1The idea in one paragraph

In 1492 Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragon took Granada, the last Muslim state in Iberia, after a ten-year war; within three months they expelled every Jew who would not convert, and within ten years the Muslims of Castile were forced to choose between baptism and exile. The promises of the surrender treaty were broken, and the Inquisition policed the new converts. In the same generation, with a few hundred Spaniards each, Hernán Cortés (1519–1521) and Francisco Pizarro (from 1532) overthrew the Aztec and Inca empires, but only with tens of thousands of indigenous allies, and with the help of epidemics that killed far more people than the fighting did. Conquest brought labour systems, silver, Christianity and a demographic catastrophe, and set off a Spanish argument, from Las Casas to Sepúlveda, about whether any of it was just. The exam asks why each conquest happened, how it was won, and what it did.

2Granada: the political context

Iberia in the late fifteenth century held several Christian kingdoms (Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Navarre) and one Muslim one, the Nasrid emirate of Granada, the last fragment of al-Andalus, as Muslim Iberia was called. Granada had survived since the thirteenth century by paying tribute to Castile when it had to and exploiting Castilian civil wars when it could.

In 1469 Isabel of Castile married Fernando of Aragon. Isabel won a war for the Castilian throne (1474–1479) and Fernando became king of Aragon in 1479. The two crowns were joined in a marriage, not merged in a state: each kingdom kept its own laws, assemblies and fueros (charters of rights). A shared war against Granada gave the monarchs something no law could: a common cause for the nobles who had just fought a civil war.

Granada divided against itself. The emir Abu l-Hasan Ali stopped paying tribute and in December 1481 seized the Castilian town of Zahara. Castile replied by taking Alhama in February 1482, and the war began. Granada then split. Abu l-Hasan's son Abu Abdallah (called Boabdil by the Castilians) rebelled against his father in 1482, backed by a court faction and by his mother, and took the city. Abu l-Hasan's brother, Muhammad al-Zaghal, became a third claimant. In 1483 Boabdil was captured at Lucena and freed only after agreeing to become Castile's vassal. From then on Fernando played the rival rulers against each other. Appeals to the Mamluk sultan of Egypt and to North Africa brought diplomacy but no armies.

Figure 1 sets out the war and what followed.

3Granada: social and economic context, and motives

Coexistence. For centuries Iberia's Christians, Muslims and Jews had lived side by side. Mudéjars, Muslims living under Christian rule and keeping their faith by law, were farmers and craftsmen in Aragon, Valencia and Castile; Mudéjar builders shaped Christian palaces and churches. Jewish courtiers served the monarchs as financiers and doctors: Abraham Seneor and Isaac Abravanel helped fund the Granada War. Intercultural exchange in building, farming, medicine and learning was real. Historians argue about how to describe it: Américo Castro made coexistence (convivencia) central to Spain's identity; his critics pointed to a history of violence, and David Nirenberg argued that violence was itself part of how the communities lived together. The trend by the 1480s was plainly towards intolerance: riots in 1391 had forced mass conversions of Jews, and the converts and their descendants, the conversos, were now suspected of practising Judaism in secret.

Economic decline and heavy taxation. Granada was small, crowded with refugees from lands already lost, and dependent on exports of silk, sugar and dried fruit carried mostly by Genoese merchants. Its emirs taxed heavily to pay tribute to Castile and to pay for defence, and the burden fed the discontent that split the dynasty.

Motives.

• Political: to finish the centuries-long Reconquista, to unite the nobility behind the new monarchs, to remove an independent state that had stopped paying tribute, and to close the southern coast to Muslim powers at a time when the Ottomans had just landed in Italy (Otranto, 1480).
• Religious: to win a crusade. Popes granted crusade bulls, whose sale to the faithful (the bula de cruzada) and a share of Church revenues paid much of the cost. Isabel's piety was real. In 1496 the pope rewarded the monarchs with the title "Catholic Monarchs".

The two are hard to separate: a crusade was also a political instrument, and the Church funded a royal war.

