Basin of Mexico

Like a giant bowl gouged out of the Earth, ringed by mountains and active volcanoes, the Basin of Mexico, the site of contemporary Mexico City, is one of the world’s most ancient and important cradles of human civilization. Conventionally called the Valley of Mexico, this singular geographic feature has no outlet to the sea, and thus technically is a basin, not a valley.

Tectonically unstable, ranging in elevation from 2,000 to 2,400 meters above sea level, and extending roughly 110 kilometers north to south and 80 kilometers east to west, the Basin of Mexico covers an area of approximately 7,000 square kilometers. Prior to the conquest of Mexico, the basin’s diverse ecological zones saw the rise and fall of diverse city-states and kingdoms.

Because it formed a closed hydrological system, and because it has ample volcanic and alluvial soils, the basin evolved a complex network of lakes, streams, and springs that also made it one of the richest and most productive ecological zones in all of Mesoamerica.

The basin’s first human inhabitants, arriving some 15,000 years ago, found an environment teeming with life—not only birds, fish, plants, and insects but a staggering diversity of mammals like rabbit, fox, pigs, deer, wolves, as well as camelids, horses, mammoths, mastadons, giant sloths, bears, and other large prey.


Initially a hunter’s paradise, the basin had by 9,000 years ago seen its largest fauna become extinct, probably due to a combination of climate change and anthropogenic pressures. The beginnings of maize cultivation, which later provided the economic underpinnings for the development of complex societies and civilizations across Mesoamerica and beyond, began in or near the basin around 5,000 b.c.e.

It is hypothesized that the absence of large draft animals suitable for domestication delayed for several thousand years the emergence of fully sedentary societies. As late as 1,000 b.c.e., the entire basin was home to an estimated 10,000 inhabitants—a tiny fraction of its carrying capacity, and of what it would be two millennia later.

Beginning around 1100 b.c.e., in the basin’s wetter southern zones, conscious manipulation of the basin’s abundant water resources marked the beginnings of an agricultural revolution, and along with it of complex societies that relatively quickly developed into large-scale state systems.

Around 500 b.c.e., to the northeast the construction of irrigation ditches and other water-control mechanisms permitted the emergence of the basin’s first true city and state, Teotihuacán. Around the same time, a host of other polities emerged around the five interconnected shallow lakes that dominated the basin’s center—from south to north Lakes Chalco, Xochililco, Texcoco, Xaltocán, and Zupango.

From around 100 b.c.e., and continuing for the next 16 centuries, there emerged an exceedingly intricate array of polities, kingdoms, and city-states across the basin, most with their capital cities located near the lakes at the basin’s center, the exact sequence and relationships of which scholars are still endeavoring to understand. The Aztecs built their capital city Tenochtitlán atop what began as a small island on the western edge of Lake Texcoco, the basin’s central and largest lake.

By the time of the Spanish arrival in 1519, the Basin of Mexico was home to an estimated 2 million to 3 million people, making it one of the most densely packed areas in the world, with an average population density of from 300 to 500 persons per square kilometer.

After the conquest, the Spanish devoted enormous resources to draining the giant lakes. In the early 21st century, the Basin of Mexico was home to the world’s second-largest megalopolis and an estimated 25 million to 30 million people.

Maroon Societies in the Americas

Maroon societies is a term designating communities of runaway slaves in the Americas, the formation of which constituted a recurrent feature of the history of African slavery over nearly 400 years, from the first importation of African slaves in the early 1500s through the selesai abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere in Brazil in 1888. The term derives from the Spanish cimarrón, originally referring to feral cattle but by the early 1500s also signifying runaway slaves.

Maroon societies were most common in the Caribbean and Brazil but were also widespread in North America and elsewhere. To slave owners and ruling groups they represented a constant and serious challenge to the institution of African slavery generally, while to slaves they represented the possibility of life outside the shackles of the slave regime. Often called palenques in the Caribbean region and Quilombos in Brazil, they had a history closely linked to the hundreds of slave rebellions that also mark the history of the Americas.

Ranging from small nomadic bands to extensive settled communities of thousands of people that endured for decades, even centuries, on the fringes of the plantation economy, Maroon societies came into existence almost as soon as African slavery in the Americas did. Most of their members were African-born, as they reproduced many of the social and cultural features of their homeland in their new surroundings.

