At the end of the 16th century,
China concentrates a quarter of the world’s population
and represents 40% of the planet’s wealth.
In the Ming Empire,
taxes were collected in kind,
an ineffective system
for such a developed economy.
In 1580,
the emperor's secretary, Zhang Juzheng,
completely changed the tax system
and the collection unit changed from rice
to silver.
But there was a problem:
China had no silver.
Only the Spaniards,
already established in Manila,
were in a position to meet this need in a stable manner
and with quality guarantees,
thanks to silver from America.
This confluence of interests
connected the two most powerful world economies of the time:
the Hispanic and the Chinese,
the Habsburgs and the Ming.
In a few decades, from East to West,
the world becomes aware of its shape,
and the Hispanic monarchy
becomes the engine of an unprecedented globalization.
The history of the Spanish Empire is unknown to most Spaniards;
it should be known.
It is worth it.
No other story can compare.
There is an entire connection of cultural,
scientific and artistic exchange
between Europe and China.
Matteo Ricci and Diego de Pantoja,
a Jesuit missionary from Valdemoro
arrive in Beijing,
gain audience
and present a series of gifts:
two clocks
and a clavichord.
Diego de Pantoja is in charge of teaching how to play
the first keyboard instrument
to four eunuchs
at the Chinese court.
Right now,
there is a translation project in China
due to his great production in Chinese,
publishing about religion or philosophy…
but also about music.
The emperor
asked for Chinese themes to be played
with Western instruments and vice versa,
They were looking for that sonic encounter,
that miscegenation that occurred at that time,
which is a fascinating phenomenon.
The communication between the Ming Empire and the Habsburg Empire
through the silver trade
and through the Manila Galleon,
which is also called Nao of China
had transcendental importance for all humanity.
A kind of metallic silver mono-standard was established,
to such an extent that countries that did not have it,
for example, Holland, France or England,
first needed to get hold of Spanish silver
if they came to trade with China.
American silver was also used in India;
it was used everywhere.
Spanish silver was the immense international currency,
that is why it is the foundation of the first globalization.
Why is history so important?
Sure, professor, history explains the past.
No, I tell you, son, history does not explain the past;
history actually explains the present,
but much more important than that,
is that he who knows history,
builds the future.
You cannot see history permanently from the present
as it is being seen;
judge it from the present, analyze it from the present...
Spain was a country that dominated half the world,
it had a language that half the world spoke,
its culture expanded enormously.
Spain needs to recover its history.
The Roman Empire existed
and changed the world.
The Spanish Empire existed
and changed the world.
It is a false link to think that the Spanish Empire is an issue of Spain.
No, the Spanish Empire is an issue of the whole world,
because it changed it,
and left its blood, its institutions, its life and its way of existing
through various continents.
All of those
are descendants of the Spanish Empire as we are.
Being ashamed of that past makes no sense, at all.
That empire was an amazing moment in the history of humanity,
and I don't think anyone
should be ashamed of it, unless half of humanity
is determined to be ashamed of itself.
That could happen, right?
I studied in Galicia,
and the Catholic Monarchs were the devil there.
In any subject, Galician language, or history itself...
the Catholic Monarchs immediately appeared like the demon at noon
and the Black Legend
was the official history from the point of view
of education there.
And yet, as soon as you explored a little, not too much,
you began to see the contradictions
and that something didn't fit.
From there on, those contradictions become, I suppose...
like the Platonic Cave, right?
You start to see contradictions and you want to get out.
Castile has a very convulsed 15th century,
with a major civil war,
with the presence of Islam in Granada but, to a large extent,
it was almost an agreed presence for many years.
Henry IV of Castile realized,
after the Turks took Constantinople,
that there was a medium-term danger
of Islamic expansion or Turkish support for Barbary Islam in North Africa.
His sister and his successor, Isabel I, already conquered Granada
between 1482
and 1491.
In 1516,
the Turks were already in Algiers.
Then it would probably have been impossible to conquer Granada.
In Spain,
it is assumed that the Jews were expelled in 1492,
without knowing
that we are the last Europeans
to expel the Jews
and, of course, it was done against the Catholic Monarchs' desire
and against
all the elites of that time.
In Spain,
the Jewish minority in the late Middle Ages
was the most important of the entire European diaspora.
There were approximately 380,000 Jews,
around 7 or 8 percent of the population,
and around 70,000 or 80,000 people were expelled.
Throughout the entire 15th century,
all that converted world gradually assimilated
into Spanish society.
There were several processes of attempts to transform
that Jewish race into converts,
and that is precisely what makes it not racist,
because what they wanted is to incorporate them as converts.
In other words, to stop being a Jew, you had to get baptized, that's it.
That does not make any racist sense:
If you were Jew from a racist point of view,
like in the 1937 Nuremberg Nazi Laws,
as much as you were baptized, you would continue being a Jew;
That transformation would be worthless then.
And yet, here of course it was worth it, as the converts also rose socially,
and tremendously so.
Most of the Jewish minority converted
more or less spontaneously.
I can tell you specific cases of how the Jews were converted
in Soria or Murcia, for example.
What happened?
Mixed marriages, permanently.
The third generation was already consolidated.
There the Holy Office did not intervene at all.
From the end of the 14th century until the Expulsion of the Jews in 1492,
three-quarters of that Jewish population were converted
and that is a unique and singular phenomenon
in the entire history of the European Jew diaspora.
You ask anyone from Gibraltar to the North Cape:
An expulsion of Jews in Western Europe?
1492 in Spain.
And why do you not know the dates of the expulsion of Jews
in the territories of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire?
Or those in France?
Or those that have occurred in…?
No,
the others don’t matter.
Only that one matters.
In 1492, three events happened at the same time:
the end of the Hispano-Muslim period in Spanish history;
secondly,
the expulsion of a section of Spanish Jews
while the others convert or stay…
and, evidently also, the Discovery of America.
Actually,
the expansive possibility that Castile had with Portugal on one side,
Aragon on the other, Nasrid Kingdom of Granada in the south,
was practically a strip of the Andalusian Atlantic.
Castile will go out to the great expansion
and will collide with the interests of Portugal.
Columbus is a man that the Portuguese discarded.
They are not interested in a bluff move,
which is to hire this very strange man
who says that there is a route to the west
and he is going to try to reach Asia by the Western Route.
Portugal
already had the Cape Route
towards the Indian Ocean,
which was the one that was known
and the one that led safely to India and the spice Islands.
