs), as the Europeans called the largest group of native inhabitants, faced annihilation. Survivors were enslaved and made to work on sugar plantations. In many ways, the Canarian experience foretold Iberian, and more generally European, actions in the Americas. W hen they stood in the way of European ambitions, the interests of indigenous peoples counted for little.
A lways in search of gold, which the eastern Atlantic islands lacked, and spurred on by Prince Henry, the Portuguese in 1444 reached the mouth of the Senegal R iver. Here the Portuguese traded warhorses for gold dust with representatives of the Muslim Wolof kingdoms. They also traded, and on a few occasions raided, for slaves. The victims of these 1440s raids and exchanges were the first A fricans to be shipped en masse across Atlantic waters. Most ended up in the households and workshops of Lisbon.
The Portuguese reached the kingdom of Benin in the 1480s, when they also began settling the offshore islands of Príncipe and São Tomé. Some captives from Benin were forced to plant and refine sugar on São Tomé. The slave-staffed sugar plantation, which would define life in much of the American tropics from the fif- teenth to nineteenth centuries, found a prototype here off central A frica just before Columbus’s famous voyages.
feitoria A Portuguese overseas trading post, usually fortified.
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By 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded A frica’s Cape of Good Hope, and ten years later, Vasco da Gama became the first European to reach India by sea. W hen Chris- topher Columbus proposed a westward route to “the Indies,” the Portuguese king, on the advice of his cosmographers, declined. Columbus’s calculations were in doubt, as was the need for an alternative. Once in the Indian Ocean, the Portu- guese used their sturdy ships and superior firepower to capture more than a dozen ports by 1510. The emphasis on ports reflected Portuguese ambitions. They sought to dominate the existing maritime Asian trade, not to establish a colonial land empire. Thus, as we shall see, Portuguese and Spanish expansion would take dif- ferent forms.
New Crossroads, First Encounters: The European Voyages of Discovery 1492–1521
FOCUS What were the main sources of conflict between europe- ans and native americans in the first decades after contact?
Portugal’s Spanish neighbors were equally interested in overseas expansion, but by Columbus’s time they lagged far behind. Like Portugal, Spain had competent sail- ors and shipbuilders, and some families were tied to the early A frican trade. W hat would distinguish Spain’s overseas enterprises from Portugal’s, however, was a tendency to acquire large landmasses by force, colonize them with large numbers of settlers, and force Catholicism on all inhabitants. In part this pattern derived from the centuries-long Christian Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula that ended with the defeat of the Muslim caliphate of Granada in January 1492. As if fated, it was at Ferdinand and Isabella’s military encampment at Granada that Columbus received his license to sail across the Atlantic.
Christopher Columbus in a New World Christopher Columbus, born in Genoa in 1451, came of age in the profit-seeking East Atlantic world centered on Lisbon. Columbus married Felipa de Perestrelo, a Portuguese noblewoman, but did not settle down. Instead, he sailed on Portuguese ships bound for West A frica, England, and even Iceland. He became obsessed with sailing west to China and Japan, which he had read about in the account of Marco Polo. Around 1485 Columbus left for Spain, where he eventually won the sponsor- ship of Isabella and Ferdinand. By 1492 he was off to cross the Atlantic in search of the successors of Qubilai K han, China’s famed thirteenth-century Mongol ruler.
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MAP 16.2 European Voyages of Discovery, c. 1420–1600 In a remarkably short time, the Portuguese and Spanish went from exploring the eastern Atlantic to circumnavigating the globe. Christopher Columbus’s first Spanish-sponsored voyage across the Atlantic in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s Portuguese-sponsored trip to India in 1497–1498 heightened the competition, and by 1519 Ferdinand
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European Voyages of Discovery, c. 1420–1600 European claims, c. 1600
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Calicut
Mozambique
Mombassa
Bombay
Magellan, a Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish, set out to circle the globe by rounding South A merica and crossing the Pacific. Magellan was killed in the Philippines, but some of his crew survived to return to Spain in 1522. It was not until the 1577–1580 voyage of the English privateer Francis Drake, led by a kidnapped Portuguese pilot, that another European circumnavigated the globe.
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On October 12, 1492, barely a month after leaving his last stop in the Canary Islands, Columbus and his mostly Spanish crew made contact with the native Taino (tah-EE-no) inhabitants of Guanahani, one of the smaller Bahama Islands. Unable to communicate with them, Columbus imagined himself somewhere near Japan, or at least “east of India.” He christened the island San Salvador, or “Holy Savior,” and called the native Bahamians and all other indigenous peoples he sub- sequently encountered “Indians” (see Map 16.2).
Remarking in his journal that the “Indians” he met in the Bahamas were tall, well built, scantily clad, and ignorant of iron weapons, Columbus proposed that they would make excellent slaves. They reminded him of the Canary Islanders. True to his word, Columbus eventually shipped some five hundred Caribbean na- tives to the markets of Seville.
After landfall in the Bahamas, Columbus sailed southwest to Cuba, then east to the large island known locally as Haiti. He renamed it “Española” (“Hispaniola,” “Little Spain” in English) and began looking for a town site to settle in the name of his queen. In the course of this and three subsequent voyages, Christopher Columbus claimed and named everything and everyone that came into his view for his royal Spanish sponsors. In his logbook, Columbus reiterated his hopes of finding gold, spices, and news of “the Great Khan.” He died in 1506, still believing he was near China.
For the diverse American peoples who met Columbus and his crewmembers, the foreigners provoked mixed feelings. They brought useful goods, including hatch- ets and sewing needles, but when their demands for food, gold, and sexual com- panionship were not met, they turned violent, torturing, raping, and murdering native islanders at will. No one, least of all Columbus, seemed willing to punish the newcomers or rein them in. Before long, some frustrated Taino hosts returned the violence in kind, but this only led to vengeance raids. In the most extreme cases, native women killed their children, then themselves, to avoid violation.
As he continued looking for China, and for gold, Columbus came to regard his arrival in the “Indies” as a divinely sanctioned event. He claimed in his writings that the Indians, particularly his Taino allies, needed him for religious indoctrina- tion, instruction in the ways of work and trade, and physical protection.
Protection was essential due to the presence of “evil” Indians, as Columbus described them, enemies of the Taino. The word Caribbean derives from Carib, or caribe, apparently an ethnic term. Groups of so-called Caribs did inhabit the smaller islands to the east and south of Borinquen, the large island renamed Puerto R ico by the Spanish. A lthough culturally similar to the Taino, these Caribs were said to have a particularly bad habit: they ate human flesh.
“Man-eating” natives were a predictable New World wonder, the sort of marvel medieval travelers had described for sensation-hungry readers. Columbus happily
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played along. It appears he blended the Latin canis (dog) and local ethnic name caribe to produce a new word: canibal, or “cannibal.” Carib and cannibal soon became interchangeable terms in the lexicon of Span- ish conquest, and the image of the cannibal stuck fast in the European imagination. Indeed, almost as quickly as news of the Indies reached Europe, printers rushed to illustrate the alleged atrocities of the Caribbean “dog-people.”
