Spanish colonization of the Americas 19th century How did America become colonized? I don't know.
What happened to Mexico in the 19th century?
What happened to Mexico in the 19th century?
During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain. The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.  In 1809 the first declarations of independence from Spanish rule occurred in the Viceroyalty of New Granada. The first two were in present-day Bolivia at Sucre (May 25), and La Paz (July 16); and the third in present-day Ecuador at Quito (August 10). In 1810 Mexico declared independence, with the Mexican War of Independence following for over a decade. In 1821 Treaty of Cordoba established Mexican independence from Spain and concluded the War. The Plan of Iguala was part of the peace treaty to establish a constitutional foundation for an independent Mexico.  These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s. The British Empire offered support, wanting to end the Spanish monopoly on trade with its colonies in the Americas.  In 1898, the United States achieved victory in the Spanish-American War with Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era. Spanish possession and rule of its remaining colonies in the Americas ended in that year with its sovereignty transferred to the United States. The United States took occupation of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico continues to be a possession of the United States, now officially continues as a self-governing unincorporated territory. CANNOTANSWER
Independence
The Spanish colonization of the Americas began under the Crown of Castile and was spearheaded by the Spanish conquistadors. The Americas were invaded and incorporated into the Spanish Empire, with the exception of Brazil, British America, and some small regions of South America and the Caribbean. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. The main motivations for colonial expansion were profit through resource extraction and the spread of Catholicism through indigenous conversions.

Beginning with the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean and gaining control over more territory for over three centuries, the Spanish Empire would expand across the Caribbean Islands, half of South America, most of Central America and much of North America. It is estimated that during the colonial period (1492–1832), a total of 1.86 million Spaniards settled in the Americas, and a further 3.5 million immigrated during the post-colonial era (1850–1950); the estimate is 250,000 in the 16th century and most during the 18th century, as immigration was encouraged by the new Bourbon dynasty.

By contrast, the indigenous population plummeted by an estimated 80% in the first century and a half following Columbus's voyages, primarily through the spread of disease, forced labor and slavery for resource extraction, and missionization. This has been argued to be the first large-scale act of genocide in the modern era.

In the early 19th century, the Spanish American wars of independence resulted in the secession and subsequent division of most Spanish territories in the Americas, except for Cuba and Puerto Rico, which were lost to the United States in 1898, following the Spanish–American War. The loss of these territories ended Spanish rule in the Americas.

Imperial expansion
 
The expansion of Spain’s territory took place under the Catholic Monarchs Isabella of Castile, Queen of Castile and her husband King Ferdinand, King of Aragon, whose marriage marked the beginning of Spanish power beyond the Iberian peninsula. They pursued a policy of joint rule of their kingdoms and created the initial stage of a single Spanish monarchy, completed under the eighteenth-century Bourbon monarchs. The first expansion of territory was the conquest of the Muslim Emirate of Granada on January 1, 1492, the culmination of the Christian Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula, held by the Muslims since 711.  On March 31, 1492, the Catholic Monarch ordered the expulsion of the Jews in Spain who refused to convert to Christianity.  On October 12, 1492, Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Western Hemisphere.

Even though Castile and Aragon were ruled jointly by their respective monarchs, they remained separate kingdoms so that when the Catholic Monarchs gave official approval for the plans for Columbus’s voyage to reach "the Indies" by sailing West, the funding came from the queen of Castile. The profits from Spanish expedition flowed to Castile.  The Kingdom of Portugal authorized a series of voyages down the coast of Africa and when they rounded the southern tip, were able to sail to India and further east.  Spain sought similar wealth, and authorized Columbus’s voyage sailing west. Once the Spanish settlement in the Caribbean occurred, Spain and Portugal formalized a division of the world between them in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.   The deeply pious Isabella saw the expansion of Spain's sovereignty inextricably paired with the evangelization of non-Christian peoples, the so-called “spiritual conquest” with the military conquest.  Pope Alexander VI in a 4 May 1493 papal decree, Inter caetera, divided rights to lands in the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal on the proviso that they spread Christianity.  These formal arrangements between Spain and Portugal and the pope were ignored by other European powers.

General principles of expansion
The Spanish expansion has sometimes been succinctly summed up as "gold, glory, God." The search for material wealth, the enhancement of the conquerors' and the crown's position, and the expansion of Christianity. In the extension of Spanish sovereignty to its overseas territories, authority for expeditions (entradas) of discovery, conquest, and settlement resided in the monarchy.  Expeditions required authorization by the crown, which laid out the terms of such expedition. Virtually all expeditions after the Columbus voyages, which were funded by the crown of Castile, were done at the expense of the leader of the expedition and its participants. Although often the participants, conquistadors, are now termed “soldiers”, they were not paid soldiers in ranks of an army, but rather soldiers of fortune, who joined an expedition with the expectation of profiting from it. The leader of an expedition, the adelantado was a senior with material wealth and standing who could persuade the crown to issue him a license for an expedition. He also had to attract participants to the expedition who staked their own lives and meager fortunes on the expectation of the expedition’s success. The leader of the expedition pledged the larger share of capital to the enterprise, which in many ways functioned as a commercial firm. Upon the success of the expedition, the spoils of war were divvied up in proportion to the amount a participant initially staked, with the leader receiving the largest share. Participants supplied their own armor and weapons, and those who had a horse received two shares, one for himself, the second recognizing the value of the horse as a machine of war. For the conquest era, two names of Spaniards are generally known because they led the conquests of high indigenous civilizations, Hernán Cortés, leader of the expedition that conquered the Aztecs of Central Mexico, and Francisco Pizarro, leader of the conquest of the Inca in Peru.

Caribbean islands and the Spanish Main

Until his dying day, Columbus was convinced that he had reached Asia, the Indies.  From that misperception the Spanish called the indigenous peoples of the Americas, "Indians" (indios), lumping a multiplicity of civilizations, groups, and individuals into a single category.  The Spanish royal government called its overseas possessions "The Indies" until its empire dissolved in the nineteenth century.  Patterns set in this early period of exploration and colonization were to endure as Spain expanded further, even as the region became less important in the overseas empire after the conquests of Mexico and Peru.

