Conquistadors The Rise and Fall Episode 6 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
01:06Europe, embellishing and magnifying the horror of Spanish crimes, a phenomenon which would
01:13come to be known as the Black Legend, a potent anti-Spanish narrative which would color the
01:20world'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.
02:20Over 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.
02:34They're thriving colonies owing a terrible blood debt to a savage global industry built
02:40on silver and slaves.
02:45At the height of the power, conquistadors made their presence known all over the hemisphere,
02:51really.
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.
03:40Those once lauded as brave crusaders of the new world, now casting an ugly shadow over
03:46King 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.
04:06The Spanish monarchy, it's King Philip II's order that the world conquests were not used
04:13by the Spanish administrators, because by the end of the 16th century, the world conquests
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.
04:54It's 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
07:08rule.
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 in 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 goods,
09:27but sometimes had a better quality and a much cheaper price than actually the Spaniards ever did.
09:33There's a great moment where Francis Drake goes to Africa and manages to get hold of
09:40a 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.
10:18And they became the target of numerous attacks in an attempt to precisely seize this great wealth.
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.
13:17Trouble plagued every corner of King Philip's empire, Catholicism forever at odds with a
13:33growing Protestant faith in Europe.
13:37A religious dispute which would culminate in a catastrophe for Philip.
13:44His infamous Spanish Armada was intended to be the greatest fleet of warships on earth,
13:51striking fear into the hearts of the empire's enemies, a 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 sentiment
14:15sweeping across Europe.
14:17A campaign of propaganda which would come to be known as the Black Legend, designed
14:23to 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
14:51military.
14:52It can build up an insurmountable navy.
14:56The Europeans look at this with great envy and great resentment because they now feel
15:02that Spain is lording the success over them and that their very existence is being threatened.
15:09And so what they do early on as Spain's success continues to gain wider notoriety is they
15:16begin to demonize Spain.
15:20All we have to do is look at the conquest.
15:22All we have to look at is the Spanish character.
15:25Spaniards are lazy, they are ignorant, and they engaged in the genocide of millions of
15:31people.
15:32And 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, that they're
15:50violent, rapacious and sexually incontinent.
15:55If you're an Italian at the beginning of the 16th century, this is really very much the
16:00centre of the intellectual world at that time.
16:03It's where the rediscovery and printing of classical texts in places like Venice is proceeding
16:08apace.
16:09Spain is seen as a slightly barbaric by comparison, less civilized by comparison, but Spain comes
16:17to 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, something like the
16:38short account of the destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé 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, because Las Casas can be considered a great
16:54defender of the Indians in that regard, and they used Las Casas' arguments for their
17:00own purposes.
17:02It takes visual form through the really extraordinary engravings of Dutch engraver and printer Theodore
17:08de Bry.
17:10So de Bry creates these illustrations, these etchings to accompany Bartolomé de Las Casas'
17:16text.
17:17Vivid illustrations of horrific violence, of people having their hands cut off, people
17:22being fed to dogs, people being tortured through having their feet burned.
17:28These really kind of visceral images enter into the kind of propagandistic imaginary
17:33of 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, their empire would
17:55begin a period of decline, with King Philip a key catalyst in its deterioration.
18:10As the sun set on a 16th century defined by King Philip's kingdom's ruthless conquest
18:15of the Americas, the crown's treasury struggled to balance the books.
18:21Fraught foreign policies expressed through misguided military endeavors had crippled
18:27their 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, with the decline
18:42of the mines of Potosi, decline of the mines in Mexico.
18:47As the 17th century wears on, the silver remittances from the New World become less and less.
18:54There's a greater demand for silver in the Americas itself, and there are certain years
18:59when no silver fleet reaches Spain at all.
19:04Also that silver allowed Spain to carry out a very ambitious foreign policy that led to
19:12increasing indebtedness of the crown and to really declare numerous bankruptcies or
19:19the inability to actually pay.
19:20So the more silver that they had, the more they paid, the more they spent, and the harder
19:26it was actually to pay back.
19:29There's a massive economic depression in Spain, and there's a huge depression in the transatlantic
19:33trade in general.
19:36That of course begins to slowly drive the colonies in the Americas and Spain itself
19:41apart.
19:42They become more and more different.
19:44The greater self-confidence, the greater wealth and power of the colonies continues to threaten
19:49that kind of royal control.
