Franciscans in the Americas

Franciscans in the Americas

The Franciscans sent the greatest number of missionaries to minister in the New World. This is quite likely due to the fact that they were the largest order in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1493, there were some 22,000 friars participating in various Franciscan observances. A large number of them were in Spain.

By 1517, this number had grown to 30,000, mainly due to reforms initiated by Cardinal Francisco de Cisneros in the simpler more relaxed Observant reform (which retained the name Order of Friars Minor). The Franciscan order has had a history marked by reforms and divisions. In 1517, Pope Leo X divided into two independent groups disgruntled Franciscans still unsatisfied by the medieval attempts at reform.

The result was a Conventual Franciscan group (those resisting change) and the Observant group, which would be called Friars Minor. A Capuchin reform surfaced in 1528 and became an independent group by 1619 (Order Friars Minor Capuchin). Among the three groups, the Franciscans had an overwhelming majority of religious representatives in the New World.


It has been suggested by historians that Franciscan missionaries, Friars Juan de la Deule and Juan de Tisin along with Father Ramón Pané, were the first members of a religious order to come to the Americas. These men accompanied Christopher Columbus in 1493 during his second expedition.

They had been sent by a special commission of the Franciscan order in response to royal instructions from the Spanish Crown aimed at bringing the natives of the Americas to Catholicism. Their initial chapel was built at Port Conception on Hispaniola, where in December of 1493 they offered Mass for the first time in the New World. A convent was built for them by Columbus at the stronghold of Santo Domingo.

Pane, probably more of a contemplative, accompanied Columbus on his voyage to Puerto Rico in 1496. Pane kept very exacting records of his activities and observations of the natives that have survived to this day. The Franciscans were at the vanguard of missionary activity on the newly discovered islands. In 1502, 17 more Franciscans arrived along with the first governor of Hispaniola. They would go on to build the first convent and church (San Francisco) at Santo Domingo.

Domingo became the base of operations for countless missionary expeditions to the north, south, and central continental mainland for many decades. During the next 25 years, more than 50 Franciscan missionaries attempted to evangelize the Caribbean islands, particularly Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Friar Juan de la Deule died while ministering to Jamaicans sometime between 1508 and 1511.

In 1512, Father García de Padilla was consecrated as bishop of Santo Domingo and, two years later, another Franciscan, Juan de Quevendo, was consecrated as the first bishop of the Central American mainland at Santa Maria Darién. The eastern part of Venezuela was also established as a Franciscan apostolic mission that lasted from 1514 to 1521.

Not until after 1576 were friaries founded in the province of Caracas. In the 17th century, the Capuchins attempted to evangelize in Venezuela. Francisco de Pamplona (a former military general) began work at Darién in 1650. The Capuchin houses located there refused to accept Creoles into the order.

Expeditions to Mexico

During 1523 and 1524, two Franciscan missionary expeditions set out for Mexico from Santo Domingo. The first friars among the Mexicans were Flemish. Among them was Father Peter of Ghent (d. 1562), who spent some 40 years among the native Mesoamericans. The following year 12 more Franciscans arrived. Around 1527, a diocese was organized under the Franciscan bishop Juan de Zumárraga.

At that point, some 70 Franciscan houses rapidly surfaced in Mexico and the region was raised in status to a province. Zumárraga is credited with setting up the first printing press in the New World. Publications in 12 languages were printed and distributed throughout the Americas.

Education of the Indian children of Mexico became a priority and labor of love among the friars. However, there was some opposition on the part of the Spanish government in regard to the education of the natives.

Most convents had schools where thousands of Mexican boys were taught to read, write, and sing. Eventually the Franciscans assisted with the development of a school for girls in Mexico City. Several colleges were also founded for the sons of tribal chiefs throughout Mexico; they became centers for further missionary activity to both South and North America.

Before the end of the 16th century, friars extended missionary efforts from Guadalajara in the northwest to New Mexico in the north, northeast to the Gulf of Mexico, and south to the Yucatán, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

Beautiful churches were constructed at Huejotzingo, Tlamanalco, Huequechula, Izamal, and Cholula. Friars Pedro de Betanzos and Francisco de la Parra became experts in the Mayan language and have handed down keys to its translation. By 1569, there were some 300 Franciscan missionaries in New Spain (Mexico) alone.

Missions to Peru

Missionary efforts to Peru were launched by Franciscans from Santo Domingo, after 1527 by Juan de los Santos, and followed by Marcos de Niza between 1531 and 1532. Earlier, Franciscans accompanied Pizarro during his conquest and exploration of the region. Evangelization progressed fairly slowly in Peru for the first 20 years due to the animosity between natives and the Spanish invaders.

From Santa Cruz eight missionaries were sent out to Peru. Friar Francisco de Aragón took 12 Franciscans and traveled south to form the main trunk from which communities in Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia grew. A center for ministry was established at Quito as well as a college.