In the Caribbean, there was no large-scale Spanish conquest of indigenous peoples, but there was indigenous resistance. Columbus made four voyages to the West Indies as the monarchs granted Columbus vast powers of governance over this unknown part of the world. The crown of Castile financed more of his trans-Atlantic journeys, a pattern they would not repeat elsewhere. Effective Spanish settlement began in 1493, when Columbus brought livestock, seeds, agricultural equipment. The first settlement of La Navidad, a crude fort built on his first voyage in 1492, had been abandoned by the time he returned in 1493. He then founded the settlement of La Isabela on the island they named Hispaniola (now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

Spanish explorations of other islands in the Caribbean and what turned out to be the mainland of South and Central America occupied them for over two decades.  Columbus had promised that the region he now controlled held a huge treasure in the form of gold and spices. Spanish settlers found relatively dense populations of indigenous peoples, who were agriculturalists living in villages ruled by leaders not part of a larger integrated political system.  For the Spanish, these populations were there for their exploitation, to supply their own settlements with foodstuffs, but more importantly for the Spanish, to extract mineral wealth or produce another valuable commodity for Spanish enrichment. The labor of dense populations of Tainos were allocated to Spanish settlers in an institution known as the encomienda, where particular indigenous settlements were awarded to individual Spaniards.  There was surface gold found in early islands, and holders of encomiendas put the indigenous to work panning for it.  For all practical purposes, this was slavery.  Queen Isabel put an end to formal slavery, declaring the indigenous to be vassals of the crown, but Spaniards' exploitation continued.  The Taino population on Hispaniola went from hundreds of thousands or millions –- the estimates by scholars vary widely—but in the mid-1490s, they were practically wiped out.  Disease and overwork, disruption of family life and the agricultural cycle (which caused severe food shortages to Spaniards dependent on them) rapidly decimated the indigenous population. From the Spanish viewpoint, their source of labor and viability of their own settlements was at risk.  After the collapse of the Taino population of Hispaniola, Spaniards took to slave raiding and settlement on nearby islands, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica, replicating the demographic catastrophe there as well.

Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos denounced Spanish cruelty and abuse in a sermon in 1511, which comes down to us in the writings of Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. In 1542 Las Casas wrote a damning account of this genocide, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. It was translated quickly to English and became the basis for the anti-Spanish writings, collectively known as the Black Legend.

The first mainland explorations by Spaniards were followed by a phase of inland expeditions and conquest. In 1500 the city of Nueva Cádiz was founded on the island of Cubagua, Venezuela, followed by the founding of Santa Cruz by Alonso de Ojeda in present-day Guajira peninsula. Cumaná in Venezuela was the first permanent settlement founded by Europeans in the mainland Americas, in 1501 by Franciscan friars, but due to successful attacks by the indigenous people, it had to be refounded several times, until Diego Hernández de Serpa's foundation in 1569. The Spanish founded San Sebastián de Uraba in 1509 but abandoned it within the year. There is indirect evidence that the first permanent Spanish mainland settlement established in the Americas was Santa María la Antigua del Darién.

Spaniards spent over 25 years in the Caribbean where their initial high hopes of dazzling wealth gave way to continuing exploitation of disappearing indigenous populations, exhaustion of local gold mines, initiation of cane sugar cultivation as an export product, and importation of African slaves as a labor force. Spaniards continued to expand their presence in the circum-Caribbean region with expeditions. One was by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba in 1517, another by Juan de Grijalva in 1518, which brought promising news of possibilities there.  Even by the mid-1510s, the western Caribbean was largely unexplored by Spaniards. A well-connected settler in Cuba, Hernán Cortés received authorization in 1519 by the governor of Cuba to form an expedition of exploration-only to this far western region. That expedition was to make world history.

Mexico

It wasn’t until Spanish expansion into modern-day Mexico that Spanish explorers were able to find wealth on the scale that they had been hoping for. Unlike Spanish expansion in the Caribbean, which involved limited armed combat and sometimes the participation of indigenous allies, the conquest of central Mexico was protracted and necessitated indigenous allies who chose to participate for their own purposes. The conquest of the Aztec empire involved the combined effort of armies from many indigenous allies, spearheaded by a small Spanish force of conquistadors.  The Aztec empire was a fragile confederation of city-states.  Spaniards persuaded the leaders of subordinate city-states and one city-state never conquered by the Aztecs, Tlaxcala, to join them in huge numbers, with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of indigenous warriors. The conquest of central Mexico is one of the best-documented events in world history, with accounts by the expedition leader Hernán Cortés, many other Spanish conquistadors, including Bernal Díaz del Castillo, indigenous allies from the city-states altepetl of Tlaxcala, Texcoco, and Huexotzinco, but also importantly, the defeated of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. What can be called the visions of the vanquished, indigenous accounts written in the sixteenth century, are a rare case of history being written by those other than the victors.

The capture of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II by Cortés was not a brilliant stroke of innovation, but came from the playbook that the Spanish developed during their period in the Caribbean.  The composition of the expedition was the standard pattern, with a senior leader, and participating men investing in the enterprise with the full expectation of rewards if they did not lose their lives.  Cortés’s seeking indigenous allies was a typical tactic of warfare: divide and conquer.  But the indigenous allies had much to gain by throwing off Aztec rule. For the Spaniards’ Tlaxcalan allies,  their crucial support gained them enduring political legacy into the modern era, the Mexican state of Tlaxcala.

The conquest of central Mexico sparked further Spanish conquests, following the pattern of conquered and consolidated regions being the launching point for further expeditions. These were often led by secondary leaders, such as Pedro de Alvarado. Later conquests in Mexico were protracted campaigns with less spectacular results than the conquest of the Aztecs. The Spanish conquest of Yucatán, the Spanish conquest of Guatemala, the conquest of the Tarascans/Purépecha of Michoacan, the war of Mexico's west, and the Chichimeca War in northern Mexico expanded Spanish control over territory and indigenous populations. But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.

