Spain's Empire

By the mid-1500s, the monarchy claimed Spain owned North America because of a grant made by the Pope in 1493.  To make this a more tangible reality, Spain established a few settlements, such as the one at St. Augustine in Florida in 1565, which had the benefit of serving as an outpost to protect Spanish ships from pirates and privateers who patrolled the southern Atlantic, looking for the Spanish fleet sailing toward the home country with holds filled with gold and silver. 

 

 

Spain continued to establish settlements and outposts throughout the late 1500s in Florida, present-day South Carolina, northern Mexico, and southern New Mexico.  The expansion into northern Mexico represented an extension of the Spanish mining frontier.  Officials continued to hear rumors of fabulous riches awaiting the man who could find them—somewhere over the next horizon. 

The greatest mine in the New World, Spain’s mine at Potosí in Bolivia, boomed, boasting a population of 120,000, mainly Indian workers who extracted silver in shifts that lasted fourteen hours.  The precious metal was sent by galleon to Spain, resulting in runaway inflation from dumping so much silver on the market. 

The sixteenth century proved to be Spain’s golden age.  By 1600, more than 200,000 Europeans—mostly Spanish—had immigrated to the New World and over 125,000 enslaved Africans had been forcibly brought to the Caribbean to work for Portuguese and Spanish plantation owners.  Under the rule of King Charles I, Spain pursued a dynastic empire, including the selection, through judicious bribes, of Charles as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.  Despite his ambitions and success, Charles V would soon confront an unexpected challenge that would have ramifications in the New World as well as in Europe.