Among the first official acknowledgments of the existence of such communities was a report to the Council of the Indies from Hispaniola of March 1542, in which Archdeacon Álvaro de Castro estimated that 2,000 to 3,000 runaway slaves were at large on the island. A follow-up report of July 1546 described some of the island’s numerous Maroon communities, some hundreds strong, and the mixed success of Spanish efforts to subdue them.


Often mixing with indigenous groups and allying with their slave masters’ enemies, Maroon communities displayed tremendous resilience in the face of persistent efforts to eradicate them and horrific punishments meted out to captured runaways, which included castration, amputation of limbs, branding, garroting, and burning alive.

The hinterlands of plantation economies throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, North America, and elsewhere witnessed the formation of Maroon societies alongside the very introduction of slavery.

In Mexico, rapid Indian depopulation prompted colonists to import upward of 120,000 African slaves in the years between 1521 and 1650. Many thousands were compelled to work in the silver mines and ranches north of Mexico City centered on Zacatecas.

From the 1560s to the 1580s, a series of revolts and uprisings rocked the region, as runaway African slaves joined forces with besieged Indians to raid ranches and storehouses, attack travelers, and return to their hidden hamlets in caves, arroyos, and other places beyond the reach of the authorities.

Jungles of Veracruz

In the 1570s, the Crown issued a series of draconian laws intended to discourage such uprisings, which nonetheless failed to have the desired effect. In 1609, a rebel Maroon community in the jungles of Veracruz, led by Yanga, successfully negotiated a peace treaty with the Spanish authorities that granted them their freedom. Nearly a century later, the community was thriving. Slave uprisings and the formation of Maroon societies continued until the selesai abolition of slavery in Mexico in 1829.

Some palenques survived for decades, later becoming towns and municipalities, such as El Cobre in eastern Cuba, where a slave uprising in 1731 led to the creation of a stable community that 50 years later had a fugitive slave population of over 1,000 scattered throughout the Sierra del Cobre.

In 1800, following a recommendation of the Council of the Indies, the Crown declared the slave-descended inhabitants of El Cobre free. Other well-known palenques in eastern Cuba included El Frijol and Ciénaga de Zapata, which survived through much of the 19th century.

Despite their best efforts to extinguish such fugitive slave communities, colonial authorities were often compelled to negotiate with them—as in the district of Popayán in Colombia, where in 1732 the Audiencia of Quito authorized a local official to offer a treaty of peace to the palenque called El Castillo, granting its inhabitants their freedom if they would agree to accept no more runaway slaves. The palenque refused the offer, and in 1745 a series of military expeditions finally captured and defeated El Castillo.

More than a century earlier, in the early 1600s, in the Cartagena district of Colombia, a runaway slave named Domingo Bioho, claiming to be African royalty and adopting the title King Benkos, staged a series of raids on plantations and farms around Cartagena and founded a fortified palenque called San Basilio.

After defeating two expeditions sent to subdue his independent kingdom, in 1619 King Benkos negotiated a favorable treaty with the Spanish authorities, only to be betrayed, captured, and hanged. Despite this setback, San Basilio survived for another century and was finally suppressed in 1713–17.

Similar episodes unfolded in the British and French Caribbean islands. In Martinique in 1665, a Maroon who called himself by his master’s name, Francisque Fabulé, led a group of 400–500 Maroons who staged repeated attacks against plantations and settlements. The French Sovereign Council negotiated a treaty with Fabulé that granted him his freedom and a promise that his band would not be punished. He was later condemned to life in the galleys.

In 1771, a decree of the Supreme Council of Martinique lamented the existence of fugitive slave communities on the island, where they had built huts, cleared land, and planted crops, and from which they sallied forth to commit various depredations. In the French island of Guadeloupe in 1668, the governor reported more than 30 Maroons living in Grande-Terre and recommended an example be made by capturing and beheading them.

Despite the authorities’ best efforts, however, the Maroon societies could not be eradicated. Nearly 70 years later in Guadeloupe, in 1737, a group of 48 Maroons led by one Bordebois was put on trial; eight were sentenced to be garroted. Similar events transpired on Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, and other islands in the British Antilles.

North American Societiea

Slave hunt in Dismal Swamp area

In British North America and, after 1783, the United States of America, Maroon societies formed and reformed repeatedly. There is evidence for at least 50 such communities during the period 1672–1864 in the mountains, forests, and swamps from Florida to Louisiana to Virginia.

