History Assignment 1
ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS
Answer the following questions. Remember to cite your sources, and use only the sources provided for this assignment:
1) Describe the societies that developed in the Americas prior to European contact. Compare and contrast American Indian civilizations in North and South America.
2) What political, religious, and technological developments spurred European exploration of the world? How did the Ottoman Empire’s expansion factor into this?
3) How were the Portuguese and Spanish Empires different?
4) Describe the Columbian Exchange, and give a few examples to illustrate the way it worked. What do we mean by “Old” and “New” Worlds?
5) Do you think we should study history? Is there any meaningful value in it? (And yes, you can be honest).
Chapter 1
America was born in melting ice. Tens of thousands of years ago, during a period known as the Ice Age, immense glaciers some two miles thick inched southward from the Arctic Circle at the top of the globe. The advancing ice crushed hills, rerouted rivers, gouged out lakebeds and waterways, and scraped bare all the land in its path. The glacial ice sheets covered much of North America—Canada, Alaska, the Upper Midwest, New England, Montana, and Washington. Then, as the continent’s climate began to warm, the ice slowly started to melt, year after year, century after century. As the ice sheets receded, they opened pathways for the first immigrants to roam the continent.
Debate still rages about when and how humans first arrived in North America. Yet one thing is certain: the ancestors of every person living in the United States originally came from somewhere else. America is indeed “a nation of immigrants,” a society of striving people attracted by a mythic new world promising new beginnings and a better life in a new place of unlimited space. Geography may be destiny, as the saying goes, but without pioneering people of determination and imagination, geography would have destroyed rather than sustained the first Americans.
Until recently, archaeologists had assumed that ancient peoples from northeast Asia began following herds of large game animals across the Bering Strait, a waterway that now connects the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. During the Ice Age, however, the Bering Strait was dry—a treeless, windswept, frigid tundra that connected eastern Siberia with Alaska.
The place with the oldest traces of human activity in the Bering region is Broken Mammoth, a 14,400-year-old site in central Alaska where the first aboriginal peoples, called Paleo-Indians (Ancient Indians), arrived in North America. More recently, archaeologists in central Texas unearthed evidence of people dating back almost 16,000 years.
Over thousands of years, as the climate kept warming and the glaciers and ice sheets continued to melt, small nomadic groups fanned out from Alaska on foot or in boats and eventually spread across the Western Hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of South America. The Paleo-Indians lived in transportable huts with wooden frames covered by animal skins or grasses (“thatch”).
Paleo-Indians were skilled hunters and gatherers in search of game animals, whales, seals, fish, and wild plants, berries, nuts, roots, and seeds. As they moved southward, they trekked across prairies and plains, working in groups to track and kill massive animals unlike any found there today: mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, camels, lions, saber-toothed tigers, cheetahs, and giant wolves, beavers, and bears.
Recent archaeological discoveries in North and South America, however, suggest that prehistoric humans may have arrived thousands of years earlier from various parts of Asia. Some may even have crossed the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in boats from Polynesian islands in the southern Pacific or from southwestern Europe.
Regardless of when, where, or how humans first set foot in North America, the continent eventually became a dynamic crossroads for adventurous peoples from around the world, all bringing with them distinctive backgrounds, cultures, technologies, religions, and motivations that helped form the multicultural society known as America.
Early Cultures in America
Archaeologists have labeled the earliest humans in North America the Clovis peoples, named after a site in New Mexico where ancient hunters killed tusked woolly mammoths using “Clovis” stone spearheads. Over the centuries, as the climate warmed, days grew hotter and many of the largest mammals—mammoths, mastodons, and camels—grew extinct. Hunters then began stalking more-abundant mammals: deer, antelope, elk, moose, and caribou.
Over time, the Ancient Indians adapted to their diverse environments— coastal forests, grassy plains, southwestern deserts, eastern woodlands. Some continued to hunt with spears and, later, bows and arrows; others fished or trapped small game. Some gathered wild plants and herbs and collected acorns and seeds, while others farmed using stone hoes. Most did some of each.
By about 7000 b.c.e. (before the Common Era), Native American societies began transforming into farming cultures, supplemented by seasonal hunting and gathering. Agriculture provided reliable, nutritious food, which accelerated population growth and enabled once nomadic people to settle in villages. Indigenous peoples became expert at growing plants that would become the primary food crops of the hemisphere, chiefly maize (corn), beans, and squash, but also chili peppers, avocados, and pumpkins.
Maize-based societies viewed corn as the “gift of the gods” because it provided many essential needs. They made hominy by soaking dried kernels in a mixture of water and ashes and then cooking it. They used corn cobs for fuel and the husks to fashion mats, masks, and dolls. They also ground the kernels into cornmeal, which could be mixed with beans to make protein-rich succotash.
The Mayans, Incas, and Mexica
Around 1500 b.c.e., farming towns appeared in what is now Mexico. Agriculture supported the development of sophisticated communities complete with gigantic temple-topped pyramids, palaces, and bridges in Middle America (Mesoamerica, what is now Mexico and Central America). The Mayans, who dominated Central America for more than 600 years, developed a written language and elaborate works of art. Mayan civilization featured sprawling cities, hierarchical government, terraced farms, and spectacular pyramids.
Yet in about a.d. 900, the Mayan culture collapsed. Why it disappeared remains a mystery, but a major factor was ecological. The Mayans destroyed much of the rain forest, upon whose fragile ecosystem they depended. As an archaeologist has explained, “Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape.” Widespread deforestation led to hillside erosion and a catastrophic loss of nutrient-rich farmland.
Overpopulation added to the strain on Mayan society, prompting civil wars. The Mayans eventually succumbed to the Toltecs, a warlike people who conquered most of the region in the tenth century. Around a.d. 1200, however, the Toltecs mysteriously withdrew after a series of droughts, fires, and invasions.
The Incas Much farther south, many diverse people speaking at least twenty different languages made up the sprawling Inca Empire. By the fifteenth century, the Incas’ vast realm stretched 2,500 miles along the Andes Mountains in the western part of South America. It featured irrigated farms, stone buildings, and interconnected networks of roads made of stone.
The Mexica (aztecs) During the twelfth century, the Mexica (Me-SHEE-ka)—whom Europeans later called Aztecs (“People from Aztlán,” the place they claimed as their original homeland)—began drifting southward from northwest Mexico. Disciplined, determined, and aggressive, they eventually took control of central Mexico, where in 1325 they built the city of Tenochtitlán (“place of the stone cactus”) on an island in Lake Tetzcoco, at the site of present-day Mexico City.
Tenochtitlán would become one of the grandest cities in the world. It served as the capital of a sophisticated Aztec Empire ruled by a powerful emperor and divided into two social classes: noble warriors and priests (about 5 percent of the population) and the free commoners—merchants, craftsmen, and farmers.
When the Spanish invaded Mexico in 1519, they found a vast Aztec Empire connected by a network of roads serving 371 city-states organized into 38 provinces. Towering stone temples, broad paved avenues, thriving marketplaces, and some 70,000 adobe (sunbaked mud) huts dominated Tenochtitlán. As the empire expanded across central and southern Mexico, the Aztecs developed elaborate societies supported by detailed legal systems and a complicated political structure. They advanced efficient new farming techniques, including terracing of fields, crop rotation, large-scale irrigation, and other engineering marvels. Their arts flourished, their architecture was magnificent. Their rulers were invested with godlike qualities, and nobles, priests, and warrior-heroes dominated the social order. The emperor’s palace had 100 rooms and 100 baths replete with amazing statues, gardens, and a zoo; the aristocracy lived in large stone dwellings, practiced polygamy (multiple wives), and were exempt from manual labor.
Like most agricultural peoples, the Mexica were intensely spiritual and worshipped multiple gods. Their religious beliefs focused on the interconnection between nature and human life and the sacredness of natural elements—the sun, moon, stars, rain, mountains, rivers, and animals. They believed that the gods had sacrificed themselves to create the sun, moon, people, and maize. They were therefore obliged to feed the gods, especially Huitzilopochtli, the Lord of the Sun and War, with the vital energy provided by human hearts and blood. So the Mexica, like most Mesoamerican societies, regularly offered live human sacrifices.
Warfare was a sacred ritual for the Mexica, but it involved a peculiar sort of combat. Warriors fought with wooden swords—to wound rather than kill; they wanted live captives to sacrifice to the gods and to work as slaves. Gradually, the Mexica conquered many neighboring societies, forcing them to make payment of goods and labor as tribute to the empire.
