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Spanish Conquistadors — Description

When the Black Death took Alfonso XI of Castile in 1350, his fifteen-year old son Peter took up his mantle of royalty. Peter was the longest surviving child of Alfonso's queen, Maria of Portugal, a good king to his people, including his Jewish subjects, but swamped with enemies in his court. Chief among these was his half-brother, Henry of Trastámara, whose Wikipedia biography begins with the sentence “Henry was the fourth of ten illegitimate children of King Alfonso XI of Castile and Eleanor de Guzmán”. This was not a man who would tolerate competition. Henry weaseled assistance out of the French and the Crown of Aragon to noogie his brother to death in 1369, allowing him to usurp everything Peter had stood for. As a thanks for the assist, Henry offered the hand of his son and successor John to the daughter of Aragon's King Peter IV, Eleanor. Henry kicked the bucket in 1376, and John would pick up his reign until 1390, succeeded by his son with Eleanor, Henry III. Their second-oldest son, Ferdinand, was given the throne of Aragon after his uncle Martin's death in 1410.
Despite spawning from the loins of the same genetic crockpot, these two branches of the House of Trastámara just could not keep their hands to themselves. This spider web of cousin-marriages, in theory, was supposed to lay the groundwork for unification, but both sides were adverse to compromise. Unification, each kingdom argued, was synonymous with the total submission of the other, no matter how much damage the mad quest for superiority did to their own kingdoms. The ineptitude of Henry III's grandson, Henry IV, was cause for his nobles to try to overthrow him in favor of his siblings, first his brother Alfonso, then their sister Isabella after Alfonso's death in 1468. Isabella, having the support of pretty much every noble in Henry's court, noogied her brother into agreeing to the Treaty of the Bulls of Guisando, which recognized Isabella as Henry's official heir and got her hitched to Ferdinand II of Aragon, heir apparent of Ferdinand I's son John II, on October 19, 1469.
Henry IV pouted very hard at this arrangement, but he was a nerd and a loser who died in 1474, giving Isabella pretty much everything she wanted, though not without outside contention. Henry's daughter Joanna convinced her hubby Afonso V of Portugal that taking Castille under her claim was easy odds, but that war ate up waaaay more time and resources than anyone realistically expected. The Treaty of Alcáçovas put a whimpering end to the conflict in 1479, both sides just kinda agreeing to go back to their rooms and leave the apologizing stubbornly wordless. Ferdinand's father died that same year, consolidating Ferdinand's authority as the new King of Aragon. His wife meanwhile imported the literally genocidal amount of bureaucracy that had kept Castile so afloat amid all the turmoil. This entailed Pope Sixtus IV giving her the keys to the Inquisition in 1478, because Isabella was so disgustingly prejudiced that she had to set up an entire police force just to double check there weren't any Jewish folks secretly minding their own fucking business amongst their population. I've already taken a cold shower over the Inquisition's history though so I will direct you instead to that miserable essay. This is just… going to be a rough one, folks. We're going to be discussing some very bad people who got away with doing some very bad things for a very long period of time. It's uncomfortable, it's heartbreaking, but these were real people who cause real pain that ripples down to interfere with normal people's lives to this very day. People who are my friends, who suffer in ways I cannot help beyond spreading awareness. This one is dedicated to my friend and sister Luna Maxis, whose people are the Taíno.
Before we hop that island though, we'll dwell a moment longer on the Iberian Peninsula, which now functionally consists of Portugal, Castile, Aragon, and one other kingdom which the other three decided didn't belong: the Emirate of Granada, final haven of Spain's Muslim heritage. They tried to dig it off of their map like a scab. Sultan Abu'l-Hasan Ali of Granada took Zahara in 1481, and the Castilians retaliated by taking Alhama de Granada the following year. That sucked for Granada because that town is smack in the middle of the big highway that connects their two big cities. The meat grinder just kinda bored into both sides like a worm, slowly and digestively, until only the city of Granada itself remained by 1490. The city was infiltrated and surrendered on January 2, 1492. Isabella had the Alhambra Decree drafted two months later, giving anyone who wasn't a practicing Roman Catholic four months to leave Spain, convert, or be burnt at the stake.