By 1549, a supervisor was sent to Lima to coordinate all Franciscans in the southern part of the continent. It was not until 1553 that Peru saw permanent Franciscan establishments. In Ecuador a Franciscan province was erected in 1565. Missionary activity to the east and south continued.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, many friars were lost to martyrdom in the territories of the Ucayali and the region north of the Amazon. Franciscans count 129 friar deaths on the Ucayali alone. In 1742, most of these centers of ministry were destroyed during native uprisings.

It took 50 years to restore the Franciscan missions in these areas. Attempts by Franciscans to evangelize Chile were gravely disappointing. Between 1553 and 1750, repeated hostilities between Spanish settlers and natives made activity in the region difficult.

Not until Chilean independence in 1832 did the friars resume their missionary work. In the southern part of Chile and Bolivia the Franciscans were more successful. Seven missionary colleges were established and Franciscans ministered to the people of Bolivia between the 16th and 19th centuries.

They reached Paraguay in the early 1600s and Uruguay a century later. In Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru, the Franciscan missionary St. Francis Solano (1549–1610), who was said to have had the gift of tongues (having learned numerous native languages), spent 14 years ministering to colonists and natives. He is still held in highest regard among descendants of the indigenous people of South America.

Franciscans in Florida

Franciscans arrived in Florida in 1573, eight years after the first permanent Spanish settlement. A larger influx of friars in 1587 and again in 1589 helped with the conversion of the Guale.

Many of the northern tribes of Florida were urban dwellers, so the Franciscans attempted to move into their cities and live among the people. Soon a chain of missions were established along the Atlantic coast for some 250 miles. However, during Indian uprisings of 1597, five Franciscan friars were martyred.

In 1612, the Franciscan province of Santa Elena, which was headquartered in Havana, Cuba, began to supervise missionary work in Florida. At its peak in 1675, some 40 friars maintained 36 missions and the bishop of Havana claimed 13,000 native souls and about 30,000 total Catholics (which might be an exaggeration) under his care.

Eventually, the Franciscan missions would fall victim to the struggle between England and Spain over the territory between St. Augustine and Charleston. Slaving raids, armed conflicts, and British alliances with Native American tribes caused the Florida missions to vanish. By 1706, most Franciscan houses in Florida had ceased to function.

By 1680, there were more than 60,000 Franciscan friars worldwide. This may have had to do with the growing number of friaries (2,113 in 1585 and 4,050 in 1762). There were 16 provinces in the Spanish Americas alone.

By the middle of the 18th century, at least a third of all Franciscan houses and friars were in the Spanish New World. Some of this growth reflected an increase in the number of native Franciscans in the Americas, especially in the 16th century. In fact, in Mexico, Spanish friars began to constitute a thin minority by the mid-1600s.

Texas Settlements

Texas began to be settled by Franciscans while the area was still linked to New Spain. Some missionaries refer to the areas occupied by Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California as the New Kingdom of St. Francis.

There was trouble in 1680; the Pueblo Revolt saw the uprising of many Native Americans, primarily in response to the denigration of their religion by the Spanish Franciscans as well as the disruption of the Pueblo economy. Under the direction of Popé, the revolt was successful, and Popé ruled from the former governor’s palace until his death in 1688.

Shortly after his death, the Spanish returned, reconquering the land without bloodshed by offering clemency to the inhabitants. In 1690, permanent missions began to be founded in the area of Texas, mostly through the efforts of Father Damian Mazanet.

Many Indians in Texas were open to accepting the Christian gospel. During the 1700s, some 21 Franciscan missions staffed by more than 160 friars were established in Texas and thousands of Indians embraced the faith.

During the mid-1700s, many were constructed in magnificent fashion of stone; some included fortress walls. Several examples of these still survive, particularly in the area around San Antonio, Texas. After the period of Mexican independence in the early 1800s, a large number of these missions were left to ruin.

While Mexico and Arizona had Franciscan visitors in the 1500s, it was not until the early 17th century that there was any permanent activity there. Father Juan de Padilla died in the region for his faith in 1542 during an early expedition.

By 1628, there were 43 churches and an estimate of some 30,000 Catholics (native and Spanish) in the territories. The Franciscans were the only missionaries to minister there and it has been recorded that nearly 300 Franciscans preached in the area during the 16th and 17th centuries. California did not experience Franciscan activity until 1769.

The work of Father Junípero Serra and his assistants saw the founding of 21 permanent missions extending from the initial foundation in San Diego north to San Francisco. For the next 100 years, 144 friars would labor in California, resulting in an estimated 80,000 baptisms among Native Americans and settlers.

English American Missions

In the English American colonies there was some isolated Franciscan activity in the late 1600s as well as some activity in French Canada in the early part of the 17th century. Between 1672 and 1699, English friars assisted the Jesuits with work in Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota. The only permanent success seems to have been in Detroit. However, even that region was unstable. In 1706, the Franciscan priest Constantine Dehalle was killed in an Indian uprising.

Father Gabrielle de la Ribaude also gave his life near Joliet, on the banks of the Illinois River, in 1681. In New France (Canada) the first missionaries in the region were four French Franciscans in Quebec around 1615. They spent the 10 years ministering to the Huron and Algonquins in the regions of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes.