In elaborate weekly rituals, captured warriors or virgin girls would be daubed with paint, given a hallucinatory drug, and marched up many steps to the temple platform, where priests cut out the victims’ beating hearts and offered them to the sun god. The constant need for human sacrifices fed the Mexica’s relentless warfare against other indigenous groups. A Mexica song celebrated their warrior code: “Proud of itself is the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlán. Here no one fears to die in war. This is our glory.”
North American Civilizations
North of Mexico, in the present-day United States, many indigenous societies blossomed in the early 1500s. Over the centuries, small kinship groups (clans) had joined together: first to form larger bands involving hundreds of people, which then evolved into much larger regional groups, or tribes, whose members spoke the same language. Although few had an alphabet or written language, the different societies developed rich oral traditions that passed on spiritual myths and social beliefs, especially those concerning the sacredness of nature, the necessity of communal living, and a deep respect for elders.
Like the Mexica, most indigenous peoples believed in many “spirits.” To the Sioux, God was Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, who ruled over all spirits. The Navajo believed in the Holy People: Sky, Earth, Moon, Sun, Thunders, Winds, and Changing Woman. Many Native Americans believed in ghosts, who acted as their bodyguards in battle.
The importance of hunting to many Indian societies helped nurture a warrior ethic in which courage in combat was the highest virtue. War dances the night before a hunt or battle invited the spirits to unleash magical powers. Yet, Native American warfare mostly consisted of small-scale raids intended to enable individual warriors to demonstrate their courage rather than to seize territory or destroy villages. Casualties were minimal. Taking a few captives often signaled victory.
Diverse Societies
For all their similarities, the indigenous peoples of North America developed markedly different ways of life. In North America alone in 1492, when the first Europeans arrived, there were perhaps several million native peoples organized into 240 different societies speaking many different languages.
These Native Americans practiced diverse customs and religions, passed on distinctive cultural myths, and developed varied economies. Some wore clothes they had woven or made using animal skins, and still others wore nothing but colorful paint, tattoos, or jewelry. Some lived in stone houses, others in circular timber wigwams or bark-roofed longhouses. Still others lived in sod-covered or reed-thatched lodges, or in portable tipis made from animal skins. Some cultures built stone pyramids graced by ceremonial plazas, and others constructed huge burial or ritual mounds topped by temples.
Few North American Indians permitted absolute rulers. Tribes had chiefs, but the “power of the chiefs,” reported an eighteenth-century British trader, “is an empty sound. They can only persuade or dissuade the people by the force of good-nature and clear reasoning.” Likewise, Henry Timberlake, a British soldier, explained that the Cherokee government, “if I may call it a government, which has neither laws nor power to support it, is a mixed aristocracy and democracy, the chiefs being chosen according to their merit in war.”
For Native Americans, exile from the group was the most feared punishment. They owned land in common rather than individually as private property, and they had well-defined social roles. Men were hunters, warriors, and leaders. Women tended children; made clothes, blankets, jewelry, and pottery; cured and dried animal skins; wove baskets; built and packed tipis; and grew, harvested, and cooked food. When the men were away hunting or fighting, women took charge of village life. Some Indian nations, like the Cherokee and Iroquois, gave women political power.
The Southwest The arid (dry) Southwest (present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah) featured a landscape of high mesas, deep canyons, vast deserts, long rivers, and snow-covered mountains that hosted corn-growing societies. The Hopis, Zunis, and others still live in the multistory adobe cliff-side villages (called pueblos by the Spanish), which were erected by their ancient ancestors.
About 500 c.e. (Common Era), the Hohokam (“those who have vanished”) people migrated from Mexico northward to southern and central Arizona, where they built extensive canals to irrigate crops. They also crafted decorative pottery and turquoise jewelry, and constructed temple mounds (earthen pyramids used for sacred ceremonies).
The most widespread and best known of the Southwest pueblo cultures were the Anasazi (Ancient Ones), or Basketmakers. Unlike the Aztecs and Incas, however, Anasazi society did not have a rigid class structure. The Anasazi engaged in warfare only as a means of self-defense, and the religious leaders and warriors worked much as the rest of the people did.
The Northwest Along the narrow coastal strip running up the heavily forested northwest Pacific coast, shellfish, salmon, seals, whales, deer, and edible wild plants were abundant. Here, there was little need to rely on farming. In fact, many of the Pacific Northwest peoples, such as the Haida, Kwakiutl, and Nootka, needed to work only two days to provide enough food for a week.
Such population density enabled the Pacific coast cultures to develop intricate religious rituals and sophisticated woodworking skills. They carved towering totem poles featuring decorative figures of animals and other symbolic characters. For shelter, they built large, earthen-floored, cedar-plank houses up to 500 feet long, where groups of families lived together. They also created sturdy, oceangoing canoes made of hollowed-out red cedar tree trunks—some large enough to carry fifty people. Socially, they were divided into slaves, commoners, and chiefs. Warfare was usually a means to acquire slaves.
The Great Plains The many tribal nations living on the Great Plains, a vast, flat land of cold winters and hot summers west of the Mississippi River, included the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Apache, and Sioux. As nomadic hunter-gatherers, they tracked herds of buffaloes (technically called bison) across a sea of grassland, collecting seeds, nuts, roots, and berries as they roamed.
At the center of most hunter-gatherer religions is the idea that the hunted animal is a willing sacrifice provided by the gods (spirits). To ensure a successful hunt, these nomadic peoples performed sacred rites of gratitude beforehand. Once a buffalo herd was spotted, the hunters would set fires to drive the stampeding animals over cliffs, often killing far more than they could harvest and consume.
The Mississippians East of the Great Plains, in the vast woodlands reaching from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean, several “moundbuilding” cultures prospered. Between 700 b.c.e. and 200 c.e., the Adena and later the Hopewell societies developed communities along rivers in the Ohio Valley. The Adena-Hopewell cultures grew corn, squash, beans, and sunflowers, as well as tobacco for smoking. They left behind enormous earthworks and elaborate burial mounds shaped like snakes, birds, and other animals, several of which were nearly a quarter mile long.
Like the Adena, the Hopewell developed an extensive trading network with other Indian societies from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, exchanging exquisite carvings, metalwork, pearls, seashells, copper ornaments, bear claws, and jewelry. By the sixth century, however, the Hopewell culture disappeared, giving way to a new phase of development east of the Mississippi River, the Mississippian culture.
The Mississippians were corn-growing peoples who built substantial agricultural towns around central plazas and temples. They developed a far-flung trading network that extended to the Rocky Mountains, and their ability to grow large amounts of corn in the fertile flood plains spurred rapid population growth around regional centers.
Cahokia The largest of these advanced regional centers, called chiefdoms, was Cahokia (600–1300 c.e.), in southwest Illinois, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers (across from what is now St. Louis). The Cahokians constructed an enormous farming settlement with monumental public buildings, spacious ceremonial plazas, and more than eighty flat-topped earthen mounds with thatch-roofed temples on top. The largest of the mounds, called Monks Mound, was ten stories tall, encompassed fourteen acres, and required 22 million cubic feet of soil. At the height of its influence, Cahokia hosted 15,000 people on some 3,200 acres, making it the largest city north of Mexico.
Cahokia, however, vanished around 1300 c.e., and its people dispersed. Its collapse remains a mystery, but the overcutting of trees to make fortress walls may have set in motion ecological changes that doomed the community when a massive earthquake struck. The loss of trees led to widespread flooding and the erosion of topsoil, which finally forced people to seek better lands. As Cahokia disappeared, its former residents took its advanced ways of life to other areas across the Midwest and into what is now the American South.
Eastern Woodlands Peoples
After the collapse of Cahokia, the Eastern Woodlands peoples spread along the Atlantic Seaboard from Maine to Florida and along the Gulf coast to Louisiana. They included three regional groups distinguished by their different languages: the Algonquian, the Iroquoian, and the Muskogean. These were the indigenous societies that Europeans would first encounter when they arrived in North America.
The Algonquians The Algonquian-speaking peoples stretched westward from the New England Seaboard to lands along the Great Lakes and into the Upper Midwest and south to New Jersey, Virginia, and the Carolinas. They lived in small, round wigwams or in multifamily longhouses surrounded by a tall palisade, a timber fence to defend against attackers. Their villages typically ranged in size from 500 to 2,000 people.
