Answer: In 1493, an explorer in Spanish service named Christopher Columbus changed the course of world history when he unexpectedly discovered two entirely new continents during an expedition to reach Asia by sailing West from Europe. Over the following decades, Spanish and Portuguese discoveries in Central and South America astounded residents of the Old World. New foodstuffs like tomatoes, chili peppers, chocolate, and corn brought from the Americas radically altered cuisines around the globe. The gold, silver and other precious metals looted from the civilizations encountered there transformed Spain, only recently united through the marriage of Isabelle of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, into one of the wealthiest kingdoms in Europe, fueling the Habsburg Dynasty’s increasingly lavish court life as well as their political and military ambitions. The desire to check Habsburg power and increase their own prestige in the process, therefore, became a prime motivation for Spain’s rivals to begin colonization efforts of their own in the New World, and while these rival powers grabbed whatever bits of the Caribbean and South America they could manage, much of their focus lay in exploring and settling the relatively unknown lands of North America.Naturally, however, the first European explorers of the northern continent were still the Spanish, and while much of the lands they claimed remained unsettled for centuries, the writ of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (which also included Mexico and the Philippines) extended throughout much of the southern half of the modern United States, from Florida to the Pacific Coast. These early Spanish explorers, called conquistadors, privately financed their expeditions after acquiring royal authorization, and their objectives were much the same as their counterparts in Mesoamerica and Peru: finding gold to loot, souls to convert, and “devil-worshippers” to kill if they refused to do so. Their identities and outlook on the world was essentially medieval, based on religious and martial traditions developed over the years back home during the Reconquista, or effort to drive the Muslim Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, such as the hidalgo (meaning “Somebody”), the ideal landless aristocrat, which many of these explorers were, who comes into prosperity with plunder taken through force of arms against the infidels. According to historian Charles Hudson in his book Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun, these conquistadors “never doubted their own superiority over the native peoples they encountered in the New World. They saw themselves as specially favored people who were carrying out a divine mission,” and this attitude certainly affected Spanish behavior towards the “Indians.” Prominent conquistadors who launched expeditions into North America include Juan Ponce de Leon, the governor of Puerto Rico who gave the name La Florida to the peninsula that bears it today, Hernando de Soto, the first European to document and cross the Mississippi River before dying along its banks in 1541, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the few survivors of a failed expedition, who wandered for eight years throughout the Southwestern United States before finally returning to Mexico City in 1536. He later chronicled his travels and the various peoples he encountered with a surprising amount of scholarly objectivity, and he is often referred to as one of the first modern anthropologists.
Private military expeditions were not the only tool of the Spanish colonial project, however. As one might expect from a society that so intensely identified with the Catholic Church, missionary efforts played an enormous role in the spread of Christianity throughout Latin America. Their methods varied wildly by monastic or priestly order, but in general, these new missions consisted of semi-autonomous communities centered around a town built along European models run by the clergy who provided religious education, often in local languages, in exchange for manual labor. Defenders of this system claimed that it was an effective barrier against indigenous exploitation, and many missions did clash with the colonial government over such issues, but it was certainly not free from abuse, and could often lead to rebellion if the clergy treated their charges too harshly or went too far in suppressing native cultural practices. Such was the case during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that took place in modern-day New Mexico, where an alliance of Pueblo tribes rose up against the abuses of the missionaries and drove off more than 2,000 Spanish settlers from their homeland for more than a decade. Many mission communities survived, however, and today cities such as Pensacola, San Antonio and San Francisco all have their roots as either missionaries or Spanish military garrisons.
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