The Iberian Christians’ relations with the other peoples, above all the Moors, were to be the precedent for their treatment of the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In the Reconquest (Reconquista) the Christians had pushed their rivals back through military force; those who carried out the conquests often went to settle among the Moors and were rewarded by the government with grants of land and other benefits. But the newly subjugated Muslims retained much of their organization and civilization for long periods, only gradually being Christianized and absorbed. As for the Jews, on the one hand they were resented and sometimes persecuted by Christian Iberians while on the other hand those who converted to Christianity often rose high in professional and political life and married well within Christian Iberian society.
The Africans had become a well-known group especially in the southern part of the peninsula, with accepted roles as house servants, craftspeople, and field workers. Possession of African slaves was part of general economic life and of social ambitions. Also, manumission was possible, and communities of freed Africans, many of them racially mixed, existed on the edges of society.
So much diversity represented a formidable challenge to the movement toward the creation of unified Christian nation-states that was coming to a head in the late 15th century. Those of the Jews and Moors who had refused to convert were in time forcibly expelled, and the Inquisition became active in the attempt to enforce the orthodoxy of those who had accepted conversion. Negative stereotypes concerning the other ethnicities were rife in Iberian culture, but over the centuries Iberia had seen diversity, close contact with different peoples, and their gradual absorption. The overseas tradition
All Iberia’s coastal peoples had maritime experience. Yet farther inland the occupation of mariner was despised; expansion was deemed a matter of conquering and occupying contiguous territory rather than of far-flung commerce. It was the Italians, above all the Genoese, who brought the lore of overseas activity to the Iberians. From the eastern Mediterranean they carried the sugar industry, the use of foreign slaves in it, and the trinket trade with distant peoples first to Spain and Portugal and then on out into the Atlantic, where they were involved together with the Portuguese on the West African coast and the islands lying off it. By the time of contact with the Americas, the Spaniards had been affected by these developments to the extent that Sevilla (Seville) and some other ports were heavily engaged in overseas commerce, often under Genoese direction, but they still mainly adhered to the tradition of conquest and settlement, reinforced by their final defeat of the Spanish Moors in 1492. The Portuguese, on the other hand, partly because of Italian influence and partly because of their own geographic situation, had gone over thoroughly to the commercial-maritime tradition, emphasizing exploration, commerce, tropical crops, and coastal trading posts rather than full-scale occupation.
It is no accident, then, that Christopher Columbus was a Genoese who had long been in Portugal and had visited the Atlantic islands. His projects were entirely within the Italian tradition. Early Latin America Spanish America
The Spaniards were not only the first of the Europeans to reach the Americas in early modern times, but they also quickly located and occupied the areas of greatest indigenous population and mineral resources. They immigrated in force and created a far-flung, permanent network of new settlements. The Caribbean phase
The islands of the Caribbean would soon become a backwater, but during the first years of Spanish occupation they were the arena of the development of many practices and structures that would long be central to Spanish-American life.
When Columbus returned to Spain from his voyage of 1492, having hit upon the island of Hispaniola (now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) as his base, his concept of what should be done thereafter was in the Italian-Portuguese maritime tradition. He wanted to explore further for trading partners, and he considered all who came along with him to be employees of an enterprise headed by himself. The Spaniards, however, immediately started moving in the direction of their own traditions. The expedition that returned to Hispaniola in 1493 was far more elaborate than it needed to have been for Columbus’ purposes, containing a large number and variety of people, animals, and equipment for a large-scale, permanent occupation of the island. A conflict of purpose between the Spaniards on the one hand and Columbus with his Italian relatives and associates on the other soon ensued. By 1499 the royal government was intervening directly, naming Spaniards to the governorship and sending further large parties of settlers. Spanish ways soon gained the upper hand.
Santo Domingo, founded on the southeastern coast of Hispaniola in 1496, became a real city, with a rash of ephemeral secondary Spanish cities spread over the island. These were oriented to gold-mining sites, which were soon at the base of the Spanish economy. Indigenous demographic loss in this hot, humid area was quick and catastrophic, and placer mines (primarily in streams, where unconsolidated deposits of heavy, valuable minerals settled) also soon began to run out. In the second decade of the 16th century the Spaniards pushed on to the other large islands, where the cycle began to repeat itself, although more quickly; around the same time, expeditions to the mainland began, partly to seek for new assets and partly to try to replace the lost population on the islands. The city
Santo Domingo became a type of entity that would reappear in every major area of Spanish occupation. The central city formed a stable headquarters for the Spaniards in the midst of a chaos of population loss and economic shifts in the countryside. The majority of all the Spaniards in the country lived there, at least when they could. Everyone of importance was there, with only underlings doing essential tasks located in the country. Governmental offices, churches, large private dwellings, and shops soon materialized around the city’s central square, together with all the people required for them. The urban core was well laid out and well built up. On the city’s edge everything was different. Here were the ranchos, impermanent structures inhabited mainly by Indians temporarily in town for work purposes. The Spanish-American city remained like this for centuries—Spanish in the centre, Indian on the edges, growing indefinitely without changing at the core, the site of an enormous process of cultural change. Indians and Spaniards
In the Caribbean phase several mechanisms developed, combining indigenous and Spanish elements, that long formed the main structural ties between Indians and Spaniards on the mainland as well. The primary form through which Spaniards attempted to take advantage of the functioning of the indigenous world was what came to be known as the encomienda, a governmental grant of an indigenous sociopolitical unit to an individual Spaniard for him to use in various ways. On the Spanish side, the institution grew out of the Reconquest tradition. Pressure among the Spaniards on the scene led to the arrangement; Columbus, while governor, had opposed it, and Spanish royal authorities tried to restrict it as much as they could. On the indigenous side, the encomienda rested on an already existing unit and the powers of its ruler. The size and benefits of the encomienda thus depended on the local indigenous situation: there could be only as many encomiendas as there were indigenous units; the encomendero (holder of the grant) could at least initially receive only what the ruler had received before him. The larger islands were inhabited by the Arawak, a sedentary if modestly developed people with kingdoms, rulers, nobles, and obligatory labour mechanisms. Their ruler was called a cacique, and the Spaniards adopted the word and carried it with them wherever they went in the Americas. The cacique received labour but not tribute in kind, and the encomendero, in practice, followed suit.