The Algonquians along the Atlantic coast were skilled at fishing and gathering shellfish; the inland Algonquians excelled at hunting. They often traveled the region’s waterways using canoes made of hollowed-out tree trunks (dugouts) or birch bark.
All Algonquians foraged for wild food (nuts, berries, and fruits) and practiced agriculture to some extent, regularly burning dense forests to improve soil fertility and provide grazing room for deer. To prepare their vegetable gardens, women broke up the ground with hoes tipped with sharp clamshells or the shoulder blades from deer. In the spring, they cultivated corn, beans, and squash.
The Iroquoians West and south of the Algonquians were the powerful Iroquoian-speaking peoples (including the Seneca, Onondaga, Mohawk, Oneida, and Cayuga nations, as well as the Cherokee and Tuscarora), whose lands spread from upstate New York southward through Pennsylvania and into the upland regions of the Carolinas and Georgia. The Iroquois were farmer/hunters who lived in extended family groups (clans), sharing bark-covered longhouses in towns of 3,000 or more people. The oldest woman in each longhouse served as the “clan mother.”
Unlike the Algonquian culture, in which men were dominant, women held the key leadership roles in the Iroquoian culture. As an Iroquois elder explained, “In our society, women are the center of all things. Nature, we believe, has given women the ability to create; therefore it is only natural that women be in positions of power to protect this function.” A French priest who lived among the Iroquois for five years marveled that “nothing is more real than women’s superiority…. It is they who really maintain the tribe.”
Iroquois men and women operated in separate social domains. No woman could be a chief; no man could head a clan. Women selected the chiefs, controlled the distribution of property, supervised the slaves, and planted and harvested the crops. They also arranged marriages. After a wedding ceremony, the man moved in with the wife’s family. In part, the Iroquoian matriarchy reflected the frequent absence of Iroquois men, who as skilled hunters and traders traveled extensively for long periods, requiring women to take charge of domestic life.
Eastern Woodlands Indians The third major Native American group in the Eastern Woodlands included the peoples along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico who farmed and hunted and spoke the Muskogean language: the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Natchez, Apalachee, and Timucua. Like the Iroquois, they were often matrilineal societies, meaning that ancestry flowed through the mother’s line, but they had a more rigid class structure. The Muskogeans lived in towns arranged around a central plaza. Along the Gulf coast, many of their thatch-roofed houses had no walls because of the mild winters and hot, humid summers.
Over thousands of years, the native North Americans had displayed remarkable resilience, adapting to the uncertainties of frequent warfare, changing climate, and varying environments. They would display similar resilience against the challenges created by the arrival of Europeans.
European Visions of America
The European exploration of the Western Hemisphere resulted from several key developments during the fifteenth century. Dramatic intellectual changes and scientific discoveries, along with sustained population growth, transformed religion, warfare, family life, and national economies. In addition, the resurgence of old vices—greed, conquest, exploitation, oppression, racism, and slavery—helped fuel European expansion abroad.
By the end of the fifteenth century, medieval feudalism’s agrarian social system, in which peasant serfs worked for local nobles in exchange for living on and farming the land, began to disintegrate. People were no longer forced to remain in the same area and keep the same social status in which they were born. A new “middle class” of profit-hungry bankers, merchants, and investors emerged. They were committed to a more dynamic commercial economy fueled by innovations in banking, currency, accounting, and insurance.
The growing trade-based economy in Europe freed kings from their dependence on feudal nobles, enabling the monarchs to unify the scattered cities ruled by princes (principalities) into large kingdoms with stronger, more-centralized governments. The rise of towns, cities, and a merchant class provided new tax revenues. Over time, the new class of monarchs, merchants, and bankers displaced the landed nobility.
This process of centralizing political power was justified in part by claims that European kings ruled by divine right rather than by popular mandate: since God appointed them, only God, not the people, could hold them responsible for their actions.
The Renaissance At the same time, the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman writings about representative government (republics) spurred the Renaissance (rebirth), an intellectual revolution that transformed the arts as well as traditional attitudes toward religion and science. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread across western Europe, bringing with it a more secular outlook that took greater interest in humanity than in religion. Rather than emphasizing God’s omnipotence, Renaissance humanism highlighted the power of inventive people to exert their command over nature.
The Renaissance was an essential force in the transition from medievalism to early modernism. From the fifteenth century on, educated people throughout Europe began to challenge prevailing beliefs as well as the absolute authority of rulers and churchmen. They discussed controversial new ideas, engaged in scientific research, and unleashed their artistic creativity. In the process, they fastened on a new phrase—“to discover”—which first appeared in 1553. Voyages of exploration became voyages of discovery.
The Renaissance also sparked the Age of Exploration. New knowledge and new technologies made possible the construction of larger sailing ships capable of oceanic voyages. The development of more accurate magnetic compasses, maps, and navigational instruments such as astrolabes and quadrants helped sailors determine their ship’s location. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also brought the invention of gunpowder, cannons, and firearms—and the printing press.
The Rise of Global Trade By 1500, trade between western European nations and the Middle East, Africa, and Asia was booming. The Portuguese took the lead, bolstered by crews of expert sailors and fast, threemasted ships called caravels. Portuguese ships roamed along the west coast of Africa collecting grains, gold, ivory, spices, and slaves. Eventually, these mariners continued around Africa to the Indian Ocean in search of the fabled Indies (India and Southeast Asia). They ventured on to China and Japan, where they found spices (cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, black pepper) to enliven bland European food, sugar made from cane to sweeten food and drink, silk cloth, herbal medicines, and other exotic goods.
Global trade was enabled by the emergence of four powerful nations in western Europe: England, France, Portugal, and, especially, Spain. The arranged marriage of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1469 unified their two kingdoms into one formidable new nation, Spain. However, for years thereafter, it remained a loose confederation of separate kingdoms and jurisdictions, each with different cultural and linguistic traditions.
The new king and queen were eager to spread the Catholic faith. On January 1, 1492, after nearly eight centuries of warfare between Spanish Christians and Moorish Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella declared victory for Catholicism at Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in southern Spain. The monarchs then set about instituting a fifteenth-century version of ethnic cleansing. They gave practicing Muslims and Jews living in Spain and Portugal one choice: convert to Catholicism or leave.
The forced exile of Muslims and Jews was one of many factors that enabled Europe’s global explorations at the end of the fifteenth century. Other factors— urbanization, world trade, the rise of centralized nations, advances in knowledge, technology, and firepower—all combined with natural human curiosity, greed, and religious zeal to spur efforts to find alternative routes to the Indies. More immediately, the decision of Chinese rulers to shut off the land routes to Asia in 1453 forced merchants to focus on seaborne options. For these reasons, Europeans set in motion the events that, as one historian has observed, would bind together “four continents, three races, and a great diversity of regional parts.”
The Voyages of Columbus
Born in the Italian seaport of Genoa in 1451, the son of a woolen weaver, Christopher Columbus took to the sea at an early age, teaching himself geography, navigation, and Latin. By the 1480s, he was eager to spread Christianity across the globe and win glory and riches for himself.
The tall, red-haired Columbus spent a decade trying to convince European rulers to finance a western voyage across the Atlantic. England, France, Portugal, and Spain turned him down. Yet he persevered and eventually persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella to fund his voyage. The monarchs agreed to award him a one-tenth share of any riches he gathered; they would keep the rest.
Crossing the Atlantic On August 3, 1492, Columbus and a crew of ninety men and boys, mostly from Spain but from seven other nations as well, set sail on three tiny ships, the Santa María, the Pinta, and the Niña. They traveled first to Lisbon, Portugal, and then headed west to the Canary Islands, where they spent a month loading supplies and making repairs. On September 6, they headed west across the open sea, hoping desperately to sight the shore of east Asia. By early October, worried sailors rebelled at the “madness” of sailing blindly and forced Columbus to promise that they would turn back if land were not sighted within three days.
Then, on October 12, a sailor on watch atop the masthead yelled, “Tierra! Tierra!” (“Land! Land!”). He had spotted a small island in the Bahamas east of Florida that Columbus named San Salvador (Blessed Savior). Columbus mistakenly assumed that they must be near the Indies, so he called the native people “Indios” and named the surrounding islands the West Indies. At every encounter with the peaceful native people, known as Tainos, his first question, using sign language, was whether they had gold. If they did, the Spaniards seized it; if they did not, the Europeans forced them to search for it.
