All language subtitles for 5.The Growth of the Colonies

In the five long decades since Columbus's arrival, the Americas had been ravaged by

the conquistadors, the crown seeking new treasures to build up and control its growing armies.

Many had taken root, the conquistadors and their offspring building lives in the colonies,

their cities sprouting from the ashes of Aztec and Inca settlements.

Their leaders, Spaniards from modest backgrounds, striving to create a new American nobility,

ruling as they saw fit.

They were untouchable, or so they thought.

Battles imbued with their brutality spread across Europe, souring popular perception

of the empire's colonists, forcing King Philip of Spain to push new laws designed

to control his itinerant soldiers.

And yet, one glittering scientific discovery would transform the settlers' fortunes

and alter the global economy forever.

Spanish silver eventually crossing palms in all four corners of the globe.

But not everyone was satisfied, some still venturing out on a desperate search for the

mystical kingdom of El Dorado.

History books may paint Spain's conquest of the remaining terrain as an agile land

grab, but modern reassessment reveals the far more complex, messy reality of this period

of change for the conquistadors, as they faced difficult terrain and staunch indigenous resistance.

The reality of the conquest of the New World was far from the swift clinical operation

boasted of in historic texts, written to promote the mission of the conquistadors.

Whilst Cortes and Pizarro had conquered and destroyed the Aztec and Inca empires, large

parts of the Americas remained free of Spanish dominion for many years to come.

Flamboyant Spanish literature may have claimed that the mystical golden city of El Dorado

still lay in wait, but in truth, the era of exploration was coming to an end.

The textbook maps that we see from our school days showing the extent of the Spanish empire

tend to suggest that these empires had vast continued swaths of space and peoples that

they ruled, when in fact, there were vast stretches of North and South America that

were only weakly, if at all, governed by the new empire.

We think about conquistadors and we think about a complete victory over indigenous people,

but the acts of conquistadors can be quite incomplete in many ways sometimes.

In the southern half of Chile, the Mapuche successfully prevented the Inca from colonizing

their territory.

And then when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, were just as successful in keeping them out

and remained in control of their lands for centuries, actually all the way until the

19th century in the national period.

The Mapuche became very skillful at fighting the Spaniards.

Actually they adopted very quickly on the horse that ironically was brought to the new

world by the Spaniards.

The same thing will happen, for example, with the Apache and the Comanche in northern Mexico

and south U.S.

Other examples of regions that weren't effectively colonized or ruled are the Gran Chaco and

Mucha Paraguay in the center of the South American continent.

The Orinoco as well, this vast region of savannas and rainforest that's even now today, amazingly

intact was not really ruled in an effective way at all.

The Maya area, which is, if you look geographically, the Americas is right slap bang in the middle,

you'd think that would have been completely absorbed into the Spanish empire.

Not at all.

Most of it remains unconquered and inhabited by free Maya peoples for most of the colonial

period.

So there are enormous swaths of land and places and indigenous communities who were never

fully under control of the Spaniards.

That should be mapped on these textbook maps, but it's just treated as if Spain rules these

vast stretches.

These geographical inaccuracies also serve to omit from the history books those conquests

which ended in embarrassing failure or even death for the conquistadors.

I would argue that we miss the absolute messiness of what was going on in the moment.

There were challenges of communication.

There were long distances that had to be traversed.

We might see some kind of progress of conquest from one place to another.

But I think that in the moment and in the making of it, it didn't feel that way at all.

And it felt much more like a kind of fragmented chipping away of things piece by piece.

These kinds of expeditions don't get a lot of attention.

There's not much glory there.

They're kind of a grim, sad manifestation of this phenomenon as it continues and continues.

One such ill-fated and often overlooked expedition was joined by a battle-scarred veteran of

the Italian Wars, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca.

This story has come to play against the centuries-old narrative of the conquistadors and their

New World heroics.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca is perhaps less storied than some of the other conquistadors

because his story is a failure rather than a supposed success story.

Nevertheless, I think his story is one of the most fascinating that we have from this period.

To my view, it's a much more typical story of so-called conquest.

Cabeza de Vaca was one of many men on an expedition led by Panfilo de Narváez in 1527, attempting

to kind of duplicate some of the fabulous successes that had occurred in Tenochtitlan.

Panfilo de Narváez set sail from what is today Cuba and tried to reach the coast of

Mexico.

