Conquistadors In The Americas

“Conquistadors were the men who during the sixteenth century engaged in the acts of exploration and conquest in the Americas that expanded Spain's colonial empire.”

The conquistadors intention was to better their own lives.

They also wanted to expand their religion to new territories.

While attempting to do both of these things the conquistadors indirectly influenced the scope and nature of world trade.

They establish the beginnings of long-term commercial contacts between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

“Undeniably, these expeditions produced great wealth and glory for individuals such as Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and Francisco Pizarro (1471?–1541), but they also promoted important long-term changes in patterns of global production
and commerce.”

“Conquistadors from parts of what would later be called Spain inherited a tradition of ongoing religious warfare to claim territory for Christendom, collectively called the reconquista, which had persisted for seven centuries preceding Christopher Columbus's discovery of a route.”

“Conquistadors routinely engaged in practices that made little strategic or military sense, simply because they were simultaneously pursuing religious and material goals.”

As one member of Cortés's expedition put it, "we came to serve God, and also to get rich"

The conquistadors confronted difficulties resulting both from the composition of their forces and from the nature of royal support for the conquest.
Very few of the armies of conquistadors were professional soldiers. Instead, they tended to be men of humble social status whose current situations were desperate enough to warrant sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to the exotic world of the "Indies," and who therefore expected not only to serve Christendom but also to profit from their efforts.

Meanwhile, the Crown was generally reluctant to invest much money in territorial conquest in the Americas, preferring to name adelantados (individuals licensed by the king to lead expeditions of exploration and conquest in exchange for privileges and rewards should they succeed in expanding the king's realms).

Thus, the conquistadors themselves tended to be essentially private entrepreneurs. Like the spiritual aspect of the conquest, this too drew on reconquista precedents. Expedition members often took out loans in order to purchase equipment, expecting to risk their lives, be rewarded handsomely, and have enough profit from the journey to more than repay their
creditors.

Consequently, rewards for successful conquistadors had to come from the proceeds of conquest, and they had to take material form converting heathens would not sufficient to cover their debts, nor to justify the risks they took. Certainly, some conquering Europeans earned considerable quantities of bullion and other wealth in the form of booty.

Still, most individual soldiers led by conquistadors found themselves with too little captured gold even to repay their debts. Here, too, reconquistapractice offered a solution. Members of conquistadors' expeditions routinely received as rewards for their effortsencomiendas, which were grants that conferred rights and responsibilities to the recipient.

To wit, the holder of the grant of encomienda enjoyed the labor of a particular group of non-Christian persons, and in exchange had to arrange for their evangelization while also providing military service at the Crown's pleasure.
Although this was neither gold nor land ownership, the encomienda shaped early Spanish colonialism in the Americas in ways that would eventually affect world trade.

The wealth, fame, and success accruing to an individual conquistador depended to great extent on the kind of indigenous society that the conqueror happened to encounter while exploring. It is no coincidence that the two best-known conquistadors, Cortés and Pizarro, were the conquerors of the two wealthiest and most powerful states in the Americas in the early sixteenth century. Hernán Cortés—unusual among conquistadors due to his minor noble family and his education—led a small expedition from Cuba in 1519 that by August 1521 had subdued the capital of the Aztec Empire.

He personally earned an astonishing amount of wealth in bullion, the royal grant of a noble title, land, and encomiendas, but his contribution to world trade lay in subordinating to the Spanish Crown millions of Mesoamerican peoples who already lived in a complex empire and were already accustomed to paying taxes and rendering labor
service.

Both the encomienda and tribute payments became important means by which Europeans could extract surplus production from indigenous persons in the Americas.

Subsequently, several expeditions in the late 1520s and early 1530s led by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro (1475?–1538) explored the Pacific Coast of South America in search of another wealthy empire to conquer.

Pizarro's men (but not Almagro's) collected thousands of pounds of gold and silver bullion in 1532 by capturing the ruler of the Incan Empire. Almagro's troops earned loot on a smaller scale when the Spanish later sacked Cuzco, the Incan capital in the Andes, to complete the conquest. Consequently, many of the conquerors of the Incas returned to Spain as rich men, rather than staying to receive encomiendas.

However, as in Mesoamerica, the conquistadors who settled in the Incan Empire after they conquered it subordinated a complex society to Spain.

As had happened in the Aztec realms, millions of Andean peoples who had been ruled by the Incas paid taxes and rendered labor service, giving rise to substantial new trade connections.

Even those conquistadors less successful than Cortés or Pizarro contributed to the creation of a vast empire for Spain in the Americas, and this spurred world trade in several important ways. Wealth was transferred from Americans to Europeans via encomiendas; a second transfer of wealth took the form of tribute collected from the millions of new indigenous subjects. Another important stimulus to increased global trade was in the settlement and administration of the conquered lands and peoples, which over time in New Spain, Peru, and other American colonies promoted very complex economies that engaged in production, consumption, and exchange of commodities in an ever-larger global trading network.

Although they envisioned none of this when they set out, individual conquistadors prepared the way for major shifts in world trade.