Conquistadors The Rise and Fall_6of6_The Black Legend
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00:00The year is 1568, almost eight decades of relentless conquest.
00:14The Aztec and Inca have been defeated, spreading the Spanish Empire across the Americas.
00:21The generations born of the first wave of conquistadors grow rich from the torrent of
00:27new world silver, a wealth which brought with it increasing power.
00:33They would begin to question their loyalty to the Spanish crown, a king that they had
00:39never seen, ruling over a land 4,000 miles away that they had never set foot upon.
00:48Would they continue to pay a lofty tax to the god-fearing kingdom their fathers and
00:52grandfathers had fought for, a distant place to which they felt no real connection?
01:01As evidence of the colonists' brutality comes to light, religious propaganda floods Europe,
01:07embellishing and magnifying the horror of Spanish crimes, a phenomenon which would come
01:13to be known as the Black Legend, a potent anti-Spanish narrative which would colour
01:20the world's perception of Central and South America for hundreds of years to come, forming
01:27cracks in a kingdom already slipping into debt, losing itself to political turmoil,
01:34fighting off pirates, and flailing to retain control of its hard-won outposts.
01:41The new world would soon endure its final official Spanish conquests.
01:48It would mark the culmination of millions of lives lost in a long series of atrocities
01:54set across two continents, all for an empire now destined for centuries of further turmoil.
02:04These would be the last days of the Conquistadors.
02:19Over 80 years in the new world, the Conquistadors' influence had spread across the North and
02:26South American continents, as well as the islands of the Philippines and Guam, their
02:34thriving colonies owing a terrible blood debt to a savage global industry built on silver
02:41and slaves.
02:45At the height of their power, the Conquistadors made their presence known all over the hemisphere.
02:52From Florida to New Mexico, California, Central America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, the entire
03:03Pacific coast, all the way to Argentina.
03:08Spanish colonies were also established on crucially important locales in Asia and in
03:13the Pacific islands.
03:16They made their presence felt all over the map.
03:19But with success came criticism.
03:23The ethics of stealing native land, of enslaving its people, a topic of fierce debate back
03:31in Europe.
03:33The souring reputation of the Conquistadors would bring shame to the Iberian Peninsula.
03:40The Spanish Empire was once lauded as brave crusaders of the new world, now casting an
03:45ugly shadow over King Philip II's reign.
03:49The 1570s, if we're going to choose a moment, is probably the best time to say, here's where
03:56the era of conquest is done and we're moving into another period of the colonial history
04:02of the Americas.
04:05The Spanish monarchy itself, King Philip II, ordered that the word conquest were not used
04:13by the Spanish administrators because by the end of the 16th century, the word conquest
04:19had come to be associated with cruelties, abuse of the indigenous population, violence,
04:25and so on and so forth.
04:30Conquistadors enjoyed the benefits of lawlessness that came with the early years of the conquest.
04:35They were kind of like the opening salvo, the first wave.
04:40But in some ways, conquistadors outlived their utility to the crown.
04:45The crown tried to develop a much more direct control over the territories through the use
04:51of ample bureaucracies, thus wrestling political control from conquistadors.
04:59By the late 1560s, fierce indignation amongst conquistadors in Peru was rife, many still
05:07reeling from the imposition of the new laws in 1542, which were designed to restrict their
05:14powers.
05:15This, coupled with ongoing pockets of Inca resistance in the mountainous regions of Vilcabamba,
05:22meant the situation was critical.
05:25The Spanish crown sent a new viceroy, the viceroy Toledo, to put things back in order.
05:34Toledo arrived in the Andean region in 1569, bringing with him a strict new set of legal
05:41structures designed to bring order by strengthening the very institutions that were already suppressing
05:47Peru's indigenous people.
05:52But the newly appointed viceroy never intended to improve their bleak conditions.
05:59His only concern was the crown.
06:04He organized a census of what had been the Inca Empire, now the Spanish Empire of Peru
06:10and adjacent regions.
06:12He established a policy to collect scattered groups of indigenous folk and move them to
06:19larger villages and towns to establish new ways of gathering tribute and especially labor
06:25service to help keep the mines of Potosi and other mines in the region operating.
06:32The Spanish crown, they wanted to maintain the flow of precious metals and to protect
06:40that flow of precious metals.
