How to Read Primary Sources? (and a comment about the related assignments) History 111 – World History since 1500

Spring 2022

Jorge Minella ([email protected])

Reading Primary Sources

 “Stuff” produced in the past by people from the past.

 Tell things from the past.

 How to read? What to ask?

 Historical imagination, study, some common sense.

The Primary Source Assignments

 Four sets of historical documents.

 Assignments.  Collective annotation on Perusall.  Final essay about one of the sets.

 How historians work.

 Autonomy.

PAPER

 Purpose of the primary source’s author.

 Argument and strategy.

 Presuppositions and values.

 Epistemology.

 Relate to Other texts.

Collective Annotation – Perusall

Iberian Societies and Expansion

History 111 – World History since 1500 Spring 2022 Jorge Minella ([email protected])

Introduction – Lecture Parts

 Portugal and Spain.

 Maritime expansion.  Accumulate wealth.  Gain power against rivals.  Spread Christianity.

 Route to Asia.

 Atlantic World.

Spain and Portugal, 15th century

 Urban centers.

 Estate society. (low social mobility)  Commoners (peasants, artisans, professionals).  Clergy.  Nobility.

 God-parentage and patron-client relations essential to maintenance of the social fabric.

Iberian Reconquista

 Medieval Iberia. 711-1492, intermittent conflict between

Christians and Muslims.

 “Plunder mentality,” territorial conquest.

 Rise of Christian religious intolerance.

Caliphate of Córdoba, c. 1000 ce.

Maritime Expansion

Europe and the Greater Mediterranean

 1453, still showing the Kingdom of Granada, in southern Iberia.

 Ottomans in Turkey and the Balkans.

 Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and the Middle East.

 New routes to Asia: silk, spices, dyes, luxury goods.

Portuguese Maritime Expansion – 15th and 16th centuries

Portuguese Maritime Expansion

 Trade – gold, spices, slaves.

 Lisbon – cosmopolitan city, experienced merchants.

 Geography – position and favorable currents.

 Politics – early state formation; most of society benefitted.

Cross-Cultural Seafaring Expertise

 Ship-building and operation techniques from the Arabs and Northern Europeans.

 Navigation instruments perfected from Chinese and Arab technologies.

 Guns: China and the Ottomans.

Portuguese carracks. Painting attributed to Gregório Lopes or Cornelis Antoniszoon, c. 1540

Concluding Remarks

 Expansion started from Portugal and Spain.

 Wealth, power, Christianity.

 Expansion shaped by previous experiences.

 Eventually resulted in the colonization of the Americas.

Conquest and Early Colonization of the Americas History 111 – World History since 1500

Spring 2022

Jorge Minella ([email protected])

Introduction – Colonialism  Spanish and Portuguese maritime

expansion.

 Toward Asia.

 Main goal: trade.

 But colonization in America later.

 Colonialism.

 Transfer of population to a new territory;

 To live as permanent settlers;

 While maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin.

Spanish Galleon. Fragment of A Naval Encounter between Dutch and Spanish Warships, Cornelis Verbeeck’s oil on panel, c. 1618/1620.

15th Century Side-Effects of Exploration

 The Spanish in the Canary Islands, 1430s.

 Enslavement of locals.

 Sugar plantations.

 The Portuguese in São Tomé, 1480s.

 Uninhabited island.

 Import of enslaved Africans.

 Sugar plantations.

 Testing models of colonization.

First Contact and Conflicts in the Caribbean

MAP 16.2 European Voyages of Discovery, c. 1420–1600. Textbook page 575.

1492 – 1519: Castilian Disappointment, Caribbean Disaster

 Cultural Clash.

 How to obtain wealth?

 Conquer land and people.  Indigenous enslavement.

 Encomienda.

 Forced conversion to Christianism.

Encomienda

 System of coerced labor.

 Native communities allocated to Spanish encomendero.

 Who could exploit native labor and demand tribute.

 Goods.

 Agricultural surpluses.

 Gold and silver.

Caribbean Catastrophe

 Catastrophic model.

 Needed extreme violence.

 Eventually undermined Spanish goals.

 Lack of labor force.

 90% of Caribbean Natives died in less than a century.

 Mostly disease.

 Overwork and enslavement.

 Forced dislocations.

 Violence and killings.

 Different colonial models.

Part of the Codex Kingsborough (c. 1550), an indigenous Mexican complaint against an abusive encomendero

The Fall of the Aztec and Inca Empires

Conquistador Companies

 Private expeditions authorized by the Crown.

