The Age of Exploration: Crash Course European History #4 (2)

the capital of the Aztec empire, gathering allies for him and warning him of impending

danger along the way.

Because of the hostility among different groups, go-betweens who knew about the animosities

and warfare among them could help mobilize support for the Europeans, so that one local

group would lead the charge against another.

That happened in the conquest of both Central America in the 1520s and the Inca Empire in

the 1530s.

In Europe meanwhile, all of this voyaging and conquering produced chaos between the

Iberian kingdoms--what land would be Spain's, and what land would be Portugal's?

A treaty sponsored by the Church eventually settled disputes between Spain and Portugal

over territory that each was claiming.

I mean, who do you call about property disputes, if not the pope?

The Treaty of Tordesillas, which was signed in 1494, provided a permanent line of demarcation

370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands off the Atlantic coast of Africa.

In 1529, another treaty set bounds for each country in the Indian Ocean and Pacific regions.

But treaties of course did not prevent the death at the hands of European weaponry and

diseases that contact entailed.

In the Western Hemisphere, the local inhabitants' lack of resistance to European diseases was

probably a more important factor than in conquest than weaponry was.

In the long run, violence, enslavement, and European diseases like smallpox and measles

led to the death of perhaps as much as ninety percent of the indigenous American population.

Diseases spread and killed so quickly that entire communities ceased to exist almost

--- at once, and with them their traditions, stories, and values.

Meanwhile, colonization proved extremely lucrative for Spain and Portugal, which within a century

went from being poor kingdoms to astonishingly rich ones, especially after 1545, when the

Spanish uncovered a huge deposit of silver in Potosi, in present day Bolivia, and began

conscripting indigenous people to do the most dangerous work in the mines.

Migration to both regions swelled, and ships now criss-crossed both Atlantic and the Pacific.

And this huge influx of wealth to Spain and Portugal would reshape power in Europe and

also life everywhere else, as everything from microbes to ideas suddenly had a truly global

reach.

Thanks for watching.

I'll see you next time.