However, in another sort of stunning display of how little Spaniards knew about the geography,

they did not understand the currents of the Gulf of Mexico, the wind currents, and ended

up landing on the western coast of what is today Florida.

They had no idea where they were and soon began to encounter one stunning setback after

another.

They engaged militarily with Amerindians from that region.

They were trounced again and again.

Cabeza de Vaca describes in his narrative the awe that he felt in watching an arrow

go through a trunk of a tree that was as thick as a person's body.

This was the strength with which these arrows were launched.

And it really does become every man for himself.

Out of this entire expedition, there are only four survivors in the end.

Cabeza de Vaca is one of them.

The Native Americans enslaved these four individuals and so they remained there for a period of

six years until they figure out a way to extricate themselves from the circumstance by turning

themselves into healers.

Native Americans basically forced these four individuals to perform healings.

At least from the accounts that we have from the surviving Europeans, it worked.

They went from slaves to really prized possessions that were passed along from one group to another.

Cabeza de Vaca starts to take on this role as a healer with more enthusiasm so that after

several years he's kind of adopted this role as a shaman maybe or a healer who travels

with this body of people who protect him to some degree but also use him for healing.

In the company of hundreds and sometimes even thousands of natives, they were able to cross

from the Atlantic Ocean, from the coast of Texas as I was saying, south into what is

now northern Mexico and all the way to the Pacific coast through mountains and rivers,

etc.

And that's how we get the first true glimpse of the interior of North America through these

accounts by these four remarkable survivors.

So perhaps we can think of this as a story of assimilation but I think it's also a story

of conquest in a different way.

Who is really conquered in this story?

Well you might say that he has conquered the people he travels with in the sense that he's

won them over.

They've become his great supporters and allies but he has also been conquered himself.

He has been won over to their way of life.

He's become a shaman.

Most of North America remained outside of effective Spanish rule.

One major exception to this was the Spanish-established forts, famously the Fort of St. Augustine

on the coast of Florida.

But also some forts up in the Carolinas, hoping to find mines of gold and silver.

Fantasies of luxurious new lives built upon piles of gold were not the only reason expeditions

ventured into uncharted territory.

Other explorers had this vague sense that the Garden of Eden might still be present

on the face of the earth.

So one of the things that drove voyages of exploration and conquest down rivers from

Ecuador or from northern Peru to Amazonia was this possibility that they might find

paradise.

The first ever European to explore this region and traverse the length of the mighty Amazon

River on another calamitous Spanish mission was Francisco de Oriana.

Oriana's journey would begin in Quito, Ecuador and take him deep into the forests below the

Andes, where his supplies would run low, leaving him to traverse the river in desperate search

of food.

Eventually he and his men would emerge from its mouth torn and tattered into the Atlantic

before sailing on to Spain, loaded with heavily embellished tales of hordes of gold, exotic

spice and dangerous encounters with a tribe of enormous powerful women, their physical

dominance reminding him of the Amazons spoken of in Greek mythology.

Their control over the Americas may have been tenuous in places non-existent, but the Spanish

were absorbing invaluable knowledge of the land, its wildlife and its people.

They were also resigned to the disappointing reality that another great golden civilization

akin to the Aztec or the Inca was little more than a myth.

The phase of exploration had reached its natural end, the Spanish now intent on finding a way

to govern the new world they had discovered.

The thing they are most interested in is very large indigenous populations to serve

as a workforce. They're also of course interested in precious metals, but they rapidly face

a law of diminishing returns.

There is no other great Native American empire like the Inca Empire, and so essentially they

have discovered and conquered the parts of the Americas they are most interested in.

It is one of those things that just dies away, because there are no longer any of these

large state-sized organized native polities to confront.

Over six decades of brutal conquests, having committed countless atrocities across the

new world, Spain had absorbed the largest empires of the Americas, making it unmatched

in its might.

Considering that Spain is only just coming into existence around the time of Columbus

and the early explorations in the Caribbean, its expansion and global rise as an imperial

power is incredibly rapid in the early 16th century. So in the 1520s, 30s and 40s, the

success of Spanish imperial expansion is really extraordinary. Spain is by far the most powerful

empire. It's actually the first empire upon which the sun never sets, although the British

claim that that was their idea.

Europe was abuzz with resentment for the conquistadors. Conversations about ethics focused on the

bleak methods used to secure their colonial power. Feeling the pressure to pull back control

from those who had now been abusing their governmental roles for decades, the Spanish

crown decided to pass a number of new laws, the first since the Laws of Burgos in 1512.

