Obrajes in Colonial Latin America

Obrajes in Colonial Latin America

Obrajes (roughly, workshops) were key enterprises in the developing economies of Spain’s American colonies, principally as sites where wool, cotton, and other fibers were carded, spun, and woven into textiles. While indigenous peoples had woven cloth for millennia, the obraje was an exclusively Spanish imposition.

From modest beginnings in the 1530s, obrajes developed over time into quasi-industrial enterprises, some with several hundred laborers, mostly Indian, under their roofs.

Working conditions were typically harsh, with long hours, poor ventilation, frequent physical abuse, and low or nonexistent pay (Indian labor and tribute were required under encomienda and related institutions). Most obrajes were thus more akin to penal sweatshops than to workshops, as conventionally understood.

The earliest known descriptions of obrajes date to the late 1530s in New Spain (Mexico). By the early 1600s, from 98 to 130 obrajes were scattered across central New Spain, clustering around the urban centers of Puebla, Mexico City, Texcoco, and Tlaxcala.


By 1600, most obrajes averaged around 50 laborers, making the total number of workers engaged in obraje production in New Spain around 6,000, though there was a spectrum from large to small; the latter were often called trapiches.

Scholars have traced the origins of private or non-state-mediated Spanish-Indian labor relations (i.e., non-encomienda, non-repartimiento) to such early colonial period obrajes—labor frequently supplemented by prisoners and convicted criminals.

Captured English sailor Miles Philips was sentenced to work in an obraje in Texcoco around 1570. “We were appointed by the Vice Roy to be carried unto the town of Texcuco ... in which towne there are certaine houses of correction and punishment for ill people called Obraches ... into which place divers Indians are sold for slaves, some for ten years, and some for twelve.”

Philips’s companion, Job Hortop, described his experiences carding wool in Texcoco’s obrajes “among the Indian slaves.” Their descriptions of “Indian slaves” corresponded with Spanish custom and law, in which obraje laborers were frequently called slaves.

The development of obrajes was encouraged by both the Crown and the highest levels of colonial government, with authorities such as New Spain’s first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, actively promoting sheep herding, wool production, and manufacture of cheap cloth within the colonies.

By the late 1600s, obrajes had become an important pillar of the colonial economy in New Spain and elsewhere, generating textiles and other goods mainly for internal consumption. In the 17th and 18th centuries, opposition to royal support for obrajes by Spain’s textile manufacturers mounted, though it remained insufficient to retard the growth of colonial production and exchange.

Similar developments unfolded in colonial Peru. As in New Spain, obrajes emerged in the decades after the conquest with official encouragement and support, especially around Quito, which by the early 17th century had become South America’s leading textile manufacturer.

Quiteño cloth, prized for its high quality, was produced by both indigenous “community obrajes” that employed ancient techniques for carding, spinning, and weaving wool (some housing upward of 200 full-time workers) and smaller, privately owned obrajes similar to those in New Spain.

Overall, obrajes illuminate key aspects of colonial Latin American history, including land and labor relations, the intersections of Spanish and Indian worlds, and the role of the state in promoting specific types of production and exchange within the colonies.

Conquest of Northwestern South America

Conquest of Northwestern South America

Before the Spanish invasions of the early 16th century, the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean littoral of northern South America were divided into a number of polities and a host of ethnolinguistic groups.

Their states and material culture were not as advanced as those in highland Peru or Mexico, so the native peoples of this variegated land had no large cities, used stone tools, produced fine gold work and pottery, and cultivated potatoes, quinoa, maize, beans, squash, and many fruits and vegetables, combined with hunting, gathering, and fishing. Native populations are estimated to have been in the millions.

One major population center was in the mountain valleys surrounding present-day Bogotá and extending northeast to the coast near present-day Caracas, the homeland of the Muisca or Chibcha peoples, divided into two large confederations. Other villages, settlements, and communities were spread across the region.


The first European contacts with the region came in 1498 when the third expedition of Christopher Columbus skirted the Venezuelan coast. Over the next two decades, Spanish encounters with the local inhabitants consisted of slave raiding and trading expeditions.