The Tainos, unable to understand or repel the strange visitors, offered gifts of food, water, spears, and parrots. Columbus described them as “well-built, with good bodies, and handsome features”—brown-skinned, with straight black hair. He marveled that they could “easily be made Christians” and “would make fine servants,” boasting that “with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” He promised to bring six “natives” back to Spain for “his highnesses.” Thus began the typical European bias toward the Indians: the belief that they were inferior peoples worthy of being exploited and enslaved.
Exploring the Caribbean After leaving San Salvador, Columbus, excited by native stories of “rivers of gold” to the west, landed on the north shore of Cuba. He exclaimed that it was the “most beautiful land human eyes have ever beheld.”
After a few weeks, Columbus sailed to the island he named Hispaniola (“the Spanish island”), present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He described the island’s indigenous people as the “best people in the world,” full “of love and without greed.” They had no weapons, wore no clothes, and led a simple life, cultivating cassava plants to make bread but spending most of their time relaxing, “seemingly without a care in the world.”
Columbus decided that the Indians were “fitted to be ruled and be set to work” generating riches for Spain. He decreed that all Indians over age 14 must bring him at least a thimbleful of gold dust every three months. As it turned out, the quota was often unattainable—there was not as much gold in the Caribbean as Columbus imagined. Nevertheless, those who failed to supply enough gold had their hands cut off, causing many of them to bleed to death. If they fled, they were hunted down by dogs. Huge numbers died from overwork or disease. Others committed suicide. During fifty years of Spanish control, the Indians on Hispaniola virtually disappeared. In their place, the Spanish began importing enslaved Africans.
At the end of 1492, Columbus, still convinced he had reached an outer island of Japan, sailed back to Spain, taking a dozen Tainos as gifts for the king and queen. After receiving a hero’s welcome, he promised Ferdinand and Isabella that his discoveries would provide them “as much gold as they need… and as many slaves as they ask.”
Thanks to the newly invented printing press, news of Columbus’s pathbreaking voyage spread rapidly across Europe and helped spur a restless desire to explore the world. The Spanish monarchs told Columbus to prepare for a second voyage, instructing him to “treat the Indians very well and lovingly and abstain from doing them any injury.” Columbus and his men would repeatedly defy this order.
Spain worked quickly to secure its legal claim to the Western Hemisphere. With the help of the Spanish-born pope, Alexander VI, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). It divided the non-Christian world, giving most of the Western Hemisphere to Spain, with Africa and what would become Brazil granted to Portugal. In practice, this meant that while Spain developed its American empire in the sixteenth century, Portugal provided it with most of its enslaved African laborers.
In 1493, Columbus returned to the New World, crossing the Atlantic with seventeen ships and 1,400 sailors, soldiers, and settlers—all men. Also on board were Catholic priests eager to convert the native peoples to Christianity. Upon his arrival back in Hispaniola, Columbus discovered that the forty men he had left behind had lost their senses, raping women, robbing villages, and, as his son later added, “committing a thousand excesses for which they were mortally hated by the Indians.”
Naming America Columbus proved to be a much better ship captain than a colonizer and governor. His first business venture in the New World was as a slave trader. When he returned to Spain from his second voyage with hundreds of captive Indians, Queen Isabella, who detested slavery, was horrified. “Who is this Columbus who dares to give out my vassals [Indians] as slaves?”
This incident set in motion a series of investigations into Columbus’s behavior. The queen sent a Spanish royal commissioner, Francis Bobadilla, to Hispaniola. The first things he saw were the corpses of six Spanish settlers hanging from a gallows; more colonists were to be hanged the next day. Bobadilla was so shocked that he canceled the executions and announced that he was supplanting Columbus as governor. When Columbus objected, Bobadilla had him jailed for two months before shipping the explorer, now nearly blind and crippled by arthritis, back to Spain in chains in 1500.
To the end of his life, in 1506, Columbus insisted that he had discovered the outlying parts of Asia. By one of history’s greatest ironies, this led Europeans to name the New World not for Columbus but for another Italian sailorexplorer, Amerigo Vespucci.
In 1499, with the support of Portugal’s monarchy, Vespucci sailed across the Atlantic, landing first at Brazil and then sailing along 3,000 miles of the South American coastline in search of a passage to Asia. In the end, Vespucci decided that South America was so large and so densely populated that it must be a new continent. In 1507, a German mapmaker paid tribute to Vespucci’s navigational skills by labeling the New World using the feminine Latin variant of the explorer’s first name: America.
Professional Explorers News of the remarkable voyages of Columbus and Vespucci stimulated more expeditions. The first explorer to sight the North American continent was John Cabot, an Italian sponsored by King Henry VII of England. Cabot’s landfall in 1497 at what the king called “the new founde lande,” in present-day Canada, gave England the basis for a later claim to all of North America. On a return voyage, however, Cabot and his four ships disappeared.
The English were actually unaware that Norsemen (“Vikings”) from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) had been the first Europeans to “discover” and colonize areas of North America. As early as the tenth century, Norsemen had landed on the rocky, fogbound shore of Greenland, a large island off the northeast coast of North America, and established farming settlements that had lasted hundreds of years before disappearing after prolonged cold weather forced them back to Scandinavia.
Religious Conflict in Europe
While explorers were crossing the Atlantic, powerful religious conflicts were tearing Europe apart in ways that would shape developments in the Western Hemisphere. When Columbus sailed west in 1492, all of Europe acknowledged the thousand-year-old supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church and its pope in Rome. The pope led a huge religious empire, and the Catholics were eager to spread their faith around the world.
The often-brutal efforts of the Spanish to convert native peoples in the Western Hemisphere to Roman Catholicism illustrated the murderous intensity with which European Christians embraced religious life in the sixteenth century. Spiritual concerns inspired, comforted, and united them. People fervently believed in heaven and hell, demons and angels, magic and miracles. And they were willing to kill and die for their religious beliefs.
Martin Luther
The enforced unity of Catholic Europe began to crack on October 31, 1517, when an obscure, thirty-three-yearold German monk who taught at the University of Wittenberg in the German state of Saxony, sent his ninetyfive “theses” on the “corrupt” Catholic Church to church officials. Little did Martin Luther (1483–1546) know that his defiant stance and explosive charges would ignite history’s fiercest spiritual drama, the Protestant Reformation, or that his controversial ideas would forever change the Christian world and plunge Europe into decades of religious strife.
Luther was a spiritual revolutionary who fractured Christianity by undermining the authority of the Catholic Church. He called the pope “the greatest thief and robber that has appeared or can appear on earth” who had subjected the Christian family to levels of “satanic” abuse. Luther especially criticized the widespread sale of indulgences, whereby priests would forgive sins in exchange for money. The Catholic Church had made a profitable business out of forgiving sins, using the revenue from indulgences to raise huge armies and build lavish cathedrals. Luther condemned indulgences as a crass form of thievery. He insisted that God alone, through the grace and mercy of Christ, offered salvation; people could not purchase it from church officials. As Luther exclaimed, “By faith alone are you saved!” To him, the Bible was the sole source of Christian truth; believers had no need for the “den of murderers”—Catholic priests, bishops, and popes.
Through this simple but revolutionary doctrine of “Protestantism,” Luther sought to revitalize Christianity’s original faith and spirituality. The common people, he declared, represented a “priesthood of all believers.” Individuals could seek their own salvation. “All Christians are priests,” he said; they “have the power to test and judge what is correct or incorrect in matters of faith” by themselves. Luther went on to produce the first Bible in a German translation so that everyone—male or female, rich or poor—could read it.
Luther’s rebellion spread quickly across Europe thanks to the circulation of thousands of inexpensive pamphlets, which served as the social media of the time. Without the new printing presses, there may not have been a Protestant Reformation.
Lutheranism began as an intense religious movement, but it soon developed profound social and political implications. By proclaiming that “all” are equal before God, Protestants disrupted traditional notions of wealth, class, and monarchical supremacy. Their desire to practice a faith independent of papal or government interference contributed to the ideal of limited government. By the end of the sixteenth century, King James VI of Scotland grew nervous that his Protestant subjects were plotting to install a “democratic form of government.”
The Catholic Reaction What came to be called Lutheranism quickly found enthusiastic followers, especially in the German-speaking states. In Rome, however, Pope Leo X lashed out at Luther’s “dangerous doctrines,” calling him “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron.”