 Higher rank commoners.

 Conquest as opportunity.  Bounty.  Encomiendas.  Noble titles.

Early 20th century depiction of Diego de Almagro’s conquistador company. Expedición de Almagro a Chile. Fray Pedro Subercaseaux, c. 1900.

Fall of the Aztec

 Rival native groups joined conquistadors.

 Emperor Moctezuma II held hostage and killed.

 Disease.

Depiction of Cortes’ conquistador band and Tlaxcalan allies. Codex Azcatitlan, mid-16th to mid 17th centuries.

Fall of the Inca

 Civil war.

 Atahualpa vs. Huascar.

 Deception and treachery.

 Atahualpa captured and killed.

 Despite immense wealth given to conquistadors.

Early 17th century representation of Atahualpa and Pizarro’s meeting. Poma de Ayala, Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno, 1615.

What Explains Conquest

 Effects of disease (smallpox, mainly).

 Circumstances and timing.

 Resentment against the Aztec led to native allies.

 Inca in civil war.

 Spanish tactic of seizing and killing the leadership proved effective.

20th century artwork depicting the transformation of Tenochtilan into Mexico City. Roberto Cueva del Río, 1986.

The Portuguese Coastal Colony

First Decades: Brazilwood Trade

 Wealth?

 Trade with Tupis.  Brazilwood for tools

and trinkets.

 Portuguese focused on Asia.

Map of Brazil in the Miller Atlas, 1519. Brazilwood trees represented.

1530s – Change to Captaincies

 Promote colonization.

 Assigned to “Donatary Captains” as possessions.

 Most failed.

 Lack of resources or interest.

 Poorly informed decisions.

 Indigenous resistance against forced labor.

 Lack of royal oversight and support.

Governorate General and Sugar

 1549 – formation of the Governorate General, based in Salvador, Bahia.

 Pernambuco.  Sugar.

 Large landed property.

 African captives.

 Model: plantations in Atlantic Islands.

Late Colonization of the Interior

 No precious metals until late 17th century.

 Profitable sugar production on coastal areas.

 Fierce indigenous groups.

 No wealthy native empires.

 Bandeirantes, 17th century.

Local Realities and Global Importance: Silver and the Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange

 Alfred Crosby (1972)

 “the massive interoceanic transfer of animals (including humans), plants, and diseases” started after 1492.

 Global change, impact in everyday life.

 Intentional exchanges.

 Unintentional exchanges.

Global Impact of Spanish American Silver

 Unprecedent amount of silver into the market.

 Global trade boost.

 Facilitated wage labor.

 Funded wars.

Local Impact of Spanish American Silver

 Spanish investment in the mines.

 Enslaved Africans working in the mints and refineries.

 Natives subjected to draft labor to work underground.  Mita and Repartimiento: harsh rotational labor draft imposed to the

indigenous communities.

Local Impact – Potosí

 10,000 mita laborers.  Brutal labor regime.

 Formed a large urban center.

 Driving force of Spanish South America’s colonial economy.

 Silver to Castile.

Mining in Potosí, an engraving from Theodoor de Bry in Historia Americae sive Novi Orbis, 1596.

Recap

 The Caribbean and the encomienda.

 Conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires.

 Brazil’s different path.

 Columbian Exchange and silver mining.

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16

The Rise of an Atlantic World 1450–1600

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World in the Making Painted on calfskins, portolan (“port finder”) charts were used by mariners in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic beginning in the late fourteenth century. A fter Columbus’s momentous transatlantic voyage in 1492, portolan charts began to depict new European discoveries in the A mericas with great accuracy. This 1500 map by Juan de la Cosa, who sailed with Columbus, is the earliest such chart.

Guns, Sails, and Compasses: Europeans Venture Abroad

FOCUS Why and how did Europeans begin to cross unknown seas in the fifteenth century?

New Crossroads, First Encounters: The European Voyages of Discovery, 1492–1521

FOCUS What were the main sources of conflict between Europeans and native Americans in the first decades after contact?

Spanish Conquests in the Americas, 1519–1600

FOCUS What factors enabled the Spanish to conquer the Aztec and Inca Empires?

A New Empire in the Americas: New Spain and Peru, 1535–1600

FOCUS Why was the discovery of silver in Spanish America so important in the course of world history?

Brazil by Accident: The Portuguese in the Americas, 1500–1600

FOCUS How and why did early Portuguese Brazil develop differently from Spanish America?

