Spanish Conquest Among The Americas Essay

The Spanish had an unintentional ally to speed the process of Spanish conquest among the Native inhabitants of the Americas: disease. Disease, and the appropriately named theory of "virgin-soil epidemics", was one of the main reasons that the Spanish were able to effectively conquer the Native Americans. Native Americans had not been exposed to Europeans for many years, and as a result their immune systems were completely defenseless in fending off common European diseases. What may have been a simple cold to the Spanish meant death to the Native Americans. Diseases such as smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus fever, and malaria were all slowly being introduced to the Americas and the Natives. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Natives succumbed to these

Spain ultimately gained control of the Western Hemisphere during these conquests in the late 1400's and early 1500's. They formed an empire in the Americas revolving around Spanish ways of life, the Catholic church, and new forms of law to create a Spanish empire. These diseases that were alien to Natives had now become part of life in America. Diseases that wiped out millions of Native Americans guaranteed that the Spanish would gain control of Native lands. "Spanish weapons and pathogens destroyed complex interconnected village chiefdoms, all but wiping out a population that had numbered in the millions" (First Americans, pp. 57) To sum it up, the Spanish technology and wars caused chaos in the Americas. Paired with Spanish diseases, these both were the main causes of Native American de-population. Natives that were once a proud and thriving people in the Americas had fell victim to European invaders. These first contacts with Europeans and the years following changed the development of the Americas and the relationships between Native peoples and