CHAPTER FOUR
Our third expansion narrative starts with Columbus sailing west in order to connect Spain with Asia while avoiding Portuguese interference. The initial idea of a route to Asia that did not pose diplomatic problems with Portugal appealed to investors in Seville. Most educated people understood that the world was round, and Columbus’s plan to reach Asia by sailing west was understood to be plausible. Columbus had difficulty getting his project financed not because the concept was faulty, but because his use of available geography was faulty. The data he used to make his case was known to underestimate the size of the globe and therefore the distance to Asia. His fleet was similar to those used in other ventures along the African coast—a small nao, the Santa Maria, and two caravels, the Niña and the Pinta. Columbus’s estimates of the distance to Asia were off by thousands of miles, and he was unbelievably lucky that the Caribbean Islands happened to be where he thought Japan should have been. Unexpectedly, Columbus found an America that, until 1492, no one had ever even dreamed of. The accidental but world-changing discovery of America turned the third narrative of expansion into the European encounter with the “New World.”
Columbus and his men arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, fresh from the conquest of the Canary Islands. In their search for treasure, they enslaved local Indians and, in 1503, brought the first African slaves to the Caribbean. Using forced labor, they extracted a moderate amount of alluvial gold in Santo Domingo, but further expeditions in the Caribbean proved expensive in terms of men and ships. Later expeditions regularly attracted a few hundred Europeans, half of whom died or returned home without much to show for their efforts. For the most part, the returns of the first two decades of conquest after 1492 were modest.
The alternative to finding treasure was for the invaders to seek wealth and status as they understood it—control of a landed society like that of rural Andalucía and Extremadura, one in which they were the landed class. For almost thirty years they explored and settled parts of the Caribbean, confronting local cultures not dramatically different from those of the Canary Islands.1 In the process they triggered the first major American pandemic as European diseases and forced labor reduced the population of Santo Domingo from at least one million in 1492 to twenty-five thousand by 1515.2 The Spanish colonists also brought sugar cane with them from the Canary Islands, and the first sugar mill in the New World went into operation in 1516. After a generation of preliminary exploration in the Caribbean, the Spaniards finally discovered the wealth of the Aztec and Inca Empires and the idea of sailing on to Asia faded away.3
The Inca Empire started with a small tribe that had been living in the Cusco Valley, high in the Andes Mountains of modern Peru, since the twelfth century. By the early 1400s the Inca had created the Kingdom of Cusco. After a leadership struggle around 1430, the forceful King Pachacuti took power in 1438. The conventional date for the founding of the Inca Empire, 1438, saw the start of nearly a century of imperial expansion.
Before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1532, the Inca Empire was far larger than most European countries. It stretched from modern Colombia to the middle of central Chile and included some twelve million people. Its capital city, Cuzco, had about 150,000 inhabitants. A royal residence like Madrid or Agra, Cuzco was primarily a residential center for the Inca imperial court and administration. The capital’s grandeur legitimized Inca authority over an empire that had overcome major limitations: The economy had no recognizable monetary system, and its commercial life was constrained by its mountainous geography.
The Inca state had adapted to rugged mountain conditions by developing a decentralized administrative structure. Food and raw materials were produced and stored locally. Controlled by the state, these resources were redistributed both as supplies for mobile army units and supplies for the local population. Local communities and their storehouses were linked together by an extensive highway system. Given the rugged terrain, these roads were built for foot soldiers, human porters, and pack llamas. Roadside communities maintained inns, storehouses, and roads. Roadside inns and decentralized storage of supplies allowed army units to move rapidly without supply trains, since food and shelter would be available at the end of each day’s march.
The system was supervised by administrators sent from Cuzco and was supported by taxes collected in kind or as labor services. The Inca rulers took ownership of undeveloped hillsides, co-opted local elites, protected communities against crop failure, supplied armies on the march, and maintained the roads, inns, and bridges that held the empire together despite the difficult terrain of the Andean valleys. By 1530 the Inca imperial highway system extended more than three thousand miles from north to south along the Andean valleys. Centered on Cuzco, it included lateral links to the coast and the nearby Chimor Empire, which the Inca conquered in the late fifteenth century.
