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Christians speaking closely related Romance languages made up the majority of the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula, but they had long coexisted with a larger element of starkly distinct peoples than most of the other nations of Europe. Not only were the Basques in the northeast of different stock, but Iberia had been largely conquered in the early Middle Ages by Muslim Arabic speakers coming from northern Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. In a long process of reconquest, called the Reconquista, the Iberians had gained back all of the peninsula by the late 15th century, but the Moors, as they called them, were still the majority of the population in several areas along the southern coast, and as servants, slaves, and craftspeople they were to be found in many parts of the peninsula. A substantial number of Jews had also long made Iberia their home. For many decades the Portuguese had been exploring along the coast of Africa, bringing back many Africans as slaves. By the late 15th century Africans were present in considerable numbers in Portugal and also in the south of Spain.
The Iberian Christians’ relations with the other peoples, above all the Moors, were to be the precedent for their treatment of the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In the Reconquest (Reconquista) the Christians had pushed their rivals back through military force; those who carried out the conquests often went to settle among the Moors and were rewarded by the government with grants of land and other benefits. But the newly subjugated Muslims retained much of their organization and civilization for long periods, only gradually being Christianized and absorbed. As for the Jews, on the one hand they were resented and sometimes persecuted by Christian Iberians while on the other hand those who converted to Christianity often rose high in professional and political life and married well within Christian Iberian society.
The Africans had become a well-known group especially in the southern part of the peninsula, with accepted roles as house servants, craftspeople, and field workers. Possession of African slaves was part of general economic life and of social ambitions. Also, manumission was possible, and communities of freed Africans, many of them racially mixed, existed on the edges of society.
So much diversity represented a formidable challenge to the movement toward the creation of unified Christian nation-states that was coming to a head in the late 15th century. Those of the Jews and Moors who had refused to convert were in time forcibly expelled, and the Inquisition became active in the attempt to enforce the orthodoxy of those who had accepted conversion. Negative stereotypes concerning the other ethnicities were rife in Iberian culture, but over the centuries Iberia had seen diversity, close contact with different peoples, and their gradual absorption.
The overseas tradition
All Iberia’s coastal peoples had maritime experience. Yet farther inland the occupation of mariner was despised; expansion was deemed a matter of conquering and occupying contiguous territory rather than of far-flung commerce. It was the Italians, above all the Genoese, who brought the lore of overseas activity to the Iberians. From the eastern Mediterranean they carried the sugar industry, the use of foreign slaves in it, and the trinket trade with distant peoples first to Spain and Portugal and then on out into the Atlantic, where they were involved together with the Portuguese on the West African coast and the islands lying off it. By the time of contact with the Americas, the Spaniards had been affected by these developments to the extent that Sevilla (Seville) and some other ports were heavily engaged in overseas commerce, often under Genoese direction, but they still mainly adhered to the tradition of conquest and settlement, reinforced by their final defeat of the Spanish Moors in 1492. The Portuguese, on the other hand, partly because of Italian influence and partly because of their own geographic situation, had gone over thoroughly to the commercial-maritime tradition, emphasizing exploration, commerce, tropical crops, and coastal trading posts rather than full-scale occupation.
It is no accident, then, that Christopher Columbus was a Genoese who had long been in Portugal and had visited the Atlantic islands. His projects were entirely within the Italian tradition.
Early Latin America
Spanish America
The Spaniards were not only the first of the Europeans to reach the Americas in early modern times, but they also quickly located and occupied the areas of greatest indigenous population and mineral resources. They immigrated in force and created a far-flung, permanent network of new settlements.
The Caribbean phase
The islands of the Caribbean would soon become a backwater, but during the first years of Spanish occupation they were the arena of the development of many practices and structures that would long be central to Spanish-American life.
When Columbus returned to Spain from his voyage of 1492, having hit upon the island of Hispaniola (now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) as his base, his concept of what should be done thereafter was in the Italian-Portuguese maritime tradition. He wanted to explore further for trading partners, and he considered all who came along with him to be employees of an enterprise headed by himself. The Spaniards, however, immediately started moving in the direction of their own traditions. The expedition that returned to Hispaniola in 1493 was far more elaborate than it needed to have been for Columbus’ purposes, containing a large number and variety of people, animals, and equipment for a large-scale, permanent occupation of the island. A conflict of purpose between the Spaniards on the one hand and Columbus with his Italian relatives and associates on the other soon ensued. By 1499 the royal government was intervening directly, naming Spaniards to the governorship and sending further large parties of settlers. Spanish ways soon gained the upper hand.
