this is Crash Course World History

and today we’re going to talk about the entire frakking globe over the course of several

centuries

so let’s get right to it.

Mr. Green. Frakking?

You don’t know about Battlestar Galactica yet,

Me From The Past?

Oh, man,

there are so many great

things in your future. [like Regretsy.com & My Drunk Kitchen]

Today, I’m going to try to show you how tiny Spain’s influence spread around the

world and shaped the lives of almost every human on the planet,

generally in negative ways.

I know,

everything is such a bummer on Crash Course recently.

[Holy Atlantic Slave Trade, Batman]

It’s the sixteenth century.

People are getting richer,

they’re living more connected lives and all I can do is whine about how much better

the old days were.

What am I, your grandpa?

Let’s get festive.

Woo.

[intro music]

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So the Aztecs weren’t the first impressive polity in Mesoamerica,

that honor would go to the Olmecs or the Mayans.

But they were probably the greatest.

The Aztecs formed out of an alliance of three major cities in modern day Mexico in about

1430,

just 89 years before Cortez and his conquistadors showed up.

The Aztec state was very hierarchical,

with an emperor at the top and a group unruly nobles beneath him.

Just like Europe.

And in addition,

there was a class of powerful priests whose job it was to keep order in the cosmos.

[like in the 5th Element?]

So, Aztec religion held that history was cyclical and punctuated by terrible disasters and then

would ultimately end with a massive apocalypse.

And the job of the priests was to avoid these disasters,

by appeasing the gods,

generally through human sacrifice.

The Aztecs extended their control over most of southern Mexico,

parts of Guatemala and the Yucatan.

And they demanded tribute from conquered people in the form of

goods, precious metals, and people to sacrifice.

If you’re familiar with The Hunger Games,

[You are totally familiar with the Hunger Games...]

it won’t surprise you to learn that this didn’t sit very well with said conquered

people.

And the fact that the Aztecs were basically ruling over thousands of people who hated

them made it a lot easier for Cortez to come in and find allies to overthrow them.

All that noted,

in less than a hundred years,

the Aztecs accomplished some amazing things.

Especially the building of their capital city Tenochtitlan,

on the site of modern day Mexico City,

which was like Venice in that it was divided and serviced by canals.

They also had floating gardens, called chinampas,

which provided food for the city.

Oh,

it’s already time for the open letter?

Alright.

[Switches from chair to lemon/lime velvet throne of impending structural disaster]

An open letter to Human Sacrifice.

But first,

let’s see what’s in the secret compartment today.

Oh, nice.

Come on.

Be a mushroom, be a mushroom, be a---

oh dahh.

Dear human sacrifice,

look,

I’m not going to defend you.

But if you really believe that the world is going to end if the gods are not appeased,

then human sacrifice kind of makes sense.

[But not if you’re Willie in Temple of Doom...]

And as evidence for this,

let me submit to you

that we engage in human sacrifice all the time.

Remember the movie, The Dirty Dozen?

No?

Because you’re too young?

That makes me hate myself.

[Don’t worry, Johnny Bookwriter, “vintage” will always be cool.]

Anyway, it was all about glorious sacrifice and how a few have to die in order for many

to live.

Did you at least see that-- that uh,

meteor movie that Ben Affleck was in?

What was that called, Stan?

Asteroid. [Stan, off camera]

Asteroid!

Armageddon. [Stan, off camera]

Armageddon!

Armageddon.

Right. Like that...

Human sacrifice.

Best wishes, John Green.

Alright,

now let’s head south to the Inca civilization, which was older than

the Aztecs and in some ways even more impressive.

Founded in the 13th century,

the Inca empire ruled between 4 and 6 million people by the time the Spanish showed up in

1532.

Trade and a very effective administrative structure held the empire together, which

was even more impressive when you consider all the roads and temples that were built

atop mountains with nothing to haul things up those mountains,

except for llamas and people.

[Thought the Mongols were the exception?]

The Inca had no written language but they were able to keep records with knotted strings

called quipus. [Gesundheit!]

And vitally, they ordered every male peasant under the Inca control to do unpaid work for

the Inca government for a specified period of time each year.

This system,

which the Inca called mit’a

allowed them to build all those roads and temples.

The Spanish would later adopt this system, and the hierarchical system with the emperor

at the top, except they would make it all,

you know,

much suckier. [Is that a historical term?]

And, yes,

that is a technical historian term.

So, the Spanish arrived in Mexico in 1519, and in Peru in 1532, benefiting in both cases

from total chaos due to disease.

And after conquering the Incas and the Aztecs, they created an empire with two administrative

divisions.