They were designed to protect the rights of their indigenous subjects, whilst tightening

the leash on the rampageous soldiers who had torn through the Americas on their king's

behalf.

The new laws of the Indies that were passed in 1542 are the most important example of

an event in which the Spanish crown and administrators of the new empire from Spain decreed a new

way of doing things in an attempt to limit the violence and the wrongs and the exploitation

that were being done by the first generations of conquistadors and colonizers.

These laws were much more expansive and much more designed to protect the native people

from the abuses of exploitation and brutality. The crown saw their responsibility as being

protectors, not only of their new holdings, but of the people who populated them. And

one of the things that they wanted to make sure was that these people, these native people,

were Christianized and educated as subjects of the crown.

One thing that they did was actually attempt to end one of the most important institutions

of the conquest, encomienda, the right to receive tribute, also labor service, from

indigenous societies. This was a source of enormous abuse.

And essentially what the new laws do is that they end the heritable nature of the encomendero

system. So these huge landed estates that these kind of men had established for themselves

in the Americas is no longer one which will be passed down from father to son, essentially

creating a kind of noble dynasty.

The conquistadors didn't like what this happened. And actually one of the most important stimulus

for rebellion and for civil war in Peru in the 1540s was these new laws limiting the

exploitation and also the ability to gain wealth and power that the first conquistadors,

such as the Pizarro brothers, had acquired.

The Spanish crown actually had to send high-ranking European officials in order to enforce the

new laws. The individual who was sent to Peru was killed. He was decapitated and his head

was paraded. But there was such a pushback. So what happened, for example, with the statute

about the encomiendas is that they were kind of phased out. So the encomiendas would not

be eliminated once and for all immediately, but they would be preserved for three lives.

So in other words, during three generations. So basically, if you had an encomienda, you

could pass it on to your children and your children could pass it on to their children

and then the encomiendas would disappear.

But many in the old country felt the new laws were too lenient. And as the 16th century

reached its fifth decade, a series of heated public debates would take place. One familiar

voice joined the melee. The outspoken Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas was back. Having

prominently relinquished his encomienda years earlier, lobbying for the original laws of

Burgos and in the meantime fighting the crown over their policy of enslaving and stealing

from native people.

He is involved in a famous disputation with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in Valladolid in

which they argue whether the conquest of the Americas was licit or not. Juan Ginés de

Sepúlveda outlines a series of arguments that the indigenous peoples were basically

subhuman, that they did not possess the use of reason and therefore through this kind

of idea from Aristotle of natural slavery that the inferior should yield to the superior.

That becomes one of the great arguments and justifications for the Spanish presence in

the Americas.

Bartolomé de las Casas advocates for the rights of the Indians, the rights for them

to be considered fully as Spanish subjects and therefore to enjoy all the privileges

and freedoms of the law and he denounces the enslavement of indigenous people.

I call the debates of 1550 perhaps a turning point or a key defining moment of early modern

humanism because this is the very first moment that a committee of theologos and juristas

of theologians and jurists are put together to reflect and to come up with the solution

to all these claims about the injustice of the war. And this is why las Casas is such

an incredible figure because he brings topics that have transcended through history, particularly

today when we think about war and how people are still healing.

The dispute is inconclusive but immediately Bartolomé de las Casas publishes this short

history of the destruction of the Indies. It's a vast exaggeration of the kinds of

excesses and outrages and cruelty that was committed in the New World but nevertheless

it is founded on a kind of an element of truth that there were some really iniquitous and

barbaric, savage behavior by the conquistadors in establishing themselves in the Americas.

He goes island by island, region by region beginning in Hispaniola about the atrocities

committed by the Spanish. That bestseller that was translated into Dutch, German, Italian,

Latin, French, that was the text that really marks the fall of the conquistadores publicly.

Times were changing and Europe was watching. As the conquistadors began to emulate the

Castilian life they had left behind, those who once wielded swords and armor were transforming

into businessmen and politicians, changing the face of the New World forever.

Even though they still don't have a really precise comprehension of this vast expanse,

they do have a sense of the opportunity that this space offers and they also critically

I think have managed to create some administrative nodes.

These institutions in the form of city councils, of judicial bodies, start to impose Spanish

ideas about legal structures, about how processes work, about how communication is going to

function into the operation of some of these American spaces.

