Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

We begin now our fifth cycle of episodes – the story of Spanish American independence. A story that is inextricably linked to the revolutions we’ve already covered. Because, as you may have noticed, though, I am narrating these revolutions in discrete units, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, this is all really one unfolding event rolling back and forth across the Atlantic as the modern world is slowly, painfully and oh so chaotically born.

But trying to cover all of Spanish American independence would be logistically insane. On the eve of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1807, the Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere stretched from the southern tip of South America to as far north as, like, San Francisco. And by the time the wars of Spanish American independence ended a generation later, that enormous empire had cracked apart into fully 16 new nations: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Mexico. To say nothing of the chunks that will wind up inside the United States. I estimate that it would take me at least 100 episodes to cover it all in full, and we are not going to do that. 

So what are we going to do? Well, when you pull back to 10,000 ft and unfocused your eyes a little bit, you can really make out three principal theaters of action in the Spanish American wars of independence. In the far north, you have Mexico. In the far south, you have a connected axis that links Argentina and Chile, that includes Paraguay and Uruguay. And then in the middle, you have a big blob that will briefly become Gran Columbia and then devolve into modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. 

Now, I’m not going to worry about Mexico right now, partly because it was geographically, politically, and militarily distinct from the South American liberation movements, and partly because I’ll be happy to tell you all about it when we get to the Mexican Revolution, whenever we get to the Mexican Revolution. 

So that leaves us with events in South America where things are geographically, politically, and militarily connected. And indeed, when the armies of José de San Martín marched north from Chile to Peru, they will arrive just ahead of the armies of Simón Bolívar, who will be marching south out of Colombia. The two great generals would famously meet at a summit in July 1822, and you can’t get much more connected than that. 

But of the two big South American theaters, there is no one who more personifies the liberation of South America than the liberator himself, Simón Bolívar. And no theater that better encapsulates the contentious and occasionally fratricidal process of Spanish American independence than the region that was once the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada and became, through Bolívar’s sheer force of will, an independent nation that historians call Gran Colombia. And so it is Bolívar and Gran Colombia that I will focus on. 

So this run of episodes, then, is going to be like a series of concentric circles. The really detailed center will be Bolívar himself and the two principal nations he liberated, Colombia and Venezuela. Then the next circle of detail will cover the other Bolivarian states Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Panama is also in there, but Panama remains part of Colombia until Theodore Roosevelt comes down with his big stick in the 20th century. Then the next circle will be Argentina and Chile, which I plan to cover enough so that you know what’s happening without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty details. And then the widest circle will bring in a few mentions of events up in Mexico, mostly to remind you just how vast the problem facing Spain was in the 1810s and 1820s. 

So, having said all that, I am actually now going to spend the rest of today’s episode on the widest circle you’re ever going to get. An expansive overview of the Spanish Empire, how it got started, how it functioned, and who lived in it, covering its development through the so-called Spanish Golden Age until the Habsburg dynasty collapsed into a heap with the death of King Charles II in November 1700. Then next week, we’ll transition into a more detailed accounting of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, which will be the principal stage upon which the rest of our series will take place and which was created amidst the enlightened Bourbon Reforms that sought to strengthen and modernize the empire and in the process, help grease the wheels of revolution. After that, it will be off to the races. 

And one last thing, of course, is my standard disclaimer that though I feel like I’ve got a pretty okay handle on Spanish pronunciation, I’ll more than likely botch a few things along the way. And even the stuff I get right is never going to be perfect and will always contain a hefty dose of Anglo-American ineptitude. 