Luther, aware that his life was at stake, fought back, declaring that he was “born to war” and refusing to abide by any papal decrees: “I will recant nothing!” The “die is cast, and I will have no reconciliation with the Pope for all eternity.” When the pope expelled Luther from the Catholic Church in 1521 and the Holy Roman emperor sentenced him to death, civil war erupted throughout the German principalities. A powerful prince protected Luther from the church’s wrath by hiding him in his castle.
Luther’s conflict with the pope plunged Europe into decades of religious warfare during which both sides sought to eliminate dissent by torturing and burning at the stake those called “heretics.” A settlement between Lutherans and Catholics did not come until 1555, when the Treaty of Augsburg allowed each German prince to determine the religion of his subjects. For a while, they got away with such dictatorial policies, for most people still deferred to ruling princes. Most of the northern German states, along with Scandinavia, became Lutheran.
John Calvin
If Martin Luther was the lightning that sparked the Reformation, John Calvin provided the thunder. Soon after Luther began his revolt against Catholicism, Swiss Protestants also challenged papal authority. In Geneva, a city of 16,000 people, the movement looked to John Calvin (1509–1564), a brilliant French theologian and preacher who had fled from Catholic France to Geneva at age twenty-seven and quickly brought it under the sway of his powerful beliefs.
Calvin deepened and broadened the Reformation that Luther initiated by developing a strict way of life for Protestants to follow. His chief contribution was his emphasis upon humanity’s inherent sinfulness and utter helplessness before an awesome and all-powerful God who had predetermined who would be saved and who would be left to eternal damnation, regardless of their behavior.
Calvin and Luther were the twin pillars of early Protestantism, but whereas Luther was a volatile personality who loved controversy and debate, Calvin was a cool, calculating, analytical theorist who sought to create a Protestant absolutism rigidly devoid of all remnants of Catholicism. Under his leadership, Geneva became a theocracy in which believers sought to convince themselves and others that God had chosen them for salvation.
Calvin came to rule Geneva with uncompromising conviction. He summoned the citizenry to swear allegiance to a twenty-one-article confession of religious faith. No citizen could be outside the authority of the church, and Calvin viewed himself as God’s appointed judge and jury. No aspect of life in Geneva escaped his strict control. Dancing, card-playing, and theatergoing were outlawed. Censorship was enforced, and informers were recruited to report wrongdoing. Visitors staying at inns had to say a prayer before dining. Everyone was required to attend church and to be in bed by nine o’clock. Even joking was outlawed.
Calvin urged that some thirty “witches” in Geneva be burned, drowned, or hanged for supposedly causing an epidemic. Overall, he had fifty-eight people put to death. Calvin also banished scores of people who fell short of his demanding standards, including members of his extended family. He exiled his sister-in-law for adultery and ordered his stepdaughter jailed for fornication. “I have found it to be true,” observed a witty Genevan, “that men who know what is best for society are unable to cope with their families.”
Calvinism For all of its harshness, Calvinism as embodied in Geneva spread like wildfire across France, Scotland, and the Netherlands. It even penetrated Lutheran Germany. Calvinism formed the basis for the German Reformed Church, the Dutch Reformed Church, the Presbyterians in Scotland, and the Huguenots in France, and it prepared the way for many forms of American Protestantism. Like Luther, Calvin argued that Christians did not need popes or kings, archbishops, and bishops to dictate their search for salvation; each congregation should elect its own elders and ministers to guide their worship and nurture their faith.
Over time, Calvin exerted a greater effect upon religious belief and practice in the English colonies than did any other leader of the Reformation. His emphasis on humankind’s essential depravity, his concept of predestination, his support for the primacy and autonomy of each congregation, and his belief in the necessity of theocratic government formed the ideological foundation for Puritan New England.
The Counter-Reformation The Catholic Church furiously resisted the emergence of new “protestant” faiths by launching a “CounterReformation” that reaffirmed basic Catholic beliefs while addressing some of the concerns about priestly abuses raised by Luther, Calvin, and others. In Spain, the monarchy established an “Inquisition” to root out Protestants and heretics. In 1534, a Spanish soldier, Ignatius de Loyola, organized the Society of Jesus, a militant monastic order created to revitalize Catholicism. Its members, the black-robed Jesuits, fanned out across Europe and the Americas as missionaries and teachers.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and killed each other. Every major international conflict in early modern Europe became, to some extent, a religious holy war between Catholic and Protestant nations.
The Reformation in England In England, the Reformation followed a unique course. The Church of England (the Anglican Church) emerged through a gradual process of integrating Calvinism with English Catholicism. In early modern England, the Catholic church and the national government were united and mutually supportive. The monarchy required people to attend religious services and to pay taxes to support the church. The English rulers also supervised the church officials: two archbishops, twenty-six bishops, and thousands of parish clergy, who were often instructed to preach sermons in support of government policies. As one English king explained, “People are governed by the pulpit more than the sword in time of peace.”
King Henry viii The English Reformation originated because of purely political reasons. King Henry VIII, who ruled between 1509 and 1547, had won from the pope the title Defender of the Faith for initially refuting Martin Luther’s rebellious ideas. But Henry turned against the Catholic Church over the issue of divorce. His marriage to Catherine of Aragon, his elder brother’s widow and the youngest daughter of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, had produced a girl, Mary, but no boy. Henry’s obsession for a male heir convinced him that he needed a new wife, and he had grown smitten with another woman, sharp-witted Anne Boleyn. But first he had to convince the pope to annul, or cancel, his twenty-four-year marriage to Catherine, who rebelled against her husband’s plan. She had a powerful ally in her nephew, Charles V, king of Spain and ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, whose armies were in control of the church in Rome.
The pope refused to grant an annulment—in part because Charles V had placed him under arrest to encourage him to make the right decision. In 1533, Henry VIII responded by severing England’s nearly 900-year connection with the Catholic Church. The archbishop of Canterbury then granted the annulment, thus freeing Henry to marry his mistress, the pregnant Anne Boleyn. The pope then excommunicated Henry from the Catholic Church, whereupon Parliament passed an Act of Supremacy declaring that the king, not the pope, was head of the Church of England. Henry quickly banned all Catholic “idols,” required Bibles to be published in English rather than Latin, and confiscated the vast land holdings of the Catholic Church across England.
In one of history’s greatest ironies, Anne Boleyn gave birth not to a male heir but to a daughter named Elizabeth. The disappointed king refused to attend the baby’s christening. Instead, he accused Anne of adultery and had her beheaded, and he declared the infant Elizabeth a bastard. (He would marry four more times.) Elizabeth, however, would grow up to be a nimble, cunning, and courageous queen.
The Reign of Elizabeth In 1547, Henry VIII died and was succeeded by nine-year-old Edward VI, his son by his third wife, Jane Seymour. Edward approved efforts to further “reform” the Church of England. Priests were allowed to marry, church services were conducted in English rather than Latin, and new articles of faith were drafted and published.
When Edward grew gravely ill in 1553, he declared that his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, should succeed him, but nine days after his death, his Catholic half-sister, Mary, led an army that deposed Lady Jane and later ordered her beheaded. The following year, Queen Mary shocked many by marrying Philip, the Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain. With his blessing, she restored Catholic supremacy in England, ordering hundreds of Protestants burned at the stake and others exiled.
“Bloody Mary” died in 1558, and her Protestant half-sister, Henry VIII’s daughter Elizabeth, ascended the throne at the age of twenty-five. Over the next forty-five years, despite political turmoil, religious strife, economic crises, and foreign wars, Elizabeth proved to be one of the greatest rulers in history. During her long reign, the Church of England again became Protestant, while retaining much of the tone and texture of Catholicism.
The Spanish Empire
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, 75 percent of them poor, single, unskilled men, made their way to the Western Hemisphere. During that time, Spain’s colonies in the Western Hemisphere shipped some 200 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver to Spain. 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.
Spain in the Caribbean The Caribbean Sea served as 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). Their motives, as one soldier explained, were simple: “To serve God and the king, and also to get rich.” As their New World colonies grew more numerous, the monarchy created an administrative structure to govern them and a name to encompass them: New Spain.
