Spanish Colonialism in the Americas Explained Simply

In 1492, an almost 800-year-old era on the Iberian Peninsula came to an end - and, in the very same year, a process began that would go on to change world history forever, though no one could have known it at the time. In January 1492, the last Muslim ruler of Granada surrendered the city to the “Catholic Monarchs” Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, ending the Reconquista, the centuries-long reconquest of Spain from Muslim rule. Just months later, in August 1492, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus set sail with three ships - funded by those same two monarchs. What followed was the European colonization of the Americas: a story of exploration, military violence, disease, and economic exploitation - and, even at the time, of early criticism from within Spain itself.

Columbus had actually set out to find a western sea route to Asia, hoping to make Europe's spice trade less dependent on the established routes through the Middle East. On 12 October 1492, he instead reached an island in the Caribbean - probably one of today's Bahamas. He believed for the rest of his life that he had reached part of Asia, which is why the Caribbean islands are still called the “West Indies” and why Indigenous Americans were long, mistakenly, called “Indians”. Since Portugal had also been pursuing overseas exploration and colonies for decades, Spain and Portugal divided the still largely unknown world between themselves in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, along an imaginary line in the Atlantic - a striking example of how casually European powers claimed foreign continents without ever consulting the people who lived there.

From the first landing to the first public condemnation: the key stages of Spanish expansion in the Americas.

The systematic conquest of the mainland began roughly a quarter century later. In 1519, the conquistador Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of present-day Mexico with only a few hundred soldiers and marched inland toward the powerful Aztec Empire and its capital, Tenochtitlan - a metropolis larger and better organized than most European cities of the time. Cortés managed to win numerous peoples as allies who had suffered under Aztec rule, above all the Tlaxcalans; without these Indigenous allies, the conquest would hardly have been possible. After an initially cautious reception by the ruler Moctezuma II, the situation escalated; following fierce fighting and a months-long siege, Tenochtitlan fell in August 1521. A smallpox epidemic, introduced by the Europeans, had already massively weakened the city beforehand.

A similar pattern repeated itself a good decade later in South America. From 1532 onward, Francisco Pizarro encountered the Inca Empire, which had already been weakened by a bitter civil war between the brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar - and which had also been struck by a smallpox epidemic that had even cost the previous ruler, Huayna Cápac, his life. Pizarro deliberately exploited this weakness: at a meeting in Cajamarca, he had Atahualpa taken prisoner, extorted an enormous ransom in gold and silver - and had him executed anyway in 1533. Shortly afterward, the Spanish conquered the Inca capital, Cusco. Here too, it was not primarily superior weapons but a combination of disease, internal division, and the skillful exploitation of local conflicts that tipped the balance.

Before Spanish troops were allowed to take military action against Indigenous groups, they were formally required to read out a specific text: the so-called Requerimiento (“Requirement”), written in 1513 by the Spanish jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios. The text invoked the papal bulls of 1493, in which Pope Alexander VI had granted the newly discovered continent to the Spanish crown, and called on the assembled Indigenous listeners to submit voluntarily to the Church and the Spanish king. Those who complied were promised peace and protection - those who refused were explicitly threatened with war, enslavement, and the seizure of their property, with the text placing responsibility for this squarely on the “disobedient” themselves, not on the Spanish. The absurdity: in practice, the Requerimiento was often read aloud in Spanish, to people who did not understand the language at all - sometimes at night outside a sleeping village, sometimes from a great distance, or even from a ship offshore, so that those addressed could not possibly grasp its content. Historians today see the Requerimiento as a particularly clear example of how a European colonial power tried to legitimize military conquest after the fact, in both legal and religious terms: the form of an “offer” was formally preserved, while the reality aimed at submission through force from the very start. Even some contemporaries criticized the practice - a sign that a certain awareness of its injustice already existed at the time.

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After the military conquests came the economic exploitation of the new colonies. Central to this was the encomienda system: the Spanish crown granted individual colonists (encomenderos) the right to demand labor and tribute from a specific Indigenous population - officially in exchange for “protection” and conversion to Christianity, but in practice often a form of forced labor that differed little from slavery. Mine workers were hit especially hard: in 1545, the Spanish discovered one of the largest silver deposits in world history at Potosí, in present-day Bolivia. Under the so-called mita system, thousands of Indigenous men were conscripted every year for forced labor underground, under conditions that killed many of them. The silver from Potosí was shipped to Europe via Seville and permanently reshaped the European economy: the sudden influx of money contributed significantly to the so-called “Price Revolution”, a decades-long wave of inflation.

The human cost of colonization was immense. Historians estimate that the Indigenous population of the Americas declined by up to 90 percent in some regions within the first hundred years after 1492 - an overall demographic catastrophe with few parallels in history. The main cause was diseases introduced from Europe, such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, against which the Indigenous population had no immunity whatsoever; on top of that came violence, forced labor, famine caused by destroyed economic structures, and forced resettlement. Remarkably, criticism of this emerged even at the time - and from a Spaniard. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas had himself initially been an encomendero before turning radically against the system. In his 1552 work “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias), he denounced the violence against the Indigenous population in stark terms. His criticism helped bring about the Spanish crown's 1542 “New Laws”, intended to restrict the encomienda system - although they were only partially enforced in practice. In 1550-51, Las Casas also publicly debated the scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda at the famous Valladolid debate, over the question of whether Indigenous peoples, by the standards of the time, were even fully human, with souls and rights.