Father Nicholas Veil was the first Franciscan to be martyred in Canada. By 1630, the British ended friar activity in most of Canada. Some work continued among the Abnaki in Nova Scotia and Arcadia until around 1633.

A group of explorers led by the Franciscan Father Louis Hennepin (1640–1701) sailed from Niagara Falls down the Mississippi. Hennepin wrote several accounts of his adventures. One of the last of the formative Franciscan missionaries in Canada was Father Emanuel Crespel, whose efforts extended all the way to the Fox River in Wisconsin during the 1720s.

Historical information on Franciscan activities during the 17th and 18th centuries is not as abundant as that of the 16th century formative period. Heroic tales of martyrs and founders survived in the form of oral traditions, written accounts, and records kept by the order. By the 17th century, the scope and goals of missionary and evangelical activity began to change.

By then it was even more necessary to educate and catechize as well as bring European culture and ideas to the native inhabitants. Dealing with a second generation of settlers, the arrival of new Europeans, as well as the issue of intermarriage, preoccupied the friars.

The mission foundations, or doctrinas, began to evolve into parishes (some were exclusively native, others were urban European, and there were many mixed communities). It was also customary to hand many of the more successful parishes and mission foundations over to diocesan secular clergy, freeing many Franciscans to attend to ministry in the more remote areas.

As the 18th century progressed, growing control by the secular clergy eventually gave way to the specialization of the Franciscans in attending to new and more isolated missionary territories in addition to the establishment of missionary colleges directed at the propagation of the faith.

Epidemics in The Americas

Epidemics in The Americas

The European encounter with the Americas after 1491 set in motion a demographic catastrophe among indigenous peoples across the hemisphere, specifically epidemic and pandemic diseases against which native peoples had no biological immunities, and a crucial component of the larger Columbian exchange between the Old World and New.

The precise characteristics and magnitude of this catastrophe remain a matter of scholarly debate. Population estimates for the Americas on the eve of the encounter vary widely. The most reputable estimates fall between 40 and 100 million for the hemisphere as a whole, a population reduced by an estimated overall average of 75 to 95 percent after the first 150 years of contact, with tremendous variations in time and space.

Colonial Latin America and The Circum-Caribbean

Central Mexico is the most intensively studied region regarding the impact of European diseases on indigenous demography. Where in 1520 there lived an estimated 25 million native peoples, in 1620 there lived some 730,000—a decline of 97 percent, attributed overwhelmingly to disease.


Similar catastrophes unfolded across the hemisphere. The most precipitous decline is thought to have occurred in the Caribbean, where the precontact indigenous population of several millions had been all but exterminated by the 1550s.

Such diseases spread rapidly in all directions, preceding and accompanying military incursions, weakening indigenous polities, and facilitating the process of conquest and colonization in the Caribbean, Mexico, the Andes, Brazil, New England, and beyond. This process of demographic catastrophe, an unintended consequence of the European encounter with the Western Hemisphere, affected every aspect of the subsequent history of the Americas.

In the English-speaking world, the predominant view for centuries regarding Indian depopulation in postconquest Spanish America centered on the “Black Legend” of Spanish atrocities, a view most forcefully articulated and propagated by the Spanish bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas in the 1500s.

By the early 2000s, a scholarly consensus had emerged that the principal cause of indigenous population declines was in fact pandemic and epidemic diseases. The exact sequence and timing varied greatly from place to place. Every locale had its unique history of demographic decline, with periodic outbreaks of various pathogens: smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, yellow fever, diphtheria, bubonic plague, malaria, and others.

Far and away the deadliest killer was smallpox, the first documented New World outbreak occurring in the Caribbean in 1518. Spanish friars, reporting to King Charles V in January 1519, estimated that the disease had already killed nearly one-third of Hispaniola’s Indians and had spread to Puerto Rico. In these earliest outbreaks, influenza probably accompanied the spread of smallpox.

By the early 1520s, three principal disease vectors, mainly of smallpox and influenza, were spreading rapidly through indigenous populations. One had entered through northern South America near the junction with the Central American isthmus, and by the late 1520s had spread far into the interior along the northern Andes.

The second had entered along the gulf coast of Mexico, from Yucatán to present-day Veracruz, and by mid-1521 was decimating the population of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. By the late 1520s, this second vector had bifurcated, spreading south into Central America and north into western and northern Mexico, where it was poised to sweep farther north.

The third disease vector was launched with the first exploratory expeditions along the Pacific coast of Central America and Peru, beginning in the early 1520s. By the late 1520s, this third vector had also bifurcated, spreading north through Nicaragua and Guatemala, and in less than a decade racing 3,000 miles south down the Andes, reaching as far as southern Bolivia.

A fourth set of vectors began spreading inland from the Brazilian coast from the beginning of permanent settlements in the early 1550s. By the late 1550s and early 1560s, the epidemics had spread along much of the Brazilian coast and were sweeping into the interior.