Peru

In 1532 at the Battle of Cajamarca a group of Spaniards under Francisco Pizarro and their indigenous Andean Indian auxiliaries native allies ambushed and captured the Emperor Atahualpa of the Inca Empire. It was the first step in a long campaign that took decades of fighting to subdue the mightiest empire in the Americas. In the following years, Spain extended its rule over the Empire of the Inca civilization.

The Spanish took advantage of a recent civil war between the factions of the two brothers Emperor Atahualpa and Huáscar, and the enmity of indigenous nations the Incas had subjugated, such as the Huancas, Chachapoyas, and Cañaris. In the following years the conquistadors and indigenous allies extended control over Greater Andes Region. The Viceroyalty of Perú was established in 1542. The last Inca stronghold was conquered by the Spanish in 1572.

Peru was the last territory in the continent under Spanish rule, which ended on 9 December 1824 at the Battle of Ayacucho   (Spanish rule continued until 1898 in Cuba and Puerto Rico).

Chile

Chile was explored by Spaniards based in Peru, where Spaniards found the fertile soil and mild climate attractive.  The Mapuche people of Chile, whom the Spaniards called Araucanians, resisted fiercely. The Spanish did establish the settlement of Chile in 1541, founded by Pedro de Valdivia.

Southward colonization by the Spanish in Chile halted after the conquest of Chiloé Archipelago in 1567. This is thought to have been the result of an increasingly harsh climate to the south, and the lack of a populous and sedentary indigenous population to settle among for the Spanish in the fjords and channels of Patagonia. South of the Bío-Bío River the Mapuche successfully reversed colonization with the Destruction of the Seven Cities in 1599–1604. This Mapuche victory laid the foundation for the establishment of a Spanish-Mapuche frontier called La Frontera. Within this frontier the city of Concepción assumed the role of "military capital" of Spanish-ruled Chile. With a hostile indigenous population, no obvious mineral or other exploitable resources, and little strategic value, Chile was a fringe area of colonial Spanish America, hemmed in geographically by the Andes to the east, Pacific Ocean to the west, and indigenous to the south.

New Granada

Between 1537 and 1543, six Spanish expeditions entered highland Colombia, conquered the Muisca Confederation, and set up the New Kingdom of Granada (). Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada was the leading conquistador with his brother Hernán second in command. It was governed by the president of the Audiencia of Bogotá, and comprised an area corresponding mainly to modern-day Colombia and parts of Venezuela. The conquistadors originally organized it as a captaincy general within the Viceroyalty of Peru. The crown established the audiencia in 1549. Ultimately, the kingdom became part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada first in 1717 and permanently in 1739. After several attempts to set up independent states in the 1810s, the kingdom and the viceroyalty ceased to exist altogether in 1819 with the establishment of Gran Colombia.

Venezuela
Venezuela was first visited by Europeans during the 1490s, when Columbus was in control of the region, and the region as a source for indigenous slaves for Spaniards in Cuba and Hispaniola, since the Spanish destruction of the local indigenous population. There were few permanent settlements, but Spaniards settled the coastal islands of Cubagua and Margarita to exploit the pearl beds. Western Venezuela’s history took an atypical direction in 1528, when Spain’s first Hapsburg monarch, Charles I granted rights to colonize to the German banking family of the Welsers. Charles sought to be elected Holy Roman Emperor and was willing to pay whatever it took to achieve that. He became deeply indebted to the German Welser and Fugger banking families. To satisfy his debts to the Welsers, he granted them the right to colonize and exploit western Venezuela, with the proviso that they found two towns with 300 settlers each and construct fortifications. They established the colony of Klein-Venedig in 1528. They founded the towns of Coro and Maracaibo.  They were aggressive in making their investment pay, alienating the indigenous populations and Spaniards alike. Charles revoked the grant in 1545, ending the episode of German colonization.

Río de la Plata and Paraguay

Argentina was not conquered or later exploited in the grand fashion of central Mexico or Peru, since the indigenous population was sparse and there were no precious metals or other valuable resources.  Although today Buenos Aires at the mouth of Río de la Plata is a major metropolis, it held no interest for Spaniards and the 1535-36 settlement failed and was abandoned by 1541. Pedro de Mendoza and Domingo Martínez de Irala, who led the original expedition, went inland and founded Asunción, Paraguay, which became the Spaniards' base. A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción, now the capital of Paraguay. Exploration from Peru resulted in the foundation of Tucumán in what is now northwest Argentina.

End of era of exploration

The spectacular conquests of central Mexico (1519–21) and Peru (1532) sparked Spaniards' hopes of finding yet another high civilization.  Expeditions continued into the 1540s and regional capitals founded by the 1550s.  Among the most notable expeditions are Hernando de Soto into southeast North America, leaving from Cuba (1539–42); Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to northern Mexico (1540–42), and Gonzalo Pizarro to Amazonia, leaving from Quito, Ecuador (1541–42). In 1561, Pedro de Ursúa led an expedition of some 370 Spanish (including women and children) into Amazonia to search for El Dorado.  Far more famous now is Lope de Aguirre, who led a mutiny against Ursúa, who was murdered. Aguirre subsequently wrote a letter to Philip II bitterly complaining about the treatment of conquerors like himself in the wake of the assertion of crown control over Peru. An earlier expedition that left in 1527 was led by Pánfilo Naváez, who was killed early on. Survivors continued to travel among indigenous groups in the North American south and southwest until 1536. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was one of four survivors of that expedition, writing an account of it. The crown later sent him to Asunción, Paraguay to be adelantado there.  Expeditions continued to explore territories in hopes of finding another Aztec or Inca empire, with no further success. Francisco de Ibarra led an expedition from Zacatecas in northern New Spain, and founded Durango. Juan de Oñate, is sometimes referred to as "the Last Conquistador", expanded Spanish sovereignty over what is now New Mexico. Like previous conquistadors,  Oñate engaged in widespread abuses of the Indian population. Shortly after founding Santa Fe, Oñate was recalled to Mexico City by the Spanish authorities. He was subsequently tried and convicted of cruelty to both natives and colonists and banished from New Mexico for life.