Most notable among these were those in the Dismal Swamp area in the Virginia–North Carolina borderlands, where thousands of runaway slaves and their descendants survived repeated efforts to capture and subdue them. Sometimes Maroons allied with local Indians, forming mixed communities of Indians and fugitive slaves.

Other times Indian individuals and polities allied with Euro-American authorities, assisting them in their eradication efforts, as occurred among the Notchee Indians in South Carolina in 1744, in Georgia in 1772, and in other places.

Communities descended from Maroon societies can be found in many parts of the Americas. In the 1980s, it was estimated that more than 10 percent of the population of the Republic of Suriname was descended from six Maroon or “Bush Negro” communities or tribes that formed in the 1500s and waged a century-long war for liberation against the Dutch authorities before finally winning their freedom in 1762.

The collective memory of the modern-day descendants of such Maroon societies has provided fertile ground for historians, anthropologists, linguists, and other scholars interested in exploring this chapter of the history of Africans in the Americas.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

Bartolomé de Las Casas

One of the most influential figures in the history of Latin America, the Spanish priest and historian Bartolomé de Las Casas became known as the “Apostle of the Indians” for his impassioned and relentless susila condemnations of the excesses of violence and cruelty perpetrated by Spanish conquistadores and encomenderos against the native inhabitants of the Americas.

His book, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, first published in 1552, caused a sensation across Spain and at the highest levels of church and state. Translated into many languages, it also formed an important component of the “Black Legend” of Spanish atrocities, a perspective that continues to hold enormous sway in considerations of the Spanish impact on the Americas. An indefatigable writer and activist, he continued writing, publishing, and speaking in favor of Indian rights from 1514 until his death in 1566.

His writings were an important element of later Enlightenment discourses on the universality of human rights and continue to resonate among liberation theologians, human rights activists, and indigenous rights activists across Latin America more than 450 years after his “brief account” was first published.

Born in Seville in 1484, son of a well-to-do merchant, Las Casas first came to the New World in 1502, at age 18, in the company of his father and some 2,500 other adventurers in the fleet of Nicolás de Ovando. Around 1506–07, he returned to Europe, was ordained a deacon in Rome, and returned to the Indies, where he was granted an encomienda.


In 1512, he became the first priest ordained in the Americas. Over the next two years, an encomendero himself and eyewitness to the forced labor, enslavement, and violence that characterized the conquest of the Caribbean, he gradually came to an understanding of Spanish actions that diverged radically from that of the vast majority of his countrymen.

His first public condemnation of Spanish excesses was in a Pentecost Sunday sermon in 1514. Freeing his own Indians, henceforth he preached incessantly about the evils of encomienda and other forms of forced labor and violence, making many enemies in the process.

In 1520, King Charles granted him an official hearing to expound his views and defend himself against his many detractors. A handful of other ecclesiastics, most notably Antonio de Montesinos and Juan Quevedo, had been advancing similar arguments.

The king sympathized with Las Casas’s position and decreed that the Indies would henceforth be ruled without recourse to force of arms—an unenforceable edict that was largely ignored. After a failed attempt to establish an economically self-sustaining Indian commune in Venezuela, in 1522 Las Casas became a Dominican monk.

Over the next four decades, he wrote prolifically and became an obsessive collector of documents that later proved of inestimable value to scholars. He was instrumental in persuading the king to issue the New Laws of 1542, which placed severe restrictions on encomienda, sparked furious resistance by encomenderos across the empire, and were repealed in 1545–46.

In 1544, he was appointed bishop of Chiapas (Mexico), where he continued his work on behalf of the Indians. Three years later, in response to mounting opposition to the radical bishop, the Council of the Indies recalled him to Spain.

In 1550, came one of the most memorable and important public debates in early modern Europe, on the question of the morality of Spain’s actions in the Americas. Pitting two intellectual giants—Las Casas versus the eminent humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued from Aristotelian premises that Indians were “natural slaves” and that Spanish actions were therefore just and appropriate—the great debate of Vallodolid failed to resolve the question, even though most council members sided with Las Casas.

In the coming years, he wrote many other works of enduring historical importance, most notably his Brief Account (1552), Apologética historia, and Historia de las Indias. He continued denouncing the institution of encomienda and Spanish cruelties and championing Indian rights until his death in July 1566. His body was interred at Our Lady of Atocha in Madrid.

Diego de Landa

Diego de Landa

Among the first Spaniards to venture into the Maya heartland of the Yucatán Peninsula, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa owes his fame, and infamy, to two distinct but related actions.

