Imperial Rivalries | AP US History Study Guide from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (2023)

When Christopher Columbus planned to sail westward across the Atlantic, he first made his way across Europe to find sponsors. His brother Bartholomew went to the court of the English king Henry VII (who rejected him, much to the chagrin of later Britons who realized the opportunity they had missed). Eventually, Columbus received support from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. He sailed west in search of a new route to the riches of East Asia and the Southwest Pacific, but he also ventured out as the agent of a certain European state. Columbus therefore claimed (and named) new land for Spain and planted the Spanish flag to mark his expanded territory.

Columbus' activities before and during his historic voyage reflected his understanding of European politics in the late 15th century. Traveling west was too expensive for an individual to fund independently, so governments sponsored such travel. European politicians knew that they were always competing with each other. They also understood that their rivalries must not offend the Church; Until the Protestant Reformation, religious authority belonged to the pope and his court in Rome, along with his representatives throughout Europe.

principalities and kingdoms

Unlike modern nations, the European states of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not particularly well organized or efficient. Any accurate map of Europe showed that principalities, not modern nation-states, ruled the continent. For example, there was no entity like "Ireland". The island was instead home to four provinces - Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster - ruled by chiefs, each controlling a large territory where the inhabitants paid taxes in exchange for protection. The leaders of such small fiefdoms and rulers of larger kingdoms tended to see their neighbors as rivals; Just as Leinster fought with Munster, England remained at odds with France, and France competed with the Spanish kingdoms. Long-distance military expeditions against more distant foreign powers were relatively rare because they were so expensive. European crusaders ventured into retaking the Holy Land from the late eleventh to late thirteenth centuries, hoping to lay claim to Jerusalem and protect it from the growing power of Muslim states, but also to trade with merchants from the nearby East to make a decent profit. Along the way, these Christian warriors would often raid the lands they traversed, spawning hostilities that lasted for generations.

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL AND THE POPE

The major national rivalries for the western hemisphere began to take shape after 1492. In the same year that Columbus sailed west, the combined forces of the Spanish kingdoms under Castilian Queen Isabella and Aragonese King Ferdinand recaptured Iberia from the Islamic Moors; They also expelled Jews who lived there or forced those who stayed to convert to Christianity (at which point they became known aspigsorconverted). Both actions endeared the monarchs to Christian leaders. On May 4, 1493, Pope Alexander VI rewarded (a Spaniard) Ferdinand and Isabella, after hearing of Columbus' discovery of a "new world," with the bull of bestowal, also known as theAmong other things, which authorized Spain to colonize and exploit American lands, despite previous papal documents granting Portugal control of newly discovered regions. The following year, the Spanish and Portuguese rulers, whose ships were then involved in Europe's most extensive exploration ventures, agreed to the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which laid down a geographic line some 1,200 nautical miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. This border entitled the Portuguese to lay claim to Brazil, which they colonized in the 16th century, in addition to the lands that Europeans had newly seen in the Old World. Spain, on the other hand, could claim everything west of the line.

These papal arrangements led the Spanish and Portuguese to establish colonies in the western hemisphere, as well as (for the Portuguese) territories in and near the Indian Ocean and southwest Pacific. In addition to Columbus' voyages, the Spanish sent other would-be conquerors to lay claim to new territories, including Hernán Cortés, who led Spanish forces to victory over the Aztecs in Mexico in the late 1510s, and Francisco Pizarro, whose army emerged victorious over the Incas in Peru in the 1530s. In the years that followed, Spanish conquerors raised their standards across much of southwestern North America, as well as Florida. Spanish and Portuguese colonizers eagerly extracted wealth from these new territories, particularly in the form of hoards of gold, silver, and precious jewels. They made sure to send thank you gifts to their religious patrons. The pope reportedly used some of the gold sent by the Spanish to cover the ceiling of Rome's ancient basilica and one of its largest churches, Santa Maria Maggiore. Acquiring this wealth was not only at great expense for the Native Americans, who witnessed the desecration of temples to satisfy the lusts of the peopleconqueror, but also for human history and art, as the newcomers typically melted down native icons, thereby wiping out ancient cultures.

ENGLAND, FRANCE AND HOLLAND PARTICIPATE IN THE RACE

The agreements of the early 1490s made sense in a Europe where the Spanish and Portuguese were the dominant maritime players. But during the 16th century, other Europeans also saw the benefits of long-distance trade and conquest. The French had been interested in Atlantic ventures since the early decades of the 16th century. Breton explorer Jacques Cartier made three voyages - 1534, 1535–1536, and 1541–1542 - as part of an effort to increase knowledge of North America and to identify a possible route across the continent to the South Seas. He never found that passage, but he explored the Saint Lawrence Valley and made a first French claim to Canada. By mid-century, a group of cartographers in Dieppe had created a series of new maps based on Portuguese nautical charts (called portolans) that suggested what explorers would find. In July 1608, after exploring other territories further south, Samuel Champlain founded Quebec City, which would become the central colonial outpost of New France. Such grand claims - like claiming ownership of Canada on the basis of founding a relatively small community - were not unique. In 1609 the Dutchman became an English captainHenry Hudson, after failing to find the Northeast Passage (which he hoped would take him through open waters north of Russia to the Pacific), he crossed the Atlantic and finally made his way up the river that now bears his name. In the years that followed, the Dutch made a formal claim to this region, naming it New Netherland and establishing their main outpost on the island of Manhattan.

THE SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

The English, for their part, planned to take control of much of North America in hopes—as did the French and Dutch—of finding the Northwest Passage, a waterway to Asia that European cartographers were convinced existed somewhere in North America . Whoever found this route could control the passage from the Atlantic to the South Seas (now the Pacific), and from there to Japan, China, and the Spice Islands.

