The territory of Spain today comprises of 195,365 square miles, being principally made up of land on the Iberian Peninsula, sharing borders with Portugal to the west, France to the north, as well as the small principality of Andorra. Spain also controls the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands in the Atlantic, as well as the two small enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the northern shore of Morocco's coastline. However, at the beginning of the 19th century, the total amount of territory to which Spain laid claim to exceeded a staggering 5 million square miles, stretching throughout almost the entirety of the Americas, from California all the way to Argentina, and even further afield to the far side of the Pacific Ocean, with the Philippines in Eastern Asia. Although this marked the peak of Spain's territorial possessions, many of these lands were brought under Spanish rule in the prior three centuries.
in what was one of the most remarkable and rapid rises to power of any nation in history. This is how Spain became the world's first superpower. In the latter half of the 15th century, Spain did not even formally exist.
The Iberian Peninsula at this time was made up of several Christian kingdoms. Chief amongst these were the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon. Over the previous seven centuries, both had gradually won back the territory.
that they had lost to the Moors, the Islamic invaders who came from North Africa and conquered much of Iberia in the early 8th century. In 1469, in an effort to join their two kingdoms in a dynastic union and further consolidate Christian power in the region, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon were married and effectively began a joint de facto rule of a unified Spain. With their kingdoms united, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand were able to successfully complete the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the name of Christendom by ousting the last remaining Muslim faction, the Emirate of Granada, in 1491. Having now secured their internal borders, the Catholic monarchs could now look to expand their dominions further afield and cash in on the burgeoning international trade routes that were developing to richer, more exotic locations overseas.
This approach had already been adopted by Spain's neighbour, Portugal. as early as the 1420s. They had explored much of the Atlantic Ocean and African coastline in search of a faster and cheaper sea route to the spice-producing East Indies, which was hoped would allow them to cut out the expensive Venetian and Ottoman middlemen who controlled the trade into Europe from the Middle East and via the Mediterranean.
It was against this backdrop that a Genoese sailor named Christopher Colombo, or Christopher Columbus as we know him today, arrived in the late 1480s with a proposal to find an alternative sea route to Asia. Being an already well-experienced navigator, Columbus championed a new idea, which was that instead of sailing south and around Africa, one could reach Asia by sailing westward into the Atlantic and circumnavigating the Earth, believing that there would be a vast, uninterrupted sea stretching from Europe to the East Indies. He initially petitioned King John II of Portugal, to fund such an expedition in the early 1480s, but his solicitations did not meet with any success. News of Columbus's proposition soon made its way to the court of Isabella and Ferdinand, who were eager to replicate the mercantile success of their Portuguese neighbours, and establish Spain's own overseas trade routes. They agreed to back the venture, and after many years of petitions and careful planning, Columbus finally set sail with three small ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
On the 3rd of August 1492, after a voyage of over two months, the ships made landfall on the morning of the 12th of October on an island which Columbus subsequently named San Salvador. Believing that he had in fact reached the East Indies, he also subsequently named the native peoples on this island as Indians. They proceeded to explore further, charting much of the Bahamas, northern Cuba and Hispaniola, before returning to Spain in January 1493. with the news that lands yet to be claimed by Europeans had been discovered.
Back in Europe, Isabella and Ferdinand were more than enthused by the discoveries and quickly dispatched Columbus again on a second voyage, this one consisting of 17 ships. He subsequently charted much of the rest of the Caribbean, while a third voyage between 1498 and 1500 resulted in the first contact with the mainland of South America. It was at this point that Columbus realized that he had inadvertently discovered an entirely unknown continent. In his fourth and final voyage from 1502 onwards, Columbus sailed along much of the coastline of Central America.
When he died in 1506, possibly somewhat disappointed, pointed to have not found his proposed westerly sea route to Asia, he had nevertheless set in motion a series of events that would come to transform the history of the world. In the wake of Columbus'discovery, a major problem soon arose between Spain and Portugal, as to who would ultimately have control and influence over these new lands. The Treaty of Tordesillas was negotiated between the two nations, with Pope Alexander VI acting as the intermediary and broker.
Signed on the 7th of June 1494, it effectively divided the world outside of Europe into two spheres of influence, one Spanish and the other Portuguese. It was believed at the time that this would grant everything in the Americas to Spain, although it would later be revealed that Brazil lay within Portugal's region. Even as the Treaty of Tordesillas was being negotiated, steps were underway to begin establishing permanent Spanish settlements in the New World.