Inca society was based on extended, lineage-based clans that were also integrated, self-sufficient economic units. Each of these clans controlled a portfolio of different types of land that included everything from lowland jungle and farmlands to terraced mountainsides and high-altitude plots where potatoes, one of the Andes’ staple food crops, were grown and freeze-dried for long-term storage. The plots were parceled out to different clan members, and each clan’s ecological niches contributed a range of products that were exchanged among clan members with different specializations.4
Before the Inca started to build their empire, the people in the Andes had lived in regional kingdoms, each with its own dynastic ruler and religious cult. When the Inca conquered one of these kingdoms, they brought the local cult figure to Cuzco, associating it with the imperial cult. At the same time, the Inca took the local ruler’s oldest son and daughter to Cusco as hostages. There the hostages entered the entourage of the imperial family. The young women joined the imperial workshops supervised by the empress and learned to make the special garments needed by the royal family. The young men entered the emperor’s entourage and learned the skills that prepared them to be administrators in some part of the emerging imperial structure.
Most of Andean economic life, both state and private, seems to have been based on labor service and reciprocity rather than markets. Economic links between the highland valleys and lower coastal areas were contained within the state’s organized use of land and labor, or within the internal economies of the clans, which have been characterized as “economic archipelagos.”
By the time the Europeans arrived, the empire had developed an economically independent aristocracy strong enough to resist the policies of the Inca rulers. This privileged class emerged because the Inca assumed that when a person died, his spirit merely crossed an invisible divide between the material and spiritual worlds. An individual who had entered the spiritual world was still alive and, under the right conditions, could give advice to people living in the material world. That is why the Inca dead were carefully mummified and brought out for important meetings.
As a result, each dead emperor was believed to still be alive on the other side of the spiritual boundary that defined material life. Each time an emperor died, he resigned his role as ruler; but since he was still “alive,” he still owned the properties and estates he had accumulated as emperor. These assets were held in trust and exploited by the cadre of courtiers that had been his entourage. The next emperor thus inherited the right to rule, but not the emperor’s property. Each new emperor had to build his own personal patrimony, one of the many traditions that led to repeated wars of expansion. After four or five imperial successions, the empire had a sizable number of Inca aristocrats who were supported by funds from the estates of deceased emperors and therefore did not depend on the current emperor for support. That political reality, combined with a dispute over the royal succession in the 1520s, threw the Inca Empire into a civil war just as the Europeans arrived.
The European invaders understood this kind of political unrest and were quick to exploit the civil war. After three unsuccessful attempts, Francisco Pizarro invaded Peru in 1530. By 1533 Pizarro was in control of Cuzco, and in 1536, with the help of Native American allies, he beat off an Inca attempt to take back Cuzco.
The Mexica, whom we usually call the Aztecs, had migrated south from central Mexico in the late fourteenth century, possibly as a reaction to climate changes of that era. When the Aztecs reached the rich lakes region of the central valley of Mexico, the rulers of two indigenous kingdoms on the shores of Lake Texcoco allowed them to settle on a swampy island in the middle of the lake. Like the early Ottoman tribe, the Aztecs served as mercenaries in nearby regional wars, in this case in Mexico’s central valley. In the process, the tribe moved from a system of government by tribal council to government by a military elite. By 1400 the military power of the Aztecs had achieved parity with their neighboring lakeside kingdoms. They confirmed this by adopting as king an important member of one of the neighboring royal families.
This allowed them to become junior associates in a triple alliance that included the two neighboring tribes in about 1420. A regional war then allowed the Mexica to seize control of the alliance in 1428. The Mexica continued to use the title Triple Alliance, but 1428 is generally recognized as the beginning of what we call the Aztec Empire. The Aztec Empire, like that of the Inca, was less than a century old when the Spaniards invaded. Unlike the Inca, the Aztecs built and maintained their empire by collecting tribute and using force to back up their demands.
In the eighty years after 1428, the Aztec army conquered one regional kingdom after another, turning much of central and southern Mexico into a tribute-paying empire. This new empire seems to have been a giant protection racket rather than an administered empire. Regional kings retained their local authority as long as they regularly sent tribute to the Aztecs in Tenochtitlán (later Mexico City), the Aztec capital. The tribute was used to support an expanding Aztec warrior class and to buy the loyalty of the client kings of recently conquered neighboring kingdoms.
Tenochtitlán, with roughly three hundred thousand inhabitants, was three times larger than any city most of the invading Europeans had ever seen, and they were stunned by its wealth and size. The city, and the empire, depended on an enormous tribute system, and on the unique environment created by the lakes of central Mexico. Valuable tribute goods, which could bear the high cost of transport by human porters, came from distant sources. Bulky basic supplies, produced locally and brought by water across the lakes, were readily available at low cost. The lakes were roughly sixteen miles wide and thirty-one miles long, providing an extensive shoreline that supported intensive, irrigated agriculture in which a given plot could produce several crops a year. Huge freight canoes transported supplies to the capital by water at a fraction of the cost of human portage.5
Although differently organized, both the Inca and Aztec Empires were comparable in size to the Eurasian empires of the time, but both also had internal weaknesses that left them vulnerable to outside intervention.6 As the Aztec Empire grew, the warrior elite continued to expand. As new conquests became more distant, the cost of conquering and controlling distant tribes consumed the revenues those wars generated. To keep up the government subsidies expected by the Aztec warrior class, the empire increased the tribute it demanded from older parts of the empire. This triggered local rebellions and required yet more unprofitable campaigns.