For Castile,
it meant the possibility of finding a route to the Indies
without entering Portuguese territory.
This is probably what made Isabel and Fernando think
they could try it at a very low cost,
just over a million maravedis.
Castile could not give up on a business like that of spices.
It is truly boxed in
and Aragon has the Mediterranean
and a whole organized and incredible commercial tradition.
Therefore, you have to venture into unknown spaces,
and that’s how it was.
Isabel the Catholic now becomes,
without opponents,
the great Queen of Spain.
She is going to undertake a universal adventure,
first through the suppression of Islam,
and secondly through the great opening to America.
Spain’s action
is one of the most important in the history of humanity.
Discovery is a legal, political, economic, scientific
and technological fact in Western tradition,
which means that I arrive at a place,
I proclaim to the other Europeans that I have arrived there,
I return home and tell about it
and then I also manage to return to the place that I was able to discover.
When Christopher Columbus returns from that unsuccessful spice attempt,
he nevertheless brings
six or seven Taino men and women
and small pieces of Guanin gold…
which means he has reached somewhere interesting.
The kings have appointed him Viceroy,
Admiral, Governor of that place
and realize that this is a contradiction
to the modern political project they want to carry out.
Therefore, they look for someone
with prestige to be able to neutralize
the personalisms of Columbus
and use him for the hegemonic project the king and queen have.
Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca is going to become
the man of action
for American projects.
Every time they have to organize an expedition,
he starts from scratch.
You have to look for money, crew, ships
and all this is consolidated and coordinated by Fonseca
until he dies in 1524.
Then, there is the Council of the Indies
which is basically created to replace everything Fonseca did.
Between America and Castile,
the navigation flow is increasing
and that must be controlled.
How?
In 1503, the Casa de la Contratación is created in Seville.
It will control not only commerce
and laws
but also science and technology.
Pedro Medina’s book
is the manual
from which all the others in Europe will be inspired.
He is the one who is going to teach Europeans cosmography;
Pedro de Medina,
unknown to practically everyone.
As Pedro Medina said,
a current sailor is wiser than Aristotle;
he knows the world more than Aristotle.
Spain does not merely rise up
and that’s it,
as if Finland arose.
No, Spain rises up
and the ancient world collapses,
which is not just anything.
The ancient world collapses,
a fourth continent appears and, therefore,
the entire world appears.
It is the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.
This document is one of the key elements
in the history of Globalization
as it proposes
what the Salamanca Academy establishes for the calendar’s reform.
The calendar, which until then had served Western humanity,
had been the Julian Calendar,
established and signed by Julius Caesar
in 46 BC.
The Julian Calendar’s reform
begins precisely at the University of Salamanca.
There, a series of calculations are made to close a gap that existed.
The mathematical problem was that there was no way to match
the Sun's rhythm with the rhythm of the Moon,
as seen from the Earth.
The struggle for the search for a perfect calendar
led to the mobilization of all the important mathematicians:
Catholics,
Jews,
Arabs...
On February 24, 1582,
the papal bull that starts the calendar’s reform
is issued by Gregory XIII.
This implied eliminating ten days
in the territories of the Spanish crown or in the papal territories.
October 4, 1582, becomes October 15, 1582.
That reform implied two things:
on the one hand,
that the salaries of those ten days be deducted for the royal officials,
today’s civil servants.
On the other hand, that debts were not computed.
It seems appropriate to the Council of the Indies
to send that reform to the new world.
The same thing happens in Mexico, but in 1583,
and it is replicated once more in Peru
and throughout its viceroyalty in 1584.
We find that, by 1586,
it is starting up even in the Philippines.
That implies, in turn, a global synchrony.
There is a constant use of the past
to say that the Spanish past is a disaster,
a horror, a colonial state…
and also, another aspect, the Inquisition,
and together with this one, more aspects are added…
This is the idea that Christians are the bad guys.
This fantasy paradise existed
and then the Christians came to establish their Inquisition.
More or less, this is the Black Legend.
The Inquisition operated before in Europe,
more precisely, in France.
In England, the executioner took the accused to his house
and did what he wanted,
while in Spain there were certain laws.
The Inquisition was born, precisely,
so that the crime of religious intolerance
is subject to a structured legal process.
It took the territories that did not have it
a long time to be able to tame the crime of religious dissent of any kind.
Between 1540 and 1700 in Spain,
those rendered to the civil authorities to execute punishment at the stake,
were approximately 1,500 people,
of which, approximately half,
were in effigies,
that is, people who had died or were absent.
In 17th and 18th centuries,
witches were burned in France, England or in the United States...
and that is not talked about at all.
Between 1540 and 1700, approximately,
the witches prosecuted would be around 150 or 200.
And from 1604 onwards,
in the Inquisitorial Courts of Spain,
Italy and the dependencies in the Courts in the Indies in America,
the three courts that existed in the Indies,
there were no more witch procedures,
at all,
unlike what happened in other parts of Europe.
In the Germanic territories, this figure reached 25,000
and it is possible that it reached 100,000 in the whole of Western Europe.
A cosmic confusion occurs when it is understood that,
since there is no Inquisition in those countries,
the crime of religious dissent is not prosecuted.
That is false.
In the Protestant territories,
religious crimes became crimes against the State,
that is, there was a fusion between the Church and the State.
The queen is still the head,
she is the Pope of the Anglican Church
in the same way the Princes of Saxony were the Popes, of their churches.
Luther was a good servant at the service of those German princes,
who are the great antagonists of the European project of Charles V,
produces a creature that is going to have a very long life,
and is going to condition the history of the entire West:
propaganda.
What the Protestants, especially the Dutch and the English did
was to take advantage of the printing press
to publish books or pamphlets
in up to fifteen different languages
to discredit the Spanish Empire.
It works like a cartoon, but literary.
Exaggerate features that can harm us,
as a nation,
underline those acts that at certain times are seen as reprehensible
and omit those features that can favor us in the international arena.
All anti-Catholic propaganda is,
by definition, anti-Spanish.
It was born to be a way of eroding the Catholic hegemonic power
which was from Spain.
The Germanic lords have the right to impose their religious option
on the population of the territory they govern.
This is called religious freedom.
With Luther’s and Calvin’s idea,
in the face of salvation, works are worth nothing,
because otherwise God would be a wimp in the hands of man.
Otherwise freedom would work in the face of salvation,
and it cannot work.
The total attributes of God,
omniscient, omnipotent, allknowing, omnipresent…
would fall apart.
So, if God is all that,
man cannot be free.
