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Origins of a Nation Many Cultures Meet First Encounters • With financial backing from Spain’s monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, Christopher Columbus found the Americas. • Note: Isabella and Ferdinand reconquered the Iberian peninsula and drove the Moors out of what would become Spain in 1492. First Encounters • Columbus returned to the Americas to conquer the land, exploit its wealth, and convert its people to Christianity. • This process changed Europe, Africa, and the Americas. • Note: Portuguese sailors were establishing trading posts in West Africa during this time period and began to expand African slave trade. Frist Encounter • Section Focus Question: How did European exploration affect the Americas? Spain Looks to the West • In 1487, the Portuguese mariner Bartolomue Dias learned how to use the counterclockwise winds of the South Atlantic to get around southern Africa. • In 1498, Vasco da Gama exploited that discovery to reach India, opening an immensely profitable trade. • The Portuguese dominated the trade routes around Africa. Spain Looks to the West • By default, in the late 1400s the Spanish looked westward into the open Atlantic to establish lucrative trade routes with East Asia. • To pursue the western dream, Spain relied on an Italian mariner from the city of Genoa named Christopher Columbus. • Columbus believed that the diameter of the earth was 18,000 miles around—almost 7,000miles smaller than it actually is. Spain Looks to the West • Columbus researched stories about North Atlantic discoveries by the Vikings. • During the ninth and tenth centuries, Vikings probed the North Atlantic to discover and colonize Iceland and Greenland. • From Greenland, some mariners reached the northeastern coast of North America. • By around 1000, they founded a settlement on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Spain Looks to the West • In 1492, Columbus sets sail with three ships and a crew of 90 men. • After 33 days at sea, he reached what we now call the Bahamas. • He found other island that he thought belonged to the East Indies. • Based on this mistaken notion, he referred to the people who inhabited the islands as Indians. Spain Looks to the West • As a representative of a Christian nation, Columbus felt he had the right to dominate the people he found. • Columbus wanted to spread Christianity to the Chinese and use the Chinese people and wealth to battle Islamic influence surrounding Europe. Spain Looks to the West • Columbus used the military advantage of horses, gunpowder, and steel to subdue the natives. • His brutality lead to his recall by Spain in 1500, and he died there in 1506. • Columbus had not reached Asia, but he had found a source of riches that enabled European Christians to grow more powerful and wealthy than the Muslim world. Spain Looks to the West • During the next three centuries, the mineral and plantation wealth of the Americas— produced by the labor of African slaves— helped finance the expansion of European commerce. • In turn, that commerce promoted the development of new technologies and the growth of military power. Spain Looks to the West Spain and Portugal Divide the Americas • With the assistance of the pope, the Spanish and the Portuguese negotiated the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. • They agreed to split the world of new discoveries by drawing a north-south boundary line through the mid-Atlantic west of the Azores. • The Portuguese secured a monopoly to exploit the cost of Africa and the Indian Ocean. The Spanish claimed Columbus’s western lands. Spain and Portugal Divide the Americas The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • In 1497, John Cabot, a Genoese mariner employed by the English, sailed to Newfoundland. • A Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Alvarez Cabral discovered the coast of Brazil in 1500. • Amerigo Vespucci, another Genoese mariner, explored enough of South America’s cost to deem it a new continent. The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • European mapmakers began to call the new continents by a variant of Vespucci’s first name. • Between 1519 and 1522, a voyage begun by Ferdinand Magellan succeeded in encircling the entire globe. • This gave a more complete picture of Earth. The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • At the start of the 1500s, the Spanish learned of a spectacular Indian empire in central Mexico. • Those soldiers who explored central Mexico and defeated the Indian civilization there were called conquistadors. • In 1519, the ruthless Hernan Cortes led a group of about 600 volunteers from Cuba to the coast of Mexico. The Spanish Expand Their American Empire The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • Marching inland, Cortes’s army alarmed the Aztec ruler, Moctezuma. • Hoping to intimidate them with his own power, Moctezuma invited the Spanish into his great city. • The largest and richest city in the Americas, Tenochtitlan had a population of 200,000. The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • The Aztec city’s central plaza of tall stone pyramid-temples dazzled with a combination of red, blue, and ochre stucco. • The city’s gold and silver inflamed the Spanish desire to conquer and plunder. • By seizing and killing Moctezuma, the Spanish provoked violent street fighting that drove them from the city. The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • The Spanish returned with reinforcements, including many revenge-seeking local Indians who had themselves been brutalized by the Aztecs. • Cortes captured Tenochtitlan. • Four months of fighting had reduced the city to a bloody rubble. The Spanish Expand Their American Empire The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • During the 1530s, Francisco Pizarro conquered the powerful Incas of Peru with just 180 soldiers. • Conquistadors were motivated by wealth, religious faith, and loyalty to the monarch. • They reasoned that riches were wasted on non-Christian Indians. The Spanish Expand Their American Empire The Spanish Expand Their American Empire The Spanish Expand Their American Empire The Spanish Expand Their American Empire. • The Spanish converted the Native Americans to Christianity. • This notion of converting people to Christianity was ingrained in Spanish culture as a result of the centuries long Reconquista. • The conquistadors benefited from superior weapons (steel- edge swords, pikes, and crossbows) The Spanish Expand Their American Empire The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • The conquistadors benefited from the psychological affect of their large guns. • These guns were not accurate but made a large noise and created large clouds of smoke. • The conquistadors also used mounted men on horseback to their advantage. • The Native Americans never experienced such tactics in warfare. The Spanish Expand Their American Empires The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • The greatest weapon that the conquistadors possessed was that they carried disease. • Brutal exploration and disease combined to destroy the natives of Hispaniola. • From 300,000 in 1492, the island’s population declined to a mere 500 by 1548. • It is believed that disease reduced the native population in the Americas by one fifth of its pre-1492 numbers. The Spanish Expand Their American Empire • The great European killers included smallpox, typhus, diphtheria, bubonic plague, and cholera. • Europeans developed immunization to these diseases over centuries of exposure. • Left with large tracks of fertile and depopulated land the colonists needed a new source of labor. The Transatlantic Exchange • The Europeans who began arriving in the Americas in the late 1400s brought more than weapons, diseases, and a thirst for wealth and power. • The colonizers also brought plants and animals that were new to the Americas. • The European arrival brought about and ecological revolution (Columbian Exchange). Columbian Exchange • Europeans introduced their domesticated livestock: pigs, horses, mules, sheep, and cattle. • They also brought seeds for their domesticated plants. • These include wheat, barley, rye, oats, grasses, and grapes. • The Europeans imported Maize and potatoes from the Americas. Columbian Exchange • Large harvests of new European crops imported from the Americas lead to a population explosion in Europe. • From about 80 million in 1492, Europe’s population grew to 180 million by 1800 (11 percent of the worlds population in 1492, to 20 percent of the worlds population in 1800). • Native American population dropped from 7 percent of the global population in 1492, to 1 percent of the global population in 1800.