Chapter 1, The New World. The conquest of the Americas is an extension of an intercontinental conflict stretching back over a thousand years. The Christian Crusades linked Europe with the wealth, power, and knowledge of Greece, Rome, and the Middle East. This hemispheric exchange of goods and information not only sparked the Renaissance, but it kick-started centuries of European expansion. Asian goods flooded European markets, creating a demand for these new commodities.
This trade created a vast new wealth, and Europeans began to battle one another for colonial trade supremacy. The landmass we refer to as America today was populated by at least 50 million people before Columbus'arrival. The illnesses the European explorers brought with them, including typhus, the bubonic plague, the common flu, mumps, measles, and most terribly, Smallpox became full-on pandemics when introduced to native immune systems that had not countered these illnesses before.
These diseases wreaked havoc among tribes, weakened entire native civilizations, but they did not end the Indian history of this continent. Archaeologists date the Siberian Clovis peoples migration to the present-day United States roughly 11,000 years ago. They came over a frozen Bering Strait, the body of water connecting present-day Russia and the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. DNA evidence also points to small-scale European immigration even before Columbus. The largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, was located just east of modern-day St. Louis and peaked at a population between 10,000 and 30,000 natives.
It rivaled contemporary American European cities in size. No new world city, in fact, would match Cahokia's peak population levels until after the American Revolution. The most organized early American society was the Incan Empire of Peru, a culture which had paved roads and shared a single government in 10,000 BC.
The Mayans had a system of language, a system of numbers, and a calendar by 1,000 BC. Other tribes and groups included the Aztecs, who built up Tenochtitlan. in the heart of modern-day Mexico City in 1300 AD, which held 200,000 people, had 70,000 buildings, had public schools, had a full-fledged military, had medical practices, and a system of slavery.
Many religions of Mesoamerica also relied on human sacrifice. The Indians of the North, and the Great Plains, the American Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest, were and still are varied peoples with unique lifestyles and societal organizations. The Inuits of the North, the Woodland Indians of the Northeast, and the Farmers of the Plains existed on variations of hunting, fishing, gathering, and agriculture and featured different patterns of gender relations, often organizing matrilineal societies with women serving as family matriarchs.
Europeans began to look to the West in earnest at the end of the 15th century. They were far too disorganized, weak, and divided before, although a handful of explorers had glimpsed western shores. and survive to tell the tale.
But beginning in the 1490s, three reasons compelled the more adventurous to take to the seas. They needed more room to grow after the populations of Europe had rebounded after the Black Death. European governments and monarchs sought to tap new mineral deposits and commodity resources internationally. And they sought a shorter trade route to the riches of the East that I mentioned before. And they believed that India lay directly westward, and that would be a faster way to get there.
Christopher Columbus, an Italian who worked for the powerful Portuguese Navy, got the country of Spain to back a risky expedition west to India in 1492. The idea was to reach the Asian lands over water by traveling west and secure an easier trade route with those peoples in the process. In 10 weeks, he hit the Bahamas and thought he had landed on an Asian island. He pushed on to Cuba and thought he was in China.
Only on his third trip to the Americas did he realize that he was in a new world altogether. By 1550, the Spanish Navy had circumnavigated the globe and explored the west coast of modern United States. Only then did they begin to think of the Americas less as a real obstacle to Asia and more as a valuable resource in and of itself.
First, though, they had to deal with the people already populating that continent. Spanish policies of subjugation were supported by the idea of natives as savages, inferior in race and culture to the peoples of Europe. Natives were obviously varied, but settlers very much thought of them as one group, though they were not.
Bartolome de las Casas traveled to the New World just a few years after Columbus's arrival and documented the Spanish brutality he witnessed that came after Columbus. I saw with these eyes of mine the Spaniards for no other reason but only to gratify their bloody mineness, cut off hands, noses, and ears, both of Indians and Indianesses. When the enslaved Indians exhausted the meager gold reserves of the small tribes they encountered, Spaniards forced them to labor on their huge new estates called encomiendas.
By presuming the natives had no humanity, the Spaniards utterly abandoned theirs in the New World. The first real organized conflict between Native Americans and Europeans came during Spain's explorations of South America. Hernán Cortés In 1518, he tried to seize the treasures and mines of the Aztecs through the capture of their emperor, Montezuma.
His 600-man army failed when the Aztecs revolted in La Noche Triste, or the Night of Sorrows. But the smallpox weakened, but smallpox weakened the Aztecs and made a later conquest of Tenochtitlan possible. Cortes was the first of the brutal conquistadors, brutal Spanish conquerors of the New World.
Conquistadors. The conquistadors were interested mostly in the mines in the New World. For 300 years, 10 times more gold and silver were extracted from New World mines than from anywhere else in the globe. Other Spanish explorers, though, focused on spreading religion and Spanish culture in order to build an agricultural kingdom in the New World.
Collectively, Spanish explorers came Florida via St. Augustine, the oldest settlement in the United States, that was 1565. They took Santa Fe in 1605. They converted millions of natives to both Catholicism and slavery, settled outposts with native-slash-mixed populations all over the New World, South and North. Like the French would decades later, the Spanish came to tolerate interracial marriage. There were simply too few Spanish women in the New World to support the natural growth of a purely Spanish population. The Catholic Church endorsed interracial marriage at interracial marriage as a moral bulwark against the continued rape of Native women. By 1600, their so-called mestizo children made up a large portion of the colonial population.
On the whole, early European and Native exchanges were biological and cultural, some beneficial, many catastrophic. This Columbian exchange can be briefly summarized as, I've got three bullet points here. Europeans brought devastating diseases, sugar, bananas, pigs, cows, and horses to the New World. The Spanish brought back to Europe corn, beans, tomatoes, and potatoes back to Europe.
Three, the population was transformed through disease, sex, conflict, and communication, changing the makeup of the Americas and forever altering the cultures and the languages of North, Central, and South America. Though the Spanish were the first conquerors of the Americas, a full half of the immigrants to the Americas in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800 were African. North Africa was largely civilized by European standards by 1100 AD.
They were Muslim and had a strong trade-based economy. Their own slave trade, whereby criminals of many races were often sold into hard labor for a period of time to serve a sentence, eventually begot the forced deportation of millions of blacks to the Americas. Once Europeans discovered that they could buy slave labor in North Africa, they overwhelmed and distorted that market, and soon not just criminals were forced into bondage.
Over time, many hundreds of thousands of innocent Africans would be kidnapped and sold into the transatlantic slave economies of the Americas. The early Europeans'arrival bridged two worlds. and 10,000 years of history separated from one another since the melting of the Bering Strait. Both sides of the world had been transformed. By the dawn of the 17th century, the stage was set for a global population shift that would reshape the history of the West.