This is Luther.
This is Luther, Servo Arbitrio,
Luther, who triggered all this controversy.
Lutheranism is a manifestation of Germanic nationalism
and was deeply marked by that Germanic seal.
The Dutch needed their own heresy
and Calvinism comes to offer them
that ideological ammunition that William of Orange totally needs.
Calvinism in Geneva
caused about 500 deaths
in the roughly 20 years that John Calvin
controlled and ruled that city,
a city of about 10,000 inhabitants.
John Calvin has today,
in the Park of the Bastions of Geneva,
a monument several meters high,
placed by the city of Geneva to honor its reformer.
If we were to make a monument to Torquemada, for example,
who caused many fewer deaths, incomparable really,
we would have to leave the country.
It is inconceivable that something like this would happen in Spain,
but it is perfectly conceivable that it happens in Geneva.
How many people did Torquemada really process?
In 160 years,
1,500 people had been prosecuted at the stake
and that eliminates that simple, manipulable and grotesque idea
that the Tribunal was so bloody.
What we call torture today torture in the Inquisition was meticulously arranged
and was very limited,
much more than that the civil courts of the time.
Of course, the civil courts were much crueler and with less guarantee.
The popularity of the inquisitorial issue reaches such extremes
that it has become a real business.
A lot of money is earned by
exhibiting instruments of torture artificially manufactured,
based on images found in different parts of Europe
that are not Spanish and have never had anything to do with the Inquisition,
and that are shown
as if at some point they had been used by the Inquisition.
This has not stopped growing,
it manifests itself in textbooks, comics and movies
and in this kind of very crude and even vulgar falsification.
It is one more development, of the absurd Black Legend
and of the enormous profitability this argument has had
and continues having.
Whoever, without much information, sees this
is convinced that these atrocities were a normal practice
in the Spanish Inquisition.
And then, that affects Spain, in terms of the image that the country has.
But, everyone is content, you see? And nothing happens.
The Protestants used the Spanish Inquisition
to build the myth of the Black Legend.
The English and the Dutch assemble History's first propaganda campaign
to weaken Spain,
to attack it and to mobilize other dynasties against it,
because in purely military terms,
they can't do it.
I have studied La Invencible.
I have studied it in my textbooks.
Instead of studying the war or who won it,
I have studied La Invencible.
La Invencible wasn’t relevant,
not even in the context of that war
which finally ended with an honorable defeat on England’s part.
England is quite a minor country at the moment.
We see a bit of the history of England as the great imperial power,
when at this moment it is not.
It was honestly not an invasion attempt.
A large part of the English population supported a change of dynasty,
which was really what it was intended to do.
Isabel I is absolutely dependent on a religious schism to be queen.
She cannot reign if this religious schism is not consolidated
as she is illegitimate.
She take the opportunity to contradict something very clear:
"We are people with less force and less power
but God has sent his winds against the emperor's ships,
against Philip II
and God is with us."
In its day, it was an act of affirmation of the dynasty of Isabel I,
but then, in the 17th century,
that act of affirmation becomes one of the myths of English,
and later British, nationalism.
It makes sense that English children study it.
But that the Spanish children study it, in the same key…
I don't know if what we have is a suicidal tendency, let's say.
I don't know, something is wrong there.
Textbooks do not adequately reflect the history of Spain,
they reflect it very badly.
History, in general, went one way and the history of America, another.
The proof is in the high school textbooks where,
when speaking about America, only Columbus and Cortés are mentioned, a bit.
But history is never explained.
It never was.
The conquerors never stopped.
Cortés is a man who succeeds young,
he goes to La Española, to Santo Domingo at the age of 19,
and he is rich in just ten years,
he has responsibilities and herds...
In a manner of speaking, he had no need to get into more trouble.
There is an urge that leads him to continue later to Cuba,
to listen to the rumors of the Western Empire
and to become the conqueror of New Spain.
He was a man well aware that he was opening new horizons for his own time.
Besides, he couldn't sit still, I think he was a hyperactive man.
There is a fascinating moment
when Cortés sends Carlos I his first letter
with a list including the famous feathers that are in Vienna
the Aztec plume
and a series of riches,
gold, silver, jade...
The offerings from the Aztecs to scare him so that Cortés would not advance.
The effect is the opposite as Cortés has more desire to go there.
Of course, those incredible riches stimulate his ambition.
Cortés can exercise violence
when he has to exercise it as captain of his army,
but he is also capable of being surprised and marvel at the American reality,
and not only to marvel but to describe it with enormous detail.
Cortés is Mexico’s inventor
He builds the foundations of a nation.
What more portentous legend than that?
A statesman who creates a new state is a unique case.
He even lays the foundations of the economic structure of Mexico.
It is awesome.
Hernán Cortés is a character off the charts,
he is magnificent.
Cortés, poor him, and a couple of other crazy people;
no dogs, nor horses, arquebuses or anything else.
They could never conquer an empire of a million soldiers
if it was not for the fact that the entire people,
subjugated by the Aztecs, threw themselves into the arms of Cortés
to free themselves from the blood sacrifice the Aztecs demanded of them.
The famous genocide did not exist.
The conquest of Mexico was not made by Hernán Cortés,
but rather by the Indians themselves.
Cortés had no idea where he got to,
or how many people inhabited the land,
or who were friends or enemies.
Marina, an Indian nobleman’s daughter,
knew perfectly well who she could ally with,
and she was guiding Cortés to build those alliances.
The true architect of the conquest of what is now called Mexico
has been a woman, who is Doña Marina herself.
I ask in class: Who conquered Mexico?
And people look at me as if to say "this has to be a trap."
And someone already says, Hernán Cortés.
No.
It was an alliance, an allied army.
Aztecs were one of many peoples.
Each of these people had their own peculiarity.
Therefore, they offered multiple responses of fear, alliance or combat
to the Hispanic presence.
This happens when something unknown comes into our reality.
The military conquest is not necessarily carried out by the Spaniards
but by the indigenous Mesoamerican in the name of the king,
who conquer the barbarian, semi-nomadic tribes of the North.
That is fascinating,
because they are indeed king’s soldiers and are part of the Spanish army
There is an image of a chief from Tetzcoco
who was in charge of conquering the entire part of Querétaro
in the north part of Mexico
He appears represented with his General flare
and his cross of Santiago as Captain of the Spanish army.
He could have been in Flanders,
directly.
He wanted to reach China as he always wanted to go further.
That is a frontier and innovative spirit.
