Related to the Oldest European Settlement in New World? thread, something I’ve wondered but never really looked up. I can understand why Columbus, who had no idea the Atlantic coast of North America was there, went so much further South, but within a few years Florida was on maps (though Spaniards were still of the notion it was a large island) and Ponce de Leon had ventured fairly far inland, by the early 1540s the survivors of de Soto’s disaster knew how vast and fertile (if not rich in gold) the North American continent was, Iceland had been colonized off and on for centuries by the Scandinavians, the Portugese and others were using islands off Canada for their bases in fishing, and by 1565 the Spanish had planted a colony in what’s now St. Augustine with tiny satellites inland, but what’s now the East Coast of the USA would wait until 1585 before there the Manteo colony (which failed), 1607 (this week is the 400th anniversary) before Jamestown, and it was the 1620s before Europeans really started colonizing in large numbers.
Divorcing the ethics of colonizing already occupied land, why did the English wait so long before settling a land mass so much closer and in many ways more hospitable to Europeans? And why did the Iberians never colonize it at all above what’s now north Florida?
Because they were after short-term earnings. As far as a central government is concerned, seizing a place and taking its gold - or founding a trading post - yielded instant profit, while setting up an agricultural colony was a long-term investment; you wouldn’t expect to see any significant returns for at least several decades. Paying huge amount of money to send people overseas to grow wheat just didn’t seem worth it - they had enough peasants back homje. It was only the existance of tobacco, a cash crop, that allowed Virginia to get off the ground, so to speak.
Besides, who ever thought of colonizing for the sake of colonizing? Greenland and Iceland were over 500 years before. The very concept of expansionism must have been new to them.
The presence of two large empires which were rapidly conquered (Aztecs and Incas) meant that the Spaniards took over their position as their areas dominant power: it was not a newly-created position. The nations nearby who’d looked at those two as The Big Neighbor now looked that way at us. And in some cases, found those strange pale people not as bad as the old bosses (hey, some Mexicans can spit on her name all they want, but Cortés would still be at the beach if it hadn’t been for Doña Marina’s aid).
We were overextended as it were, no resources to go further north. Reaching the north-american coast implied very complicated navigation, the best land was occupied, our military resources were mostly being spent in Europe… a very small amount of the colonizers were conquistadores; mostly they were people who had no interest in fighting with anybody over land rights. A lot of Florida and Louisiana was damn swamp, some people went there but it wasn’t nobody’s idea of a vacation spot. Many little factors start piling up, then they combine with European politics (Tordesillas, Flandes, the Italian wars) and it’s not just a matter of picking a spot in the map, sailing a straight line there and telling those pesky injuns who speak funny to move someplace else and btw, is that girl unmarried? She ain’t half bad-looking… A girl whose husband or father you killed is quite more likely to give you radical surgery than one you’ve wooed, by the way. At least a Spanish girl, so the Spaniards assumed the “Indian” gals would apply the same rule.
Alessan, that last line is a joke, right? We’d only been part of the expansion of, let’s see, the Phoenicians, the Greek, the Carthaginians, the Romans, been run through by a bunch of different Germanic tribes before the Visigoths finally stayed, then been expanded on by the Moors before we expanded back on them. No idea of expansion indeedy.
But had there been any mass migrations since the Moors, a thousand years earlier? The reconquista doesn’t count - it wasn’t colonization, just a change of ownership (followed by a forced change of religion). When was the last time the Spanish, or any other Western European, founded a new town or planted a field where there hadn’t been a field before? Europe had reached a certain poplulatrion level in the Middle Ages and more or less stayed there. Sure, things fluxated a bit due to plague, war or so on, but all in all people lived in the same place their ancestors did five hundred years before - or moved to cities.
All over Castilla, both la Vieja (the Elder, nowadays part of Castilla-León) and la Nueva (the newer); Castilla la Vieja used to be pretty much a desert. Any town called Villanueva (new town) was founded during the Middle Ages; Puente la Reina (most towns with Puente in the name)… the kings of Navarra spent a lot of money moving the pilgrims to Santiago from what had been a naval route (which was difficult to control, whether we’re talking taxes, banditry or illness) to a land-based one. The majority of the towns through which the main road from Roncesvalles and Jaca goes to Santiago are middle-ages foundations. All Cinco Villas (Aragon near Navarra) are middle-ages towns.
Pamplona’s Basque name “the triple” comes from having been three distinct towns, one of them of “francos” (immigrants, many of them had been pilgrims to Santiago). Add Villafranca to the list of names that imply a middle-ages origin. Many towns have a “de arriba” and a “de abajo” (upper and lower) because the village moved down to the valley once a defensive position became less important than access to water.
