How did the Spanish conquer and colonize the Americas?

T HE S PANISH E MPIRE
Spain in the New World

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Throughout the sixteenth century, Spain struggled to manage its

colonial empire while trying to repress the Protestant
Reformation. Between 1500 and 1650, some 450,000 Spaniards,
most of them poor, single, unskilled men, made their way to the
colonies in the Western Hemisphere. Once there, through a
mixture of courage, cruelty, piety, and greed, they shipped some
200 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver to Spain, which helped
fuel the nation’s “Golden Empire” and trigger the emergence of
capitalism in Europe, enabling new avenues for trade, investment,
and unimagined profits. By plundering, conquering, and
colonizing the Americas and converting and enslaving its
inhabitants, the Spanish planted Christianity in the Western
Hemisphere and gained the financial resources to rule the world.

CLASH OF CULTURES
The Caribbean Sea was the gateway through which Spain entered
the Americas. After establishing a trading post on Hispaniola, the
Spanish proceeded to colonize Puerto Rico (1508), Jamaica (1509),
and Cuba (1511–1514). As its colonies multiplied to include
Mexico, Peru, and what would become the American Southwest,
the monarchy created an administrative bureaucracy to govern
them and a name to encompass them: New Spain.
Many of the Europeans in the first wave of settlement in the
New World died of malnutrition or disease. But the Native
Americans suffered far more casualties, for they were ill-equipped
to resist the European invaders. Civil disorder, rebellion, and tribal
warfare abounded, leaving them vulnerable to division and
foreign conquest. Attacks by well-armed soldiers and deadly
germs from Europe overwhelmed entire indigenous societies.

CORTÉS’S CONQUEST The most dramatic European

conquest of a formidable Indian civilization occurred in Mexico.
On February 18, 1519, Hernán Cortés, a Spanish soldier of fortune
who went to the New World “to get rich, not to till the soil like a
peasant,” sold his Cuban lands to buy ships and supplies, then set
sail—without royal authority—for Mexico and its fabled riches.
Cortés’s eleven ships carried nearly 600 soldiers and sailors, as well
as 200 indigenous Cuban laborers, sixteen warhorses, greyhound
fighting dogs, and cannons.
 Cortés
How did the and theconquer
Spanish Aztecsand colonize the Americas?

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The Spaniards first stopped on the Yucatan Peninsula, where

they defeated a group of Maya. To appease his European
conqueror, the vanquished chieftain gave Cortés twenty enslaved
young women. The Spanish commander distributed them to his
captains but kept one of the girls (“La Malinche”) for himself and
named her Doña Marina. Malinche spoke Mayan as well as
Nahuatl, the language of the Mexicas, with whom she had
previously lived. She became Cortés’s interpreter—and mistress;
later she would bear the married Cortés a son.
After leaving Yucatan, Cortés sailed west and landed at a place
he named Veracruz (True Cross). There he convinced the local
Totonacs to join his assault against the Mexicas, their hated rivals.
To prevent his soldiers, called conquistadores (conquerors), from
deserting, Cortés ordered the Spanish ships burned. He spared
only one vessel to carry the expected riches back to Spain.
Conquistadores were then widely recognized as the best soldiers
in the world. They received no pay; they were pitiless professional
warriors willing to risk their lives for a share in the expected
plunder. One conquistador explained that he went to America “to
serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in
darkness, and to grow rich, as men desire to do.”

Cortés in Mexico A page from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a historical narrative from
the sixteenth century. The scene, in which Cortés is shown seated on a throne,
depicts the arrival of the Spanish in Tlaxcala in central Mexico.

With his small army and thousands of Indian allies, Cortés

brashly set out to conquer the sprawling Mexica Empire, which
extended from central Mexico to what is today Guatemala. The
army’s nearly 200-mile march through the mountains to the
Mexica capital of Tenochtitlán took almost three months.

Spanish Invaders As the Spanish army marched across Mexico,

the conquistadores heard fabulous stories about Tenochtitlán,
with its gleaming white buildings and beautiful temples. With
some 200,000 inhabitants scattered among twenty neighborhoods,
it was larger than London, Paris, and Seville, the capital of Spain.
Laid out in a grid pattern on an island in a shallow lake, divided by
long cobblestone avenues, crisscrossed by canals, connected to
the mainland by wide causeways, and graced by formidable stone
pyramids, the city seemed impregnable. Cortés wrote that the
How did the Spanish conquer and colonize the Americas?
“floating city” was “so big and so remarkable” that it “was
unbelievable.” A conquistador reported that their first glimpse of
the city left them speechless: “We did not know what to say or
whether what appeared before us was real.”
The Mexicas viewed themselves as having created the supreme
civilization on the planet. “Are we not the masters of the world?”
the emperor, Moctezuma II, said to his ruling council when he
learned that the Europeans had landed on the coast. Through a
combination of threats and deceptions, the Spanish entered
Tenochtitlán peacefully. Moctezuma mistook Cortés for the exiled
god of the wind and sky, Quetzalcoatl, come to reclaim his lands.
The emperor stared at the newcomers with their long hair, sharp
metal swords, gunpowder, and wheeled wagons. He gave the
Spaniards a lavish welcome, housing them close to the palace and
providing gifts of gold and women.
Within a week, however, Cortés executed a palace coup, taking
Moctezuma hostage. He then ordered religious statues destroyed
and coerced Moctezuma to end the ritual sacrifices of prisoners of
war. Cortés explained why the invasion was necessary: “We
Spaniards have a disease of the heart that only gold can cure.”