Widespread death from disease weakened indigenous polities, engendering profound cultural crises and facilitating processes of conquest and colonization. The most dramatic and extensively documented such instance occurred in Tenochtitlán during the conquest of Mexico, where a major smallpox outbreak coincided with the Spanish invaders’ siege of the island city.

From May to August 1521, as many as 100,000 of the city’s inhabitants succumbed to the disease. The smallpox virus typically enters the victim’s respiratory tract, where it incubates for eight to 10 days, followed by fever and general malaise, then the eruptions of papules, then vesicles, and finally large weeping pustules covering the entire body, followed soon after by death.

Scholars agree that this smallpox epidemic, occurring just as their empire and capital city were under assault by the Spanish and their Indian allies, fatally weakened the Aztec capacity to mount an effective resistance.

A similar if distinctive dynamic is thought to have unfolded before and during the conquest of Peru. Again, the timing of the Spanish invasion could not have been more propitious. Less than a decade before the incursion of Francisco Pizarro in 1532, the vast Inca Empire was in relative tranquility under a unified ruling house.

Around 1525–28, at the height of the Inca Huayna-Capac’s northern campaign against recalcitrant indigenous polities around Quito, an unknown pestilence, probably smallpox, ravaged the northern zones. During this epidemic, the Inca was struck by fever and died.

Spanish chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León recorded that the first outbreak of the disease around Quito killed more than 200,000 people. Other chroniclers offered similar descriptions of a wave of pestilence in the northern districts during this same period.

Huayna Capac’s death set in motion a crisis of dynastic succession and civil war that Pizarro deftly exploited to the Spaniards’ advantage. Contributing to the spread of the disease was the Andean tradition of venerating the mummified corpses, as thousands of indigenous Andeans came into contact with the dead Inca and those who ritually had prepared his body.

During this early period, more politically decentralized zones including the Central American isthmus, the Maya regions, northern South America, and the Brazilian coast and hinterlands were also severely stricken, facilitating Spanish and Portuguese incursions less by exacerbating elite divisions or shattering cosmologies than by the sheer magnitude of the deaths.

Almost everywhere that Europeans intruded, indigenous polities, societies, and cultures became profoundly weakened by maladies with no precedent and no cure, as emphasized repeatedly in scores of locales by a diversity of Spanish, mestizo, and indigenous chroniclers.

The second major pandemic to sweep large parts of the Americas was measles, beginning in the early 1530s. From the Caribbean islands the pathogen quickly spread to Mesoamerica, South America, and Florida, causing mortality rates estimated at 25–30 percent. Outbreaks of bubonic and pneumonic plague began erupting around the same time.

In the mid-1540s, came another series of waves of epidemics across large parts of Mesoamerica and the Andes. The precise bacterial or viral agents responsible for the “great sickness” that swept Central Mexico in the 1540s remain the subject of debate, though the evidence suggests typhus, pulmonary plague, mumps, dysentery, or combinations of these.

There is little disagreement that the death rates thus generated were extremely high, as upward of a million natives in New Spain succumbed to the collection of epidemic diseases in the 1540s. By this time, bubonic plague, typhus, and other pathogens had spread to the Pueblo Indians in the Southwest and to Florida.

The spread of epidemic diseases swept inland from Florida beginning in the 1520s and perhaps earlier. The odyssey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his small party of shipwreck survivors across the U.S. South and Southwest (1528–37) is thought to have introduced numerous diseases to the native inhabitants.

In particular, the expedition of Hernando De Soto from Florida through the North American Southeast to the Mississippi River Valley (1538–42) is believed to have wreaked tremendous ecological damage, introducing previously unknown pathogens across large parts of the interior.

By the time of sustained European encounters with these regions, beginning in the 1680s, the dense populations and many towns and settlements described by De Soto more than a century before had vanished, leaving behind a landscape largely denuded of its human inhabitants.

Local and regional studies show endless variations on these more general themes, with wave after wave of epidemic diseases wreaking demographic havoc for centuries after the initial encounter. In Brazil, the creation of numerous disease vectors along the coast from the 1550s to the 1650s, diseases often carried by African slaves, generated repeated epidemics of smallpox, typhus, and other pathogens that dramatically reduced populations in the interior.

The disease chronology of northwestern Mexico in the first half of the 17th century illustrates the more general pattern of repeated outbreaks, which in this case were recorded in 1601–02, 1606–07, 1612–15, 1616–17, 1619–20, 1623–25, 1636–41, 1645–47, and 1652–53.

In his classic study of the postconquest Valley of Mexico, Charles Gibson recorded major disease outbreaks every few years, with 50 major epidemics from 1521 to 1810, an average of a major epidemic every six years.

Colonial North America

The Pilgrims in Massachusetts and the first Europeans to settle on the coast of Maryland and Virginia found a nearly empty country. Almost nine-tenths of the former Native American populations had been wiped out by smallpox in an epidemic of 1618–19.

John Winthrop, the leader of colonial Massachusetts, commented in 1684: “For the native, they are neere all dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.” This Puritan leader and others felt that this disease was God’s plan to make land available for Europeans by eliminating the Native Americans who had previously occupied it.

