Original subtitles

The year is 1568, almost eight decades of relentless conquest.

The Aztec and Inca have been defeated, spreading the Spanish Empire across the Americas.

The generations born of the first wave of conquistadors grow rich from the torrent of

new world silver, a wealth which brought with it increasing power.

They would begin to question their loyalty to the Spanish crown, a king that they had

never seen, ruling over a land 4,000 miles away that they had never set foot upon.

Would they continue to pay a lofty tax to the god-fearing kingdom their fathers and

grandfathers had fought for, a distant place to which they felt no real connection?

As evidence of the colonists' brutality comes to light, religious propaganda floods

Europe, embellishing and magnifying the horror of Spanish crimes, a phenomenon which would

come to be known as the Black Legend, a potent anti-Spanish narrative which would color the

world's perception of Central and South America for hundreds of years to come, forming

cracks in a kingdom already slipping into debt, losing itself to political turmoil,

fighting off pirates, and flailing to retain control of its hard-won outposts.

The new world would soon endure its final official Spanish conquests.

It would mark the culmination of millions of lives lost in a long series of atrocities

set across two continents, all for an empire now destined for centuries of further turmoil.

These would be the last days of the conquistadors.

Over 80 years in the new world, the conquistadors' influence had spread across the North and

South American continents, as well as the islands of the Philippines and Guam.

They're thriving colonies owing a terrible blood debt to a savage global industry built

on silver and slaves.

At the height of the power, conquistadors made their presence known all over the hemisphere,

really.

From Florida to New Mexico, California, Central America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, the entire

Pacific coast, all the way to Argentina.

Spanish colonies were also established on crucially important locales in Asia and in

the Pacific islands.

They made their presence felt all over the map.

But with success came criticism.

The ethics of stealing native land, of enslaving its people, a topic of fierce debate back

in Europe.

The souring reputation of the conquistadors would bring shame to the Iberian peninsula.

Those once lauded as brave crusaders of the new world, now casting an ugly shadow over

King Philip II's reign.

The 1570s, if we're going to choose a moment, is probably the best time to say, here's where

The era of conquest is done, and we're moving into another period of the colonial history

of the Americas.

The Spanish monarchy, it's King Philip II's order that the world conquests were not used

by the Spanish administrators, because by the end of the 16th century, the world conquests

had come to be associated with cruelties, abuse of the indigenous population, violence,

and so on and so forth.

Conquistadors enjoyed the benefits of lawlessness that came with the early years of the conquest.

They were kind of like the opening salvo, the first wave.

But in some ways, conquistadors outlived their utility to the crown.

The crown tried to develop a much more direct control over the territories through the use

of ample bureaucracies.

It's wrestling political control from conquistadors.

By the late 1560s, fierce indignation amongst conquistadors in Peru was rife, many still

reeling from the imposition of the new laws in 1542, which were designed to restrict their

powers.

This, coupled with ongoing pockets of Inca resistance in the mountainous regions of Vilcabamba,

meant the situation was critical.

The Spanish crown sent a new viceroy, the viceroy Toledo, to put things back in order.

Toledo arrived in the Andean region in 1569, bringing with him a strict new set of legal

structures designed to bring order by strengthening the very institutions that were already suppressing

Peru's indigenous people.

But the newly appointed viceroy never intended to improve their bleak conditions.

His only concern was the crown.

He organized a census of what had been the Inca Empire, now the Spanish Empire of Peru

and adjacent regions.

He established a policy to collect scattered groups of indigenous folk and move them to

larger villages and towns, to establish new ways of gathering tribute and especially labor

service to help keep the mines of Potosi and other mines in the region operating.

The Spanish crown, they wanted to maintain the flow of precious metals and to protect

that flow of precious metals.

So they invested in governmental infrastructure, boats and navies, in building forts in order

to maximize the income that's coming from it.

So the Toledo reforms, as they're referred to, is a case in which the Spanish imperial

state, the colonial imperial state, adopts a series of far more rigorous policies of

rule.

Similar things were done in Guatemala and Central America.

Similar things were done in Mexico during the second half of the 16th century.

Conquistadors resented those desires of the crown to control their moves and in many times

protested that they were not given the prerogatives that they deserve for having actually done

the conquest in the name of the king at their own expense.

