Conquering the New World

The native peoples of the Americas lived in a great diversity of social and political arrangements. Some were nomads roaming large, sparsely inhabited territories; others practiced agriculture in complexly organized states. Among the settled peoples, the largest groupings could be found in the Mexican and Peruvian highlands. Combining an elaborate religious culture with a strict social and political hierarchy, the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru ruled over subjugated Indian populations in their respective empires. From their large urban capitals, the Aztecs and Incas controlled large swaths of land and could be ruthless as conquerors.

The Spanish explorers organized their expeditions to the mainland of the Americas from a base in the Caribbean. Two prominent commanders, Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and Francisco Pizarro (c. 1475–1541), gathered men and arms and set off in search of gold. With them came Catholic priests intending to bring Christianity to supposedly uncivilized peoples. When Cortés first landed on the Mexican coast in 1519, the natives greeted him with gifts, thinking that he might be an ancient god returning to reclaim his kingdom. Some natives who resented their subjugation by the Aztecs joined Cortés and his soldiers. With a band of fewer than three hundred Spanish soldiers and a few thousand native allies, Cortés captured the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán (present-day Mexico City), in 1519. With 200,000 inhabitants, Tenochtitlán was bigger than any European capital. Two years later, Mexico, then named New Spain, was added to the empire of the new ruler of Spain, Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. To the south, Pizarro conquered the Peruvian highlands in 1532 to 1533. The Spanish Empire was now the largest in the world, stretching from Mexico to Chile.

The gold and silver mines in Mexico proved a treasure trove for the Spanish crown, but the real prize was the discovery of vast silver deposits in Potosí (today in Bolivia). When the Spaniards began importing the gold and silver they found in the New World, inflation soared in a fashion never before witnessed in Europe.

Not to be outdone by the Spaniards, other European powers joined the scramble for gold in the New World. In North America, the French went in search of a “northwest passage” to China. The French wanted to establish settlements in what became Canada, but permanent European settlements in Canada and the present-day United States would succeed only in the seventeenth century. By then the English and Dutch had also entered the contest for world mastery.