Smallpox followed the priests, explorers, traders, soldiers, and settlers from Europe into the heartland of the North American continent. The Hurons were affected in 1640, the Iroquois in 1662. In British North America, smallpox indirectly promoted the growth of institutions of higher learning. Wealthy colonial families sent their sons to England to educate them.

Many of these young men, born in North America, did not have the immunity to smallpox their fellow students in England possessed. Enough of these young men from the colonies contracted and died from smallpox while being educated in Europe that colonial North Americans founded their own colleges, including Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale.

In some cases, smallpox was spread to North American indigenous peoples intentionally, as a form of germ warfare. During the American Revolution, American troops were victims of the disease during a campaign in Quebec. George Washington successfully had the susceptible American troops inoculated. British troops, who had grown up in England and Ireland, had immunity to the disease.

By the time George Vancouver explored the Pacific coasts of what would become Washington State and the Province of British Columbia, he found entire villages of Native Americas in ruins and deserted with skeletons lying all around. By the 20th century, smallpox had wiped out as much as 90 percent of the preconquest Native American population.

In sum, the impact of hitherto unknown European diseases on indigenous societies unleashed a demographic cataclysm across the Western Hemisphere, representing one of the most important chapters in the history of the postconquest Americas, whose characteristics and impacts scholars are still grappling to comprehend.

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was the Spanish explorer who led the expedition looking for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola rumored to be located in south-western North America. Coronado served in the entourage of Antonio de Mendoza, Spain’s first viceroy to Mexico.

He served as governor of New Galicia from 1538–39, when he was named the commander of the expedition Mendoza was putting together to look for the Seven Cities of Cibola. The expedition spent 1540–42 looking for the cities, but did not find them. After the expeditions returned to Mexico, Coronado faded into obscurity and died in 1554.

Born into a wealthy family in Burgos, Spain, in 1510, Coronado decided to go to the New World to make his fortune. He arrived in Mexico in 1535 as part of Mendoza’s following, where he was appointed as governor of New Galicia in August 1538. New Galicia was a frontier outpost on Spain’s northernmost border of Mexico.

During the preceding years, rumors had circulated in Mexico of a fabulously rich kingdom of seven cities called Cibola in the American Southwest. In 1539, Mendoza determined to send an expedition into that area to find the Seven Cities of Cibola, and he named Coronado to command the expedition.


The expedition set out on April 22, 1540, and headed where the first of the cities was supposedly located. Arriving on July 7, Coronado discovered only an unimpressive pueblo village. Attacking the village Coronado was knocked out by a stone and almost killed, but was saved by two of his officers.

The Spanish eventually captured the village, and Coronado made the pueblo his temporary camp from which he sent out parties to scout the surrounding area in hopes of finding Cibola.

These parties scouted a large part of the American Southwest and were the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon. In November 1540, the main body of the expedition caught up with Coronado. He then moved his base camp into the valley of the Rio Grande in December, where they spent the winter forcing the local natives to give them food and warm clothing.

The expedition set out again in spring, leaving camp on April 22, 1541. They moved east into Texas and then southwest. They picked up a local guide, who told them of rich kingdoms to the north. Coronado sent most of the expedition back to the previous winter’s camp and headed north with a small group of horsemen to try to find these kingdoms.

The rich villages turned out to be Wichita Indian villages made up of grass huts along the Arkansas River in what would become Kansas. Finding no gold, Coronado returned to his camp. In December 1541, Coronado was thrown from his horse under another horse and nearly killed. The following April, Coronado decided to return to Mexico.

Upon returning to Mexico, Coronado lost his governorship and was charged with incompetence and mistreating the local natives. He was cleared of both charges but never held another command or office. He died in 1542.

Columbian Exchange

Columbian Exchange

Two ecological systems, evolved for thousands of years in near total isolation from each other, suddenly thrust together, flooding each side with the organisms of the other over the course of nearly five centuries—this is the concept of the Columbian exchange, a term coined by historian Alfred W. Crosby in 1972 to describe the biological intermingling of the Old World and New World in the centuries following the first contacts of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans.

Encompassing all classes of animals, plants, and microbes, and the attendant cultural and social transformations they engendered, the Columbian exchange forever transformed the face of the planet and represents one of the most important consequences of the European encounter with the Americas.

Plants comprised one broad category of this centuries-long biotic exchange. In 1951, Russian botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov listed 640 of humanity’s most important cultigens. Of these, more than 500 originated in the Americas.


Among the most important staple crops of the Western Hemisphere to make their way to Europe, Africa, and beyond were maize, beans (of many varieties), potatoes and sweet potatoes, squashes and pumpkins, peanuts, and manioc (cassava).

Also important were the papaya, guava, avocado, pineapple, tomato, chili peppers of many varieties, and cacao. Maize cultivation originated in Mesoamerica around 5000 b.c.e. before spreading to both South and North America at least 1,000 years before the European arrival.

The most important staple crop of the Americas, maize soon became one of the most important cultigens in both Europe and Africa. Beans, of which there are more than a thousand species, formed one pillar of the maize-beans-squash triad of staple crops common among many pre-Columbian American cultivators.