By the late 16th century, it becomes very rare for Spaniards to talk about conquests,

even when they're going to places that they've never been before.

Even though there's huge swaths of land that the Spanish have not conquered or even entered,

there's hundreds of indigenous groups that the Spanish have never encountered.

They no longer call any campaigns against those groups as conquests.

They have shifted to calling them pacifications.

Meanwhile, other European nations were moving against the Spanish, eager to build their

own empires.

These jostling kingdoms were drawing in on Spain's overseas territories, coveting their

wealth, snatching at the nation's power.

Resentment of Spain's success aided the mission of state-funded navy pirates known as privateers,

sent to disrupt trade and ravage Spanish galleons, loaded with the treasures of the

New World.

By the late 16th century, the world has changed.

There are a lot more competitors in the Americas that want to claim lands.

And so the Spanish perception is that they have conquered the Americas, and they are

now defending that from other Europeans.

By this time, France and England and many other European territories, they're starting

to pay attention to what the Spaniards are doing in the Americas.

Increasingly the English and the Dutch begin to insert themselves and effect trade between

Spain and the New World.

Merchants started to make their appearance in the Americas to trade with Spanish colonists,

who in many occasions they welcomed them with open arms because they provided the same goods,

but sometimes had a better quality and a much cheaper price than actually the Spaniards ever did.

There's a great moment where Francis Drake goes to Africa and manages to get hold of

a cargo of slaves, which he then transports across the Atlantic to the Americas.

And in Cartagena de Indias, he describes himself as being well-received, despite the fact that

Philip II has explicitly instructed people in the Americas not to trade with the English.

It's only when the ship is damaged, and he has to put in at Veracruz for repairs before

going back to Europe, that the authorities in Mexico City are alerted to the presence

of this English trading ship.

The silver extracted in the Americas was carried to Spain, became also a big target for English

and French and Dutch privateers.

And they became the target of numerous attacks in an attempt to precisely seize this great wealth.

But the king's growing problems were not only limited to the attacks that Spanish ships

were suffering in the Atlantic.

Despite ever more crown-appointed viceroys landing in the New World, hopelessly attempting

to claw back control, colonial reliance on Spain was dwindling.

As greater development of Spanish colonies and settlements in the New World take place,

with the opening up of trade routes to the Far East and to China, and independently a

vast amount of wealth being created through the export of silver on the Manila galleons

and the establishment of livestock farming, the Americas become increasingly autonomous

and independent, and far less dependent on Spain.

You get the development of a criollo society, in other words a society of people who were

born in the New World who are natives there, who've never been to the Iberian Peninsula.

They grow in numbers, but they also grow in wealth and power, and it becomes increasingly

difficult for the Spanish who come across, who are sent across by the crown, to run

their territories in the Americas, to retain control.

They need to negotiate and work with this indigenous, well, this American criollo elite.

Below that level, there's huge amounts of intermarriage between indigenous and Iberian

people.

And of course you have the transatlantic slave trade from very early on, so black Africans,

you also have large numbers of immigrants from the Far East, from Malaya, from China,

from Indonesia.

It's a multicultural, multi-ethnic world of growing power.

That kind of growing autonomy and independence from the center is a kind of really crucial

thing I think that spells the end for the conquistadors.

The colonies became more and more prosperous as time went by.

We tend to think almost exclusively of the wealth that was extracted from the Americas

and taken to Spain, to Europe, and to other places.

I think we rarely consider the amount of wealth that was created through the labor of indigenous

and African people that conquistadors and the children of conquistadors and colonists

benefited from.

Many of them continue living in the societies that they have helped to create.

Many of them were wealthy.

Many of them inherited land and inherited possessions, and they were distinguished members

of these societies.

So the so-called achievements of conquistadors became an element of pride in this family saga.

Trouble plagued every corner of King Philip's empire, Catholicism forever at odds with a

growing Protestant faith in Europe.

A religious dispute which would culminate in a catastrophe for Philip.

His infamous Spanish Armada was intended to be the greatest fleet of warships on earth,

striking fear into the hearts of the empire's enemies, a powerful emblem of new world wealth.