His infamy rests on his systematic destruction of dozens of Maya texts (or codices) and thousands of Mayan idols in his crusade to extinguish idolatry and spread Christianity among the Maya in the 1560s—a crusade accompanied by tortures, burnings at the stake, and many other atrocities against the region’s indigenous inhabitants.

Yet Landa was also among the earliest experts on Mayan language and culture, his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Account of the Things of Yucatán, 1556) representing a landmark document that provided an exceptionally vivid, detailed, and important description of Maya language and culture, and that proved key in the eventual decipherment of ancient Maya texts in the second half of the 20th century.

Landa thus occupies a peculiar and highly ambiguous position as both the most important early destroyer and preserver of knowledge on the preconquest Maya of Yucatán.


Born in Cifuentes, Guadalajara, Spain, on March 17, 1524, Landa entered the Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo in 1540. Nine years later he journeyed to Yucatán as part of the broader missionary effort to convert the New World’s indigenous inhabitants to Christianity.

His first several years were spent at the monastery at Izamal, learning Mayan, revising an existing grammar, and undertaking the routine duties of Franciscan missionaries: preaching, tending to the sick, performing sacraments.

Growing restless, Landa sought and received permission to venture alone into the interior, where he spent many months wandering through large parts of the peninsula and acquiring intimate knowledge of Mayan language and culture.

In 1553, he returned to the monastery at Izamal and supervised the construction of a permanent structure at the prominent Maya religious center. Eight years later, in 1561, the General Chapter of the Franciscans appointed the 37-year-old Landa as the region’s first provincial.

By 1562, Landa had overseen the construction of 12 monasteries and the baptism of thousands of Maya, who Landa believed had abandoned their idols and embraced the Christian faith.

In May 1562, a chance discovery of a cave near the village of Maní containing numerous idols and human skulls launched Landa on a crusade to extirpate, once and for all, idolatry among the natives.

Employing a torture technique known as the garrucha, or hoist (in which the individual was bound at the wrists, hoisted into the air, and lashed, sometimes with large stones attached to the feet and hot wax hurled onto the body), the friars gained numerous “confessions” from the natives on their continuing adherence to non-Christian religious beliefs and practices.

Soon afterward, on Sunday, July 12, 1562, the friars celebrated a massive auto-da-fé at Maní, in which great piles of idols (including at least 27 Maya manuscripts, or codices) were set to the torch, and various punishments meted out to offenders against the Christian faith, including floggings, incarceration, and fines.

The inquisition continued for the next three months. Altogether an estimated 4,500 natives were tortured, with many hundreds left permanently disabled and 158 dying in consequence of the interrogations.

Landa’s illegal and unauthorized excesses led to a prolonged power struggle with the region’s bishop, Francisco de Toral, whose authority he was charged with usurping. Ordered back to Spain, he was absolved by the Council of the Indies, and in 1573 he returned to Yucatán as second bishop of Mérida, in which capacity he served until his death on April 30, 1579.

La (Doña Marina) Malinche

La (Doña Marina) Malinche

La Malinche was one of the key players in the 16th century conquest of Mexico by Spanish conquistadores. However little is known about Malinche’s life before or after the years of the Spanish conquest in the 1520s.

Malinche was born into a noble family of the Aztec upper class. Her name is probably derived from a corruption of the Nahuatl word Malintzin. She was probably born in Oluta, in the province of Coatzacoalcos, which is in the area between central Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula.

Upon the death of her father, her mother sold Malinche into slavery. During this time, Malinche learned several languages, including Mayan. She was approximately 18 years old when the Spanish conquistadores landed in Mexico and began their conquest of her native land.

In April 1519, Malinche was given as a translator to Hernán Cortés during his dealings with the Aztecs. She was immediately baptized as a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Spaniards bestowed upon Malinche the Christian name Marina.


A great amount of the information that has survived about Malinche is the result of the writings of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. In his writings, Diaz noted that Malinche was a beautiful woman who was intelligent, extremely loyal, and not easily embarrassed. She was greatly respected by many of the men, both Aztec and Spanish, with whom she interacted in her role as Cortés’s interpreter.

In his famous book The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–21, Díaz del Castillo stated that Malinche’s mother remarried upon the death of her first husband, Malinche’s father.

When her mother gave birth to a new son, in order to safeguard the baby’s inheritance, Malinche’s mother and stepfather sold the little girl into slavery to some Aztecs from Xicalango. The Aztecs from Xicalango then sold Malinche to a group of Aztecs from Tabasco.