Scholars disagree as to whether the so-called Caribs practiced cannibalism. W hat mattered for Columbus and his followers was that their allies, the “good Indi- ans,” said they did. With such a legal pretext (the eating of human flesh being regarded as a clear violation of natural law in the Western tradition), the newcomers could claim to be serving a necessary police role. They alone could adequately “protect” and “punish”—that is, take over Western-style functions of government in the “New World.”
Spanish sovereignty in the Americas required more legal support. Even before the voyages of Columbus, Portugal’s overseas interests had clashed with Spain’s. With the pope’s mediation, in 1494 the Spanish and Portuguese split the world into two zones of influence. According to the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Spanish were to rule everyone living 370 leagues (roughly 1110 miles) or more west of the Canaries. A frica, Asia, and eventually Brazil, which was not known to Europeans until 1500, fell to the Portuguese (see again Map 16.2).
W hy was the Roman Catholic pope involved in an agreement of this k ind? First, fi fteenth-centur y Europeans regarded his authorit y as above that of secular rulers. More important, however, was the matter of spreading the Christian gospel, a job Columbus himself embraced. Iberian monarchs, as pious Catholics, promised to sponsor the conversion of ever yone their subjects encountered abroad and also to continue the medieval fight against “ infidels.” Commerce may have supplied the initial and most pow- erf ul motive for overseas expansion, but a drive for religious and cultural hege- mony soon played an important part in European colonization.
Dog-Faced Cannibals European readers of chivalry tales and travel accounts expected the A merican “New World” to yield fantastic and horrible creatures. Early news from the Caribbean and Brazil suggested the existence of humans with doglike, omnivorous appetites, seeming to confirm the alleged observations of Marco Polo and other medieval travelers. In this 1527 woodcut, a German artist fused Weimaraner-like dogs’ heads with naked German butchers, one with a raised steel cleaver, to represent native A mericans. Since this image predates the Spanish conquest of the Incas by five years, the horned llama-like animal at lower left is of special interest.
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From Independence to Servitude: The Encomienda System A lthough missionaries were present in the Caribbean from the 1490s, early Span- ish colonization was mostly a mad dash for gold and slaves. Settlers had little inter- est in working the land, preferring instead to live off native American slaves and tribute payers. As news of massive abuse and alarming death rates reached Spain, Queen Isabella demanded an end to Amerindian slavery. A fter 1503 only violent rebels and alleged cannibals were to be enslaved.
Would the Taino then be free in exchange for accepting Catholicism and Span- ish protection against the Caribs? No, in large part because their labor was thought necessary to mine gold, which Spain’s monarchs desperately wanted. Compromise came in the form of the encomienda system. Native villages were entrusted to Spaniards in a manner resembling medieval European feudalism: village farming folk were to offer labor and surplus produce to their “lord” in exchange for military protection. Chiefs served as middlemen. The Spanish encomenderos who received these fiefdoms were self-styled men-at-arms, and from their ranks would come the conquerors of the mainland.
Indians deemed good and faithful subjects paid tributes to their encomendero, or “trustee,” as he was called, in local goods, twice a year. Adult men were also re- quired to work for the encomendero from time to time. For his part, the encomen- dero was to protect his tributaries from outside attack and ensure their conversion to Christianity. However reciprocal in theory, the encomienda system was in fact used mostly to round up workers for the gold mines. It looked like slavery to the few Spanish critics who denounced it, and even more so to the many thousands of native peoples who suffered under it.
One Spanish critic was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Hispaniola encomendero’s son turned Dominican priest who became the leading defender of native American rights in early modern times. Through constant pleading at court, and in university debates and publications, Las Casas helped to suppress the indigenous slave trade and restrict the encomienda system by the early 1540s. For the Tainos, the reforms came too late. By 1510 there were only a few hundred encomienda subjects whereas a decade before there had been hundreds of thousands. By almost any measure, the Columbian era in the Caribbean was a disaster.
Columbus’s Successors Columbus’s accomplishments spawned dozens of like-minded expeditions (see again Map 16.2). These included the four voyages of A merigo Vespucci (1497–1504), a Florentine merchant for whom the continents of the Western
encomienda A feudal- style grant of a native A merican village to a conquistador or other Spaniard.
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Hemisphere would later be named. Vespucci won fame as a publicist of the new lands and peoples that Europeans were encountering throughout the A merican tropics. Vespucci soon realized that the A mericas were not part of Asia. This did not, however, prevent him from embracing other European preconceptions. In re- lating his voyages to Brazil, Vespucci calmly described the roasting and eating of human flesh among the local inhabitants. His reports only added to the European fi xation on native A merican cannibalism.
Other voyages included those of Juan de Solís and Ferdinand Magellan. Both were Portuguese explorers sailing for Spain, and both, like Columbus, sought a westward route to Asia. Solís sailed up the R ío de la Plata estuary near modern Buenos Aires in 1516, but was captured and killed in a skirmish with local inhab- itants. Magellan learned details of the Argentine coast from survivors of the Solís expedition, then organized a much more ambitious voyage to the Moluccas, or Maluku, in what is today Indonesia. The epic journey that followed, arguably one of the boldest ever undertaken, was recorded by the Venetian Antonio de Pigafetta.
Of the five ships that left Spain in 1519, two were wrecked before Magellan reached the straits at the southern tip of South America that still bear his name. W hen food ran short, crewmembers shot and salted penguins and sea lions. En- counters with the native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the neighboring mainland were brief and hostile. A lways the good publicist, Pigafetta described encounters with primitive giants, giving rise to the legend of Patagonia, or “the land of Big Foot.”
Once in the Pacific, Magellan sailed northwest to Guam, in the Mariana Islands. The four-month ocean crossing had left the crew malnourished; many died from the effects of scurv y, a disease caused by lack of vitamin C. Magellan then sailed to the Philippine island of Sebu, where he became embroiled in a dispute between local chieftains. A larmed to find Muslim merchants active in the region, Magellan sought to create an alliance with new converts to Christianity through a show of force. Instead, he and forty crew members were killed. Only one vessel escaped, returning to Spain in 1522 by following the new Portuguese sailing route through the Indian and Atlantic oceans. For the first time in recorded history, the world had been circumnavigated (see again Map 16.2).
Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, Spanish colonists became disillusioned with the fabled “West Indies” of Columbus. Unhappiest of all were the newest immigrants, desperate young men with dreams of gold. They fanned out across the Caribbean in search of new sources of wealth, both human and metallic. Most failed, and many died, but some eventually found what they sought: fabled continental em- pires rich beyond belief.
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The Columbian Exchange In a landmark 1972 book, historian A lfred Crosby argued that the most signifi- cant consequences of 1492 were biological.3 W hat Crosby called the Columbian Exchange referred to the massive interoceanic transfer of animals (including humans), plants, and diseases that followed in Columbus’s wake. Many of these transfers, such as the introduction of rats and smallpox to the Americas, were un- intentional. Yet all had profound consequences.
Since European explorers circled the globe shortly after Columbus’s time, this process of biological ex- change was a worldwide phenomenon. Indigenous cuisines, farming practices, and transportation modes were changed, sometimes for the better. Northern European populations, for example, grew rapidly thanks to A ndean potatoes, which thrived in cool, wet climates. South and Southeast Asian cuisines were altered by the introduction of A merican capsi- cum peppers and peanuts, which flourished in the Old World tropics.