However, the Armada would face an embarrassing and unexpected defeat by the English queen,

Elizabeth I's navy, in 1588.

A highly symbolic failure which would further feed into the growing anti-Spanish sentiment

sweeping across Europe.

A campaign of propaganda which would come to be known as the Black Legend, designed

to deride and discredit Philip's empire.

Europeans in general, they were tremendously jealous.

You can imagine, you know, they hear about this tremendous wealth that Spain has acquired

through gold and silver and precious metals and even labor.

These vast lands that they claim domain to.

Spain becomes not only tremendously wealthy, but now it can build up almost an invincible

military.

It can build up an insurmountable navy.

The Europeans look at this with great envy and great resentment because they now feel

that Spain is lording the success over them and that their very existence is being threatened.

And so what they do early on as Spain's success continues to gain wider notoriety is they

begin to demonize Spain.

All we have to do is look at the conquest.

All we have to look at is the Spanish character.

Spaniards are lazy, they are ignorant, and they engaged in the genocide of millions of

people.

And so was born the Black Legend.

The Black Legend, it's a myth that grows up slowly across the 16th century.

It starts out in Italy and it's the idea that the Spanish are particularly cruel, that they're

violent, rapacious and sexually incontinent.

If you're an Italian at the beginning of the 16th century, this is really very much the

centre of the intellectual world at that time.

It's where the rediscovery and printing of classical texts in places like Venice is proceeding

apace.

Spain is seen as a slightly barbaric by comparison, less civilized by comparison, but Spain comes

to dominate politically in Italy.

That basically causes the Italians to develop these sort of unpleasant negative stereotypes

about what the Spanish are like.

And that just then simply grows and is built upon.

The best weapons of the Black Legend came from within Spain itself, something like the

short account of the destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de Las Casas.

If you want one single piece of writing that helped create the Black Legend, that's it.

What they did was to take Las Casas' arguments, because Las Casas can be considered a great

defender of the Indians in that regard, and they used Las Casas' arguments for their

own purposes.

It takes visual form through the really extraordinary engravings of Dutch engraver and printer Theodore

de Bry.

So de Bry creates these illustrations, these etchings to accompany Bartolomé de Las Casas'

text.

Vivid illustrations of horrific violence, of people having their hands cut off, people

being fed to dogs, people being tortured through having their feet burned.

These really kind of visceral images enter into the kind of propagandistic imaginary

of people.

And in the 1590s, that's again consolidated in things like the theatre.

So the Spaniard on stage in early modern London becomes this kind of villainous figure.

As negative sentiment towards the Spanish hardened around the world, their empire would

begin a period of decline, with King Philip a key catalyst in its deterioration.

As the sun set on a 16th century defined by King Philip's kingdom's ruthless conquest

of the Americas, the crown's treasury struggled to balance the books.

Fraught foreign policies expressed through misguided military endeavors had crippled

their economy.

The nation's reliance on a dwindling supply of American silver only added to the strain.

The 17th century is when things become a bit more glum, a bit more grim, with the decline

of the mines of Potosi, decline of the mines in Mexico.

As the 17th century wears on, the silver remittances from the New World become less and less.

There's a greater demand for silver in the Americas itself, and there are certain years

when no silver fleet reaches Spain at all.

Also that silver allowed Spain to carry out a very ambitious foreign policy that led to

increasing indebtedness of the crown and to really declare numerous bankruptcies or

the inability to actually pay.

So the more silver that they had, the more they paid, the more they spent, and the harder

it was actually to pay back.

There's a massive economic depression in Spain, and there's a huge depression in the transatlantic

trade in general.

That of course begins to slowly drive the colonies in the Americas and Spain itself

apart.

They become more and more different.

The greater self-confidence, the greater wealth and power of the colonies continues to threaten

that kind of royal control.

Over the remainder of the 17th century, Spain and its colonies would drift ever further

apart, the crown falling from the House of Habsburg to the dynasty of the Bourbons in

the year 1700, an ancient family with a thoroughly different approach to running an empire.

Under this new regime came a final, desperate grasp for control of the new world.

The Bourbons come in and they are frustrated by how ineffective the administration of the

empire is.

They attempt once again to reimpose royal control in the Americas.