So to get things started here, we’re going to go back into the misty fog of post-Roman Iberia, that is modern Spain and Portugal, which, as you may or may not know, was invaded by North African Muslims in the early 700s. Most, but not all of the Iberian Peninsula then became a Muslim-ruled territory called Al-Andalus, and over the next few centuries became a front in the wider Mediterranean conflict between Islam and Christendom. Over the centuries, Christendom slowly pushed its way back into Iberia in a process later dubbed ‘the Reconquista’ or the reconquest. As Reconquista progressed, a patchwork of kingdoms took root in Christian Iberia: Castile, Leon, Aragon, Portugal, Navarre, Valencia, Catalonia, plus some other smaller feudal units thrown in for good measure. By the 1400s, all that was left of Al-Andalus was a rump Muslim territory called the Emirate of Granada down on the southwest coast. 

Now, the big thing to note here is that at this point, Spain as such does not exist. These Christian kingdoms are separate kingdoms, and rivalries and alliances between the Iberian monarchies help define what is of actual interest to us here: the expansion of those Iberian monarchies off the peninsula and the subsequent creation of the first global empires. It was coastal Portugal who first started wandering out into the Atlantic in the late 1300s. They focused first on navigating south along the African coast, in part looking for trade routes to the Indies that did not require them to go through the Islamic territories that dominated most of the eastern Mediterranean. Now following close behind them, though, was the Kingdom of Castile, the largest and richest of the Iberian monarchies. In the early 1400s, Castile staked a claim to the Canary Islands, which lay off the west coast of Morocco, a claim naturally disputed by the Portuguese. 

By the late 1400s, big changes in the balance of power in Iberia were afoot as an incredibly complicated game of marriage, intrigue, and revolt played out. To keep things simple, let’s just say that in 1474, King Henry IV of Castile died, and a struggle immediately broke out called the War of Castilian Succession. This conflict pitted Henry’s sister Isabella against Henry’s daughter Joanna, both of whom claimed the crown of Castile. Now, the future direction of Iberia was at stake here because Isabella was married to Ferdinand, heir to the neighboring Kingdom of Aragon, while Joanna was married to Alfonso V, the king of Portugal. But by 1476, Isabella had pretty much won the fight. At which point the war of internal succession segued into a war of external conflict between Castile, now linked to Aragon, and the jilted Portugal. 

In 1478, Isabella then authorized a major push against Portuguese hegemony in the Atlantic. She initiated the conquest of the remaining Canary Islands, but more importantly, she wanted to move in on the recently discovered and highly lucrative Gulf of Guinea on the African coast. The Castilians outfitted a convoy of 35 merchant and naval vessels to sail down and assert Castilian rights to navigation and trade. And we’re talking here about gold, ivory, pepper, and, of course, our first batch of Sub-Saharan African slaves. To handle what they hoped would be a major haul of goodies, the Castilians established a receiver of customs in the port of Seville. Merchants were able to obtain a royal license to take part in the expedition that obligated them to turn over 20% of their profits to the Crown, thus establishing what became a standard feature of Spanish imperialism – the royal fifth. But while the Castilian fleet sat anchored off the coast of Africa with a fortune in their holds, 11 Portuguese ships launched a surprise attack and captured the entire Castilian fleet without losing a man. 

OK, so why am I telling you all this? Where’s Bolívar? I’m telling you all this because as a direct result of this battle of Guinea, the Castilians and Portuguese signed the Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479, which did two really important things. First, it recognized Isabella and Ferdinand’s claim to the Castilian throne. And second, it established Portuguese hegemony over, like, the entire Atlantic Ocean. A latitudinal line was drawn just south of the Canary Islands, which the Portuguese agreed to let the Castilians keep, beyond which the Portuguese would have a sole and undisputed claim to navigation and trade. All of this was then duly ratified by the Pope, who, among other things, was basically Europe’s notary public. 