But European livestock also rapidly altered land- scapes, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. In the worst case, the highlands of central Mexico were reduced to deserts following the introduction of sheep in the sixteenth century. Lacking predators, and having access to vast new pastures, their populations exploded. Similar processes of environmental transfor- mation were later repeated in Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and the western United States.
As in the case of ship-borne rats, many unwanted exchanges took place as well. Worst among these were diseases, mostly caused by viruses, bacteria, and blood parasites, introduced to previously unexposed hosts. In A frica and Eurasia the repeated spread of diseases such as smallpox, measles, and mumps had allowed people over time to develop immunity against these and other pathogens. As seen in Chapter 14, pandemics of plague could still be devastating, but never to the extent that they would be in long-isolated regions overseas. The peoples of the Americas, Australia, and Polynesia
Maize Perhaps the most globally transformative native A merican crop (v ying with the potato), maize was first domesticated in highland Mexico some 7000 years ago. This 1542 German depiction is the most accurate to survive from the first decades after maize was introduced to Europe. Similar varieties soon transformed global dietary patterns, particularly in sub-Saharan A frica. Some cultures adopted maize only as livestock feed.
Columbian Exchange Historian A lfred Crosby’s term for the movement of A merican plants, animals, and germs to the rest of the world and vice versa.
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proved tragically vulnerable in this regard; they suffered what was probably the worst demographic collapse in history.
Germs, coupled with colonialism, killed tens of millions. Evidence suggests that throughout the A mericas and Pacific Islands, indigenous populations declined by almost 90 percent within a century. Recovery and acquired immunity came slowly. With the introduction of malaria, yellow fever, and other mosquito-borne blood parasites, A merica’s lowland tropics became especially deadly. On the plus side, world food exchanges spurred population growth in Europe, A frica, and Asia, and contributed to the rebound of the A mericas. Overall, the spread of A merican crops boosted world population significantly before the end of early modern times. The peoples of the A mericas, however, paid a steep price for the Columbian Exchange.
Spanish Conquests in the Americas 1519–1600
FOCUS What factors enabled the spanish to conquer the aztec and inca empires?
Two men disappointed by the Caribbean islands were Hernando Cortés and Fran- cisco Pizarro. Cortés gained fame after 1521 as conqueror of the Aztecs, and Pizarro after 1532 as conqueror of the Incas. Their experiences on the American mainland gave rise to the almost mythical Spanish-American livelihood of conquistador, or conqueror. Like Columbus, neither man acted alone, but both altered the course of global history.
The Fall of Aztec Mexico As we saw in Chapter 15, the people known as Aztecs called themselves Mexica (meh-SHEE-cah). By the time Spaniards reached them in the late 1510s, the Mexica ruled much of Mesoamerica, often by terror. Cortés would soon discover, however, that the Aztec Empire was vulnerable.
A brash and ambitious leader, Hernando Cortés left his base in southern Cuba after a dispute with his sponsor, the governor. In Yucatan, as we have seen, he found an extraordinarily valuable translator in Malintzin. By September of 1519 Cortés set out for the interior from the new town of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf coast. With him were Malintzin and several hundred horses and well-armed men, accompanied by fighting dogs. A fter attacking both Aztec allies and enemies, the
conquistador Spanish for “conqueror,” a new livelihood in the A mericas after Columbus.
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Spanish and several thousand new allies entered Tenochtitlán in November 1519 as guests of the emperor, Moteuczoma, or “Moc- tezuma,” II.
Shortly after being treated to a feast by the curious and gra- cious Moctezuma, Cortés and his followers managed to seize the unsuspecting emperor. Fearful for their ruler’s life, the Aztec people, now leaderless, faced great uncertainty. Cortés ordered that anyone who opposed the Spanish and their allies would be publicly cut to pieces and fed to the dogs. Treachery, terror, and seizure of indigenous leaders were in fact stock tactics developed by Spanish conquistadors in the Caribbean. These tactics proved even more effective against mainland imperial peoples who de- pended on divine kings. Attached to their subsistence plots, set- tled farmers had nowhere to run.
There followed several months of looting and destruction, punctuated by battles and skirmishes. Some who resented the Aztecs supported the Spanish, most significantly the Tlaxcalans, but others resisted violently. Soon unfamiliar diseases such as smallpox and influenza swept through Tenochtitlán and the entire Valley of Mexico, decimating a vast and densely populated region already facing food shortages. Ironically, the people who would give the world maize, tomatoes, chocolate, vanilla, and a
thousand other life-sustaining and pleasurable foods were now receiving only the deadliest ingredients of the Columbian Exchange: viruses and bacteria. Cortés or- dered that images of the Virgin Mary be placed atop Aztec temples to assert the power of the invaders’ Christian deities.
W hile Cortés went to negotiate with soldiers sent by Cuba’s governor to arrest him in early 1520, the Spaniards left behind in Tenochtitlán provoked a siege by massacring Aztec nobles. Rushing to the city with Cuban recruits whom he had just won over, Cortés reached his comrades only to be trapped by the Aztec war- riors. The desperate Spaniards brought out the captive emperor, Moctezuma, in hopes of calming tempers, but he was killed in a hail of stones. The besieged Span- ish tried to flee Tenochtitlán but were quickly pinned down on one of the city’s three narrow causeways. Cortés and others escaped at the head of the pack, but many other Spaniards, about half the total number, fell into Aztec hands. Accord- ing to Aztec accounts, when the city’s male warriors fell dead or exhausted, women warriors took over, attacking with equal vigor (see Reading the Past: Tlatelolcan Elders Recall the Conquest of Mexico).
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READING THE PAST
Tlatelolcan Elders Recall the Conquest of Mexico In what would become New Spain, or colonial
Mexico, Spanish missionaries quickly introduced
European-style writing systems. Indigenous scribes
picked them up within a few decades of the con-
quest, rendering Nahuatl, Maya, and other local
languages in a Latinate script with Spanish pho-
netics. Formal documents, including histories and
sermons, were produced in this manner, but also
interviews, myths, genealogies, criminal testimo-
nies, and a host of everyday transactions. The fol-
lowing excerpt is a direct English translation of a
Nahuatl document from about 1540 relating the
conquest of both Tenochtitlán and its “twin city,”
Tlatelolco. The Tlatelolcan elders relating the story
to junior scribes apparently witnessed and partici-
pated in the events in question.
“And when they reached Yacocolco here, Spaniards
were captured on the Tlilhuacan [tleel-WALK-on]
road, as well as all the people from the various al-
tepetl [allied city-states]. Two thousand died there,
and the Tlatelolcans were exclusively responsible
for it. At this time we Tlatelolcans set up skull racks;
skull racks were in three places. One was in the
temple courtyard at Tlillan, where the heads of
our [present] lords [the Spaniards] were strung; the
second was in Yacocolco, where the heads of our
lords [the Spaniards] were strung, along with the
heads of two horses; the third place was in Çacatla,
facing the Cihuateocalli [see-wah-tayoh-CAH-yee]
[Woman-Temple]. It was the exclusive accomplish-
ment of the Tlatelolcans. After this they drove us
from there and reached the marketplace. That was
when the great Tlatelolcan warriors were entirely
vanquished. With that the fighting stopped once
and for all. That was when the Tlatelolcan women
all let loose, fighting, striking people, taking cap-
tives. They put on warriors’ devices, all raising their
skirts so that they could give pursuit.”