Santo Domingo, founded on the southeastern coast of Hispaniola in 1496, became a real city, with a rash of ephemeral secondary Spanish cities spread over the island. These were oriented to gold-mining sites, which were soon at the base of the Spanish economy. Indigenous demographic loss in this hot, humid area was quick and catastrophic, and placer mines (primarily in streams, where unconsolidated deposits of heavy, valuable minerals settled) also soon began to run out. In the second decade of the 16th century the Spaniards pushed on to the other large islands, where the cycle began to repeat itself, although more quickly; around the same time, expeditions to the mainland began, partly to seek for new assets and partly to try to replace the lost population on the islands.
The city
Santo Domingo became a type of entity that would reappear in every major area of Spanish occupation. The central city formed a stable headquarters for the Spaniards in the midst of a chaos of population loss and economic shifts in the countryside. The majority of all the Spaniards in the country lived there, at least when they could. Everyone of importance was there, with only underlings doing essential tasks located in the country. Governmental offices, churches, large private dwellings, and shops soon materialized around the city’s central square, together with all the people required for them. The urban core was well laid out and well built up. On the city’s edge everything was different. Here were the ranchos, impermanent structures inhabited mainly by Indians temporarily in town for work purposes. The Spanish-American city remained like this for centuries—Spanish in the centre, Indian on the edges, growing indefinitely without changing at the core, the site of an enormous process of cultural change.
Indians and Spaniards
In the Caribbean phase several mechanisms developed, combining indigenous and Spanish elements, that long formed the main structural ties between Indians and Spaniards on the mainland as well. The primary form through which Spaniards attempted to take advantage of the functioning of the indigenous world was what came to be known as the encomienda, a governmental grant of an indigenous sociopolitical unit to an individual Spaniard for him to use in various ways. On the Spanish side, the institution grew out of the Reconquest tradition. Pressure among the Spaniards on the scene led to the arrangement; Columbus, while governor, had opposed it, and Spanish royal authorities tried to restrict it as much as they could. On the indigenous side, the encomienda rested on an already existing unit and the powers of its ruler. The size and benefits of the encomienda thus depended on the local indigenous situation: there could be only as many encomiendas as there were indigenous units; the encomendero (holder of the grant) could at least initially receive only what the ruler had received before him. The larger islands were inhabited by the Arawak, a sedentary if modestly developed people with kingdoms, rulers, nobles, and obligatory labour mechanisms. Their ruler was called a cacique, and the Spaniards adopted the word and carried it with them wherever they went in the Americas. The cacique received labour but not tribute in kind, and the encomendero, in practice, followed suit.
The encomendero used the indigenous labour in various ways: to construct houses in the Spanish city where he lived, to provide servants, to produce agricultural products on properties he acquired, and above all to work in the growing gold-mining industry. The encomienda set up most of the main forms of Spanish-Indian contact. Although based on traditional mechanisms, it involved major movements of people and new types of activity. Through these dislocations and the exposure of the Indians to new diseases, the encomienda was instrumental in the quick virtual disappearance of the indigenous population on the large islands.
The encomienda was primarily a transaction between the encomendero, the cacique, and his people, but it could not stop there. Auxiliaries with European skills were needed to run mining operations and supervise the growing of European crops and livestock. The encomendero would hire some Spaniards in supervisory capacities, augmented by African slaves when possible, but the limits of his resources were soon reached. He needed permanent indigenous employees who could learn needed skills and act as a cadre. The indigenous world already knew the naboría, a person directly and permanently dependent upon the ruler or a noble. This role was appropriated by the Spaniards, who commandeered substantial numbers of Indians for their permanent employ, calling them naborías. On the mainland the permanent indigenous worker was to become an ever-growing element of the equation, the locus of the greatest cultural change, and a channel between the Spanish and indigenous worlds.
In the Reconquest tradition, the Spaniards believed that non-Christians taken in battle could properly be enslaved. Nevertheless, the bulk of the sedentary population in the Caribbean and on the mainland was not enslaved. Only as the population declined seriously did slave-raiding around the edges of the Caribbean become a major factor, the Spaniards attempting in vain to replace the losses. All over Spanish America, Indian slavery was to be a secondary factor, brought into play mainly with less-than-sedentary peoples and under economic pressures—that is, the lack of other assets. The slaves were always, as in this case, employed far from their place and culture of origin.
A new Spanish subculture
Cacique was not the only word and concept incorporated into local Spanish culture in the Caribbean and spread from there wherever the Spaniards went. Some of the new cultural goods were the result of Spanish action, like the encomienda or the ranchos; others were straight out of the indigenous world, including naboría, maíz (corn; maize), canoa (canoe), coa (digging stick), and barbacoa (grill, palisade, anything with pointed sticks, the origin of the English word barbecue). Still others came out of the Portuguese Atlantic tradition, like rescate (literally rescue or redemption), a word for informal trading with indigenous people often involving force and taking place in a setting where conquest had not yet taken place. This whole new overlay on Hispanic culture maintained itself partly because it was adjusted to the new situation but above all because each set of new arrivals from Spain readily adopted it from the old hands already there.