Discontent among the tributary kingdoms was aggravated by a religious ideology that demanded human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that the vital spirit of a warrior was similar to the spirit that moved the sun and made things grow. They thought it was necessary to replenish the sun’s energies by releasing the vital energy of captured warriors. This explains why Aztec battle tactics emphasized capturing enemy soldiers alive so that they could be sacrificed.
When Cortés and his men arrived, the tensions within the Aztec Empire presented an ideal environment for outside intervention. Cortés spent more than a year in or near the Aztec capital (November 1519 to February 1521) before the final siege. Once the invading Spaniards had learned to communicate with surrounding tribes, they were able to recruit thousands of allies from the Tarascan and other discontented tribes. As a result, when Cortés laid siege to the Aztec capital, his few hundred Spaniards were joined by several thousand men from subject kingdoms glad for a chance to end Aztec hegemony. Cortés’s final capture of Tenochtitlán was also aided by a devastating smallpox epidemic among its Aztec defenders.
The contrast between the apparent resources of the Aztec and Inca Empires and an invasion force of well under a thousand Europeans has inspired numerous explanations for the outcome of the Spanish invasion. One explanation depends on the technological gap between Europe and the stone-age cultures of the Americas. Another depends on the aggressive ruthlessness of the Europeans. A third explanation draws upon the geopolitical fragility of the Inca and Aztec Empires, which made it easy for the European invaders to find Native American allies. Yet another explanation depends on the dramatic vulnerability of Native Americans to European diseases. Whatever explanation, or combination of explanations, is best, the empire that took shape after the Spaniards arrived played a major role in European history and in the globalization of economic life.
The Spanish American Empire was the only real territorial empire conquered by Europeans in the Early Modern era, and the Spaniards went to some lengths to blot out the vestiges of the Aztec and Inca Empires. The latter left one heritage, however, that is hard to evaluate but may well have been important. Most people in Mexico or the Andes lived within regional kingdoms that had only recently been integrated into the Aztec or Inca Empire, and many of these kingdoms readily helped the Spaniards topple their Aztec and Inca rulers.
In both empires the populace was accustomed to the concept of rule by a large-scale, central political authority. Because the Aztecs and the Inca had built large, centralized states, the Spaniards could preempt that tradition of central authority and use it as the foundation for a centralized political system. The Spaniards were not creating empires, they were taking control of established empires. In doing so, they took over the empires’ indigenous provincial structure and encouraged the Native American elites to remodel their governmental institutions using the Spanish form of city government as a model. The importance of prior Native American experience with centralized government is impossible to measure, but it may help explain why the newly conquered Native Americans accepted the new imperial government and the Spaniards, with a surprisingly small warrior elite, were able to assert control over the Native American empires.7
Once in control of the Aztec and Inca Empires, a few hundred Europeans were faced with managing indigenous populations that outnumbered them many times over. In the immediate wake of the conquests, the invaders concentrated on confiscating the accumulated treasure of the Aztecs and Inca and shipping it home. Their next goal was to extract tribute that could be converted to European forms of wealth. They searched for any valuable commodity, from gold to sarsaparilla, that could be sold profitably in Europe despite the high cost of shipping it home.
Having unexpectedly found America, and having dramatically conquered its two empires, the Spanish invaders and their Habsburg rulers were faced with the task of managing a huge new empire. The men who carried out the conquest needed to establish control over the countryside and its people. The first official solution was the encomienda, or trusteeship. Individual soldiers were appointed as encomenderos, or trustees, over Indian towns, in theory charged with governing them in the name of the king of Castile. This official solution was reinforced by an informal one in which, from the first conquests in the Caribbean islands, Spanish men took local women as partners. While many liaisons were simply consensual and often forced, many others took the form of formal marriage to duly Christianized Indian women. As a way of transferring the authority of the previous ruler to the encomendero, the latter often married a woman from the family of the Indian ex-king.8
For these European men this was a chance to create an idealized version of a landed estate in Andalucía, which entitled them to almost complete control over the country people and their land—a neo-feudal society in which the landlords controlled access to the land and had virtual ownership of its people. The new European landlords expected to control rents, labor, taxes, and justice as they saw fit, free of interference from the Spanish Crown, and attempted to turn their improvised controls into the framework for a landlord-dominated agrarian society. They also set about Europeanizing the ecology of the New World by introducing familiar crops from Spain: grapes, wheat, barley, pigs, sheep, cattle, and horses.