Source: James Lockhart, ed. and trans., We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 265–267.
Examining the Evidence
1. W hat does this document tell us about Aztec political identity during the conquest?
2. W hat does it tell us about military culture and gender roles?
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Cortés and his bedraggled Spanish forces eventually regrouped with aid from the Tlaxcalans, their staunchest allies, but it was over a year before Tenochtitlán and its twin city of Tlatelolco fell. Cut off from the mainland, the Aztecs faced starva- tion, then attack by land and water. Cortés ordered thirteen small, European-style sailing vessels built on the shores of Lake Texcoco, and armed with cannon these helped pound remaining Aztec warrior contingents in canoes. By August 1521 Cortés and his men and allies had forced the Aztecs to retreat to Tlatelolco. Both cities were then occupied and pillaged.
Soon after, a successor emperor to Moctezuma was killed for allegedly hiding booty, prompting dissatisfied conquistadors to fan out across Mesoamerica in search of riches and other empires. The self-promoting Cortés traveled to Spain to consolidate his gains, but found little support from the emperor Charles V. Con- quest of the Aztec center had been difficult, and at the fringes conquest carried on. Far more difficult would be winning the hearts and minds of millions of former Aztec subjects now anxious to assert their own agendas. This would be the long story of colonial Mexico, a “New Spain” so unlike its Iberian namesake.
The Fall of Inca Peru W hen Francisco Pizarro left Panama City in 1522 in search of “Pirú,” a mythical chieftain, he had no idea that events high in the Andes would conspire to favor his dream of repeating the success of Cortés. But as with Cortés and his many companions and aides, an empire—even with guns, germs, and steel on one’s side—could not be toppled overnight.
In fact it took a decade of reconnaissance and failure before Pizarro at last marched into Peru. In the meantime he had ac- quired Quechua translators immersed in Castilian Spanish; a small army of men with horses, armor, and state-of-the-art weap- ons; and a license from Charles V. By late 1532, when Pizarro’s forces began marching across a coastal desert reminiscent of southern Spain, Peru at last seemed ripe for the taking.
Tawantinsuyu (tah-wahn-tin-SUE-you), as the Incas called their empire, faced crisis in 1532. A succession battle had recently been won by Atawallpa (also Atahualpa). According to eyewit- ness accounts, when Pizarro and his 168 men climbed into the Andes to meet Atawallpa in the city of Cajamarca, the new Sapa Inca was flush with victory. Atawallpa seemed invulnerable, and apparently intended, rather like Moctezuma in Mexico, to draft the foreigners into his service. In November 1532 Pizarro and
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Pizarro’s Invasion of the Inca Empire, 1531–1533
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his men captured Atawallpa in an act reminiscent of Cortés’s seizure of Moctezuma. Humiliated, Atawallpa was held hostage for nearly a year as his subjects scram- bled to collect enough gold and silver to free him. The Incas possessed far more precious metals than the Aztecs, and the ransom they offered was staggering. Suddenly Pizarro and his followers were rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Thus “Peru” became synonymous with great wealth among Europeans, an association soon reinforced by the discovery of immensely rich silver mines. Despite the ransom, however, Atawallpa was killed on Pizarro’s orders in 1533. The treachery was complete, and by 1534 Tawantinsuyu was in Spanish hands.
The Conquest: Myths and Realities How did a small number of Spanish men topple two of the world’s largest empires? Some biologists and an- thropologists have claimed that these great, isolated in- digenous empires faced inevitable defeat because they lacked iron, sufficient protein, draft animals, wheeled vehicles, writing, acquired immunity to numerous pathogens, and other advantages. Historians have long puzzled over this riddle, too, but more with an eye on human actors and the timing of events.
For their part, the conquistadors and their Spanish contemporaries regarded these victories as the will of their Christian God. Spain’s enemies—and internal critics such as Las Casas—emphasized the conquista- dors’ “sins” of treachery, cruelty, lust, and greed. By the nineteenth century, historians less interested in judg- ing the Spanish focused on individual leadership. They emphasized the intelligence and tenacity of Cortés and Pizarro, and the apparent weakness and indecisiveness of their adversaries, Moc- tezuma and Atawallpa.
Recently, historians have focused on other causal factors. These include the im- portance of indigenous allies and interpreters; the conquistadors’ accumulated ex- perience as “Indian fighters” in the Caribbean; imperial politics and the timing of Spanish arrival; indigenous adaptation to Spanish fighting methods; contrasting
Pizarro Meets Atawallpa Throughout colonial times native and European artists depicted the day in 1532 when Inca emperor Atawallpa met Francisco Pizarro. This is the first known image of the Peruvian encounter, a woodcut accompanying an eyewitness account published in Seville, Spain, in 1534. It depicts Atawallpa on a litter holding up what is probably the prayer book given him by the priest Vicente de Valverde, also pictured. Pizarro stands back with his fellow Spaniards, armed but not poised to attack. In the distance is a European- style castle presumably meant to stand for an Inca city. Notably absent is the native A ndean interpreter whom we know only by his Christian name, “Little Philip.”
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goals of warfare; and of course, the introduction of novel weapons, animals, and diseases. Most historians agree that the conquests resulted from the convergence of these many variables—a number of them, such as the appearance of the able translator Malintzin, unpredictable (see Seeing the Past: Malintzin and the Meet- ing Between Moctezuma and Cortés).
Were indigenous peoples overawed by Spanish horses and technology, and did they view the newcomers as gods? Much evidence suggests the answer is “no.” As
SEEING THE PAST
Malintzin and the Meeting Between Moctezuma and Cortés This image, taken from the early post-conquest
document known as the Florentine Codex, was
created by an indigenous Mexican artist who had
been exposed to European prints and paintings
while being schooled by Spanish friars. In it, Ma-
lintzin translates the words between Aztec emperor
Moctezuma and Hernando Cortés at their first mo-
mentous meeting.
Examining the Evidence
1. How does this drawing reflect the indigenous artist’s instruction by Spanish friars?
2. To what extent is it a reflection of Malintzin’s per- ceived importance in the conquest of Mexico?
Malintzin Interprets for Cortés and Moctezuma (The Granger Collection, New York.)
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this quote from a Spanish soldier who participated in the conquest of Mexico sug- gests, Aztec warriors adapted rapidly to the threat of cannon and armored oppo- nents on horseback:
One day an Indian I saw in combat with a mounted horseman struck the horse in the chest, cutting through to the inside and killing the horse on the spot. On the same day I saw another Indian give a horse a sword thrust in the neck that laid the horse dead at his feet. . . . Among them are extraordinary brave men who face death with absolute determination.4
The evidence from Inca Peru barely differs. A fter the capture of Atawallpa in 1532, Andean warriors avoided open field engagements where they might be run down by mounted Spaniards, preferring instead to ambush their enemies as they crossed rivers and traveled through narrow canyons. Simple stones and slingshots proved a surprising match for guns and steel swords in these conditions. Rebel- lions and raids continued for decades in the Mexican and Peruvian backcountry, but the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca imperial cores was sealed by those empires’ own former subjects: although they did not know what was in store for them, most were anxious for something different.