Not all beans are American in origin—soybeans, for instance, originated in the Eastern Hemisphere—but many of the most popular varieties are American, including the lima, Rangoon, kidney, navy, snap, and frijole beans (pinto, red, black, and others).

Potatoes, indigenous to the Andes, were developed into hundreds of varieties in the centuries before 1500. After the conquest of Peru, Spaniards selected several varieties to transport back home, particularly the white potato, which soon spread across much of Europe.

Wealthier classes tended to look upon the potato as a quasi-food, while for many of the poor it became an important staple crop, most infamously in Ireland, where overreliance on a few varieties led to the Irish famine of the 1840s. Another tuberous American starch was manioc.

Known in its form as tapioca pudding among many Europeans, and as cassava across much of Africa and Asia, where it became an important staple crop and famine food, manioc has very little nutritional value but grows where many other cultigens will not, thriving in a broad belt extending 30 degrees north and south of the equator.

Far and away the most important nonfood cultigens transferred from the Americas to the Old World were tobacco and coffee, both of which rapidly became extremely popular in Europe before their subsequent spread across the globe. Also important were some varieties of cotton, and, from the 19th century, rubber.

The most important plant crops making their way from the Old World to the Americas included wheat, rice, bananas, sugar, grapes, olives, mangos, breadfruit, and African yams. Also important were chickpeas, melons, onions, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, and radishes. European fruits transplanted to the New World included oranges, lemons, pomegranates, citrons, and figs. Wheat was taken to New Spain soon after the conquest of Mexico.

By 1535, New Spain was exporting wheat to the Caribbean and beyond, while wheat cultivation soon spread to wherever conditions permitted. Bananas were taken to the Antilles from the Canary Islands in 1516, after which banana cultivation spread rapidly throughout the Caribbean Basin and beyond.

Sugar, originating in the Mediterranean and cultivated in the Canary Islands and Azores in the 1400s, was taken to Hispaniola in 1493 by Columbus. Its subsequent spread in the Spanish Antilles was slow until the Spanish Crown intervened actively to promote its cultivation, while its spread in Brazil was due mainly to the actions of planters.

Grape cultivation, overwhelmingly for wine production, met many obstacles in the Caribbean and New Spain but proved successful in Peru and Chile; by the 1650s, they were producing wine for export. Olives followed a similar path, with initial failures in the Antilles and New Spain followed by success in Andean highland valleys.

Another category of plants consisted of weeds, plants for which people had not devised a use, and whose exchange across the Atlantic was unintended; examples include the dandelion, daisy, and Kentucky bluegrass. Though no definitive study has determined the precise number of such species exchanged, there is little doubt that it runs into the thousands.

Animals

The introduction of cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats also profoundly affected peoples and cultures across the Americas, with important regional variations. Pigs proliferated across the Caribbean from early on, and there were few places thereafter where abundant pigs did not accompany both Spanish and Portuguese or were not adopted by indigenous Americans.

Cattle ranching emerged as an important economic pillar across much of the hemisphere, with beef, hides, and tallow becoming major commodities across most of the Americas save the Amazon Basin and the Andes. Sheep thrived especially on the high plateau of Central Mexico and Rio Grande Basin, the Andes, and across southern South America.

Native peoples were quick to adopt whatever of these animals the environment permitted, generating widespread variations across the hemisphere. The unintended consequences of sheep and cattle proliferation in some regions included widespread overgrazing and soil erosion.

During the colonial period, the environmental effects of unrestrained sheep herding in central and northern Mexico were especially deleterious. Animals unintentionally taken to the Americas by Europeans included thousands of species of insects, rats, and a variety of other vermin.

Animals comprised another broad category of organisms exchanged between Old World and New. The pre-Columbian Americas had no beasts of burden save the camelids of the Andes, the llama and alpaca. Other domesticated New World animals included the guinea pig, dog, turkey, and duck.

European introductions included horses, donkeys, mules, cattle, oxen, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, and many varieties of larger dogs. While many indigenous peoples rejected wheat and other European crops, many also readily adopted these four-legged European domesticates.

The horse, several varieties of which had evolved in the Americas and become extinct at the beginning of the Holocene, exercised a profound influence across the hemisphere. From the Argentine pampas to the Great Plains of North America, horses and their kin transformed fundamental aspects of society and culture, beginning with their introduction into the Antilles by Christopher Columbus in 1493.

Herds of wild horses spread quickly north after the conquest of Mexico, reaching the Great Plains by the mid-1700s and perhaps before. The introduction of horses to South America is generally attributed to Pedro de Mendoza’s few animals taken to Buenos Aires in 1535. Fifty years later, vast herds populated the vast open prairies of the pampas.

Pathogens

A selesai and monumentally important category of organisms exchanged between Old World and New consisted of microbes. While the vast majority were harmless, a handful were deadly pathogens responsible for one of the most precipitous and widespread demographic declines in world history.