06:43So they invested in governmental infrastructure, boats and navies, in building forts in order
06:51to maximize the income that's coming from it.
06:55So the Toledo reforms, as they're referred to, is a case in which the Spanish imperial
07:00state, the colonial imperial state, adopts a series of far more rigorous policies of rule.
07:10Similar things were done in Guatemala and Central America.
07:14Similar things were done in Mexico during the second half of the 16th century.
07:22Conquistadors resented those desires of the crown to control their moves and many times
07:27protested that they were not given the prerogatives that they deserve for having actually done
07:33the conquest in the name of the king at their own expense.
07:39By the late 16th century, it becomes very rare for Spaniards to talk about conquests,
07:44even when they're going to places that they've never been before.
07:47Even though there's huge swaths of land that the Spanish have not conquered or even entered,
07:52there's hundreds of indigenous groups that the Spanish have never encountered.
07:56They no longer call any campaigns against those groups as conquests.
08:01They have shifted to calling them pacifications.
08:06Meanwhile, other European nations were moving against the Spanish, eager to build their
08:13own empires.
08:16These jostling kingdoms were drawing in on Spain's overseas territories, coveting their
08:22wealth, snatching at the nation's power.
08:28Resentment of Spain's success aided the mission of state-funded navy pirates known as privateers,
08:34sent to disrupt trade and ravage Spanish galleons, loaded with the treasures of the
08:40New World.
08:42By the late 16th century, the world has changed.
08:45There are a lot more competitors in the Americas that want to claim lands.
08:51And so the Spanish perception is that they have conquered the Americas, and they are
08:56now defending that from other Europeans.
09:01By this time, France and England and many other European territories, they're starting
09:06to pay attention to what the Spaniards are doing in the Americas.
09:10Increasingly the English and the Dutch begin to insert themselves and effect trade between
09:14Spain and the New World.
09:18Merchants started to make their appearance in the Americas to trade with Spanish colonists,
09:23who in many occasions, they welcomed them with open arms because they provided the same
09:27goods sometimes at a better quality and a much cheaper price than actually the Spaniards
09:32ever did.
09:33There's a great moment where Francis Drake goes to Africa and manages to get hold of
09:39a cargo of slaves, which he then transports across the Atlantic to the Americas.
09:44And in Cartagena de Indias, he describes himself as being well-received, despite the fact that
09:50Philip II has explicitly instructed people in the Americas not to trade with the English.
09:54It's only when the ship is damaged and he has to put in at Veracruz for repairs before
09:59going back to Europe that the authorities in Mexico City are alerted to the presence
10:05of this English trading ship.
10:09The silver extracted in the Americas was carried to Spain, became also a big target for English
10:15and French and Dutch privateers.
10:18They became the target of numerous attacks in an attempt to precisely seize this great
10:25wealth.
10:27But the king's growing problems were not only limited to the attacks that Spanish ships
10:32were suffering in the Atlantic.
10:36Despite ever more crown-appointed viceroys landing in the New World, hopelessly attempting
10:41to claw back control, colonial reliance on Spain was dwindling.
10:58As greater development of Spanish colonies and settlements in the New World take place,
11:04with the opening up of trade routes to the Far East and to China, and independently a
11:09vast amount of wealth being created through the export of silver on the Manila galleons
11:14and the establishment of livestock farming, the Americas become increasingly autonomous
11:18and independent, and far less dependent on Spain.
11:22You get the development of a criollo society, in other words a society of people who were
11:26born in the New World who are natives there, who've never been to the Iberian Peninsula.
11:32They grow in numbers, but they also grow in wealth and power, and it becomes increasingly
11:37difficult for the Spanish who come across, who are sent across by the crown, to run
11:42their territories in the Americas, to retain control.
11:46They need to negotiate and work with this indigenous, well, this American criollo elite.
11:54Below that level, there's huge amounts of intermarriage between indigenous and Iberian
12:00people.
12:02And of course you have the transatlantic slave trade from very early on, so black Africans,
12:07you also have large numbers of immigrants from the Far East, from Malaya, from China,
12:11from Indonesia.
12:14It's a multicultural, multi-ethnic world of growing power.
12:19That kind of growing autonomy and independence from the center is a kind of really crucial
12:25thing I think that spells the end for the conquistadors.
12:29The colonies became more and more prosperous as time went by.