A New Empire in the Americas: New Spain and Peru 1535–1600
FOCUS Why was the discovery of silver in spanish america so important in the course of world history?
Soon after conquest, Spanish settlers penetrated deep into the Americas, trans- forming the world’s largest overseas land empire into the world’s greatest source of precious metals. Spain’s monarchs in turn used this mineral bounty to pursue their ambitions in Europe and beyond. Merchants used it to link the world economy. But for the millions of native Americans subjected to Spanish rule, life would re- volve around negotiating a measure of freedom within an imperial system at least as taxing as those of the Aztecs and Incas.
American Silver and the Global Economy In 1545 an indigenous prospector found silver ore on a high, red mountain in what is today Bolivia. The Cerro R ico, or “R ich Hill,” of Potosí (poh-toe-SEE) turned out to be the most concentrated silver deposit ever discovered (see Map 16.3). This
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MAP 16.3 European Claims in the Americas, c. 1600 Beginning in the 1510s, the Spanish used bases in Cuba and on the Isthmus of Panama to launch the conquests of the Aztec and Inca Empires. In search of similar empires, Spanish explorers drove deep into the interiors of North and South America; by the 1540s they had penetrated the U.S. Southwest and South America’s R ío de la Plata basin, and made their way down the Amazon. Other conquests in Central America, northwest Mexico, and New Granada led to the creation of a vast Spanish-American Empire, under the twin capitals of Mexico City and Lima. Portuguese Brazil, by contrast, consisted of only a few small settlements along the Atlantic coast, but by 1600 it was the world leader in sugar production, increasingly dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans.
0º
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90ºW
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Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Antarctic Circle
Tre aty o
f To rd
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4 9 4
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1100 Miles
PACIFIC OCEAN
ATLANTIC OCEAN
Gulf of Mexico
Caribbean Sea
Bahamas 1492
Hispaniola 1492
Puerto Rico 1502
Trinidad 1498
Cuba 1514
Jamaica 1509
ISTHMUS OF PANAMA
FRENCH COLONY 1555–1567
Amaz on R.
M is
si ss
ip pi
R .
PERU B�ZIL
NEW SPAIN
NORTH AMERICA
SOUTH AMERICA
A n
d e
s
M
o u
n t
a i
n s
Acoma 1599
St. Augustine 1565
Santiago de Guatemala 1524 Cartagena de Indias
1532
Panama 1519
Mexico City 1521
Zacatecas 1546
Guanajuato 1554
Veracruz 1519
Caracas 1567
Cuzco 1533
Potosí 1545
RÍO DE LA PLATA
Salvador 1549
Buenos Aires 1535
Rio de Janeiro 1565
Lima 1535
Huancavelica 1564
Santiago 1541
Quito 1534
Bogotá 1538
Pachuca 1528
Fort Caroline 1564–1565
(France)
PERNAMBUCO
NEW G�NADA
MEXICO
Spanish
Portuguese
Date of conquest or se�lement
Headquarters of the Inquisition
Brazilwood
Gold
Mercury
Pearls
Silver
Sugar Plantation
Emeralds
European Claims in the Americas, c. 1600 European claims, c. 1600
Major economic activities
1492
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and related silver discoveries in early Spanish America transformed not only life in the colonies, but the global economy. As we will see in subsequent chapters, in regions as distant as China and South Asia, American silver affected people’s livelihoods in profound ways. Even before Potosí, silver mines had been located in Mexico, and new finds followed. Mexican districts such as Zacatecas (zah-cah- TAY-cus) and Guanajuato (hwan-uh-WA H-toe) were expanding by the 1550s and would continue to drive Mexico’s economy for centuries.
A lthough the Spanish adopted Old World techniques of tunneling and refining, the silver boom also spurred technical innovations. Chief among these was the use of mercury to separate silver from crushed ore. Amalgamation, as this process is known, was practiced in antiquity, but it was Bartolomé de Medina, a merchant working in Mexico in the mid-1550s, who patented a refining process suitable for New World environments. Medina’s invention revolutionized Spanish-American silver mining even as it spread one of the world’s most persistent toxins, mercury.
Amalgamation was implemented in Potosí after 1572. A lthough Spain itself pro- duced mercury, New World sources had been sought since conquest. Before long, the mine owners’ dreams came true: in highland Peru the mercury mines of Huan- cavelica (wan-kah-bell-EE-cah) were discovered in 1564. Thus the Spanish paired Andean mercury with Andean silver, sparking an enormous boom in production. Potosí yielded tens of millions of ounces of silver annually by the 1580s.
Even with abundant mercur y, silver production remained costly. Unlike gold panning, underground mining required massive investment. Water-powered ore-processing mills, first developed in Germany, were among the world ’s most complex machines at the time, and mercur y remained expensive despite Spanish price controls. Less often calculated, although well k nown even in the si xteenth centur y, were the environmental and health costs of mercur y pollution. Soils, rivers, and refiner y workers’ clothing were saturated with mercur y, leading to neurological disorders and birth defects. “Trembling like someone with mer- cur y poisoning” became a common colonial metaphor for fright, ak in to “shak- ing like a leaf.”
More costly than mercury and machines was labor. Mining was hard and deadly work, attracting few volunteers. A frican slaves supplemented the workforce in boomtowns such as Zacatecas and Potosí, but Spanish-American silver mines came to rely mostly on native American draft and wage workers. The draft, or mita (MEE-tah) as it was called in the Andes, entailed a year of service in Potosí, Huan- cavelica, or some other mining center, followed by six years of work in one’s own home region, usually in subsistence farming or herding. In Mexico the Spanish implemented a similar system called repartimiento (reh-par-tee-M YEN-toe). Drafted indigenous laborers received a small wage and rations during their work
mita A Spanish revival of the Inca draft labor system.
repartimiento A n allotment of indigenous laborers in colonial Mexico, similar to the A ndean mita.
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stints, but given the danger of these jobs and the high cost of living in mining towns, the mita and repartimiento severely disrupted indigenous lifeways. Many considered draft work a death sentence.
Potosí boomed in the first years of the mita, but heightened demand for mine laborers in this remote and unhealthy site only worsened an already dramatic in- digenous demographic collapse. Most eligible workers who remained in the region learned to avoid the most dangerous tasks, and many sold whatever they could to pay a cash fee for exemption. Mine owners were forced to pay wages to stay in business.
The R ich Mountain of Potosí This c. 1603 image of Potosí’s famous Cerro R ico shows not only the legendary red mountain with its silver veins but also workers, most of them native A ndeans, refining silver by mercury amalgamation, and antlike llamas carrying ore down the mountain. The ore-crushing mill in the foreground is powered by a stream of water supplied by canals coming down from artificial reservoirs built high in a neighboring mountain range.
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American Silver and Everyday Life The silver bonanza of the sixteenth century altered many livelihoods. In the Spanish colonies, everything from ranch work to church building was connected in one way or another to the flow of silver. Dependent miners living in towns such as Potosí and Zacatecas spurred merchants and landowners to expand their in- ventories, crops, and livestock herds. Mule-drivers, weavers, tanners, and other specialists came to rely on the mines’ productivity for their sustenance. In town centers, indigenous market women carved out a lucrative space as well. Silver pro- duction even drove Spanish missionaries to intensify conversion efforts. World- wide, Spanish-American silver funded the expansion of the Catholic Church.
