Read Empire of Blue Water for Free Online Page A

remarkable series of conquests would have to say there was something at work that could not be explained by armaments, management style, or weak opponents. The variable
x,
to the Spanish, was God’s will. Machiavelli marveled at how Ferdinand had transformed himself from a “small, weak king” into the “greatest monarch in Christendom.”
    And Spain had extended that monarchy to the New World. When Spain’s explorers—native or not—discovered a new territory, they did what all such men did: clambered to the shore, jabbed a pole with a fluttering banner atop it into the ground, and declared the land the property of their monarch. But in the Spanish case, the statement was literal: Mexico, Peru, the islands of the Caribbean, and all of Central America belonged
personally
to the current king or queen of Spain. They were not annexed but taken as legal birthright; the long-absentee landlord had arrived to claim his ancestral home. When some locals were found, they’d be read (in Spanish, a language the natives could not understand) a long proclamation called the Requerimiento, which began with the creation of the world and showed how the pope had granted rights to all the piece of land the conquistadors were now standing on. The Requirimiento was in effect a property deed with a history going back to the beginning of time, and it had to be read before the property passed into the hands of the Crown and before the conquistadors could launch the inevitable attacks on their listeners. “This monarchy of Spain,” wrote Thomas Companella in 1607, “which embraces all nations and encircles the world, is that of the messiah, and thus shows itself to be the heir of the universe.”

    The voyages of Columbus were the expression of an ambitious and forward-thinking monarchy, the conquistadors embodied a warrior spirit that reveled in adventure and accepted hardship as a test, but the empire was the result of gold and silver. Without the ore that poured forth from the mines of Mexico and Peru, Spain would have remained a modest European power and not the world-altering behemoth it became. The discovery of the Americas’ wealth transformed the world economy and Spain’s place in it. The amounts are staggering: between 1500 and 1650, approximately 180 tons of gold flowed through the official port of Seville, so much that the entranceway that connected it to the royal palace where Philip IV impatiently awaited the arrival of his treasure was known as “the Golden Doorway.” Gold animated the dreams of the explorers, conquistadors, merchants, and pirates, but it was the 16,000 tons of silver (worth at least $3.7 billion in current dollars) that Spain extracted from American mines that allowed for uniform coins to be made and distributed throughout the world, revolutionizing (in fact, one might say, creating) the global economy. In 1535, Spain decreed that a mint be established in Mexico City, and a year later the production of rough silver cobs began, using crude dies and a sledgehammer and then, in 1732, a minting machine. During its useful life, the mint produced 2.68 billion silver coins; merchants and common people were soon using them for buying everything from a bushel of corn to a shipload of Chinese ceramics. Even in the American colonies, the Spanish piece of eight was more popular and plentiful than were English notes; the currency issued by the Continental Congress were denominated in “Spanish Milled Dollars.” Fueled by a universal currency, worldwide trade exploded, and the gold and silver streaks arced across the oceans like sparks from a Roman candle. Ships from the Atlantic seaboard to Shanghai and everywhere in between traded on the new commercial sea routes, exchanging pieces of eight or silver ingots for Colombian emeralds, French muskets, and indigo from the ancient woods of the Caribbean. “The king of China could build a palace with the silver bars from Peru which have been carried to his country,”