COUNTERPOINT: The Mapuche of Chile: Native America’s Indomitable State

FOCUS How did the Mapuche of Chile manage to resist European conquest?

backstory By the mid-1400s, some 60 million people

inhabited the Americas, about half of them

subjects of the Aztec and Inca Empires (see

Chapter 15). These empires relied on far-

flung tribute networks and drew from diverse

cultural traditions even as they spread their

own religious practices and imperial lan-

guages. Outside the Aztec and Inca realms,

smaller states and chiefdoms occupied much

of the hemisphere. Conflict between groups,

whether in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, or eastern

North America, was frequent.

The inhabitants of western Eurasia and

North Africa were slowly recovering from the

Black Death of 1347–1350 (see Chapter 14).

Weakened nobilities and rebounding popu-

lations stimulated trade, political consolida-

tion, and the adoption of new technologies for

war and transport. The long-distance trade in

luxury goods also recovered, but by the early

1400s the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the

eastern Mediterranean intensified competi-

tion and limited western European access to

overland routes such as the Silk Road.

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Malintzin (mah-LEEN-tseen) was only a girl when she was traded away around 1510 to serve a noble family in what is today the state of Tabasco, Mexico. She herself was a noble, a native speaker of the Aztec language, Nahuatl (NAH-watt). Malintzin’s new masters were Chontal Maya speakers, and soon she learned this language.

Throughout Malintzin’s servitude in Tabasco, stories circulated there and in the neighboring Yucatan peninsula of bearded strangers. One day in the year 1519, vessels filled with such men arrived in Tabasco. The Tabascans attacked a party that came ashore, but they were defeated. In exchange for peace, they offered the strang- ers gold and feather work, and also several servant girls, among them Malintzin. W hen asked through an interpreter where the gold had come from, the Tabascans said “Mexico.”

The strangers’ interpreter was a Spanish castaway, Jerόnimo de Aguilar, who had lived several years in the Yucatan, recently ransomed by his countrymen. Aguilar soon discovered that Malintzin knew the language of Aztec Mexico. The strangers’ leader, Hernando Cortés, took a special interest in her for this reason, but he also considered her the most beautiful and intelligent of the captives.

Twice given away now, Malintzin joined the foreigners in their floating homes. Heading west, they reached an island where Cortés ordered a party ashore to make contact with villagers and, through them, to speak with traveling Aztec representa- tives. Only Nahuatl was spoken.

Suddenly the bilingual Malintzin was thrust into a role of global significance. She passed along in Nahuatl the words Aguilar gave her in Chontal Mayan. Then she did the reverse when the Aztec ambassadors replied. Aguilar made sense of the Mayan replies for Cortés, who was already planning a march on the Aztec capital. From here until the end of the conquest campaigns in 1521, Malintzin served as Cortés’s key to Aztec Mexico.

In modern Mexican mythology Malintzin, or Malinche (mah-LEEN-cheh), is regarded as a traitor, a collaborator, even a harlot. But these characterizations are anachronistic and unfair. Malintzin was not seen as a traitor in her own day, even by the Aztecs. In their paintings of the conquest, early Nahuatl-speaking artists often placed Malintzin at the center, poised and confident.

But why had Europeans like Cortés suddenly arrived in Malintzin’s world? In part it was because wealth-seeking Iberians (inhabitants of the peninsula occupied by Spain and Portugal) had long begun charting the Atlantic. Over time they

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T h e Ri s e o f a n At l a n t i c Wo r l d 145 0 –16 0 0

developed the technologies needed to navigate open seas, exploring first the west coast of Africa and then crossing the ocean itself. Flush with capital, Italian bankers helped fund these enterprises.

The resulting Iberian encounter with the Americas was an accident of monumental significance. In quest of legendary Asian riches, Christopher Columbus and his successors landed instead in the previously isolated regions they called the New World. It was new to them, of course, but not so to native Americans like Malintzin. Cultural misunderstandings, political divisions among indigenous peoples, and European firearms aided conquest and settlement, but germs made the biggest difference.

These germs were part of what historian Alfred Crosby dubbed “the Columbian Exchange,” the first major biological relinking of the earth since the continents had drifted apart in prehistoric times. Although Europeans brought deadly diseases to the Americas, they also brought animals for transport, plowing, and consumption. Another effect of this global exchange was rapid population growth in parts of the world where American crops such as potatoes and maize took root. European expansion made the Atlantic a global crossroads, the center of a new pattern of ex- change affecting the entire world.