W hereas most indigenous peoples adapted to Spanish laws and civic traditions and even tolerated the oppressive obligations of mine work, they usually resisted total conversion to Catholicism. Confident in the universality of their religion, European missionaries expected indigenous populations to accept Christianity as they themselves understood it. W hen they did not, conversion turned to coercion. Soon after military conquest, priests and Church officials used violent means to advance their project.
Native Americans were not the only victims of religious intolerance. Offices of the Inquisition, a branch of the Catholic Church dedicated to enforcing ortho- dox beliefs and practices, were established in Mexico City and Lima in 1570–1571 and Cartagena in 1610. Their purpose was to punish alleged deviants and heretics among the Spanish settlers and people of A frican descent. In the indigenous ma- jority (soon exempted from prosecution by the Inquisition due to their newness to the faith), complete conversion was limited by long-held beliefs. Most native American converts adopted the Christian God, his holy intermediaries, and saints on their own terms, as new additions to an already crowded pantheon. Missionary priests became pessimistic and often angry with this half-hearted Catholicism, al- though some realized that conversion was a slow process requiring that they them- selves achieve a better understanding of would-be converts.
It was only after some priests learned to speak indigenous languages fluently that Europeans began to transform native cosmologies. One way around conflict- ing beliefs was to ignore elders and focus conversion efforts on native youths, par- ticularly boys. Upon maturity, they would be exemplary believers, leaders in the new faith. Many such boys were removed from their parents’ custody, taught to read and write, and ordered to collect myths and sagas. These stories were then altered by European priests to match Christian history and beliefs.
The missionaries had less success with women. Despite the burdens of colo- nialism, indigenous women continued teaching their children the old ways while
Inquisition A branch of the Catholic Church established to enforce orthodoxy.
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also pressing for social recognition within the new order. Some, like Malintzin, refashioned themselves as something in between Spanish and indigenous, often bearing mestizo (meh-STEE-soh) or mixed-heritage children. But the persistence of indigenous language and lifeways was due mostly to humble indigenous women, unsung keepers of the hearth. Despite Spanish determination to remake the Americas to serve European interests and ambitions, diverse indigenous cultures would continue to shape colonial society.
Brazil by Accident: The Portuguese in the Americas 1500–1600
FOCUS how and why did early Portuguese Brazil develop differently from spanish america?
The Portuguese followed a distinct path in colonizing Brazil. The trend in the century after contact in 1500 was from benign neglect and small-scale trade with indigenous coast-dwellers toward a more formal royal presence and settled plan- tation agriculture, mostly concentrated along the northeast coast. By 1600, Brazil was the world’s largest sugar producer. It also became the prime destination for sub-Saharan A frican slaves. A key stimulus for this shift was French encroachment in Brazil. The arrival of French traders and religious refugees forced the Portu- guese to briefly take their eyes off India.
Native Encounters and Foreign Competitors It was on the way to India in early 1500 that Pedro Á lvares Cabral and his fleet were blown west ward from Cape Verde, in West A frica. Toward the end of April the fleet sighted land, which the captain dubbed the “Island of the True Cross.” The landmass was later found not to be an island, but rather part of the conti- nent of South A merica. The huge eastern portion of the continent claimed by Portugal under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas would later be called Brazil (see again Map 16.3).
Brazil was initially of little interest to Portugal. Without gold or some other lu- crative export, there seemed to be no point in colonizing this distant land. Brazil’s one obvious resource, and what earned it its name, was brazilwood, a tree with a deep-red, pithy heart. Portuguese traders, soon followed by French competitors, set up posts all along Brazil’s vast coast to barter with indigenous Tupi speakers for precut, red-hearted logs.
mestizo A person of mixed European and native A merican ancestry.
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Brazilwood was shipped to Europe, where dye was extracted and sold at profit. Native Brazilians willingly participated in this trade because it brought them tan- gible benefits: metal hatchets, knives, sewing needles, and other utilitarian items, along with beads, bells, and other adornments. For some, it also brought military alliances against traditional enemies. In several places Portuguese degredados, or criminal castaways, survived exile and married into eminent indigenous families, becoming translators and commercial middlemen.
French competition for control of Brazil and its dyewood pressed the Portuguese to assert their claims more forcefully. A fleet of warships was sent from Lisbon in 1532 to protect Portuguese traders and to punish French interlopers. Land claims were also reorganized. A fter 1534 Brazil was carved into fifteen proprietary colo- nies, granted to courtiers by K ing Manoel. Brazil’s new “lords” were expected to organize defense against French and indigenous enemies.
With few exceptions, the Brazilian proprietary colonies failed; the French were still a menace, and native Brazilians, not Portuguese colonists, had the run of the land. In 1549 the Crown tried another strategy: Salvador, a defensible hamlet lo- cated at the tip of a wide bay in northeastern Brazil, was made the royal capital and seat of a governor-general. Jesuit missionaries also arrived. They soon set out to convert tens of thousands of native, Tupi-speaking allies to Roman Catholicism.
The French did not easily give up on their Brazilian enterprise, and in fact re- doubled their efforts at midcentury. In 1555 they established a new colony in Gua- nabara Bay, near modern R io de Janeiro (see again Map 16.3). The colony’s leader, however, could not sort out disputes between Catholics like himself and numerous Protestant refugees, or Huguenots. Divided by religion, like France itself at the time (as we will see in Chapter 19), the French colony was doomed. The Portu- guese drove out Catholics and Protestants alike by 1567. As for indigenous ene- mies, Portuguese wars and slaving expeditions were just beginning.
Bitter Sugar: Slavery and the Plantation Complex in the Early Atlantic World 1530–1600 A search for precious metals and gems came up short after the capital of Salva- dor was established in 1549, but the Portuguese found other ways beyond bra- zilwood to profit from the colony. On Brazil ’s northeast coast, sugar cane was planted as early as the 1530s. By 1570, Brazil was the world ’s number one sugar producer. Cane sugar was Brazil ’s answer to Spanish-A merican silver, but like silver, sugar had a cost. First indigenous, then A frican, slaves were made to do the burdensome work required to produce it (see Lives and Livelihoods: Atlantic Sugar Producers).
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LIVES AND LIVELIHOODS
Atlantic Sugar Producers
Found in countless foods and beverages, and now a major global source of biofuels, cane sugar was once a rare commodity. Introduced to the Mediterra- nean by Muslim traders and colonists in the eighth or ninth century C.E ., sugar was at first a medicine and high-status condiment. Its source, sugar cane, a tall, thick grass, was eventually planted in Egypt, Sicily, Cyprus, and southern Iberia, and by at least
the fourteenth century was processed not only by Muslims but also by Chris- tian landowners in southern Spain and Portugal. Though later associated ex- clusively with slavery, sugar making in this era was done by a mixed free and enslaved labor force. Before long, women joined men in both cane fields and processing plants.
