What is the significance of the reconquista to the conquest of the indies

In , they completed the Reconquista: the centuries-long Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The Reconquista marked another step forward in the process of making Spain an imperial power, and Ferdinand and Isabella were now ready to look further afield. Their goals were to expand Catholicism and to gain a commercial advantage over Portugal.

To those ends, Ferdinand and Isabella sponsored extensive Atlantic exploration. Starting in , he approached Genoese, Venetian, Portuguese, English, and Spanish monarchs, asking for ships and funding to explore this westward route.

The Spanish monarchs knew that Portuguese mariners had reached the southern tip of Africa and sailed the Indian Ocean. They understood that the Portuguese would soon reach Asia and, in this competitive race to reach the Far East, the Spanish rulers decided to act.

This sixteenth-century map shows the island of Hispaniola present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic. Note the various fanciful elements, such as the large-scale ships and sea creatures, and consider what the creator of this map hoped to convey.

In addition to navigation, what purpose would such a map have served? Columbus held erroneous views that shaped his thinking about what he would encounter as he sailed west. He believed the earth to be much smaller than its actual size and, since he did not know of the existence of the Americas, he fully expected to land in Asia. On October 12, , however, he made landfall on an island in the Bahamas. He then sailed to an island he named Hispaniola present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti.

As a devoted Catholic, Columbus had agreed with Ferdinand and Isabella prior to sailing west that part of the expected wealth from his voyage would be used to continue the fight against Islam. Today they highlight the difficult task of historical work; while the letters are primary sources, historians need to understand the context and the culture in which the conquistadors, as the Spanish adventurers came to be called, wrote them and distinguish their bias and subjective nature.

Another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, sailing for the Portuguese crown, explored the South American coastline between and Unlike Columbus, he realized that the Americas were not part of Asia but lands unknown to Europeans.

The exploits of the most famous Spanish explorers have provided Western civilization with a narrative of European supremacy and Indian savagery. What does this letter show us about Spanish objectives in the New World? How do you think it might have influenced Europeans reading about the New World for the first time? The Columbus landfall accelerated the rivalry between Spain and Portugal, and the two powers vied for domination through the acquisition of new lands.

In the s, Pope Sixtus IV had granted Portugal the right to all land south of the Cape Verde islands, leading the Portuguese king to claim that the lands discovered by Columbus belonged to Portugal, not Spain. The resulting Treaty of Tordesillas in drew a north-to-south line through South America; Spain gained territory west of the line, while Portugal retained the lands east of the line, including the east coast of Brazil. What does it reveal about the state of geographical knowledge, as well as European perceptions of the New World, at the beginning of the sixteenth century?

Inspired by tales of rivers of gold and timid, malleable natives, later Spanish explorers were relentless in their quest for land and gold. He and his men were astonished by the incredibly sophisticated causeways, gardens, and temples in the city, but they were horrified by the practice of human sacrifice that was part of the Aztec religion.

A similar linguistic Imperialism was at work in Aztec and Incan empires before the arrival of the Spanlards. The essence of Nebrija's arguments was alive in the America's indigenous peoples' language policies. Some scholars claim that there were as many as 1, languages spoken in the Americas at the time of Columbus' arrival. In an area where a different language was spoken from town to town, even mutually unintelligible languages spoken in the same town, a common language was indispensable for commerce, politics, and the administration of the empire.

As many as 80 different languages were spoken within the realm of the Aztec empire, which stretched across much of what is modern day Mexico and Central America.

The Incan empire, too, maintained a policy of linguistic domination in which all subjects of the empire were obligated to know Qucchua, or face punishment. Thus, Spanish and Native American linguistic policies in were actually very similar. When the two empires collided, however, the traditional language policies of both empires, which to impose the language of the politically dominant group on all others, initially collapsed. Attempts to spread the Spanish language to the Native Americans in the Conquest period failed for the most part.

Thus, Nebrija's prediction that "language has always been the companion of empire, and it followed it with such a way that together they began, they grew, and they flourished, and afterwards, together, they both fell. The use of language itself however, whether it be Spanish or any one of the Native American languages, played a crucial role in establishing the Spanish Empire, on the military, spiritual.

Language as an Instrument of Military Conquest. In this first instance of contact, Columbus laid some of the foundations for the Spanish conquest of the Americas, many of which revolve around language. Columbus's acts were based on a formal, ritual tradition of taking possession that had already been in place in the Spanish empire. The Spanish presence in America got its authority from language acts, such as that of taking possession and naming; it derived part of its military advantage through the control of interpreters, and therefore, of information; and it justified its domination by the fact that the Native Americans did not have any religion, and were ripe for conversion.

On October 11, , Columbus's ships landed on the island he named San Salvador. The first thing he did upon landing, as recorded in his Journal, was to call:. According to Columbus, the natives of the island soon gathered around.

There is a brief period of contact, in which they exchange gifts, and in which Columbus sizes up the people. They must be good servants, and intelligent, for I can see that they quickly repeat everything said to them. I beheve they would readily become Christians; it appeared to me that they have no religion.