The entire 18th century has been characterized by many historians as a period of kind of

reconquest of the Americas.

Spain understood that it had to really determine its dominance in Europe.

And the way to do that was to extract all of the possible resources that it could from

its existing colonies.

As one historian has described it, juicing the Americas for everything that they were

worth in order to try to bolster Spain's position on the international stage.

So what they tried to do is to sort of enforce some administrative reform.

They wanted to push manufacturing, they wanted to push technology, modernize Spain, continental

Spain that is.

But this is coming in practical terms in the new world at the expense of that autonomy

that had been gained by the colonial population and they weren't keen obviously to give back.

The Bourbons are very much focused on the extraction of this wealth and the creation

of new tariffs and taxes and the monopoly of certain products.

And that is going to create an element of dissatisfaction among the colonial elites.

At a time in which the Atlantic, it's really boiling, let's say, with movements of independence

and songs of liberty and ideas of freedom from Europe.

Too much time had elapsed from, you know, that sort of very highly centralized control

of the beginning, reasserting authority after that lengthy period where the colonial population

had achieved a certain degree of autonomy, it wasn't going to work.

The Bourbon dynasty are basically hamstrung by the resistance of the criollo elites living

in the Americas.

That leads to a series of rebellions against Spanish control.

And in the longer term, that eventually leads to independence movements of many countries

in Latin America in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

So most of the countries of Latin America became independent in the 1810s or by the

early 1820s at the latest.

This is when Spain ceases to be a great imperial power and loses the empire that the conquistadors

had won for it three centuries before.

But when the countries of Latin America became independent, it did not mark the return to

power of Native American peoples.

Native American peoples remained, and have remained since, a minority in their own lands,

a disenfranchised, impoverished majority.

1898, the crumbling husk of Spain's empire falls to the United States.

Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam, lost in the Spanish-American War.

One particularly effective tactic in breaking Spanish resistance had been US propagandists'

use of an archaic but still potent 16th century weapon, the return of the black legend.

The United States had extensive interest in the Caribbean in terms of sugar.

The consumption of American sugar grew by about 400 or 500% in the 1890s.

Americans became obsessed with consuming sugar.

And certainly Cuba produced a great deal of sugar.

The United States began to demonize the Spaniards again.

And what did they do?

They resurrected the black legend.

All of these attributes that were given to the Spaniards by 16th century England.

And they said, this is why the Spaniards deserve to be overthrown in the Caribbean.

Using the same descriptions, lazy, brutal, and worst of all, Catholic, because there

was a strong anti-Catholic element already present in the United States, which considered

itself a Protestant nation.

Four hundred years had passed since Columbus mistook Hispaniola for an East Asian island.

The course of billions of lives changing forever in the moment the Italian mapmaker's

eyes settled on the new world.

A historic discovery which would launch Spain's expansion across America, bolstering an empire

relentless in its ravaging of the land and the cruel treatment of its people.

But how did this relatively small contingent of outsiders make such a significant mark

on the Americas?

As modern historians begin to pry open this question, a different picture of the conquistador

begins to emerge.

So how did they do it?

We tend to fall back on this idea that, oh, they had guns, they had steel weapons, they

had ships, they had superior writing technology.

And a lot of these things are not as effective as we think they are.

They're really kind of ways for us to sort of struggle with the explanation as to how

this small group of people was able to conquer all this larger group of people.

The feats of the conquistadors used to be seen as almost superhuman, as though they

were almost supermen.

They seemed to speak to some essential superiority of Europeans over indigenous peoples, some

cultural superiority, as well as a technical one, even a moral superiority.

Not wanting to underplay the sheer bravery and energy displayed by the conquistadors,

the result was a foregone conclusion.

Victory was certain.

The Spaniards, the Europeans, ultimately benefited from the fact that the old world was a very

disease-rich environment in which all sorts of horrible pathogens had been circulating

for hundreds of years, if not longer, and where, as a result, European populations had

built up immunities to those things.

By contrast, the Native Americans had lived for thousands of years essentially in a natural

quarantine separated from the rest of humankind by the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean

to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.

It's difficult to overestimate the impact of disease.

This was cataclysmic.

And I would argue that Spaniards routinely lost in their military encounters when disease

had not already had a significant impact on the population they were encountering.

