Preparation for Overseas Conquest

Codex Manesse, Freiderich von Hausen

The Europeans were not the first to undertake sea voyages.  In fact they learned valuable techniques from the Arab world and others.

Inuit (Eskimo) plied the entire Arctic circle in their rapid kayaks for centuries and made contacts with many people, as did Indian and Polynesian fishermen of the Pacific rim.  Egyptians and Greeks and Norsemen knew the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

What was different was the mindset of European merchants and heads of state.  Their own society was set up in a hierarchy, in which domination of one class over another was an accepted way of life.

In a sense, the first people colonized under the profit motivation by the use of labor, before overseas exploitation was made possible, were the European and English peasantry.  Indeed, whole nations, such as Ireland, Bohemia and Catalonia, were colonized.  The Moorish nations, as well as the Judaic Sephardic nation, were physically deported by the Crown of Castile from the Iberian Peninsula, an act that was accomplished, significantly, in 1492.  All the institutions of colonialism, all the methods for relocation, deportation and expropriation were already practiced, if not perfected.

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Indians of the Americas, 9

http://www.carnaval.com/columbus/4voyages.htm#first

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/columbus_christopher.shtml

The Transformation of Society

Illustration of the Bubonic Plague

The colonization is a story of military conquest carried out by a people possessing vastly superior arms against sometimes practically unarmed populations, of subduing and sometimes exterminating those populations, of appropriating their land and their labor to the ends of the conquerors.

John Mohawk, “Discovering Columbus: The Way Here,” View from the Shore, 45

The reconquest prepared Spain for its task of conquering a native population.  Necessitating almost continuous fighting, the reconquest advanced not by townships but by great regions, emphasizing their importance as the basic unit of Spanish national life and contributing to the rise of nationalism.

Though capable leaders’ unity, self-reliance, and resettlement all helped to achieve the Reconquest, the most important factor was probably the willingness of Christian Spaniards to transform their society for this purpose.  This transformation was extremely thorough.  Late medieval Castile became essentially a society organized for war, a dynamic military machine which would function well so long as it had more lands to conquer.  It might be disconcerted by military defeats, but it could survive them….

Only Spain was able to conquer, administer, Christianize and Europeanize the populous areas of the New World precisely because during the previous seven centuries here society had been constructed for the purpose of conquering, administering, Christianizing and Europeanizing the inhabitants of al-Andalus.

Thus if the Reconquest is important in Old World history because it is the primary example of the reversal of an Islamic conquest and because it fostered the transfer of Greek and Asian culture to western Europe, in the general sweep of world history it is vital because it prepared the rapid conquest and Europeanization of Latin America.

D.W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain, 173-178, passim in 1492: Discovery/Invasion/Encounter, 8