Without any linguistic contact, he doesn't even mention using gestures at this point , Columbus has characterized these people, in light of how they might serve the ultimate aims of Spain. Columbus continues in his journal:. With God's will, I will take six of them with me for Your Majesties when I leave this place, so that they may learn Spanish.

By the time he sets sail, on October 14th, he has named the island San Salvador, and is on his way to take possession of all the surrounding islands. Authority in the Americas, for the Spaniards, was based on language, speech accompanied by a written record. This tradition derives from a Roman Law, according to Stephen Greenblatt, which acknowledges the act of taking possession by verbalizing the act, as long as the act is not contradicted.

The rationale behind the process seems absurd, since, of course, there was no possibility for the Indians to contradict him, not understanding his words. For Columbus, this is not a problem, since he doesn't recognize that the Indians don't understand him. Todorov notes that Columbus refuses to recognize that the Native Americans' languages are different from his own, or that there is any such thing as linguistic diversity at all.

His only two options to a foreign language, then, are "to acknowledge it as a language but refuse to believe it is different; or to acknowledge its difference but refuse to admit it is a language. But it is evident that upon his initial arrival in the Americas, he believes the former, from his attitude that he understands what the Indians tell him, and vice versa.

For example, on October 15, his fifth day in contact with the Indians, he says,. The prisoners I took on San Salvador kept telling me that the people of this island wore great gold bracelets and legbands, but I thought it was an invention to enable them to escape.

Not only does he deny that there is a linguistic barrier, Columbus sees the treachery of the Native Americans as the greatest obstacle to communication. Columbus's method of taking possession through an oral act, then, makes sense to him. The Roman Law gives him authority. Stephen Greenblatt notes, however, that:. The problem [with this law] is not simply opposing interests-natives' desire to retain possession of their land against the Spanish desire to appropriate-but incommensurable positions.

The Arawak are not simply denied the opportunity to dispute the Spanish claim; they are not in the same universe of discourse. The concept of taking possession through a speech act is nonexistent in their culture. Often the Spanish operate in their own universe where what they say becomes law, even if some people who are affected by that act neither accept nor understand that law.

But the formalism of Columbus's actions make them legitimate in his, and the Spaniards' eyes, and therefore, he has authority. The perceived authority through words becomes real authority through other military actions. Another significant aspect of the process of taking possession is recording the deed. Columbus took the secretary of the fleet, Rodrigo de Escobedo, on shore with him to serve as witness for his claiming the land for Spain.

In the conquest, and throughout the colonial period, the Spanish were fanatical about keeping written records and notarizing every step of the conquest. Verbal testimony alone could not be trusted to be accurate. This reflects the significance of the written word for the Spanish, for whom it not only validated speech acts, but also made the act into a historical act.

Part of the ritual process of taking possession was that of naming, or renaming, the territory. Giving an island, or any other piece of land, a name was equated with claiming it for oneself. Columbus is obsessive about naming the places he goes; on December 6 he records:.

At dawn we were four leagues from the harbor, which I have called Puerto de Santa Maria. We sighted a beautiful head land By naming these places, he is insinuating that either they had no name before and he is discovering them, or that he is giving them their correct names.

In both cases, he denies their previous identity. Greenblatt states: "Such a christening entails the cancellation of the native name--the erasure of the alien, perhaps demonic, identity--and hence a kind of making new. After the discoverers anive to the provinces and lands that they discover, with the officials, they should name all the land, each province for itself, the principal mountains and rivers which are there. Naming is not restricted to geography, however, in the Conquest, the Spaniards gave names to individuals and groups just as they did to objects.

Native Americans who were taken prisoner by the Spanish to become interpreters were commonly baptized and given Christian names, like Dona Marina, Julian and Melchoir. Naming, then, became a means of conquest of both places and of people.

Thus, in his first encounter with the Indians, Columbus set the precedents for the act of taking possession, all of which revolved around language: oral declarations, written records, and renaming the place, giving it an identity within a European context. Columbus also initiated the practice of kidnapping natives to serve as interpreters for the Spanish conquistadors.

Interpreters were an indispensable instrument in the military conquest of the Americas. In traditional colonial relationships, it is the conquered who learn the language of the conqueror, and the case of the Spanish Empire during the rnilitary conquest was no different. As stated in Columbus's record of the first encounter with the natives in the Caribbean, one of the first things Columbus did was "take" six of them in order to teach them Spanish. In essence, he kidnapped them in order to use them to the Spanish advantage in the conquest.

Greenblatt comments, that:. The radically unequal distribution of power that lies at the heart of almost all language learning in the New World is most perfectly realized in the explorers' preferred method for dealing with the language problem From the very first day in , the principal means chosen by the Europeans to establish linguistic contact was kidnapping. Typically, it was captured Indians who served as translators for the Spanish. There were few cases of Spaniards who learned Indian languages in the initial wave of conquest.

The demand for translators was immense, and the custom of kidnapping an Indian or two to serve as translators every time the Spanish entered a new territory was so common that it was a routine part of almost every conquest expedition. Francisco de Solano notes that:.