“Hi I'm Cristoffa Corombo!” said Christopher Columbus, persistent lunatic, “do you like money?”
“Why yes I do in fact like money,” responded Ferdinand and Isabella.
“So do I! Would you be interested in giving me some money? I'd like to sail an entire expensive fleet into the vast unknown of the sea at the edge of the world from whence no one has ever returned!”
“Do you know what you're doing?”
“I think the Earth is pear-shaped.”
“Shit, I can't deny, that does sound pretty kickass. You son-of-a-bitch, I'm in.”
On October 12, 1492, Columbus plinked three merchant vessels, the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa María, into an island which the indigenous Lucayan people called Guanahani, traditionally identified today as San Salvador Island, after what Columbus rudely renamed the place of his landing, but it could be any number of islands in the Bahamas. Wow, said Christopher Columbus, this island is beautiful, and you people are so chill, I'm so happy this - and you - are ours now! Columbus then introduced the concept of a “gun” to the islanders and used it to mug as many as twenty-five of them onto his ship as curiosities and human loot to drag back to Castile, remarking disgustingly of these peoples’ good health, “they should be good servants”.
After assessing the conquerability of the Taíno peoples of the wider Caribbean, Columbus was given an even bigger paycheck in 1493 to circle back and storm the beaches one by one. On November 19, 1493, he landed on an island which the locals called Boríken, Columbus called San Juan Bautista, and today is called Puerto Rico. News had spread fast of the things that follow these pasty extremists when they land on your island. Out of the Spaniards’ flapping mouths slithered a specter that crawls down your throat and incubates in your skin. After two weeks, your children catch a fever, they can't stand, they puke their innards out, and then your precious baby breaks out all over in pustulant blisters. Most don't survive, and those that do are forever scarred by the scabs of flesh eaten out from the inside. These are people whose immune systems had never had to train for smallpox.
The Taíno fought back in 1504, they had too, else more of their friends and family would die. Or worse. On the isle of Haiti, first tainted by Colombus's bootstain on December 6, 1492, the Taíno cacique Cotubanamá rose in rebellion over his holdout in Higüey, on the easternmost tip of the island. The Spanish governor, Nicolás de Ovando, groaned flippantly and tasked his lackey Juan de Esquivel, in whose retinue was a young Juan Ponce de León, to “deal with the problem”. 400 Spanish knights marshalled out, burned Higüey to the ground, cut the hands off of their women and children, hanged Cotumbanamá by the neck until dead, and by 1508, most of the Taíno left alive were clasped in irons and subjugated as laborers. By 1565, there were only 200 members of the tribe left in all the world, and the colonial government declared them “extinct”. That's a population drop from 3 million people in less than a single human lifetime. That's the entire population of the state of Connecticut obliterated down to the size of my apartment block. Today there are no people of 100% Taíno descent left as a result of this slaughter, and the United States continues to deny their descendants federal recognition as a sovereign tribe on this basis. According to the government's books, they've already killed them all.