12:35We tend to think almost exclusively of the wealth that was extracted from the Americas
12:39and taken to Spain, to Europe, and to other places.
12:43I think we rarely consider the amount of wealth that was created through the labor of indigenous
12:48and African people that conquistadors and the children of conquistadors and colonists
12:54benefited from.
12:57Many of them continue living in the societies that they have helped to create.
13:01Many of them were wealthy.
13:02Many of them inherited land and inherited possessions, and they were distinguished members
13:08of these societies.
13:11So the so-called achievements of conquistadors became an element of pride in this family saga.
13:19Trouble plagued every corner of King Philip's empire.
13:24Catholicism forever at odds with a growing Protestant faith in Europe.
13:30A religious dispute which would culminate in a catastrophe for Philip.
13:36His infamous Spanish Armada was intended to be the first to attack.
13:43His infamous Spanish Armada was intended to be the greatest fleet of warships on earth,
13:50striking fear into the hearts of the empire's enemies.
13:54A powerful emblem of new world wealth.
13:58However, the Armada would face an embarrassing and unexpected defeat by the English queen,
14:04Elizabeth I's navy, in 1588.
14:09A highly symbolic failure which would further feed into the growing anti-Spanish sentiments
14:15sweeping across Europe.
14:18A campaign of propaganda which would come to be known as the Black Legend,
14:23designed to deride and discredit Philip's empire.
14:27Europeans in general, they were tremendously jealous.
14:31You can imagine, you know, they hear about this tremendous wealth that Spain has acquired
14:37through gold and silver and precious metals and even labor.
14:42These vast lands that they claim domain to.
14:46Spain becomes not only tremendously wealthy, but now it can build up almost an invincible military.
14:52It can build up an insurmountable navy.
14:56The Europeans look at this with great envy and great resentment
15:01because they now feel that Spain is lording the success over them
15:06and that their very existence is being threatened.
15:10And so what they do early on as Spain's success continues to gain wider notoriety
15:16is they begin to demonize Spain.
15:20All we have to do is look at the conquest.
15:23All we have to look at is the Spanish character.
15:26Spaniards are lazy, they are ignorant, and they engaged in the genocide of millions of people.
15:33And so was born the Black Legend.
15:38The Black Legend, it's a myth that grows up slowly across the 16th century.
15:42It starts out in Italy and it's the idea that the Spanish are particularly cruel,
15:50that they're violent, rapacious and sexually incontinent.
15:55If you're an Italian at the beginning of the 16th century,
15:59this is really very much the center of the intellectual world at that time.
16:03It's where the rediscovery and printing of classical texts in places like Venice is proceeding apace.
16:11Spain is seen as a slightly barbaric by comparison, less civilized by comparison,
16:16but Spain comes to dominate politically in Italy.
16:21That basically causes the Italians to develop these sort of unpleasant negative stereotypes
16:27about what the Spanish are like.
16:29And that just then simply grows and is built upon.
16:32The best weapons of the Black Legend came from within Spain itself.
16:37Something like the short account of the destruction of the Indies by Bartolome de Las Casas.
16:42If you want one single piece of writing that helped create the Black Legend, that's it.
16:48What they did was to take Las Casas' arguments,
16:51because Las Casas can be considered a great defender of the Indians in that regard,
16:57and they used Las Casas' arguments for their own purposes.
17:02It takes visual form through the really extraordinary engravings of Dutch engraver and printer Theodore de Bry.
17:10So de Bry creates these illustrations, these etchings to accompany Bartolome de Las Casas' text.
17:17Vivid illustrations of horrific violence, of people having their hands cut off,
17:22people being fed to dogs, people being tortured through having their feet burned.
17:29These really kind of visceral images enter into the kind of propagandistic imaginary of people.
17:35And in the 1590s, that's again consolidated in things like the theatre.
17:41So the Spaniard on stage in early modern London becomes this kind of villainous figure.
17:50As negative sentiment towards the Spanish hardened around the world,
17:54their empire would begin a period of decline,
17:57with King Philip a key catalyst in its deterioration.
18:02As the sun set on a 16th century,
18:05defined by King Philip's kingdom's ruthless conquest of the Americas,
18:10the crown's treasury struggled to balance the books.
18:14Fraught foreign policies, expressed through misguided military endeavors,
18:19had crippled their economy.
