Conquest and Colonization in the Americas

A sermon in Hispaniola

In December 1511, on the island of Hispaniola, a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesinos preached to the Spanish settlers. He asked (paraphrased): By what right do you hold these people in such cruel servitude? Are they not human beings? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves? The settlers were furious. One listener, a settler and slave-holder named Bartolomé de Las Casas, later gave up his Indigenous labourers and spent fifty years campaigning for Indigenous rights.

The Spanish conquest of the Americas is one of the most important and most painful developments of this period. Spaniards at the time argued about whether it was just. So do historians today.

The Caribbean: the first colony

After 1492, Spaniards settled Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), home to the Taíno. Under the encomienda system, the Crown "entrusted" groups of Indigenous people to Spanish settlers, who could demand their labour and tribute in return for supposedly protecting them and teaching Christianity. In practice it was often forced labour in gold mines and fields. Combined with epidemics, violence, famine and the destruction of communities, it caused a catastrophic population collapse within a few decades. Taíno identity and ancestry did not vanish: many people in the Caribbean today trace Taíno heritage, and DNA studies confirm it.

The Crown passed the Laws of Burgos (1512) to regulate treatment; they were largely ignored. From 1513, conquistadors were required to read the Requerimiento, a Spanish text demanding that Indigenous people accept the Pope's grant of their lands to Spain and Christianity, or face war. It was often read in Spanish, to people who could not understand it, sometimes from a distance or even at night.

Mexico, 1519 to 1521

• Hernán Cortés landed on the Gulf coast in 1519 with about 500 Spaniards. A Nahua woman, Malintzin (called Doña Marina by the Spanish, later La Malinche), who spoke Nahuatl and Maya and soon learned Spanish, became his interpreter and adviser. Without her, the Spaniards could not have negotiated.
• The Tlaxcalans, enemies of the Mexica, first fought the Spaniards and then allied with them. So did other peoples resentful of tribute.
• In November 1519 Moctezuma II welcomed Cortés into Tenochtitlan; the Spaniards soon took him hostage. In May 1520, Spaniards under Pedro de Alvarado massacred Mexica nobles at a religious festival. The city rose up; Moctezuma died (accounts disagree on how), and the Spaniards fled with heavy losses (the Noche Triste, 30 June 1520).
• Smallpox swept the Valley of Mexico in 1520, killing many, including Moctezuma's successor Cuitláhuac.
• In 1521, Cortés returned with tens of thousands of Indigenous allies and boats built for the lake. After a siege of about three months, Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521, and its last ruler, Cuauhtémoc, was captured.

Historians of the "New Conquest History", such as Matthew Restall, stress that this was in large part a war between Indigenous peoples, in which the Spanish were a small but decisive ally, and that the old story of a handful of Spaniards defeating an empire is a myth created by conquistadors' own accounts.

Peru, 1532 to 1572

• Francisco Pizarro arrived in 1532, just after Atahualpa had won the Inca civil war against his brother Huascar.
• At Cajamarca in November 1532, Pizarro's force of about 170 men ambushed Atahualpa's unarmed escort and captured him. Atahualpa offered to fill a room with gold and silver as ransom. The Spaniards took the ransom and executed him anyway in 1533.
• Spaniards installed puppet rulers. One of them, Manco Inca, rebelled in 1536 and besieged Cusco. He then founded an independent Inca state at Vilcabamba, which resisted until 1572, when the Spanish captured and executed its last ruler, Túpac Amaru.
• Spaniards also fought each other: Pizarro was killed by rival Spaniards in 1541.

Building a colonial system

• Government: the Crown ruled through the Council of the Indies in Spain and viceroys in New Spain (Mexico, from 1535) and Peru (from 1542).
• Silver: in 1545 a huge silver deposit was found at Potosí (in today's Bolivia). In the 1570s Viceroy Francisco de Toledo reorganized the Andean mita into a system of forced labour: Indigenous communities had to send a share of their men to the mines each year, where many fell sick or died. American silver flowed to Spain and, via Manila, to China.
• Religion: missionaries baptized millions, built churches on the sites of temples, and sometimes destroyed sacred objects and books. Indigenous people often blended Christian and older practices.
• Society: a hierarchy developed with Spanish-born officials at the top, American-born Spaniards (criollos), people of mixed ancestry (mestizos), Indigenous people and enslaved Africans. Indigenous nobles sometimes kept status and used Spanish courts to defend their land.

The debate in Spain

• Las Casas's A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (written 1542, printed 1552) described Spanish atrocities in vivid terms. It helped bring about the New Laws (1542), which banned the enslavement of Indigenous people and limited encomiendas. Settlers in Peru rebelled, and the laws were partly withdrawn.
• At the Valladolid debate (1550 to 1551), Las Casas argued that Indigenous peoples were rational, free human beings with legitimate governments. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, using Aristotle's idea of "natural slaves", argued that war against them was just. No clear winner was declared.
• Perspective: Las Casas condemned Indigenous slavery but, early in his career, suggested bringing enslaved Africans instead; later he regretted it and condemned African slavery too. His figures were sometimes exaggerated, and Spain's rivals later used his book to spread the "Black Legend" of uniquely cruel Spaniards. Historians use him carefully, but much of what he described is confirmed by other evidence.

Population collapse, survival and resistance

Indigenous populations fell catastrophically after contact. Estimates vary widely, but many historians conclude that in some regions, such as central Mexico, populations fell by as much as 90 percent within about a century. Epidemic diseases to which people had no prior immunity (smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus) were the largest single cause, but war, forced labour, famine, displacement and the breakdown of communities made epidemics far deadlier. Whether the term genocide applies to the conquest as a whole is debated by historians; many argue that deliberate policies of violence and forced labour, not disease alone, caused the destruction, and that some episodes clearly meet the definition.

Indigenous peoples also resisted and survived:

• the Mixtón War (1540 to 1542) in western Mexico, and decades of Chichimeca resistance in the north;
• the Maya fought for generations; the Itza kingdom remained independent until 1697;
• the Mapuche in Chile defeated the Spanish at Curalaba (1598) and kept their independence south of the Biobío River for centuries;
• many communities preserved their languages, land rights and traditions inside colonial society, and wrote their own histories, like the Nahua accounts in the Florentine Codex.