Spain and Portugal conquered the Americas,

Matthew Restall, a Professor of Latin American History, Women’s Studies, and Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He also serves the Director of the university’s Latin Studies. Throughout “Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest,” he discusses many false truths that have been passed down through history. For instance, he discusses, “The Myth of Exceptional Men.” “The Myth of Spanish Army,” and “The Myth of Completion.” For the sake of time, I will discuss three myths that correlate with class lectures and serve as the topic of this paper, “The Myth of Exceptional Men,” “The Myth of the King’s Army,” and the “Myth of the White Conquistador.” It should be noted that Restall speaks to his audience assuring us that his “...his purpose is not to degenerate this technique of historical writing completely...Nor do I mean to create a narrative in which individual action is utterly subordinated to the larger structural forces and causes of social change.” (4). He states that his intentions are to react to more than just the works of Columbus, Pizzaro, and Cortez.

He was loved in Spain because of his discoveries. Later that year he left to sea once again, this time he went to explore more of the Islands in the Caribbean. Columbus and his crew found the Navidad settlement destroyed and everyone was killed. Since the Queen felt slavery was offensive, Columbus created a forced labor policy to rebuild the destroyed settlement. He rebuilt the settlement to find gold and other goods to sell. He found small pieces of gold and sold it, but a lot of the people disliked what he did. Before he returned to Spain, Columbus left his brothers in Hispaniola and explored more of the Caribean thinking it was Islands of China. Columbus’s third voyage led him to finally exploring the mainlands. He discovered the Orinoco River, which is now in Venezuela. The Hispaniola was also falling apart at the time because of the poor leading of his brothers and because people thought they were being deceived by Columbus. The Spanish Crown sent an official to arrest Columbus and took his authority. He returned to Spain to go to the Royal Court, but his charges were later dropped. Columbus lost his ability to be governor of the Indies and for a while, lost his riches from his voyages. Columbus later convinced King Ferdinand to go on another voyage and he promised to bring back a lot of riches. He went on his last voyage ever in 1502 and this time he was traveling along the eastern coast of Central America. He was unsuccessful in finding a route to the Indian Ocean. A brutal storm left them stranded in an island of Cuba. Islanders eventually got tired of their gold obsession and unfair treatment, they decided to starve the Spaniards. Columbus decided to punish the islanders by taking away the moon. On February 29, 1504, There was a lunar eclipse and it startled the islanders, so they made trades with the Spaniards again. The Royal Governor of the Hispaniola sent people to rescue the stranded Spaniards. In July, Columbus and

Columbus started out on his first voyage in the middle of 1492. It turned out to be a great success and he won Spain many places in South America. The king, queen, and the people of Spain were pleased with Columbus. Isabella immediately ordered him to sail again. On this second voyage, he formed the first European settlement in the Americas. Colonists that accompanied him began to criticize Columbus and his adventures. However, Isabella continued to support him.

For decades, the history of Latin America has been shrouded in a cover of Spanish glory and myth that misleads and complicates the views of historians everywhere. Myths such as the relationship between natives and conquistadors, and the individuality of the conquistadors themselves stand as only a few examples of how this history may have become broken and distorted. However, in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest Matthew Restall goes to great lengths to dispel these myths and provide a more accurate history of Latin American, in a readable and enjoyable book.

During this time period a nation’s wealth and power can be measured by the amount of land in which they possess. For example, Spain controlled a vast empire that stretched from modern California to Peru . The Spanish Empire was so vast that it had rivaled that of Ancient Rome. Although unlike the British and French, Spain established an empire of towns, and modern day Mexico City served as the center of Spanish control. Along with establishing the first university in the new world, Spain also established St. Augustine and Santa Fe as response to the British and French expansion efforts.

-Treaty negotiated by the pope in 1494 to resolve the territorial claims of spain and Portugal.