19:52Over the remainder of the 17th century, Spain and its colonies would drift ever further
19:57apart, the crown falling from the House of Habsburg to the dynasty of the Bourbons in
20:04the year 1700, an 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 by how ineffective the administration of the
20:28empire is.
20:30They attempt once again to reimpose royal control in the Americas.
20:34The entire 18th century has been characterized by many historians as a period of kind of
20:41reconquest 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 that it could from
20:58its existing colonies.
21:01As one historian has described it, juicing the Americas for everything that they were
21:06worth in 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, modernize Spain, continental
21:21Spain that is.
21:22But this is coming in practical terms in the new world at the expense of that autonomy
21:28that had been gained by the colonial population and they weren't keen obviously to give back.
21:33The Bourbons are very much focused on the extraction of this wealth and the creation
21:39of 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, it's really boiling, let's say, with movements of independence
21:59and songs of liberty and ideas of freedom from Europe.
22:05Too much time had elapsed from, you know, that sort of very highly centralized control
22:09of the beginning, reasserting authority after that lengthy period where the colonial population
22:14had achieved a certain degree of autonomy, it wasn't going to work.
22:21The Bourbon dynasty are basically hamstrung by the resistance of the criollo elites living
22:30in the Americas.
22:32That leads to a series of rebellions against Spanish control.
22:37And in the longer term, that eventually leads to independence movements of many countries
22:42in Latin America in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
22:52So most of the countries of Latin America became independent in the 1810s or by the
22:56early 1820s at the latest.
23:00This is when Spain ceases to be a great imperial power and loses the empire that the conquistadors
23:06had won for it three centuries before.
23:09But when the countries of Latin America became independent, it did not mark the return to
23:15power of Native American peoples.
23:18Native American peoples remained, and have remained since, a minority in their own lands,
23:24a disenfranchised, impoverished majority.
23:291898, the crumbling husk of Spain's empire falls to the United States.
23:39Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam, lost in the Spanish-American War.
23:49One particularly effective tactic in breaking Spanish resistance had been US propagandists'
23:54use of an archaic but still potent 16th century weapon, the return of the black legend.
24:04The United States had extensive interest in the Caribbean in terms of sugar.
24:09The consumption of American sugar grew by about 400 or 500% in the 1890s.
24:13Americans became obsessed with consuming sugar.
24:16And certainly Cuba produced a great deal of sugar.
24:19The United States began to demonize the Spaniards again.
24:22And what did they do?
24:23They resurrected the black legend.
24:25All of these attributes that were given to the Spaniards by 16th century England.
24:30And they said, this is why the Spaniards deserve to be overthrown in the Caribbean.
24:35Using the same descriptions, lazy, brutal, and worst of all, Catholic, because there
24:40was a strong anti-Catholic element already present in the United States, which considered
24:45itself a Protestant nation.
25:02Four hundred years had passed since Columbus mistook Hispaniola for an East Asian island.
25:09The course of billions of lives changing forever in the moment the Italian mapmaker's
25:15eyes settled on the new world.
25:18A historic discovery which would launch Spain's expansion across America, bolstering an empire
25:25relentless in its ravaging of the land and the cruel treatment of its people.
25:32But how did this relatively small contingent of outsiders make such a significant mark
25:38on the Americas?
25:40As modern historians begin to pry open this question, a different picture of the conquistador
25:46begins to emerge.
25:49So how did they do it?
25:51We tend to fall back on this idea that, oh, they had guns, they had steel weapons, they
25:56had ships, they had superior writing technology.
26:00And a lot of these things are not as effective as we think they are.
26:06They're really kind of ways for us to sort of struggle with the explanation as to how
26:11this small group of people was able to conquer all this larger group of people.
26:16The feats of the conquistadors used to be seen as almost superhuman, as though they
26:20were almost supermen.
26:22They seemed to speak to some essential superiority of Europeans over indigenous peoples, some
26:28cultural superiority, as well as a technical one, even a moral superiority.
26:36Not wanting to underplay the sheer bravery and 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 that the old world was a very
26:52disease-rich environment in which all sorts of horrible pathogens had been circulating
26:58for hundreds of years, if not longer, and where, as a result, European populations had
27:03built up immunities to those things.
27:07By contrast, the Native Americans had lived for thousands of years essentially in a natural
27:13quarantine separated from the rest of humankind by the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean
27:20to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.
27:26It's difficult to overestimate the impact of disease.
27:29This was cataclysmic.
27:31And I would argue that Spaniards routinely lost in their military encounters when disease
27:39had not already had a significant impact on the population they were encountering.