The most important consequence of these early encounters was the implantation of deadly European diseases, which rapidly spread west across Colombia and south into the Andes, causing millions of deaths. By the late 1520s, only a few small permanent settlements had been established between the isthmus of Panama and the mouth of the Orinoco River.

In 1528, Charles V contracted with the Wesler banking house of Ausburg for exploration and settlement of the mountainous region of Venezuela and Colombia. After six expeditions inland, the Wesler incursions found no large cities and very little gold.

Nor did they found any towns, while committing many abuses against the natives. In 1548, the Crown cancelled the contract. In 1530, two years after the Wesler agreement, Diego de Ordas, a former captain of Hernán Cortés, received royal authority to explore the Orinoco Basin, whose mouth lay far to the east of the northern Andes. His expedition of some 600 Spaniards also ended in failure.

In 1535, the discovery of golden objects in native tombs prompted further Spanish interest in the region. Several expeditions followed. The most important was led by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who in 1536 led his 800-strong force up the Magdalena Valley.

By the time he reached the Chibcha settlements, fewer than 200 of his men survived. Subjugation of the zone took more than a year, as native arrows, slings, and clubs once again proved no match for Spanish horses and steel.

Combining warfare and threats with diplomacy and subterfuge, by 1538 Quesada had largely subdued the Chibcha. The loot proved substantial: some 150,000 pesos of gold, hundreds of emeralds, and other precious objects, divided unevenly among Quesada and his men, the governor of Santa Marta, and the Crown.

Toward the end of the Chibcha campaign, two other expeditions converged on the zone: a Wesler-financed expedition led by Nikolaus Federmann and the remnant of the Andean force of Sebastián de Benalcázar, leader of the Quito expedition under Francisco Pizarro in the Conquest of Peru.

Quesada called the region New Granada and founded a town, Santa Fé de Bogotá, on the site of the former Chibcha capital. Meanwhile, most of the interior lay unexplored. A akibat series of expeditions took place in the 1540s and 1550s, most in search of the mythical kingdom of El Dorado.

The year 1541 saw three such efforts: one headed by Gonzalo Pizarro, another by Hernán Pérez de Quesada (brother of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada), and a third by Philip von Hutten, the last of the Welser explorers.

Benalcázar followed in 1543. All ended in failure. One result of this string of failed expeditions was the journey and journal of Francisco de Orellana, one of Gonzalo Pizarro’s lieutenants, who floated down the Amazon River to its mouth. A akibat expedition in 1559 under Pedro de Ursúa ended in mutiny and a failed rebellion against the Spanish Crown under commoner Lope de Aguirre.

Caracas was founded in 1567, while the region did not become a viceroyalty (the largest colonial-era political jurisdiction, as in Mexico and Peru) until the Crown created the Viceroyalty of New Granada, with its capital at Santa Fe de Bogotá, in 1739.

Throughout the colonial period, Spanish, Dutch, and English settlements in the region were limited mainly to the Caribbean littoral and the northwestern Andes, while vast areas of the interior remained terra incognita and outside the orbit of European control.

Viceroyalty of New Spain

For 300 years (1521–1821), the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the richest and most important political jurisdiction in Spain’s American holdings, expanded from its original boundaries in central Mexico south and west to the Pacific Ocean; south and east to include the Yucatán Peninsula, Florida, the Caribbean, northern South America, and Central America to contemporary Panama (the latter in a jurisdictional subdivision called the Kingdom of Guatemala); and north to include significant portions of what later became the U.S. Southwest.

At the political, economic, and demographic center of this vast colony was the Basin of Mexico, at the heart of which lay Mexico City, built atop the ruins of the aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.

Consequences of Colonial Rule

Three hundred years of colonial rule bequeathed to New Spain an enduring legacy whose consequences remain amply apparent in Mexico and Central America today. Most fundamentally, the new colonial order created new social and racial hierarchies, with Spaniards dominant, Indians subordinate, and, as time passed, mestizos (“mixed-race” Spaniards and Indians) occupying a widening middle ground.