On Aug. 3, 1492, Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa María, commanded by Columbus himself, the Pinta under Martín Pinzon, and the Nina under Vicente Yanez Pinzon. After stopping at the Canary Islands, he sailed due west from Sept. 6 until Oct. 7, when he changed his course to the southwest. On Oct. 10 a small rebellion was quelled, and on Oct. 12 he landed on a small island in the Bahamas. He took possessions for Spain and brought natives aboard, discovered other

1). The Nations of Europe sought to expand their empire because they were on the verge of overpopulation.Between 1550 and 1600 the population grew from three million to four million people. Also, England and Spain were at a war for power. The Spanish attempts at colonizing the New World had been extremely successful, for they had gained both wealth and power. The English did not see such success, as their ships would crash, be lost to the seas, or their colonization efforts would cease to be useful. Through the Spaniards control over the Americas they had gained a massive naval army, noted as the Spanish Armada. The Spanish attempt to invade England in 1588 failed which lead to the beginning of the fall of the Spanish empire in the New World.

In Victors and the Vanquished, Schwartz poses the question of “How can we evaluate conflicting sources” (ix)? Through reading historical events such as the “Conquest of New Spain” there is an undeniably large amount of destruction of cultural material and bias testimonies of events recorded several years after they occurred. After analyzing the Spanish Conquest of Mesoamerica there is a debatable amount of evidence from the Mesoamericans and Spanish explanations of this event in history. The intentions of each explanation created a conflict to historians, art historians and anthropologists on which viewpoint holds to accuracy. There is also the issue of not only inaccuracies, but the motives behind each bias account. As many of these aspects are taken into consideration, interpreting each justification between both sides of history in Mesoamerica as a clash of ethnocentrism between two different cultures that causes an uncertainty of what actually happened in history.

Supported by Spain, seeking a water route to the spice islands in 1492 Christopher Columbus left Spain on his first voyage. After more then a month had passed, the crew started to loose all hope and the voyage seemed like a failure. Until on October 12, 1492 land was sighted. The land that was sighted was not what Columbus had originally intended to find. Columbus landed in the Caribbean Sea in the Bahamas, which was thousands of miles away from his original destination. It was there that he met the indigenous people of the islands. These encounters that he had along with the treatment of these native people would eventually help shape his legacy, but at the

“Compare and contrast the early colonial empires of Portugal, Spain, and England in terms of motives, economic foundations, and relations with Africans and Native Americans. What factors explain the similarities and differences in the two ventures?”

- The colonies would sell what they would find in the new world to Europe. It was beneficial because the colonies would make money by selling their goods to Europe. Europe then would manufacture the good and then sell it back to the colonies for more money. This would take a lot of the colonies money which would make it harder for the

When Columbus returned in November 1493 he was surprised to learn that the settlement he had left behind had been destroyed. Some of the 39 men had clashed with the Taino Indians, and were killed. Other crewmembers had become sick, unable to cope with the harsh environment of the Caribbean. As time progressed, small settlements were founded across the island, and the heart of the Spanish conquest in the New World, Hispaniola, began to develop accordingly. In April 1493 a settlement on the northern coast called La Isabela was founded in what is now the province of Puerto Plata, and in 1494 Concepcion de la Vega was founded.

1. Three arguments’ that Juan Gines de Sepulveda used to justify enslaving the Native Americans were for gold, ore deposits, and for God’s sake and man’s faith in him. 2. Three arguments that Bartolome de las Casas gave in attacking Spanish clonial policies in the New World were the Indians eating human flesh, worshiping false gods, and also, he believed that the Indians were cowardly and timid. 3. For comparisons that Sepulveda used, in lines 1-7, to express the inferiority of the Indians was their prudence, skill virtues, and humanity were inferior to the Spanish as children to adults, or even apes to men. Comparisons he used to dismiss the significance of the Indians

Deficit Procedure”, which meant that Portugal’s public finances would no longer be under the corrective arm of the Stability and Growth Pact (GBP). In fact, Portugal’s budget deficit fell to 2 percent of GDP, far below the limit of 3 percent in the MoU, being the lowest since the early 90s. Equally important to mention was the unemployment rate which decreased to an eight-year low of 9.2 percent in May 2017, number that seemed to be impossible to reach after an all-time high of 17.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013.