Conquerors are frontier heroes
and I believe that this impulse is that of 16th century Spain.
In 1500, Juan de la Cosa’s map can already be drawn,
which is a spectacular advance.
In 1505 onwards, there are meetings of pilots in all directions.
The entire land of Mexico is traversed.
For an obvious reason, a passage does not appear as it does not exist.
There is a decisive point:
Vasco Núñez de Balboa.
On September 29, 1513, he bumps into the Pacific Ocean.
We have reached the other sea through the isthmus of Panama,
but we do not know how they connect by sea.
On their return of every trip to America,
pilots brought new information about the coast
that is then incorporated into a model, which was made in La Casa de la Contratación.
named Padrón Real.
In 1508,
the figure of the Piloto Mayor (Head Pilot)
and this Padrón Real (Royal Register) were created.
Burgos and Seville are the two great cosmopolitan cities of the crown.
What is special about Burgos is that,
since mid 15th century,
high-level merchants there handle a vast amount of money
and have branches in different points especially important for European trade,
such as Amberes, London, Lisbon...
The Haros are one of those families.
They are a converted lineage family originally from La Rioja
who usually trade through the fairs of Medina del Campo.
Cristobal de Haro is responsible for managing the Lisbon branch
and he reaches out where there is something to profit.
In 1515,
Juan Díaz de Solís enters the Río de la Plata
He did not know that Cristobal de Haro had already sent an expedition
with the Portuguese to explore the area.
Next step is going further south.
Haro met Fernão Magalhães, Fernando de Magallanes, in Lisbon.
They were both angry with the king of Portugal,
and somehow, they understand that their best chance is going to be in Castile.
Haro's role will be fundamentally financial.
He was, together with Juan de Fonseca, the shipowner.
Magallanes, who was a naturalized Spaniard.
carried all the weight of the expedition.
He manages to take the step
from the North Sea
to the South Sea.
The dimension of the Pacific is established here.
There was a sea between Asia and America,
which is the largest body of water on the planet.
Until that moment this was not known.
And with this, an ordeal begins.
Day by day, the Pacific is killing people.
When he got to the Philippines,
to Cebu,
Magallanes is almost a missionary.
He starts preaching and so on.
- Bring me the gifts for King Humabón.
- Yes, my captain.
- These are gifts that I offer you, and you, madam
They are fabrics from Spain.
In Cebu, King Humabón and his wife are baptized.
King Humabón is named after Emperor Carlos,
and his wife, is named after Carlos’ mother
who was Queen Juana,
the so-called Juana la Loca.
But the queen is craving that statue of baby Jesus.
Therefore,
Magallanes,
as a sign of friendship and goodwill,
donates that statue of the Cebu child
to Queen Juana.
Magallanes gets into a war that was not his with Lapu Lapu,
who has a tremendous bronze sculpture in the Philippines.
The soldier Lapu Lapu kills Magallanes.
The Spaniards walk away and flee.
The child Jesus is left abandoned in Cebu,
and what do the indigenous people do with that child?
They worshipped him.
When it wasn't raining,
they took that statue of the child from Cebu
and carried it to the sea.
They soaked it in the sea
and they did not remove it from there until it rained.
For forty-four years,
this baby Jesus became the God of Water for the Filipinos,
the God who attracted rain in times of drought.
There is confusion among those who succeed him.
They lose ten months in Asia,
and when Elcano and Gómez-Espinosa finally take charge
of the two remaining ships,
they go to the Moluccas.
That is to say, they fulfill the objective for what had been organized,
which is to get to the spices,
the richest commodity there was at that time.
The value was incalculable,
more than gold, in weight
and, at that time, it was considered a valid element against Black Death.
When it reached Europe,
its yields were 10,000% at its highest.
Above all, clove and nutmeg,
which are unique spices, rare in the world,
that appeared naturally in those islands.
Above all, spices bring sophistication, right?
If there were spices,
the dishes were much tastier.
It was like today’s caviar or truffle.
Elcano trades there with clove, the most valuable spice.
He loads the Nao Victoria with it, and says, now I'm leaving, but which way?
There were two ships,
his and the Trinidad,
led by Gómez de Espinosa, another great man.
Gómez Espinosa says:
the shortest way is to go towards America,
but we are trying a new way back.
He doesn't make it.
Actually, the decision to go around the world was Elcano's in the Moluccas.
Elcano devised a more ingenious solution,
which was to try to use the Portuguese route,
trying not to run into the Portuguese.
That was his success.
Elcano's action has an impressive intrepidity.
The journey from Timor to Cape Verde is impressive.
An ocean liner doesn't do that.
Nao Victoria, which was the most modern ship,
consisted of floating wooden planks.
It was the one with the best caulking,
and that was probably what allowed it to hold.
Because the return from Cape Verde to Sanlúcar de Barrameda is terrible.
Those who have to sail a ship that involves fifty people
are indeed eighteen.
They are baling water, they are defeated.
It was very hard because they were going with very few troops.
There are no continents dividing the seas;
the entire planet can be crossed by sea.
A comparison is made with the arrival to the Moon…
I believe the trip around the world was much more important than that event.
When they arrive to Cape Verde Islands they are one day late.
The Portuguese say that it is Thursday,
but their charts say that it is Wednesday.
That means that the Earth is spinning on its own axis,
that is, it is a spinning globe.
For the first time ever, this is verified.
The same year that Magallanes' expedition begins,
the city of Veracruz and Panama City are founded,
and Carlos I is elected, not crowned, as emperor.
King Carlos I, who was young but no stupid
understands that he has to have a real investment to ensure some benefits.
Haro tried to make the trip a private initiative so the crown could not enter.
In the end, it is going to be a joint venture.
In this Armada Haro invested almost 2,000,000 maravedis
and the Crown around 6,500,000.
There were enormous benefits,
if we put aside the number of lives it cost.
The coverage of the entire investment is made
with just one of the five ships.
What they carry is so valuable…
Expenses were covered and money was earned.
A few months after Elcano’s return,
we already have a map on the table.
The following year,
in 1523,
Nuño García de Toreno made the first map
in which the American continent and the Pacific Ocean were already included.
That is, a world map as we find them today.
At the same time that a cartography is being made
for precisely that conquest of space,
the conquest of time is taking place in a synchronic and coordinated way.
The network we would call longitude and latitude today
is being formed through that circumnavigation
and Iberian expansion in the world.
All the continents and oceans begin to be placed as they should.