During the first century of colonial rule, the colony’s major social institutions can be identified as the following: the colonial state and its byzantine administrative apparatus; the Roman Catholic Church, both its “regular” and “secular” branches; encomienda; Indian communities; and the patriarchal family.


From around the mid-1600s, hacienda, generally accompanied by debt peonage, displaced encomienda as the principal institution governing land-labor relations between Spaniards and Indians, largely in consequence of steep population declines among Indians resulting from the ravages of epidemic diseases, which effectively rendered encomienda obsolete.

Secular Church's Power Grows

During the same period, the so-called secular church (the ecclesiastical hierarchy emanating from Rome, with the pope at its head) grew in power relative to the regular church (composed of quasi-independent missionary or “mendicant” orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits, and others, each governed by specific reglas or rules).

This growing power of the secular church, densely entwined with the colonial state, was especially apparent in the most densely populated core regions, while the missionary orders remained strong in the colony’s peripheral zones, such as Yucatán, the northern deserts, and elsewhere.

The overall animo of the colonial period was for the regular church to initiate the process of conversion in peripheral areas, and, over time, as populations grew and the state extended its reach, to cede ecclesiastical authority to the encroaching secular church.

Far from a monolithic institution, the colonial church was wracked by division and conflict, both within and between its major branches. By the end of the colonial period, the Roman Catholic Church, both regular and secular, was not only one of the colony’s most important social institutions, but also far and away its largest landowner.

Contrary to a popularly held view, surviving Indian communities in New Spain and elsewhere retained various forms of collective (or “corporate”) landownership throughout the colonial period. This too became a crucial colonial legacy, especially evident in liberal efforts to privatize landownership in the decades after independence in 1821, efforts fiercely resisted by both the church and Indian communities.

Industry

The Basin of Mexico became and remained the colony’s breadbasket and major source of grain, meat, and other foodstuffs, as well as domestic industry such as obrajes, with expanding market relations especially important in the fertile and well-watered zones north and west of Mexico City.

In the 1540s, the discovery of large deposits of silver northwest of the Basin of Mexico, centered on the province of Zacatecas, provided the colonial state with a steady supply of silver bullion, fueling a price revolution in Iberia and the rest of Europe and transforming the regional colonial economies of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and other mining regions.

By the mid-1600s, the sprawling colony sank into what one scholar dubbed “New Spain’s century of depression,” though the nature and extent of that “depression” remain the subject of scholarly debate. Compared to the thriving colonies of British North America and elsewhere, however, New Spain did experience a prolonged period of relative economic stagnation.

The imperial state’s efforts to redress its colonies’ relative economic decline, launched after the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13), are known collectively as the Bourbon Reforms, named after the ruling dynasty that assumed power in Spain after the fall of the Habsburgs.

In a process similar to that unfolding elsewhere in the Americas, as time passed, the “creoles” (or criollos, i.e., Spaniards born in the Americas) became an increasingly important and powerful group, despite its relatively small size—a gradual shift that by the late 1700s led to a growing sense of American identity and the first stirrings for independence from Spain.

Indian and “mixed-race” rebellions and uprisings occurred throughout the colonial period, but most remained local and regional and focused on redress of specific grievances relating to colonial governance or perceived abuses by individual authorities.

Demographics

The demographic makeup of the colony changed markedly over time, from its initial overwhelming preponderance of Indians and tiny number of Spaniards, to steep Indian population decline, to increasing number of mestizos and others of “mixed race,” Africans, and a small but growing number of creoles.

New Spain’s population at the end of the colonial period is estimated at around 6 million—around 50 percent Indian, 30 to 40 percent “mixed race,” 10 to 20 percent Spanish and creole, and less than 1 percent African.

In sum, 300 years of colonial rule left a profound and lasting legacy across New Spain, in every realm of society. Grappling with the nature of that legacy remains one of the most challenging and central tasks facing scholars of postconquest Mexico and Central America.

Colonial Administration of New Spain

Colonial Administration of New Spain

In order to administer their vast holdings in the New World, the Spanish Crown devised an exceedingly intricate bureaucratic system intended to exert royal authority, to protects its economic and political interests, to maintain order and stability, and to prevent the formation of cohesive interest groups that might challenge royal authority. In theory, all political and legal authority in Spain’s overseas holdings ultimately derived from the Crown.