The overwhelming direction of the flow of disease was from Europe to the Americas. By the 16th century, after centuries of plagues and epidemics, European peoples inhabited a highly evolved disease pool in which immunities to the most virulent pathogens were widely shared.

Such immunities did not exist in the Americas, although a wide variety of diseases were endemic in the Western Hemisphere, including tuberculosis, histoplasmosis, leishmaniasis, Chagas’ disease, amebic dysentery, various rickettsial fevers, syphilis, and many types of intestinal parasites. Of the diseases transplanted from Europe to the Americas, smallpox was the deadliest killer, along with typhus, measles, bubonic plague, and malaria.

The one pathogen that migrated the other way was syphilis, a disease and a process of transmission that spawned a huge body of literature and debate. A broad scholarly consensus emerging from this debate holds that both venereal syphilis and an endemic nonvenereal strain (caused by various strains of the bacterium Treponema pallidum) were most likely first contracted by European men through sexual relations with indigenous women and spread by the captured Indians taken to the Spanish court by Columbus in 1493.

It is believed that the epidemic that spread among the men of Christopher Columbus at the garrison of Isabela on Hispaniola in 1493 during the conquest of the Caribbean was a form of syphilis, probably contracted through the rape of Indian women.

The disease was unknown in Europe before 1493. By 1496, it had spread to France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Greece, and by 1503, to China, spreading farther and becoming endemic thereafter.

In sum, scholarly debates and investigations continue on these and many other environmental and biological consequences engendered by the coming together of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas after 1492.

John and Sebastian Cabot - European Explorers

John Cabot

Key figures among the European explorers during the age of discovery whose exploits gave important knowledge of the Americas to their European patrons, John Cabot (c. 1451–98) and his son, Sebastian Cabot (c. 1483–1557), have long been a source of controversy and speculation regarding various aspects of their lives and achievements. Probably born in Genoa around 1451, John Cabot moved to Venice in his youth, where he became a naturalized citizen.

Believing, like Christopher Columbus, that he could reach the Far East by sailing west, he journeyed to England in the 1480s, residing mainly in Bristol until March 1496, when King Henry VII granted him the authority to launch an expedition of discovery in his name. Sailing from Bristol on May 20, 1497, with one ship and a crew of 18, he reached the North American coast on June 24. It is not known whether his son, Sebastian, accompanied him.

The precise location of his landing is a matter of some dispute but is generally believed to be Cape Breton Island. Cabot is conventionally credited with “discovering” North America on behalf of his English patrons, even though the fish-rich seas off the coast of northern North America had been visited for most of the previous century by commercial fishermen of various European nationalities.

Regardless of which European first sighted the North American mainland during this era, Cabot’s claims of discovery became the basis for English claims to North America.


Rewarded for his discovery with an annual pension of 20 pounds, Cabot launched a second voyage in 1498. He was never heard from again and is presumed to have died in or near North America. His son, Sebastian, also received a patent from the king of England to continue the explorations begun by his father.

Searching for the fabled Northwest Passage through the Americas to the Far East, he is generally believed to have explored the northern shores of North America, perhaps sailing as far as Hudson Bay, in 1508–09. In 1512, he switched patrons, entering the Spanish service under Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Sebastian Cabot

In 1518, he was named chief pilot, and in 1526, following the return of the ship of Ferdinand Magellan, he sailed to the Río de la Plata region of southern South America, probably searching for gold and other treasure.

In 1530, after the expedition had largely failed, he returned to Spain. In 1548, he switched patrons again, returning to England and in 1553 becoming governor of a joint-stock company, later known as the Muscovy Company, much of whose capital was expended in the failed effort to discover the Northwest Passage.

One of the company’s expeditions did reach the White Sea, culminating in a commercial treaty with Russia and substantial weakening of the Hanseatic League. Sebastian Cabot claimed for himself many of the discoveries and achievements of his father. Until the work of 19th-century scholars, it was thought that Sebastian, not John, had “discovered” North America for the English.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was the first European to see and travel through the U.S. Southwest and author of one of the most remarkable tales in the history of exploration.

He and several companions survived a shipwreck off the Texas coast in 1528, were enslaved by Indians, escaped, and spent the next eight years wandering westward through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and possibly California before turning south into Mexico and reuniting with their countrymen. His official report of this remarkable odyssey of some 6,200 miles, submitted to the king under the title La Relación (The Account), was published in 1542.


His report stirred the Spanish imagination with its speculations about the fabled “Seven Cities of Cibola,” which he claimed lay just to the north of the lands through which he had journeyed, while also providing modern-day scholars with an unprecedented glimpse into Native American society and culture before the Spanish invasion and conquest of portions of the U.S. Southwest after 1550.

Born in Jérez, Andalusia, Spain about 1490, Álvar Núñez was the grandson of Pedro de Vera, renowned for his ruthless conquest of the Canary Islands in the early and mid-1400s. (Cabeza de vaca, or “cow’s head,” was an honorific title bestowed on his mother’s side of the family from an incident in the reconquest of Iberia dating to the year 1212; this explorer is often referred to simply as Álvar Núñez.)