Factors affecting Spanish settlement

Two major factors affected the density of Spanish settlement in the long term. One was the presence or absence of dense, hierarchically organized indigenous populations that could be made to work. The other was the presence or absence of an exploitable resource for the enrichment of settlers. Best was gold, but silver was found in abundance.

The two main areas of Spanish settlement after 1550 were Mexico and Peru, the sites of the Aztec and Inca indigenous civilizations. Equally important, rich deposits of the valuable metal silver.  Spanish settlement in Mexico “largely replicated the organization of the area in preconquest times” while in Peru, the center of the Incas was too far south, too remote, and at too high an altitude for the Spanish capital. The capital Lima was built near the Pacific coast. The capitals of Mexico and Peru, Mexico City and Lima came to have large concentrations of Spanish settlers and became the hubs of royal and ecclesiastical administration, large commercial enterprises and skilled artisans, and centers of culture. Although Spaniards had hoped to find vast quantities of gold, the discovery of large quantities of silver became the motor of the Spanish colonial economy, a major source of income for the Spanish crown, and transformed the international economy.  Mining regions in both Mexico were remote, outside the zone of indigenous settlement in central and southern Mexico Mesoamerica, but mines in Zacatecas (founded 1548) and Guanajuato (founded 1548) were key hubs in the colonial economy.  In Peru, silver was found in a single silver mountain, the Cerro Rico de Potosí, still producing silver in the 21st century. Potosí (founded 1545) was in the zone of dense indigenous settlement, so that labor could be mobilized on traditional patterns to extract the ore.  An important element for productive mining was mercury for processing high-grade ore. Peru had a source in Huancavelica (founded 1572), while Mexico had to rely on mercury imported from Spain.

Establishment of early settlements

The Spanish founded towns in the Caribbean, on Hispaniola and Cuba, on a pattern that became spatially similar throughout Spanish America. A central plaza had the most important buildings on the four sides, especially buildings for royal officials and the main church.  A checkerboard pattern radiated outward.  Residences of the officials and elites were closest to the main square. Once on the mainland, where there were dense indigenous populations in urban settlements, the Spanish could build a Spanish settlement on the same site, dating its foundation to when that occurred. Often they erected a church on the site of an indigenous temple. They replicated the existing indigenous network of settlements, but added a port city. The Spanish network needed a port city so that inland settlements could be connected by sea to Spain.  In Mexico, the Hernán Cortés and the men of his expedition founded of the port town of Veracruz in 1519 and constituted themselves as the town councilors, as a means to throw off the authority of the governor of Cuba, who did not authorize an expedition of conquest. start of the conquest of central Mexico; once the Aztec empire was toppled, they founded Mexico City on the ruins of the Aztec capital.  Their central official and ceremonial area was built on top of Aztec palaces and temples. In Peru, Spaniards founded the city of Lima as their capital and its nearby port of Callao, rather than the high-altitude site of Cuzco, the center of Inca rule. Spaniards established a network of settlements in areas they conquered and controlled. Important ones include Santiago de Guatemala (1524); Puebla (1531); Querétaro (ca. 1531); Guadalajara (1531–42); Valladolid (now Morelia), (1529–41); Antequera (now Oaxaca(1525–29); Campeche (1541); and Mérida.  In southern Central and South America, settlements were founded in Panama (1519); León, Nicaragua (1524); Cartagena (1532); Piura (1532); Quito (1534); Trujillo (1535); Cali (1537) Bogotá (1538); Quito (1534); Cuzco 1534); Lima (1535); Tunja, (1539); Huamanga 1539; Arequipa (1540); Santiago de Chile (1544) and Concepción, Chile (1550).  Settled from the south were Buenos Aires (1536, 1580); Asunción (1537); Potosí (1545); La Paz, Bolivia (1548);  and Tucumán (1553).

Ecological conquests

The Columbian Exchange  was as significant as the clash of civilizations. Arguably the most significant introduction was diseases brought to the Americas, which devastated indigenous populations in a series of epidemics. The loss of indigenous population had a direct impact on Spaniards as well, since increasingly they saw those populations as a source of their own wealth, disappearing before their eyes.
 
In the first settlements in the Caribbean, the Spaniards deliberately brought animals and plants that transformed the ecological landscape. Pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens allowed Spaniards to eat a diet with which they were familiar. But the importation of horses transformed warfare for both the Spaniards and the indigenous.  Where the Spaniards had exclusive access to horses in warfare, they had an advantage over indigenous warriors on foot. They were initially a scarce commodity, but horse breeding became an active industry. Horses that escaped Spanish control were captured by indigenous; many indigenous also raided for horses.  Mounted indigenous warriors were significant foes for Spaniards.  The Chichimeca in northern Mexico, the Comanche in the northern Great Plains and the Mapuche in southern Chile and the pampas of Argentina resisted Spanish conquest.  For Spaniards, the fierce Chichimecas barred them for exploiting mining resources in northern Mexico. Spaniards waged a fifty-year war (ca. 1550-1600) to subdue them, but peace was only achieved by Spaniards’ making significant donations of food and other commodities the Chichimeca demanded.  "Peace by purchase" ended the conflict.  In southern Chile and the pampas, the Araucanians (Mapuche) prevented further Spanish expansion.  The image of mounted Araucanians capturing and carrying off white women was the embodiment of Spanish ideas of civilization and barbarism.

Cattle multiplied quickly in areas where little else could turn a profit for Spaniards, including northern Mexico and the Argentine pampas.  The introduction of sheep production was an ecological disaster in places where they were raised in great numbers, since they ate vegetation to the ground, preventing the regeneration of plants.