After staying in Tabasco for a short period of time, Malinche was eventually given as a gift to Cortés upon his arrival in Mexico. In addition to working as a translator for Cortés, Malinche served as a guide and diplomat.

Cortés was so impressed with Malinche’s efforts on his behalf that he eventually arranged for her marriage to one of his men, a Castilian knight named Juan de Jaramillo. They were married at the town of Orizaba. She later bore him a daughter named María.

Despite her marriage to de Jaramillo, Malinche remained a key figure in Cortés’s later exploits in Tenochtitlán. Diaz observed that she was present when Cortés was carrying on negotiations with Moctezuma II in 1523.

Working with a Spanish priest named Geronimo de Aguilar, Malinche translated Cortés’s words into the Nahuatl dialect spoken by Moctezuma after de Aguilar translated from Spanish to the Mayan dialect that she understood.

Later, Malinche apparently became fluent enough in Spanish that Aguilar’s assistance was no longer needed during the simpulan negotiations with Moctezuma. Indeed, Malinche’s skill in language and in secular politics was so great that she even acted as counselor to the Aztec king during his dealings with Cortés.

In addition to their professional relationship, Malinche bore Cortés a son named Martín. Cortés seemed to have held his relationship with Malinche in some esteem as he named their son Martín after his own father.

Cortés later had the boy legitimized, and he always seemed to favor Martín among his other children in later life. However, in the majority of letters Cortés sent back to Spain, anytime he mentioned Malinche, it was always in her role as his translator. He never alluded to any personal details about Malinche in his Spanish correspondence.

Over the next several years, Malinche’s power seemed to increase. She always dressed in expensive garments and appeared to have her hair styled in the most elegant native fashions. She traveled throughout much of Mexico with Cortés, translating for him in his dealings with the Mayan Empire in 1526.

Sometime after the birth of their son, Martín, the relationship between Malinche and Cortés seemed to flounder. She is rarely mentioned in Cortés’s correspondence after the mid-1520s. After the completion of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in late 1526, Malinche all but disappears from historical records to the point that little to no information is recorded about her death.

There is some speculation that she may have died of complications surrounding the birth of her daughter, María, in 1527 as her husband Juan de Jaramillo is recorded as having married again the following year.

Vilification in History

The vilification of Malinche in Mexican history can be traced to the expulsion of the Spaniards by the Mexicans in 1821. Malinche became synonymous with the image of Eve. Mexican nationalists came to blame Malinche for all the woes suffered by the Mexican people during the colonial rule of the Spanish.

She served as the scapegoat when the Mexican government needed someone to blame for the poor state of political affairs that the new Mexican government faced in the 1820s. Malinche was painted as a scarlet woman whose actions were driven by her extreme sexual appetite.

In the 19th century, particularly in Mexican literary and artistic movements, Malinche’s role as an interpreter, strategist, and diplomat was virtually ignored. Her historical reputation was reduced to that of having been merely Cortés’s sex-starved mistress who betrayed her people.

In reality, Malinche was a respected female who played a crucial role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the growth and spread of Christianity among the Aztec and Mayan peoples. While women such as La Malinche are vilified for their respective roles in the conquests of their peoples by foreign invaders, this condemnation signifies the important role that such women played in the secular politics of their native lands.

Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada

Gonzalo Jiménez  de Quesada

The man who conquered New Granada (modern-day Colombia) for the Spanish Empire, Gonzalo Jiménez (or Ximenes or Giménez) de Quesada, was one of the least controversial of the famous conquistadores and one of the few to write in detail about his experiences (although the book has been lost).

Jiménez de Quesada was born in either Córdoba or Granada in Spain. He was trained in the law in Granada, which had been captured from the Moors in the last stage of the Reconquest of Spain (Reconquista) in 1492.

After many years as a lawyer, he was offered the position of magistrate and auditor to the province of New Andalucia, the northern part of South America, with a base at Santa Marta in modern-day Colombia.


There Governor Don Pedro de Lugo put Quesada in charge of an expedition to find some land suitable for settlement as Santa Marta, despite being located on the Pearl Coast. Of the 1,000 men capable of bearing arms, Quesada took charge of 800.