The Mexicas Fight Back For eight months, Cortés tried to

convince the Mexicas to surrender, but they instead decided that
Moctezuma was betraying them and resolved to resist the
invaders. In the spring of 1520, the Spaniards attacked the Mexicas
and killed many of the ruling elite. The Mexicas fought back,
however, prompting Cortés to march Moctezuma to the edge of a
balcony and force him to order the warriors to lay down their
weapons. “We must not fight them,” the emperor shouted. “We are
not their equals in battle. Put down your shields and arrows.” The
priests, however, denounced Moctezuma as a traitor and stoned
him to death.
For the next seven days, Mexica warriors forced the Spaniards to
retreat after suffering heavy losses. Their 20,000 Indian allies
remained loyal, however, enabling Cortés to regroup his forces.
Sporadic fighting continued for months. In 1521, having been
reinforced with more soldiers and horses from Cuba and
thousands more indigenous warriors eager to defeat the despised
Mexicas, Cortés surrounded the imperial city for eighty-five days,
cut off the city’s access to water and food, and watched as a
smallpox epidemic devastated the inhabitants, killing 90 percent
of them.

The Biological and Military Defeat of Tenochtitlán The

ravages of smallpox and the support of thousands of Indian allies
help explain how such a small force of well-organized and highly
disciplined Spaniards vanquished a proud imperial nation in
August 1521. After 15,000 Mexicas were slaughtered, the others
surrendered. A merciless Cortés ordered the leaders hanged and
the priests devoured by dogs, but not before torturing them
(literally putting their feet to the fire) in an effort to learn where
more gold might be found. A conquistador remembered that the
streets “were so filled with sick and dead people that our men
walked over nothing but bodies.” In two years, Cortés and his
army had waged a genocidal war and seized an epic empire that
had taken centuries to develop.
Cortés became the first governor-general of New Spain and
quickly began replacing the Mexica leaders with Spanish
bureaucrats and church officials. Mexico City became the imperial
capital of New Spain, and Cortés ordered that a grand Catholic
cathedral be built from the stones of Moctezuma’s destroyed
palace.

PIZZARO’S INVASION OF THE INCAN EMPIRE Cortés’s

conquest of Mexico established the model for waves of plundering
conquistadores to follow. Within fifty years, Spain had established
a vast empire in Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, and
How did the Spanish conquer and colonize the Americas?
South America—calling it New Spain. The Spanish cemented
control of their empire in the Americas through ruthless violence
and enslavement of the indigenous peoples followed by
oppressive rule over them—just as the Mexicas had done in
forming their empire.
In 1531, Francisco Pizarro mimicked the conquest of Mexico
when he led a band of 168 conquistadores down the Pacific coast
of South America. They brutally subdued the extensive Incan
Empire and its 5 million people living in present-day Ecuador,
Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. The Spanish killed
thousands of Incan warriors, seized imperial palaces, took royal
women as mistresses and wives, and looted the empire of its gold
and silver.
From Peru, Spain extended its control southward through Chile
and north to present-day Colombia. A government official in
Spain reported in 1534 that the amount of gold and silver flowing
into the treasury “was incredible.”

SPANISH AMERICA As the sixteenth century unfolded, the

Spanish shifted from looting the indigenous peoples to enslaving
them. To reward the conquistadores, the Spanish government
transferred to America a medieval socioeconomic system known
as the encomienda. Favored soldiers or officials received large
parcels of land—and control over the people who lived there. The
conquistadores were told to Christianize the Indians and provide
them with protection in exchange for “tribute”—a share of their
goods and their forced labor.
New Spain thus became a society of extremes: wealthy
encomenderos and powerful priests at one end, and Indians held
in poverty at the other. The Spaniards used brute force to ensure
that the Indians accepted their role. Nuño de Guzman, a governor
of a Mexican province, loved to watch his massive fighting dog tear
apart rebellious Indians. He was equally brutal with colonists.
After a Spaniard talked back to him, he had the man nailed to a
post by his tongue.

IMPOSING THE CATHOLIC RELIGION Once in control of

the Americas, the Spanish sought to convert the Indians into
obedient Catholics. Hundreds of priests fanned out across New
Spain, using force to convert the Indians. “Though they seem to be
a simple people,” a priest declared in 1562, “they are up to all sorts
of mischief, and without compulsion, they will never speak the
[religious] truth.” By the end of the sixteenth century, there were
more than 300 Catholic monasteries or missions in New Spain.
Catholicism had become a major instrument of Spanish
imperialism and the most important institution in the Americas.
Some officials criticized the forced religious conversion of
Indians and the harsh encomienda system. A Catholic priest,
Bartolomé de Las Casas, was horrified by the treatment of Indians
in Hispaniola and Cuba. The conquistadores behaved like “wild
beasts,” he reported, “killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and
destroying the native peoples.” Las Casas insisted that the role of
Spaniards in the New World was to convert the Indians, “not to
rob, to scandalize, to capture, or destroy them, or to lay waste their
lands.” In 1514, he resolved to devote himself to aiding the
Indians.
Las Casas spent the next fifty years advocating better treatment
for indigenous people, earning the title Protector of the Indians.
He urged that the Indians be converted to Catholicism only
through “peaceful and reasonable” means, and he eventually
convinced the monarchy and the Catholic Church to issue new
rules calling for better treatment of the Indians. Still, the use of
“fire and the sword” continued, and angry Spanish colonists on
Hispaniola banished Las Casas from the island.
 On returning to Spain, Las Casas said, “I left Christ in the Indies
How did the Spanish conquer and colonize the Americas?
not once, but a thousand times beaten, afflicted, insulted and
crucified by those Spaniards who destroy and ravage the Indians.”
In 1564, two years before his death, he bleakly predicted that “God
will wreak his fury and anger against Spain some day for the
unjust wars waged against the Indians.”