Finally, we should not make the mistake of assuming that Europeans met no signifi- cant resistance in the Americas. As we shall see in the Counterpoint that concludes this chapter, one group of native Americans who successfully fought off European conquest, in part by adopting the horse and turning it against their oppressors, were the Mapuche of Chile.

1. What were the main

biological and environ-

mental consequences of

European expansion to

the Atlantic after 1492?

2. What roles did misun-

derstanding and chance

play in the conquests of

the Aztecs and Incas?

3. How did Eurasian

demand for silver and

sugar help bring about

the creation of a linked

Atlantic world?

OVERVIEW QUESTIONS

The major global development in this chapter: European expansion across the Atlantic and its profound consequences for societies and cultures worldwide.

As you read, consider:

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Guns, Sails, and Compasses: Europeans Venture Abroad

FOCUS Why and how did europeans begin to cross unknown seas in the fifteenth century?

Nordic and southern European mariners had long been venturing out to sea, test- ing winds and currents as they founded colonies and connected markets. Some shared information, but as in the Mediterranean, colonizing distant lands was a competitive process. In the fifteenth century tiny Portugal forged the world’s first truly global maritime empire. Neighboring Spain followed, spurred on by Christo- pher Columbus and a crusading spirit.

Motives for Exploration Early modern Europeans sought to accumulate wealth, gain power against their rivals, and spread Christianity. Commerce was a core motive for expansion, as European merchants found themselves starved for gold and silver, which they needed to purchase Asian spices, silks, gems, and other luxuries. In part because of Europe’s relative poverty, ambitious monarchs and princes adopted violent means to extend their dominions overseas and to increase their tax and tribute incomes. Finally, Europe’s many Christian missionaries hoped to spread their religion throughout the globe. These motives would shape encounters between Europeans and native Americans.

“Gold is most excellent,” wrote Christopher Columbus in a letter to the king and queen of Spain. “Gold constitutes treasure, and anyone who has it can do whatever he likes in the world.”1 Columbus was a native of the Italian city-state of Genoa, and Genoese merchants had long traded for gold in North A frica. A frican gold lubricated Mediterranean and European trade, but population growth, com- mercial expansion, and competition among Christian and Islamic states strained supplies. It was thus the well-placed Portuguese, who established a North A frican foothold in Morocco in 1415, who first sought direct access to A frican gold (see Map 16.2, pages 576–577).

Italian merchants made some of their greatest profits on spices. Since most spices came from the tropical margins of Asia, they rose considerably in value as they passed through the hands of mostly Islamic middlemen in the Indian Ocean and eastern Mediterranean. Indian pepper and Indonesian nutmeg were but a few of the many desired condiments that Portuguese and other European merchants

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hoped to purchase more cheaply by sailing directly to the source. This entailed either circumnavigating A frica or finding a western passage to the Pacific.

Slaves were also prized throughout the Mediterranean basin, and demand for them grew with the expansion of commercial agriculture and the rise of wealthy merchant families. Prices also rose as source regions near the Black Sea were cut off after 1453 by the Ottomans. As the word slave suggests, many captives came from the Slavic regions of eastern Europe. Others were prisoners of war. In part to meet growing Christian European demand, sub-Saharan A fricans were transported to North A frican ports by caravan. As with gold, southern European merchants sought captives by sailing directly to West A frica.

Sugar, another commodity in high demand in Europe, required large invest- ments in land, labor, and machinery. Produced mostly by enslaved workers on eastern Atlantic islands such as Portuguese Madeira by the mid-fifteenth century, cane sugar increasingly became common as both a sweetener and preservative. As sugar took the place of honey in Old World cuisines, few consumers pondered its growing connection to overseas enslavement. In time, European demand for sugar would lead to the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade and the forced migra- tion of millions of A fricans to the Americas.

Technologies of Exploration As they set sail for new horizons, Europeans employed innovations in three tech- nological spheres: gun making, shipbuilding, and navigation. First was firearms manufacture. Gunpowder, a Chinese invention, had been known since at least the ninth century C.E . Chinese artisans made rockets and bombs, but it was early modern Europeans who developed gunpowder and gun making to their greatest destructive effect.

