Contact and conquest · AP US History

Period 1 · Contact and conquest

1491–1607

In 1491 the Americas were home to tens of millions of people, in societies as varied as any on earth. By 1607, when the English founded Jamestown, Spain ruled an empire from Mexico to Chile, Portugal held the coast of Brazil, and the Native population had collapsed.

The period has two big ideas. First, Native peoples had spread across North America over thousands of years and built distinct and increasingly complex societies by adapting to, and changing, their environments. Second, European overseas expansion after 1492 brought Europeans, Native Americans and Africans into contact, set off the Columbian Exchange of plants, animals and diseases, and produced new social and economic systems built on coerced labor.

Europe in 1491 was turning outward. The Renaissance had revived learning and trade; the printing press spread maps and travel accounts. New monarchies were gathering power: Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile had joined their kingdoms by marriage in 1469 and finished the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Iberia, when Granada fell in 1492. The Ottoman Turks, who had taken Constantinople in 1453, and Venetian merchants controlled the routes that brought Asian spices and silks west, so Atlantic kingdoms looked for a way round them by sea.

West and Central Africa had kingdoms and empires of their own: Songhai on the Niger, with Timbuktu a center of Islamic learning; Benin; and Kongo, whose king was baptized a Christian in 1491. Gold, salt and captives moved north across the Sahara. Portugal had been trading on the African coast for half a century.

The figure is the Atlantic world as the period runs, year by year: red where Spain ruled, blue Portugal, gray the rivals still at home, and the fleets that joined them. The dark line is the treaty line of 1494; pins rise at the towns, forts and capitals as they were founded or taken.

topic
1.2	Native American societies before contact
1.3	European exploration in the Americas
1.4	The Columbian Exchange, Spanish exploration and conquest
1.5	Labor, slavery and caste in the Spanish colonial system
1.6	Cultural interactions between Europeans, Native Americans and Africans
1.7	Comparison in Period 1

Period 1 is about 4–6% of the AP exam.

1.2 · Native American societies before contact

adapting to many environments

The first Americans came from Asia, across the land bridge of Beringia or along the Pacific coast, at least 15,000 years ago and perhaps more than 20,000. Over the millennia that followed their descendants spread across two continents and adapted to every environment in them.

Maize was the great change. Farmers in southwestern Mexico domesticated it from a wild grass, teosinte, about 9,000 years ago. It spread north, reaching the Southwest by about 2100 BCE and the Eastern Woodlands by about 200 BCE, though it became the staple there only after about 900 CE. Where maize grew it supported economic development, settlement, advanced irrigation and social diversification: towns, priests and chiefs, trade, and a surplus to feed them.

In Mesoamerica and the Andes it fed empires. The Mexica (Aztecs) ruled central Mexico from Tenochtitlan, a lake city of perhaps 150,000–250,000 people (estimates vary), and drew tribute from conquered peoples. The Inca governed the Andes from Cuzco through a network of roads, storehouses and labor service.

region	how people lived	for example
Southwest	maize with irrigation; towns of adobe and stone	Hohokam canals; Ancestral Puebloans at Chaco Canyon (850–1150); the Pueblo peoples
Great Basin, Great Plains	dry lands and grasslands: largely mobile hunting and gathering	Shoshone; Plains peoples hunting bison on foot
Northeast, Mississippi valley, Atlantic coast	mixed farming and hunting; permanent villages	Mississippian Cahokia; Haudenosaunee (Iroquois); coastal Algonquian peoples
Northwest, California	hunting, fishing and gathering; settled towns where the ocean and rivers were rich	Chinook; Chumash

Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, was the largest city north of Mexico: 10,000–20,000 people at its height (UNESCO’s estimate), 1050–1150 CE, round earthen platform mounds; Monks Mound rises about 30 meters. In the Northeast the Haudenosaunee, the Five Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca), lived in bark longhouses and grew the “three sisters,” maize, beans and squash. Women farmed and owned the fields; descent ran through the mother (matrilineal); clan mothers chose the men who sat as sachems on the council. Oral tradition credits the Peacemaker and Hiawatha with the confederacy’s Great Law of Peace; its founding date is disputed, between c. 1142 and c. 1600 (disputed).