18:21The nation's reliance on a dwindling economy,
18:24and the economic collapse of the country,
18:27had crippled their economy.
18:29The nation's reliance on a dwindling supply of American silver only added to the strain.
18:36The 17th century is when things become a bit more glum, a bit more grim,
18:41with the decline of the mines at Potosi,
18:44decline of the mines in Mexico.
18:48As the 17th century wears on,
18:50the silver remittances from the New World become less and less.
18:54There's a greater demand for silver in the Americas itself,
18:57and there are certain years when no silver fleet reaches Spain at all.
19:04Also that silver allowed Spain to carry out a very ambitious foreign policy
19:10that led to increasing indebtedness of the crown,
19:15and to really declare numerous bankruptcies,
19:18or the inability to actually pay.
19:20So the more silver that they had, the more they paid,
19:23the more they spent, and the harder it was actually to pay back.
19:29There's a massive economic depression in Spain,
19:31and there's a huge depression in the transatlantic trade in general.
19:36That, of course, begins to slowly drive the colonies in the Americas and Spain itself apart.
19:41They become more and more different.
19:44The greater self-confidence, the greater wealth and power of the colonies
19:48continues to threaten that kind of royal control.
19:51Over the remainder of the 17th century,
19:54Spain and its colonies would drift ever further apart.
19:59The crown falling from the House of Habsburg
20:02to the dynasty of the Bourbons in the year 1700.
20:06An ancient family with a thoroughly different approach to running an empire.
20:14Under this new regime came a final, desperate grasp for control of the New World.
20:22The Bourbons come in and they are frustrated
20:26by how ineffective the administration of the empire is.
20:30They attempt once again to reimpose royal control in the Americas.
20:35The entire 18th century has been characterized by many historians
20:39as a period of kind of reconquest of the Americas.
20:44Spain understood that it had to really determine its dominance in Europe.
20:52And the way to do that was to extract all of the possible resources
20:58that it could from its existing colonies.
21:01As one historian has described it,
21:03juicing the Americas for everything that they were worth
21:06in order to try to bolster Spain's position on the international stage.
21:12So what they tried to do is to sort of enforce some administrative reform.
21:17They wanted to push manufacturing, they wanted to push technology,
21:20modernize Spain, continental Spain that is.
21:23But this is coming in practical terms in the New World
21:26at the expense of that autonomy that had been gained by the Creole population
21:30and they weren't keen, obviously, to give back.
21:33The Bourbons are very much focused on the extraction of this wealth
21:38and the creation of new tariffs and taxes and the monopoly of certain products.
21:45And that is going to create an element of dissatisfaction among the colonial elites.
21:52At a time in which the Atlantic is really boiling, let's say,
21:57with movements of independence and songs of liberty
22:00and ideas of freedom from Europe.
22:03Too much time had elapsed from, you know,
22:06that sort of very highly centralized control of the beginning.
22:09Reasserting authority after that lengthy period where the Creole population
22:13had achieved a certain degree of autonomy, it wasn't going to work.
22:23The Bourbon dynasty are basically hamstrung by the resistance
22:27of the Creole elites living in the Americas.
22:30That leads to a series of rebellions against Spanish control
22:34and in the longer term that eventually leads to independence movements
22:39of many countries in Latin America in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
22:50So most of the countries of Latin America became independent in the 1810s
22:54or by the early 1820s at the latest.
22:56This is when Spain ceases to be a great imperial power
23:00and loses the empire that the conquistadors had won for it
23:04three centuries before.
23:06But when the countries of Latin America became independent,
23:10it did not mark the return to power of Native American peoples.
23:15Native American peoples remained and have remained since
23:19a minority in their own lands, a disenfranchised,
23:23impoverished majority.
23:291898.
23:31The crumbling husk of Spain's empire falls to the United States.
23:36Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam.
23:41Lost in the Spanish-American War.
23:45One particularly effective tactic in breaking Spanish resistance
23:51had been US propagandists' use of an archaic
23:55but still potent 16th-century weapon.
23:58The return of the black legend.
24:01The United States had extensive interest in the Caribbean in terms of sugar.
24:06The consumption of American sugar grew by about 400-500% in the 1890s.
24:11Americans became obsessed with consuming sugar
24:14and certainly Cuba produced a great deal of sugar.
24:17The United States began to demonize the Spaniards again.
24:20And what did they do? They resurrected the black legend.