That same year, 1479, Ferdinand’s father died and Ferdinand became king of Aragon. And then he and Isabella ruled Castile and Aragon together as co-monarchs. But critically, the two realms were not otherwise united. Now, most of the Iberian kingdoms and principalities had by this point developed permanent political councils called Cortes that functioned a lot like the French Estates General. They were convocations of the lords and clergy and various knights of the realm. These councils served as the guardians of the kingdom’s own laws and rights and privileges. And so, as the kingdoms of Spain became more unified under the coming Habsburg dynasty, the Habsburg monarchs are ruling a hodgepodge of territories, all of them with their own separate list of rights and duties. It’s a long time before you get anyone talking about the Kingdom of Spain, singular. It’s always the kingdoms of Spain, plural. And important for our purposes is that if a monarch was killed or incapacitated, sovereignty of his individual realm would devolve to the councils, a principle that will play a huge role in events after Napoleon overthrows the Spanish monarchy in 1807, which is the trigger for everything. 

Okay, so with Castile and Aragon united and now at peace with Portugal, Isabella and Ferdinand then focused on completing Reconquista. And in 1482 began what turned out to be a decade-long offensive against the Emirate of Granada. And while they did so, an ambitious navigator from the Italian city of Genoa named Christopher Columbus started making the rounds, trying to gin up support for his plan to find a trade route to the Indies by sailing west. He nearly convinced the king of Portugal to back him, but the King’s advisers told him that Columbus had no idea what he was talking about. Now, contrary to the old myth, it’s not because they believed the world was flat. No thinking person thought that. But they had run the math and determined, quite correctly, that Columbus’s estimate of the distance to the Indies was wildly off the mark. Then, in 1488, came the fantastic news that a Portuguese explorer had finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope, establishing that there was indeed a sea route to the Indies around Africa. So no need for wild-ass adventures off into the west. 

So Columbus then turned to Isabella and Ferdinand, but they too repeatedly turned him down. And it wasn’t until just before completing Reconquista that they had a change of heart. And so it is by sheer historical coincidence that 1492 marks both the end of Reconquista and the beginning of ‘la Conquista’ – the Conquest. Because it was shortly after the fall of Granada that Isabella and Ferdinand finally approved Columbus’s scheme. The final rationale for backing him being that the cost of failure was negligible. I mean, what, the guy just disappears over the horizon and never comes back? Big deal. But the possible profits of success were enormous. So they signed a document in April 1492 called The Capitulations of Santa Fe, that, among other things, made Columbus viceroy and governor of any territory he might happen to discover and admiral of the ocean sea. He also got to keep for himself 10% of any future riches acquired. And when, surprisingly enough, Columbus’s voyage turned out to be a success, Isabella and Ferdinand would come to regret signing such an expensive document. 

Okay, so that gets us basically to where we began our cycle of episodes on the Haitian Revolution. Columbus makes his first voyage in 1492, discovering, among other things, the island of Hispaniola. Well, last time, we stayed fixed on Hispaniola to follow the story through as it became a colonial backwater, eventually allowing French buccaneers to occupy the western third of the island and then everything that follows from it. Well, this time we’re going to stick with the Spanish as they abandon Hispaniola and turn their attention to, well, everything that we’re about to now talk about. 

So, as I mentioned, Columbus had once pitched his project to the King of Portugal. And when he returned from his first voyage, he stopped in Lisbon and told the king all about what he had found, which naturally led the king to get all riled up, pull out his copy of the Treaty of Alcáçovas and write an angry letter to Isabella and Ferdinand claiming legal title to Columbus’s discoveries. This led to a furious round of diplomatic negotiations that culminated in June 1494 with the signing of the pivotal Treaty of Tordesillas. Once again, of course, notarized by the Pope. 

Now, this was a mighty fateful treaty, to say the least. Portugal was mostly focused on protecting their claim to the African coast and they demanded the latitudinal demarcation line south of the Canary Islands not be disturbed. In exchange, they agreed to a longitudinal line ultimately drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, Portuguese possessions off the west coast of Africa. This new north-south running line confirmed Portuguese hegemony over the African coast. But what no one realized at the time was that it left all of North America and all but the Brazilian bulge of South America on the Spanish side of the line. So, yes, the Treaty of Tordesillas sets up everything that comes next. And also, yes, there are a few maps up at revolutionspodcast.com to help you make sense of all this. 

