42 Ch. 1 • Medieval Legacies and Transforming Discoveries
he wanted placed under the authority of the Church. Charles V ordered a
pause in Spanish conquests until such moral issues could be considered, but
the Spanish destruction of what they considered pagan temples and idols
continued and the empire continued to expand.
As the Indian population was depleted through disease, overwork, and
brutality, the Spanish looked for new sources of labor. Domestic slavery
still existed in Italy, Spain, and Muscovy in the sixteenth century, as well as
in the Arab world, and some Indians in the New World also had slaves. By
the fifteenth century, Portuguese traders along the coast of West Africa
had begun to make profits selling Africans as servants in Lisbon or as sugar
plantation workers in the Portuguese Atlantic islands. Portugal soon domi
nated the African network of slave-trading, which depended on chieftains
and traders in African kingdoms, merchants in Seville and Lisbon, settlers
in Mexico and Peru, and Brazilian sugar growers. The Spaniards believed
that Africans could best survive the brutally difficult work and hot climate
of America. Between 1595 and 1640 about 300,000 slaves were trans
ported to the Spanish colonies in the Americas, and five times that many
would be shipped during the next century.
Gradually, more Spanish settlers arrived to populate the American
colonies, including small traders, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and masons. (In
Paraguay, the governor asked that no lawyers be allowed to emigrate,
“because in newly settled countries they encourage dissension and litiga
tion.”) By the mid-sixteenth century about 150,000 Spaniards had crossed
to America, and by the end of the century about 240,000 Spaniards had
emigrated there. Most never returned to Spain.
In 1552, a Spanish official wrote King Charles V (ruled 1516-1556,
Holy Roman emperor 1519-1558) that the discovery of the East and West
Indies was “the greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from
the incarnation and death of Him who created it.” But Michel de Mon
taigne (1533—1592), a French writer who had met Indians brought back
from Brazil, offered another view in 1588, when he observed that “so many
goodly cities [were] ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and
made desolate; so infinite millions of harmless peoples of all sexes, states,
and ages, massacred, ravaged and put to the sword... ruined and defaced
for the traffic of pearls and pepper.”
ConclusionThe economic and political structures of early modern Europe drew on the
dynamism of the medieval period. Demographic vitality finally overcame
the catastrophic losses brought by the Black Death. Within Europe, com
merce and manufacturing expanded. Mediterranean traders roamed as far
as the Middle East and even Asia. And although much of Central Europe
and the Italian peninsula remained a hodgepodge of small states, rulers in