Spain moved fast after the first contacts. Within fifty years of 1492, small Spanish forces had toppled the two largest empires in the Americas and built an empire that would last three centuries.
Key idea
Why it works
Worked example: Explain the conquest
- Allies: Tlaxcalans and other Native peoples who resented Aztec rule fought alongside the Spanish.
- Disease: the smallpox epidemic of 1520 had killed many people, including the ruler.
- Siege: boats with cannons controlled the lake, and the city was cut off from food.
Answer: Native allies, disease and a siege that starved the city, along with Spanish weapons.
Worked example: The encomienda
- The colonist was to protect them and teach them Christianity.
- In return he could demand their labor and tribute.
- In practice it often meant forced, deadly work in mines and fields.
Answer: A grant of Native labor and tribute that led to widespread abuse.
Some Spaniards protested. The priest Bartolomé de las Casas, once an encomienda holder himself, spent decades denouncing the abuses. The crown's New Laws of 1542 banned new encomiendas and the enslavement of Native people, though colonists resisted and abuses went on. In the Valladolid debate (1550 to 1551), Las Casas argued against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda that Native peoples were fully rational people with rights. Las Casas had at first suggested using enslaved Africans instead, a view he later rejected as equally unjust.
In what is now the United States, Spain founded St. Augustine in 1565, the oldest continuously occupied European-founded city in the country, and New Mexico (Juan de Oñate's expedition of 1598; Santa Fe in 1610), with missions to convert the Pueblo peoples.
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