When the Indians of the region were ignorant of the language of other zones to be conquered, the conquistador would try to capture in advance some Indians from those areas to make them his allies and to teach them Spanish and to entrust to them the future task of guides and translators for the army in dangerous territories. The policy was codified into law in by the New Ordinances of Discovery and Population , which gave the conquistadors the right to take three or four Indians from each zone as interpreters.

The Spanish believed that having interpreters at their disposal would be essential to the military conquest; and they were not mistaken. Throughout the conquest, native interpreters who accompanied the Spanish in their expeditions served as guides, as a medium for communication, and perhaps most importantly, as irreplaceable sources of information. Interpreters could provide indispensable military information, which aided in planning attacks. Learning the size, structure and military tactics of the enemy army could be the difference between victory and defeat.

The Spanish used interpreters to gather cultural information of all types about those they were going to subjugate which was useful in the conquest, as it helped them learn how best to approach these people.

Sometimes this information could help avoid armed conflict altogether. In the Ordinances of Discovery Law 15 expresses how these interpreters could be used to the advantage of the conquistadors:. Try to bring some Indians for interpreters to the places you go, where you think it will be the most fitting Arid by way of said interpreters.

And in this way you will know if there is any type of stones, precious things like those which are esteemed in our kingdom. Dona Marina spoke both Maya and Nahuatl, the official language of the Aztec empire, Aguilar, a native of Spain who had been shipwrecked in the Yucatan, spoke both Spanish and Maya. Through the cooperative translations of these two, Cortes learned about the makeup of the Aztec empire, and was able to use this information to his advantage.

As Todorov observes, "It is as a consequence of this perfected system of information that Cortes quickly gains a detailed knowledge of the existence of internal dissensions among the Indians. As a result, Cortes was able to convince them to wage war against the Aztecs as the allies of the Spanish. There were examples too, when the system of capturing Indians to be interpreters backfired. He presented his plan to officials in Portugal and England, but it was not until that he found a sympathetic audience: the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

Columbus wanted fame and fortune. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the same, along with the opportunity to export Catholicism to lands across the globe. Columbus, a devout Catholic, was equally enthusiastic about this possibility. On October 12, the ships made landfall—not in the East Indies, as Columbus assumed, but on one of the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador. In January , leaving several dozen men behind in a makeshift settlement on Hispaniola present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic , he left for Spain.

He kept a detailed diary during his first voyage. More troublingly, it also recorded his initial impressions of the local people and his argument for why they should be enslaved. They have no iron …They would make fine servants … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. About six months later, in September , Columbus returned to the Americas. Then he headed west to continue his mostly fruitless search for gold and other goods. His group now included a large number of indigenous people the Europeans had enslaved.

In lieu of the material riches he had promised the Spanish monarchs, he sent some enslaved people to Queen Isabella. In May , Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic for the third time.

Conditions were so bad that Spanish authorities had to send a new governor to take over. Meanwhile, the native Taino population, forced to search for gold and to work on plantations, was decimated within 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred of what may have been , Taino were left on their island.

Christopher Columbus was arrested and returned to Spain in chains. His survival and that of his companions depended more on their rendering services to the natives than on their once superior arms. It is fascinating to see how these Christian men were reduced to the use of Christian principles to guarantee their survival among the tribes of the Gulf coast. For several years I have been fascinated by the problem of conquest in the Americas.

Undeniably, at the time of discovery, European nations espoused ideas of conquest that were rooted in Hellenic and Roman traditions. In the aftermath of discovery, the notion of conquest was compounded by becoming a "school question. Regaining the peninsula from the Moors solidified the Spanish sense of identity and purpose, but the discovery of the New World shattered the tranquility of contained continents and convenient boundaries. With millions of new peoples and scores of unfamiliar cultures within their political reach, the Spaniards embarked on uncharted seas.

Polemical shoals were pounded by philosophical and legal rhetoric, driven by the storm of conquest. Without question the real-time shipwreck of Cabeza de Vaca was deeply affected by the issues being debated over the propriety of conquering the peoples of the New World.

Spanish presence in the Caribbean was irrefutably superior in terms of firepower, technology, and political organization. No Indian group could match the Spaniard, so the issue of the subjugation of the tribes became paramount. Usually a Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesinos, who preached a sermon on the First Sunday of Advent, , is credited with launching the debate over the rights of Indian peoples.

He asked how anyone could justify taking away the lands and lives of such gentle, domesticated and peaceful peoples by waging an "unjust war. By papal edict the lands belonged to Spain; conquest was a presumptive consequence. Then, the universities entered the joust. Matas de Paz, a Dominican theologian at Salamanca, appealed to St. Thomas Aquinas in advancing an argument favoring Spanish dominion in the Americas. As we shall see in a moment, Aristotle gets most of the credit for the antecedents of this debate, but nearly everyone has overlooked the preeminent position of Aquinas, especially in his Summa Contra Gentiles which helped to shape the missionary thought of the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages.

Paz concluded that waging war on the "infidels" of the Americas was only justified on the grounds of Papal authority, otherwise the Indians were to be left in peace and not made slaves for any reason.

A few short years after participating in the Junta of Burgos that culminated in the New Laws of Burgos concerning the Indies, Paz died, but his ideas persisted in Spanish policy.