On the Northwest coast, salmon and cedar supported large villages of plank houses, ranked societies and the potlatch, a feast at which leaders won status by giving goods away. Across the continent, most peoples were animists, seeing spiritual power in the natural world, and long-distance trade carried copper, shells, obsidian and ideas between regions.

The figure runs from 7000 BCE to 1491: maize farming (red) spreads north, hunting and gathering peoples (blue) hold the rest.

1.3 · European exploration in the Americas

God, gold and glory

European states explored and conquered in the Americas for three reasons: the search for new sources of wealth, economic and military competition with one another, and the wish to spread Christianity.

Portugal led. Prince Henry “the Navigator” (1394–1460) sponsored voyages down the African coast in search of gold, slaves and a sea route to Asia. Portuguese captains settled the Atlantic islands, built the fort of Elmina on the Gold Coast (1482), and inched south until Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope (1488). Vasco da Gama sailed round Africa to India (1498), opening a sea route to the spice trade. Pedro Álvares Cabral, bound for India, landed in Brazil (1500).

Spain followed. With Granada taken, Ferdinand and Isabella backed Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator, who proposed to reach Asia by sailing west. He reached the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, then Cuba and Hispaniola, and believed to the end of four voyages that he had found islands off Asia; hence “Indies” and “Indians.” In 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the non-Christian world along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands: lands to the west for Spain, to the east for Portugal. That is why Brazil speaks Portuguese.

The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci argued that these lands were a “New World,” and the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller named it “America” after him on his map of 1507. Balboa crossed Panama to the Pacific in 1513; Magellan’s fleet sailed round the world, 1519–1522. England sent John Cabot (1497) and France Jacques Cartier (1534) to look for a northwest passage to Asia; neither found one, and neither country planted a lasting colony before the 1600s.

What made it possible: the caravel, a small, fast ship whose lateen (triangular) sails could tack into the wind; the magnetic compass, the astrolabe and quadrant for finding latitude; better maps; the knowledge of Atlantic winds and currents won in the island voyages; gunpowder weapons; and the printing press, which spread news of every voyage.

voyage	for	result
Bartolomeu Dias, 1487–1488	Portugal	rounds the Cape of Good Hope
Christopher Columbus, 1492	Spain	crosses to the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola
John Cabot, 1497	England	reaches Newfoundland or Cape Breton
Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499	Portugal	sails round Africa to India
Pedro Álvares Cabral, 1500	Portugal	lands in Brazil on the way to India
Jacques Cartier, 1534	France	enters the Gulf of St. Lawrence

1.4 · The Columbian Exchange, Spanish exploration and conquest

plants, animals, germs and empire

After 1492 plants, animals, people and diseases crossed the Atlantic in both directions: the Columbian Exchange. It changed diets, landscapes and populations on both sides of the ocean.

to the Americas	to Europe, Africa and Asia
horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens	maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava
wheat, rice, sugarcane, bananas	tomatoes, beans, squash, peppers, cacao
smallpox, measles, influenza; malaria and yellow fever from Africa	tobacco; silver and gold

In Europe, American crops, above all maize and potatoes, fed more people and helped populations grow; cassava and maize did the same in Africa. American gold and silver flooded into Spain and on across Europe and to Asia, driving up prices and helping Europe move from feudalism toward capitalism. Improvements in ships and a more organized trade, including joint-stock companies that pooled investors’ money, changed economies on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the Americas, Spanish livestock and crops remade the land and the lives of the people on it: cattle and pigs ran over Native fields, and horses, spreading north over the next two centuries, would transform life on the Great Plains. Worst were the epidemics. Native Americans had no immunity to Old World diseases. Smallpox reached Hispaniola in 1518 and Tenochtitlan in 1520, killing far ahead of the Spanish themselves.