Those nodes can be really important in a landscape devastated by disease where not just the population

but the indigenous structures supported by that population have crumbled. And having

a kind of rigid Spanish structure, that ends up really starting to lead to different social

structures, different landscapes as they change the landscape physically with Spanish farming,

new institutions that start taking root. All of that stuff really I think begins to alter

the way that the Americas look and how they operate from within.

Colonists borrowed from the culture of their former home, implementing political hierarchies,

restrictions, and robust legal structures built on a foundation of marginalization.

This shift would provide the Crown with an opportunity, a way to finally take back control.

The attempt by the Spaniards was always to replicate Spanish life in the New World, creating

cities, creating churches, cathedrals, and an entire apparatus of civil and religious

government. And at the same time, they tried to force all those people around them to assimilate,

let's say, into the Spanish way of life. And that meant evangelization, that meant

dress codes, to become like a close copy of the Spaniards without ever granting them equality.

The Crown worked to establish a judicial system on the mainland known as the Audiencia, high

courts which sought to administer justice and put an end to abuses of power, which also

acted as an advisory board to the royal viceroys.

The first generation of conquistadors, if you will, from Columbus himself through to

Pizarro and the conquest of the Inca Empire, that time, that period where these men are

acting with a great deal of autonomy and independence begins to come to an end with the establishments

of these Audiencias, which allow both Spanish subjects living there but also indigenous

people to appeal to law and to use the law to protect their own interests as against

the kind of rapacity of certain unscrupulous individuals.

With only a few exceptions, the decision of the Audiencia was final.

By 1550, six had been established across the Americas, including in Mexico, Lima and Guatemala.

In areas where there is no settled kind of state, there is no political structure for

the Spanish to kind of insert themselves into, they essentially, in the end,

they essentially have to build fortresses.

They build fortresses in order to try to control the territory, these presidios.

And basically they are military garrisons so that to keep lines of communication and

trade open so that they can, you know, move goods through those areas.

Areas where there are often hostile, you know, indigenous tribal groups who might attack

or kill those people.

As the cultural practices of continental Spain flooded the colonies,

a vile racial hierarchy emerged.

So it's really very much about transplanting, in a way, the class structure of Spain,

the kind of grandees, the upper nobility into the context of the New World.

The Spanish encouraged intermarriage between the people who were higher up in the military

hierarchy and the daughters, particularly, of the local cateches,

the indigenous chieftains and tribal leaders.

By the middle of the 16th century, the Spanish colonial society had begun to develop

its own complex social racial hierarchy.

The important thing here to put you at the top of the social hierarchy was lineage.

In other words, that you were Spanish or you have a big amount of Spanish blood.

The most common categories of the system included Spaniards at the top, Espanoles.

At the very bottom would be Africans.

And then above them, Indios.

But there are also included a number of categories to designate the individuals

who are born of mixed ancestry between those founding populations of Europeans,

Africans and Native Americans.

The two most common ones were Mestizos, those born of Spanish and indigenous relationships,

and Mulatos, which could be born of either relationships between Spaniards and Africans

or between Africans and indigenous peoples.

The legal system applied different privileges and obligations to each of the different racial groups

in colonial society.

Africans and indigenous peoples tended to have the most obligations or restrictions placed upon them

by virtue of their racial category, whereas Spaniards and to a lesser extent Mestizos

had fewer restrictions or obligations placed upon them

and had more privileges that they could benefit from.

I think that for us, in retrospect, the intolerance of Spaniards is very visible.

I am not sure that it was always racial contempt in the way we understand it.

I think it became racial contempt.

I think a lot of the early contempt was really about religion.

The contempt that Spaniards felt for people who practiced human sacrifice

or who practiced idolatry in their views, that would go on to create really strong barriers,

sort of interpersonal barriers, the sense of you are not like me, I think.

The colonial industries had grown vital for Europe's continued prosperity.

And those industries had come to rely almost entirely on one of humanity's bleakest creations, slavery.

At least 200,000, maybe even half a million enslaved Nicaraguans

ended up working in the gold fields or on plantations in the Antilles on the Caribbean islands.

Even larger numbers sailed with conquistadors to the Isthmus of Panama

where they were used as beasts of burden, so to speak,

carrying things back and forth from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast.

Peoples from what is now southern Chile are being shipped all the way to Peru, for example.