Not only America, but Europe and Asia are also discovered,
everything is discovered...
For the first time, the globe and the orb are discovered.
Continents, seas and oceans begin to be distributed
in conditions that adjust to the one and only geographical reality.
What bothered many people the most
was precisely that Spain built the first overseas world empire,
because there are two oceans in between
the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Even the Black Legend is still manifesting itself,
and it has continued to function.
There is no doubt that the Black Legend
is the most perfect work of political marketing.
Never in the history of humanity has there been a lie turned into truth
that lasted so long.
All the countries that have had power at some point in their lives
have always had people who have denigrated them.
We can call it Black Legend, propaganda or a denigration of the contrary.
Our case is a special one.
How is it different?
In the fact that we assume it from the first moment,
and we rejoice in that external denigration.
The hatred of Spain leads to admitting the Black Legend in a complete way,
which does not mean that there were errors, because there were.
There were acts of violence
because the company was a company of men, not angels.
It would be stupid to think that it was a company of angels,
it was a company of men.
And men are like that, sometimes violent, sometimes they love,
sometimes they fight, sometimes they hate,
sometimes they detest...
they have sublime acts and horrible acts,
Using only one part of that, as when you believe the Black Legend
the legend the enemy invented about them,
they begin to have a hatred for themselves
a contempt for themselves.
In reality, a lower value,
that is, to consider themselves less than they were.
All good things have been forgotten.
You still hear nonsense about the Conquest of America
and children and generations have not been educated
in the objectivity of history.
Spain not only discovered that new continent,
but also brought Western, European cultures there.
It opened printing presses, universities,
the magnificent urbanism that it developed
and, above all, a Laws of the Indies by which the Indians
were equal subjects of the kings of Spain,
as non-Indians of European Spain were.
The subjects of Felipe IV…
All are subjects of Felipe IV,
the Indians, the non-Indians, the mestizos, the non-mestizos,
who are born in Europe or are born in America.
Colonialism is something else entirely.
It is a model of expansion based on the difference between the metropolis
and its colonies.
England did not generate other Englands.
Spain did generate other Spains.
It was incorporating territories
and to all of them it brought their ways of life,
their rights, their aqueducts, their societies,
their organizational systems...
Spain is going to completely sow all of Spanish America with universities...
And there is a rosary of universities.
Lima’s University,
the University of San Marcos de Lima,
was founded almost seventy years earlier than
what we could consider the first North American university, which is Harvard.
When the English founded Harvard,
Spain had already founded ten universities.
It is always said that Spain had sent criminals,
swineherds, pig farmers like Pizarro, right?
The Spanish Empire did not export something worse than themselves,
but the best of themselves.
The best teachers in Spain come to America.
They go to Mexico and to Peru.
And one looks at those universities
and they had the same privileges
and the same conditions as the University of Salamanca.
It had always been said
that Spain had not participated in what had been the scientific revolution.
However,
at the University of Salamanca, there are great discoveries of physics,
of the Earth.
In 1555, Domingo de Soto
formulates in a book the law of free fall,
but in the books that we have read as children,
it is written that it had only been discovered by Galileo Galilei,
sixty three years later.
Or, for example, in 1529,
there was a rector of the University of Salamanca named Pérez de Oliva.
who was explaining some new things,
among them magnetism.
According to science books,
magnetism is something invented by or that appears in Gilbert's first book
from 1600.
The same happens in medicine.
The solutions to the subject of syphilis by Doctor Villalobos,
or the discovery of the ear bones and the skull's structure
by Doctor Cosme de Medina or his student, Doctor Collado.
In 1516, Pedro Ciruelo published for the first time in Salamanca,
a complete Treatise on Mathematics.
Here,
Acosta's book on the Natural History of the Indies was written and published,
in which two very important elements appear:
Darwin's evolutionary theory
two hundred fifty years before Darwin
and the Humboldt Current Theory,
which in this case was discovered by Humboldt in the 19th century.
It appears in Acosta's work published here.
That is to say,
Salamanca was a leader in knowledge
and still today, we continue to enjoy its results.
There were a lot of positions in Spain,
from Father Las Casas to Fonseca.
There are many very diverse approaches,
it is not possible to give a single and monolithic answer.
Perhaps, the man who has gone the furthest in his vision
was Father Vitoria.
Do we legitimately have the possibility of having sovereignty over America?
There should be a people's law above all,
and to which all,
winners and losers, had to be accountable.
From there, the Salamanca School was born,
but it does not stop revealing a philosophical
and legal valuation of persons.
Castile, or Spain, has arrived,
and has imposed its law because it is the victor.
But what he proposes is that it is possible to evangelize
without conquering.
Basically, from there on, an extremely interesting development
will take place in the Salamanca School,
which is, somehow, one of the great legacies
of our story.
If one crosses the Atlantic,
goes through the baquía, baquía is the tropical fever,
the drowsiness, the adaptation…
You survive
and become a veteran of the Antillean frontier.
It is a very risky enterprise,
comparable to the first circumnavigation.
nineteen out of two hundred forty-five arrive.
One would hire life insurance for that trip…
All the sailors who embarked made a will before leaving.
There is neither a course nor a road or route
that leads from Far East Asia to America,
which is the way back so as not to run into the Portuguese way.
That must be discovered so a first attempt is made,
followed by a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth...
All failed.
In 1559, Felipe II wrote a letter addressed to Fray Andrés de Urdaneta.
What does a king say to a friar?
Felipe II notes that Urdaneta says that he is able to bring the ships back,
from the Philippines to Mexico.
Urdaneta was ordained a priest,
became an Augustinian,
and was a professor at the seminary in Mexico.
Already sixty-five years old he began, with a renewed spirit,
to plan that expedition.
Urdaneta is the one who chooses Legazpi as head of the expedition.
Legazpi and Friar Urdaneta,
the cosmographer,
the adventurer, a character too…
Both of them are incredible characters.
They set sail from Mexico, from Puerto de Navidad,
with a practically secret destination.
In fact, it is read when they are already at sea,
and Miguel López de Legazpi reads the orders to the crew.
They don't go to the spices, they go to the Philippine Islands.
There are seven expeditions one after another,
spending money, blood, time and what there was not...
Until the genius Urdaneta arrives,
and says no, I am going and I am coming back.
He knew that he had to navigate to a northern parallel,
the closer to the 40th parallel the better,
so the winds and currents
were conducive to finally reach the West Coast of the United States,
around California, and then go down to what is now Acapulco.