27:44So when we think about Spanish success, I would argue that we need to think about Spanish
27:48success in the face of a decimated population.
28:02Also, we have to be able to appreciate the role played by local indigenous peoples in
28:07permitting those new colonies to be established.
28:11Otherwise, if we don't do that, we fall back on the old Spanish idea that they achieved
28:16a miraculous conquest of empires of millions of people just using a few hundred Spaniards.
28:23How did they do that?
28:24Because 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, then we have to go back and see how indigenous
28:36communities one by one made decisions to accommodate the Spaniards because they thought that that
28:41was going to be in their best interest.
28:43So it wasn't that this plucky band of 300 Spaniards defeated the Aztec Empire.
28:50No, no.
28:52It was a group of several hundred thousand natives and several hundred Spaniards who
28:59engaged in a battle, a series of battles, and were victorious.
29:07Where we see Spanish successes, we see alliances with indigenous groups.
29:12Where they aren't able to create alliances, as in Yucatan, they fail spectacularly.
29:18And this is probably true in several of these arenas throughout the Americas that for many
29:22people it was not immediately discernible that the Spanish were the ones entirely in
29:29charge.
29:30What they would have viewed were these alliances.
29:33I think that it took some time, several decades, for Amerindians in different locations and
29:38in Central America to understand how Spaniards perceived themselves as being wholly in command
29:46of these military contests.
29:50And so in the end, the question should not be how did a few hundred Spaniards or a few
29:55hundred Europeans conquer millions and millions of people.
29:59The question should be how 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 a far more diverse set of actors,
30:15protagonists who were African and indigenous, and really more complex, messy encounters
30:20that lasted for many generations, then we don't need to come up with an answer to that
30:25first question.
30:27Then we don't have to worry about whether it was God or racial superiority or that their
30:32guns were really, really useful after all.
30:39What then was the true cost of the Spanish conquests?
30:44The conquistadors set the fetid foundations of 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 from the moment Columbus arrives, if we count
31:02forward about a hundred years, is possibly as much as 90%.
31:07That's the biggest, most dramatic decline in human population possibly of all time.
31:16Wherever they went, populations were decimated.
31:19The specific permutations of how that occurred varied.
31:24Places like Panama, the Caribbean, the primary agent was warfare, followed by famine, caused
31:30by warfare and social disruption, as well as exploitation.
31:36In places like Mexico and Peru, disease was a more significant force for a longer period
31:42of time.
31:45The conquest created a great deal of inequality in 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, while other individuals
32:02work towards the achievement of that end.
32:06The legacy of forced labor, the ways in which the coercion of both Amerindians and Africans
32:14drove the engine of growing wealth in the Americas, is hard to ignore in the kind of
32:20inequalities that exist into the present.
32:27The black legend, we still hear it today.
32:30All the elements of the black legend are there in the arguments for why we should control
32:35the border and increase border security because of all these undesirables that have all of
32:40these undesirable elements and the heritage of these brutal individuals who destroyed
32:46an entire civilization.
32:48So perhaps the legacies are there not in terms of dominant structures, but in terms of mindsets
32:55and ways of being as well.
33:00The lasting legacy of the colonization is the degradation of native peoples, their exploitation,
33:16their marginalization, and their continued marginalization.
33:22There is still an indigenous majority in both Mexico and Peru at the end of the colonial
33:27period.
33:28But during the 19th century into the 20th century, those 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 throughout Latin America today,
33:43most of them are mestizo countries.
33:45They're mostly of what we used to call mixed race or mixed ethnic heritage.
33:54Minority does become deeply ingrained in all of Latin America.
34:01By the early 20th century, 90% plus of everyone living in Latin America is a Christian.
34:10And most of them are members of the Roman Catholic faith.
34:14Because the church did have an impact.
34:18It regulated the cycle of life.
34:21It was the minute by minute, hour by hour activity for so many people.
34:39Spain opened up the Americas, a blend of bodies, technology, and biology from across the globe
34:47merging as the decades passed in a cultural, physical, and molecular coalescence which
34:55would come to be known as the Columbian Exchange.
35:00This experiment in the late 16th century is really the first time in world history where
35:07people from the major continents are all living together in a single society.
35:18It's impossible to disentangle the role of Africa and Africans from the Spanish conquest.
35:24They fought in the wars of conquests alongside Spaniards.
35:29More Africans were brought in order to fulfill the labor demands put in place by conquistadors
35:35after the conquest.