Very early on, the greatest demand for African slavery was in Mexico and Peru, what are today Mexico and Peru.

There are millions of people who are transported over time

and we know that the loss of life is tremendous across these voyages.

In many contexts, Africans and Native Americans worked side-by-side.

They worked side-by-side in Spanish homes if they were living in the city.

They worked side-by-side on rural estates, whether it's sugar plantation or livestock ranches or farms.

As a result, Africans and Native Americans very frequently formed common cause

and even formed multi-ethnic families.

In fact, many descendants of enslaved Africans learn indigenous languages

and form families with indigenous people in Spanish America.

Popular literature has, for centuries, pushed a particular vision of the legend of the conquistadors.

One of white European bravery and cunning in the face of a savage, undeveloped new world.

But these embellished accounts often fail to mention the other characters who played a role in Spain's empire.

Evidence of their involvement offering a fresh perspective on the conquest and colonization of the Americas.

In terms of where conquistadors came from, in terms of their national identity, most obviously they were Spaniards.

As Spain came into being and created an empire, conquistadors also could be Portuguese, they could be Italian.

And once we get to the new world, conquistadors are also of African descent.

They could be free, they could be African slaves that fight and then win their freedom as a result of fighting.

Someone who defies our idea or expectation of what a conquistador looks like would be, for example, Juan Garrido.

Juan Garrido was an African man born in the Kingdom of Congo.

He was a free man and he arrived in Hispaniola around 1502 approximately.

And he participated in expeditions in Puerto Rico and Cuba as a conquistador.

He joined the forces of Cortes and participated in the conquest of Mexico in 1519.

In the wake of the conquest, he acts like many other Spanish conquistadors.

He's active in trying to secure special rights and privileges for having served in the conquest.

Juan Garrido is far from the stereotypical conquistador that the average person actually has in mind,

but it represents the diversity that we encounter sometimes in these expeditions, in these groups.

We don't know how many conquistadors of African descent there were,

because the Spaniards were generally reluctant to give credit to other people.

I suspect that because we know why they weren't generally given as much credit as non-Africans were,

and because we have examples of specific individuals and their names,

I suspect that there were many more than we realized.

Thinking about conquistadors that probably defy our expectations,

I think possibly Catalina de Auzo is one of the most interesting characters in the entire colonial period.

She doesn't fight as a woman.

She dresses up as a man in Spain and takes passage to the Americas,

and lives in the Americas for many years as a man.

She adopts her brother's name.

She became a soldier.

She fought in the Chilean frontier.

It came to a point in which she was discovered,

even though she was dressed as a man and breaking the laws,

thanks to the fact that she was still a virgin.

Catholics put a lot of stock into this at the time.

Therefore, she had preserved the most important aspect of her womanhood.

So she was actually taken to Spain,

where the king gave her permission to actually dress like a man for the rest of her life.

It's a wonderful and complicated story, I think,

because she's a conquistador that confounds all our expectations of what a conquistador should be,

but at the same time helps us to see how there are certain kinds of roles.

And this sort of stereotype of just who these Spanish men were

and what they had achieved in the Americas.

The conquistadors were about to unlock the full potential of the precious metal

held in the depths of the Cerro Rico in Potosí, Bolivia.

By 1554, an efficient method of extracting silver had been developed.

Allowing production across Spanish mines to increase relentlessly year on year.

And Cerro Rico held more silver than anywhere else across the New World.

The irony is that in the end, finally the Spanish found the precious metal,

but it wasn't gold.

The real gold of the New World was silver.

The Spaniards discovered this mountain in the middle of the Andes called Potosí.

The city of Potosí became possibly one of the most important places in global history.

And it's hard to overemphasize this point.

Potosí became, during the late 16th century,

possibly the main producer of silver in the world.

Potosí was the main mine, but it was not the only one.

There were many other mines in the Andes.

And it was actually extracted through indigenous labor, forced indigenous labor.

It's understood that perhaps some 8 million people died in the mining of silver.

People were compelled to work in the mines for essentially forever.

It was in large part this silver that was used to finance the slave trade.

To me, it's devastating.

It's devastating to think about.

It was in large part this silver that was used to finance the slave trade.

To me, it's devastating to think about the ways in which the exploitation of one group

was used to finance the exploitation of another.

And yet these two twin engines of silver and slavery

were really what allowed the Spanish economy to boom in this time period.

