In 1492, the same year that Columbus sighted America, the great Moorish city of Granada, in Spain, fell after a ten-year siege. For five centuries the Christian kingdoms of Spain had been trying to drive the North African Muslim Moors ("the Dark Ones," in Spanish) off the Iberian Peninsula, and with the fall of Granada, they succeeded.
But the lengthy Reconquista had left its mark on Spanish society. Centuries of military and religious confrontation nurtured an obsession with status and honor, bred religious zealotry and intolerance, and created a large class of men who regarded manual labor and commerce contemptuously.
With the Reconquista ended, some of these men turned their restless gaze to Spain's New World frontier.
At first Spanish hopes for America focused on the Caribbean and on finding a sea route to Asia. Gradu ally, however, word filtered back of rich kingdoms on the mainland.
Between 1519 and 1540, Spanish conquistadores swept across the Americas in two wide arcs of conquest-one driving from Cuba through Mexico into what is now the southwestern United States; the other starting from Panama and pushing south into Peru.
Within half a century of Columbus's arrival in the Americas, the conquistadores had extinguished the great Aztec and Incan empires and claimed for church and crown a territory that extended from Colorado to Argentina, including much of what is now the continental United States.
The military conquest of this vast region was achieved by just ten thou sand men, organized in a series of private expeditions. Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and other aspiring conquerors signed contracts with the Spanish monarch, raised money from investors, and then went about recruiting an army.
Only a small minority of the conquistadores-leaders or followers were nobles. About half were professional soldiers and sailors; the rest comprised peasants, artisans, and members of the middling classes.
Most were in their twenties and early thirties, and all knew how to wield a sword.
Diverse motives spurred these motley adventurers.
Some hoped to win royalties and favors by bringing new peoples under the Spanish flag. Others sought to ensure God's favor by spreading Christianity to the pagans.
Some men hoped to escape dubious pasts, and others sought the kind of historical adventure experienced by heroes of classical antiquity.
Nearly all shared a lust for gold.
As one of Cortés's foot soldiers put it, "We came here to serve God and the king, and also to get rich." One historian adds that the conquistadores first fell on their knees and then fell upon the aborigines. Armed with horses and gunpowder and preceded by disease, the Conquistadors quickly overpowered the indians.
But most never achieved their dreams of glory.
Few received titles and nobilities, and many of the rank and file remained permanently indebt to the absentee investors who paid for their equipment.
Even when an expedition captured especially rich booty, the spoils were unevenly divided: men from the commander's home region often received more, and men on horseback generally got two shares to the infantryman's one.
The conquistadores lost still more power as the crown gradually tightened its control in the New World. By the 1530s in Mexico and the 1550s in Peru, colorless colonial administrators had replaced the freebooting conquistadores.
Nevertheless, the conquistadores achieved a kind of immortality. Because of a scarcity of Spanish women in the early days of the conquest, many of the conquistadores married Indian women.
The soldiers who conquered Paraguay received three native women each, and Cortés's soldiers in Mexico-who were forbidden to consort with pagan women-quickly had their lovers baptized into the Catholic faith.
Their offspring, the "new race" of mestizos, formed a cultural and a biological bridge between Latin America's European and Indian races.