The Viceroyalty of New Spain, founded in 1521,

and the Viceroyalty of Peru, founded in 1542.

In some ways,

the Aztec and Inca empires were perfect for Spanish conquest.

Their administrative structures were similar,

there was a similar link between secular and religious power,

albeit different religions.

All of which made it relatively easy for the Spanish crown to step into the void left by

those two great empires and send their own administrators to run the place.

While most of the Spanish aristocrats who came over ran large agricultural operations,

you don’t see a lot of movies called, like,

Indiana Jones and the Search for A Nice Farm in the Countryside.

[Probably still much better than that Crystal Skull nonsense.]

The real glory for conquistadors was gold.

Initially they found some,

both in the Caribbean and in Mexico,

but never enough to get,

like, super-rich.

Fortunately,

or as I will argue, unfortunately,

they did find a mountain made of silver.

So the Spanish adapted the mita,

which the Incas had used to build roads and public buildings,

to mine and process that silver.

So 1/7th of the adult male Indian population from each district was required to work in

the silver mines for a year,

being paid only subsistence wages.

Now, you might wonder why the Spanish didn’t purchase African slaves to work in the mines.

They did in Mexico,

but in South America it was cheaper to use indigenous labor.

Purchasing slaves was inefficient because

1. They didn’t have experience working at high

altitudes,

and 2. Mine work was super deadly.

Mercury,

which can be used to refine silver ore,

was found at the mountain of Huancavelica.

And mercury poisoning among miners was so common that parents would often maim their

children to keep them from having to work the mines.

You can see why I’m struggling to be festive!

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

[Let’s go see if the Canadians can zazz things up a bit...]

So Spanish mines in the Americas produced over 150,000 tons of silver between the 16th

and the 18th centuries, over 80% of the world’s supply.

Spain became the richest nation in Europe and Spanish silver pesos became the de-facto

currency.

But the Spanish royal family

does not appear to have understood inflation—

and the huge influx of silver caused skyrocketing inflation, and since they never set tax rates

to account for it, they collected the same amount of money sixty years after the discovery

of silver, but that money was worth a fraction of what it once had been.

And in general,

it’s not clear that Spain benefited much from the discovery of silver.

Rich countries have a way of finding their way into expensive and not totally necessary

wars, and Spain was no exception. While empire wasn’t the central cause of Spain’s many

16th century wars,

it sure did fund them.

So in 1519

(which was a heck of a year for Spain)

Charles V united the kingdoms of Spain and Austria by being named head of the Holy Roman

Empire,

so called because

it was not Holy,

not Roman,

and not an Empire.

Charles had this dream of a unified central Europe, which was constantly being thwarted

by German nobles, who had a dream of a non-unified central Europe, and eventually Charles V’s

ambitions were shattered and he gave the Austrian half of his kingdom to his son Ferdinand and

gave Spain with the American stuff to Philip in 1556.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

So, Philip II didn’t only inherited all of Spain’s holdings in the Americas and

in Europe and in the

Phillip-not-a-coincidence-ines. [Dedicated to that reach, eh?]

He also inherited a rebellion in the Netherlands,

because the Dutch were like,

“We’re gonna be Protestant, also you guys know nothing about economics,”

which, incidentally,

the Dutch are still saying to the Spanish.

And then the English sided with the Dutch and there was a war featuring a disastrous

invasion of England,

called the Spanish Armada,

in 1588.

England’s success against the Spanish, even though it can largely be chalked up to the

weather,

was credited to queen Elizabeth I. [Like a boss, even still.]

That led to a period of wealth and national pride, which meant that people had both the

money and the desire to see,

I don’t know,

plays about old English Kings named Richard.

And that, my friends,

is how the discovery of silver in Bolivia contributed to the genius of William Shakespeare.

[And Kevin Bacon?]

Anyway,

American silver didn’t cause these wars

anymore than it wrote Hamlet,

but the new wealth made both more possible.

Knowing that they had this enormous silver “war chest” at their disposal made them

much more inclined to build all those ships that got sunk in 1588.

And soon enough even a mountain of silver could not pay for all the warring, and the

Spanish crown had to borrow money, which they couldn’t pay back, so they defaulted on

their debt several times in the 17th century.

Yay, silver.

So,

most of the silver mined in the Americas went to Europe,

but at least a third of it went to China.

Either directly,

on Spanish galleons,

or indirectly through through the purchase of Chinese goods.

China had encountered inflation of its own after printing the world’s first paper money

in the 12th century,

so they switched back to coins.

Initially,

Chinese coins were made out of copper or bronze,

but their economy was so big—

they were the leading producer of consumer goods until the 19th century—