4Granada: the war, the treaty and the decree

The Granada War (1482–1492) was won by siege, not battle. Castile's artillery broke the walls of Ronda (1485) and Loja (1486). Málaga resisted a long siege in 1487 and was punished: most of its people were sold into slavery. Baza fell in 1489, and al-Zaghal handed over Almería and Guadix. Only Granada was left. In 1491 the monarchs built a permanent siege camp, Santa Fe, and blockaded the city.

The Treaty of Granada (25 November 1491), the surrender terms, promised the Muslims they could keep their mosques and their religion, their property, their own judges applying Islamic law, and the freedom to emigrate to North Africa. On 2 January 1492 Boabdil handed over the city and the Alhambra; he was given a lordship in the Alpujarras mountains and left for North Africa in 1493.

The Alhambra decree (31 March 1492), signed in the conquered palace, ordered every Jew in Castile and Aragon to convert or leave by the end of July. The stated reason was that Jews were leading conversos back to Judaism. Estimates of how many left range widely, from about 40,000 to well over 100,000; many others converted. Abravanel went into exile; Seneor was baptised.

Key actors.

• Fernando de Aragón: the war's strategist and diplomat, who exploited Granada's divisions.
• Isabel de Castilla: organiser of supply and finance, and the religious driving force.
• Abu Abdallah: the last king, whose rebellion against his father opened Granada to division. Later Christian legend has his mother mocking him for weeping over a kingdom he had not defended like a man; treat that as legend, not evidence.
• Tomás de Torquemada: a Dominican friar, Isabel's confessor, Inquisitor General from 1483, who pressed for the expulsion of the Jews.

5Granada: the impact

The Spanish Inquisition. Authorised by the pope in 1478, it held its first tribunal at Seville in 1480. Unlike the medieval papal inquisition it was run by the Crown. Its target was not Jews or Muslims, over whom it had no power, but baptised Christians suspected of heresy, above all conversos accused of secretly practising Judaism. It worked through anonymous denunciation, secret trials and public ceremonies of penance and punishment (autos de fe); those who would not repent were handed to the secular authorities to be burned. Henry Kamen argued that the death toll was lower, and the institution less all-powerful, than Protestant and Enlightenment writers claimed, though its fear and its reach into daily life were real.

Forced conversions and expulsions. In Granada the first archbishop, Hernando de Talavera, sought conversion by persuasion and learned Arabic to do it. In 1499 Cardinal Cisneros arrived and pushed mass baptisms, and Arabic books were burned. The Albaicín quarter rose, then the Alpujarras (1499–1501); the Crown declared that the rebellion cancelled the treaty. In 1502 all Muslims in Castile were ordered to convert or leave. Those who stayed became Moriscos, converts from Islam, as the conversos were converts from Judaism. Marranos was an insulting name for conversos suspected of secretly keeping Jewish practices. The Moriscos were finally expelled from Spain in 1609–1614.

Social and demographic change. Persecution, enslavement (as at Málaga) and emigration to North Africa removed much of Granada's Muslim elite. Castilian settlers moved in, given land and houses taken from the conquered. The Muslim population was pushed out of the best land and the city centre into the Albaicín and the mountain villages.

New institutions. Castile governed Granada with the tools it had used all through the Reconquista: grants of conquered land and lordship to nobles and military orders (the encomienda in its Iberian sense, a grant held in return for service and protection) and fueros, charters of rights and privileges granted to towns to attract Christian settlers. The encomienda crossed the Atlantic within a generation and was changed there into something far harsher.

6Mexico and Peru: motives and arguments

Political and economic motives. Columbus's voyage of 1492 opened the Caribbean, and in 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas divided newly found lands between Castile and Portugal. The Crown licensed private expeditions by contract (a capitulación): the leader paid most of the costs, and the Crown took a royal fifth (quinto) of treasure and granted titles if he succeeded. The conquistadors were mostly lesser nobles and commoners from Castile and Extremadura looking for gold, land, labour and status that Spain could not give them. "God, gold and glory" is a slogan, but not a wrong one.