The Spanish invaders also needed to be able to coordinate their dispersed military resources; having dismantled the central authority of the Aztec and Inca Empires, they took over the underlying urban networks that had sustained the defeated empires. After establishing Lima and Mexico City as capitals of their two viceroyalties, the new rulers took over most of the important Aztec and Inca towns and put themselves in charge of local government, grafting Spanish-style town governments upon preconquest communities.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Crown was evolving a long-term policy intended to establish direct royal jurisdiction over its new Indian subjects, assert royal authority within the empire, and marginalize the conquerors and their encomiendas. Soon after the conquest, the Crown authorized the Franciscan and Dominican missionary orders to build dozens of missions intended to convert the Indians to Catholic Christianity. While that was the official agenda, the Crown also saw the missions as a way to protect at least some Native Americans from the conquistadores. Each new mission was granted royal jurisdiction over the Indians in its town. The Crown accepted the premise that Indians were potentially full-fledged humans and lacked only the knowledge of Christianity to become truly civilized gente de razón (“reasoning men”). By granting the missions civil jurisdiction over the Indians, the Crown separated them from the neo-feudal societies evolving in the encomiendas.
Soon the Crown had to confront the growing independence and power of the encomenderos. The Castilian Crown had a vision of colonial jurisdiction different from that of the invading soldiers—one in which the Indians were royal subjects subordinate to royal policy. Royal policy and the rule of law were to be implemented by officials and judges appointed by, and responsive to, the government in Spain. Vice-regal governments in Lima and Mexico City represented the Crown and set policy. Each capital had a viceroy, a treasurer, and a vice-regal judge; and each of them reported separately to the Spanish Crown, presumably as a check on corruption. Implementation was put in the hands of the cabildos, or city councils, in a system that assigned jurisdiction over both countryside and urban areas to municipal governments. This form of local administration was similar to that of Castile except that, from the Crown’s perspective, it was free of the intermediate provincial or national assemblies that frustrated royal administration at home.
By 1530 the emerging Spanish American Empire was governed through the Consejo de Indias (Council for the Indies), appointed by and reporting to the king. On the pattern of the Castilian bureaucracy, the Consejo de Indias had a subcommittee, or Cámara de Indias, that functioned as a personnel committee. The Cámara kept dossiers on hundreds of candidates for positions in its American Empire. When a position came open, the committee reviewed the files and proposed candidates to the king, who made the final decision. Through this mechanism the king selected the viceroys, treasury officials, judges, and customs officials who staffed the colonial administration.
The king and his personnel committee, the Cámara de Indias, also had jurisdiction over the selection of the bishops and archbishops in Spanish America. Charles V coerced the papacy into creating a patronato, or patriarchate, of the Indies, with its office in Madrid, to govern the Catholic Church in America. Nominated by the king, the patriarch of the Indies controlled all religious appointments in the empire. He made recommendations about bishops, archbishops, and other important church officials, and the candidates were processed by the same personnel committee that selected members of the civil administration in the Indies. Thus the Catholic Church in Spanish America was a de facto arm of the royal bureaucracy, giving the Spanish Crown more authority over the Church in America than it had over the Church in Spain.
At the level of city government, the conquistadores set up the original cabildos, or town councils, and filled them with their political friends. The cabildo was the municipal agency that implemented royal policy for a city and its surrounding township. Thus, control of the cabildos was crucial to the power of the encomenderos. City officials were nominated locally, but the king reserved the right to ratify or reject the nominations. During the sixteenth century the crown displaced the conquistadores from town councils and dismantled the encomienda system, abolishing the landlords’ control over labor and transferring legal jurisdiction to the Crown and its system of royal courts.
Meanwhile, in the first half of the sixteenth century, the invaders reorganized American agriculture to fit Spanish diets and customs. Given the costs and risks of trans-Atlantic shipping, the new sixteenth-century Spanish American Empire seemed destined to become a largely self-sustaining agrarian society that replicated the agrarian economy of Europe. But the Spaniards also realized that only if America could be made to produce goods valuable enough to stand the cost of trans-Atlantic transport would American merchants be able to pay for European products. Meanwhile, newly introduced European crops and livestock had devastating effects on the American landscape and native agriculture. Even as this process was working itself out, the Spanish Crown was confronted with another challenge—the discovery of immensely rich silver mines in Peru and Mexico.