The first was the city of Santo Domingo. Established by Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher's brother, on the island of Hispaniola, in what is now the Dominican Republic, in 1496. From there, a wide range of Spanish settlements were established across the Caribbean in the 1500s and 1510s. Cuba became the centre of the burgeoning Spanish Empire in 1515, following the conquest of the island from the natives and the establishment of Havana.
Meanwhile, exploration of the American mainland continued, and in 1513 the explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and became the first ever European to set eyes on the Pacific Ocean. The development of the Spanish presence in the Caribbean was just a stepping stone towards a greater imperial drive. The centers of Native American civilization lay on the mainland, particularly in Central America. where peoples such as the Maya and the Olmecs had developed advanced civilizations over thousands of years. By the time the Spanish arrived, the preeminent native power was the Aztec Empire, which ruled much of what is now modern day Mexico, from the capital of Tenochtitlan, a vast city built on a lake and approachable only by huge man-made causeways.
The Spanish at first began by exploring the Yucatan Peninsula in 1517, but soon rep... reports of a rich and powerful empire lying somewhere to the west began to reach their ears. Armed with this knowledge, a conquistador by the name of Hernan Cortes set sail with a small expedition from Havana on the 18th of November 1518, and arrived off the Mexican coastline a few weeks later. In the summer of 1519, Cortes founded the settlement of Villa Rica de la Cruz, which became his base of operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
That autumn he began to head inland, gathering allies amongst the native peoples, such as the Tlaxcala, whom the Aztecs had conquered and had oppressed for decades. In early November, Cortes arrived at Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs, led by their monarch, King Montezuma II, cautiously welcomed the Spanish, whom they viewed with a mixture of awe and fear, suspecting on the one hand that these men dressed in metal armor and carrying European weapons were gods, but also fearful of what their true intentions might be. Cortes soon tried to seize control of the city, detaining Montezuma and calling for reinforcements from the Caribbean. Cortes remained in charge there for the next six months, but relations between the Spanish and their hosts soon turned ugly, and on the 29th of June 1520, Montezuma was killed by his own people while pleading for calm.
The following night, known in Spanish as La Noche Triste, the sad night, Cortes and his men were driven from Tenochtitlan, losing almost all of the vast amount of treasure they had managed to accumulate since occupying the city. Cortes managed to regroup his small band of Spaniards. who numbered less than 1,000 men, as well as the more numerous Tlaxcala allies, over the autumn and winter of 1520. By the following spring he began his campaign back towards Tenochtitlan, and had the city surrounded by early summer, beginning a siege that lasted for ten weeks.
In the resulting battle, the great Aztec civilization was effectively put to an end. Many of the native peoples had already succumbed to the perils of European diseases, such as smallpox which the Spanish had unknowingly brought with them. The natives had almost no natural immunity to these diseases and consequently millions of people died in droves.
Those who had somehow survived or were yet to be affected by the disease then had to face the wrath of the Spanish and their native allies as they entered the city. The Tlaxcala were particularly determined to eradicate all traces of their Aztec oppressors by sacking, looting and pillaging the city, putting many of the inhabitants the sword in the process. Afterwards, Tenochtitlan would soon be re-established as Mexico City, and become the administrative capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
Mexico was not the only center of advanced civilization in the Americas. Much further to the south and high up in the Andes Mountains, peoples such as the Chico and Nazca had built sophisticated societies since ancient times. When the Spanish arrived in the New World, the Inca civilization had become the dominant power in the region, ruling over a territory consisting of much of modern-day Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Contact with the Incas was first made in the mid-1520s, following which two conquistadors, Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, led a band of men into Peru with the aim of conquering the powerful empire. Their first expedition in 1528 met with little success, though as with Cortes in Mexico, they did introduce smallpox to the region, which decimated the native population and weakened resistance ahead of the coming Spanish conquest.
Pizarro returned to Peru in 1531, armed with royal approval to lead a fresh expedition against the Inca empire. What followed was a prolonged war that lasted throughout much of the 1530s. Unlike Cortes in Mexico, however, Pizarro did not score a swift victory over the Incas, partly because their empire was more decentralized and spread out than that of the Aztecs.
Moreover, the Spanish were divided amongst themselves in Peru, with Pizarro and his brothers leading one faction, and the Almagros leading another. This resulted in a quasi-civil war erupting between the Spanish conquistadors. even as they were in the process of fighting Incas.
Pizarro himself was eventually killed by Diego de Almagro II in 1541. By that time, the Spanish had established control over much of the region, which they were now governing directly from the newly founded capital at Lima. The Viceroyalty of Peru was established in 1542, as a counterpart to the Viceroyalty of New Spain. However, the Incas continued to offer resistance well into the 1570s.