This system of what has been called “Hispanic absolutism” stood in sharp contrast to the situation in British North America, where various forms of local authority, including colonial and town assemblies, mingled with and effectively limited the exercise of royal authority.

Not so in Spain’s dominions, at least in theory, although in practice there quickly emerged substantial self-rule. Nor was there any legal or functional separation of executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. While some bodies were more concerned with judicial matters, others with legislative and executive, effective distinctions among these functions did not exist.


Nor was there a clear separation between royal and ecclesiastical authority, though in theory the Crown was the supreme authority in the colonies in consequence of the Patronato Real (Royal Patronage), which derived its legal basis from papal bulls of 1501 and 1508.

Habsburg Spain’s political culture was highly legalistic and placed a premium on the generation of paperwork, demonstrated by both the quality of the paper (still crisp after more than four centuries) and its quantity, most housed in the massive Archive of the Indies in Seville.

A key characteristic of the byzantine administrative hierarchy that governed Spain’s New World holdings was the functional overlapping of jurisdictions, as discussed later.

Some have proposed that the confusion and conflicts thus generated were part of an intentional strategy of “divide and rule” on the part of the Crown, a mechanism meant to ensure that subordinate administrative bodies would squabble among themselves, thus permitting the Crown to stand above the fray and act as the ultimate arbiter whenever serious conflicts arose. If this was not an intentional strategy—and opinion is divided on this point—it nonetheless worked in practice to that effect.

Hierarchical Structure

At the pinnacle of authority stood the king. Directly subordinate to him in the royal chain of command was the Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), established in 1524, modeled on the Council of Castile, and exercising supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority in the day-to-day running of the American “kingdoms.”

The Council of the Indies, which comprised a dozen or so members, drafted and issued laws, interpreted laws, and nominated appointees to secular and religious offices, all subject to the king’s tamat approval. “Its tendency was meticulous and bureaucratic. It operated through lengthy, deliberative sessions surrounded by massive quantities of reports, laws, opinions, briefs, and other types of contemporary record.”

Within the colonies, the highest royal authority was the viceroy, conceived as the direct representative of the Crown in the colony. Viceroys were responsible for enforcing law, collecting revenues, administering justice, and maintaining order—virtually everything having to do with governing the viceroyalty. The viceroyalty was the largest administrative unit.

Until 1717, all of Spain’s American holdings fell under the jurisdiction of two viceroyalties: the Viceroyalty of New Spain (created in 1535, capital Mexico City, embracing all of Southwest North America through Central America to Panama, with much of Central America under the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Guatemala), and the Viceroyalty of Peru (or New Castile, created in 1542, capital at Lima, embracing all of South America not claimed by Portugal).

In 1717, a third viceroyalty, that of New Granada (Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador), was carved out of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and in 1776, a fourth, the Viceroyalty of La Plata (Argentina).

Partially subordinate to the viceroy were the audiencias, established before 1550 in Santo Domingo, Mexico City, Guatemala, New Galicia (in New Spain), and Panama, Lima, and Bogotá (in Peru), with more added later, and with much shifting of boundaries, jurisdictions, and status over the next 250 years. Judicially subordinate only to the Council of the Indies, the audiencias served as a kind of appellate court and legislative body, subject to royal approval.

Described as “the most durable and stable” of the many branches of colonial government, audiencias were composed of the colonies’ most prominent men: ecclesiastics, captains-general, encomenderos, merchants, landowners, and others, appointed by the council and king.

The boundaries between viceregal and audiencia authority were never clearly delineated, resulting in much disagreement between them. A similar situation obtained for local officials subordinate to the audiencias and viceroys, most notably alcaldes mayores, corregidores, and gobernadores, among whom leading authority Charles Gibson has discerned “no appreciable functional distinction.”

Each exercised administrative, judicial, and some legislative authority within its districts. Alcaldes were superior to regidores, while municipal councils (ayuntamientos and cabildos) were generally associated with corregidores.