So when we think about Spanish success, I would argue that we need to think about Spanish

success in the face of a decimated population.

Also, we have to be able to appreciate the role played by local indigenous peoples in

permitting those new colonies to be established.

Otherwise, if we don't do that, we fall back on the old Spanish idea that they achieved

a miraculous conquest of empires of millions of people just using a few hundred Spaniards.

How did they do that?

Because Spaniards are superheroes and they had God on their side.

And that's not an explanation that will hold up for us.

So in explaining what really happens, then we have to go back and see how indigenous

communities one by one made decisions to accommodate the Spaniards because they thought that that

was going to be in their best interest.

So it wasn't that this plucky band of 300 Spaniards defeated the Aztec Empire.

No, no.

It was a group of several hundred thousand natives and several hundred Spaniards who

engaged in a battle, a series of battles, and were victorious.

Where we see Spanish successes, we see alliances with indigenous groups.

Where they aren't able to create alliances, as in Yucatan, they fail spectacularly.

And this is probably true in several of these arenas throughout the Americas that for many

people it was not immediately discernible that the Spanish were the ones entirely in

charge.

What they would have viewed were these alliances.

I think that it took some time, several decades, for Amerindians in different locations and

in Central America to understand how Spaniards perceived themselves as being wholly in command

of these military contests.

And so in the end, the question should not be how did a few hundred Spaniards or a few

hundred Europeans conquer millions and millions of people.

The question should be how did they come to present these events in that way?

And is that really what happened?

Because if it isn't, if those events actually involved a far more diverse set of actors,

protagonists who were African and indigenous, and really more complex, messy encounters

that lasted for many generations, then we don't need to come up with an answer to that

first question.

Then we don't have to worry about whether it was God or racial superiority or that their

guns were really, really useful after all.

What then was the true cost of the Spanish conquests?

The conquistadors set the fetid foundations of a new world cursed by greed and prejudice.

This would be the dark legacy left in their wake.

The population decline of indigenous peoples from the moment Columbus arrives, if we count

forward about a hundred years, is possibly as much as 90%.

That's the biggest, most dramatic decline in human population possibly of all time.

Wherever they went, populations were decimated.

The specific permutations of how that occurred varied.

Places like Panama, the Caribbean, the primary agent was warfare, followed by famine, caused

by warfare and social disruption, as well as exploitation.

In places like Mexico and Peru, disease was a more significant force for a longer period

of time.

The conquest created a great deal of inequality in the new societies that came after it.

It was a model around profit.

The economic interests of a few were placed at the top of society, while other individuals

work towards the achievement of that end.

The legacy of forced labor, the ways in which the coercion of both Amerindians and Africans

drove the engine of growing wealth in the Americas, is hard to ignore in the kind of

inequalities that exist into the present.

The black legend, we still hear it today.

All the elements of the black legend are there in the arguments for why we should control

the border and increase border security because of all these undesirables that have all of

these undesirable elements and the heritage of these brutal individuals who destroyed

an entire civilization.

So perhaps the legacies are there not in terms of dominant structures, but in terms of mindsets

and ways of being as well.

The lasting legacy of the colonization is the degradation of native peoples, their exploitation,

their marginalization, and their continued marginalization.

There is still an indigenous majority in both Mexico and Peru at the end of the colonial

period.

But during the 19th century into the 20th century, those populations come to dwindle

in the context of the rise of other demographic sectors.

So if you look at the majority of the populations of countries throughout Latin America today,

most of them are mestizo countries.

They're mostly of what we used to call mixed race or mixed ethnic heritage.

Minority does become deeply ingrained in all of Latin America.

By the early 20th century, 90% plus of everyone living in Latin America is a Christian.

And most of them are members of the Roman Catholic faith.

Because the church did have an impact.

It regulated the cycle of life.

It was the minute by minute, hour by hour activity for so many people.

Spain opened up the Americas, a blend of bodies, technology, and biology from across the globe

merging as the decades passed in a cultural, physical, and molecular coalescence which

would come to be known as the Columbian Exchange.

This experiment in the late 16th century is really the first time in world history where

people from the major continents are all living together in a single society.

