Spanish Empire

B

Spain’s New Leaders

Upon the death of Ferdinand in 1516, his grandson Charles of Ghent inherited Spain—which he ruled as Charles I—as well as its colonies and parts of Italy. Charles was also heir to the Habsburg possessions in what are now Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria. In 1519 he became emperor of the Holy Roman Empire as Charles V, and he ruled the largest Western empire since the Roman Empire. By the time Charles abdicated in favor of his son, Philip II, in 1556, the empire also included the kingdoms of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru. When Charles abdicated, however, he divided his empire between his brother, Ferdinand, and his son Philip. As king of Spain, Philip held Spain, the Italian possessions, the Netherlands, and the Spanish Indies. Despite the division of lands, the Spanish Empire remained too large to be governed effectively.

Spain tried to monopolize commerce within the empire. But by the 1520s the ships of the seafaring nations of northern Europe—England, France, and the emerging Netherlands—were intruding into the Caribbean Sea to pirate and trade. As the native peoples died, some of these European nations helped supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves. But for more than a century, other Europeans made few serious attempts to establish colonies of their own in the Americas.

C

Life in the American Colonies

In America, relatively few Spaniards dominated a vast indigenous population. To gain control of Native American labor, the Spanish initially introduced the encomienda, an official grant giving a Spaniard jurisdiction over one or more native communities. They justified this practice as instructing Native Americans in Christianity, and they governed these communities by relying on existing native hierarchies and chiefs.

The Spanish colonists tended to settle where the native population was most plentiful. These tended to be urban areas and many were sites where the Spanish had built their own city on an existing native city or town. Cortés provided a model for this when he built Mexico City over the conquered Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. He introduced to Mexico many crops and industries familiar to Spaniards, such as sugar, silk, cattle, wheat, and cotton, and he instituted gold and silver mining and the slave trade.

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By the 1550s, Spanish settlements spread from Chile north to Mexico. Other Spaniards had ventured into Florida, California, and the present southwestern United States. Eventually, a chain of 250 Spanish towns spread through the Americas. About 2000 people a year sailed to Mexico and Peru from Sevilla, the only Spanish port allowed contact with the Americas.

By mid-century the area was governed as two large administrative regions called viceroyalties. The viceroyalty of New Spain encompassed Mexico, most of Central America, and Spanish territory in the Caribbean; the viceroyalty of Peru included what is now Panama and almost all of Spanish South America.

D

Religion and the Church

Representatives of the king called viceroys governed the viceroyalties. However, outside the cities, priests and friars were the most direct Spanish authorities. These clergy had the most ongoing contact with Native Americans through instructing native peoples in Christianity and European ways. Some early friars, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, were among the greatest defenders of and advocates for the native peoples. Although some argued against mistreatment of the indigenous peoples, the presence of the clergy, as well as their devotion to Christian faith and Spain’s king, strengthened imperial control over all segments of colonial society.

The church played a vital role in the Spanish colonies. It served as a bank, a social welfare agency, and as a center of education. Spanish clergy furthered study of natural science and natural history. They learned native languages, produced dictionaries, studied indigenous societies, and taught Native Americans to write in their native languages. They also preserved a record of native societies, of the Spanish cultural elements flooding into them, and of the ways in which the native peoples adapted to the Spanish.

The native peoples adapted the new European ways as they saw fit. Even after contact with Europeans, Native Americans continued to see their state as autonomous, with its own territory and traditions. As before, they viewed the ruler and the gods as embodiments of the people as a whole, but after the arrival of the Spanish, the emperor became a Spaniard and the gods had new names. Religion in the indigenous societies was inseparable from the culture, government, and social order. In addition, religion defined their understanding of the cosmos, human origins, destiny, social order, and their place in the universe. It also helped them to come to terms with the unknown. Catholic missionaries were most successful where they encountered practices or symbols similar to those in European Christianity.

E

Economics in the Colonies

The colonial system of agriculture shifted in the mid-1500s as encomiendas were replaced by great estates called haciendas. These estates depended on a system of plantation slavery, which relied heavily on the labor of African slaves. Africans were brought into the colonies to replace the indigenous peoples who had died in large numbers following contact with the Europeans. In the Caribbean islands, these plantations produced mostly sugarcane.

At first, most of the Africans who were brought to America arrived by way of the Seville slave market. Eventually, slaves were imported directly from Africa, mostly to the Caribbean and the tropical coasts of the mainland. Many were taken to America on the ships of other Europeans. Foreigners imported slaves both legally, as licensed by the Spanish government, and illegally, through smuggling. Slaves did a variety of work. Some became overseers, skilled artisans, herders, farmers, teamsters, miners, or domestic workers. Slaves also cut sugarcane and built and worked sugar mills. Some even escaped to found their own communities. There were also non-African slaves, including Muslims and Jews from Spain, most of them women. Although there were many slaves in the Spanish colonies, many were also freed, and at one point in the 18th century there were more free blacks than slaves in Spanish America. (see Blacks in Latin America)

The American colonies also provided Spain with valuable gold and silver from mines worked by forced native labor. Together with agriculture, mining maintained Spain’s empire in the Americas. The most noted silver mines were in Mexico and Potosí, a boomtown in present-day Bolivia at the eastern edge of the Andes. There, Native Americans worked the mines suffering harsh conditions and under a system of forced labor.

America's precious metals (some gold but mostly silver) revolutionized European economies; banking prospered, commerce expanded, and prices soared. Spain, however, was unable to keep much of the silver. Large amounts of it left Spain to pay for costly wars, campaigns against heresy, luxuries for its kings and nobles, and administration of its global empire. In addition, a general European recession beginning in the 1620s hit Spain especially hard. Ultimately, much of the precious metals from Spain’s colonies ended up in Asia to pay for Asian goods bought by Europeans. Potosí silver streamed through the Philippines, Turkey, Sumatra, and China, where Spain’s ruler was known as the Silver King. Silver from the Americas sustained a global economy.

F

Other Europeans

By the late 17th century, the Americas had become a focus of European rivalries for commerce and international balance of power. All ships trading between Spain and its American colonies stopped in the Caribbean, where they were targeted by English, Dutch, and French raiders. Notorious pirates waylaid treasure fleets, raided ports, smuggled merchandise, and sometimes settled on islands suitable for growing sugar—a highly profitable enterprise—and dealing in contraband. In this way, the English took over control of Jamaica, a center of Caribbean raiding, piracy, and bootlegging. Beginning in 1638 the English also occupied what is now Belize. In the 17th century the English, Dutch, and French all occupied the Guianas (now Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana). Even so, at that point the other European powers preferred to profit indirectly from Spain's colonies in the Americas.

During the 17th century, Spain suffered from a general European recession and domestic crises, and after 1620 the nation lost much of its imperial economic and commercial control. Contact with the Americas decreased, and the colonies were left increasingly on their own. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and other conflicts drained the budget, while famine and shortage of essential resources crippled the Spanish nation. As a result, the nation lost most of its wealth and was forced to reduce contact with the American colonies.

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