Very few people in history have had as much to gain as Charles of Habsburg. Charles was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella. Ferdinand and Isabella themselves only had one child, Joanna the Mad. She married into the most powerful royal family in Europe, the House of Habsburg. Not only did the Habsburgs sit on the throne of Austria, but they also controlled all the German speaking states, which comprised the Holy Roman Empire.
Joanna herself only had one child, Charles, who stood to inherit, not only the Kingdom of Spain, but the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. As a result, Charles V became the King of Spain in 1516, and Holy Roman Emperor in 1520. At the time of his ascension, Charles controlled more territory than any European monarch since Charlemange. He also had fewer tools with which to rule his possessions than any previous European monarch. The Holy Roman Empire consisted of a collection of duchies and principalities that were frequently restless, unruly and disrespectful. Charles had very few tools with which to tame them. At the same time, a German priest named Martin Luther was stirring up a frenzy with his protests against corruption in the Catholic Church.
Charles saw his mission as bringing order to his various kingdoms. He was not successful in doing this and by the time he retired to a monastery in 1556, the Holy Roman Empire had lost much of whatever political authority it had had under Charles V. In the meantime, Martin Luther had created a outlawed separatist movement within European Christianity known as Protestantism.
Charles’ inability to control the German princes or, the Protestants, was not due to his lack of ability as a ruler. The problems Charles was faced with during his reign were larger than any one person could have dealt with. At the same time, Charles had something of a mania for managing the Spanish possessions in the New World. He didn’t mind Spanish adventurers and Conquistadors looting the various New World empires so long as they did it on their own dime, and sent regularly sent the required one fifth share of their plunder back to Spain. However, Charles very much minded that when the conquest of the New World was over, the Conquistadors had set themselves up in the wreckage of the Aztec and Incan Empires as self appointed aristocrats.
Once the initial phase of the conquest of the New World was over, agents of the Spanish crown shouldered their way in and either retired or demoted the Conquistadors and set about setting up formal colonial governments under the supervision of the Spanish crown. The Spanish possessions in Central and South America were divided into two viceroyalties. These were the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru. Each of these viceroyalties were ruled by a Viceroy chosen by the king and they were expected to be ruled in the same manner that Charles ruled Spain, in other words from the top down. The Spanish Viceroys in the New World were able to impose order with a remarkable degree of success considering that only 250,000 Spaniards could be persuaded to emigrate to New Spain and Peru.
From only a dozen outposts in 1530, the Viceroys of NewSpain and Peru eventually chartered a hundred and twenty towns by 1574, followed by an additional two hundred and ten by 1624. Even more importantly, the Spanish Viceroyalties in the New World shipped two hundred tons of gold and 15,000 tons of silver back to Spain between 1500 and 1650. The total amount of bullion sent back to Spain by the Spanish treasure fleets is estimated to have an approximate value of 1.4 billion dollars into today’s currency. This is believed to be at least three to five times the entire stock of bullion in all of Europe during this period. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary to replace the Conquistadors, with their penchant for outright killing the native population, with agents of the crown, who were intent on reducing them to slavery. They did this by carving great estates, known has haciendas, out of the Aztec and Incan Empires. The owners of these estates were granted encomenderos, which gave them the right to levy servitude, which was little better than forced labour, from nearby indigenous villages and families.
At the same time, the Church was working to Christianize the indigenous population. This resulted in the burning of traditional books and the suppression of traditional religious and cultural practices. This process had three phases. The first phase was enslavement, either in the form of literal enslavement by the Conquistadors, or indirectly through the encomendero. The second phase consisted of dislocation, as traditional native religious and cultural practices were suppressed and replaced with Spanish culture. The third phase consisted of a period of confrontation, as the natives attempted to push back against their Spanish overlords, not just literally against forced labour or attempted enslavement, but also against the imposition of European religion and culture.