Sugar cane is so tough that consid- erable energy is required to extract maximum juice. Efficient presses were thus a technical hurdle for commercial producers. Like silver refining, sugar making required technical expertise and a complex sequence of chemical processes that allowed for few errors.
Specialists were required to design and build ever larger and more powerful machines, which were among the most complex mechanical apparatus known at the time.
Animals such as oxen were often used for power, but waterwheels were preferred for their greater effi- ciency. In the generally dry and sometimes frost-prone Mediterranean basin, access to warm, well-watered plains and consistently flowing millstreams was se- verely limited. Bounded by ecological and capital con- straints, mill ownership remained a dream of most sugar producers. This soon proved equally true in the
Sugar Plantations Enslaved sugar-makers worked not only in fields but also in powerful mills and refining furnaces. Men, women, and children were all involved. This 1662 Dutch image of Pernambuco, Brazil, depicts enslaved sugar refinery and transport workers during the intense harvest period when the mills ran all night. The Dutch controlled Pernambuco and its sugar plantations from 1630 to 1654. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.)
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Atlantic islands and Brazil. For their part, millwork- ers, particularly the women and sometimes children who fed canes through the rollers, faced loss of limbs and sometimes death. “And in these Mills,” wrote En- glish visitor Richard Flecknoe in 1654, “the work of immediately applying the canes to the Mill being so perilous [that] if through drowsiness or heedlessness a finger’s end be but engaged between the posts, their whole body inevitably follows.”1
Rendering the precious juice into white crystal sugar was also difficult and labor intensive. Workers had to boil the juice in huge copper vats, then reduce it in a series of smaller vats into a concentrated syrup they poured into molds to crystallize. Women were usually in charge of whitening the resulting brown sugar loaves with wet clay and removing them from the molds and packing them for shipment. Euro- pean consumers considered white sugar purer than brown, “purged” of imperfections. Each phase of the process required skill and close monitoring, and fires had to be stoked throughout the night. Sugar making
thus produced a number of task-specific livelihoods, such as purger (purifier), mold-maker, and crating supervisor. Given its complexity, high capital invest- ment, and careful attention to timing, sugar making has been described as an early modern precursor of industrial, or factory, production. However labeled, sugar work was monotonous and occasionally deadly.
Europeans’ taste for sugar grew slowly at first, but by 1600, sugar was an ordinary ingredient in many foods. Its association with slavery also gradually increased. Numerous slaves labored in the early cane fields and mills of the East Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, but the pattern rep- licated in the Americas—predominantly A frican slaves manning large plantations—appeared first on the Portuguese island of São Tomé, off equato- rial West A frica. By 1550, the so-called plantation complex was established in the Spanish Caribbean and Brazil. In the Americas, as in the Canaries, with the decimation of local cultures, indigenous slavery gave way to A frican slavery.
Questions to Consider:
1. How did the rise of Atlantic sugar affect the global economy? 2. How did it transform livelihoods?
For Further Information:
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power. New York: Viking, 1985. Schwartz, Stuart B., ed. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
1. E. Bradford Burns, ed., A Documentary History of Brazil (New York: A lfred A. K nopf, 1966), 82.
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Sugar growers near Salvador competed with their counterparts in Pernambuco, one of the few surviving proprietary colonies. Each region vied for the greater share of total output, with Pernambuco usually ahead. Native Brazilian slaves were ex- ploited in large numbers in both regions, but well before 1600 Portuguese planters turned to A frica for still more enslaved laborers. Indigenous workers died from dis- ease and abuse, as happened in the early Spanish Caribbean, and were also prone to run away to the interior. As will be seen in greater detail in the next chapter, the Portuguese responded by importing millions of enslaved A fricans from western or Atlantic A frica.
Though more resistant to Old World diseases than their native American co-workers, many A fricans died in the cane fields of Brazil, literally worked to death. Instead of moderating workloads, improving nutrition and medical care, and encouraging family formation, Portuguese masters opted to exhaust the labor power of their slaves, the vast majority of them young men. The reason was as log- ical as it was cold-hearted: having direct access to more captives at relatively low cost, sugar planters “used up” laborers much like mine owners did mita workers in Peru. Even when female slaves were introduced and families formed, high child mortality rates discouraged reproduction. Brazil would subsequently become so dependent on A frica for labor that by the time the slave trade ended in the nine- teenth century over 40 percent of all slaves transported across the Atlantic had landed in this single destination.
COUNTERPOINT: The Mapuche of Chile: Native America’s Indomitable State
FOCUS how did the Mapuche of chile manage to resist european conquest?
The climate of southern Chile, a land of rugged coasts and dense forests, is wet and cool. Gently rolling hills are interspersed with picturesque lakes, rivers, and volcanoes. Near the coast is a temperate rain forest. Fish and wildlife are abun- dant. Towering araucaria pines yield nuts rich in fat and protein, and wild berries abound in the thickets. This is the homeland of the Mapuche (mah-POOH-cheh), or A raucanians (a term derived from the Bay of A rauco), one of the A mericas’ most resilient native cultures. Across nearly five centuries, they successfully
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resisted attempted conquests by the Incas, the Spanish, and the Chilean nation-state.
Today, more than five hundred years after Columbus, the Mapuche, half a million strong, are still proclaiming their inde- pendence. It was only in the 1880s that Chilean armed forces managed to partially subdue the Mapuche using modern weap- ons. But what of colonial times, the era of the conquistadors? There was substantial gold in the Mapuche heartland, yet the Spanish failed to conquer them despite knowing this since the time of Pizarro. W hy?
A Culture of Warfare Successful Mapuche resistance owed much to cultural patterns. As poets, ex-captives, and Mapuche commentators themselves noted, this was a fiercely independent people raised to fight. The Mapuche reared boys for a life of warfare, apparently before as well as after Spanish arrival in the region. Girls were raised to produce and store the food surpluses needed for the war effort. Despite arriving with horses, steel-edged weapons, and firearms, the Spanish fared little better than the Incas against the native Chileans.
There were early successes, however. The first conquistadors in Chile, headed by Pedro de Valdivia, managed to reduce a large number of Mapuche to encomienda servitude by 1550. R ich gold deposits were subsequently discovered, and Mapuche men were forced to work them. Once it became clear that the Spanish were only after gold and captive laborers, the Mapuche resisted violently. To drive their point home, they captured, killed, and ate portions of Valdivia’s corpse in a great public ceremony. Mapuche cannibalism was plainly intended to terrorize the enemy.
Uprisings Against the Spanish W hat followed was a general uprising lasting from 1553 to 1557. Raids on Spanish settlements continued until 1598, when the Mapuche captured and ate yet an- other governor, Martín García de Loyola. This incident was followed by a mass uprising in 1599. It was a resounding success. No Spanish town remained south of the Biobío R iver after 1600, and Spanish attempts to reconquer the Mapuche and occupy their lands failed throughout the colonial period.
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MAPUCHE
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The Mapuche of Chile, c. 1550
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W hat factors besides a culture of warfare allowed the Mapuche to succeed when so many other native American cultures fell to European invaders? As in North America’s Great Plains, the introduction of horses by the Spanish enhanced Ma- puche warrior mobility. Steel-edged weapons and guns were also captured and adopted. Further, the Mapuche “Columbian Exchange” included adopting Old World foods and animals such as wheat, apples, chickens, and pigs, markedly in- creasing their subsistence base.