Urdaneta himself is the one who insists on Acapulco to be the port of departure
and entry for those galleons.
Very shortly after, in 1571,
Miguel López de Legazpi founded the city of Manila,
and from that bay
it was finally possible to maintain commercial relations across the Pacific.
From that moment on, that astral conjunction is produced:
Urdaneta's return trip
and the crown of Portugal to Felipe II.
Then, my dear friend, the total panic attack.
From 1580 onwards,
the entire Asian market
is in the hands of the Hispanic Monarchy.
They achieved what they had been looking for
since the end of the 15th century.
This explains the paroxysm in the rebellions
that take place in the Netherlands.
There is a commercial aspect that is normally ignored.
You just have to see how the dates coincide,
and that helps to understand a lot of things.
In the first meeting between China and the West,
the Hispanic link is key.
It is the Spanish who become catalysts for this economic and cultural exchange
between China and the West.
I think there is no real awareness of the importance
the connection that existed between the Habsburg Empire and the Ming Empire had.
Butter and sugar began to appear,
which were things that did not exist in the Chinese Empire.
It is providential when the Spanish arrive.
They arrive at the right time.
China is increasingly demanding
that the payment to the public treasury should be made in silver,
and that only metallic payments in silver and nothing else would be accepted.
But China had very few original sources of silver.
The sources, the silver remittances, were also huge,
those that come from the American mines, mainly from the Zacatecas in New Spain,
and from Potosí in the Viceroyalty of Peru.
Through Manila,
which is the place of exchange with the Chinese
who come from the shores of Fujian,
an economy generates that will transform the world’s finance.
With China being the most populous country on Earth,
the conversion of its economy
around the silver standard
will have effects around the globe.
For the first time,
there is a standard, silver,
as a medium of exchange,
as a monetary unit.
The Real-de-a-Ocho is a Spanish coin
whose launch and above all, its later development,
coincides with the Conquest and the Empire.
After it is minted with new methods that make counterfeiting more difficult,
and maintains value, weight and measure,
the Real-de-a-Ocho becomes international currency.
In the United States,
the Spanish Milled Dollar, the Spanish minted dollar
is the monetary standard for the dollar.
Even the symbol is created with the two columns of Plus Ultra
and the tie that joins the columns.
That is the symbol's origin.
Many think that much of America's silver ended up in Spain, and it did not.
A third of the American Spanish silver ended up in China.
They added engravings to those coins to give them circulation.
They came out with some engravings, which they called Chops.
They were Chinese characters, sometimes conventional characters,
or sometimes the merchant's signature,
Chong, Cheng, Li...
Keep in mind that the Philippines was the bazaar of the East.
The Chinese say: The Spanish are interested in this.
Well, we are going to bring porcelain to them.
Are they interested in silk? We bring silk.
Are they interested in ivory? We bring ivory.
One of the characteristics of Buddhist art
is that they usually have enlarged lobes.
Therefore, it is striking that these virgins sometimes have very large ears
reminiscent of Chinese iconography.
Also, there are folds in the neck that sometimes appear a bit chubby.
The Chinese who are going to Manila every year,
understand what the Spanish wanted
and end up making religious images that make no sense to them,
or much later, Manila shawls
that can also have an affectionate meaning in Spain
but none for them.
- Where do you go with a Manila shawl?
Where do you go with a chiné dress?
- To show off and see the Verbena,
and to get into bed afterwards.
The famous Manila shawl had not been woven in the Philippines.
It had been woven in China,
but the Philippines traded it in America.
Then Spain created its own silk road, the Manila Galleon sea route.
Manila-Acapulco, Acapulco-Veracruz, Veracruz-Cádiz-Seville.
We call Manila the epicenter of the first Globalization,
because it is the place where Asia meets America,
and the place, above all, where silver arrives.
That is why Manila has essential importance
from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
Chinese goods were very cheap.
Because of that, the Galleon was an impressive business.
Manila Galleon's capacity,
one of the largest wooden ships of its time,
was more than 1,500 tons, even reaching 2,000 tons.
The importance of this trade route
has made humanity, the entire world, connect.
Consequently, it also arouses interest in exchange
between western and eastern worlds
because the products arouse curiosity about China
and vice versa.
It will be the longest-lived intercontinental route
that has ever existed.
It will end in 1815, with the arrival of the Magellan Galleon,
returning from Acapulco to Manila.
Almost 250 years of trade.
This explains the importance of all this exchange of products,
tools and techniques
that come from America to Europe, from Asia to America, directly.
They arrive for any type of cuisine and they open huge new possibilities.
There really was a connection through the fleet
and the entire administrative organization,
which made possible something that, even today,
with all the means we have, would have been difficult.
A widow from a town in Córdoba goes to Mexico.
In her will, she says
she was able to endow all of her daughters with her work,
and I believe there were four.
Finally,
at sixty years old, which is a lot for the end of the 16th century,
she continued working
and did business with an other daughter residing in Zacatecas
that would send her carrots
bought from farms on the outskirts of Mexico.
Preserved carrots.
She even managed silver resources,
to invest in the Manila Galleon.
Hers and others.
Reading those who were there and lived during that time,
you notice the existence of a link with the crown.
Maybe not so much with the rest of the regions or kingdoms,
but with the figure of the crown, absolutely,
"We are subjects of the Hispanic Monarchy"
and that is an identity card.
Two important elements of the action of Spain in America remain:
Catholicism
and Spanish.
In Asia, only Catholicism,
indeed in the Philippines.
Without Spain, Catholicism would possibly now be an entelechy
The vast majority of Catholics are in areas
colonized by the Spanish and the Portuguese.
In Greek, Catholic means he that looks at everything.
We Spaniards looked at everything.
We Spaniards aspired to everything,
and we have also travelled it.
You talk about the Spanish Empire
or you talk about the history of Spain,
and you automatically judge.
Immediately.
It is a moral history.
All the other histories of the western countries
are the history of that country,
but the history of Spain is not.
You immediately put a moral judgment ahead the Spanish history.
What happened in the Netherlands was not a war
between Spain and the Netherlands.
It was a civil war in the interior of the Netherlands,
between some Dutch who supported unity
and the great project that was the Catholic Monarchy,
and others who decided that the best option
in order to control that territory on their own,
was Secession.
- You see?
I think we are unfair with the Spaniards.
- What do you want? It is politics.
When you start to study different episodes,
you realize there are more Dutch with the Duke of Alba
than there are Dutch
on the Orange side.