A Clash of Cultures
The often-violent encounters between Spaniards and Native Americans involved more than a clash of cultures. They involved contrasting forms of technological development. The Indians of Mexico used wooden canoes for water transportation, while the Europeans traveled in much larger, heavily armed sailing vessels. The Spanish ships also carried warhorses and fighting dogs, long steel swords, crossbows, firearms, gunpowder, and armor. “The most essential thing in new lands is horses,” reported one Spanish soldier. “They instill the greatest fear in the enemy and make the Indians respect the leaders of the army.”
Cortés’s Conquest The most dramatic European conquest of a major 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 for Mexico.
Cortés’s fleet of eleven ships carried nearly 600 soldiers and sailors. Also on board were 200 indigenous Cuban laborers, sixteen warhorses, greyhound fighting dogs, and cannons. The Spanish first stopped on the Yucatan Peninsula, where they defeated a group of Mayans. The vanquished chieftain gave Cortés twenty young women. Cortés distributed them to his captains but kept one of the girls (“La Malinche”) for himself and gave her the name of Doña Marina. Malinche spoke Mayan as well as Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, with whom she had previously lived. She became Cortés’s interpreter—and his mistress; she would later bear the married Cortés a son.
After leaving Yucatan, Cortés and his ships sailed west and landed at a place he named Veracruz (“True Cross”), where they convinced the local Totomacs to join his assault against their hated rivals, the Mexica (Aztecs). To prevent his soldiers, called conquistadores (conquerors), from deserting, Cortés had the ships scuttled, sparing only one vessel to carry the expected gold back to Spain.
With his small army and Indian allies, Cortés brashly set out to conquer the extensive 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 (modern Mexico City) took almost three months.
Spanish Invaders As Cortés and his army marched across Mexico, they heard fabulous stories about Tenochtitlán. With some 200,000 inhabitants scattered among twenty neighborhoods, it was one of the largest cities in the world. 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 and its massive buildings seemed impregnable.
Through a combination of threats and deceptions, the Spanish entered Tenochtitlán peacefully. The emperor, Montezuma II, a renowned warrior who had ruled since 1502, mistook Cortés for the exiled god of the wind and sky, Quetzalcoatl, come to reclaim his lands. Montezuma gave the Spaniards a lavish welcome, housing them close to the palace and exchanging gifts of gold and women.
Within a week, however, Cortés executed a palace coup, taking Montezuma hostage while outwardly permitting him to continue to rule. Cortés ordered many religious statues destroyed and coerced Montezuma to end the ritual sacrifices of slaves.
In the spring of 1520, disgruntled Mexica priests orchestrated a rebellion after deciding that Montezuma was a traitor. According to Spanish accounts, the Mexica stoned the emperor to death; more recently, scholars argue that the Spanish did the deed. One account says that they poured molten gold down Montezuma’s throat. Whatever the cause of the emperor’s death, the Spaniards were forced to retreat from the capital city.
Cortés, however, was undaunted. His many Indian allies remained loyal, and the Spaniards gained reinforcements from Cuba. They then laid siege to Tenochtitlán for eighty-five days, cutting off its access to water and food, and allowing a smallpox epidemic to devastate the inhabitants.
After three months, the siege came to a bloody end in August 1521. The ravages of smallpox and the support of thousands of anti-Mexica Indians help explain how such a small force of Spaniards vanquished a proud nation with millions of people. A conquistador remembered that as he entered the capital city after its surrender, the streets “were so filled with sick and dead people that our men walked over nothing but bodies.
Cortés became the first Governor General of “New Spain” and quickly began replacing the Mexica leaders with Spanish bureaucrats and church officials. He ordered that a grand Catholic cathedral be built from the stones of Montezuma’s destroyed palace.
In 1531, Francisco Pizarro mimicked the conquest of Mexico when he led a band of 168 conquistadores and sixty-seven horses down the Pacific coast of South America from Panama toward Peru, where they brutally subdued the Inca Empire and its 5 million people. The Spanish killed thousands of Inca 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.
New Spain As the sixteenth century unfolded, the Spanish shifted from looting the native peoples to enslaving them. To reward the conquistadores, Spain transferred to America a medieval socioeconomic system known as the encomienda, whereby favored soldiers or officials received huge parcels of land—and control over the people who lived there. The Spanish were to Christianize the Indians and provide them with protection in exchange for “tribute”—a share of their goods and labor.
New Spain became a society of extremes: wealthy encomenderos and powerful priests at one end of the spectrum, and Indians held in poverty at the other. The Spaniards used brute force to ensure that the Indians accepted their role as serfs. Nuño de Guzman, a governor of a Mexican province, loved to watch his massive fighting dog tear apart rebellious Indians. But he was equally brutal with Spanish colonists. After a Spaniard talked back to him, he had the man nailed to a post by his tongue.
A Catholic Empire The Spanish launched a massive effort to convert the Indians into Catholic servants. During the sixteenth century, hundreds of priests fanned out across New Spain.
Most of the missionaries decided that the Indians could be converted only by force. “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 monasteries or missions in New Spain, and Catholicism had become a major instrument of Spanish imperialism.
Some officials criticized the forced conversion of Indians and the encomienda system. A Catholic priest, Bartolomé de Las Casas, observed with horror the treatment of Indians by Spanish settlers in Hispaniola and Cuba. To ensure obedience, they tortured, burned, and cut off the hands and noses of the native peoples. Las Casas resolved in 1514 to spend the rest of his life aiding the Indians, and he began urging the Spanish to change their approach.
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 colonists on Hispaniola banished Las Casas from the island. 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.”
The Columbian Exchange
The first European contacts with the Western Hemisphere began the Columbian Exchange, a worldwide transfer of plants, animals, and diseases, which ultimately worked in favor of the Europeans at the expense of the indigenous peoples.
The plants and animals of the two worlds differed more than the peoples and their ways of life. Europeans had never encountered iguanas, buffaloes, cougars, armadillos, opossums, sloths, tapirs, anacondas, rattlesnakes, catfish, condors, or hummingbirds. Nor had the Native Americans seen the horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, and rats that soon flooded the Americas.
The Exchange of Plants and Foods The exchange of plant life between the Western Hemisphere and Europe/Africa transformed the diets of both regions. Before Columbus’s voyage, Europeans had no knowledge of maize (corn), potatoes (sweet and white), or many kinds of beans (snap, kidney, lima). Other Western Hemisphere food plants included peanuts, squash, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, pineapples, avocados, cacao (the source of chocolate), and chicle (for chewing gum). Europeans in turn introduced rice, wheat, barley, oats, grapevines, and sugarcane to the Americas. The new crops changed diets and spurred a dramatic increase in the European population, which in turn helped provide the restless, adventurous young people who would colonize the New World.
An Exchange of Diseases The most significant aspect of the Columbian Exchange was, by far, the transmission of infectious diseases. During the three centuries after Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans and enslaved Africans brought deadly diseases that Native Americans had never encountered: smallpox, typhus, malaria, mumps, chickenpox, and measles. The results were catastrophic. By 1568, just seventy-five years after Columbus’s first voyage, infectious diseases had killed 80 to 90 percent of the Indian population—the greatest loss of human life in history.
Smallpox was an especially ghastly killer. In central Mexico alone, some 8 million people, perhaps a third of the entire Indian population, died of smallpox within a decade of the arrival of the Spanish. Unable to explain or cure the diseases, Native American chieftains and religious leaders often lost their stature—and their lives—as they were usually the first to meet the Spanish and thus were the first infected. As a consequence of losing their leaders, the indigenous peoples were less capable of resisting the European invaders. Many Europeans, however, interpreted such epidemics as diseases sent by God to punish those who resisted conversion to Christianity.
The Spanish in North America
Throughout the sixteenth century, no European power other than Spain held more than a brief foothold in the Americas. Spanish explorers had not only arrived first but had stumbled onto those regions that would produce the quickest profits. While France and England were preoccupied with political disputes and religious conflict at home, Catholic Spain had forged an authoritarian national and religious unity that enabled it to dominate Europe as well as the New World.
Hispanic America For most of the colonial period, much of what is now the United States was governed by Spain. Spanish culture etched a lasting imprint upon America’s future ways of life. Hispanic place-names— San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Pensacola, St. Augustine—survive to this day, as do Hispanic influences in art, architecture, literature, music, law, and food.
St. Augustine
In 1513, Juan Ponce de León, then governor of Puerto Rico, made the earliest known European exploration of Florida. Meanwhile, Spanish explorers sailed along the Gulf coast from Florida to Mexico, scouted the Atlantic coast all the way to Canada, and established a short-lived colony on the Carolina coast.