The Europeans had an ally that the natives were almost totally unable to resist. This was disease. The spreads of European diseases in the Americans played an important role in clearing the way for European incursions into the New World. European diseases proved to be an extremely effective weapon against the indigenous population. The reason for this was because there was nothing in the natives’ medical experience to prepare them for the impact that European diseases, such smallpox, typhoid, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, dystentary and even the self-inflicted disease of alcoholism, would have on their cultures.
The Native Americans had constructed their civilizations without being exposed to European diseases. As a result, even when priests and missionaries tried to treat the native population fairly, they were unable to control the spread of infectious diseases. Along the eastern shore of North America, there were believed to have been as many as seventeen major epidemics among the native population. In some cases, these were infectious diseases that had travelled north from Mexico. In other cases, these disease outbreaks were the result of encounters with European ships along the coast.
This string of outbreaks included smallpox in 1519, typhus in 1531, and again in 1585. It has been estimated that as a result of repeated exposure to European diseases between 70% and 95% of native population died. By the end of the 17th century, the Spanish settlement of the New World had matured and began to transition from an extraction society to a permanent settler society, where the Spaniards became permanent settlers with no expectation of returning to Spain at all.
In 1516, Juan Ponce de Leon explored and mapped the coast of Florida. In 1521, he attempted to establish a Spanish settlement there, however, he was killed by the Calusa people, and the colony was abandoned. In 1539, Hernando de Soto financed another expedition to Florida. He landed near what is now Tampa and struck north into Georgia before turning west toward the Mississippi River. He was probably the first European to encounter the Cherokee people, who were living in the Georgia highlands. He found roads, towns, farms and temples, however, de Soto was not interested in any of those things. De Soto was looking for gold and plunged blindly onward. He eventually became the first European to cross the Mississippi River, in May, 1542.
De Soto found no gold among the indigenous peoples of the American southeast. His only accomplishment was to leave a trail of wreckage and disease among the Cherokee. The last great Conquistador expedition to be undertaken was by Francisco de Coronado in 1540. He was pursuing rumours of gold among the native cities on the Great Plains. He eventually returned to Mexico empty handed and financially ruined in 1542. He had wandered to no purpose for over three hundred miles, spreading disease and misery as far north as Kansas. However, the strangest story of the period of the Spanish Conquistadors is the very last, the expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez.
Narvaez, who had been a former associate of Cortez, launched his own expedition into central Florida in 1528. A combination of hostile natives, starvation, disease and shipwreck eliminated all but four of Nrvaez’ expedition, including the expedition’s treasurer, Cabeza de Vaqua, who had been captured and enslaved by the natives, along with a black mercenary named Estaban. While enslaved, they pawned themselves off as medicine men among the Florida tribes with an unusually high success rate. Almost over night, they went from being slaves to celebrities. As a result, they were passed from tribe to tribe to perform healings. Eventually, they were joined by two other survivors and together, over the course of eight years they wandered more than thirteen hundred miles, until they ended up in western Mexico, in 1536, where they blundered into a patrol of Spanish soldiers. They had unintentionally become the most travelled Spaniards in the Western Hemisphere.
Being a Conquistador was no longer turning a profit in the same way that it had during the hey day of Cortez and Pizarro. The reality was that Spain was no longer able afford overseas adventures in the same way that it had previously. The reason for this was due to the steady supply of gold and silver that had taken Spain from being a junior member of the European family to a world power in the 16th and 17th Centuries. However, at the same time, the influx of gold and silver from the New World into the Spanish economy proved to be too much of a good thing, a bit like eating five birthday cakes in a single sitting. The sudden large scale influx of bullion from the New World wound up poisoning the Spanish economy. As this new found wealth flowed into the Spanish system, the demand for Spaniards spend caused prices all across Europe to go up by between 300% and 500%.
At the same time, the Spanish crown spent lavishly on foreign adventures in order to prop up its commitment in other places. One example of this was the bitterly fought revolt in the Spanish Netherlands, which lasted for decades. Th Dutch uprising against the Spanish turned the Spanish Netherlands into Spain’s bleeding ulcer. No matter how much gold and silver, the Spanish spent on the war in the Netherlands, they were forced to grant the Dutch conditional independence in 1609.