The The conquest of these two great native civilizations and the establishment of the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru formed the cornerstones of Spain's empire in the New World during the 16th century, but there were also other developments. In the late 1530s the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto began a series of explorations along the northern frontier of New Spain. These saw him chart much of the territory across what is now the southern United States, from Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, westwards through Mississippi, and the Pacific. Louisiana and Texas.
There were advanced civilizations here also, mound-building cultures living in considerable towns and cities like Etowah and Cahokia. However, while de Soto was able to bring back information on these regions, no determined efforts were made by the Spanish to colonize these regions for many years, except for some tentative settlements along the coastline of Florida and in southern Texas. Quite simply, there was better, more readily available land closer to Mexico City.
and other core parts of the Spanish Empire to settle first. Meanwhile, far to the south, Juan Diaz de Solis had become the first Spanish explorer to chart the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, around what is modern day Argentina and Uruguay in 1516. Another explorer, Pedro de Mendoza, led an expedition here 20 years later and established the settlement of Buenos Aires, on the 2nd of February 1536. Although like in North America, large parts of Argentina and neighbouring Chile would remain virtually untouched by the Spanish for many decades to come. Spanish expansion across the Americas was a gradual process, and centred mainly on the regions of Mexico and Peru. While all of this was occurring in the Americas, there was also a Spanish colony being established far across the Pacific Ocean. When Ferdinand Magellan undertook his circumnavigation of the globe between 1519 and 1522, He discovered an archipelago of islands in Eastern Asia that lay within Portugal's side of the boundary determined by the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Despite being west of the line for the territory to be claimed by Spain, further explorations of these islands were undertaken in the 1540s, during which they were named Las Islas Filipinas, or the Islands of Philip, in honour of Prince Philip, the heir to the Spanish throne. It was only after he had been crowned as King Philip II in 1556 that a military expedition was finally sent to the Philippines to establish a Spanish colony there in the mid-1560s. The northern island of Luzon, the largest in the archipelago, was quickly conquered and the city of Manila was founded in 1571. The Spanish did however face stiff resistance from the Muslim inhabitants of the southern island of Mindanao and adjacent smaller islands. Just as in the New World, Spanish rule over the Philippines was fragmentary right from the outset.
with only Luzon effectively under complete control. Nevertheless, their settlement in the Philippines gave Spain a strategically important foothold in Asia. and the East Indies. As the Spanish Empire continued to expand in the 16th century, it was recognized that immense sums of money would be required to finance the men and material needed in order to sustain Spain's claim to these new territories.
Fortunately enough, shortly after the conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas, large gold and silver mines were discovered in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru. The Spanish began mining these precious metals extensively and exploited the native peoples of the region. using them as forced labor, particularly at sites like Cerro Rico near Potosi in Bolivia, a veritable mountain of silver discovered in 1545 which produced 80% of the world's supply over the next two centuries. This bullion was transported overland to ports like Cartagena in Colombia and then brought together in an annual treasure fleet which was sent back to Spain.
So vast was the amount of gold and silver flooding into Spain's coffers, that it caused a massive period of global inflation, called the Price Revolution, in the second half of the 16th century. As more and more Spaniards continued to arrive in the colonies, a complex society was beginning to emerge across the Spanish Empire. Most of those who set off from Spain for the New World in the 16th century were single men, often the younger sons of Spanish nobility seeking prosperity in the Americas. Conversely, very few women left Spain in this way. And so, many of the Spanish men arriving in Mexico, Peru and other regions married native women.
As a result, a mixed race, or mestizo population, soon began to emerge across the empire. This was characterized by the dominance of Spanish as the spoken language and the prevalence of Catholicism in all aspects of colonial life. In addition to more Europeans coming to the Americas from the late 16th century onwards, an increasingly common sight was the arrival of slaves from Western Africa. particularly into the Caribbean, where the prosperous sugar plantations required many workers. Despite the seemingly never-ending supply of treasure being extracted from the colonies, by the beginning of the 17th century there was already a decline in the amount of gold and silver arriving back in Spain.
Moreover, the Spanish government was spending so much of this money on its wars in Europe that King Philip II had to declare bankruptcy four times during his reign. It was this poor governance and the diminishing supply of gold and silver from the New World, which would ultimately lead to the beginning of the decline of the Spanish Empire. By this point, the Spanish conquests and territorial expansion in the Americas had largely stopped, as there were no more major civilizations like those of the Aztecs or the Incas to subjugate.