He organized the men into work parties and they built six rivercraft. Quesada divided his men into two groups; 200 manned the vessels and sailed up the Magdalena River, while the remaining 600 with him trekked inland, leaving on April 6, 1536. In spite of the heat, all the men wore heavily padded quilted cotton to protect them from arrows; even the horses were covered in the improvised armor.

Quesada had arranged a meeting point up the Magdalena River where the men on foot would meet with the boats, which carried much of the supplies. The land group were slowed down by the jungle, occasional attacks by Indians, insects, and disease.

However they reached the agreed meeting point on time but the sea party was not there. After waiting a few days, Quesada urged the men to continue inland, rather than return to Santa Marta. Although he had no military training, Quesada’s years as a lawyer enabled him to present the matter in a persuasive manner, and all acquiesced.

The men were desperately short of food, and there are the usual accounts of eating snakes, lizards, frogs, and even some dogs captured from the Indians, as well as boiling down leather harnesses to satiate their hunger.

Expedition Saved

The expedition was saved when the sea party turned up soon afterward, having been delayed by tropical storms. Quesada was then able to send the sickest men back to Santa Marta, replenish the supplies of the others, and press on with the expedition, which, in January 1537, reached the foothills of the Andes.

After covering 400 miles in eight months, there were only 166 men and 60 horses left. Quesada then had his men elect him as their captain-general, and they were determined to conquer land for themselves.

Unlike many other conquistadores, Quesada forbade his men to slaughter Indians, urging them to treat them humanely. However, Quesada was not averse to looting Indian temples, which were often covered in gold and precious stones. After one Indian chief, Bogotá, was killed in battle, the Spanish captured his successor, Sagipa, whom they offered to free for a large ransom in gold.

Soon afterward, Quesada heard that Sagipa was planning to trick him, and he had the chief executed. The nearby land was then declared conquered “in the name of his most sovereign emperor, Charles V.” A small township was then built, which Quesada named as Santa Fe de Bogotá (it was long believed that Quesada was born at Santa Fe, in Spain).

Having established his own town, Quesada was eager to return to Santa Marta and have the conquest officially acknowledged. Before he could do so, two other conquistador parties arrived.

One, led by Sebastián de Belalcázar, one of the men who had served under Francisco Pizarro, arrived from Quito, having founded the cities of Pasto, Popayan, and Cali. The other, led by a German adventurer, Nicholas Federman, on an expedition paid for by the Welser financiers of Germany, who had been granted a concession by Charles V, had come from Venezuela.

The three forces—that of Quesada, and the two new arrivals—were all about the same size, and they all realized that any fight would probably leave the victor, with numbers seriously depleted, at risk of attack from the Chibcha Indians, who still lived in the area.

Sense prevailed and the three decided to return to Spain and put their claims to the king of Spain, who would be able to arbitrate the matter. It seems that Quesada would have been the man who suggested this and also thought that he would have the best hope of winning any litigation.

Quesada then returned to the coast and in July 1539 sailed from Cartagena back to Spain. In Madrid, all three conquistadores failed to win the land. Don Pedro de Lugo, who had been a friend of Quesada, had died and his son, Luís, who had abandoned Santa Marta many years earlier after having stolen vast amounts of gold and emeralds from the Indians, was given title to his father’s land, and to the area found by Quesada. Quesada was appointed marshal of New Granada, and an alderman of Bogotá, the city he had founded.

Returning to New Granada, as the new Spanish colony was called, Quesada became one of the most influential men in the region, where he was well known for being critical of the rapaciousness of the large landowners, and also that of some officials.

Many people came to him for advice and it was not until 1569, when he was in his 70s, that Quesada decided to lead one last expedition. This was to try to locate the famous El Dorado, which was said to be 500 miles southeast of Bogotá.

There, an Indian king was said to cover himself in gold dust and then wash it all off in a lake. The legend had long captivated many people in Europe and the king of Spain agreed to help with the expedition in exchange for a share in the proceeds.

The expedition had 300 mounted soldiers, 1,500 Indian porters, several hundred black African slaves, 1,100 horses and mules, 600 cattle, and 800 sheep. Nearly three years later, Quesada led 28 men back to Bogotá.

On the journey several thousand Spanish, Indians, and Africans had died, and others had fled into the jungle. Disease, Indians, and wild animals had taken their toll and even Quesada had contracted leprosy. He was also faced with a massive bill—60,000 ducats—for the failed expedition.