In 1539, Hernando de Soto and 600 conquistadores landed on the western shore of La Florida (Land of Flowers) and soon set out on horseback to search for riches. Instead of gold, they found “great fields of corn, beans and squash… as far as the eye could see.” De Soto, who a companion said was “fond of the sport of killing Indians,” led the expedition north as far as western North Carolina, and then moved westward across Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama before happening upon the Mississippi River near what today is Memphis. After crossing the Mississippi, the conquistadores went up the Arkansas River, looting and destroying Indian villages along the way. In the spring of 1542, de Soto died near Natchez, Mississippi; the next year, the survivors among his party floated down the Mississippi River, and 311 of the original adventurers made their way to Spanish Mexico.
In 1565, in response to French efforts to colonize north Florida, the Spanish king dispatched Pedro Menendez de Aviles with a ragtag group of 1,500 soldiers and colonists to found an outpost on the Florida coast. St. Augustine became the first permanent European settlement in the present-day United States. The Spanish settled St. Augustine in response to French efforts to colonize north Florida. In the 1560s, French Protestant refugees (called Huguenots) established France’s first American colonies, one on the coast of what became South Carolina and the other in Florida. The settlements did not last long.
At dawn on September 20, 1565, some 500 Spanish soldiers from St. Augustine assaulted Fort Caroline, the French Huguenot colony in northeastern Florida, and hanged all the men over age fifteen. Only women, girls, and young boys were spared. The Spanish commander notified his Catholic king that he had killed all the French he “had found [in Fort Caroline] because… they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these Provinces.” Later, when survivors from a shipwrecked French fleet washed ashore on Florida beaches after a hurricane, the Spanish commander told them they must abandon Protestantism and swear their allegiance to Catholicism. When they refused, his soldiers killed 245 of them.
The Spanish Southwest The Spanish eventually established other permanent settlements in what are now New Mexico, Texas, and California. From the outset, however, the settlements were sparsely populated, inadequately supplied, dreadfully poor, and consistently neglected by Spanish colonial officials.
In New Spain, civil liberties and notions of equal treatment were nonexistent; people were expected to follow orders. There was no freedom of speech, religion, or movement; no local elections; no real self-government. The military officers, bureaucrats, wealthy landowners, and priests appointed by the king regulated every detail of colonial life. Settlers could not travel within the colonies without official permission.
New Mexico The land that would later be called New Mexico was the first center of Catholic missionary activity in the American Southwest. In 1595, Juan de Oñate, the rich son of a Spanish family in Mexico, received a land grant for El Norte, the mostly desert territory north of Mexico above the Rio Grande—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and parts of Colorado. Over the next three years, he recruited colonists willing to move north with him: soldier-settlers and Mexican Indians and mestizos (the offspring of Spanish and indigenous parents).
In 1598, the caravan of 250 colonists, including women, children, horses, goats, sheep, and 7,000 cattle, began moving north from the mountains above Mexico City across the harsh desert landscape. “O God! What a lonely land!” one traveler wrote to relatives in Mexico City.
After walking more than 800 miles in seven months, they established the colony of New Mexico, the farthest outpost of New Spain. It took wagon trains eighteen months to travel to Mexico City and back. The Spanish labeled the local Indians “Pueblos” (a Spanish word meaning village) for the city-like aspect of their terraced, multistoried buildings, sometimes chiseled into the steep walls of cliffs.
Hopis, Zunis, and other Pueblo peoples sought peace rather than war, yet they were often raided by Apaches (from a Pueblo word meaning “enemy”). “Their government,” Oñate noted, “is one of complete freedom, for although they have chieftains, they obey them badly and in few matters.”
The goals of Spanish colonialism were to find gold, silver, and other valuable commodities while forcing the Native Americans to adopt the Spanish religion and way of life. Oñate, New Mexico’s first governor, told the Pueblos that if they embraced Catholicism and followed his orders, they would receive “an eternal life of great bliss” instead of “cruel and everlasting torment.”
There was, however, little gold or silver in New Mexico. Nor was there enough corn and beans to feed the Spanish invaders, who had to be resupplied by caravans traveling for months from Mexico City. Eventually Oñate forced the Indians to pay tributes (taxes) to the Spanish authorities in the form of a yard of cloth and a bushel of corn each year.
Catholic Missions Once it became evident that New Mexico had little gold, the Spanish focused on religious conversion. Priests forced Indians to build and support Catholic missions and to work in the fields they had once owned. They also performed personal tasks for the priests and soldiers— cooking, cleaning, even sexual favors. Whips were used to herd the Indians to church services and to punish them for not working hard enough. A French visitor reported that it “reminded us of a… West Indian [slave] colony.”
Some Indians welcomed the Spanish as “powerful witches” capable of easing their burdens. Others tried to use the European invaders as allies against rival Indian groups. Still others rebelled. Before the end of New Mexico’s first year of Spanish rule, in December 1598, the Acoma Pueblo revolted, killing eleven soldiers and two servants.
Oñate’s response was even more brutal. Over three days, Spanish soldiers destroyed the entire pueblo, demolishing buildings and killing 500 Pueblo men and 300 women and children. Survivors were enslaved, and children were separated from their parents and moved into a Catholic mission, where, Oñate remarked, “they may attain the knowledge of God and the salvation of their souls.”
The Mestizo Factor Few Spanish women journeyed to New Spain in the sixteenth century. Those who did had to be married and accompanied by a husband. As a result, there were so few Spanish women in North America that the government encouraged soldiers and settlers to marry Native Americans and did not discriminate against the children (mestizos) of the mixed marriages. By the eighteenth century, mestizos were a majority in Mexico and New Mexico. Such widespread interbreeding and intermarriage led the Spanish to adopt a more inclusive social outlook toward the Indians than the English later did in their colonies along the Atlantic coast. Since most colonial officials were mestizo themselves, they were less likely to belittle or abuse the Indians. At the same time, many Native Americans falsely claimed to be mestizo as a means of improving their legal status and avoiding having to pay annual tribute.
The Pueblo Revolt In 1608, the Spanish government decided to turn New Mexico into a royal province and moved its capital to Santa Fe (“Holy Faith” in Spanish). It became the first permanent seat of government in the present-day United States. By 1630, there were fifty Catholic churches and monasteries in New Mexico as well as some 3,000 Spaniards. Roman Catholic missionaries in New Mexico claimed that 86,000 Pueblos had embraced Christianity during the seventeenth century.
In fact, however, resentment among the Indians increased as the Spanish stripped them of their ancestral ways of life. “The heathen,” reported a Spanish soldier, “have conceived a mortal hatred for our holy faith and enmity [hatred] for the Spanish nation.”
In 1680, a charismatic Indian spiritual leader named Popé (meaning “Ripe Plantings”) organized a massive rebellion of warriors from nineteen villages. The Indians burned Catholic churches; tortured, mutilated, and executed 21 priests and 400 Spanish settlers; destroyed all relics of Christianity; and forced the 2,400 survivors to flee. The entire province of New Mexico was again in Indian hands, and the Spanish governor reported that the Pueblos “are very happy without religion or Spaniards.”
The Pueblo Revolt was the greatest defeat Indians ever inflicted on European efforts to conquer the New World. It took twelve years and four military assaults for the Spanish to reestablish control over New Mexico.
Horses and the Great Plains
Another major consequence of the Pueblo Revolt was the opportunity it gave Indian rebels to acquire Spanish horses. (Spanish authorities had made it illegal for Indians to ride or own horses.) The Pueblos established a thriving horse trade with other tribes. By 1690, horses were in Texas, and soon they spread across the Great Plains.
Before the arrival of horses, Indians had hunted on foot and used dogs as their beasts of burden. Dogs are carnivores, however, and it was difficult to find enough meat to feed them. The vast grasslands of the Great Plains were the perfect environment for horses, since the prairies offered plenty of forage.
With horses, the Indians in the Great Plains gained a new source of mobility and power. Horses could haul up to seven times as much weight as dogs; their speed and endurance made the Indians much more effective hunters and warriors. Horses grew so valuable that they became a form of Indian currency and a sign of wealth and prestige. On the Great Plains, a warrior’s status reflected the number of trained horses he owned. The more horses, the more wives he could support and the more buffalo robes he could exchange for more horses.