The first silver mines were discovered in the 1540s at Zacatecas in Mexico and Potosí in Peru. Over the next decades, additional mines were discovered at Guanajuato, Taxco, San Luís de Potosí, and elsewhere. The task that now faced the Habsburg government was the creation of an export-oriented mining industry. As in a modern oil-producing country, the production, transportation, and export of the key commodity, silver, shaped the routes, transport, and strongholds of the empire, mobilizing thousands of tons of silver for export to Europe and Manila.
In addition, a rapidly expanding workforce of miners and laborers had to be fed and housed. The mines themselves had an endless appetite for lumber to reinforce the mine shafts and charcoal for refining the silver. Located in a rugged countryside still not entirely pacified, the silver industry required heavily protected wagon trains on land and naval convoys at sea. Soon an extractive, export-oriented economy was being superimposed on what had been emerging as a self-sufficient agrarian society.
The most constant problem at the mines was a chronic shortage of labor, and it got worse as the population declined and more silver mines were opened. A Mexico that had at least 10 million people in 1519 had a population of about 1.5 million in 1600. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Crown had abolished the old encomiendas and had shifted its focus from protecting the Indians to exploiting them as labor for the mines. To do this the Crown took back the jurisdictional rights it had given to the missions and the mission towns.
By the later sixteenth century, thanks to European diseases, the rapid spread of sheep and cattle raising, and the destruction of field crop farming, most Mexican villages were half deserted. The Crown then forced the consolidation of small Indian towns into larger communities that were more easily administered. Every town maintained a register of all adult men and their ages. The Crown, or local authorities, could then requisition a portion of the men on the roster for two-week work periods wherever the authorities needed them. Given that labor conscription often meant work in the mines or on sugar plantations, and that silver refining used large amounts of mercury, work in the mines soon shortened the worker’s lifespan. When the conscription system didn’t work, the mines began paying their workers what looked like a reasonable daily wage. At the same time, they began selling the workers their food and other supplies in company stores. The workers contracted to work a stipulated amount of time, only to discover that they owed money to the company store and could not leave until the debt was paid. The result was a form of debt peonage that made it impossible for workers to leave the mines.
Keeping the mines working was only part of the Crown’s problem—once the silver was refined, it had to be brought safely to Europe. This led to a set of carefully regulated transport routes from the American mines to Spain. One route carried silver from Mexican mines to Mexico City and then to Vera Cruz. The Mexican silver mines were located in distant, rugged mountain areas, and keeping up the supply of labor, food, and mining supplies was a constant logistical problem. To move the building supplies and fuel the mines needed, the Spaniards had to build a new road system that could handle large freight wagons. By 1600 wagon trains were passing through Mexico City on a 560-mile journey to Zacatecas, and then to even more distant mining towns.9 These convoys rarely traveled more than fifteen miles a day, and for much of the later sixteenth century they traveled in armored convoys because of recurrent attacks by “unpacified” Chichimeca Indians.
The second interior route began high in the Andes at Potosí and carried silver twelve hundred miles overland to Cuzco and then to Lima. From there the silver went by sea to Panama, where it was carried by mule train across the isthmus and then transferred to Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast. From Vera Cruz and Cartagena, the silver traveled by ship to Havana. From there, after the fleet was resupplied, the silver traveled in protected fleets to Seville.
The advantage of the convoyed fleet was clear. Despite the aura of incompetence historians have generated as they interpret seventeenth-century Spain, over more than two centuries, only a handful of treasure ships, and only one fleet, were ever captured by Spain’s enemies. The regulations on private trade that were part of the convoy system allowed the Crown to collect its taxes and supposedly protected the monopolies on trade held by the merchants in Seville, Mexico, and Lima. While it did protect the silver shipments, the convoy system hampered trans-Atlantic trade because royal taxes and merchant guild monopolies kept prices high. One of the more onerous taxes was the avería that paid for the warships that protected the convoys.
Like other European governments of the time, the Spanish monarchy did not maintain a standing navy. The Crown kept a few warships in reserve; when a fleet was needed, some of the royal ships were refitted for action, but most of a royal naval fleet consisted of large merchant ships and their crews that were hired by the Crown and equipped with artillery. The armed escorts for the periodic fleets to America and back were naval squadrons assembled in this fashion.
Rather than paying for an expensive escort squadron from the royal treasury, the escort was paid for by assessing an avería on all the goods carried by the fleet being escorted. This tax varied from trip to trip, and the cost of the escort was calculated as a percentage of the value of the cargo. Spread across a large fleet, the averia could be quite modest, but if the fleet were small, the averia could be as much as 17 percent of the registered value of the cargo. As the official fleets got smaller in the seventeenth century, the averia increased, encouraging evasion.