24:23All of these attributes that were given to the Spaniards
24:26by 16th-century England.
24:28And they said this is why the Spaniards deserve to be overthrown in the Caribbean.
24:33Using the same descriptions.
24:35Lazy, brutal, and worst of all, Catholic.
24:38Because there was a strong anti-Catholic element
24:41already present in the United States
24:43which considered itself a Protestant nation.
24:45400 years had passed since Columbus mistook Hispaniola
24:50for an East Asian island.
24:53The course of billions of lives changing forever
24:58in the moment the Italian Empire was overthrown.
25:02It was the beginning of a new era.
25:05It was the beginning of a new era.
25:08It was the beginning of a new era.
25:11The course of billions of lives changing forever
25:14in the moment the Italian mapmaker's eyes settled on the new world.
25:19A historic discovery which would launch Spain's expansion across America,
25:24bolstering an empire relentless in its ravaging of the land
25:29and the cruel treatment of its people.
25:32But how did this relatively small contingent of outsiders
25:36make such a significant mark on the Americas?
25:40As modern historians begin to pry open this question,
25:44a different picture of the conquistador begins to emerge.
25:49So, how did they do it?
25:51We tend to fall back on this idea that, oh, they had guns,
25:55they had steel weapons, they had ships,
25:58they had superior writing technology.
26:00And a lot of these things are not as effective as we think they are.
26:06And they're really kind of ways for us to sort of struggle
26:09with the explanation as to how this small group of people
26:12was able to conquer all this larger group of people.
26:16The feats of the conquistadors used to be seen as almost superhuman,
26:20as though they were almost supermen.
26:22They seemed to speak to some essential superiority
26:25of Europeans over indigenous peoples,
26:28some cultural superiority as well as a technical one,
26:32even a moral superiority.
26:36Without wanting to underplay the sheer bravery
26:40and energy displayed by the conquistadors,
26:43the result was a foregone conclusion.
26:45Victory was certain.
26:48The Spaniards, the Europeans, ultimately benefited from the fact
26:51that the Old World was a very disease-rich environment
26:54in which all sorts of horrible pathogens
26:57had been circulating for hundreds of years, if not longer,
27:01and where, as a result,
27:03European populations had built up immunities to those things.
27:07By contrast, the Native Americans had lived for thousands of years
27:12essentially in a natural quarantine,
27:15separated from the rest of humankind
27:17by the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean to the east
27:21and the Pacific Ocean to the west.
27:26It's difficult to overestimate the impact of disease.
27:30This was cataclysmic.
27:32I would argue that Spaniards routinely lost
27:36in their military encounters
27:38when disease had not already had a significant impact
27:42on the population they were encountering.
27:44So when we think about Spanish success,
27:47I would argue that we need to think about Spanish success
27:50in the face of a decimated population.
28:03Also, we have to be able to appreciate the role
28:06played by local indigenous peoples
28:08in permitting those new colonies to be established.
28:11Otherwise, if we don't do that,
28:13we fall back on the old Spanish idea
28:16that they achieved miraculous conquests
28:19of empires of millions of people
28:21just using a few hundred Spaniards.
28:23How did they do that?
28:25Because Spaniards are superheroes, and they had God on their side.
28:28And that's not an explanation that will hold up for us.
28:32So in explaining what really happens,
28:34then we have to go back and see how indigenous communities,
28:37one by one, made decisions to accommodate the Spaniards
28:40because they thought that that was going to be in their best interest.
28:43So it wasn't that this plucky band of 300 Spaniards
28:47defeated the Aztec Empire.
28:50No, no.
28:52It was a group of several hundred thousand natives
28:56and several hundred Spaniards
28:59who engaged in a battle,
29:02a series of battles, and were victorious.
29:06Where we see Spanish successes,
29:09we see alliances with indigenous groups.
29:12Where they aren't able to create alliances, as in Yucatan,
29:16they fail spectacularly.
29:18And this is probably true in several of these arenas
29:21throughout the Americas, that for many people,
29:24it was not immediately discernible
29:27that the Spaniards were the ones entirely in charge.
29:30What they would have viewed were these alliances.
29:33I think that it took some time, several decades,
29:36for Amerindians in different locations and in Central America
29:40to understand how Spaniards perceived themselves
29:43as being wholly in command of these military contests.