Horses gave the Indians on the Great Plains a new source of mobility and power. Horses could haul up to seven times as much weight as dogs; their speed and endurance made the Indians much more effective hunters and warriors. Horses grew so valuable that they became a form of Indian currency and a sign of wealth and prestige. On the Great Plains, a warrior’s status reflected the number of horses he owned. The more horses, the more wives he could support and the more buffalo robes he could exchange for more horses.
By the late seventeenth century, the Indians were fighting the Spaniards on more equal terms. This helps explain why the Indians of the Southwest and Texas, unlike the Indians in Mexico, were able to sustain their cultures for the next 300 years. On horseback, they were among the most fearsome fighters in the world.
Buffalo Hunting The Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Sioux reinvented themselves as horse-centered cultures. They left their traditional woodland villages and became nomadic buffalo hunters. A bull buffalo could weigh more than a ton and stand five feet tall at the shoulder. Indians used virtually every part of the buffalo: meat for food; hides for clothing, shoes, bedding, and shelter; muscles and tendons for thread and bowstrings; intestines for containers; bones for tools; horns for eating utensils; hair for headdresses; and dung for fuel. They used tongues for hair brushes and tails for fly swatters. One scholar has referred to the buffalo as the “tribal department store.”
Women and girls butchered and dried the buffalo meat and tanned the hides. As the value of the hides grew, Indian hunters began practicing polygamy, because more wives could process more buffalo carcasses. The rising value of wives eventually led Plains Indians to raid other tribes in search of brides.
The introduction of horses on the Great Plains was a mixed blessing; they brought prosperity and mobility but also triggered more conflicts among the Plains Indians. Over time, the Indians on horseback eventually killed more buffaloes than the herds could replace. Further, horses competed with the buffaloes for food, often depleting the prairie grass. As horse-centered culture enabled Indians to travel greater distances and encounter more people, infectious diseases spread more widely. Yet horses overall brought a better quality of life. By 1800, a white trader in Texas would observe that “this is a delightful country, and were it not for perpetual wars, the natives might be the happiest people on earth.”
The Spanish Empire in Decline
During the one and a half centuries after 1492, the Spanish developed the most extensive empire the world had ever known. It spanned southern Europe and the Netherlands, much of the Western Hemisphere, and parts of Asia.
Yet the Spanish rulers overreached. The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries killed millions, created intense anti-Spanish feelings among the English and Dutch, and eventually helped bankrupt the Spanish government. At the same time, the Spanish Empire grew so vast that its size and complexity overtaxed the government’s resources.
Spain’s colonial system was mostly disastrous for the peoples of Africa and the Americas. Spanish explorers, conquistadores, and priests imposed Catholicism on the native peoples, as well as a cruel system of economic exploitation and dependence. As Bartolomé de Las Casas concluded, “The Spaniards have shown not the slightest consideration for these people, treating them (and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there from the outset)… as piles of dung in the middle of the road. They have had as little concern for their souls as for their bodies.” In the end, the lust for empire (“God, Glory, and Gold”) brought decadence and decline to Spain and much of Europe.
Challenges to the Spanish Empire
Catholic Spain’s conquests in the Western Hemisphere spurred Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands (Holland) to begin their own explorations and exploitations of the New World.
The French were the first to pose a serious threat. Spanish treasure ships sailing home from Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean offered tempting targets for French pirates. At the same time, the French began explorations in North America. In 1524, the French king sent Italian Giovanni da Verrazano across the Atlantic. Upon sighting land (probably at Cape Fear, North Carolina), Verrazano ranged along the coast as far north as Maine. On a second voyage, in 1528, he was killed by Caribbean Indians.
New France Unlike the Verrazano voyages, those of Jacques Cartier, beginning in the next decade, led to the first French effort at colonization in North America. During three voyages, Cartier ventured up the St. Lawrence River, which today is the boundary between Canada and New York. Twice he got as far as present-day Montreal, and twice he wintered at Quebec, near which a short-lived French colony appeared in 1541–1542.
France after midcentury, however, plunged into religious civil wars, and the colonization of Canada had to await the arrival of Samuel de Champlain, “the Father of New France,” after 1600. Over thirty-seven years, Champlain would lead twenty-seven expeditions from France to Canada—and never lose a ship.
The Dutch Revolt From the mid-1500s, greater threats to Spanish power in the New World arose from the Dutch and the English. In 1566, the Netherlands included seventeen provinces. The fragmented nation had passed by inheritance to the Spanish king in 1555, but the Dutch soon began a series of rebellions against Spanish Catholic rule.
A long, bloody struggle ensued in which Queen Elizabeth aided the Dutch, sending some 8,000 English soldiers to support their efforts. The Dutch revolt, as much a civil war as a war for national independence, was a series of different uprisings in different provinces at different times. Each province had its own institutions, laws, and rights. Although seven provinces joined together to form the Dutch Republic, the Spanish did not officially recognize the independence of the entire Netherlands until 1648.
The Defeat of the Armada Almost from the beginning of the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands, the Dutch captured Spanish treasure ships in the Atlantic and carried on illegal trade with Spain’s colonies. While England’s Queen Elizabeth steered a tortuous course to avoid open war with Spain, she desperately sought additional resources to defend her island nation. She encouraged English privateers such as Sir Francis Drake to attack Spanish ships and their coastal colonies in America, leading the Spanish to call her the “pirate queen.”
English raids on Spanish ships and settlements continued for some twenty years before open war erupted between the two nations. Philip II, the king of Spain who was Elizabeth’s brother-in-law and fiercest opponent, finally had enough and began plotting an invasion of England. To do so, he assembled the massive Spanish Armada: 132 warships, 8,000 sailors, and 18,000 soldiers. It was the greatest invasion fleet in history to that point.
On May 28, 1588, the Armada began sailing for England. The English navy’s ninety warships were waiting. As the fleets positioned themselves for battle, Queen Elizabeth donned a silver breastplate and told her forces, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a King of England too.”
As the battle unfolded, the heavy Spanish galleons could not compete with the speed and agility of the English warships. Over a two-week period, the English fleet chased the Spanish ships through the English Channel. Caught up in a powerful “Protestant wind,” the Spanish fleet was swept into the North Sea, a disaster that destroyed scores of warships and thousands of men. The stunning victory greatly strengthened the Protestant cause across Europe. The ferocious storm that smashed the Spanish fleet seemed to be a sign that God favored the English. Upon learning of the catastrophic defeat, Spain’s King Philip sighed, “I sent the Armada against men, not God’s winds and waves.”
The defeat of the Spanish Armada confirmed England’s naval supremacy, established Queen Elizabeth as a national hero, and cleared the way for colonizing America’s “remote heathens and barbarous lands.” Although Elizabeth had many suitors eager to marry her, she refused to divide her power. She would have “but one mistress [England] and no master.” By the end of the sixteenth century, Elizabethan England had begun an epic transformation from a poor, humiliated, and isolated nation into a mighty global empire.
English Exploration of America
English efforts to colonize America began a few years before the battle with the Spanish Armada. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth asked Sir Walter Raleigh to organize a colonizing mission on the North American coast. His expedition discovered the Outer Banks of North Carolina and landed at Roanoke Island. Raleigh named the area Virginia, in honor of Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen.”
After several false starts, Raleigh in 1587 sponsored another expedition of about 100 colonists, including 26 women and children, led by Governor John White. White spent a month helping launch the settlement on Roanoke Island and then returned to England for supplies, leaving behind his daughter Elinor and his granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas.
White’s journey back to Virginia was delayed because of the naval war with Spain. When he finally returned, in 1590, the Roanoke colony had been abandoned and pillaged. On a post at the entrance to the village, someone had carved the word “CROATOAN,” leading White to conclude that the settlers had set out for the island of that name some fifty miles south, where friendly Indians lived.
The English never found the “lost colonists.” They may have been killed by Indians or Spaniards. The most recent evidence indicates that the “Lost Colony” suffered from a horrible drought that prevented the settlers from growing enough food to survive. While some may have gone south, most went north, to the southern shores of Chesapeake Bay, where they lived for years until Indians killed them.
Whatever the fate of the lost colonists, there were no English settlements in North America when Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. The Spanish controlled the only colonial outposts on the continent. This was about to change, however. Inspired by the success of the Spanish in exploiting the New World, the English—as well as the French and Dutch—would soon develop colonial empires of their own.