In addition to their unintended effects on the economy and politics of Europe, the gold and silver mined in the New World first had to make the dangerous transatlantic crossing to Spain. Consequently, Spanish treasure fleets made enticing targets for adventurers, privateers and pirates. By the mid-17th Century, Spain had spent away much of the wealth that it had plundered from the New World. As a result, Spain had lost much of the influence that it had enjoyed over European affairs during the last hundred years.
Bad news for Spain proved to be good news for France. From the 1580s onward, France had been wracked by a series of civil wars known as the Wars of Religion. The Wars of Religion were fought on one side by the emerging French Protestant community known as the Huguenots, and the Catholic majority on the other side. The Wars of Religion were riddled with acts of brutality on both sides, such as the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre, in addition to the assassination of Catholic and Protestant leaders alike.
In 1590, the Protestant heir to the French throne, Henri IV adopted a conciliatory tone, offering to officially, if not sincerely, become a Catholic. This satisfied both Catholics and Protestant and under the rule of Henri IV, France was able to stabilize and rebuild its fortunes. Prior to the Wars of Religion, France had undertaken a series of limited expeditions to the New World in the 16th Century. In 1524, the Italian navigator Giovanni de Verrazano had mapped much of the North American coastline. In 1535 Jacque Cartier probed up the St. Lawrence River and into the North American interior.
Despite these early explorations, the French displayed an unusual inability to make anything stick. Two initial settlement attempts, in South Carolina and Florida ended in failure. One colony was destroyed by the Spanish who tolerated no interlopers in their North American empire. Consequently, French exploration in North America did not resume until after 1600.
After a series of failed starts, Samuel de Champlain established a settlement on the heights overlooking the St. Lawrence River on the site of what is now Quebec City in 1608. From that point on, the French were able to establish a stable foothold in North America, which they named New France.
The French had the good sense not to expect gold mines on the St. Lawrence River. Instead they found an abundance of something that was almost as valuable. The shores of the St. Lawrence River were teaming with beavers, otters, foxes and lynx. In Europe, fur was an incredibly expensive luxury commodity. Europeans had been trading with the natives for furs from very early on. In 1543, Jacques Cartier had been surprised at the site of natives along the banks of the St. Lawrence waving pelts on sticks in anticipation on trading with the Europeans.
Trade along the St. Lawrence was controlled by a powerful confederation of native tribes that consisted of the Seneca, the Mohawk, Cayuga, Oneida and the Onenedaga. These tribes were known as the Five Nations, or the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois menaced the French as the chief suppliers of the European fur trade. In 1609, Samuel de Champlain and nine French soldiers joined an Algonquin raid on the Iroquois using firing arms, killing several Iroquois chiefs. As a result, the Iroquois and the French became mortal enemies. Following this incident, the Iroquois made it virtually impossible for the French to develop the fur trade south of the St. Lawrence River. As a result, by the 1680s, the French had extended their trading network, first west to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and then south down the Mississippi River Valley to the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1682, the French explorer Robert de le Salle led an ambitious expedition all the way down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, where he claimed the mouth of the Mississippi for France and named the territory Louisiana in honour of King Louis XIV. Le Salle was follow by other fur traders who established a string of trading posts along the banks of the Mississippi, in addition to the sites of what are now Biloxi and Mobile, on the Gulf of Mexico. In 1718, a private company called the Company of the Indies was established. The Company of the Indies was granted a license for development to develop the French territory of Louisiana and established an administrative capital on the site of what is now New Orleans.
Despite their ambitious program of exploration along the Mississippi River Valley, the French were unable to establish a successful settler society. Much of the French effort in opening up and exploring North America was limited to resource extraction, as opposed to settlement. After the fur trade, the primary pursuit of the French in North America was the christianization of the native population, which they were substantially less successful at than the Spanish had been. As a result, the French managed to make New France and Louisiana undesirable to would be colonists, adventurers and traders. In the absence of quick sources of wealth, such as gold and silver, the French crown saw few returns on the promotion of New World colonization and kept its attention fixed on Europe as a result.
