Gradually, Europeans realized that the American continent had held rich prizes, especially the gold and silver of the advanced Indian civilizations in Mexico and Peru.
Spain secured its claim to Columbus's discovery in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), dividing with Portugal the "heathen lands" of the New World.
The lion's share went to Spain, but Portugal received compensating territory in Africa and Asia, as well as title to lands that one day would be Brazil.
The islands of the Caribbean Sea-the West Indies as they came to be called, in yet another perpetuation of Columbus's geographic confusion-served as offshore bases for staging the Spanish invasion of the mainland Americas. Here supplies could be stored, and men and horses could be rested and acclimated, before proceeding to the conquest of the continents.
The loosely organized and vulnerable native communities of the West Indies also provided laboratories for testing the techniques that would eventually sub due the advanced Indian civilizations of Mexico and Peru. The most important such technique was the institution known as the encomienda.
It allowed the government to "commend," or give, Indians to certain colonists in return for the promise to try to Christianize them. In all but name, it was slavery.
Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas, appalled by the encomienda system in Hispaniola, called it "a moral pestilence invented by Satan."
In 1519 Hernán Cortés set sail from Cuba with sixteen fresh horses and several hundred men aboard eleven ships, bound for Mexico and for destiny.
On the island of Cozumel off the Yucatán Peninsula, he rescued a Spanish castaway who had been enslaved for several years by the Mayan-speaking Indians.
A short distance farther on, he picked up the female Indian slave Malinche, who knew both Mayan and Nahuatl, the language of the powerful Aztec rulers of the great empire in the highlands of central Mexico.
In addition to his superior firepower, Cortés now had the advantage, through these two interpreters, of understanding the speech of the native peoples whom he was about to encounter, including the Aztecs. Malinche eventually learned Spanish and was baptized with the Spanish name of Doña Marina.
Near present-day Veracruz, Cortés made his final landfall. Through his interpreters he learned of unrest within the Aztec empire among the peoples from whom the Aztecs demanded tribute. He also heard alluring tales of the gold and other wealth stored up in the legendary Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.
He lusted to tear open the coffers of the Aztec kingdom.
To quell his mutinous troops, he boldly burned his ships, cutting off any hope of retreat. Gathering a force of some twenty thousand Indian allies, he marched on Tenochtitlán and toward one of history's most dramatic and fateful encounters.
As Cortés proceeded, the Aztec chieftain Mocte zuma sent ambassadors bearing fabulous gifts to welcome the approaching Spaniards. These only whetted the conquistador's appetite. "We Spanish suffer from a strange disease of the heart," Cortés allegedly informed the emissaries, "for which the only known remedy is gold." The ambassadors reported this comment to Moctezuma, along with the aston ishing fact that the newcomers rode on the backs of "deer" (horses).
The superstitious Moctezuma also believed that Cortés was the god Quetzalcoatl, whose return from the eastern sea was predicted in Aztec legends. Aztec legends.
Expectant yet apprehensive, Moc tezuma allowed the conquistadores to approach his capital unopposed.
As the Spaniards entered the Valley of Mexico, the sight of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán amazed them. With 300,000 inhabitants spread over ten square miles, it rivaled in size and pomp any city in contemporary Europe.
The Aztec metropolis rose from an island in the center of a lake, surrounded by floating gardens of extraordinary beauty.
It was connected to the mainland by a series of causeways and supplied with fresh water by an artfully designed aqueduct
Moctezuma treated Cortés hospitably at first, but soon the Spaniards' hunger for gold and power exhausted their welcome. "They thirsted mightily for gold; they stuffed themselves with it; they starved for it; they lusted for it like pigs," said one Aztec. On the noche triste (sad night) of June 30, 1520, the Aztecs attacked, driving the Spanish down the causeways from Tenochtitlán in a frantic, bloody retreat. Cortés then laid siege to the city, and it capitulated on August 13, 1521.
That same year a smallpox epidemic burned through the Valley of Mexico. The combination of conquest and disease took a grisly toll. The Aztec empire gave way to three centuries of Spanish rule. The temples of Tenochtitlán were destroyed to make way for the Christian cathedrals of Mexico City, built on the site of the ruined Indian capital.
And the native population of Mexico, winnowed mercilessly by the invaders' diseases, shrank from some 20 million to 2 million people in less than a century.
Shortly thereafter in South America, the iron fisted conqueror Francisco Pizarro crushed the Incas of Peru in 1532 and added a huge hoard of booty to Spanish coffers.
By 1600 Spain was swimming in New World silver, mostly from the fabulously rich mines at Potosí in present-day Bolivia, as well as from Mexico.
This flood of precious metal touched off a price revolution in Europe that increased consumer costs by as much as 500 percent in the hundred years after the mid-sixteenth century.
Some scholars see in this ballooning European money supply the fuel that fed the growth of the economic system known as capitalism.
Certainly, New World bullion helped transform the world economy. It filled the vaults of bankers from Spain to Italy, laying the foundations of the modern banking system.
It clinked in the purses of merchants in France and Holland, stimulating the spread of commerce and manufacturing. And it paid for much of the burgeoning international trade with Asia, whose sellers had little use for any European goods except silver.
Yet the invaders brought more than conquest and death. They brought crops and animals, language and laws, customs and religion, all of which proved adaptable to the peoples of the Americas. Especially in Mexico, they intermarried with the surviving
Indians, creating a distinctive culture of mestizos, people of mixed Indian and European heritage. To this day Mexico remains a unique blend of the Old World and the New, producing both ambivalence and pride among its people.
Cortés's translator, Malinche, for example, has given her name to the Mexican language in the word malinchista, or "traitor." But Mexicans also celebrate Columbus Day as the Dia de la Raza-the birthday of a wholly new race of people.