So while those negotiations were still underway, Columbus went ahead and took his second voyage in 1493. This one was a full-blown colonization project: 17 ships carrying about 1,200 men of various means and trades, who were then deposited on Hispaniola. Columbus’s third voyage then came in 1498, which was one part supply run for the beleaguered and angry colonists of Hispaniola and one part voyage of further exploration. And here we do get to a turning point in the history of the Spanish Empire, because on the third voyage, Columbus hit mainland South America, specifically the northeast coast of Venezuela.

Now, the other turning point here is that when Columbus finally arrived in Hispaniola, he found the inhabitants there totally hated his guts. And the longer he stayed there, the more they hated his guts. Accusations of mismanagement and cruelty had already filtered back to Isabella and Ferdinand, who used the opportunity to try to get out from under the comically wide-reaching Capitulations of Santa Fe. In 1499, they sent a new governor to Hispaniola to investigate the charges against Columbus. And in 1500, Columbus was heading back across the Atlantic, in chains. Now he’s going to get out from under this cloud and make one more voyage in 1502, that was quite a disaster. Before finally dying in 1506, his heirs would then spend the next 30 years suing the Crown of Castile to force them to honor the Capitulations of Santa Fe. But let’s not fall down that rabbit hole. 

As Columbus was being pushed out of the picture, Isabella and Ferdinand then handed the future management of their new world territories to a bishop named Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca. Fonseca helped organize Columbus’ second voyage, and from that point on, so 1493, until his death in 1524, Fonseca was essentially the supreme authority over what was then being called the West Indies. Under his direction, some of the mainstays of Spanish imperial policy were born.

In 1503, for example, the Casa de Contratación was born, literally the House of Trade, and established in Seville giving them a monopoly over the incoming and outgoing trade with the New World. The House of Trade took over the licensing of expeditions, collected colonial taxes, maintained all the charts and maps and records and claims and, most importantly, made sure the Crown always got the royal fifth.

Then, in 1511, Bishop Fonseca established a permanent standing Committee of the Indies that was nested inside the Council of Castile. Because, to be really clear here, the voyages of Columbus were chartered through the Crown of Castile, and so Castile’s council claimed jurisdiction over the West Indies. 

So over the next 30 or 40 years, you get the heyday of the Spanish conquistador. Now, conquistador is kind of a catch-all label but it does refer to a very specific system of private individuals acquiring a royal license to explore, conquer, occupy, and exploit lands in the Spanish West Indies. These guys would underwrite their own expeditions and recruit men by offering profit-sharing contracts, one-fifth, as always, reserved to the Crown. At the moment, though, very little thought was given to, like, establishing a thriving global trade network or making peaceful contact with existing civilizations for the mutual benefit of yada, yada, yada. The point was to find gold, silver, pearls, and riches. The conquistadors were treasure hunters. Ruthless, cold-blooded, vicious treasure hunters. And every further expansion of their efforts inevitably begins with a rumor that just over the horizon is a city made of pure gold. 

So we’re not going to get into a play-by-play of the various conquistador expeditions, although they are infinitely fascinating. But as they fanned out across North, Central and South America, the island of Hispaniola went from principal capital of the Spanish West Indies to forgotten ghost town. I mean, hell, Vasco Núñez de Balboa stumbled onto the Pacific Ocean in 1513 and claimed the whole damn thing for Spain. The Spanish officially had bigger fish to fry. The Conquest was underway. 

The two most important conquests were those in Mexico and Peru. In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico and made contact with the thriving Aztec empire that ruled Central Mexico. And though Cortés only led a few hundred guys by 1521 the densely populated inner Aztec realms lay prostrate at his feet thanks to a combination of treachery, gunpowder, smallpox and measles. Then, a few years later, Francisco Pizarro got permission to start exploring the west coast of South America and in 1532 he made contact with the thriving Inca Empire that ruled most of the Andes Mountains. Following the same playbook as Cortés, Pizarro employed a deadly combination of treachery, gunpowder, smallpox, and measles to overthrow the Inca and take control of their territory, though technically, the conquest of the Inca would take until 1570 to complete. 