The Spanish brought new crops for cultivation. They preferred wheat cultivation to indigenous sources of carbohydrates: casava, maize (corn), and potatoes, initially importing seeds from Europe and planting in areas where plow agriculture could be utilized, such as the Mexican Bajío.  They also imported cane sugar, which was a high-value crop in early Spanish America. Spaniards also imported citrus trees, establishing orchards of oranges, lemons, and limes, and grapefruit.  Other imports were figs, apricots, cherries, pears, and peaches among others. The exchange did not go one way. Important indigenous crops that transformed Europe were the potato and maize, which produced abundant crops that led to the expansion of populations in Europe. Chocolate (Nahuatl: chocolate) and vanilla were cultivated in Mexico and exported to Europe.  Among the foodstuffs that became staples in European cuisine and could be grown there were tomatoes, squashes, bell peppers, and to a lesser extent in Europe chili peppers; also nuts of various kinds: Walnuts, cashews, pecans, and peanuts.

Civil governance

The empire in the Indies was a newly established dependency of the kingdom of Castile alone, so crown power was not impeded by any existing cortes (i.e. parliament), administrative or ecclesiastical institution, or seigneurial group. The crown sought to establish and maintain control over its overseas possessions through a complex, hierarchical bureaucracy, which in many ways was decentralized. The crown asserted is authority and sovereignty of the territory and vassals it claimed, collected taxes, maintained public order, meted out justice, and established policies for governance of large indigenous populations. Many institutions established in Castile found expression in The Indies from the early colonial period. Spanish universities expanded to train lawyer-bureaucrats (letrados) for administrative positions in Spain and its overseas empire.

The end of the Habsburg dynasty in 1700 saw major administrative reforms in the eighteenth century under the Bourbon monarchy, starting with the first Spanish Bourbon monarch, Philip V (r. 1700-1746) and reaching its apogee under Charles III (r. 1759-1788). The reorganization of administration has been called "a revolution in government." Reforms sought to centralize government control through reorganization of administration, reinvigorate the economies of Spain and the Spanish empire through changes in mercantile and fiscal policies, defend Spanish colonies and territorial claims through the establishment of a standing military, undermine the power of the Catholic church, and rein in the power of the American-born elites.

Early institutions of governance

The crown relied on ecclesiastics as important councilors and royal officials in the governance of their overseas territories. Archbishop Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, Isabella's confessor, was tasked with reining in Columbus's independence. He strongly influenced the formulation of colonial policy under the Catholic Monarchs, and was instrumental in establishing the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) (1503), which enabled crown control over trade and immigration. Ovando fitted out Magellan's voyage of circumnavigation, and became the first President of the Council of the Indies in 1524. Ecclesiastics also functioned as administrators overseas in the early Caribbean period, particularly Frey Nicolás de Ovando, who was sent to investigate the administration of Francisco de Bobadilla, the governor appointed to succeed Christopher Columbus. Later ecclesiastics served as interim viceroys, general inspectors (visitadores), and other high posts.

House of Trade

The crown established control over trade and emigration to the Indies with the 1503 establishment the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in Seville. Ships and cargoes were registered, and emigrants vetted to prevent migration of anyone not of old Christian heritage, (i.e., with no Jewish or Muslim ancestry), and facilitated the migration of families and women. In addition, the Casa de Contratación took charge of the fiscal organization, and of the organization and judicial control of the trade with the Indies.

Assertion of royal control in the early Caribbean
The politics of asserting royal authority to oppose Columbus resulted in the suppression of his privileges and the creation of territorial governance under royal authority. These governorates, also called as provinces, were the basic of the territorial government of the Indies, and arose as the territories were conquered and colonized. To carry out the expedition (entrada), which entailed exploration, conquest, and initial settlement of the territory, the king, as sovereign, and the appointed leader of an expedition (adelantado) agreed to an itemized contract (capitulación), with the specifics of the conditions of the expedition in a particular territory. The individual leaders of expeditions assumed the expenses of the venture and in return received as reward the grant from the government of the conquered territories; and in addition, they received instructions about treating the indigenous peoples.

After the end of the period of conquests, it was necessary to manage extensive and different territories with a strong bureaucracy. In the face of the impossibility of the Castilian institutions to take care of the New World affairs, other new institutions were created.

As the basic political entity it was the governorate, or province. The governors exercised judicial ordinary functions of first instance, and prerogatives of government legislating by ordinances. To these political functions of the governor, it could be joined the military ones, according to military requirements, with the rank of Captain general. The office of captain general involved to be the supreme military chief of the whole territory and he was responsible for recruiting and providing troops, the fortification of the territory, the supply and the shipbuilding.

Beginning in 1522 in the newly conquered Mexico, government units in the Spanish Empire had a royal treasury controlled by a set of oficiales reales (royal officials). There were also sub-treasuries at important ports and mining districts. The officials of the royal treasury at each level of government typically included two to four positions: a tesorero (treasurer), the senior official who guarded money on hand and made payments; a contador (accountant or comptroller), who recorded income and payments, maintained records, and interpreted royal instructions; a factor, who guarded weapons and supplies belonging to the king, and disposed of tribute collected in the province; and a veedor (overseer), who was responsible for contacts with native inhabitants of the province, and collected the king's share of any war booty. The veedor, or overseer, position quickly disappeared in most jurisdictions, subsumed into the position of factor. Depending on the conditions in a jurisdiction, the position of factor/veedor was often eliminated, as well.

The treasury officials were appointed by the king, and were largely independent of the authority of the viceroy, audiencia president or governor. On the death, unauthorized absence, retirement or removal of a governor, the treasury officials would jointly govern the province until a new governor appointed by the king could take up his duties. Treasury officials were supposed to be paid out of the income from the province, and were normally prohibited from engaging in income-producing activities.