Amidst these horrors and those that befell Cuba after the Spanish invaded in 1511 was a prominent friar, if there can be such a thing, named Bartolomé de Las Casas. Bartolomé was an aspiring young man, studying to become a priest when Columbus first brought home some bright green parrots and people being held against their will. This wasn't particularly uncommon in 15th century Spain, slavery has been an institutionalized consequence of warfare since before anyone in Europe had the means to write it down. Military hostages, usually Muslims up to this point, were taken off the battlefield every day and thrown into the slave trade so that their captor could profit off of their agricultural labor. That of course did not make it okay, but it did make it common. Isabella by 1503 had begun to hand out encomiendas (“entrustments”) to any conquistadors (“conquerors”) who claimed land in the New World for the Crown of Castille, effectively making anyone willing to kill for it himself a very wealthy and very powerful governor. Everything is free when you steal it. An encomienda is essentially a royal receipt guaranteeing you the legal right to keep a certain amount of people from the lands they conquered as their own personal enslaved laborers. Just a generation prior, this was a manner in which they could “divide the loot” among Crusaders claiming territory in the Holy Land. Las Casas himself even owned a few slaves before he decided that was a sin that needed cast off. It was one thing to take prisoner a soldier who knows what he's getting into. What the conquistadors were doing to the indigenous Americans, Las Casas argued, was an entirely different ballgame. The conquistadors were barbaric marauders who profit off of the suffering of others, greedy as the grave and like Death are never satisfied. Las Casas was there at Higüey, he saw the “good treatment and Christianity the Indians received”, and was disgusted, insulted as a man of God, a god he argued to King Ferdinand in 1516 doctrinally does not approve of the actions of these conquistadors.
Mind you he then argued the solution to encomienda “stock” running low because they've all died of smallpox was to switch to importing African slaves from Portugal. Incidentally, the first asiento, “settlement”, for the purchase of African slaves to be shipped overseas was signed off by King Charles I in August 1518. They had to buy people through Portugal because of the Treaty of Tordesillas signed between Spain, the Portuguese, and the Pope in 1494. In order to keep the two kingdoms from slap fighting each other as they conquered the universe, Pope Alexander VI split their turf down the globe's entire meridian in such a way as to give Spain jurisdiction over the Caribbean while allowing Portugal to keep their African colonies and get some American land in Brazil at the same time. They assumed they'd just sorta figure it out later. Oh Charles is king now btw, Isabella kicked it in 1504, Ferdinand followed her in 1516, and their grandson Charles took their place. He was a Habsburg by way of his other grandfather, Maximilian I, effectively uniting the two domains under one polity. No one cares, he's rich, inbred, and racist.
Back to more important reality, Las Casas would eventually come to understand that there's no such thing as good slavery, rescinding his views on the policy and freeing all of his slaves by 1542. That year he penned for the king's attention A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a comprehensive census of all the damage that has been done to innocent people's lives. Whether or not that absolves him of the hurricane he caused by suggesting a shift to African slavery is a question better explored by the people who are still affected by the consequences than some white girl with a DeviantArt account. His words ruined lives, I don't want to wave that off, and I do in fact encourage philosophical discourse in the comments section, I'll be reading. The point I'm trying to make is that the phrase “product of their time” is an excuse and nothing heavier. There were people telling the perpetrators of these crimes exactly how and why their actions are short-sighted and destructive. The conquistadors were not people who didn't know any better or were “just doing what they were told”. They knew what they were doing, they had people telling them that what they're doing was wrong, and they went ahead with it anyway. They made a choice to commit these deeds, because they wanted to, and the people with the power to stop it chose not to do so. Slavery was not abolished in Spain until October 7, 1886.
Hernán Cortés received his encomienda upon his arrival in Haiti in 1504. Cortés proved himself so good at mass murder that the governor of Cuba hand selected him to lead an expedition to the mainland in 1518, following the first pyrrhic settlement attempt of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba and Juan de Grijalva. Scheming ambitions got his charter revoked, but Cortés had already assembled a fleet of 11 ships with some 600 conquistadors armed with guns, so he mutinously embarked to the Yucatán. They reached the mouth of the Mezcalapa River on March 19, 1519. In his tow were Gerónimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who'd been in the company of Mayan lords since his ship crashed back in 1511, and a Nahua slave girl whom history only remembers by her Spanish name, La Malinche. Aguilar had learned to speak his lord's Mayan tongue, while La Malinche could translate between that dialect and Nahuatl. Cortés had everything he needed to make a poignant threat directly in the face of the great noblemen who reigned the Aztec Empire from their splendid palaces in Tenochtitlan.