Now, all of this, not just the conquests of Mexico and Peru, but all of it taken together, came at a devastating human cost. Everything we know about the existing population of the Amerindians, and for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to use the term Amerindian, even though it is terribly inadequate as a term to describe all the native inhabitants of what becomes the Spanish Empire. Anyway, everything we know about their population numbers is guesswork, but it was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 million people. After Columbus arrived, that population collapsed, with estimates of the brutal reduction running as high as 90%, thanks to that poisonous cocktail of treachery, gunpowder, smallpox, and measles. 

Now, the reason Mexico and Peru are so important was, of course, because of the silver mines that they contained. From the beginning of the Conquest, conquistadors were shipping loads of treasure back home, but it was mostly extracted from crafted items they had either traded for or, as often as not, outright stolen from the native communities that they then destroyed. Anything of remarkable beauty might be kept in its original form, but most of it was melted down into bars or coins. But Mexico and Peru both held massive silver deposits that, once discovered, fundamentally changed the shape of the global economy. By the 1540s, the great Mexican silver mine at Zacatecas had been identified and was fully operational by the late 1580s. And then, down in Peru, the great silver mine at Potosí was opened in 1545. And these were just the two biggest mines, and smaller operations augmented Spanish silver mining across the empire. The Spanish American mines absolutely flooded the world market and wound up producing something like 85% of the world’s silver. 

Now, the ironic thing here is that all this silver produced what’s known as the Spanish Golden Age, an age that coincides with the arrival of the Habsburg dynasty and their unification of the Spanish Crown, which ruled now the kingdoms of Spain. So the Habsburgs were, of course, one of the most important royal houses in the history of Europe, who had come to dominate the Holy Roman Empire through their Austrian branch, while the Spanish branch is being formed right here, right now, in the early 1500s. Isabella and Ferdinand’s daughter Joanna married a Habsburg prince named Philip the Fair. And in 1500, they had a son named Charles, then some murky convulsions unfolded, but with Joanna suffering from some kind of undiagnosed mental illness. But long story short, Isabella died in 1504, Philip the Fair died in 1506 and then Ferdinand died in 1516, and 16-year-old Charles inherited their claims to everything. So, in his own right, he now had claims to sovereignty almost the entire Iberian Peninsula, save principally for Portugal, unifying what was now being called the Spanish Crown. 

But this Charles was not just the grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, he was also the grandson of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. And when Maximilian kicked off in 1519, now 19-year-old Charles spread out some massive bribes and got himself elected Holy Roman Emperor, which is why he is principally referred to in history books as Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Now, Charles V is a hugely important figure in European history, thanks in part to the great heaping loads of silver now coming in from his growing empire in the New World, which he controlled thanks to his direct claim to the throne of Castile. That royal fifth was now gob-smackingly enormous. And it was all his to do with as he liked. And mostly what he liked to do was fight wars against the French. 

Now, we’re not going to get lost in all that. Instead, we’re going to head back over to the growing Spanish Empire and get an idea of how it functioned and how it propped up the Spanish Golden Age, which I mean, really ought to be called the Spanish Silver Age. In 1524, Charles officially peeled the Indies out from being a subsidiary committee of the Council of Castile and made it its own sovereign unit. So from the King’s administrative perspective, his American empire was now run through a Council of the Indies, who themselves ran things through the Casa de Contratación, the House of Trade, located in Seville. 

Now, from the time of Columbus’s arrival, a local administration in the West Indies was overseen by the governor of Hispaniola. But in 1511, the Crown had exported an institution of longstanding tradition in Iberia to help him govern: the ‘audiencia’. The audiencia is a super important institution – a small governing council of leaders who wielded combined legislative, judicial, and executive authority. Now, though the audiencias are about to become technically subordinate to the viceroys, more of them will be planted over the years. And this network of audiencias became the political and administrative backbone of the Spanish Empire. Eventually, there would be, among others, audiencias located in Mexico City, Bogotá, Caracas, Quito, Lima, Charcas, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. Do those sound familiar? They should. They are today the capitals of Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. And they became the capitals because that’s where the audiencias were. 