Municipal councils were the only form of collective self-governance in the Spanish American colonies. There was nothing akin to colonial assemblies of British North America, for example. All authority was vested in individual officials and corporate bodies directly subordinate to royal authority.

The other major cor porate body charged with overseeing Spain’s New World colonies was the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación), founded in 1503 and located in Seville, which was to trade, commerce, and finance what the Council of the Indies was to politics, law, and governance.

The Crown, through its Seville-based mercantile guild (consulado), worked to maintain a royal monopoly on a wide variety of goods, from precious metals to tobacco to many other export commodities.

But despite the Crown’s efforts to maintain a relationship of mercantilism with the colonies, in everyday practice smuggling, contraband, and similar efforts to avoid royal monopolies and royal controls became very common.

Absolutist System

At no level of government did there exist any degree of democratic decision making. In theory, the system was absolutist: All authority flowed from the top down, and nothing but compliance from the bottom up.

In practice there existed a substantial degree of local self-governance by individual authorities, and considerable deviation from royal laws and decrees, most commonly expressed in the phrase obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey but I do not fulfill”).

In other words, officials universally acknowledged the Crown’s supreme authority while very often balking at the enforcement of specific laws, usually premised on the belief that it was necessary to respond sensibly and pragmatically to realities on the ground.

Selective enforcement of the New Laws of 1542, intended to place limits on the institution of encomienda, ranks among the most prominent examples of this strong tendency to disobey or only selectively enforce royal laws and decrees.

Scholars continue to debate the consequences of this structure and style of colonial governance for postcolonial Spanish America. Key questions include the longterm implications of the institutionalization of endemic conflict among various branches of government, with the many claimants to political authority vying for supremacy, as expressed in the abundant lawsuits, appeals, and related forms of litigation that marked the entire colonial period.

Another concerns the cultural legacy bequeathed by the structural tendency toward disobedience to royal authority and the formation of a political culture in which practical deviation from the letter of the law became the norm.

Another key area of investigation focuses on the ways in which subordinate individuals and collectivities, particularly Indian communities, learned to use this elaborate legal structure to defend and advance their interests, as they did throughout the colonial period.

Some scholars argue that the Spanish American tradition of vesting local authority in individual officials, combined with the absence of substantial collective authority and democratic institutions, over time generated a political culture that emphasized executive authority far more than legislative or judicial authority, provoking sharp conflicts and diverse syntheses with republican and representative forms of governance and Enlightenment notions of citizenship in the postcolonial period, with many variations in time and space.

Moctezuma II - Aztec Emperor

Moctezuma II - Aztec Emperor

High priest and eighth son of Mexica emperor Axayácatl (d.1481), Moctezuma II, succeeding his uncle Ahuítzol, was selected as the new emperor by a gathering of some 30 Aztec lords in 1502.

Popularly remembered as a weak and indecisive ruler who failed to perceive or resist the threat posed by the invading Spaniards, Moctezuma (or Montezuma, meaning “he who angers himself”) was a key actor in the conquest of Mexico.

Ample historical evidence supports the interpretation that Moctezuma’s vacillation and political paralysis were crucial in giving the Hernán Cortés and the Spanish the strategic and tactical edge they needed to defeat the mighty Aztecs.


Like all seven Mexica rulers who preceded him following the establishment of the royal house in the late 1300s, Moctezuma II was considered semidivine in a culture saturated with state-sponsored religious symbols and practices.

During his tenure as emperor, he also earned a reputation as a stickler for probity, propriety, and solemnity in public and religious affairs and for ruthlessness in military matters. He has been described as dark, having wavy hair and communicating in stern but eloquent speech.

His weaknesses as a ruler became apparent only after his spies reported the arrival of strange, white-skinned, bearded men, accompanied by imposing four-legged “deer ... as high as rooftops” (horses) in large floating vessels off the Caribbean coast in April 1519.

His indecisiveness from this point forward is commonly attributed to his belief that the strangers’ arrival represented the fulfillment of a prophecy regarding the return of the god Quetzalcoatl—an assertion that continues to provoke controversy among scholars.

