New Spain
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Viceroyalty of New Spain (Template:Lang-es Template:IPA-es) was an integral territorial entity of the Spanish Empire, established by Habsburg Spain during the Spanish colonization of the Americas. It covered a huge area that included territories in North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania. It originated in 1521 after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the main event of the Spanish conquest, which did not properly end until much later, as its territory continued to grow to the north. It was officially created on 18 August 1521 as a Kingdom (Spanish: reino), the first of four viceroyalties Spain created in the Americas. Its first viceroy was Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco, and the capital of the kingdom was Mexico City, established on the ancient Tenochtitlan.
It included what is now Mexico plus the current U.S. states of California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, Washington, Florida and parts of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; the southwestern part of British Columbia of present-day Canada; the Captaincy General of Guatemala (which included the current countries of Guatemala, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Mexican state of Chiapas); the Captaincy General of Cuba (current Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago); and the Captaincy General of the Philippines (including the Philippines, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Caroline Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the short lived Spanish Formosa in modern-day northern Taiwan, as well as, for a century, the island of Tidore and the briefly occupied Sultanate of Ternate, both in modern-day Indonesia).
Other kingdoms of the Spanish Empire bordered New Spain and were given the right of appeal to the most senior representative of the king. These kingdoms were independent of New Spain (separate from New Spain itself): Nueva Galicia (1530), Captaincy General of Guatemala (1540), Nueva Vizcaya (1562), New Kingdom of León (1569), Santa Fe de Nuevo México (1598), Nueva Extremadura (1674), and Nuevo Santander (1746).
New Spain proper was itself organized in captaincies general. There were four captaincies: Captaincy General of the Philippines (1574), Captaincy General of Cuba, Captaincy General of Puerto Rico, and Captaincy General of Santo Domingo. These independent kingdoms and territorial subdivisions each had their own governor and captain generals (who in New Spain was the viceroy himself, who added this title to his other dignities). In Guatemala, Santo Domingo and Nueva Galicia, these officials were called presiding governors, since they were leading royal audiences. For this reason, these hearings were considered "praetorial".
There were two great estates in America. The most important was the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca, property of Hernán Cortés and his descendants that included a set of vast territories where marquises had civil and criminal jurisdiction, and the right to grant land, water and forests and within which were their main possessions (cattle ranches, agricultural work, sugar mills, fulling houses and shipyards). The other estate was the Duchy of Atlixco, granted in 1708, by King Philip V to José Sarmiento de Valladares, former viceroy of New Spain and married to the Countess of Moctezuma, with civil and criminal jurisdiction over Atlixco, Tepeaca, Guachinango, Ixtepeji and Tula de Allende. Another important Marquisate was the Marquisate of Buglas in Negros Island at the Philippines which was awarded to the descendants of Sebastian Elcano and his crew, the first to circumnavigate the world. King Charles III introduced reforms in the organization of the viceroyalty in 1786, known as Bourbon reforms, which created the intendencias, which allowed to limit, in some way, the viceroy's attributions.
New Spain developed highly regional divisions, reflecting the impact of climate, topography, indigenous populations, and mineral resources. The areas of central and southern Mexico had dense indigenous populations with complex social, political, and economic organization. The northern area of Mexico, a region of nomadic and semi-nomadic indigenous populations, was not generally conducive to dense settlements, but the discovery of silver in Zacatecas in the 1540s drew settlement there to exploit the mines. Silver mining not only became the engine of the economy of New Spain, but vastly enriched Spain and transformed the global economy. New Spain was the New World terminus of the Philippine trade, making the kingdom a vital link between Spain's New World empire and its Asian empire.
From the beginning of the 19th century, the kingdom fell into crisis, aggravated by the Peninsular War, and its direct consequence in the kingdom, the political crisis in Mexico in 1808, which ended with the government of Viceroy José de Iturrigaray and, later, gave rise to the Conspiracy of Valladolid and the Conspiracy of Querétaro. This last one was the direct antecedent of the Mexican War of Independence, which, when concluding in 1821, disintegrated the viceroyalty and gave way to the Mexican Empire, in which finally Agustín de Iturbide would be crowned.