But the Council of the Indies decided that direct rule by the audiencias, basically government by committee, was too unwieldy to be the final, final authority. And so they reformulated things again, creating first the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1535, and then the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542. The Viceroyalty of New Spain had jurisdiction over all the territory in North America, down into Central America, and then also including the Philippines, which were charted and acquired in the 1540s. The Viceroyalty of Peru then had jurisdiction over the whole of Spanish South America. Now, the viceroy was, like it sounds, a royal emissary exercising royal sovereignty. And one thing worth noting here is that New Spain and Peru were referred to as kingdoms rather than colonies. Nothing was called a colony, at least not until the Bourbon Reforms that we’re going to talk about next week. 

Now, along with the state, of course, comes the church. And wherever the conquistadors went, they brought with them Catholic missionaries who saw it as their duty to convert the heathen natives to the true faith. Now, at first, this process went great, at least that’s what the missionaries thought. But then it turned out that the Amerindians were just incorporating the Christian god into their broader pantheon of deities, and that wouldn’t do at all. So a process of slow cultural annihilation was undertaken by the dual power of the church and the state, which, given the strong Catholic nature of the Spanish monarchy, were often represented in one and the same man. 

Now, in the first stage of the Conquest, this process manifested in the encomienda system, which we talked about very briefly in Episode 4.1. That’s where native groups would be placed under the protection of a Spaniard, usually as a reward for his service on some expedition or another, and then he would protect them by forcing them to work and make him rich. Now, these guys were supposed to see to the religious education of their charges. But the encomiendas weren’t generally too troubled with what god these people worshiped as long as they got to work. Because although these unfortunate Amerindians were not technically owned, this was de facto slavery. And as I also mentioned in Episode 4.1, a priest named Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had himself once been an encomienda, grew progressively distressed about what he was witnessing and he started to petition the Crown to protect the Indians as a father would protect his children. De Las Casas finally succeeded with his long campaign on behalf of the Amerindians, and in 1542, Charles V and the Council of Indies promulgated new laws that they called the ‘New Laws of the Indies for the good treatment and preservation of the Indians’. Thanks to these New Laws, the scope and power of the encomienda system was severely curtailed. It took a while to implement in full, but the New Laws do mark the end of the most exploitative era of the encomiendas. Of course, De Las Casas also suggested lessening the horrors inflicted on the Amerindians by importing slaves from Africa to do their work, which helped kick off the flood of African slave labor across the Atlantic. He came to regret that, too. 

But though the encomiendas were being phased out, that did not mean life suddenly got great for the conquered Amerindians. And indeed, the Spanish really just moved on to an ever-so-slightly less exploitative system. Once the new laws were promulgated, full-blooded Amerindians were classified as minors in Spanish law and then resettled in communities called ‘reductions’, as part of a program to instruct these child Indians on the proper mode of European living and religion. These reductions, though, would be headed by a native leader who would be responsible for making sure that his people stayed in line, paid the tribute that the Crown now imposed upon them, and that they showed up for their forced labor duties, because ditching the encomienda did not mean ditching forced labor. The Amerindians were forced to provide free labor for all manner of public works projects, which meant most especially working in the mines. At the height of its operations, for example, the Peruvian silver mine at Potosí was run by upwards of 200,000 laborers. 

Now, the Spanish Empire was not entirely run by forced Amerindian labor. They were now augmented by African slave labor and even, get this, paid wage labor.

So as the Spanish Empire grew up, the native populations and culture were slowly eradicated and then merged with the arriving white Spaniards and black Africans, neither of whom arrived with many women in tow. As the three principal races, that is, Spanish white, African black, and native Amerindian started intermixing, a racial classification system, just like the one we saw grow up in Saint Domingue, soon developed to determine the social status of all the mixes and matches that arose. By the end of the Spanish Golden Age, a pretty clear hierarchy had developed. 