The ambassadors of Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II met Cortés halfway with lavish gifts, but Cortés told them shut up nerd I'm here to swirlie someone. Further ambassadors were sent to try to persuade these strange deer-riders to turn back from whence they came, but their mission did not have the support of the minor city-states, who allied with the Spanish as they passed through in order to overthrow their rivals. Besides, everyone saw what the conquistadors did to anyone who resisted their “friendship”. Moctezuma stalled as long as he could, but he and Cortés were two very different diplomats from two very different cultures, and one had a stronger arm than the other. Moctezuma was held hostage as a political prisoner and puppet until his people deemed him a coward and stoned him to death on June 29, 1520. Moctezuma's brother Cuitláhuac assumed power and kicked the Spaniards out of the city the following night. Cortés returned with a vengeance, and Tenochtitlan was drowned in the blood of the 200,000 leftover after 15 million people had already died of smallpox. Lake Texcoco, upon which a city larger than Constantinople had been sustained for two hundred years, was subsequently drained and paved over to make room for Mexico City, capital of “New Spain”.
The Incas of South America were the next to suffer. Francisco Pizarro had made contact with the Empire in 1528, and by the time he returned in 1532, their ruler had died of the same fever that was killing his people. His son Atahualpa was in the middle of fighting over the throne with his brother Huáscar when the conquistadors showed up to greet him and request his submission to the god of some foreign desert. Friar Vincente de Valverde approached Atahualpa with a sheaf of pulped trees which he claimed spoke the wonders of God. Atahualpa, once he figured out how to open the thing, found nothing inside but chicken scratch, and chucked this childish insult back in the Spaniards’ faces. Bravery, however, was less persuasive than gold to these drunken, diseased intruders. Gold was plentiful in this land beneath the Sun, Atahualpa bargained with the conquistadors after they slaughtered his warriors. He could fill a whole room with the sparkling tribute they so bafflingly demanded, as if gold had any other use than ceremony and decoration. Atahualpa was stalling, learning about his opponents, but they unfortunately caught on. The Spanish gave him a choice between converting to Christianity or being burnt at the stake, Atahualpa chose to convert, and then they executed him anyway.
A king's treasury was not enough to satiate the Spanish addiction, however, not when they heard there was moreee. Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada stumbled out of the Amazon Rainforest in 1537, snakebitten, and harassed by jaguars and locals who hadn't asked him to be there in the first place. He'd powered through one of the most inhospitable locations to anyone who hasn't lived and grown with it for thousands of years, driven onwards by legends of a kingdom that covers their kings head to toe in gold powder and coronates them by dunking it all beneath the glint of Lake Guatavita. He came to find out that “El Dorado” (“The Golden”), as the stories named these kings, was any number of chieftains ruling the largely uncentralized Muisca people, like Tisquesusa, lord of Bogotá, who was murdered and had his city turned into the capital of Colombia. By 1562, the region had been thoroughly enslaved, and the Spanish forced the Muisca to drain their own sacred lake with buckets to access all the gold artifacts their ancestors had worked and sacrificed as a gift to their gods. The sacrilege was only paused, temporarily, by the inefficiency of the technology.
The first European to step foot in what would eventually become the continental United States was Ponce de León in 1513, but he discovered Florida, so I'm hesitant to count that. Pánfilo de Narváez launched an expedition to determine if we live in a godless enough world for there to be more Florida beyond in 1527. That expedition shit itself though, a crew of 600 reduced to only four by 1532, four men who got pulled across the Mississippi River in the indigenous slave trade and discovered to their horror that not only did more Florida exist, but a whole Texas existed too. They had been rescued around the other side of Mexico in 1536, and reading the survivor account convinced Hernando de Soto, governor of Cuba, that he could do better. He landed in Tampa Bay in 1539 and just sorta started beating people up until he was satisfactorily somewhere else. His climb into the Appalachian Mountains took him through what is today Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas until he died of that ol’ bayou fever on the banks of the Great River in 1542. Luis de Moscoso Alvarado would continue the expedition into Louisiana, Texas, and back around into Mexico.