Conquest in the central mainland areas
The Spanish occupation of the larger Caribbean islands did not entail spectacular episodes of military conflict. Yet force was involved, and the Spaniards developed many of the techniques they would use on the mainland. One of the most important was the device of seizing the cacique in a parley, then using his authority as the entering wedge. The Spaniards also learned that the indigenous people were not a solid unit but would often cooperate with the intruders in order to gain advantage against a local enemy.
Also during the Caribbean phase an expeditionary form evolved that was to carry the Spaniards to the far reaches of the hemisphere. Spanish expansion occurred under royal auspices, but expeditions were conceived, financed, manned, and organized locally. The leaders, who invested most, were senior people with local wealth and a following; the ordinary members were men without encomiendas, often recently arrived. The primary leader of an important expedition was often the second-ranking man in the base area, just behind the governor, ambitious to be governor himself but blocked by the incumbent.
There was no permanent organization and no sense of rank. The word “army” was hardly used, and the word “soldier” not at all; still, the possession of steel helmets, steel swords and lances, and horses gave the Spaniards an overwhelming technical advantage over any indigenous force they were likely to meet. On flat, open ground, two or three hundred Spaniards often defeated indigenous armies of many thousands, suffering few casualties themselves. The conquering groups showed a surprising diversity, coming from many different regions of Spain (plus some foreign countries) and representing a broad cross section of Spanish pursuits. It was they who founded and settled in the new cities, and the later stream of immigration initially consisted primarily of their relatives and compatriots. Conquest and settlement were a single process.
Having in about one generation largely exhausted the demographic and mineral potential of the Greater Antilles, the Spaniards began a serious push toward the mainland in two approximately contemporary streams, one from Cuba to central Mexico and surrounding regions and the other from Hispaniola to the Isthmus of Panama region and on to Peru and associated areas. The Peruvian thrust started first, in Tierra Firme (the area of Panama and present northwestern Colombia) in the years 1509–13. The results were appreciable, but the Panamanian occupation was thrown somewhat in the shadow for a time by the spectacular conquest of central Mexico in 1519–21.
Conquest of Mexico
The leader of the Mexican venture, Hernán (Hernando) Cortés, had some university education and was unusually articulate, but he conformed to the general type of the leader, being senior, wealthy, and powerful in Cuba, and the expedition he organized was also of the usual type. Passing by the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula, the Spaniards landed in force on the central coast, almost immediately founding Veracruz, which despite small shifts in location has been the country’s main port ever since. The Aztec empire, or Triple Alliance, of the city-states of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tacuba, centring on the Mexica (Aztec) of Tenochtitlán, dominated central Mexico. The coastal peoples among whom the Spaniards landed, however, had only recently been incorporated in the Aztec tribute system, and they offered the Spaniards no open resistance.
Moving inland, the invaders encountered the second power of the region, the Tlaxcalans. Tlaxcala briefly engaged the Spaniards in battle but, suffering heavy losses, soon decided to ally with them against their traditional enemy, the Aztec. As the Spaniards moved on toward Tenochtitlán, many of the local subordinate states (altepetl) also came to terms. Even in Tenochtitlán itself fighting did not ensue immediately; the Spaniards as usual seized the cacique (that is, the king of Tenochtitlán, often called the Aztec emperor, Montezuma or Moteucçoma) and began to exercise authority through him.
The expected secondary reaction was not long in coming, and fighting broke out in the capital. At this point the most unusual part of the process began, for Tenochtitlán was on an island in the midst of a lake, shot through with canals and extensively built up. Here the Spaniards lost much of their usual advantage. They were forced from Tenochtitlán with severe casualties. Although they retained their superiority in the open country, they had to retire to Tlaxcala, accumulate reinforcements, and then come back to Tenochtitlán to carry out a unique full-scale siege, including the use of European-style vessels with cannon on the lake. After four months the Spaniards captured the Aztec capital and began turning it into their own headquarters as Mexico City.
Other parts of central Mexico came under Spanish control more easily, and several Spanish cities were established in the region. Soon successor conquests were under way, to Guatemala, Yucatán, and the north. Those to the north led to little in the short run because that area was inhabited by less-sedentary peoples. Cortés acted as governor for a time and was given great rewards, but rivalries among the Spaniards soon made it possible for the royal government to replace him, first with an audiencia, or high court, and then also with a viceroy, direct representative of the Spanish king.