Devastated by his failure, Quesada retired to his country house, La Suesca, where he wrote of his life, in the hope that sales might help pay off his debts. He died on February 16, 1579, of leprosy. His book was lost. The township that Quesada had founded is now the city of Bogotá (current population 7 million), and one of the main roads in the city is Avenida Jiménez de Quesada.

Indigo in the Americas

Indigo in the Americas

Prized for its beauty as a deep blue dye for clothing and textiles, indigo has a long history in the Western world. Archaeologists have unearthed indigo-tinted fabrics in Greece dating to 2500 b.c.e., while the Greek historian Herodotus, writing about 450 b.c.e., provides the first documentary evidence on the use of indigo as a dye.

In the decades after the conquest of Central America, indigo became another of the marketable commodities produced in the Americas to feed the growing European demand for foodstuffs, dyes, and other products.

The dye itself was derived, via a complex and odoriferous steeping and fermentation process, from the dark green, oval-shaped leaves of two species of leguminous shrub in the Indigofera genus: Indigofera tinctoria, indigenous to Asia, and Indigofera suffructiosa, native to Central and South America.

The latter species, called xiquilite in Nahuatl, was used as a pigment and dye by the Maya of Central America for centuries, perhaps millennia, before the conquest. The Spaniards called indigo dye añil, derived from al-nil, the Arabic word for “blue.”


From around 1580 to 1620, indigo production saw something of a boom in the Central American lowlands, particularly western Guatemala and Nicaragua. In light of the precipitous decline in native populations across much of the isthmus, and the severe shortages of labor that ensued, indigo’s minimal labor requirements constituted one of its principal commercial advantages.

The plant itself was sturdy, grew readily in well-drained soils at an elevation below 1,500 meters, and required little attention prior to harvesting the leaves. Only one to two months of intensive labor was required during the harvest and processing phases, making indigo one of the few commercially viable commodities in Central America’s labor-scarce environment.

Initial efforts were focused on wild plants, but from the 1580s indigo plantations and processing facilities were established in many parts of the isthmus. By 1600, indigo had emerged as Central America’s principal export product.

After 1620, production stagnated, witnessing a brief resurgence in the late 1600s before stagnating again for the rest of the colonial period. Nearly a quarter-million pounds of indigo was imported to Seville annually from 1606 to 1620, though these figures exclude illicit commerce, which was doubtless substantial.

Meanwhile, indigo production in Asia continued to grow. Throughout the 1600s, indigo was one of the chief products of the Dutch and British East India Companies. Evidence suggests that the inability of Asian indigo production to meet rising European demand was one of the principal engines of indigo production in the Americas.

Other regions in the Caribbean basin also emerged as important sources of indigo, including Saint-Domingue (France to 1803), Jamaica (Great Britain after 1655), Suriname (Holland), and Brazil (Portugal). Soon sugar displaced indigo, tobacco, and other products as the Caribbean’s principal export crop, though indigo production continued throughout large parts of the Americas through the colonial period and after.

By the 1740s, an indigo boom had emerged in South Carolina, complementing rice production in the same region. It was not until the late 19th century, that a viable synthetic dye finally displaced indigo as the most important source of dark blue coloration in fabrics.

Honor Ideology in Latin America

The cultural concepts of honor and shame played an extremely important role in the history of Latin America, influencing everything from national politics to domestic divisions of labor. Most scholars agree that the roots of these cultural notions reach back to the Mediterranean world in the centuries before the European encounter with the Americas.

Scholarly investigations into what has been termed the honor-shame complex in Iberia, North Africa, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean all point to a diverse but widely shared set of beliefs and practices regarding the appropriate social roles of males and females that often transcended the differences between Christianity and Islam.

Institutionalized in various ecclesiastical, political, and legal frameworks, these cultural notions were transported to the New World in the decades and centuries after the European conquests. There they entwined with indigenous and African notions regarding honor, shame, and proper gender roles, leading to a shifting kaleidoscope of beliefs and practices among all social groups and classes.

The most effective scholarly efforts to probe the honor-shame complex in Latin America have remained attentive both to broader shared patterns in diverse historical contexts and to temporal and spatial specificity marked by changes over time.

In the most general terms, honor among Latin American men was considered both a prized personal possession and a crucially important expression of one’s public self. Honor derived from both social status and virtuous behavior.

This distinction in the sources of honor found expression in the Spanish language: the term honor generally referred to status-derived honor, while honra generally referred to virtue- or behavior-based honor. Higher social status necessarily conferred more honor: wealthy men inherently possessed more honor than poor men; noble lineage inherently conferred more honor than plebian lineage.

