Map 8.6: Long-distance Sea Voyages of the Fifteenth Century
Portugal’s successes and pretensions roused the hostility and rivalry of Castile.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s determination to conquer the Canary Islands was in part
their “answer” to Portugal’s Cape Verde. When, in 1492, they half-heartedly
sponsored the Genoese Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) on a westward voyage
across the Atlantic, they knew that they were playing Portugal’s game.
Although the conquistadores confronted a New World, they did so with the
expectations and categories of the Old. When the Spaniard Hernán Cortés (1485–
1547) began his conquest of Mexico, he boasted in a letter home that he had
reprimanded one of the native chiefs for thinking that Mutezuma, the Aztec emperor
who ruled much of Mexico at the time, was worthy of allegiance:
I replied by telling him of the great power of Your Majesty [Emperor
Charles V, who was also king of Spain] and of the many other princes,
greater than Mutezuma, who were Your Highness’s vassals and
considered it no small favor to be so; Mutezuma also would become
one, as would all the natives of these lands. I therefore asked him to
