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The conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas may have been the most spectacular episodes of Spanish military expansion in the Americas, but they were roughly concurrent with many others almost equal in importance. The organization of the Indias Menores into its own governorate separate from Santo Domingo accelerated the exploration and conquest of the mainland interior. Convinced that there was a civilization ruled by a golden king beyond Coquivacoa, Diego de Almagro - accompanied by the captain-general, Rodrigo de Bastidas - spearheaded the expedition into the Andean Cordilleras of the north. Moving up the Magdalena River from Santa Marta de la Vela, Almagro encountered the Muisca, whom he conquered with 250 Spaniards over the years 1516 to 1524, settling the town of Santa Ana de Guatavita. Almagro and another Spaniard named Diego de Mazariegos would later partake in the conquest of Pacific coast and Andean highlands between the Tierra Muisca and Fermín Beraza’s grant in old Chinchaysuyu from 1528 to 1539. Further afield in Nueva Andalucía, Sebastián de Belalcázar and the lowborn Diego Caballero would war with the Guajiros and Mariches, founding San Pedro de Maracaibo in 1523 and Trujillo de Coro in 1525, while Alonso de Ojeda funded the colonization of the coast adjacent from Santa Margarita (spared the fate of other colonies in the nearby Caribes due to its aridity), exploring the Orinoco River and founding the city of San Jerónimo de Cumaná in 1516. Meanwhile, Francisco de Carvajal and Gaspar de Espinosa, having participated in the capture of Cusco, moved south to claim the seaward side of the Andes, while Spaniards such as Hernando de Soto, Felipe Marquéz de Losada, and Diego de Béjar began to traipse around the Río de La Plata watershed following the discovery of its estuary by Juan Díaz de Solís in 1515.

Separated from effective royal authority by thousands of sea miles, the adelantados felt secure enough to request terms from the Crown very generous to themselves - after all, had they not spilled their own blood in hardships unimaginable to acquire for Spain these unspeakably wealthy kingdoms? It was assumed by a good number of adelantados that their conquests would remain entirely in their family’s hands, governed as autonomous protectorates of the Crown in exchange for the evangelization and hispanicization of the Indios and payment of the quinto real [1]. Nonetheless, the Crown refused to grant administrative titles in the Americas this requested hereditary clause, and, despite committed resistance, refused to budge - the nobility in Spain proper had cemented into a nigh-unbreakable landholding bloc, and it was essential that the same did not happen in the New World. This policy angered a great many adelantados, many of whom had acquired their demesne by flouting royal authority - whether Indio or Spanish. But what could they do? For the adelantado, a royal ban meant a major restriction of access to much needed supplies and manpower, an open season on their territory for any ambitious Spaniards, and also the dissolution of any legal bonds of subservience for their followers and subordinates. Nonetheless, personal encomiendas - some of which were truly vast - remained hereditary possessions, although the Crown would soon begin looking for ways to dismantle them. The Crown also made efforts to break up the holdings of its overseas subjects by forbidding the ownership of more than one administrative position at once. For instance, as both Francisco de Montejo and Juan de Grijalva’s concessions in Nueva Castilla (Tabasco and Huasteca, respectively) were gained without the approval of the Crown or the governor, and with the death of Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar in 1523, their grants in Cuba were consolidated into a governorate-general, which was handed over to the encomendero Juan Lobo de Olivenza (who participated in Cuba’s conquest). Olivenza would build a port at El Surgidero de la Habana, replacing San Severino de Hicacos as the island’s principal westerly port. While these divisions complicated the process of exportation back to Spain, they served to more evenly distribute the benefits of trans-Atlantic trade and encouraged healthy competition. For instance, in Nueva Vizcaya, while San Martín de Limac was founded with the intentions of it being the primary port, it was located within the captaincy general of Beñat Chavarría - which prompted Esteban Beraza to eventually found his own port at Huelva de Riohica [2] in order to make better and more immediate returns on shipping out Incan gold.