Because Europeans had long since fallen in love with East Asian silk, as well as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and paprika from places like Banda, these 16th-century explorers knew there was a huge demand for anything they could bring back. In theory, a northern route would drastically reduce the length of the voyage, thus ensuring that the spices sailors brought home would be fresher than those of other Europeans taking southern routes around Africa or South America. A fast water route would also have allowed the northern Europeans to both cut off the Spanish, who only got east efficiently after claiming Mexico and building a large port at Acapulco (so they could send silver to the Philippines to ship spices and silk to buy). , as well as the Portuguese, who reached the Pacific by circumnavigating Africa and then crossing the Indian Ocean. More importantly, the discovery of the northern route would prove (at least according to the English) that God favored the Reformation, and therefore rewarded those who had broken away from Rome - a far greater price than the line of demarcation the Pope had rewards Spain and Portugal.

RELIGIOUS CONTEST AND THE MAP OF THE “NEW WORLD”

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of religious disputes in post-Reformation Europe. After the Reformation, northern European Protestants strove to make claims in new territories to prevent the spread of what is now known as Roman Catholicism. Under Queen Elizabeth I, a daughter of Henry VIII, the English renewed their longstanding effort to colonize Ireland, which had begun in the 12th century but never fully achieved success. Elizabeth's commanders, fueled by the idea that Irish Christianity was inferior to their own and therefore needed to be eradicated, employed brutal tactics on the battlefield. This experience shaped the mindset of some Englishmen who later joined missions across the Atlantic. The English, who would eventually gain control of the Atlantic coast of North America between Canada and Florida, made their struggle with Rome central to their arguments for conquest and colonization. As it turned out, they were helped by an account by a former slave owner-turned-Dominican missionary named Bartolomé de Las Casas, who published a book in 1552 (in Seville) with the titleA Brief Account of the Destruction of India. The book contained lurid details of torture and murder perpetrated by Spanish conquistadors in India, and Las Casas urged the Spanish court to recognize them in order to stop such violent tactics. When the book appeared in English translation in London in 1583, its purpose had less to do with changing Spanish tactics. It became a testament to the inherently barbaric nature of Iberian Catholics, a theme taken up by other English authors in the 1580s and 1590s. These texts helped persuade reluctant Protestants to commit valuable resources to establishing overseas colonies, thereby widening Europe's imperial competition for supremacy in the Atlantic basin.

EXPLORATION BOOK SHOP

Although Europeans, looking west across the Atlantic, were in constant competition for lands, riches, and souls, they exchanged information about new discoveries with surprising frequency. When Columbus returned from his first voyage, his first testimony quickly appeared in a book now known to scholars as the Barcelona Letter of 1493, after the place where a publisher first printed it. Editions in other languages ​​soon appeared, including one also published in Basel, Switzerland, in 1493, which contained rough woodcuts made by an artist who had read the text and attempted to create a visual rendering of Columbus' first encounter with the to create Arawak or Tainos. By 1500, descriptions of Columbus' voyages had spread throughout Europe.

The dissemination of works about Columbus was only the beginning. During the 16th century, as the printing presses spread across Europe, dozens of new books testified to both the opportunities and the dangers of the western hemisphere. One such book was written by a young English mathematician named Thomas Harriot, who in 1585 had traveled to the outer shores of modern North Carolina. In 1588 Harriot published a small book detailing the region he had seen, the peoples who lived there and the natural resources that could be extracted from its landscape. Harriot called his bookA short and true account of the newfound land of Virginia. Two years later, an enthusiastic supporter of English colonization named Richard Hakluyt the Younger (to distinguish him from his cousin) took the text from Harriot's book and collaborated with a Flemish engraver from Frankfurt am Main, Theodor de Bry, to produce it first fully illustrated published account of an Indian population. In 1590 all the English, French, German and Latin versions of de Bry's presses rolled.

What could explain such a release strategy? After all, France was still a Catholic nation, as was parts of German-speaking central Europe, so a book extolling the virtues of territory claimed by the English may only fuel the desire of English enemies to conquer the region. Nonetheless, Hakluyt and the others welcomed the multilingual edition because they recognized that the European scientific community needed to be aware of new discoveries. The scholars among them could read Latin, but in the late 16th century vernacular languages ​​also became important for the transmission of knowledge as people who were not scholars became interested in the world around them and the new discoveries.

The four-language edition of Harriot'sShort and true reportserves as a cautionary tale for scholars trying to understand European imperial rivalries during the initial colonization of America. Europeans fought fiercely for territories and souls they believed could and should conquer. They also engaged in legal wrangling over which European nation could legitimately lay claim to which parts of the non-European world. Among these arguments was a tract by a Dutch jurist named Hugo Grotius, published in 1609 assea ​​of ​​freedom(theopen sea), which aimed to undermine the Treaty of Tordesillas. Grotius claimed that the Spanish and Portuguese could not make permanent claims to territories because of a geographic line drawn through the ocean, because no one could own the sea.

When the English founded Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, imperial rivals were vying for control of the Atlantic Basin's resources. Eventually, European struggles would also breed American battles, with far-reaching consequences for the native peoples who came into contact with newcomers striving to establish a firm grip on the western hemisphere.

Peter C. MancallAndrew W. Mellon is Professor of Humanities and Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.His publications includeDeadly Voyage: The Last Expedition of Henry Hudson - A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic(2009),Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession with an English America(2007) andTravel Tales from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology(2006). He is currently working on itAmerican origins, which will be the first volume of the Oxford History of the United States.