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado meanwhile, as governor of Nueva Galicia led an expedition northwards into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas in 1540. Some nerd monk named Marcos de Niza went up that ways the previous year and brought back whispers of Cíbola, the “Seven Cities of Gold”, but Coronado came back disappointed when all he found was culturally significant Zuni homes to desecrate. Francisco de Orellana meanwhile got stuck with the Herculean task of sailing from one end of the Amazon River to the other. Incidentally, it was first called the Amazon River by Orellana, who was attacked by hot warrior women in the jungle and reminded of the Scythian women of Greek myth. If the Spanish bastards could tough that voyage out then they were unfortunately here to stay. Buenos Aires had been founded after the Inca conquest, St. Augustine went up in 1565 and remains the oldest continually inhabited European settlement in the United States, while Caracas was founded in 1567. They got what they wanted. The other side of the world had been thoroughly uprooted and envenomated.
But of course Alexander wept not for new lands to conquer, because the Spanish figured well launching ourselves into the unknown ocean has been extremely profitable, so why not try it again? The Pacific is certainly more daunting yes but it's got all these little pit stops along the way! And at the end of the road, well would you look at that, they did eventually make it to the Indies by sailing west. Fuck you Christopher Colombus. And fuck you, Ferdinand Magellan. I wasn't going to mention you because I thought you were Portuguese, but no actually you were on Spain's payroll. Magellan had set out to circumnavigate the globe in 1519, but he was killed on the island of Mactan halfway through. Still, he claimed the archipelago for Spain, and in 1543 Magellan's follow up, Ruy López de Villalobos, named these islands las Islas Filipinas, the Philippines, in honor of King Philip II. Manila was taken as its capital from the Tagalog by Miguel López de Legazpi in 1571.
Philip is king now btw. King Charles abdicated in 1556, dividing his kingdom into Austria, overseen by his son Ferdinand, and Spain, ruled by his other spawn. Phillip inherited seventeen provinces of the Netherlands from his father's domain, rife with some Calvanist heresy which I frankly am too exhausted to give a shit about today. The answers to your history test are that the Dutch triggered the Eighty Years’ War in 1566 and gained their independence in 1648. Good for them. The Spanish monarchy literally degenerated at the genetic level after that. Philip married Anna of Austria in 1570, and through her produced Philip III, who'd succeed his father in 1598. The catch is that Philip II was Anna of Austria's uncle, her mother was his sister. Philip III then, in turn, married his first-cousin-once-removed, Margaret of Austria, and they bore Philip IV, whose recessive traits are starting to look a little funky. Philip IV, king from 1621 to 1640, then married his niece and printer jammed out Charles II. Charles II could not feed himself and was ill from his first breath. Everyone expected him to die young, and then felt pity on him when he didn't. A man unfit to govern himself, let alone a kingdom, was king for an agonizingly long time, from 1665 until his final, croaking moan fled his dysfunctional corpse on November 1, 1700. If you sought proof that chasing everything you ever wanted, consequences be damned, irrevocably changes you into a twisted monster mimicking, poorly, human form if given enough time, it lies pulped in a lead coffin underneath El Escorial, gilded in stolen gold it couldn't take with it.
Design notes, I like how these came out, I think I'm finally getting the hang of these factions sheets. That's kinda all I got for this one. I'm tired and sad and hormonal. Text someone you haven't in a while, ask that girl out, put in some volunteer hours at your local charity instead of scheduling yourself for another 12 hours of doomscrolling in bed, I promise you they need and appreciate the labor. Just do something good while you still have breath in your lungs, you never know when you won't anymore. Maybe you can't fix the world as it is or heal the wounds other people's mistakes have scarred across this Earth, but you are alive. You have a choice, and you have it now. Do not let deeds like we discussed today be the only deeds that go down in history. Help someone you shouldn't, even if that's just asking if they're doing okay today, just because it's the right thing to do. If I can convince you to do that, if you, you, help just one life who otherwise might've been lost because you've seen for yourself just how mean we can be to each other, then this blog will have fulfilled its purpose.
I love you. Be kind.