How many died is disputed, because no one counted. Estimates for the whole hemisphere in 1492 range from 8.4 million to over 112 million; a 2019 synthesis of 119 regional estimates gives about 60.5 million (middle half of the range 44.8–78.2 million) and some 56 million deaths, about 90%, by 1600. For central Mexico, Borah and Cook’s figures fall from 25.2 million in 1518 to 1.075 million in 1605 (the graph); other historians start as low as 4.5 million, but every estimate shows a catastrophe.

Conquest. Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519 with a few hundred Spaniards, won tens of thousands of Native allies, above all the Tlaxcalans, enemies of the Mexica, and used the interpreter Malintzin (La Malinche). Moctezuma II received him; the Spanish were driven out in 1520, came back, besieged the city and cut its food and water, and Tenochtitlan fell in 1521, weakened by smallpox. Francisco Pizarro, with fewer than 200 men, seized the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, in an empire already split by civil war and by disease. Steel, guns and horses mattered, but allies, epidemics and Native divisions mattered more.

Spanish expeditions then pushed north in search of gold: Ponce de León to Florida (1513), Hernando de Soto across the Southeast (1539–1542), Francisco Vázquez de Coronado through the Southwest and onto the Plains (1540–1542) looking for the “Seven Cities of Cíbola,” and Juan de Oñate into New Mexico (1598).

1.5 · Labor, slavery and caste in the Spanish colonial system

encomienda, the slave trade and the castas

Spain’s American empire ran on forced labor: first Native Americans’, then, more and more, enslaved Africans’. A ranking by birth and ancestry, the casta system, sorted everyone in it.

The encomienda. The Crown granted conquerors and settlers (encomenderos) the right to demand tribute and labor from the Native people of a district, in return for protecting them and teaching them Christianity (formalized in 1503). In practice it meant overwork in mines and fields, and abuse. The Laws of Burgos (1512) tried to regulate it; the New Laws (1542) forbade enslaving Native people and limited encomiendas, over settlers’ fierce resistance. Labor drafts followed: the repartimiento and, in Peru, the mita, adapted from the Inca labor tax, which from 1573 sent Native men in rotation to the silver mines of Potosí (found 1545).

Enslaved Africans. As Native populations collapsed, Spanish and Portuguese colonists turned to Africa. Portuguese traders had dealt on the West African coast since the 1440s, and their sugar plantations on Madeira and São Tomé were the model. They partnered with African rulers and merchants who held and sold captives, often prisoners of war; slavery in West Africa existed, but it was usually not a permanent, inherited status as it became in the Americas. Enslaved Africans arrived in Hispaniola from about 1502; from 1518 the Crown licensed shipments straight from Africa (the asiento). Brazil’s sugar plantations, worked by enslaved Africans, made it the world’s leading sugar producer by the end of the century. This was chattel slavery: people owned as property, their children born enslaved.

years	enslaved Africans embarked
1501–1525	13,363
1526–1550	50,762
1551–1575	61,007
1576–1600	152,373
1501–1600	277,505

(SlaveVoyages estimates. It was only the beginning: about 12.5 million people were embarked in all, 1501–1866.)

The casta system. The Spanish defined, carefully, the status of everyone in a population of Europeans, Africans and Native Americans that mixed from the start, not least because most early Spanish migrants were men. At the top were peninsulares, born in Spain; then criollos, of Spanish descent born in the Americas; then people of mixed ancestry, mestizos (Spanish and Native), mulattos (Spanish and African) and zambos (African and Native); then indios, who paid tribute; and at the bottom enslaved Africans. Rank set taxes, jobs, dress and legal rights. The order varied by place and time, and people did move between categories, but the principle, status by ancestry, would last.

1.6 · Cultural interactions

Europeans, Native Americans and Africans

Europeans and Native Americans saw the world differently: about religion, gender roles, family, land use and power. Each side tried to make sense of the other, often wrongly, and each took from the other what it found useful.