29:50And so, in the end, the question should not be
29:54how did a few hundred Spaniards or a few hundred Europeans
29:57conquer millions and millions of people?
29:59The question should be
30:01how did they come to present these events in that way?
30:04And is that really what happened?
30:07Because if it isn't, if those events actually involved
30:11a far more diverse set of actors,
30:15protagonists who were African and indigenous,
30:18in really more complex, messy encounters
30:21that lasted for many generations,
30:23then we don't need to come up with an answer to that first question.
30:27Then we don't have to worry about whether it was God or racial superiority
30:32or that their guns were really, really useful after all.
30:39What then was the true cost of the Spanish conquests?
30:44The conquistadors set the fetid foundations
30:47of a new world cursed by greed and prejudice.
30:52This would be the dark legacy left in their wake.
30:57The population decline of indigenous peoples
31:00from the moment Columbus arrives, if we count forward about 100 years,
31:05is possibly as much as 90%.
31:08That's the biggest, most dramatic decline in human population,
31:13possibly of all time.
31:16Wherever they went, populations were decimated.
31:20I think permutations of how that occurred varied.
31:24Places like Panama, the Caribbean,
31:26the primary agent was warfare, followed by famine,
31:30caused by warfare and social disruption,
31:33as well as exploitation.
31:36In places like Mexico and Peru,
31:39disease was a more significant force for a longer period of time.
31:45The conquest created a great deal of inequality
31:49in the new societies that came after it.
31:52It was a model around profit.
31:55The economic interests of a few were placed at the top of society,
32:00while other individuals worked towards the achievement of that end.
32:06The legacy of forced labor,
32:08the ways in which the coercion of both Amerindians and Africans
32:14drove the engine of growing wealth in the Americas,
32:18is hard to ignore in the kind of inequalities that exist into the present.
32:26The Black Legend. We still hear it today.
32:29All the elements of the Black Legend are there in the arguments
32:33for why we should control the border and increase border security
32:37because of all these undesirables that have all of these undesirable elements
32:41and the heritage of these brutal individuals
32:45who destroyed an entire civilization.
32:48So perhaps the legacies are there not in terms of dominant structures,
32:53but in terms of mindsets and ways of being as well.
33:08The lasting legacy of the colonization is the degradation of native peoples,
33:15their exploitation, their marginalization,
33:18and their continued marginalization.
33:22There is still an indigenous majority in both Mexico and Peru
33:26at the end of the colonial period.
33:28But during the 19th century into the 20th century,
33:31those populations come to dwindle
33:34in the context of the rise of other demographic sectors.
33:39So if you look at the majority of the populations of countries
33:42throughout Latin America today, most of them are mestizo countries.
33:46They're mostly of what we used to call mixed race or mixed ethnic heritage.
33:54Christianity does become deeply ingrained in all of Latin America.
34:01By the early 20th century,
34:0490% plus of everyone living in Latin America is a Christian,
34:10and most of them are members of the Roman Catholic faith,
34:13because the church did have an impact.
34:17It regulated the cycle of life.
34:20It was the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour activity for so many people.
34:30Spain
34:38Spain opened up the Americas,
34:41a blend of bodies, technology, and biology
34:46from across the globe merging as the decades passed
34:50in a cultural, physical, and molecular coalescence
34:55which would come to be known as the Columbian Exchange.
35:00This experiment in the late 16th century
35:03is really the first time in world history
35:07where people from the major continents
35:10are all living together in a single society.
35:18It's impossible to disentangle the role of Africa and Africans
35:22from the Spanish conquest.
35:24They fought in the wars of conquests alongside Spaniards.
35:28More Africans were brought in order to fulfill the labor demands
35:33put in place by conquistadors after the conquest.
35:37You can't travel across huge parts of the Caribbean and the mainland,
35:43places like Colombia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Cuba,
35:47without seeing, quite literally,
35:50the legacy of African participation in the Spanish conquest
35:55and later colonization.
35:59We have Africans, we have Europeans,
36:02we have natives of North and South America,
36:05and after about 1569,
36:08we have large numbers of Asians
36:11who enter into what we now call Latin America.
36:16The Spanish conquest, by virtue of that,
36:19created an entire array of new cultures and peoples
36:25that formed through that conjunction.
36:28It's the exchange of microbes, animals, flora and fauna,
36:33knowledge, DNA,
36:35that completely altered the way we live today.