At its peak, the mining city established in Potosí

was home to up to 160,000 people,

a jumble of Spaniards, indigenous Americans, and African slaves.

The city ran off their backs,

workers each expected to shift ore

through the dark, cramped mine shafts to the surface.

Every back-breaking day, death hung over the miners,

never waiting long to claim its next victim.

The work never ceased.

Potosí's 22 dams powered 140 mills,

which ground down the extracted ore

before it was chemically converted into the precious silver.

The coins extracted in mines like Potosí

and other mines both in Mexico and Peru,

that silver and those silver pesos

became the main currency in many places in the world,

and even the English and the French used it because it was a trusted currency,

and therefore it became a very important vehicle for global exchange.

The priority of the Spanish economy was to protect the gold,

The priority of the Spanish crown during this time

was to organize the entire Spanish system

around the protection of the silver fleets.

In the 16th century you have a massive need for silver and gold,

particularly in order to keep armies in the field.

Soldiers are very problematic when they don't get paid,

and when they don't eat,

and the Spanish are a predominant military power in Western Europe.

Spanish galleons were loaded with silver

and other luxuries of the New World,

invigorating the empire's economy

and keeping Spanish soldiers marching forward.

The Spanish articulated their transatlantic trade

with their colonies in the form of a monopoly.

The colonies were only authorized to trade with Spain

Two fleets were sent annually to the Americas

with manufactured goods,

and those were to be exchanged by products in the Americas.

This obviously did not satisfy colonists

because the prices were extraordinarily inflated.

The other kind of crucial thing is,

in territories as vast as Latin America,

it's almost impossible in the age of sale

to impose any kind of effective control on trade.

So increasingly, piracy, contraband, illegal trading

are completely ubiquitous in this time.

It poses a growing problem because it's only through official trade

that the royal authorities get the royal fifth,

and that's where a lot of the income and wealth

that the crown derives from the New World comes from.

Decades on from Queen Isabella's death,

King Philip still wished to fulfill his great-grandmother's dream

of finding a swift trade route to Asia.

By order of the crown,

five ships, captained by local magistrate

Miguel López de Legazpi, set off from Mexico.

Their task, locate and acquire

a significant share of the lucrative eastern spice trade.

The Spanish would establish a colony in Cebu,

with Legazpi naming the islands

in honor of his king, Philip II.

It had taken them over 70 years,

but the Philippines were now yet another arm of the empire

and an important new capital.

Manila, the city founded by the Spanish,

which became the capital,

emerged very rapidly as one of the most important ports of trade,

linking not only Mexico and the Americas to Asia directly

via galleons that would sail back and forth,

but also became an important port of trade

for overseas trade in Southeast Asia,

in the South China Sea, in the Indian Ocean itself.

This bullion also provided the opportunity

to establish connections

with the most lucrative trade in the world,

that with China itself.

China could not get enough silver.

It became like a silver stock market.

China could not get enough silver.

It became like a silver sink,

either directly across the Pacific,

through these Manila galleons,

or indirectly through Europe.

China, with its silks,

with its exotic woods,

furniture, art pieces, clothing, etc.,

which were extraordinarily lucrative

when they were sold again in Europe,

in parts of the Indian Ocean world,

just as much in Acapulco

and other cities of Mexico

and the Spanish governed new world.

In fact, most of the silver that was produced during this era

actually ended up on not the European side of the world,

but the Asian side of the world.

And this is important to the development of China and India

as societies, as economies, as polities,

turning them into economic powerhouses

or strengthening them beyond what they already were.

One should think of these conquests

as creating the world's first genuinely global economy

and the world's first genuinely global economic superpowers,

besides their political importance,

their social importance and their cultural importance.

The conquest and colonization proper

for the archipelago of islands known today as the Philippines,

in many ways, marks the ending of the period of conquest

from the perspective of the Spanish Empire.

Nearly a century had passed since Columbus claimed Hispaniola,

the empire whose expansion he had mistakenly initiated,

now reaching the peak of its power.

But with success came criticism.

Spain's enemies flooding Europe with hyperbolic nightmares,

propaganda designed to foster fear,

vilifying its people and its culture.

Meanwhile, a rift was growing

between the crown and its new world colonies,

the conquistadors' descendants rising to power,

ready and willing to fight for their autonomy,

finally freeing themselves from the shackles of an archaic monarchy.

The king didn't know it yet,

but the fortunes of his mighty Spanish Empire

were teetering in the balance.