The last Indian empire in Mexico, the Aztec, fell to Spanish invaders in the early 1500s. For more than the next two hundred years, Mexico was a Spanish colony. The Spaniards took Mexico's fortunes, but also introduced many advances in culture and traditions, government, education and religion. The descendants of the Spaniards became Mexico's ruling class, whereas the Indians remained at a lower-class status. Once New Spain settled in its new territory, it would be under influence of the mother country Spain. Its colonial system would be entrenched in the new colony and its economy would strive to gain profit and make Spain more wealthy and more powerful.
The Spanish introduced in particular war and violence in a brutal way that some would describe as a great protection technique and others describe as a crime to humanity. A large amount of lives and livelihood were sacrificed during the intense conquest of New Spain. The
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relationship between the indigenous population and the higher class population, as well as the result of the conquest, were also all perceived differently in a number of primary sources such as that those discussed below. These first-hand accounts each give their own vivid history lesson as they surprise the audience with its details. We learn about the hardships that soldiers suffered in their march towards Mexico city as well as the political conspiracies that took place within the Spanish army. When reading, An Account of the Destruction of the Indies, the wickedness that man was displayed plainly and direly by Las Casas as he had no mercy on women or children; as “they would enter into the villages and spare not the children, or old people, or pregnant women, or women with suckling babes, but would open the women‘s belly and hack the babe to pieces as they were butchering lambs shut up in their pens”#. War and violence outshines excessive use of power for sure. This source seems to, rightly so, favour the victims due to the words and details used. The economy was based on agriculture, ranching, mining, industry, and commerce. A large amount of the economy’s labour-force was made up of the indigenous people, or ‘Indians’. They would go on to build New Spain’s lower aspect of the economy and soon after many resisting ‘Indians’ gave in to the new power’s demands for labor and started to work for them. Shortly thereafter, some ‘Indians’ found refuge. Although, some ‘Indians’ were paid reasonable wages, most were treated unfairly and badly. A number of ‘Indians’ died from doing their job due to the work conditions and maltreatment by the superior. In the Letter to King Phillip II, violence and authority merge. The descriptions used here seems to protect the powerful as the letter lacks detail and deep emotions, in comparison to the Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Nevertheless, the picture of great violence was painted; as “they tried to kill me, and I hanged then all“#. ‘Indians’ were always to remain at the bottom of the social status, along with women and children.
Power and greed were clearly the root to all evils in this conquest, as the rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer. War and violence was also a great focus in the primary source of The Conquest of New Spain (2); as a very interesting but yet shocking read, these two themes also connect with religion. The account of Bernal Diaz Castillo and his Spanish soldiers being violently attacked and forced to leave the land they were unaware that they had entered. The portrayal of the Spanish killing the Aztecs for God, to put an end to human sacrifice, and to stop sodomy is a very troubling and upsetting. It seems that there were more killing in this source; “they were fed on deer, fowls, little dogs, and other creatures which the hunted and also on the little bodies of the Indians they sacrificed, I was told”# . It seems like there were more violence in the Entrance into Mexico and the Stay in Mexico than the An Account of the Destruction of the
Indies. These primary sources clearly portray war and violence as a primary theme, and merges with other themes at the same time. Some of the sources contain such brutal details that they are disturbing, and accounts simply seem to be informatively but airbrushed. In school you are informed of the fact that there were lives and land lost in wars and battles but you are not introduced to all the gruesome details as these. Reading the records definitely makes me think that some people are deprived of the necessary education needed to understand the details about history. These subjects should be core in high school and college, rather than optional at higher-level.