In Spain towns come in four basic flavors of age: “before the romans”, “the romans”, “the reconquista” and “new”.
Fernando el Católico replaced the Muslims and Jews in the vegas of Levante… with the people who’d fought him in Navarra. It’s hard to raise in arms when a) you’re several weeks away from home and from the neighbors you’ve always known and b) the same dude you’d like to kick has given you lands.
Some specific dates for large cities which were intended to be large from the start:
Bilbao just celebrated its 700 anniversary. The founders were from Haro, in Rioja, one of them was my great-great-grandwhatever-father, we feel so proud!
Ciudad Real, 1255.
Both are provincial capitals; Bilbao is one of Spain’s 4-largest metropolitan areas. It if wasn’t for the boys of ETA, it would be even bigger.
Was actually the first european settlement in N. America-it dates to ca. 1100 AD. As far as i know, it was a real settlement-because the Vikings built houses and a smith’s forge was found. Women were also present-because a spinning weight was found as well.
Seems like the Vikings predated any of the Spanish settlements, by quite a few years.
Then to, Cambridge MA has a site (claimed to have been the site of lief Ericsson’s house)!
Where’s that? I’ve never heard of it! (Although there’s a statue of Leif in his Viking Longboat on the green divided of Comm Ave to the west of Mass Ave.)
There’s also the monument to Prince Henry Sinclair in Westford, MA. It’s claimed he visited in 1398.
It’s difficult to imagine today, because we’re used to Britannia ruling the waves, but England wasn’t much of a naval power in the Sixteenth Century. The English spnsored a few voyages of exploration, as far back as John Cabot in the 1490’s, but they would have found it difficult to sustain colonies in the face of Spanish opposition.
As late as the 1580’s, the English had to resort to piracy (the traditional weapon of the weak against the strong) to harass the Spanish fleets in the New World. It was only after the destuction of the Spanish Armada in 1588 that Spain was crippled as a naval superpower, and only in the Seventeenth Century that England came into its own.
It was the enemy of my enemy is my friend strategy. A strategy that they would later on regret once they figured out that Cortes was a new boss like the old boss, but a bit worse.
Just a slight night pick or clarification, Nava and others has touched upon the reason why north of FL was pretty much left alone. But. The Spanish Empire reach a good chunk of what we consider the US, almost half of it.
Here is a good map from Encarta showing the Spanish Empire at its height in 1770L Map
Here is an 1810 Map showing in yellow what was still under Spanish control: Map
One thing to consider is that England, Spain, and Portugal had a bit of practice colonization before the discovery of the new world. Portugal had the Azores and Madeira, Spain had the Canaries, and the Reconquista, and England had Ireland.
As for why Mexico and the Incas were colonized first, well, the Spanish came in and took over existing empires that already had existing gold and silver mines. The whole operation was considered a way to suck gold and silver out of the Americas and ship it back to Spain. But North America had no such existing precious metal extraction infrastructure that could be taken over.
Eventually the Carribean islands became sources of fantastic wealth from agriculture. But this was because the Carribean could grow crops that couldn’t grow in Europe. Sugar cane could be grown in the Mediterranean, but only in what was then Ottoman dominated areas. And setting up plain old farms was not interesting, the first colonizers came to get rich, which they thought meant killing indians and taking their gold first, then finding the indian’s gold mines and enslaving them and forcing them to work the mines.
And remember that North America wasn’t a very good site to set up self-sufficient agricultural colonies, because it was jammed full of already existing farming villages. It wasn’t until those villages were decimated by disease that Europeans could move into the now-empty land. The Pilgrims didn’t set up shop in a wilderness, they set up their colony on the site of an indian farming village that had been wiped out by disease a few years earlier, of which Squanto was the only survivor. Every good agricultural site was already occupied by farmers until this demographic collapse. So before the plagues you’d have to wipe out the existing villages. While people might sail halfway across the world with the dream of conquering villages, those conquistadors didn’t imagine settling down and becoming farmers afterwards, they imaginged enslaving the villagers and living like aristocrats.
Spain and Portugal I’m sure would have been glad to take all of N. America. But they didn’t have the resorces to conquer two continents. So they had to make a choice: go north towards the Sonoran desert and and endless lands of (relatively)poor farmers and savages, or south towards a purported “city of gold.”
Leif’s supposed Boston pied à terre is mentioned in this Staff Report, though this web page has more details on the alleged location. Google throws up scads more pages mentioning the claim.
Needless to say, historians and archaeologists are now almost universally agreed that this is all utter bollocks. (L’Anse Aux Meadows is, of course, another matter.)
That didn’t mean it was fun to cross. Especially once he struck out on the gold. A great coincidence in all of it was that that the town of Sonora was a big location in the California gold rush many, many years later.