Spanish law and indigenous peoples

The protection of the indigenous populations from enslavement and exploitation by Spanish settlers were established in the Laws of Burgos, 1512–1513. The laws were the first codified set of laws governing the behavior of Spanish settlers in the Americas, particularly with regards to treatment of native Indians in the institution of the encomienda. They forbade the maltreatment of natives, and endorsed the Indian Reductions with attempts of conversion to Catholicism. Upon their failure to effectively protect the indigenous and following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire and the Spanish conquest of Peru, more stringent laws to control conquerors' and settlers' exercise of power, especially their maltreatment of the indigenous populations, were promulgated, known as the New Laws (1542). The crown aimed to prevent the formation of an aristocracy in the Indies not under crown control.

Queen Isabel was the first monarch that laid the first stone for the protection of the indigenous peoples in her testament in which the Catholic monarch prohibited the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Then the first such in 1542; the legal thought behind them was the basis of modern International law.

The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) was the first moral debate in European history to discuss the rights and treatment of a colonized people by colonizers. Held in the Colegio de San Gregorio, in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it was a moral and theological debate about the colonization of the Americas, its justification for the conversion to Catholicism and more specifically about the relations between the European settlers and the natives of the New World. It consisted of a number of opposing views about the way natives were to be integrated into colonial life, their conversion to Christianity and their rights and obligations. According to the French historian Jean Dumont The Valladolid debate was a major turning point in world history “In that moment in Spain appeared the dawn of the human rights”.

The indigenous populations in the Caribbean became the focus of the crown in its roles as sovereigns of the empire and patron of the Catholic Church. Spanish conquerors holding grants of indigenous labor in encomienda ruthlessly exploited them. A number of friars in the early period came to the vigorous defense of the indigenous populations, who were new converts to Christianity. Prominent Dominican friars in Santo Domingo, especially Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de Las Casas denounced the maltreatment and pressed the crown to act to protect the indigenous populations. The crown enacted Laws of Burgos (1513) and the Requerimiento to curb the power of the Spanish conquerors and give indigenous populations the opportunity to peacefully embrace Spanish authority and Christianity. Neither was effective in its purpose. Las Casas was officially appointed Protector of the Indians and spent his life arguing forcefully on their behalf. The New Laws of 1542 were the result, limiting the power of encomenderos, the private holders of grants to indigenous labor previously held in perpetuity. The crown was open to limiting the inheritance of encomiendas in perpetuity as a way to extinguish the coalescence of a group of Spaniards impinging on royal power. In Peru, the attempt of the newly appointed viceroy, Blasco Núñez Vela, to implement the New Laws so soon after the conquest sparked a revolt by conquerors against the viceroy and the viceroy was killed in 1546. In Mexico, Don Martín Cortés, the son and legal heir of conqueror Hernán Cortés, and other heirs of encomiendas led a failed revolt against the crown. Don Martín was sent into exile, while other conspirators were executed.

Indigenous peoples and colonial rule

The conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires ended their sovereignty over their respective territorial expanses, replaced by the Spanish Empire. However, the Spanish Empire could not have ruled these vast territories and dense indigenous populations without utilizing the existing indigenous political and economic structures at the local level.  A key to this was the cooperation between most indigenous elites with the new ruling structure.  The Spanish recognized indigenous elites as nobles and gave them continuing standing in their communities.  Indigenous elites could use the noble titles don and doña, were exempt from the head-tax, and could entail their landholdings into cacicazgos.  These elites played an intermediary role between the Spanish rulers and indigenous commoners.  Since in central and southern Mexico (Mesoamerica) and the highland Andes indigenous peoples had existing traditions of payment of tribute and required labor service, the Spanish could tap into these systems to extract wealth.  There were few Spaniards and huge indigenous populations, so utilizing indigenous intermediaries was a practical solution to the incorporation of the indigenous population into the new regime of rule.  By maintaining hierarchical divisions within communities, indigenous noblemen were the direct interface between the indigenous and Spanish spheres and kept their positions so long as they continued to be loyal to the Spanish crown.

The exploitation and demographic catastrophe that indigenous peoples experienced from Spanish rule in the Caribbean also occurred 
as Spaniards expanded their control over territories and their indigenous populations. The crown set the indigenous communities legally apart from Spaniards (as well as Blacks), who comprised the República de Españoles, with the creation of the República de Indios.  The crown attempted to curb Spaniards' exploitation, banning Spaniards' bequeathing their private grants of indigenous communities' tribute and encomienda labor in 1542 in the New Laws. In Mexico, the crown established the General Indian Court (Juzgado General de Indios), which heard disputes affecting individual indigenous as well as indigenous communities. Lawyers for these cases were funded by a half-real tax, an early example of legal aid for the poor. A similar legal apparatus was set up in Lima.

The Spaniards systematically attempted to transform structures of indigenous governance to those more closely resembling those of Spaniards, so the indigenous city-state became a Spanish town and the indigenous noblemen who ruled became officeholders of the town council (cabildo). Although the structure of the indigenous cabildo looked similar to that of the Spanish institution, its indigenous functionaries continued to follow indigenous practices. In central Mexico, there exist minutes of the sixteenth-century meetings in Nahuatl of the Tlaxcala cabildo.  Indigenous noblemen were particularly important in the early period of colonization, since the economy of the encomienda was initially built on the extraction of tribute and labor from the commoners in their communities. As the colonial economy became more diversified and less dependent on these mechanisms for the accumulation of wealth, the indigenous noblemen became less important for the economy. However, noblemen became defenders of the rights to land and water controlled by their communities.  In colonial Mexico, there are petitions to the king about a variety of issues important to particular indigenous communities when the noblemen did not get a favorable response from the local friar or priest or local royal officials.

Works by historians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have expanded the understanding of the impact of the Spanish conquest and changes during the more than three hundred years of Spanish rule. There are many such works for Mexico, often drawing on native-language documentation in Nahuatl, Only the most valuable low bulk products would be exported.

