The Aztec ‘Death Whistle’

Civilizations of the Western Hemisphere:

1450-1750

Life in the Spanish Americas

Question: To what extent was the Spanish conquest of the Americas brutal and destructive?

The Black Legend

Connect Europe & the Americas

• Write a paragraph elaborating on these topics from before the break:

– Protestant Reformation & Counter-Reformation

– Mercantilism

• Write a short paragraph summarizing Aztec and Incan SPICE

• Portugese & Dutch: ???

• French: ???

• English: ???

Goals of Empires:

• Spanish: create ‘New Spain’ – transplant a civilization and reap economic benefits• Successful legacy

Goals of Empires:

Spanish Empire: 1770

Spanish Speaking World Today

Life in the Spanish Americas

• Conquistadors as independent men vs. colonial bureaucracy

• Mercantilism based on encomiendas, haciendas, and mining

• Racially mixed society

• Catholic Church as Unifier

From Columbus to Cortes: 1492-1519

Cortes’ Journey, 1519

Spanish Empire Building

Catedral Metropolitana: Mexico City

Spanish Empire Building

• Born in Spain; governors & above.

Peninsulares

• Wealthiest; born in Americas

Creole

• Mulatto (half-Spanish; half-black)• Mestizo (half-Spanish; half-Indian)

Mixed (50/50)

• Racial terms not meant to be entirely negative (still not…)

Other mixed races

• Worked on farms; conversion meant not enslaving them

Native American

• Manumission common• By 18th- century

majority were free

African

Casta painting: racial

categories of all

the possible hybrids

Life under the Spanish: syncretism!

•In 1492, Hispaniola had 250,000 Native

Americans

•In 1538, it had 500

How Bad Was It?

Encomienda

Bartolome de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

As we have said, the island of Hispaniola was the first to witness thearrival of Europeans and the first to suffer the wholesale slaughter ofits people and the devastation and depopulation of the land. It allbegan with the Europeans taking native women and children both asservants and to satisfy their own base appetites; then, not content withwhat the local people offered them of their own free will…they startedtaking for themselves the food the natives contrived to produce by thesweat of their brows, which was in all honesty little enough…

They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyonethey found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women,and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them topieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords…They even laidwagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke,or cut an individual's head from his body, or disembowel him with asingle blow of their axes.

…[men] work in perpetual darkness, with no idea of when it is day or night; and as these are places never visited by the sun, not only is there perpetual darkness but it is also extremely cold, with a very heavy atmosphere unfit for man’s nature; and so it happens that those who enter the mine for the first time feel weak and dizzy, as happened to me, experiencing nausea and cramps in the stomach.

The miners always work by candlelight…Each man has a fifty-pound load in a blanket tied over his breast, with the ore it contains at his back…They climb by catching hold with both hands, and in this way ascend the great distances I have described, often more than 150 estados, a horrible thing about which it is frightening even to think….Such is the power of money, for the sake of which men do and suffer so much.

José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 1590

Goya, The Spanish Inquisition

“The missionary has to be like the father of a family; for the Indian, whatever his age, is like a child in needing to be trained and punished for his own good.” (Jesuit missionary)

Mission: Success Story…but at a price?

• Missions as a place for education

– ….museums do not show whipping posts

• Disease

• Poor mental health

• YET were missions a place of refuge in a world where economic alternatives were few?

Proselytization: Syncretism

Cusco: The Last Supper Painting in the Cathedral

cf. ‘Black Legend’ Article

• Summarize Cerio’s reassessment of the Black Legend in one sentence and then rank his evidence. What is his strongest evidence and weakest evidence and why?

• To what extent do the Spanish deserve the reputation as having a cruel empire in its American colonies?

• In criticizing the “Black Legend” do we fabricate a “White Legend” in its place?