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Pros And Cons Of The Spanish Conquistadors

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The new world offered so many new possibilities, its raw materials and richness in new resources was a wonderful picture that was getting painted to the Spanish conquistadors. The one taint on that great future was the matter of the Indigenous people that inhabited the lands. What to do with them? Are we required to respect their property and freedom? The Spanish attempted to justify taking everything from these natives, by saying these Indians had it coming they are godless and refuse to convert. “War against these barbarians can be justified not only on the basis of their paganism but even more so because of their abominable licentiousness, their prodigious sacrifice of human victims, the extreme harm that they inflicted on innocent persons, …show more content…

Each document gives us a different and fresh point of view that is completely unlike that the other. One can be in defense of the Indians and the other can be justifying slavery or war. “Thanks to their virtues and the practical wisdom of their laws, the latter can destroy barbarism and educate these [inferior] people to a more humane and virtuous life. And if the latter reject such rule, it can be imposed upon them by force of arms. Such a war will be just according to natural law.” (Juan Ginés). It is nice to see the different point of views, some can be almost baffling to read that people in this time actually thought of that. While some of the documents, restore your faith in humanity for a little bit. For example Bartolomé de las Casas' plays devil’s advocate in the document “Excerpt from In Defense of the Indians”, he writes about the Romans and how they perceived the Spanish as barbaric and asks his readers were they justified in fighting our ancestors? “Do you think that the Romans, once they had subjugated the wild and barbaric peoples of Spain, could with secure right divide all of you among themselves, handing over so many head of both males and females as allotments to individuals?” .”(Bartolomé de las Casas'). Were we wrong in fighting them? He turns the tables and gives a good examples, making the reader decide for themselves on what is really barbaric, is it something that is just different than our

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1374 Words | 6 Pages

Native groups often took land and materials from weaker groups whenever it suited them. They understood the concept of ownership by conquest. From the time the first settlers landed on Turtle Island [America], the Natives were pushed from their home. In 1783, George Washington wrote a letter to James Duane, outlining principles of the Indian Policy of the Continental Congress. Washington outlined ‘an enlightened People’ would consider the Native to be deluded and that “as the country is large enough to contain us all; and as we are disposed to be kind to them and to partake in their trade…we will draw a veil over what is past and establish a boundary line between them and us beyond which we will endeavor to restrain our People from Hunting or Settling” (4).

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580 Words | 3 Pages

It raises the question of how the Spanish viewed the natives: as people standing in the way of their gold, or fascinating and interesting people with rich culture and

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1101 Words | 5 Pages

Document F illustrates a different point of view of this same idea with the actual native people who were being overtaken by Europeans and Americans

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488 Words | 2 Pages

For this week I decided to write a summary of chapter 11: Anglo-Saxons and Mexicans. The new political ideologies were created between 1830 to the 1840s. These new ideas were influenced by pride and obvious racism. These beliefs inspired the idea that American Anglo-Saxons were the dominant force and that they should be the ones to shape the destiny of others. The idea of the American Anglo-Saxon race was influenced by the American Mexican war.

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461 Words | 2 Pages

A century after Columbus made the Americas known to Europe, the Spaniards sent out additional ships to explore and bring back wealth and knowledge. However, Hérnan Cortés, the leader of this expedition, did not follow his mission. He first conquered a city on the coast and moved inward to continue overtaking the Aztec empire (Lecture?). The moment Cortés and his men touched the land, European diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever began decimating the Aztecs, who had never built up immunities. In addition to this, there had already been drought, causing a shortage of food and water throughout the empire.

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196 Words | 1 Pages

How should the ancient Aztecs and Incas be remembered? Although the ancient Incas and Aztecs did bad things,they also did many things during their reign to outwit the bad that they’ve done. These ancient civilizations should be remembered for the things they did within their community. There has been many good things done within these civilizations and i believe they should be remembered by something good, rather than something bad.

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951 Words | 4 Pages

As a young conquistador coming to a strange land that has a large pyramid with thousands of people surrounding it as they were chanting and yelling while looking toward the very top of the stairs that led to the top of the pyramid. You see people at the top and notice how they are cutting out the hearts of these human sacrifices and tossing them down the stairs. You stare in horror and notice what a terrible and cruel place you have come across. There was human sacrifice going on and gruesome wars over land that ultimately led to more and more death. But then you take another look around and see their agriculture and all the amazing irrigation systems they have set up and you 're completely shocked about how well their farming systems are.