Europeans had also borrowed Chinese papermaking and movable type technol- ogies, and by 1500 they published treatises detailing the casting and operation of cannon. Soon, crude handguns and later muskets transformed field warfare, first in Europe, then worldwide. As gun and powder technologies improved, contingents of musketeers replaced archers, crossbowmen, and other foot soldiers.

The second key technological leap was in ship construction. A lthough small, swift-sailing vessels traversed the medieval Mediterranean, long-distance car- riers were cumbersome and even dangerous when overloaded. The Roman-style galley was a fighting vessel propelled by captive oarsmen with occasional help from sails. Galleys functioned best where seas were calm, distances short, and prisoners plentiful. Something else was needed for the rougher waters and longer voyages common in the North Atlantic. Here, shipwrights combined more rigid North Sea

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hull designs and square sail rigs with some of the defen- sive features of the galley. They also borrowed the gal- ley’s triangular or lateen sails, which in turn had been adapted from the Arabian dhows (dowz) of the Indian Ocean.

The resulting hybrid vessels, including the caravel used by ocean-crossing mariners such as Columbus, proved greater than the sum of their parts. A lthough slow and unwieldy by modern standards, these late- fifteenth-century European ships were the world’s most durable and maneuverable means of heav y trans- port to date. Later modified into galleons, frigates, and clippers, they would serve as the basic models for virtu- ally all European carriers and warships until the advent of steam technology in the early nineteenth century.

European navigational innovations also propelled overseas expansion. Cosmographers believed the world to be spherical by Columbus’s time, but finding one’s way from port to port beyond sight of land was still a source of worry. One aid was the magnetic com- pass, like gunpowder and printing a fairly ancient Chi- nese invention developed in a novel way by Europeans. We know from travelers’ accounts that sailors in the Indian Ocean also used compasses, but rarely in com- bination with portolan (“port finder”) sea charts, which contained detailed compass bearings and harbor de- scriptions (see again the chapter-opening illustration). Charts and compasses together changed European navigators’ perceptions of what had formerly been trackless seas.

Another borrowed instrument, apparently Arabic in origin, was the astrolabe. A calculator of latitude (one’s location north or south of the equator), it proved even more critical for long-distance maritime travel than the compass. Precise knowledge of latitude was essential for early modern sailors in particular since longitude, a more complicated east–west calculation, was hard to determine until the mid-eighteenth century.

Portuguese Ship The Portuguese were the first Europeans to develop ocean-going ships for extended, return voyages. Initially they combined rigid hull designs from the Atlantic with maneuverable triangular sails of A rabic origin to build caravels, but these small vessels had limited cargo space and were vulnerable to attack. This evocative image from a contemporary manuscript shows Vasco da Gama’s flagship, the St. Gabriel, on its way to India in 1497–1498 with every stitch of canvas out. For such long trips the Portuguese chose to sacrifice the maneuverability of the caravel in favor of maximizing sail surface and relying on trade winds. The resulting ships, which could carry up to 1200 tons of cargo and were built like floating fortresses, are known as “carracks.” Portugal’s national symbol until recent times, the red cross of the Order of Christ, identified such ships as Portuguese. (The A rt A rchive/Science Academy Lisbon/ Gianni Dagli Orti.)

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Thus armed with an impressive ensemble of borrowed and modified tools, weapons, and sail- ing vessels, Europeans were poised to venture out into unknown worlds. Add the recent devel- opment of the printing press, and they were also able to publicize their journeys in new if not alto- gether honest ways.

Portugal Takes the Lead W hy did tiny Portugal, one of Europe’s least populated kingdoms, lead the way in overseas expansion? A look at key factors helps solve this puzzle. First, Portugal was an ancient maritime crossroads straddling two commercial spheres, the Mediterranean and northeast Atlantic (see Map 16.1). Coastal shipping had grown effi- cient while overland transport remained slow and costly. Well before 1400, merchants from as far away as Venice and Stockholm put in at Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, to break up their journeys. Commercial competition was fos- tered by Portugal’s kings, and along with money and goods, important shipbuilding and sailing knowledge was exchanged. Capital, in the form of money, ships, and goods, accumulated in the hands of merchant clans, many of them foreign.

Other factors besides accumulating capital pushed the Portuguese abroad. By the 1430s, fish- ermen regularly ventured far out into the Atlantic in pursuit of better catches. Moreover, arable land in Portugal became scarce as populations grew, rendering overseas colonization more attractive. A lso, religious and strategic concerns drove Por- tuguese nobles to capture the Islamic port city of Ceuta (SYOO-tah), on Mo

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