The one component of French society that might have had sufficient incentive to accept the hardships of hacking anew society out of the wilderness was France’s Huguenot population. The Huguenots were the one group in French society that had sufficient incentive to want to go somewhere where they could worship in freedom. However, the French crown believed that if the Protestants were given licence to settle in New France or Louisiana, the might prove to be too fractious, too unreliable or too many, should they be allowed to emigrate. As a result, Protestant emigration to the New World was completely forbidden.
In addition to the Royal edicts issued by the French crown, Louis’ various foreign adventuress drained the population of potential colonists, as well as draining the Royal treasury of the funds necessary for a sustained colonization program. By 1750, the Company of the Indies had only been able to bring approximately 5,400 settlers to colonize Louisiana. At the same time, the French crown made Louisiana undesirable for settlement when it began to use Louisiana as a dumping ground for convicts. The transient nature of the fur trade, coupled with its geographical isolation held the population of New France to around 3,000 by 1660. By 1700, the population had increased to approximately 15,000 thanks to a series of government subsidies, but even with government support, the population of New France was only 52,000 by 1750.
If not the French, then perhaps the Dutch would have better luck reaping lasting profits from the New World. Now that they were freed from Spanish rule, the lose confederation of provinces that comprised the Netherlands found itself saddled with the least productive farmland in Europe, in addition to the wreckage of a forty year war for independence. Despite this, the Dutch, who had been long acquainted with ships and the sea, turned themselves into a maritime trading power. As a result, not only did the Dutch profit directly from maritime trad, but also expanded into maritime insurance, banking and finance.
Within fifty years of Dutch independence, Amsterdam became the financial capital of Europe. Once freed from Spanish rule, the Dutch wasted little time in expanding across the Atlantic, in the form of the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch East India Company hired the English navigation Henry Hudson to map the coast of North America, and search for the fabled Northwest Passage. He discovered a wide, navigable river which still bears his name.
At first, the Hudson River seemed like it might lead to a route to the Pacific Ocean, however, it only led deeper into the interior of North America. In the end, the Dutch abandoned the search for the Northwest Passage and pursued other more lucrative ventures, such as the fur trade. The Iroquois were happy to trade with the Dutch because the Dutch were willing to sell the Iroquois firearms to fight their mortal enemies, the Algonquin and the French.
The Dutch established their first colony in what became New Netherland up the Hudson River at Fort Nassau in 1614. In 1625, the Dutch established a second settlement on the Atlantic coast, on the tip of Manhattan Island. They named their new settlement New Amsterdam. Unlike the French, the Dutch did not let religious considerations stand in the way of their colony’s commercial success. Even though the Dutch were committed Calvinists, they were also committed to making as much money as possible. As a result, they turned a blind eye the various religious fringe groups came to New Amsterdam and welcomed anyone who came to make their fortune. Not only did the Dutch raise no eyebrows at colonists from Germany, France and England, they also ignored assemblies of French Jews, English Quakers and German Lutherans. In 1644, one traveller claimed that it was possible to hear eighteen different languages being spoken on the streets of Manhattan.
New Amsterdam was also a happier place for women. In contrast to many other places in Europe, it was possible at the time for Dutch women to own property in their own name, even while married. One thing the colony was not, however, was commercial success. By 1660, just five thousand colonists had emigrated to New Amsterdam. Eventually, the Dutch West Indies Company, which was the successor to the Dutch East India Company, had to resort to enticing prospective entrepreneurs with the title of Patroon if they brought fifty colonists with them, in addition to sizeable land grants along the Hudson River.
Meanwhile, Amsterdam saw New Amsterdam as little more than a supply port for Dutch ships raiding the Spanish treasure fleets in the Caribbean. Neither the French or Dutch were able to replicate the success of the Spaniards in North America. There was one European maritime power who has not yet been heard from. This was England. The Spaniards, the French as the Dutch would soon wish that they had never heard from the English at all.
Wordsmith 