More importantly, however, it was the French, Dutch and English who had begun to occupy much of the land across North America that had been claimed by Spain. but had thus far been neglected to settle and colonize it properly. These three powers also began to threaten the Spanish dominance of the Caribbean during this time, as they fought for possession of many of the islands.
England, for instance, wrestled control of Jamaica from Spain during the Anglo-Spanish War of 1654 to 1660. All of this was symptomatic of the growing stagnation of the Spanish Empire in the 17th century. By the turn of the 18th century, Spanish colonial society had matured to the extent that there were now settlements across the vast swathe of land from northern Mexico, all the way to Chile and Argentina. Some regions remained largely unexplored, notably the arid Atacama Desert high up in the Andes, as well as the dense, disease-ridden jungles of Guiana.
These would continue to remain largely uninhabited by the Spanish. However, two areas which were experiencing increasing interest during the second half of the 18th century were California, and Texas. In particular, the southwest of California was being explored by the Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra and his followers from the late 1760s onwards.
Over the course of the next decade they would establish a dozen missionary settlements along the coastline of California, which would later serve as the founding of the cities of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Meanwhile, in the more established centers of Spanish colonial rule, such as Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Santiago, There were growing divisions. There were effectively three classes of individuals living here by the 18th century.
The peninsulares were administrators and newcomers to the Americas who had been born in Spain. Criollos were people of Spanish descent who were born in the new world but to parents of exclusively Spanish heritage. Finally there were the mestizos, people born in the Americas to a mix of Spanish and native ancestors.
These varied groups were developing different allegiances to Spain. with mainly the Creollos and the Mestizos increasingly believing that the colonies would be better off ruling themselves. Even though the Spanish Empire had clearly stagnated by the end of the 18th century, it had not yet collapsed.
It would be events in Europe, however, that would ultimately determine the fate of Spain's empire. By 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor of France, had decided to take direct control over Spain and install his brother Joseph as its king. This triggered a series of uprisings across South and Central America, led by figures like José de San Martín in Argentina, Bernardo O'Higgins in Chile, Simón Bolívar in Venezuela and Colombia, as well as Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico. Between 1808 and 1810, a series of wars of independence broke out across all of these regions, with colonial nationalists seeking to use the opportunity created by France's occupation of Spain as a means of throwing off Spanish power in South and Central America altogether.
They were, however, opposed by royalist and pro-Spanish elements within each of these countries, particularly by the peninsulares. Thus, these wars of independence became long protracted affairs which dragged on throughout the 1810s. Furthermore, once the legitimate King Ferdinand VII had reclaimed the Spanish throne in 1813, Spanish state aid once again began to arrive in the colonies to suppress the rebellions. Nevertheless, in the face of this overwhelming adversity, Simon Bolivar managed to lead a successful revolution across Venezuela, Colombia and Panama, which led to the establishment of Gran Colombia as an independent state in 1819, which was formally ratified in 1821. He then campaigned further south using his resources to liberate Peru from Spanish rule, with victory at the Battle of Ayacucho in December 1824. By that time, Jose de San Martin and others had already succeeded in establishing Argentina's independence from Spain in 1816, while Chile followed suit in 1818 with its Declaration of Independence, though the war against Spain there dragged on until 1826. Further to the north, after 11 years of intermittent warfare, Mexico left the Spanish Empire as well in 1821, briefly establishing itself as the first Mexican Empire, but was quickly followed afterwards by the first Mexican Republic in 1823. The revolutions of the early 19th century practically eroded Spain's vast overseas empire in its entirety, but a few pockets of territory remained under their control, which they subsequently guarded jealously for the remainder of the 19th century as the last vestiges of their national greatness. These included Cuba, Puerto Rico and a number of other small Caribbean islands, as well as the Philippines in Asia.
But as Spain became increasingly wracked by political instability at home throughout much of the 19th century, these last remaining colonies began to experience guerrilla warfare and insurrection in attempts to achieve independence. In the end, it was the Cuban War of Independence, which began in 1895, which ushered in the final chapter of Spain's once mighty empire. The war there dragged on for several years, eventually leading to the United States intervening in 1898. The resulting Spanish-American War was a brief conflict in which Spain was roundly defeated and had to relinquish control over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, which all became US dependencies to a greater or lesser extent. With that, the once vast and immensely rich Spanish Empire, which had begun with a chance discovery by a Genoese sailor, came to an end after 400 years.