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2. Spanish and Mississippian Violence
- The University of Tennessee Press
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ChApter 2 Spanish and Mississippian Violence The Mississippians and Spanish who squared off against one another in the sixteenth-century Southeast inherited long-developing and distinct cultures of violence. Some Mississippian elites used violence to legitimize their power over commoners, and many Mississippian communities went to war to acquire prestige goods, for religious reasons, and to accumulate war honors and prove masculinity. The Spanish soldiers who served under Hernando de Soto were fighting in the name of their sovereigns and according to the mandates of their brand of Christianity and notions of gender, and they stood to benefit economically from a successful expedition . Soto and his soldiers used a particular culture of violence that owed much to Castilian ideas about colonization. The most notable difference between Mississippian and Spanish violence was in the amount of death each caused. The conflict between Mississippians and Spaniards, and Mississippian and Spanish cultures of violence, set the stage for the violence that was to occur in the future by speeding the dispersal of large polities throughout the Southeast. The clash between Mississippians and Spaniards showcased sophisticated cultures of violence at the moment those traditions began to adapt to the violent realities of colonization in the American Southeast. Remnants of Mississippian and Spanish ways of violence would survive into the 1700s, albeit in forms altered significantly by the arrival of the English and the coalescence of early modern native nations. From the Christian reconquista of the Iberian peninsula onward, Spanish people—mainly Castilians, though others participated as well—had mounted increasingly expensive and aggressive expeditions against people they viewed as innately inferior to themselves, first in the Canary Islands, then in the Caribbean, and finally in mainland North and South America. The Spanish presence in Southeastern North America during the 1500s should be seen as a part, albeit a late and generally unsuccessful one, of the Spanish exploration and conquest of other parts of the Atlantic world. The Spanish combined the cultural theories they had accumulated through centuries of fighting “others” on the Iberian peninsula and in the Atlantic world with the military tactics they perfected in the invasion of the 30 Spanish and Mississippian Violence Americas as they probed the Southeast as a possible candidate for conquest and colonization.1 By the 1540s, however, the American Southeast remained firmly under native control. Still, Spanish activities reshaped the Southeast, weakening some groups, destroying others, and accelerating the changes that may have already been taking place as autonomous villages, and, later, towns and nations replaced the chiefdoms as the principal native polities in the Southeast. In fact, the conflicts of the sixteenth century proved to be the last gasp for each of these formidable cultures of violence in the American Southeast—or at least the forms of those cultures that faced off against each other. By the time the English began their colonial forays in the interior of the region in the seventeenth century, many of the chiefdoms Soto invaded had dispersed—a result of internal and external pressures—and autonomous villages demonstrated many of the characteristics which would define early modern Native American warfare. Similarly, after their initial violent and unprofitable excursions in the Southeast, the Spanish concentrated on setting up missions and drawing labor from native villages as well as protecting the northern rim of the empire from European interlopers. Future Spanish expeditions continued to engage in violence but were more attuned to the political realities of indigenous life in the Southeast. Forging a Spanish Culture of Violence By the time they reached the American Southeast in the 1500s, the Spanish had a longstanding culture of violence, and a superb military, with its roots in Iberian campaigns against Muslims and the conquests of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. In the years before Soto’s entrada, the Spanish would extend their domination over vast portions of the Americas. The two most stunning examples of this domination were achieved in Mexico’s central valley in the 1520s under the leadership of Hernán Cortés and in the Andes by Francisco Pizarro in the 1530s. The Spanish did not launch this assault on the Americas simply because they could. A number of complex cultural factors and ideas prompted the Spanish to exert extraordinary effort and spend colossal amounts of money to conquer and later to colonize the Americas. Their religious beliefs, like those of the Mississippians, placed great emphasis on military success. As Charles Hudson and others have noted, the term “Spanish” is flawed when...