BORN IN BLOOD AND FIRE Chapers 1 3 Chapter 1 and the free market over government control and also advocates equal citizenship liberalism favors progress over tradition reason over faith universal over local values nationalism opposite of liberalism nonsedentary people led a mobile existence as hunters and gatherers and movement kept their groups small and their social organizations relatively simple the roamed the open plains sertao various kinds of scrub that might be thorny and drop its leaves in the dry season the Pampas peoples who gave their name to the Argentine grasslands were also forest people were often semisedentary they built villages but moved them frequently allowing old garden plots to be reabsorbed into the forest and opening new ones elsewhere Shifting cultivation was thus a successful adaptation nonsedentary Tupi semisedentary societies some indigenous people were fully sedentary and usually on high plateaus rather than in forests Tenochtitlan was surrounded by lake waters on all side and in these waters the inhabitants of the city constructed garden platforms called chinampas the builders of the Inca Empire had their own elaborate form of sustainable agriculture involving terraced slopes irrigation and the use of nitraterich bird droppings called guano for fertilizer a permanent agricultural base allowed the growth of larger denser conglomerations of people the construction of cities greater labor specialization Aztecs Incas and Mayas all had hereditary nobilities that specialized in war the rulers of the Aztec Empire were a people called the Mexicas Nahuatl the common language of city states in the region the Inca capital was called Cuzco which meant the naval of the universe Iberia was Spain and Portugal the Inca was really only the emperor and his empire rugged mountainous land the Moors brought with them the learning of the Greeks and Romans better preserved in the Middle East during Europe s Dark Ages they were better physicians better engineers and better farmers than the Iberian Christians whose languages gradually filled with Arabic words for new crops such as basil artichokes and almonds new processes and substances such as distillation and alcohol new furnishings such as carpeting and new sciences such as algebra and chemistry Iberian Christians believed they have found the tomb of Santiago Saint James the Apostle in the remote northwestern corner of the peninsula never conquered by the Moors the Moor slaying Santiago pictured as a sword swinging knight became the patron saint of reconquest and his tomb in Santiago de Compostela became Europe s greatest shrine another effect of the re conquest was to perpetuate the knightly renown and influence of the Christian nobility during the 1500 s Catholics and Protestants began fighting bitterly in western Europe and the monarch of a unified Spain led the Catholic side pouring prodigious resources to the war effort Portuguese commander was Pedro Alvares Cabral before turning back east he bumped into Brazil and named it the Island of the True Cross the the Portuguese settling the land meant clearing the forest and planting crops and sugarcane was the only crop with major export potential which made sugar cane the cash crop choice for centuries to gain the land and the labor of forest people like the tupi the portuguese resorted to force of arms which meant attacking and enslaving each tribal group of a few hundred one by one in bloody skirmishes an activity quite taxing to the limited manpower of the Portuguese particularly lethal were European diseases against which indigenous people had no natural resistance contagion ran rampant among Tupinamba slaves in the close quarters of plantations the African slave trade began to take on massive proportions only after the Portugues arrived in the 1400 s material resources the first area to be affected by the slave trade was West Africa from Senegal to Nigeria the Aztec and the Inca emperors commanded tens of thousands of warriors and vast by the time Hernan Cortes the spanish leader found the Aztec Empire had already been dealing with indigenous Americans for fifteen years the leader of Peruvian expedition Fransisco Pizarro Inca ruler Atahualpa was hostage in 1532 Atahualpa had an army in the tens of thousands and Pizarro had only 168 Spaniards Spanish advantage in military technology horses steel and gunpowder gave the invaders a devastating superiority of force man for man against warriors armed only with bravery and stone edge weapons spanish weaponry produced staggering death tolls Spanish tactic repeatedly used in Mexico the surprise slaughter of indigenous nobles within an enclosed space At Pizarro s invitation Atahualpa s followers entered a square where Spaniards had hidden cannons Then Spaniards on horses charged into the masss of bodies swinging their long steel blades in bloody arcs sending heads and arms flying as no indigenous American weapon could do Pizarro used indigenous allies to topple the Inca Empire and had imposed a centralized power that broke up rival city states and resettled their populations the Incas had a state religion that provided an ideological justification for empire Inca civil was began Atahualpa lead one side and his brother Huscar lead the other Pizarro was able to play the two sides against each other which achieved the ultimate victory for himself encomienda treasure captured from indigenous royalty indigenous people were entrusted to each conqueror who had the responsibility of Christianizing them and the privilege of making them work for him conquerors who received encomiendas became much like European nobles able to live from the labor of serf like farmers who delivered part of their crops as regular tribute the Spanish normally created encomiendas out of already existing communities with their own indigenous nobles whom the Spanish called caciques Mexico officially became New Spain Malinche a Spanish deformation of her indigenous name Malintzin She was one of twenty female slaves given to Cortes as he sailed up the Mexican coast seeking the Aztec Empire in 1519 She spoke Maya and Nahuatl and she learned Spanish in months the Aztec princess Techichpotzin baptized Isabel was the daughter of Moctezuma Isabel de Guevara helped conquer Argentina and Paraguay in 1530 s and 1540 s Ines Suarez was a 30 year old woman when she came to America in 1537 alone looking for her husband She first searched in Venezuela then Peru where she