Requerimiento

Impact

Somewhat paradoxically, the impact of the Requerimiento was both negligible and profound. It was negligible in the sense that the intended audience was unable to understand the document, for it was read in Spanish to people who did not know Spanish. Observers noted that the document was often read to trees, empty beaches, and abandoned villages as well as from the decks of ships far out of earshot of land. One of these observers was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who was appalled by Spanish treatment of the Amerindians. He wrote that when he first read the document, he did not know “whether to laugh or cry” (qtd. in Kamen, p. 97). Even the document's author, Palacios Rubios, believed that it was faintly ridiculous. One of his contemporaries wrote that Rubios “could not stop laughing when I told him what some commanders had done with it” (qtd. in Kamen, p. 97). From this point of view, the Requerimiento itself had virtually no impact at all.

From another perspective, the impact of the document was profound and far reaching. In its wake, the conquest of the New World continued. In 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama, leading the first European expedition to the western coast of the New World and the Pacific Ocean. In Mexico the Spanish subdued the Aztec Empire, launching an invasion under Hernán Cortés in 1519 and declaring victory in 1521 after the fall of Tenochtitlán (rebuilt as Mexico City). In 1532 Spaniards under the command of Francisco Pizarro defeated the Incas at the Battle of Cajamarca, completing the conquest of Peru. Estimates hold that during the 1500s, about a quarter million Spaniards settled in the New World, with devastating effects on indigenous populations. In Mexico, for example, according to some estimates the indigenous population declined by about 90 percent during the 1500s. Over the same period, the native population of Peru declined from about 6.5 million to about 1 million. Spanish hegemony lasted until the 1800s, when independence movements in South America broke Spain's hold on the New World. In 1898 the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War, driving it out of its last colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico and thus ending Spanish rule in the Americas.