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622 Words | 3 Pages

The Spaniards were wrong for keeping the Indians as their slaves. The Spaniards also had no right to take away what religious believes the Indians had. Two documents, the first one was by Las Casas who was a Dominican priest, he documented how the Spaniards treated the Indians as slaves because the Indians did not want to convert to Christianity. The second document was by Josepha who was a Spanish-speaking Indian who documented the Native Americans taking away Christianity from the Spaniards. The Spaniard took away all the freedom from the Indians, because the Spaniards want the Indians to convert to Christianity, the Indians did not want to convert so the Spaniards took everything from the Indians, and used the Indians as slaves.

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245 Words | 1 Pages

The strong tactics of the Spanish Conquistadors, the mistakes of Montezuma, and disease lead to the defeat of the Aztec army of 200,000 men. The Spanish Conquistadors had the advantage over the Aztecs, using the allies they had and the technology they used in battle. Montezuma, the ruler of Tenochtitlan made a mistake when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived, by thinking they were Gods.. The conquistadors also brought over diseases, which whipped out most of the Aztec army leading to a slight setback for the Aztecs. The Aztecs then, had no chance against the Spanish.

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830 Words | 4 Pages

Historians differ on what they think about the net result of the European arrival in the New World. Considering that the Columbian Exchange, which refers to “exchange of plants, animals, people, disease, and culture between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas after Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492,” led to possibly tens of millions of deaths on the side of the American Indians, but also enabled agricultural and technological trade (Henretta et al. 42), I cannot help but reflect on whether the effects should be addressed as a historical or a moral question. The impact that European contact had on the indigenous populations of North America should be understood as a moral question because first, treating it as a historical question is difficult due to lack of reliable historical evidence; second, the meaning of compelling historical claims is contestable as the academic historian perspective tends to view the American Indian oral history as invalid; and finally, what happened to the native Indians is morally repulsive and must be discussed as such. The consequences of European contact should be answered as a moral question because historically, it is hard to be historically objective in the absence of valid and dependable historical evidence.

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344 Words | 2 Pages

Las Cases begins his essay “Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indes” by giving a brief history of the discovery and an account of the characteristics of the ingenious peoples that lived there. Las Cases then goes on to describe the evils those people were subjected to, by the Spaniards, in the name of God and greed. “...they behaved with such temerity and shamelessness that the most powerful ruler of the islands had to see his own wide raped by a Christian officer.”, Las Cases writes. Las Cases' sympathizes with the native people, and his position in his writing appears to be to portray the Spanish as wholly evil, with no redeeming qualities.

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867 Words | 4 Pages

On these islands I estimate there are 2,100 leagues of land that have been ruined and depopulated, empty of people.” (Las Casas) Nothing positive came from the people of Spain setting foot on the land of the Indians. Depopulation was just one of many hazardous effects that the Spaniards

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1008 Words | 5 Pages

In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. We all know this catchy tune right? But what we don’t know, is what Columbus thought when he arrived in the North America or what he though of the Native Americans he met. In fact, we don’t know much about all the explorers after Columbus and what they thought. Each explore had their own view of the Native Americans, and three great examples are Columbus, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas

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1187 Words | 5 Pages

In the 16th Century, Spain became one of the European forces to reckon with. To expand even further globally, Spanish conquistadors were sent abroad to discover lands, riches, and North America and its civilizations. When the Spanish and Native American groups met one another, they judged each other, as they were both unfamiliar with the people that stood before them. The Native American and Spanish views and opinions of one another are more similar than different because when meeting and getting to know each other, neither the Spaniards nor the Native Americans saw the other group of people as human. Both groups of people thought of one another as barbaric monsters and were confused and amazed by each other’s cultures.

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1506 Words | 7 Pages

This power imbalance and these payments are key in the subjugation of the natives. Furthermore, the paternalism of the Spanish toward the Indigenous peoples is obvious: “Captain [Cortes] stared at him [Cuauhtemoc]…then patted him on the head” (p.117). Post-conquest, and still today, “difficult relations” between the descendants of the Indigenous peoples and the “others” (p.117) still exist. The European view of the natives “as idolatrous savages” or, on the contrary, as “models of natural virtue” (p.175) demonstrate the versatile and often contradictory views held. Similarly, the Aztecs at times saw the Spaniards as gods, and other times as gold-hungry savages who “fingered it like monkeys” (p.51).

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