Anais Nin once said that “we write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection.” In his book, Seven Myths of Spanish Conquest, Matthew Restall tries to change our perception of the past in other to open our eyes to what life was really like during the colonial period. As Restall puts it, the main propose of the book is to “illustrate the degree to which the Conquest was a far more complex and protracted affair” (p.154) than what was supposed in the latters and chronicles left by the conquistadores. Each one of Restall’s chapters examines one of seven myths regarding the mystery behind the conquest. By doing so, Matthew Restall forces us to look back at the Spanish conquest and question
“The Conquest of New Spain” is the first hand account of Bernal Diaz (translated by J.M. Cohen) who writes about his personal accounts of the conquest of Mexico by himself and other conquistadors beginning in 1517. Unlike other authors who wrote about their first hand accounts, Diaz offers a more positive outlook of the conquest and the conquistadors motives as they moved through mainland Mexico. The beginning chapters go into detail about the expeditions of some Spanish conquistadors such as Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, Juan de Grijalva and Hernando Cotes. This book, though, focuses mainly on Diaz’s travels with Hernando Cortes. Bernal Diaz’s uses the idea of the “Just War Theory” as his argument for why the conquests were justifiable
The passage from Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain is a clear example of a narrative source. Díaz is presenting his personal account of Hernan Cortes’s expedition into Tenochtitlan. An interesting aspect of this narrative is that it was written almost 50 years after the events described occurred . Bernal Díaz del Castillo was only 24 years old when on November 8, 1519 he and the rest of Hernán Cortés’s expedition first entered the city of Tenochtitlán . He did not finish his account, titled The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, which many suspect was intended as a slight to Francisco López de Gómara’s accounts of the expeditions , until 1567 . This was not his first travel to the New World, in fact, it was his fourth . Díaz del Castillo was 19 years old the first time he traveled to the Americas, this time was to Panama . Díaz later became a governor in Guatemala, mostly as a reward for his actions as a conquistador . The event that is commonly seen as spurring the not-well-educated Bernal Díaz del Castillo to write of his experiences with Cortés was the publication of Francisco López de Gómara’s Coleccion de historiadores primitivos de las Indias Occidentales, which Díaz saw as seriously flawed and underappreciating the work of the conquistadors . The book this passage comes from languished on shelves until it was published in 1632, posthumously .
Spain, as one of the most powerful nations in the old world, had a great influence on many events in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Spanish also had an influence on many other empires/nations' fate. One of the empires that suffered a grave fate at the hands of the Spanish was the Aztec empire. The Aztec empire was not the oldest Mesoamerican empire and it was formed from an agreement between three city-states. The Aztec's class system had the emperor on top, then the priests, and everyone else below them. The priests were responsible for keeping the gods happy. The sacrifice of goods and people was a commonplace in the Aztec culture, and it was often the goods/people of other nations that were taken for sacrifices. As one can imagine,
The early years of colonial Mexico were a time of great change, as the native Indian populations were decimated by disease and increasingly dominated by the Spanish social and economic structure. Under the encomienda system, the initial flood of Spanish immigrants were provided with a support structure in New Spain, as the Indians’ land and labor were put at their disposal in exchange for moral guidance.[3] As Spain sought to reap the benefits of its new colony, the need for dependable labor in Mexico’s agr...
In Matthew Restall’s book The Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, he argues that many of the widely accepted modern beliefs about the Spanish Conquest are misguided or skewed. These myths more importantly show how dependent history is on the perspective of the one who is writing it, and how the writer perceives the events happening around them. One example, is the myth of white Spaniards going to a foreign land on the decree of a king and finding barbarous natives who are inferior to these so-called great men. Using documentation written from both sides, and taking into account the context of the time period, Restall explores the myths of the Spanish Conquest in order to frame a less romanticized, well-rounded view of what actually happened
The downfall of the Aztec Empire was a major building block of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas. Spain’s empire would stretch all the way into North America from the Southwest United States all the way up the Pacific Coast. The unfortunate side effect of this was the elimination of many nations of indigenous people. The three major themes shown in this conquest really give deeper look into the anatomy of this important historical event. Without context on the extent of native assistance given to Cortez in his fight with the Aztecs, a reader would be grossly uniformed. The Spanish conquest was closer to a civil war than an actual conquest. Until reading detailed personal accounts of the fighting it is difficult to judge the deadly effectiveness of the Spaniards technological superiority. Without it is difficult to imagine 500 conquistadors holding thousands of native warriors at bay. Once the greed of Cortez and greed in general of the Europeans one understands that if it wasn’t Cortez if would have just been a different man at a different time. Unfortunately fame and prosperity seem to always win over cares about fellow human beings
Bowden’s idea of why this happened focused mainly on the old misunderstood traditions of the tribes living in Mexico. He shows how the friars, churches and icons took the blunt of the revolts force. Bowden points out the religious differences and similarities be...