Regardless, it is clear that the Mexica emperor did almost everything in his power to appease and placate the Spaniards, especially Cortés. Most often cited in this regard are his decisions not to attack but to welcome the armed strangers into the capital island-city of Tenochtitlán, against the counsel of many of his advisers, and to submit willingly to being kept as Cortés’s prisoner for seven months, from mid-November 1519 until his death the following June.

Extant documentation demonstrates many instances of his paralysis, indecision, fear, and anxiety, even as it offers a detailed portrait of him as a ruler and human being.

Also controversial is the manner of his death; whether he was slain by his Spanish captors, or by the stones hurled by his own subjects following his efforts to quell their violent revolt against the invaders, the sources agree that he died on June 30, 1520, and that his death marked the end of the initial, relatively peaceful phase of the conquest and the beginning of the war without quarter that would result in Spanish victory and the onset of 300 years of colonial rule.

Mita Labor in the Andean Highlands

For many centuries prior to the Spanish conquest, the indigenous peoples of the Andean highlands had employed a system of reciprocal labor exchange known as mita (MEE-ta). Literally translating as “turn work” or a “turn” of labor, mita was integral to the system of ayllus, which in the absence of markets constituted the principal mechanism by which individuals, families, and communities exchanged goods and services.

Mita was also the principal way in which pre-Columbian Andean states, including the Inca, secured the labor necessary for the construction of roads, agricultural terraces, warehouses, temples, and other public works.

In the aftermath of their conquest of the Inca, the Spanish came to employ a modified version of the mita labor system, which by convention is generally referred to as mita (rather than mit’a) labor. The differences between the two systems were profound.

In the preconquest mita system, even the lowliest peasant could be assured of a minimal level of subsistence, just as highland communities were ensured an adequate number of workers even after local notables (kurakas) and the imperial state had siphoned off the specified number of mita laborers (mitayos).


Under Spanish rule, the mita system was essentially shorn of much of its reciprocal qualities, while demands for labor intensified dramatically. Especially after the reforms instituted by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s, the mita labor system became, in effect, a system of forced labor in which the state demanded that communities (now called repartimiento) contribute as many as one-seventh of their able-bodied labor force at any given time to work in the silver and mercury mines, in workshops (or obrajes), in agriculture and ranching, and in many other capacities.

Combined with the devastation wrought by the violence of conquest and the epidemic disease that raged throughout the highlands, causing precipitous population declines for which periodic censuses failed to account, the mita labor system emerged as one of the most fearsome and brutal institutions of the entire colonial period.

Overall, the Spanish state was less concerned with fostering conditions under which individuals, families, and communities could reproduce the conditions of their own existence than with extracting the greatest quantity of labor in the shortest possible time.

Mita Labor

The results of this transformation, for ordinary Andeans, were horrific. Communities were drained of their most productive workers, who were gone for months at a time, making it far more difficult for them to meet their tributary quotas “in kind” (e.g., in corn, textiles, and sundry other goods).

This presented a new imposition, since before the conquest the Inca state and its agents had required communities to contribute mita labor exclusively, not goods. Mitayos, often accompanied by their wives, children, and other relatives, were often subjected to the most brutal working conditions imaginable, especially those assigned to work in the silver and mercury mines.

Females who accompanied mitayos during their turn at labor became vulnerable to rape and other abuses, while other family members were frequently assigned to secondary tasks by colonial authorities, further depleting the quantity of labor available to the larger community.

The abuses of mita labor continued throughout the colonial period and were a major contributing factor in the many revolts and uprisings that rocked the Andean highlands in the decades and centuries after the consolidation of colonial rule in the 1570s.

Conquest of Mexico

Conquest of Mexico

The conquest of Mexico represents one of the most ofttold and epic sagas in the European conquest of the New World. Our knowledge of the defeat of the Aztecs (Mexica) is based on a rich array of firsthand accounts, both Spanish and native.

The first conquest of a major indigenous polity in the Americas by a European power, the conquest of Mexico fueled the European imagination while providing a template for the violent subjugation of the rest of Mesoamerica and large parts of South America in the decades to follow.