Not surprisingly, much of the trans-Atlantic trade slipped into various kinds of smuggling and contraband trade, with local Spanish authorities quietly welcoming ships from England, Holland, and France. Only in the mid-1700s was the Spanish commercial system reformed and made more flexible, allowing selected ports in Spain to trade directly with several Spanish American ports, and allowing individual ships to sail when and where they chose, rather than forcing them to wait for a convoy.
Meanwhile, central Mexico experienced dramatic demographic and ecological changes. Aside from the needs of the mining industry, better transport had become crucial for adequate urban supply. As European diseases killed off the native population (and labor supply), the intensive agriculture in the Valley of Mexico collapsed. The introduction of European livestock aggravated the problem, with overgrazing and deforestation degrading the hillside terraces around the central valley. This, in turn, damaged the watershed and lowered the water level in the lakes around the capital city, disrupting transport by water. As farmland near the lakes was shifted to grazing, wheat and corn had to be imported to Mexico City from towns as far as 125 miles away.10
In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the new seaport of Lima replaced Cuzco as imperial capital and primate city, but Cuzco remained important as an economic center for the Andean region. Roughly halfway between Lima and Potosí, Cuzco was a crucial link in the mobilization of supplies for the mines at Potosí. Because of the rugged Andean terrain, this supply network depended on long trains of pack mules.11 At considerable cost, this network distributed mercury, wheat, maize, cacao, coca, wine, sugar, silks, porcelain, American-made cloth, and European trade goods throughout the Andes, but the first priority went to supplies for the mines and to the export of silver.12
The emerging Spanish American Empire looked large and important on a map, but in reality, it was in a precarious situation. An empire of several million Native Americans, reaching from Santa Fe in modern New Mexico to Santiago in Chile, was governed by no more than twenty thousand to thirty thousand Spaniards. For Spanish control to work, the Spaniards had to find a balance between coercion and collaboration.
That balance changed from one time and place to another, but it only worked if the Indian communities were given a fair amount of autonomy. The Spanish government modified the traditional Indian town governments to look like Spanish town governments, but in practice they continued to be run by the traditional elders of the Indian communities. These elders preserved their autonomy by accepting some Spanish demands and quietly ignoring others. They converted part of their farmland to European crops, in part because the Spaniards wanted wheat and barley, but also because the collapse of the Native American population reduced the demand for traditional American staples. In Mexico the Spaniards created a written alphabet for use with Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and developed an entire legal and administrative system using that language. The Native Americans soon learned how to exploit Spanish forms of local government and how to take advantage of Spanish contract law in bargaining with the government for service contracts. The ability of Indian communities to resist Spanish forms of government and social control was part of a complex tension between Spanish authority and indigenous resistance. When the Spanish pushed too hard, they sometimes ran into local revolts, the most dramatic of which took place in New Mexico. In 1680 several Indian communities in New Mexico carried out a coordinated attack on Spanish authority, killing several hundred Europeans and driving the Spanish out of New Mexico for more than a decade.13
Beginning in 1610 the Jesuits began developing a series of missions in what is now Paraguay, recruiting and converting Guaraní Indians. With large herds of livestock, the missions became a target for raiders from Portuguese Brazil. This prompted the Jesuits to train a small army of Native American soldiers that included well-trained infantry backed by expert Native American cavalry. Beginning in the 1630s and lasting until the Jesuit missions were disbanded in the later eighteenth century, this corps of three to five thousand trained Guaraní soldiers protected the Viceroyalty of Peru from foreign attacks and helped put down Indian uprisings within the empire.14
Another illustration of this de facto collaboration and local autonomy involved the Potosí silver mines in Peru. Once Potosí was discovered, it became the viceroyalty’s principal raison d’être. It was crucial to keep the mule trains loaded with silver moving to Lima. The Indian communities that once had provided transport services for the Inca government now negotiated contracts with the Spanish government for the transport of mining supplies and silver. These communities acquired a degree of self-government as the Spaniards converted traditional village governments to their Castilian equivalent. The Indians soon learned how to use their Spanish-style town governments to negotiate the contracts that provided transport services to the viceroyalty, including the transport of silver from Potosí to Lima.
From the perspective of the European Habsburg Empire, an unbroken flow of silver from America to Spain was crucial. Perennially at war with the Turks, the Dutch, and the French, the government in Madrid depended on American silver for the survival of Habsburg power in Europe. Even a short disruption of the flow of silver to Lima and Spain because of a local labor dispute could disrupt the Habsburg Empire’s ability to pay for its European wars. Thus, the Habsburg Empire in Europe, which depended on American silver, was hostage to Mexican and Peruvian communities whose members had learned Spanish legalisms and could disrupt the flow of silver.15
By the 1560s, Spanish American merchants in Mexico City were very interested in direct trade with Asia. Earlier expeditions had demonstrated that you could sail from Acapulco to the East Indies following the tropical trade winds. It was also well known that American silver was very valuable in China. A direct connection between Mexico and Asia, one that cut out various Asian and European middlemen, could bring American silver to China, where it was literally worth twice as much as it was in Mexico or Lima. The problem was to find a way to return to Mexico once you reached Asia.