	Europeans	Native Americans (many eastern peoples)
land	owned, bounded, bought and sold	used, held in common by kin
religion	one God; convert the world	spirits in the natural world
work and family	men farm; patriarchal households	women farm; descent often through mothers
power	monarchs, nobles, the Church	councils, kin, consensus, gifts

Misunderstanding shaped the first years. To many Native peoples an exchange of goods sealed a relationship and its obligations; Europeans saw a purchase. A grant of the right to use land was read by Europeans as a sale of it forever. Europeans who saw women working fields judged Native men idle; Native observers found European hierarchy and hoarding strange.

Adoption ran both ways. Native peoples took up metal tools and kettles, cloth, guns and, in time, horses; some accepted Christianity, often blending it with their own beliefs. Europeans adopted maize, tobacco, canoes, snowshoes and Native trails, and depended on Native guides, interpreters and food.

Native resistance and diplomacy. As Europeans took more land and labor, Native peoples defended their sovereignty, prosperity, religion and ways of life by negotiation and alliance (the Tlaxcalans chose to ally with Cortés against the Mexica) and by war: the Taíno leader Enriquillo held out in the mountains of Hispaniola from 1519 until a treaty in 1533; Acoma Pueblo fought Oñate’s colonists in 1599 and was destroyed for it.

The European debate. Contact raised the question of how non-Europeans should be treated. The Spanish read conquered peoples the Requerimiento (1513), a demand in Spanish that they submit to the Crown and the Church or face war. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, once an encomendero himself, argued that Native Americans were rational, free people to be converted by peaceful means, and documented atrocities in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (written 1542, printed 1552). Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda answered, citing Aristotle, that they were “natural slaves” whom Spain could rightly conquer. They argued it at Valladolid, 1550–1551; no verdict was given. Religious, cultural and, increasingly, racial justifications were offered for subjugating Native Americans and especially Africans.

Africans resisted slavery openly, by revolt and by escape (communities of runaways, maroons, formed on Hispaniola and in Panama), and quietly, by slowing work and by keeping their families, languages, music and religions alive.

1.7 · Comparison in Period 1

how contact looked from each side

Comparing means naming similarities and differences and explaining why. In Period 1 the comparisons to know are among the European powers, and between European and Native American views of each other, as they changed.

	Spain	Portugal	France	England
aims	gold and silver, conversion, empire	Asian trade, African gold and slaves, sugar	a passage to Asia, then fish and furs	a passage to Asia, then land and trade
by 1607	empire from Mexico to Chile; St. Augustine (1565); New Mexico (1598)	Brazil’s coast; forts in Africa and Asia	Cartier’s voyages (1534–1542); no lasting colony until Quebec, 1608	Roanoke failed (1585, 1587); Jamestown (1607)
labor	encomienda, then drafts and enslaved Africans	enslaved Africans on sugar plantations	Native trading partners	settlers (later servants and enslaved Africans)
with Native peoples	conquest, conversion, mixing (the castas)	enslavement, then African labor	trade and alliance	trade, then war over land

Similarities. All were moved by wealth, rivalry and religion; all depended on Native knowledge and allies; all brought disease. Differences came from what each found and what each wanted. Spain met dense, tribute-paying empires and silver, so it conquered and ruled Native peoples as laborers. France, seeking furs, needed Native hunters and allies more than land. England, arriving late after Spain’s defeat at sea in 1588 and with people to send, would want land.

Change over time. European views moved from wonder and the hope of easy riches, through conquest, to the Valladolid debate and the casta order. Native views moved too: from curiosity and the hope of trade or alliance against old enemies to recognition of a threat, met by diplomacy, adaptation and resistance. By 1607 the Atlantic had become one world, joined by trade, conquest and the slave trade.

The figure is the period on one strip: each event appears as the year reaches it, Spain’s rising above the strip and everyone else’s hanging below, colored by who acted (red Spain, blue Portugal, gray England and France, black Europe at large); the bars on the strip are the conquests of the Mexica and Inca, the encomienda’s years, and the Reformation.