Religious arguments. The pope's grant of 1493 gave Castile the new lands on condition that their peoples were converted, so conquest was presented as a religious duty. From 1513 captains had to read the Requerimiento to indigenous peoples, a Spanish text demanding that they accept the authority of the pope and the Crown or face just war; it was usually read in a language they did not understand. The case was disputed inside Spain. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a humanist scholar, argued from Aristotle that some peoples were natural slaves, and that the sins of idolatry and human sacrifice justified war to civilise them. Bartolomé de las Casas, a former colonist turned Dominican friar and later bishop of Chiapas, argued that the indigenous peoples were rational, free and to be converted only by peaceful persuasion; his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (written 1542, printed 1552) described colonial cruelty in terms that later fed the Black Legend of unique Spanish brutality. The two argued before royal judges at Valladolid in 1550–1551, and no formal verdict was given.

Figure 2 sets out both conquests.

7Cortés and the Aztec Empire

Moctezuma II (ruled 1502–1520) led the Mexica, whose capital Tenochtitlan stood on an island in Lake Texcoco and dominated the Triple Alliance, a tribute empire across central Mexico. Subject peoples paid heavy tribute and supplied victims for sacrifice. The Tlaxcalans had never been conquered and were at constant war with the Mexica.

Cortés sailed from Cuba in February 1519 with about 500 soldiers, 16 horses and a few cannon, defying Governor Diego Velázquez, who had tried to cancel his command. At Potonchán he was given twenty women, among them Malinche (baptised Marina), a Nahua noblewoman who had been enslaved among the Maya and spoke both languages. With a Spanish castaway who spoke Maya, she made communication with the Mexica possible, and soon she interpreted directly and advised Cortés. Cortés founded Veracruz so that its town council could make him answerable to the king rather than to Velázquez, and beached his ships.

Alliances. The Totonacs of Cempoala, a subject people, joined him first. The Tlaxcalans fought him in September 1519 and then allied with him against their old enemy, which was the turning point of the campaign. At Cholula, in October, Spaniards and Tlaxcalans massacred the town's nobles and warriors, claiming a plot. On 8 November 1519 Moctezuma received Cortés in Tenochtitlan; within days Cortés took him hostage and ruled through him.

Collapse and siege. In May 1520 Cortés left the city to defeat Pánfilo de Narváez, sent by Velázquez to arrest him, and recruited Narváez's men. Meanwhile Pedro de Alvarado massacred Mexica nobles at the festival of Toxcatl. The city rose. Moctezuma was killed, by Spaniards or by his own people's stones, the sources disagree, and on the Noche Triste (30 June–1 July 1520) the Spaniards fought their way out, losing hundreds of men and most of their treasure. They survived because Tlaxcala took them in. Then smallpox, brought with Narváez's force, swept Tenochtitlan; it killed the new ruler Cuitláhuac. In 1521 Cortés returned with thirteen brigantines built for the lake and an allied army of tens of thousands, cut off the city's food and water, and destroyed it street by street. Cuauhtémoc, the last ruler, was captured on 13 August 1521, and the city fell.

8Pizarro and the Inca Empire

Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro and the priest Hernando de Luque formed a partnership in Panama in 1524 and explored south. In 1529 the Capitulation of Toledo made Pizarro governor of the land he would conquer and gave Almagro much less; the resentment would later destroy them both.

The Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu) ran two thousand miles down the Andes, bound by roads and a rotation of labour service. Around 1527 the emperor Huayna Capac died, probably in an epidemic, possibly smallpox, spreading ahead of the Spaniards, and his sons Huáscar and Atahualpa fought a civil war. Atahualpa's generals had just won it when Pizarro arrived.