It's impossible to disentangle the role of Africa and Africans from the Spanish conquest.

They fought in the wars of conquests alongside Spaniards.

More Africans were brought in order to fulfill the labor demands put in place by conquistadors

after the conquest.

You can't travel across huge parts of the Caribbean and the mainland, places like Colombia,

Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, without seeing quite literally the legacy of African

participation in the Spanish conquest and later colonization.

We have Africans, we have Europeans, we have natives of North and South America, and after

about 1569, we have large numbers of Asians who enter into what we now call Latin America.

The Spanish conquest, by virtue of that, created an entire array of new cultures and peoples

that formed through that conjunction.

It's the exchange of microbes, animals, flora and fauna, knowledge, DNA, that completely

altered the way we live today.

A very, very important part of the Columbian Exchange is the fact that many, many food

crops came from the New World and went to the old.

Corn, chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, manioc.

Many of these foodstuffs became essential for life.

Imagine Ireland without potatoes.

Imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes.

These are essential aspects, and they all have their origins in the New World.

Domesticates now pour into the Americas, so there are now horses, cattle, sheep, pigs,

goats, chickens, and all those other animals in the Americas.

What is interesting is that a similar biological exchange occurred across the Pacific.

What we have is highly productive American crops, especially corn and sweet potatoes,

and to some extent, peanuts, making their way into Asia, but most especially into China,

and helping boost population there.

So rather than a demographic decline, what we have is a population increase.

So again, this whole global economy as we know it today had something to do with this

exchange as China's population increased at this time.

The conquest completely reconfigured humanity's relationship with foodstuffs and led to a

far richer and diverse and calorific diet for human populations around the world.

Who were the conquistadors?

An elite force of religious missionaries out to bravely save the unenlightened?

Or brutish killers, unable to contain their insatiable lust for gold?

Were the Americas really captured through a miraculous blend of Spanish military skill

and a cunning manipulation of a naive, native people?

Or was this simply an alluring image built up through hundreds of years of historic sources?

A 21st century reappraisal of this tale reveals the facts, that disease and existing indigenous

conflicts did most of the killing for the conquistadors, clearing the way for colonization.

As their story continues to evolve under a modern lens, how should we look back on these

complex characters from history?

How do we judge their impact, which, for better or for worse, changed the world forever?

The history of the conquistadores, or the experience of the conquistadores, is not something

that is forgotten.

That historical memory leads to discussions on identity, on national politics, on indigenous

rights.

That historical memory is still feeding anger of so many people.

How many monuments have been destroyed over the last years?

Across Latin America, particularly in indigenous parts of Latin America and Mexico, Columbus,

Cortes and other conquistadors have moved from being sort of the introduction of European

society to becoming symbols of subjugation and conquest.

This doesn't mean that they renege on their Hispanic past, but it is symbolic of how problematic

the conquest is seen.

As we have become more diverse in our thinking about what conquistadors represented, as we're

asking new questions about what the conquistadors did, as we are becoming more nuanced in the

reading of these sources, we need to stop putting the conquistadors' ideas and worldview

in the center stage.

We need to give room to all of the other people, actually, who came around them.

All of them get a voice.

We need to think about how this history has shaped our identity and our celebration of

who we are and how mixed we are.

The encounters fostered by the Spanish conquest has created a tapestry of cultures and peoples

of the Americas that today are vibrant reminders of the ability of the human spirit to survive

in the face of decimation and disease and collapse and to find new ways of forging a

path forward despite colonialism and oppression.

What the conquistadors did is just the beginning.

Everything is all tied up in mythology and misconceptions and propaganda and so on.

It's a huge big mess.

In order to untangle that mess and finally, at some point, have some kind of reckoning

with what happened in the Americas and how indigenous peoples were treated and how we

want them to be treated as we move through the 21st century, we have to come to terms

with what happened 500 years ago and understand that it isn't that, oh, like the black legend

says that the Spaniards are bad, the Spanish empire was bad, or the conquistadors are bad.

That misses the point.

The point is, the problem is empire.

The real takeaway from the story of the conquistadors is that empires are abusive and exploitative

and they encourage actions which traumatize and victimize huge sections of populations.

One country invading another is never okay.

That's really the end of the story.