36:39A very, very important part of the Columbian Exchange
36:42is the fact that many, many food crops came from the New World
36:45and went to the Old.
36:47Corn, chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, manioc.
36:53Many of these foodstuffs became essential for life.
36:57Imagine Ireland without potatoes.
37:00Imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes.
37:03These are essential aspects,
37:05and they all have their origins in the New World.
37:09Domesticates now pour into the Americas,
37:12so there are now horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens,
37:16and all those other animals in the Americas.
37:19What is interesting is that a similar biological exchange
37:22occurred across the Pacific.
37:25What we have is highly productive American crops,
37:29especially corn and sweet potatoes,
37:32and to some extent peanuts,
37:34making their way into Asia,
37:36but most especially into China,
37:38and helping boost population there.
37:41So rather than a demographic decline,
37:45what we have is a population increase.
37:49So again, this whole global economy as we know it today
37:53had something to do with this exchange
37:55as China's population increased at this time.
37:59The conquest completely reconfigured
38:02humanity's relationship with foodstuffs
38:05and led to a far richer and diverse and calorific diet
38:10for human populations around the world.
38:21Who were the conquistadors?
38:24An elite force of religious missionaries
38:27out to bravely save the unenlightened?
38:30Or brutish killers,
38:32unable to contain their insatiable lust for gold?
38:36Were the Americas really captured
38:39through a miraculous blend of Spanish military skill
38:42and a cunning manipulation of a naive native people?
38:47Or was this simply an alluring image
38:50built up through hundreds of years of historic sources?
38:54A 21st century reappraisal of this tale reveals the facts
39:00that disease and existing indigenous conflicts
39:03did most of the killing for the conquistadors,
39:07clearing the way for colonization.
39:10As their story continues to evolve under a modern lens,
39:14how should we look back on these complex characters from history?
39:22How do we judge their impact,
39:24which, for better or for worse,
39:26changed the world forever?
39:30The history of the conquistadores,
39:32or the experience of the conquistadores,
39:35is not something that is forgotten.
39:38That historical memory leads to discussions on identity,
39:44on national politics, on indigenous rights.
39:49That historical memory is still feeding anger of so many people.
39:56How many monuments have been destroyed over the last years?
40:01Across Latin America,
40:03particularly in indigenous parts of Latin America and Mexico,
40:07Columbus, Cortes, and other conquistadors
40:11have moved from being sort of the introduction of European society
40:16to becoming symbols of subjugation and conquest.
40:20This doesn't mean that they renege on their Hispanic past,
40:24but it is symbolic of how problematic the conquest is seen.
40:34As we have become more diverse in our thinking
40:38about what conquistadors represented,
40:41as we're asking new questions about what the conquistadors did,
40:45as we are becoming more nuanced in the reading of these sources,
40:49we need to stop putting the conquistadors' ideas and worldview
40:53in the center stage.
40:55We need to give room to all of the other people
40:58who actually came around them.
41:00All of them get a voice.
41:03We need to think about how this history has shaped our identity
41:09and our celebration of who we are.
41:14On how mixed we are.
41:19The encounters fostered by the Spanish conquest
41:23has created a tapestry of cultures and peoples of the Americas
41:28that today are vibrant reminders of the ability of the human spirit
41:35to survive in the face of decimation and disease and collapse
41:41and to find new ways of forging a path forward
41:45despite colonialism and oppression.
41:53What the conquistadors did is just the beginning.
41:56Everything is all tied up in mythology and misconceptions
41:59and propaganda and so on.
42:01It's a huge big mess.
42:03And in order to untangle that mess
42:06and finally at some point have some kind of reckoning
42:10with what happened in the Americas
42:12and how indigenous peoples were treated
42:14and how we want them to be treated as we move through the 21st century,
42:18we have to come to terms with what happened 500 years ago
42:22and understand that it isn't that, oh, like the black legend says,
42:26you know, that the Spaniards are bad, the Spanish Empire was bad
42:30or the conquistadors are bad.
42:32That misses the point.
42:34The point is, the problem is empire.
42:38The real takeaway from the story of the conquistadors
42:42is that empires are abusive and exploitative
42:48and they encourage actions
42:52which traumatize and victimize huge sections of populations.
42:58One country invading another is never OK.
43:01That's really the end of the story.