It has been told as a David and Goliath story:
Heroic, young and wonderful David, always a lover of freedom...
That is, something wonderful,
in opposition to the horrible Spanish Empire,
obscurantist and Catholic,
which has taken freedom from that happy people,
that was the Netherlands' territory until the Spanish arrived and happiness ended.
The Habsburgs led a whole policy of support for Catholicism
which was persecuted by Calvinism and Lutheranism, et cetera.
All these circumstances make the history of Spain highly ideological.
Let's say you are a historian of modern France, right?
And you study modern France.
You are not saying all day long if Louis XIV is good or bad.
With Felipe II it's different as he must be immediately condemned.
You first proceed to condemn,
and once you have done it, in order to show that you are one of the good guys,
you can then say something.
But first, you have to condemn,
because if you do not condemn that story,
it means you are contaminated with the same evil.
It has always been said, right?
The decadence, Carlos II...
The Black Legend of an inquisitorial Spain,
a dark Spain,
a Spain that does not keep pace with the evolution of European culture
and so on.
What Carlos II had was an heir who came from abroad,
who found himself in need of prestige.
Obviously, the way of saying that this change has been favorable and positive
is a condemnation of the entire previous era.
Not at all.
Carlos II was not stupid.
Carlos II is not mentally weak but physically.
I think he is a mentally normal person.
Of course, the word "bewitched" is very beautiful,
there is no one to uproot it.
Not even if it were shown that he was a phenomenon, a great King…
First of all, Felipe V was the grandson of Louis XIV,
and the French shadow
permanently floated over Spain.
When Felipe V is named King,
Louis XIV begins to take over Spanish trade with America,
and to try to have even more of it...
It was a great business.
One of the elements was the rights of the slave trade in America,
and the commercial rights with Spanish America
sought by France, as well as by England
and Holland and later on, of course, the immense American market.
Deep down what is being dealt with is the desire of many to participate
in all the possessions and commercial possibilities of the Spanish Empire.
The Spain of Carlos III is a world power.
Where is that decadence then?
The Bourbon triumph meant that Spain became France's doorman,
and that has greatly conditioned us on the specific themes of the Black Legend.
In the 18th century, Spain still had the entire American Empire
with important reforms,
but that image passed through that French filter,
which says that the neighbors were the worst.
From 1808, the disaster breaks out.
This is the greatest moment of the disaster.
So far, the historical event that I think we can consider the most serious
is the Napoleonic Invasion.
The war of 1808 should not be called the War of Independence,
because we didn't achieve independence from anything.
Spain was absolutely independent,
and had been more powerful than France, throughout the modern age.
The Napoleonic Invasion absolutely destroyed everything
that had been done throughout the 18th century and previously in the 17th.
The invading army, the French, razed everything it could.
The English allied army was even worse,
because they burned all the factories that competed with England...
For six years, we had the longest Napoleonic War in Europe,
and then bad luck that Fernando VII came.
Long Live Spain.
Long Live Spain
and Death to France
who burned the papal bull.
From 1808 to 1810, there was a war between the Spanish Empire and Napoleon,
in America and in Europe.
Despite the dire circumstances and the continuous wars until 1810,
there is no rupture of the empire.
And deny faith
Long Live Spain
England had always looked at Spanish America
like the cat looks at the canary,
but it had not been able to eat it.
First, what it wants is free trade
as it allows them to sell their goods.
Secondly,
if this is going to produce a breakup with Spain,
from whatever arises,
many states have to emerge.
It wants territorial fragmentation.
Balkanization.
The Spanish Empire collapses,
and not even the viceroyalties survive.
There were the viceroyalties of Mexico, New Spain, Granada, Río de la Plata...
Great Britain preaches Campanario's nationalism,
so each one of the republics that are going to be created,
is created differently from one another
as if they had been enemies.
It also preaches Hispanophobia.
Civilizations.
It is the English language.
Spanish is barbaric.
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
despite being the greatest prose writer in Castillian,
that he handled admirably, he did not like it.
What is civilization?
The Protestant says catholicism is awful.
Everything is an atrocity.
What is civilization? It is the city of Buenos Aires.
What is barbarism? It is the barbaric inland
and its chieftains.
It must be razed.
That is why during the Argentinian Civil War
he tells a general not to spare gaucho blood
as it is the only human attribute they have...
Kill them.
When you study the 19th century and how the Argentine nation loses strength,
you find that the concept of extermination appears in the Law.
That is a very dramatic breakdown.
When you study the 16th century,
you find that all legislation is in favor of indigenous subjects.
The so-called “Pueblos Originarios” were the most faithful to Spain
because the indigenous masses in Peru, in Ecuador,
were against Independence, and that is how it was.
The War of Independence was not the end of a 300-year struggle.
No. For 300 years they lived in peace in America.
It would be desirable for the whole population
to stop using history as a weapon,
to stop using history to win votes,
to cut off Fray Junipero’s head, because this comes in handy...
We must leave history there, where it is.
Period.
Many American cities have been founded by Fray Junipero.
The first mass and the city’s name has been given by Fray Junipero.
San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Bernardino,
Sacramento…
Are all Christian names.
If they wanted to say in the past that Junipero's work did not exist or
Junipero's work was something bad for this place,
they would simply have changed the names.
At the time of the Franciscans,
the indigenous populations of California increased,
not decreased.
They disappeared later, during the Gold Rush when,
by the way, Stanford was California’s Governor
and the disappearance of all these population
occured in just twenty or thirty years.
The indigenous people called him Padre Viejo.
When he was already on his deathbed,
they removed pieces of his clothing,
they wanted to cut his hair
and they gave him a great funeral and great masses.
The natives wept a lot for him.
He is buried there.
Many of those Indians spoke Spanish.
Geronimo is called like that because he is from Arizpe.
Arizpe is a town founded by a Jesuit whose name was Geronimo de la Canal.
Two generations had been sedentary there.
From 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed,
and Mexico loses a little more than half of its territory,
the Apaches have to stay on the other side of the border,
as they absolutely refuse to abandon the lands
in which they had been reasonably well-off.
Most of the tribes
and populations in California disappeared
when the Spanish Empire disappeared.
It's the job of North American cinema to tells us how the Anglo-Saxons
advance against these evil natives,
who want to scalp and destroy them,
and they come up against these wild people.
This is simply trying not to see reality.
All the villages of the West,
which were already founded and evangelized,
disappear from history.
Someone is going to be to blamed for the disappearance of those populations,
and it is not going to be a white Protestant.