The early Crown-appointed governors Francisco de Bobadilla, Samuel López Valmojado, Adrián Sánchez de Cardeña, and their like were all very strict and left numerous disputes in their wake, but they were each instrumental in laying the bedrock of Spanish colonial society and how it was to be organized. Bobadilla and Cardeña devoted significant time and effort to ensuring the new settlements in the Indies were organized exactly how they were in Spain, and in some cases even better - with cabildos and corregidores, on an efficient grid system centered on a plaza de armas which was girded by the town church. Valmojado successfully forced the Atlantic and Pacific together, turning Panamá from a mosquito-ridden hell into a serviceable colony - using Indios to drain the nearby swamps and wetlands; playing his hand at genetics by overcoming the problem of tropical disease through encouraged intermarriage with the locals; and establishing the first mule trains across the isthmus, thereby jumpstarting the treasure fleets of Nueva Vizcaya (especially after the discovery of the Cerro Rico de Potosí [3] in Esteban Beraza’s territory in 1536). When Cortés designated the lands conquered by him and his comrades as “Nueva Castilla,” he was testifying to the fact that Spanish America with the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas had become entirely different to what it was before: these were not simply colonies, they were kingdoms - peopled, developed, and with a rich, growing history and a distinct, also growing, culture. The names of the original viceroyalties sought to mirror that, as well as to stress that there was an earnest effort to create Spain anew in this virgin territory.

The weather in much the Indies, while not impossible to endure, was certainly difficult for those of European stock. While the Spaniards wisely founded their colonial cities in the tropics in the “healthier” areas on the coast and in the mountains, those Spaniards determined, brave, or far-sighted enough could find multiple avenues to settle the land that they had discovered regardless of its natural or biological circumstances. Recounting a wave of yellow fever that struck Santo Domingo in 1519, a Spanish Dominican friar recalled how the entire Criollo population of the shoemaker’s quarter was “stricken dead, yet their sons of mixed blood emerged from the barrio without even a fever.” It became rapidly apparent - especially in the malarial “white graveyard” that was the West Indies - that the native Indios, and eventually the imported African slaves as well, possessed something in their very blood that protected them from the tropical diseases to a much greater degree than that of the Europeans. This nascent understanding of genetics - combined with the fact that the hardships of trans-Atlantic travel and colonial life ensured that the vast majority of Castilian migrants to the New World were unmarried males - served to quickly eliminate whatever stigma interracial marriage still had in the colonies. Nearly 190,000 Spaniards migrated to the Americas in the 16th century (roughly 52,000 to Nueva Castilla, 36,000 to Nueva Vizcaya, 35,000 to Brasil, 28,000 to Nueva Andalucía, 22,000 to Las Antillas, and 15,000 to the watershed of the Río de La Plata and south of Nueva Vizcaya), and as many as 8 out of 10 of them were male and not bound by any vows of celibacy. This readiness for miscegenation was welcomed by the colonial Spaniard with a speed and universality unseen since the Dark Ages, and effected a societal change equally as transformative. What would have been in any other circumstances a society with a small elite Spanish caste ruling over a gigantic Indio populace with which they had practically nothing in common soon became a society with dozens of shades of “españolismo” - each keeping those below them in check and adding pressure to the motor of “el mestizaje.”


Spain’s empire had grown exponentially in the space of three decades due to these adelantados, and was thus in desperate need of reorganization. The conquest of the Incas by 1530 convinced the Council of the Indies that it was time to restructure the colonial administration to better fit the enormity of what was to be administered, with Nueva Castilla and Nueva Vizcaya were made into viceroyalties in 1532 (with royal approval, of course). Captains and governors general typically administered their territories directly, while collaborating with a cabildo (colonial council) composed of the leading encomenderos and military officials under their governance (or sometimes just lending them an appeasing ear). However, with the vastness of these colonial territories becoming more apparent, and with settler and Indio populations increasing - leading to the foundation of more chartered pueblos (predominantly Indio settlements) and vilas (predominantly European settlements) - more levels of administration were required. Beginning in 1529, major cities - meaning any settlement that hosted either a presidio (a permanent, fortified, royally-commissioned garrison) or a cathedral (or whatever passed for the seat of an official bishopric) - and their respective districts were to be administered by an alcalde, who would function in tandem with an ayuntamiento council, while smaller towns and their respective districts were to be administered by a corregidor working in tandem with the local cabildo (the districts were to be drawn up at the discretion of the governorate or captaincy general’s land office). These attempts at organization would be clarified and compiled by Juan Pelayo (in his “Leyes Nuevas,” ratified in 1552), who would also create viceroyalties over Las Antillas (formerly Las Indias Mayores) and Nueva Andalucía (formerly Las Indias Menores) in 1536.


[1] The "royal fifth" of all precious metals, which went straight into the Crown's coffers
[2] OTL Ica
[3] The most productive silver mine ever recorded in the Americas, possibly in the world