Diego de Almagro, also known as El Adelantado and El Viejo, was a Spanish conquistador known for his exploits in western South America. He participated with Francisco Pizarro in the Spanish conquest of Peru. While subduing the Inca Empire he laid the foundation for Quito and Trujillo as Spanish cities in present-day Ecuador and Peru respectively. From Peru, Almagro led the first Spanish military expedition to central Chile. Back in Peru, a longstanding conflict with Pizarro over the control of the former Inca capital of Cuzco erupted into a civil war between the two bands of conquistadores. In the battle of Las Salinas in 1538, Almagro was defeated by the Pizarro brothers and months later he was executed.
The history of Peru spans 10 millennia, extending back through several stages of cultural development along the country's desert coastline and in the Andes mountains. Peru's coast was home to the Norte Chico civilization, the oldest civilization in the Americas and one of the six cradles of civilization in the world. When the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, Peru was the homeland of the highland Inca Empire, the largest and most advanced state in pre-Columbian America. After the conquest of the Incas, the Spanish Empire established a Viceroyalty with jurisdiction over most of its South American domains. Peru declared independence from Spain in 1821, but achieved independence only after the Battle of Ayacucho three years later.
The Spanish colonization of the Americas began in 1493 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola after the initial 1492 voyage of Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus under license from the Queen Isabella I of Castile. These overseas territories of the Spanish Empire were under the jurisdiction of Crown of Castile until the last territory was lost in 1898. Spaniards saw the dense populations of indigenous peoples as an important economic resource and the territory claimed as potentially producing great wealth for individual Spaniards and the crown. Religion played an important role in the Spanish conquest and incorporation of indigenous peoples, bringing them into the Christian faith peacefully or by force. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. Spanish colonists settled in greatest numbers where there were dense indigenous populations and the existence of valuable resources for extraction.
The Viceroyalty of Peru was a Spanish imperial provincial administrative district, created in 1542, that originally contained modern-day Peru and most of the Spanish Empire in South America, governed from the capital of Lima. The Viceroyalty of Peru was officially called the Kingdom of Peru. Peru was one of the two Spanish Viceroyalties in the Americas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532–1592) was a Spanish explorer, author, historian, mathematician, and astronomer. His birthplace is not certain and may have been Pontevedra, in Galicia, where his paternal family originated, or Alcalá de Henares in Castile, where he later is known to have studied. His father Bartolomé Sarmiento was born in Pontevedra and his mother María Gamboa was born in Bilbao, Basque Country.
During Spain's New World Empire, its mainland coastal possessions surrounding the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico were referred to collectively as the Spanish Main. The southern portion of these coastal possessions were known as the Province of Tierra Firme, or the "Mainland Province". The Province of Tierra Firme, or simply Tierra Firme, was also called Costa Firme.
A Real Audiencia, or simply an Audiencia, was an appellate court in Spain and its empire. The name of the institution literally translates as Royal Audience. The additional designation chancillería was applied to the appellate courts in early modern Spain. Each audiencia had oidores.
The Captaincy General of Chile or Governorate of Chile, was a territory of the Spanish Empire from 1541 to 1817 that was, for most of its existence, part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. It comprised most of modern-day Chile and southern parts of Argentina. Its capital was Santiago de Chile. In 1810 it declared itself independent, but in 1814 the Spanish reconquered the territory, but in 1817 it gained independence as the Republic of Chile. It had a number of Spanish governors over its long history and several kings.
The Ecuadorian–Peruvian territorial dispute was a territorial dispute between Ecuador and Peru, which, until 1928, also included Colombia. The dispute had its origins on each country's interpretation of what Real Cedulas Spain used to precisely define its colonial territories in the Americas. After independence, all of Spain's colonial territories signed and agreed to proclaim their limits in the basis of the principle of uti possidetis juris, which regarded the Spanish borders of 1810 as the borders of the new republics. However, conflicting claims and disagreements between the newly formed countries eventually escalated to the point of armed conflicts on several occasions.
Francisco Álvarez de Toledo, also known as The Viceroyal Solon, was an aristocrat and soldier of the Kingdom of Spain and the fifth Viceroy of Peru. Often regarded as the "best of Peru's viceroys", he is as often denounced for the negative impact his administration had on the Indigenous peoples of Peru.
The Conquest of Chile is a period in Chilean historiography that starts with the arrival of Pedro de Valdivia to Chile in 1541 and ends with the death of Martín García Óñez de Loyola in the Battle of Curalaba in 1598, and the destruction of the Seven Cities in 1598–1604 in the Araucanía region.
The Governorate of New Castile was the gubernatorial region administered to Francisco Pizarro in 1529 by King Charles I of Spain, of which he was appointed governor.
After the territorial division of South America between Spain and Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) the colonial administration of the continent was divided into Governorates.
The Governorate of New Andalusia was a Spanish Governorate of the Crown of Castile in South America which existed between 1534–1617.
Colonial Argentina is designated as the period of the History of Argentina when it was an overseas territory of the Spanish Empire. It begins in the Precolumbian age of the indigenous peoples of Argentina, with the arrival of the first Spanish conqueror.
The first European to discover Chile was Ferdinand Magellan, in 1520, following the passage in the Strait which bears his name on a wall, at the southern tip of Latin America. Following the conquest of Aztec Empire by Hernán Cortés between 1518 and 1521, a new wave of territorial expansion occurs in the direction of the Inca Empire from 1532. This is done by Francisco Pizarro. The conquest of part of Chile started from 1535. This conquest is in a particular context and results in a partial settlement of the Spaniards in today's Chile.
Chilean expansionism refers to the foreign policy of Chile to expand its territorial control over key strategic locations and economic resources as a means to ensure its national security and assert its power in South America. Chile's significant territorial acquisitions, which occurred mostly throughout the 19th century, paved the way for its emergence as a thalassocracy and one of the three most powerful and wealthiest states in South America during the 20th century. It also formed Chile's geopolitical and national identity as a tricontinental state and one of the countries with the longest coastlines in the world.
The Governorate of New León was a Governorate of the Crown of Castile created in 1534. It was granted to Simón de Alcazaba y Sotomayor and later to Francisco de Camargo, expanding the territory to the Strait of Magellan bordering with the Governorate of Terra Australis since 1539.
The Governorate of Terra Australis or Governorate of Pedro Sancho de la Hoz was a Spanish Governorate of the Crown of Castile created in 1539 which was granted to Pedro Sancho de la Hoz and consisted in all the territories to the south of the Strait of Magellan until the South Pole and to the East and West the borders were the ones specified in the Treaty of Tordesillas and Zaragoza and respectively.