Bernel Diaz Del Castillo. A man who was once a foot soldier in Hernan Cortes’s spanish army. The same army that discovered and took over the Aztec empire in the early 1520’s. It was not until later on in Castillo’s life that he wrote this memoir or “personal history” as some would argue, called the True History of the Conquest of New Spain. The name seemingly strikes the question “What is True History?”. Before writing his version of the of what happened in New Spain, Castillo watched many attempt to tell the story of the spanish conquest and tell it with biases that he believed should not have been taken into account. Being a first hand witness to what happened in the spanish conquest Castillo believed that the record should be set straight,
When the Spaniards arrived on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico in 1519, they encountered the advanced society of the Aztecs. With Tenochititlan at its capital, the Aztec empire was vast. The Aztecs had substantial wealth from trading and extensive payments of tribute from conquered peoples. Bernal Diaz in his The Conquest of New Spain comments, "We were dazzled at the richness of the country that we passed through" (282). The Spaniards encountered a powerful, advanced people in the New World, making Cortes and his crew of approximately 600 seemingly ensured of defeat. The Aztec religion lends much to Spanish success in conquest.
In schools, students are being taught wrong information. “Our gods were vanquished after the fall of Tenochtitlan as were our traditions. Our warriors and nobles were eradicated, our children starved and our women ravished by the white conquerors and their allies.” (157). In books across America, the Spaniards were said to be good people, but the way that Huitzitzilin described what happened, shows the complete opposite of how the Spaniards actually were.
The Conquest of New Spain Cortés came not to the New World to conquer by force, but by manipulation. Bernal Daz del Castillo, in the "Conquest of New Spain," describes how Cortés and his soldiers manipulated the Aztec people and their king Montezuma from the time they traveled from Iztapalaopa to the time when Montezuma took Cortés to the top of the great Cue and showed him the whole of Mexico and its countryside, and the three causeways which led into Mexico. Castillo's purpose for recording the mission was to keep an account of the wealth of Montezuma and Mexico, the traditions, and the economic potential that could benefit Cortés' upcoming conquest. However, through these recordings, we are able to see and understand Cortés' strategy in making Mexico "New Spain." He came as a wolf in sheep's clothing and manipulated Montezuma through his apparent innocence.
The Spanish-American war was the first and biggest step that the United States of America took toward imperialism. It was the war that secured the US as the most powerful country in the world. This war was a benefit to the USA because we gained land, gained respect, and taught a lesson to one of our enemies. In addition to this, the losses that we suffered were almost nothing compared to other conflicts or wars. The Spanish-American war was by no means for the sole purpose of gaining land and respect, the United States freed an oppressed country and took pieces of land that were better off under US control.
Two of the biggest and greatest civilization in the Americas were the Aztecs and Incas. These two civilization were both said to be conquered by the Spanish, but it wasn’t just the Spanish who conquered them. These two civilizations both fell from a combination of a weak government, lack of technology, new disease introduced by the invaders, and not being prepared for the invaders. For many centuries the Aztec civilization revolved around a ideological, social, and political system in which expansion was the cornerstone. Expansion was the cornerstone of their whole civilization, because their religion requested that a large number of human sacrifices where to be made to the gods.
Hi I'm doing my report on the Spanish American War. In the following pages I will be giving information on how and why the war started, major battles, and the results of the war. I will also include stories from people on the battleship Maine.