At Cajamarca on 16 November 1532, Atahualpa came to meet the Spaniards in the town square with thousands of largely unarmed attendants. The friar Vicente de Valverde demanded his submission; when Atahualpa rejected the prayer book he was offered, 168 Spaniards attacked from hiding with guns and horses, killed thousands, and captured him. Atahualpa offered to fill a room once with gold and twice with silver for his freedom, and did so. Pizarro had him executed in July 1533 anyway, on charges of plotting against the Spaniards. Atahualpa had already had Huáscar killed.

Alliances. Huáscar's supporters in Cuzco welcomed the Spaniards as allies against Atahualpa's faction, and peoples the Incas had conquered, such as the Cañari and the Huanca, fought beside them. Pizarro crowned a puppet emperor, Manco Inca, and took Inca noblewomen as partners, which tied him to the royal lineage. When Manco rebelled in 1536 and besieged Cuzco, indigenous allies again helped the Spaniards hold it; Manco retreated to found an independent Inca state in Vilcabamba that lasted until 1572.

The conquerors turned on each other. Almagro, back from a failed expedition to Chile, seized Cuzco; he was defeated at Las Salinas in 1538 and executed. His followers murdered Pizarro in Lima in 1541. When the New Laws of 1542 limited the encomienda, Pizarro's brother Gonzalo led a colonists' revolt that killed the viceroy before it was crushed in 1548.

9Mexico and Peru: the impact

Social and economic impact.

• The encomienda. A Spaniard was "entrusted" with a group of indigenous people, who owed him tribute and labour; he owed them protection and Christian instruction. It was not a grant of land, but in practice it meant forced work and abuse. The New Laws (1542) banned new grants and inheritance; colonial resistance forced the Crown to back down on inheritance.
• The mita. The Inca mit'a had been a rotation of labour owed to the state. The Spaniards adapted it to draft indigenous workers to the silver mines of Potosí, found in 1545 (the system was fully organised in the 1570s). In the mines the mita became a byword for death.
• Trade. Silver from Potosí and from Zacatecas in Mexico (1546) flowed to Seville, paid for Spain's wars and entered world trade. New crops and animals crossed the ocean in both directions: horses, cattle, sheep and wheat to the Americas; maize and potatoes to Europe. Indigenous economies were reorganised around tribute, mines and Spanish towns.

Demographic change. Figure 3 shows one estimate, and the size of what happened.

Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah estimated about 25 million people in central Mexico in 1518 and about 1 million by 1605. Other historians put the starting figure far lower, but every estimate shows a fall of the order of 90% within a century, and Peru suffered a comparable collapse. The causes:

• Disease, the largest single cause. Smallpox, measles, influenza and typhus were new to the Americas, so no one had immunity (virgin soil epidemics). Smallpox reached Tenochtitlan in 1520 and the Andes probably before Pizarro. A great epidemic the Nahua called cocoliztli struck Mexico in 1545–1548.
• War, massacre and famine during the conquests.
• Forced labour and overwork under the encomienda and in the mines, and the disruption of farming, family life and the will to have children.

Historians such as Alfred Crosby, who coined the term "Columbian Exchange", stressed the biology; others stress that conquest and exploitation made the epidemics deadlier. Use both.

Cultural impact.

• Religion. Franciscan friars arrived in Mexico in 1524, followed by Dominicans and Augustinians; there were mass baptisms and the destruction of temples and many sacred books. Christianity was absorbed and reshaped: older beliefs survived inside Christian festivals and saints' cults.
• Language. Spanish became the language of government, but friars preached in Nahuatl and Quechua, wrote grammars, and taught indigenous nobles to write their own languages in the Latin alphabet, which is why so much indigenous testimony survives, including the Nahua accounts collected by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún.

The historians. William Prescott's nineteenth-century histories told a heroic story of a few hundred Spaniards. Matthew Restall's Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003) attacked it: the Spaniards were not a handful of exceptional men but the spearhead of vast indigenous armies, and the story that the Mexica took Cortés for a returning god was invented after the conquest. Miguel León-Portilla collected the Nahua view of defeat in The Broken Spears. Camilla Townsend has written Malinche as a woman with limited choices rather than a traitor.