Overview

Beginning in 1492 with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus (1451?-1506), Spanish explorers and conquistadors built a colonial empire that turned Spain into one of the great European powers. Spanish fleets returned from the New World with holds full of gold, silver, and precious gemstones while Spanish priests traveled the world to convert and save the souls of the native populations. However, Spain's time of dominance was to be relatively short-lived; only two centuries later, Spain's European power was in decline, and a century after that, virtually all her colonies were in open revolt. Much of the reason for this sequence of events, and for the subsequent history of former Spanish territories can be traced back to the reasons for and the nature of Spanish imperialism.

Background

For almost 800 years, Arabs occupied and ruled the Iberian Peninsula. For over a century, a...