At the very top of this hierarchy, were ‘the peninsulares’ – whites born in Spain. Beneath them were ‘criollos/creoles’ – whites born in the Americas. And I should mention that while ‘Creole’ really refers to anyone and anything native to the Americas, in the Spanish context, ‘criollo’ is all but synonymous with whites born in America. Below them were mestizos, mixed-race children of whites and Amerindians, that is, a white man and a native woman. And critically here, if you had any white blood at all, that released you from the legal burdens imposed by the Spanish authorities on full-blooded Amerindians, the tributes, the forced labor, and more than a few native women found a white man whose blood could release her children from de facto bondage. Then there were the African slaves coming into it. And you have, just like in Saint Domingue, ‘mulattos’ (the mix of one white and one black) and then further on through the ‘quadroons’ and ‘octoroons’. Collectively, mixed-race black and whites are called ‘pardos’. Below them were ‘zambos’, which was a mix of black and Amerindian. And all of these mixed-race people were collectively called ‘castas’, because of their inferiority in the caste system. So below all of them were then the full-blooded Indians, free blacks, and at the very bottom, black slaves.

Now, this is all important because while the American Revolution resulted in a system of white supremacy, and the Haitian revolution resulted in a system of black supremacy. The Spanish American Revolution will result in a system of total and complete racial color blindness. And though the political proclamations and social propaganda was never really achieved in practice, the color blindness of post-Spanish America remains a really important ideological principle. 

So all of these people combine to work in and administer the economic system of Spanish America. From the very lowest slave working in the worst conditions in the mine up through the very senior peninsulares, viceroys and governors, all of them kept under pretty tight control and all of their work directed to enrich the Spanish Crown. As I mentioned, all exports to and imports from the Americas had to run through the port of Seville, where the House of Trade could monitor everything. The port cities in the Americas were forbidden even from trading with each other, as that might tend to keep wealth in the New World rather than shipping it back to enrich the Old World.

To keep shipments to and from Spain safe from British and French and Dutch pirates who were now roaming the waters, the Spanish developed a convoy system: these huge trade fleets protected by the Spanish Navy. And by the late 1500s, they also had established a twice-yearly shipment to and from the Philippines. The famous ??Manila galleons would depart from Acapulco on the Pacific Coast of New Spain, loaded with silver. They would then land in Manila, trade all that silver for Chinese spices, and then come back to Acapulco. Chinese goods would then be transferred overland to Veracruz, the principal port city on the Atlantic side of New Spain and from their ship to Seville. This Chinese trade was another boon to Spanish economic fortunes and is also how 40% of all silver minted in the Americas winds up in China. And it was in describing this sprawling Spanish trade network that you first get the old saw about, quote, “the empire upon which the sun never sets”. 

Now, what I just described was essentially the political and economic system that will run the empire for the whole rest of the Spanish Golden Age, which, as I mentioned, collapses along with the Habsburg dynasty at the end of the 1600s. So let’s hop across the Atlantic again and finish off today’s episode by finishing off the Habsburgs. 

In the mid-1550s, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, proceeded through a series of planned abdications to relinquish his various titles. And in 1556, Charles’s brother became Holy Roman Emperor. And then Charles’s son Philip inherited the Spanish Crown. Now, at that point, Philip was also technically the King of England, thanks to his marriage to Queen Mary in 1553. But that only lasted until 1558, whereupon she died and he was politely asked to take a hike. 