Cabeza de Vaca statue in Texas

After a distinguished military career in Spain from 1511 to the 1520s, in 1527 he was appointed second in command of an expedition of conquest in Florida led by Pánfilo de Narváez. It was Narváez’s bungling leadership, along with bad luck and bad weather, that eventually led to the shipwreck off the coast of Texas, whence the Cabeza de Vaca’s overland odyssey commenced.

Certain features of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación have received particular attention. One concerns the customs and lifestyles of the indigenous peoples whose paths he and his companions crossed. Descriptions of their foods, material cultures, gender relations, marriage rites, celebrations, religious beliefs and practices, languages, methods of warfare, and relations with other groups captivated European readers.

Cabeza de Vaca’s personal transformation is another element of the book that readers find striking. Stripped of the accoutrements of European civilization, Cabeza de Vaca grows humbler, more spiritual, and more appreciative and sympathetic with his native hosts.

His journey has thus been interpreted as both a literal journey across unknown lands, and an inner spiritual journey in which he comes to acknowledge the humanity of the Indians. This is reflected, some maintain, in the reputation he and his companions earned as healers.

Cabeza de Vaca Monument

Time and again they reportedly cured the ailments of those soliciting their assistance, an aspect of his Relación that has aroused considerable attention. In the 1930s, the scholars Carl Sauer and Cleve Hallenbeck attempted to retrace Cabeza de Vaca’s overland journey. Hallenbeck’s account is still considered the definitive study on the topic.

After reuniting with his countrymen and returning to Spain in 1537, Cabeza de Vaca was appointed governor of the Río de la Plata region. Undertaking further remarkable overland odysseys in South America, he ran afoul of the authorities, was imprisoned for two years, and was sent back to Spain, where he was found guilty but pardoned by the king.

His odyssey inspired an award-winning film (Cabeza de Vaca, 1991), further testimony to the enduring interest inspired by his extraordinary odyssey as described in his Relación.

Bull of Demarcation

Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas threatened to intensify the rivalry between the Catholic kingdoms of Spain (Castile) and Portugal into open warfare. Both kingdoms wanted to claim all newly discovered lands that were not Christian, that is, not Catholic.

The Line of Demarcation was Pope Alexander IV’s solution to this problem. He issued the Bull of Demarcation to prevent Spain and Portugal from battling over new territories with resources such as gold. The bull successfully prevented a war between Spain and Portugal in the 16th century.

Neither the pope nor the Spanish or Portuguese actually knew what this line was dividing. The knowledge of the lands west of Europe was sketchy, and most people thought that the land Columbus had reached was part of Asia.

The pope may have believed that the Spanish would reach the same lands sailing west over the Atlantic that the Portuguese would reach sailing east around Africa. Previously in 1455, 1456, and 1481, popes had issued bulls about newly discovered land, although they had no knowledge of the actual geography of the earth.

The Roman Catholic nations left out of these bulls, including the French and Dutch, paid no attention to the papal decrees. The power of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages had guided all international affairs in Europe up to the 15th century. France and Holland ignored the document, showing that the temporal power of the church was waning.

When Columbus returned from the Americas, he stopped in Portugal before going to back to the court of Ferdinand V and Isabella I of Spain. King João II of Portugal claimed the lands Columbus told him about even though the explorer had sailed for the Spanish monarchs.

Ferdinand and Isabella appealed to Pope Alexander VI, a Spaniard, for a solution. He issued the Inter caetera, the papal Bull of Demarcation, which was very biased toward Spain.

This document conferred all non-Christian lands found west of the designated line to Spain to explore and convert to Christianity. Portugal was to have all non-Christian lands east of the line. This decree in principle shut the Portuguese out of the Americas.

Dissatisfied, the Portuguese appealed to both the pope and Spain. Two more papal bulls followed—Examinae devotionis and another Inter caetera. These documents drew a line 100 leagues west of Cape Verde Islands.

Discoveries east of the line were to belong to Portugal, and discoveries west of the line were to belong to Spain. This resulted in Spain’s domination of all of South and Central America except Brazil, which the Portuguese claimed. The Treaty of Tordesillas modified the papal bull in 1494.

The Bull of Demarcation and later decrees gave the rights to colonize, exploit, and convert all non-Christian territory to Catholicism. These decrees treated all newly discovered nations and people as property and disregarded all non-Christian governments the Catholic explorers found.

Later the church realized these bulls were the cause of the enslavement and brutalization of native peoples and tried to emphasize peaceful, noncoerced conversion to Christianity. But it was too late; the system of Europeans’ forcibly taking control of non-Christian lands was already entrenched in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

There have been modern movements for the revocation of these papal bulls. Indigenous peoples feel they were used for the subjugation of non-Christian indigenous peoples and should be rescinded to reflect modern thinking.

Certainly, the leaders in Rome could not have foreseen the horrendous decimation of native peoples that the conquest by the European powers caused. The Falkland War of the 1980s was in part justified by Argentina’s claim that the Falkland Islands is based on the Inter caetera. However, the Treaty of Madrid in 1750 annulled the boundary line.