Spain had sent out a number of expeditions in search of Pacific trade routes, starting with the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan. Knowing that the Pacific Ocean promised a maritime route to Asia and aware of the profits being made in Lisbon, Charles V authorized a new attempt to find such a route. Magellan seemed a good choice as commander, since he had extensive firsthand experience in the Indian Ocean. He had been a member of one of the first Portuguese expeditions to the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean and had participated in the conquest of Melaka in 1511. He may also have visited the Maluku Islands. Discredited by political enemies in Portugal, Magellan brought his experience to Castile and was named commander of the new Pacific expedition.
After leaving Spain, Magellan first had to find a passage through or around South America into the Pacific. Then he had to find a route to the Maluku Islands, which, he hoped, were on the Spanish side of the papal demarcation line.16 Storms, mutinies, and deteriorating ships left Magellan with only two ships when he reached the Philippines. Once there, he intervened in local politics, as he had seen the Portuguese do, and was killed. The two remaining ships sailed south to the Maluku Islands, Tidor, and Ternate, the sources of nutmeg, cloves, and mace. The survivors negotiated for cargo, and the two surviving ships set out for Spain. The eastbound ship proved unseaworthy and was lost with all but a few survivors; the other ship, the Victoria, sailed west for the Cape of Good Hope.
The westbound Victoria left the Malukus in November 1521; reached the Cape of Good Hope on May 22, 1522; and limped into the Andalucían port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1522. Commanded by Juan Sebastian Elcano, the ship arrived with only 18 of the expedition’s 270 original crewmembers. Seventy feet long and displacing about eighty-five tons, the Victoria was nothing special in terms of European ship design. Largely by accident, she was the first ship to sail around the world.
The return of the Victoria with enough cloves to pay for Magellan’s expedition prompted the Spanish to send another fleet to Asia in 1525 under the command of García Jofre de Loaísa. Following Magellan’s path, part of the fleet reached the Malukus, where the last of Loaísa’s ships was wrecked. Another expedition left Mexico in 1527 under the command of Álvaro de Saavedra. Saavedra followed equatorial trade winds, which were now well understood, to the East Indies—the problem was to find a way to sail back to Mexico. Saavedra tried twice to sail back to America, but the expedition had to return to the Malukus, where the survivors were stranded together with the survivors of the Loaísa expedition. Eventually the Portuguese, who considered the Malukus within their jurisdiction, rounded up the survivors and returned them to Spain.
Two more expeditions were undertaken in 1541–1542, chartered by the viceroy of Mexico. The first, commanded by Ruy López de Villalobos, left Mexico with six ships and four hundred men. Their first task was to plant a colony in the Philippines. The westbound trip went smoothly, but the colony was badly equipped and was abandoned after six months. Ships lost, and captured by the Portuguese, two-thirds of the one hundred survivors opted to stay in the Malukus while the Portuguese returned the others to Spain.
The viceroy’s second expedition, launched in 1542, suggests that he had seen some speculative cartography showing that the unexplored coast of California curved northwest, allowing a northern coastal route to Asia. Even more speculative cartography hinted at a northern passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. In any case, the main goal of the expedition was to find out if there was a coastal route to Asia.
The expedition sailed from San Blas, Mexico, under the command of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo with the two-hundred-ton San Salvador and two smaller ships. Cabrillo was a veteran of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico. He apparently had training as a boat builder, since he had helped build the boats that allowed Cortés’s men to capture the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. Subsequently he followed Pedro de Alvarado into Guatemala, where he became a wealthy encomendero. In the 1530s Cabrillo helped build several ships, including those used for the Villalobos expedition, and was personally involved in the construction of the San Salvador. Led by the San Salvador, his squadron reached the Oregon-California border despite contrary winds and currents, indicating that he was a first-rate navigator. He is remembered in San Diego, California, because the San Salvador was the first European ship to make landfall on what became US territory—sixty-five years before the first European settlement in Virginia. Cabrillo died of an injury on one of the Channel Islands. Short of supplies, and having failed to find a route to Asia, the squadron headed back to Mexico. After that failure, the prospect of trans-Pacific trade dropped from sight.