So King Philip II of the Spanish kingdoms kept up his father’s passion for waging war and cast himself as the great defender of Catholicism, battling the forces of the Protestant Reformation on the one side and the Muslim Turks on the other. And this is pretty much where all that silver is going to go because he needs to pay for armies and navies to fight his wars. He was, for example, the principal financier for the Holy League’s Navy that soundly defeated the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, one of the greatest naval battles of all time. But Philip did manage to add to his revenue streams, and just a few years later, he snuck in a successful claim to the Portuguese throne when the Portuguese were in the midst of a succession crisis. And so, in 1581, Philip was also made king of Portugal, uniting the crowns of Spain and Portugal and all of their respective overseas holdings under one crown for the next 60 years. 

So though King Philip II was, like, richer than God, he was constantly short of cash. It all just disappeared into the hands of his creditors the minute it showed up in Seville. Spanish finances were mismanaged to the point where Philip had to repeatedly declare bankruptcy and stiff the men he owed money to, which he did in 1557, 1560, 1575, 1596. Now, we’re not going to wander into this, but all of that played a huge role in the Dutch war of independence, as the Dutch rebelled against the Spanish Habsburgs, a conflict that runs from 1566 to 1648. Because while Spanish credit was now crap, Dutch credit was awesome and getting awesomer. 

Phillip’s fortunes then took a further hit when his rivalry with Queen Elizabeth of England led him into another one of the great naval battles in history. Because in 1588, Philip dispatched the famous Spanish Armada, which mother nature and the English then proceeded to sink to the bottom of the deep blue sea. So after Philip II died in 1598, the 1600s then turned into one long stretch of stagnation and decay overseen by his heirs. All the Spanish Crown’s profits from their empire were immediately being handed over to creditors or used to purchase goods from the rising commercial industries of neighboring countries because the massive amounts of Spanish silver brought into the country was causing inflated prices for home industries, but making import super cheap, which totally arrested the economic development of the Iberian Peninsula. 

Meanwhile, the rising Dutch and English who were taking advantage of all this started growing their own overseas empires and ignoring those Spanish claims laid out in the Treaty of Tordesillas. And then the French got into the act, and suddenly everyone was becoming a colonial power, and the Spanish and the Portuguese were fast losing traction. 

So after its peak during the reigns of Charles and Philip in the 1500s, the subsequent reigns of Philip III, Philip IV, and Charles II that spanned the whole length of the 1600s was just one long decline. They got sucked into the Thirty Years’ War, and in not a good way. The ministers of Philip IV tried to strengthen the Crown’s central authority to cope with this war and instead triggered revolts in Portugal and Catalonia. The former successful, the latter crushed. And then, even after the Thirty Years’ War ended, a further war with France dragged on until 1659. Well exhausted by now, the Spanish monarchy was slipping into full second-rate power status, a process greatly accelerated by the long and torturous reign of King Charles II, who inherited the throne at the age of three in 1665. The problem was that Charles II was physically and mentally disabled, possibly thanks to Habsburg inbreeding, but nobody really knows. During his reign, men and women who acted as regents and caretakers of the monarchy just used it as an excuse to make themselves and their friends rich. So by the time Charles II finally died childless in November 1700, the Spanish Crown and the Spanish empire were utterly, completely morbid. 

But help was on the way, kind of. As they say in the biz, the fundamentals of the empire were sound. I mean, yeah, Spain was not really being allowed to sit at the adult table anymore, but their overseas empire was by far, and I mean by far, the largest and most lucrative in the world. I mean, at this point, the French are like running beaver pelts out of Canada. Saint Domingue is just now being colonized. It’s not anywhere close to being turned into the sugar engine that it became. The British are, what, just now figuring out how to run a stable tobacco colony in Virginia, catching some cod off the New England coast. So, yeah, the Spanish Empire had been badly mismanaged and was in need of top-to-bottom reform, but that did not mean it couldn’t be fixed. And next week, we’ll kick things off with the death of Charles II, because, as I said, he died childless, which kicked off the war of the Spanish succession, which would bring a new dynasty into power: the Spanish Bourbons. These guys attempted to turn Spanish fortunes around, a process that we will follow specifically through the lens of one of the new administrative units they created to better manage their domains: the Viceroyalty of New Granada.

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