Despite their new mounts and weapons, Chile’s native warriors did not alter their style of warfare. Rather than face the better-armed Spanish on the open field,
Mapuche Man and Woman The Mapuche peoples of Chile proved as resistant to the Spanish as they had been to the Incas. Hostilities began in 1549, and by 1599 Mapuche warriors had destroyed all inland Spanish settlements south of the Biobío R iver. This image, painted by a Spanish priest who fled the Mapuche in 1600, depicts a Mapuche woman with her spinning equipment and trademark horned hairstyle. To the left is the great Mapuche leader Lautaro, who led the first uprisings. As is evident, the Mapuche adopted Spanish-style helmets and body armor, which they fashioned from the raw hides of introduced cattle. Like the Plains peoples of North A merica, the Mapuche also adopted the horse to great effect. (Courtesy of the University of Oviedo Librar y, Spain.)
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the Mapuche preferred night attacks, long-distance raiding, captive-taking, and other tactics later termed guerrilla, or “little war,” by the Spanish. Long bamboo lances remained the weapon of choice, and Mapuche men continued to fight bare- foot. A lliances were another key to success. The great uprising of 1599 linked culturally related neighbors in a confederacy that the Spanish termed “the Indom- itable State.”
Mapuche resistance turned southern Chile into a permanent frontier of Spanish South America. The Mapuche, though still frequently at war with their European neighbors, had proved the fact of their independence. Throughout the Spanish world, they became legendary. Only in the late nineteenth century was a tenuous peace established with the Chilean government. Like many treaties between nation-states and indigenous peoples, this peace brought not integration but marginalization and poverty. As a result, the Mapuche are still fighting.
Conclusion The first wave of European overseas expansion in the Americas was deeply trans- formative, and would not be repeated in A frica, Asia, or Oceania for several cen- turies. Hundreds of isolated cultures were brought into contact with one another, often for the first time. European farmers and ranchers migrated to new landscapes, which they and their plants, livestock, and germs quickly transformed. Millions of sub-Saharan A fricans, most of them captive laborers, joined a fast-emerging Atlantic, and soon globally integrated, world.
Spearheading this transformation were the uniquely positioned and highly motivated Portuguese, armed and outfitted to undertake risky voyages of recon- naissance and chart new routes to commercial success abroad. A lthough most interested in material gain, the Portuguese also promoted a militant Christianity while establishing a global network of trading posts. In Brazil they took another tack, establishing hundreds of slave-staffed sugar plantations.
Early modern Spaniards sought the same gold, spices, sugar, and slaves that motivated their Portuguese neighbors, but after encountering the Americas, they turned away from trading posts in favor of territorial conquest. Those they de- feated were forced to extract wealth and accept conversion to the Catholic faith. Ironic as it may seem, it was imperial peoples such as the Aztecs and Incas who proved most vulnerable to the Spanish onslaught, and more especially to foreign disease. Mobile, scattered cultures such as the Mapuche of Chile proved far more resistant. Even at the margins, however, violent conquest and the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade transformed livelihoods for millions. Some individuals swept
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up in the early phases of colonial encounter and the Columbian Exchange, such as Malintzin, found advantages and even a means to social gain. Countless others found themselves reduced to servitude in an emerging Atlantic world defined by race as much as by wealth or ancestry. This new order forged in the Americas would soon affect much of western A frica.
review The major global development in this chapter: European expansion across the Atlantic and its profound consequences for societies and cultures worldwide.
Important Events
1441 First sub-Saharan Africans captured and taken by ship to Portugal
1492 Fall of Granada and expulsion of Jews in Spain; Columbus reaches America
1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divides known world between Portugal and Spain
1498 Vasco da Gama becomes first European to reach India by sea
1500 Portuguese reach Brazil
1519–1521 Spanish conquest of Aztec Mexico
1519–1522 Magellan’s ship circumnavigates the globe
1532–1536 Spanish conquest of Inca Peru
1545 Discovery of silver deposits at Potosí
1549 Portuguese establish royal capital of Salvador; first Jesuits arrive in Brazil
1555 French establish colony in Brazil’s Guanabara Bay
1564 Discovery of mercury mines in Huancavelica, Peru
1567 Portuguese drive French from Brazil
1570–1571 Inquisition established in Lima and Mexico City
1572 Mita labor draft and mercury amalgamation formalized in Potosí
1592 Potosí reaches peak production
1599 Great Mapuche uprising in Chile
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KEY TERMS Columbian Exchange (p. 582) conquistador (p. 583) encomienda (p. 580)
feitoria (p. 574) Inquisition (p. 593) mestizo (p. 594)
mita (p. 591) repartimiento (p. 591)
CHAPTER OVERVIEW QUESTIONS 1. W hat were the main biological and environmen-
tal consequences of European expansion into the Atlantic after 1492?
2. W hat roles did misunderstanding and chance play in the conquests of the Aztecs and Incas?
3. How did Eurasian demand for silver and sugar help bring about the creation of a linked Atlantic world?
MAKING CONNECTIONS 1. How did Spanish and Portuguese imperial aims
differ from those of the Incas and Aztecs (see Chapter 15)?
2. How would you compare the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the Ottoman conquest of Con- stantinople discussed in Chapter 14?
3. W hat role did European consumers play in the rise of the A merican plantation complex?
4. How did global demand for silver affect the lives of ordinary people in the Spanish colonies?
For further research into the topics covered in this chapter, see the Bibliography at the end of the book. For additional primary sources from this period, see Sources of World in the Making.
M a k i n g C o n n e c t i o n s
- PART 3: The Early Modern World, 1450–1750
- 16: The Rise of an Atlantic World 1450–1600
- The Major Global Development in this Chapter: European expansion across the Atlantic and its profound consequences for societies and cultures worldwide.
- backstory
- Guns, Sails, and Compasses: Europeans Venture Abroad
- Motives for Exploration
- Technologies of Exploration
- Portugal Takes the Lead
- New Crossroads, First Encounters: The European Voyages of Discovery 1492–1521
- Christopher Columbus in a New World
- From Independence to Servitude: The Encomienda System
- Columbus’s Successors
- The Columbian Exchange
- Spanish Conquests in the Americas 1519–1600
- The Fall of Aztec Mexico
- The Fall of Inca Peru
- The Conquest: Myths and Realities
- A New Empire in the Americas: New Spain and Peru 1535–1600
- American Silver and the Global Economy
- American Silver and Everyday Life
- Brazil by Accident: The Portuguese in the Americas 1500–1600
- Native Encounters and Foreign Competitors
- Bitter Sugar: Slavery and the Plantation Complex in the Early Atlantic World 1530–1600
- COUNTERPOINT The Mapuche of Chile: Native America’s Indomitable State
- A Culture of Warfare
- Uprisings Against the Spanish
- Conclusion
- Review
- SPECIAL FEATURES
- READING THE PAST: Tlatelolcan Elders Recall the Conquest of Mexico
- SEEING THE PAST: Malintzin and the Meeting Between Moctezuma and Cortés
- LIVES AND LIVELIHOODS: Atlantic Sugar Producers
