Every one of us knows that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, that he showed us the world was round and that he brought the small pox that devastated the people he found in the New World he had discovered. But do we know the astounding chain of events leading up to his momentous feat or the chain of legendary islands that led the Europeans across the Atlantic? Have we ever played the six degrees of separation with the actors of conquest, only to discover that it is more a game of two or three degrees? Can we tell the fact from the fiction in this story, the truth from the lie, the various ways each generation has revised the history to suit its own needs? Can we ever really understand what drove these men (and women) to the acts they committed or how truly alien and new everything must have seemed as these two worlds collided with one another? There are so many questions about the exciting period of the conquest of the Americas and we have so much information available, yet much of it colored by assumptions that are firmly embedded in our psyches. When we begin to struggle to overcome our preconceived notions, we begin to see there are so many gaps and omissions that tantalize us and so many conflicting and contradicting explanations that infuriate us. Fascination with this period and a strong desire to wrestle with its enigmatic material led directly to the creation of this forum as place to lay out the story and analyze it and to look at the characters who make this story so absorbing and try to see the things they must have seen and understand them the way they understood them, experience them the way they must have experienced them. The ConquistaAmerica blog will deepen understanding of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of America by establishing the historical context of both the conquerors and the conquered, analyzing the political and socioeconomic organization of both European empires, investigating the state of knowledge and learning of Western civilization at that time and highlighting various aspects of life in the XV and XVI centuries in the New World, Old World and all points in between and beyond.
It would difficult, if not impossible, to understand this complex and revolutionary event without first firmly placing it within the flow of ongoing historical narrative. We get to start in media res by thrilling to the phenomenal risks and intrepid exploits of the European explorers as they bet it all and dared to sail over the edge of the world where monsters be, only later to be appalled by the ruthless and bloody slaughter of the native people and the boundless greed that devoured gold as if from a slop trough and fettered, abused and exploited "lesser" beings for material gain and a desperate grasp for glory. But the anti-heroes in this tale did not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, but rather were forged by some Iberian Vulcan in their centuries-long journey from ancient Rome and Carthage, through a dark collapse and subsequent subjugation to the enlightened nomadic followers of Allah, until finally united in Christian rule under the Reyes Católicos, where they wrested their peninsula back from the infidels by drenching their arms in blood up to the elbow. Yet we cannot allow all this swashbuckling adventure to dampen the awe and wonder inspired by the incredible civilizations that occupied the New World before it was new, feelings that have not been significantly eroded by the merciless passage of the centuries. Finally, it would be folly to squander the lessons provided by this chapter in the story of our evolution to modern homo sapiens, a chapter whose foreshadowing murmurs reverberate and influence our existence even today, at times comforting us by showing how far we have come, but far too often reminding us of how we have never managed to truly lift ourselves from the primordial muck that, to our shame, human nature often inhabits.
The organization of civilization itself provides even more insight into the impulse that drove the Spanish and Portuguese west in the first place. There were kings and queens and a whole host of nobles and bureaucrats filled with the pride of their recent successes of reconquering their lands and pushing their realms ever farther out from their nascent nations, as well as with the empty coffers that were a material reminder of the sacrifices they had made and the danger of ruin and starvation their fledgling empires faced. The powerful church, too, had emerged from the darkness stronger than ever, having been the only institution capable of preserving civilization by providing hope and salvation, but now she found herself hungry for souls, thirsty for the destruction of the evil one's minions, and full of faithful followers dedicated to carrying out her wishes, yet beset both by infidel external forces as well as heretical pressures from within; she would pull out all the stops to bring more believers into her fold, save through tough love those being led astray and conquer all the forces of malevolence arrayed against her. But it costs money to build kingdoms, whether they are of this world or not, and this epoch, like all epochs before and since, did not lack for people and institutions who recognized opportunity and had the will and the means to endow the missions with the funding they needed, in exchange for their pound of flesh in the case of failure, tons and tons of riches in the case of success. The individuals in these empires also divided themselves up into social castes, sometimes out of tradition and lineage, sometimes from natural endowment and sometimes due to the vagaries of fortune; yet either through tacit understanding or rigid social stricture, everyone knew his place while striving for something more. Last but not least, we must admit the obvious by pointing out that the Spanish and Portuguese were not alone in the world and as such had to navigate relations with the other powers and forces that shared the globe with them, whose interests were more often than the Iberians would have liked directly at odds with their own.
True understanding of this bygone era requires us to abandon what we know now and limit ourselves to the extent of knowledge that the participants in the conquest had at their disposal. While we have been blessed with detailed maps and atlases and global positioning systems, their world was a dark, beshrouded world created largely from fantasy and hope, and whose murk was pierced by thin meanderings limited by line of sight and forced by nature to follow paths of prevailing winds and obstacles man had yet to shape to his liking. The lands they found, and the lands they dreamed of were populated by an odd mixture of real and fantastical beings; both the Old and the New World would be forever changed by the exchange of creatures great and small, plants that would cure and feed a growing world, and new races of man, while it would take ages to finally abandon the preconceived notions of mythical beasts and the chauvinistic beliefs of superiority and difference. The detrimental side of these exchanges has almost become cliche, but it points to an emergent aspect of this society that was ill-prepared to deal with much of the pestilence that resulted: medicine was plagued by superstition and only nursed along by the teachings of ancients whose knowledge had managed to survive. However, science and technology were embarking on their own adventures of discovery that would help shape our ability to wage war against our tiniest enemies (after many victims had been sacrificed to their gods of suffering), while also expanding our view of all dimensions of the world around us, getting us to the farthest points of our mysterious globe with greater speed and precision, and providing us more efficient means to destroy each other and the world we inhabit.
The final dimension of our analysis of the period of conquest will bring the experiences into reality by showing what life was like at the time. The past will be split into brilliant prismatic colors of clothing, architecture, interior decoration and landscaping. The competing smells both vile and pleasant will make the past more present: sewage and gardens, body odors and campfires, rotting flesh and unspoiled expanses. Our ears will delight at the sounds of music, the pulse of life in the towns, and the relative silence that occurs in the absence of trains, planes and automobiles. The tongue may dance with joy or curl in revulsion, as a matter of taste, as we try the culinary offerings from the table and wine cellars of the Iberian empires and the cultures they conquered, not to mention the hybrids they engendered. And we will add texture to it all, by looking a various little details of the experiences, both everyday and extraordinary, that befell the people in the XV and XVI centuries.
So begins our journey of discovery of that turbulent tumult that was the conquest of the Americas. Now we will root around in the libraries and archives of the world to dig up all the tidbits that abound, weaving together a thrilling tale of adventure, intrigue and disaster. We will map out the relationships between all the actors who made this undertaking possible by providing the funding, the vision or the actual sweat, moxie and ruthlessness to pull it off. We will weep bitter tears at the plight of its victims, chew our nails to the quick at the derring-do of the adventurers and marvel at their ability to do it all with such limited knowledge and scarcity of tools and resources. Over the course of our travels, we will experience along with them all new and wondrous sensations, many of which have become commonplace for us today, many more have simply become distant and unfathomable. All the while we must remember that this is the story of all of us and we all have the opportunity to add our own perspectives and make it even more immediate, more comprehensible and thus more memorable