35:37You can't travel across huge parts of the Caribbean and the mainland, places like Colombia,
35:44Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, without seeing quite literally the legacy of African
35:51participation in the Spanish conquest and later colonization.
35:59We have Africans, we have Europeans, we have natives of North and South America, and after
36:06about 1569, we have large numbers of Asians who enter into what we now call Latin America.
36:16The Spanish conquest, by virtue of that, created an entire array of new cultures and peoples
36:25that formed through that conjunction.
36:29It's the exchange of microbes, animals, flora and fauna, knowledge, DNA, that completely
36:36altered the way we live today.
36:39A very, very important part of the Columbian Exchange is the fact that many, many food
36:43crops came from the New World and went to the old.
36:47Corn, chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, manioc.
36:54Many of these foodstuffs became essential for life.
36:57Imagine Ireland without potatoes.
37:01Imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes.
37:03These are essential aspects, and they all have their origins in the New World.
37:10Domesticates now pour into the Americas, so there are now horses, cattle, sheep, pigs,
37:14goats, chickens, and all those other animals in the Americas.
37:19What is interesting is that a similar biological exchange occurred across the Pacific.
37:25What we have is highly productive American crops, especially corn and sweet potatoes,
37:31and to some extent, peanuts, making their way into Asia, but most especially into China,
37:38and helping boost population there.
37:42So rather than a demographic decline, what we have is a population increase.
37:49So again, this whole global economy as we know it today had something to do with this
37:54exchange as China's population increased at this time.
37:59The conquest completely reconfigured humanity's relationship with foodstuffs and led to a
38:06far richer and diverse and calorific diet for human populations around the world.
38:21Who were the conquistadors?
38:24An elite force of religious missionaries out to bravely save the unenlightened?
38:30Or brutish killers, unable to contain their insatiable lust for gold?
38:37Were the Americas really captured through 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 built up through hundreds of years of historic sources?
38:54A 21st century reappraisal of this tale reveals the facts, that disease and existing indigenous
39:02conflicts did most of the killing for the conquistadors, clearing the way for colonization.
39:11As their story continues to evolve under a modern lens, how should we look back on these
39:16complex characters from history?
39:22How do we judge their impact, which, for better or for worse, changed the world forever?
39:30The history of the conquistadores, or the experience of the conquistadores, is not something
39:36that is forgotten.
39:39That historical memory leads to discussions on identity, on national politics, on indigenous
39:47rights.
39:50That historical memory is still feeding anger of so many people.
39:56How many monuments have been destroyed over the last years?
40:02Across Latin America, particularly in indigenous parts of Latin America and Mexico, Columbus,
40:08Cortes and other conquistadors have moved from being sort of the introduction of European
40:15society to becoming symbols of subjugation and conquest.
40:21This doesn't mean that they renege on their Hispanic past, but it is symbolic of how problematic
40:27the conquest is seen.
40:35As we have become more diverse in our thinking about what conquistadors represented, as we're
40:42asking new questions about what the conquistadors did, as we are becoming more nuanced in the
40:48reading of these sources, we need to stop putting the conquistadors' ideas and worldview
40:54in the center stage.
40:56We need to give room to all of the other people, actually, who came around them.
41:01All of them get a voice.
41:04We need to think about how this history has shaped our identity and our celebration of
41:13who we are and how mixed we are.
41:19The encounters fostered by the Spanish conquest has created a tapestry of cultures and peoples
41:27of the Americas that today are vibrant reminders of the ability of the human spirit to survive
41:36in the face of decimation and disease and collapse and to find new ways of forging a
41:44path forward despite colonialism and oppression.
41:53What the conquistadors did is just the beginning.
41:57Everything is all tied up in mythology and misconceptions and propaganda and so on.
42:01It's a huge big mess.
42:04In order to untangle that mess and finally, at some point, have some kind of reckoning
42:10with what happened in the Americas and how indigenous peoples were treated and how we
42:15want them to be treated as we move through the 21st century, we have to come to terms
42:20with what happened 500 years ago and understand that it isn't that, oh, like the black legend
42:26says that the Spaniards are bad, the Spanish empire was bad, or the conquistadors are bad.
42:33That misses the point.
42:37The point is, the problem is empire.
42:41The real takeaway from the story of the conquistadors is that empires are abusive and exploitative
42:50and they encourage actions which traumatize and victimize huge sections of populations.
42:59One country invading another is never okay.
43:03That's really the end of the story.