Agricultural export products
Cacao beans for chocolate emerged as an export product as Europeans developed a taste for sweetened chocolate. Another important export product was cochineal, a color-fast red dye made from dried insects living on cacti. It became the second-most valuable export from Spanish America after silver.

19th century

During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain.
The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.

In 1809 the first declarations of independence from Spanish rule occurred in the Viceroyalty of Peru. The first two were in the Alto Perú, present-day Bolivia, at Charcas (present day Sucre, May 25), and La Paz (July 16); and the third in present-day Ecuador at Quito (August 10). In 1810 Mexico declared independence, with the Mexican War of Independence following for over a decade. In 1821 Treaty of Córdoba established Mexican independence from Spain and concluded the War. The Plan of Iguala was part of the peace treaty to establish a constitutional foundation for an independent Mexico.

These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s. The British Empire offered support, wanting to end the Spanish monopoly on trade with its colonies in the Americas.

In 1898, the United States achieved victory in the Spanish–American War with Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era. Spanish possession and rule of its remaining colonies in the Americas ended in that year with its sovereignty transferred to the United States. The United States took occupation of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico continues to be a possession of the United States, now officially continues as a self-governing unincorporated territory.

In popular culture

In the twentieth century, there have been a number of films depicting the life of Christopher Columbus. One in 1949 stars Frederic March as Columbus. With the 1992 commemoration (and critique) of Columbus, more cinematic and television depictions of the era appeared, including a TV miniseries with Gabriel Byrne as Columbus. Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992) has Georges Corroface as Columbus with Marlon Brando as Tomás de Torquemada and Tom Selleck as King Ferdinand and Rachel Ward as Queen Isabela. 1492: The Conquest of Paradise stars Gérard Depardieu as Columbus and Sigorney Weaver as Queen Isabel.  A 2010 film, Even the Rain starring Gael García Bernal, is set in modern Cochabamba, Bolivia during the Cochabamba Water War, following a film crew shooting a controversial life of Columbus. A 1995 Bolivian-made film is in some ways similar to Even the Rain is  To Hear the Birds Singing, with a modern film crew going to an indigenous settlement to shot a film about the Spanish conquest and end up replicating aspects of the conquest.

For the conquest of Mexico, a 2019 an eight-episode Mexican TV miniseries Hernán depicts the conquest of Mexico.  Other notable historical figures in the production are Malinche, Cortés cultural translator, and other conquerors Pedro de Alvarado, Cristóbal de Olid, Bernal Díaz del Castillo.  Showing the indigenous sides are Xicotencatl, a leader of the Spaniards' Tlaxcalan allies, and Aztec emperors Moctezuma II and Cuitlahuac.  The story of Doña Marina, also known as Malinche, was the subject of a Mexican TV miniseries in 2018. A major production in Mexico was the 1998 film, The Other Conquest, which focuses on a Nahua in the post-conquest era and the evangelization of central Mexico.

The epic journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca has been portrayed in a 1991 feature-length Mexican film, Cabeza de Vaca. The similarly epic and dark journey of Lope de Aguirre was made into a film by Werner Herzog, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), starring Klaus Kinsky.

The Mission was a 1996 film idealizing a Jesuit mission to the Guaraní in the territory disputed between Spain and Portugal.  The film starred Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, and Liam Neeson and It won an Academy Award.

The life of seventeenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, renowned in her lifetime, has been portrayed in a 1990 Argentine film, I, the Worst of All and in a TV miniseries Juana Inés. Seventeenth-century Mexican trickster, Martín Garatuza was the subject of a late nineteenth-century novel by Mexican politician and writer, Vicente Riva Palacio. In the twentieth century, Garatuza's life was the subject of a 1935 film and a 1986 telenovela, Martín Garatuza.

For the independence era, the 2016 Bolivian-made film made about Mestiza independence leader Juana Azurduy de Padilla is part of the recent recognition of her role in the independence of Argentina and Bolivia.

Dominions

North America, Central America

Viceroyalty of New Spain (1535–1821)
Las Californias
Nuevo Reino de León
Territorio de Nutka
Nuevo Santander
Nueva Vizcaya
Santa Fe de Nuevo México
Nueva Extremadura
Nueva Galicia
Captaincy General of Guatemala
 La Luisiana (until 1801).
 Spanish Florida (until 1819).
Captaincy General of Cuba (until 1898) 
Captaincy General of Puerto Rico (until 1898)
Santo Domingo (last Spanish rule 1861–1865)
Captaincy General of the Philippines (administered by New Spain from 1565 to 1821, then after Mexican independence transferred to and directly administered by Madrid until 1898)

South America
Viceroyalty of Perú (1542–1824)
Captaincy General of Chile (1541–1818)
Viceroyalty of New Granada (1717–1819)
Captaincy General of Venezuela
Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (1776–1814)

See also

 Atlantic World
 Cartography of Latin America
 Castas
 Spanish Empire
 Spanish American Enlightenment
 Black legend (Spain)
 Hapsburg Spain
 List of largest empires
 Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas
 
 Valladolid debate
 Viceroyalty of New Spain
 Viceroyalty of Peru

Notes

References

Further reading

 Altman, Ida and David Wheat, eds. The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2019. 
 Brading, D. A., The First America: the Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
 Burkholder, Mark A. and Lyman L. Johnson. Colonial Latin America, 10th ed. Oxford University Press 2018.  
 Chipman, Donald E. and Joseph, Harriett Denise. Spanish Texas, 1519–1821. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992)
 Clark, Larry R. Imperial Spain’s Failure to Colonize Southeast North America: 1513 - 1587 (TimeSpan Press 2017) updated edition to Spanish Attempts to Colonize Southeast North America (McFarland Publishing, 2010)
 Elliott, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
 Gibson, Carrie. Empire's Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day (New York: Grove Press, 2015)
 Gibson, Carrie. El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019)
 Gibson, Charles. Spain in America. New York: Harper and Row 1966. 
 Goodwin, Robert. América: The Epic Story of Spanish North America, 1493-1898 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019)
 Hanke, Lewis. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1965).
 Haring, Clarence H. The Spanish Empire in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1947)
 Kamen, Henry. Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (HarperCollins, 2004)
 Lockhart, James and Stuart B. Schwartz. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press 1983. 
 Merriman, Roger Bigelow. The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and in the New  (4 Vol.  London: Macmillan, 1918) online free
 Portuondo, María M. Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2009).
 