The second component, virtue-based honor, was based especially on a man’s capacity to act “with manliness” (con hombría). Such manliness derived from many sources, but among the most important was a man’s capacity to control and monopolize the sexuality of the girls and women he considered his.

For a man’s daughter or wife to be sexually active outside his control, or sexually assaulted or raped, caused dishonor and shame to both the victim and to the man claiming sexual dominion over her.

Women’s honor, in contrast, was based on their capacity to act with shame (vergüenza), defined especially by their sexual propriety and their deference and submission to men. Among the most humiliating insults that could be launched at members of either gender was to be called “shameless” (sin vergüenza).

The notion of humiliation was crucial to all aspects of honor. According to historian William Ian Miller, “Honor [ideology in Latin America] is above all else the keen sensitivity to the experience of humiliation and shame ... to simplify greatly, honor is that disposition which makes one act to shame others who have shamed oneself, and to humiliate someone who has humiliated oneself.”

Recent research demonstrates the various ways in which patriarchy, masculinity, honor, shame, violence, and sexuality were tightly bound up together in a dynamic cultural complex that shared certain key attributes and that varied widely over time and space, but characteristically in ways that asserted males’ dominion over females. Inquiries into this cultural complex in specific contexts comprises an exceptionally fertile field among contemporary scholars of Latin American history.

Hacienda in Spanish America

Hacienda in Spanish America

Hacienda (ah-see-END-ah) in Spanish America refers to the institution of private landownership, or a landed estate, owned by a hacendado (ah-sen-DA-doh). Hacienda emerged as the principal form of landownership, and one of the principal social institutions in the core areas of the Spanish empire (especially New Spain and New Castile, or Mexico and Peru) in the late 16th century.

The transition from encomienda to hacienda has been the subject of considerable research and debate among scholars. Since the pioneering work of François Chevalier (1952), a large body of scholarship has shown that this transition was neither linear nor direct, and that attention to local and regional history is essential for understanding this transition in specific contexts.

It is useful to distinguish between two main types of hacienda, although the two were often combined: agricultural and pastoral. Agricultural haciendas were typically established in areas of densest Indian settlement, where a servile labor force made possible its day-to-day operation. The rich agricultural lands surrounding Mexico City, for instance, were peppered with hundreds of such haciendas.


At the core of a typical agricultural hacienda was the “great house,” the residence of its Spanish or Creole hacendado. Pastoral haciendas, devoted principally to grazing of cattle and sheep, emerged mainly on the periphery of Spain’s American holdings, such as in northern Mexico and the pampas (plains) of the Río de la Plata region.

Haciendas could also include mines, obrajes (workshops), and other enterprises. A typical hacienda included numerous tracts of noncontiguous lands devoted to a variety of productive operations, especially farming, ranching, and mining.

Hacendados accumulated their lands in numerous ways, mainly through direct and legal usurpation of collectively held Indian lands. Hacienda lands were also often acquired through purchase and legal appropriation of tracts left vacant in consequence of Indian depopulation.

The distinction between haciendas and plantations is not always clear, although the latter term is generally applied to large-scale, well-capitalized, market oriented economic enterprises devoted to one or two tropical export products (sugar, tobacco, indigo), often worked by African slaves. This is in contrast to the typically less capitalized, more locally and subsistence oriented production of haciendas, though the distinctions are often difficult to draw.

Other forms of landownership that blend into hacienda include estancias (a-STAHN-see-ahs) and latifundia (lah-te-FOON-dee-ah). The former refers principally to large cattle and sheep ranches on the periphery of the Spanish American empire, and the latter to massive private landholdings and monopolization of land resources in a particular area.

The question of labor relations inevitably accompanies discussions of the nature of the Spanish American hacienda. The typical colonial labor relationship on haciendas was the institution of debt peonage, in which laborers were bound to the hacienda principally in consequence of their accumulated debt to the hacendado. Yet here, too, there remains considerable controversy.

In some contexts, debt effectively bound laborers to haciendas. In other cases, mainly those in which population densities were lower and labor thus scarcer, debt was sometimes used as a kind of lever by peons in order to secure pay advances and more favorable working conditions, and to play one hacendado off against another.

In light of the great variety and complexity of Spanish American colonial society, questions regarding the nature of land and labor relations in specific contexts remain the topic of ongoing scholarly research and debate.

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.