Twenty years later, things had changed in the Spanish Empire. The young and vigorous Philip II had replaced his aging father, Charles V. Promising new silver mines had been discovered in Mexico and Peru. By 1560, significant new revenues were arriving in Spain from the American Empire. As silver became more plentiful in America and Europe, it financed a rapid increase in European trade with Asia, especially with China, the world’s biggest economy and one committed to a silver-based monetary system. By the mid-1560s, American silver was worth twice as much in China as in America. The merits of a trans-Pacific trade route were more obvious than ever.
In 1564 Philip II authorized and subsidized an expedition intended to enforce the Spanish claim to the Philippines and open direct trade between Mexico and Asia. The expedition was charged with establishing a permanent base in the Philippines and with finding a viable route back to Mexico. Led by Miguel López de Legazpi, with Andrés de Urdaneta as navigator, the expedition left Mexico in November 1564 and landed at the southern Philippine port of Cebu in February 1565. With Cebu as a base, Legazpi visited several other islands, negotiating with the local rulers. In 1570 he turned his attention to Manila, about 375 miles north of Cebu by sea. Legazpi finally got control of Manila, a small port subordinate to the sultan of Brunei, in 1571.
Meanwhile, Andrés de Urdaneta took off from Cebu on June 1, 1565, heading north. A veteran navigator, he was convinced he would find prevailing winds that blew from west to east at latitude forty degrees north. Whether by accident or by design, he set sail at the best time in the spring and apparently found the northbound Kuroshio current. This current begins near the Philippines and flows north past Japan until it branches into the eastbound North Pacific current. There, at about forty degrees latitude north, Urdaneta also found the eastbound prevailing winds he was looking for. Urdaneta made it back to Acapulco in only four months, but he arrived with a large part of his crew dead from scurvy and the rest barely able to handle the ship.17
By 1570–1571 the merchant community in Mexico City had followed up on Urdaneta’s success and organized the first round trip of the Manila galleon. For the next 250 years, at least one galleon a year left Acapulco loaded with silver and a plan to purchase silks and other Asian luxury goods. For the first twenty of those years, the Manila trade was essentially unregulated; one to six ships sailed in any given year, some of them from Lima rather than Acapulco. In the 1590s, however, the merchants of Seville persuaded Philip II to limit the Manila trade to only two ships per year. Thereafter, one or two official ships sailed every year for the next 220 years. There is a lot of scholarly debate over how much silver went to China by this trans-Pacific route and how important it was to global trade and to the evolution of the Chinese Empire. When we look at this silver trade in a larger context, we can reconsider the importance of the Manila galleons and the great maritime trade route that connected America with Asia and completed the chain of trade that literally encircled the globe.
Remarkably, for most of three centuries Spain’s American Empire extended five thousand miles from New Mexico to Chile with little need for a standing army to enforce its rule. While there were more than a few local rebellions, the underlying pattern was one of interdependence. As we have seen, the empire was an enormous demographic disaster. The population of the two viceroyalties fell from around 12 million in Peru to about 2.5 million, while that of Mexico fell from at least 10 million to about 1.5 million between the conquests and 1600. Given the sheer size of either Mexico or Peru, much of the countryside was left virtually deserted and much of the indigenous ecosystem destroyed.
Gradually the Spanish Empire in America developed its own economy, producing not only sugar but also cotton and wool textiles and ships of all sizes. The enormous output of the Mexican and Peruvian mines beginning in the 1550s, and Spain’s control over the export of silver from America, extended the Habsburg Empire’s domination in Europe to the 1640s. As early as 1615, however, Habsburg power was being undermined. The powerful merchant communities in Mexico City and Lima controlled the flow of silver; as a result, more and more silver was invested in America itself or went directly to Asia on the Manila galleons.
As more American silver was held back in America, sold to other countries illegally, or shipped to China, the government in Madrid found it harder and harder to get the silver it needed to fund its endless European wars. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the Habsburg Empire in Europe was bankrupt, while Spain’s American Empire was becoming economically more complex and self-sustaining. America had acquired an importance in the larger world out of proportion to its modest and thinly distributed population. It was important to Europe because the Habsburg Empire in Europe needed American silver to fund its prolonged wars in Germany and the Netherlands. At the peak of silver shipments to Spain, America’s silver helped fund the struggle to stop Ottoman expansion into Europe and the Mediterranean.
Equally important, as American silver escaped Habsburg control and reached other parts of Europe, it provided European merchants with a commodity for which there was an endless demand in China and India. By the mid-1600s, American silver was eluding Spanish control but was benefitting the commercial worlds of Europe and America. Meanwhile, the enormous profits produced by a direct, trans-Pacific trade route between Spain’s American Empire and Asia constituted the final link in a truly global commercial network.