A magic date: 1492. The year began with Christopher Columbus watching
the Moors surrender the city of Granada, their last stronghold in Spain,
to the joint monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. He reminded them of the
triumph in a summation he wrote later of what he too had accomplished
that year. “I saw the banners of your Highnesses raised on the towers of
the Alhambra in the city of Granada, and I saw the Moorish king go out
of the gate of the city and kiss the hands of your Highnesses and of my
lord the Prince.” Shortly after the victory, he added, “your Highnesses
... determined to send me, Christopher Columbus to the countries of
India, so that I might see what they were like, the lands and the
people, and might seek out and know the nature of everything that is
there....”
This remarkable coincidence—the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and
Columbus’s almost simultaneous discovery of the “Indies”—resulted in a
burst of explosive expansionism. The following year, 1493, Columbus
established Spain’s first colony in the New World on the island of
Hispaniola, occupied now by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. By 1515
Cuba had been conquered and its cities of Santiago and Havana
established as bases for further exploration. In 1519 Hernán Cortés
swept out of Cuba into Mexico and found a new source of wealth for his
country, his followers, and himself by looting the Aztec empire of
stores of gold and silver the Indians had been accumulating for
centuries. A decade later Francisco Pizarro began his dogged and even
more lucrative conquest of the Incas of Peru.
Meanwhile, what of the Northern Mystery, as historian Herbert E. Bolton
aptly named the unknown lands above Mexico? Was it not logical that
similar treasures awaited discovery there? And so the fever for
adventure and riches drew three more distance-defying explorers—Hernando
de Soto, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo—into
three different parts of what is now the United States. Each reached as
far as he did because inside him burned the awesome, often
contradictory, but always steel-bright fires of medieval Spain.
Our tangible connection to this age of pathfinding and discovery is a
scattering of historic places stretching from Florida to California.
They are evidence of Spanish life and color in the old borderlands. This
book draws into a whole the stories of several such places. Here are the
beginnings of Spanish North America.