Among the most important Spanish conquests in the Americas were those of Hernán Cortez against the Aztecs of Mexico, and Francisco Pizzaro against the Inca of Peru. In both these confrontations, proud empires were completely subjugated, and their people made serfs.
Hernán Cortés invaded the Aztec Empire with the aid of many indigenous allies. At that time, the Aztec Empire was a fragile confederation of city-states, and the Spanish were able to convince the frustrated leaders of the subordinate states and one unconquered one (Tlaxcala) to join them. Cortés began his campaign against the Empire in 1519 and with his coalition army captured the emperor Cuauhtémoc and the capital, Tenochtitlan, in 1521. The Spanish then campaigned against the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemala, the Tarascans (Purépecha) of northwestern Michoacan, and the Chichimec in northern Mexico.
The war of the Spanish against the mightiest empire in the America – the Inca of the Peruvian highlands – began when Francisco Pizarro, with his Andean allies captured and strangled the Emperor, Atahualpa in 1532, but it didn’t end for another 40 years until the last Inca stronghold of Vilcabamba (1500 m northeast of Cusco) was conquered in 1572. The Spanish were greatly aided initially by a civil war between the supporters of the Emperor Atahualpa and his brother Huáscar, and the help of several indigenous nations that had been historically repressed by the Incas.
The Spanish colonial economy
To govern their New World lands, the Spanish organized colonists and native people into two distinct social orders or republics – Spaniards and Amerindians (la republica de los indios). The Spaniards would supervise the land, run the mines, and staff the colonial administrations, and the Amerindians would provide the labor to feed, house and clothe the Spanish. In return, the Amerindians were promised military protection and instruction about the saving grace of God. The Spanish enforced this system of stratification through three institutions: the requerimiento, the encomienda, and the repartimiento.
When soldiers first encountered the native peoples, they were supposed to read aloud in Spanish the requerimiento, which told the natives they had to submit to the authority of the Spanish crown and learn of Christ’s word or face the sword. The conquistadors charged with reading it usually did so in Spanish, which of course the indigenous people did not understand. Other conquistadors would read it from the decks of their ships, out of earshot. It was also read while standing outside of villages, with no villagers even in sight, or to their backs as they walked away.
Once the indigenous people were subjugated, hereditary ownership of their native land was awarded in huge swaths to nobles and officers who, through the encomienda, received tribute and labor from the Indian villages. The encomiendas included all the indigenous cities, communities and families that resided therein. The indigenous occupants were required to provide tribute of anything the land proved to hold – gold, crops, foodstuffs, and animals, and they also owed a portion of their time to work on plantations or mines.
The encomienda system was thinly disguised slavery, and the encomenderos did everything in their power to strip the natives of their culture and worked them to the bone. The Ameridians were often forced to choose between fulfilling quotas and starving to death or not making the quotas and suffering from the often-lethal wrath of the overseers. The Crown passed laws to make it clear that the indigenous people were not meant to be slaves and were in fact Spanish subjects with certain rights, but these laws were met with great hostility and resistance.
In a major crown reform in 1542, known as the New Laws, encomendero families were restricted to holding the grant for two generations rather than in perpetuity, eliciting a huge cry. The widespread protest forced the crown to back down for a while, but in the early 1600s, the king replaced the encomienda with the repartimiento, where government officials (corregidor de indios) took over the regulation of indigenous laborers. The Amerindians were still drafted to work for cycles of varying lengths of time on farms, mines, workshops, and public projects, but at least there was some oversight of their wellbeing. A major reason for this move was that so many Amerindians had died from disease and oppression that vast stretches of land were now unoccupied and without any potential labor.
In the 17th century another agricultural system called the hacienda evolved from the encomienda, where land was still granted to private individuals, but free labor had to be recruited on a permanent or casual basis. The desperate poor had little choice but to accept the pitiful compensation offered. The haciendas would grow in size, power and influence for 200 years, even as the political and ruling systems changed hands from the Spanish. It wasn’t until the 20th century that land reforms abolished haciendas across most of Latin America.
Bibliography:
Batchelder, R.W. and Sanchez, N. (2013). The encomienda and the optimizing imperialist: an interpretation of Spanish imperialism in the Americas. Public Choice 156: 45-60.
Lockhart, J. (1969). Encomienda and Hacienda: The Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies. The Hispanic American Historical Review 49(3): 411–429.
Illustration: The conquest of Mexico by Hernando Cortes – Nicolas Eustache Maurin (died in 1850)/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
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