With the conquest of Cuba complete and much of the Caribbean under Spanish dominion, the first explorations along the coast of modern-day Mexico were in 1517 under captain Francisco Hernández de Córdoba. This initial exploratory foray was followed in 1518 by an expedition under Juan de Grijalva that further probed the easternmost fringes of the Aztec domain.


Both were under the authority of the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez. In a series of sometimes violent encounters with the native inhabitants along the coast, the Grijalva expedition learned that a great city lay somewhere in the interior.

The stage was thus set for a third expedition, also under Governor Velázquez’s authority, to ascertain further the nature of these mysterious lands and peoples. After much behind-the-scenes political intrigue and deal making within Cuba, the governor selected Hernán Cortés as the expedition’s leader—a choice he would soon come to regret.

Setting Sail

The 11 ships under Cortés’s command set sail from Cuba in December 1519 with some 530 European men, several hundred Cuban Indians (including women), 16 horses, and numerous dogs.

They were exceedingly well armed with artillery, cannons, swords, cutlasses, lances, crossbows, arquebuses, and other weaponry, and well stocked with bread, meat, and other provisions, including trinkets for use as gifts to friendly natives. Officially this was to be an expedition of discovery only. Governor Velázquez had not granted its leader the authority to conquer or colonize.

Making initial landfall at Cozumel Island, Cortés learned from the natives that two Christians were held captive in the interior. One of them, Jerónimo de Aguilar, had shipwrecked off the coast of Yucatán in 1511 and lived among the local inhabitants for the past eight years. His knowledge of Chontal Maya and native customs would prove crucial in the events to follow.

The expedition continued north and west, past Yucatán and along the coast of present-day Tabasco state. On March 25, 1519, at the village called Potonchan, after one in a series of violent encounters with coastal peoples, Cortés was given 20 young native women as a peace offering.

One of these women, Malinali, baptized Marina, became one of the key actors of the conquest, acting as Cortés’s interpreter, confidant, and later mistress, bearing his child—reputedly the first mestizo (Spanish-Indian) child. She spoke both Maya and Nahuatl, the latter the language of the Aztecs, and had intimate knowledge of Indian people’s customs and practices.

To Mexicans she was later known as La Malinche (Doña Marina), or worse, La Chingada (the violated one) and conventionally has been viewed as a traitor to her people, an interpretation challenged by more recent feminist scholarship.

The expedition reached San Juan de Ulúa, an island off the coast of modern-day Veracruz, on Maundy Thursday 1519. Reaching the mainland on Good Friday, Cortés established friendly relations with the local Totonac chieftain, an Aztec subordinate named Teudile.

On Easter Sunday, Cortés undertook a characteristically theatrical gesture when he staged a mock-battle on the beach, firing cannon and racing his horses, to the astonishment of his hosts. He also asked for gold, which he portrayed as medicine for sick comrades.

Within days, Aztec emperor Moctezuma II was informed of the strangers’ activities via oral reports and painted renderings. Scholarly debates continue regarding whether Moctezuma and his priests viewed the bearded strangers as gods, particularly whether Cortés was the Plumed Serpent Quetzalcoatl returning from the east as prophesied.

In order to circumvent the authority of Governor Velázquez and establish his own authority to wage a campaign of conquest, Cortés pulled a legal sleight of hand, founding a town called Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, appointing its officials, and resigning his office.

His men in turn elected him the town’s principal judicial and military authority. In accordance with Spanish law, he now derived his authority directly from the Crown. The maneuver is often cited as a prime example of the conquistador’s political cunning.

Inland Expedition

With their base at Villa Rica, the expedition inland began. Soon a pattern developed, whereby Moctezuma politely denied Cortés the right to enter the Aztec capital, and Cortés politely insisted on visiting the sovereign as an ambassador of King Charles I. The campaign that followed demonstrated Cortés’s masterful ability to perceive and exploit the political and ethnic divisions between the Aztecs and their subordinate polities.