 Restall, Matthew and Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction (2012)  excerpt and text search
 Restall, Matthew and Kris Lane. Latin America in Colonial Times. New York: Cambridge University Press 2011.
 Thomas, Hugh. Rivers of Gold: the rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan (2005)
 Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992)

Historiography
 Cañeque, Alejandro  "The Political and Institutional History of Colonial Spanish America" History Compass (April 2013) 114 pp 280–291, 
 Herzog, Tamar (2018). "Indigenous Reducciones and Spanish Resettlement: Placing Colonial and European History in Dialogue". Ler Historia (72): 9-30. doi:10.4000/lerhistoria.3146. ISSN 0870-6182.
Weber, David J. "John Francis Bannon and the Historiography of the Spanish Borderlands: Retrospect and Prospect." Journal of the Southwest (1987): 331–363. See John Francis Bannon
 Weber, David J. “The Spanish Borderlands, Historiography Redux.” The History Teacher, vol. 39, no. 1, 2005, pp. 43–56. JSTOR, online.

External links

 Spanish Exploration and Conquest of North America
 Spain in America (Edward Gaylord Bourne, 1904) 'Spain in America'
 The Spanish Borderlands (Herbert E. Bolton, 1921) 'The Spanish Borderlands'
 Indigenous Puerto Rico DNA evidence upsets established history
 
 “The Political Force of Images,” Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520–1820.

 
Spanish exploration in the Age of Discovery
16th century in North America
16th century in Central America
16th century in South America
16th century in the Spanish Empire
History of indigenous peoples of the Americas
 
History of the Colony of Santo Domingo

Former empires
Americas
History of the Americas
Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.

The book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.

Tales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.

Purpose and structure

A didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem ("Some man has made me a proposition..." or "I fear that such and such person intends to...") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are "examples" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.

Each chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: "And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses." A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.

Origin of stories and influence on later literature
Many of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.

Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, "What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman".

Tale 32, "What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.

Story 7, "What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.

Tale 2, "What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market," is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.

In 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name "The Count Lucanor". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.

The stories

The book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.

 What Happened to a King and His Favorite 
 What Happened to a Good Man and His Son 
 How  King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors
 What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die 
 What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak
 How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown 
 What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana 
 What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed 
 What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion 
 What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils 
 What Happened to a Dean of  Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo
 What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster 
 What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges 
 The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer 
 What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville 
 The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes 
 What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner 
 What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg 
 What Happened to the Crows and the Owls 
 What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy 
 What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him 
 What Happened to the Lion and the Bull 
 How the Ants Provide for Themselves 
 What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons 
 What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin
 What Happened to the Tree of Lies 
 What Happened to an Emperor and to  Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives 
 What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain 
 What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead 
 What Happened to King Abenabet of  Seville and Ramayquía His Wife 
 How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor 
 What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth 
 What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron 
 What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another 
 What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman
 What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together 
 What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas 
 What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River 
 What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow 
 Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul 
 What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem 
 What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety 
 What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman 
 What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous 
 What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal 
 What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived 
 What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid 
 What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends 
 What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled 
 What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal 
 What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty

References

Notes

Bibliography

 Sturm, Harlan

 Wacks, David

External links

The Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.
JSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.
Selections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)

14th-century books
Spanish literature
1335 books Fanny Chambers Gooch (1849-1931) was an American author.

Early life
Fanny Chambers Gooch was born in 1849 in Hillsboro, Mississippi, to William and Feriba Chambers. She spent most of her life in Texas. She was the eighth of thirteen children.

Career
Through her book Face to Face with the Mexicans (New York, 1888), she became famous. The book describes what happened when she moved to the city of Saltillo, Mexico, completely unaware of Mexican culture.

Returning after some years to her former home in Austin, her descriptions of her Mexican experiences so entertained her friends that she was asked to prepare a series of articles on the subject for a Texas newspaper. She decided to publish her work in book form. She returned to Mexico, where she spent some time in its principal cities, mingling with its people in every station. She went to New York and superintended the publication of the work. The book at once attracted the notice of the leading reviewers and became very successful.

She is also the author of The Boy Captive of the Texas Mier Expedition, The Tradition of Guadalupe and Christmas in Old Mexico and Christmas in Old Mexico. The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association wrote that Christmas in Old Mexico was an "interesting and instructive booklet."

In 1911, Volume 80, Part 2 of The Publishers Weekly wrote of The Boy Captive of the Texas Mier Expedition, "The author [Gooch] is an enthusiastic and competent student of the history of Texas and Mexico. She has passed laborious years in the independent investigation of some of the most romantic and significant events in Texas history, and has gathered in her MS. dealings with the Mier expedition, much interesting and original material and has presented this material in her book. The story deals with the life of a real boy. John C. C. Hill, who at the age of thirteen lived through these experiences."

She also contributed one chapter of Mexican recipes (such as tamal de cazuela) to the book Austin's First Cookbook (1891). A total of 89 women contributed the 300 recipes, and Gooch was one of the only ones known to have worked outside her home.

Her work is also excerpted in the 2005 book Mexico Otherwise: Modern Mexico in the Eyes of Foreign Observer.

Personal life
The year following the publication of Face to Face with the Mexicans, Gooch married Dr. D. T. Iglehart, of Austin.

She died in 1931. (Austin American, October 12, 1931)

References

External links

 

1842 births
1913 deaths
19th-century American writers
Writers from Austin, Texas
19th-century American women writers
Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Woman of the Century