This distortion of history with a poorly told story
generates all that we have now.
There is one thing that is absolutely ignored:
The “Pueblos Originarios”, the natives, were never anti-Hispanic,
they always remained faithful to the Hispanic idea.
For this reason, the saying goes: Sir, the Conquest was made by the Indians
and the Independence was made by the Spanish.
- There is a lot of injustice, we can no longer bear it.
That is why, from the first of January,
we had no choice but to take up arms.
The Zapatista movement developed
as a response
to the state's lack of attention
to these indigenous populations.
Once the hostilities ended,
negotiations were conducted that resulted in the San Andrés Accords.
What did they consist of?
In that the Mexican state undertook to respect the uses and customs
of the Government and Administration of those indigenous populations.
What the indigenous groups understood as "traditional uses and customs"
were nothing other than the ones they had in the 16th and 17th centuries,
consolidated by the Hispanic Monarchy.
So, they claimed as autochthonous what had been created
during the viceregal system.
For the moment,
the laws that govern the interior of these communities are the laws
of the 16th and 17th centuries.
But, of course, they do not know it.
I have already sent a letter
to the King of Spain
and another letter to the Pope,
so that an account of grievances is made
and the native people are asked for forgiveness.
In historical processes there are neither good nor bad,
neither heroes nor villains;
There are actors who, depending on their own ideas
act in one sense or another.
It seems to me that it is a historiographical exercise to erase
the imprints of the Spanish-Iberian culture on the territory.
Artificially, as it happens, as day after day,
one encounters reality and with it that Hispanic heritage.
It is almost an act of psychoanalytic denial, right?
To deny our own past,
because otherwise it could not be explained that way
as three hundread years go a long way.
By 1500, this clear perspective has already been taken.
Native Americans are persons and they should be treated as such.
Therefore, they cannot be sold.
King Fernando is going to summon to Burgos the best theologians
and jurists in the kingdom to stipulate what to do.
They draft in the convent of San Francisco de Burgos
the so-called Thirty-Five Laws of Burgos.
They are a wonder of humanity.
There is one thing about Indian women,
how they cannot be forced into marriage,
how they can appeal…
It is a wonderful thing.
At this time, when slavery was absolutely normal,
it is very important that they stopped to think about something like that:
That they could have private property, their family home,
that their wives would be kept from other men…
It is not only authorized,
but Spaniards are asked to marry the natives.
And we found this from the very beginning.
From the second voyage of Columbus onwards,
Castilian families started to go there.
When institutions can advance,
women begin to go, often in groups of single women,
who have not been able or didn’t have an easy time getting married in Castilla.
They go to America because, in the early years,
there are mainly men there.
For example,
in Cortés' company there are women who do not want her husband to go alone
to such an adventure so they go with them.
There are nurses, cooks, prostitutes, obviously,
but there are also women who embark out of necessity,
out of love
or adventure.
In the new world, at least in the mindset of that moment,
creation is possible.
Colonialist countries do not export themselves,
nor do they provoke integration phenomena.
It is an absolutely commercial enterprise,
not one of territorial integration.
You see Christopher Columbus arrive in America,
and what is in America a hundred years later?
Something else.
To begin with, we have a phenomenon of extraordinary longevity:
It lasts for a very long time.
The painting of Martín de Loiola marrying the Inca Princess
is a gigantic statement of inclusion.
Spanish nobility did not deny indigenous nobility,
it accepted it as such.
They married them.
Those children that were sired continued to be noble.
They did not stop being noble because their mother or father was an Indian.
Until the 20th century, the British Raj had forbidden mixed marriages
in India.
They were forbidden in such a way... That they were excluded
from social and official life.
Maharaja of Kapurthala had to marry an Indian woman,
but as he married a white woman,
that marriage could not be recognized
and Anita Delgado couldn't be invited anywhere.
She had broken the rule.
She married an Indian man.
Something that absolutely characterizes
and defines Spanish colonization is miscegenation.
There was also reverse miscegenation,
indigenous men who married Spanish women, but to a lesser extent.
Approaching that world is very interesting
because you see figures that come from a culture
and are able to take root in a totally different environment,
and humanize it.
In a way,
they make that impressive cultural fusion
that I think is another great legacy:
human miscegenation, cultural blending, etcetera.
That is what defeats, let's say, the Black Legend,
which speaks of the Spanish being genocidal.
If you see us,
the Mexicans or Latin Americans,
we are a mixture between the Spanish who came from the peninsula,
or those Spaniards' children who were born right there in Mexico:
the Creoles,
the indigenous people, the mulattos,
and all those who lived in the kingdom’s territories.
On the other hand,
there is no mixture in the United States
or let's say, the Anglo-Saxon settlers.
The English Empire is colonization,
or the French Empire and,
of course, the Dutch above all.
The Spanish conquest in America should never be called colonization,
because they did not create a colony.
The American Empire did not create colonies.
It transferred the way of life of the Spanish and Spaniards moved there,
and they first creating viceroyalties, and then, during the 19th century,
our overseas province.
There were no colonies. They never were colonies.
There was a time when Mexicans clearly knew they were the world's capital.
The true capital of the Spanish Empire was not Madrid but Mexico.
The Philippines were called the colony of the colony,
because it was a Mexican colony more than a Spanish one.
Spain’s viceroyalty is with the Philippine governance.
It is like a coexistence, not only administrative,
but also a very rich cultural one.
In the 16th and 17th centuries in Nueva España,
the same was happening in Lima as in Seville,
including mores, reading habits, ambience.
They are equidistant from China and Spain.
The capital Mexico is worth more than Madrid in everything.
Mexico should recover the awareness of having been the articulating axis
of the economy of the world,
and of the importance that Mexican's silver had
in the consolidation of those international markets.
I think this could help us to deconstruct
the victimizing discourse of the conquered,
poor us, who were massacred.
No, just the opposite.
We lack a global version.
We lack a global history of the Spanish-speaking world,
of Spain and Hispanic America.
We hold the answers to many questions about Globalization
from the perspective of other cultures.
We are at a good time, on both sides of the Atlantic,
to rethink how we have constructed the historical discourse,
and adhere more to that reality
and less to the founding myths and the Black Legends.
World history cannot be explained without Spanish history.
There are stories that can be told independently,
but nothing of the current world is understood
without telling the history of the Hispanic countries and monarchy.
If it has always been true,
now more than ever,
the fight for the past is definitely the fight for the future.
In memory of our ancestors, for our sons.