Events in Cempoala—in which Cortés tricked the Cempoalan cacique into an alliance—are often cited as exemplary of this ability. So too is his decision to scuttle his ships, along with other actions that worked to instill a sense of purpose, unity, and loyalty among his men.

After winning the alliance of the Tlaxcalans—one of the few polities the Aztecs had proved unable to subdue—and slaughtering some 6,000 Cholulans in an infamous surprise attack, the expedition reached Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519. Entering the magnificent city, the Spaniards were greeted graciously by the indecisive Moctezuma.

A few days later on November 14, Cortés boldly took the Aztec emperor hostage, holding him as prisoner within his own capital city. After some six months in this uneasy state, Cortés learned that Governor Velázquez of Cuba had dispatched an expedition under Pánfilo de Narváez to arrest him (Cortés) for violating his orders.

Leaving his second in command Pedro de Alvarado in charge in Tenochtitlán, in early May 1520, Cortés hastened back to Cempoala, defeated the Narváez force on May 28–29, and won over its survivors. Returning to Tenochtitlán, the Spanish force under his command now more than 1,000 strong, Cortés learned to his chagrin that Pedro de Alvarado had slaughtered hundreds of Mexican nobility during a religious celebration.

Trapped for several days, the Spanish force barely escaped the city in its withdrawal of La Noche Triste (The Sorrowful Night) of July 1, 1520, in which an estimated 400–600 Spaniards were killed. During the fighting, the emperor Moctezuma was slain, by which side remaining a matter of debate. Regrouping his forces near the coast, Cortés decided to lay siege to the great city.

In an audacious and monumental undertaking, he supervised the construction of 13 brigantines, which were then carried in sections over the mountains, assembled, and launched on Lake Texcoco. By this time, his forces numbered some 900 well-armed Spaniards, 86 horses, and thousands of Indian allies.

The siege of the island city of Tenochtitlán began in May 1521. Meanwhile an epidemic, probably of smallpox, was laying waste to the Aztec capital. Even before the siege had begun, an estimated one-third of the city’s inhabitants had succumbed to European diseases against which they had no immunity.

After three months of furious fighting, the Spanish invaders and their Indian allies reduced Tenochtitlán to rubble. Leading the city’s defense was Cuauhtemoc, Moctezuma’s cousin, whom much Indian lore later came to memorialize as a hero. The city fell on August 13, 1521—some two and a half years after the invaders’ first landfall at Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz.

Scholars have emphasized various factors that made possible the defeat of the mighty and war-hardened Aztecs by a few hundred Spanish invaders. Near the top of all such lists is Cortés’s political brilliance, combined with his unshakable will to conquer, acquire riches, and spread the Christian faith. His ability to perceive and exploit preexisting divisions within the Aztec polity, and success in gaining thousands of loyal Indian allies, are often cited as sine qua non of the conquest.

Also emphasized in this vein is that no native inhabitants could have known that Cortés was but the advance guard of an aggressive and expanding kingdom, accustomed to campaigns of conquest, inspired by an exclusive and highly militarized religion, determined to create an overseas empire.

Other major factors most often cited in making the conquest possible include Spanish superiority in the technologies of warfare, especially their horses, swords, and armor; the invaders’ skills in the arts of war, steely resolve, unity of purpose, and loyalty to each other and their leader; the adversaries’ very different cultural conceptions of warfare, with the Spaniards focused on killing the enemy, and the Aztecs more concerned with capturing prisoners for later sacrifice; the Spaniards’ advantage of language, thanks to Jerónimo de Aguilar and La Malinche; the weak and indecisive leadership of Moctezuma; the role of myth, legend, and fatalism in weakening Aztec resolve; and the role of disease in weakening the Aztec capacity to resist once the selesai siege had begun.

Atop the smoldering ruins of Tenochtitlán the Spaniards built a new capital city—Mexico City—often using the same blocks of stone they had just toppled, and foundations already in place, using the labor of the vanquished Indians to realize their vision of the Spanish Christian kingdom spread to the New World.

For the next 300 years, New Spain would be Spain’s most important colony. Soon many of the victorious conquistadores and their countrymen began looking beyond Mexico, as New Spain served as a launching point for further campaigns of conquest.