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Essay on Conquistadors
There is one historical event which everybody knows. Even those whose predilections do not turn towards history know that Christopher Columbus discovered America. This general knowledge of one fact indicates how that singular achievement, the discovery of a New World, has captivated the sentiment of all Europe and all America as the most notable event in secular history. But Columbus chiefly concerns us here as the man who gave to Spain a vast and opulent dominion beyond the Ocean, as the first of the Conquistadores. He found the way for those Spanish explorers, discoverers, conquerors and settlers who in the course of a marvelous half-century penetrated a world of novel and fantastic pattern, subdued two extensive monarchies rich in hoarded treasures and in unworked veins of precious metals, traversed forests, deserts, mountains, plains and rivers of a magnitude hitherto unknown, and marked out the limits of an empire nearly twice the size of Europe with an audacious and almost careless rapidity, lavish of effort, suffering, violence and human life.
The most intriguing finding of initial research on the coffee planters in Costa Rica was that, as a social group, they emerged from Spanish colonial nobility, principally from the conquistadors. Their forefathers had monopolized power since the Conquest and have continued doing so until the mid-twentieth century. They were only one group (albeit the most important politically and economically) that had descended from the conquerors, for among others were cattle ranchers, sugarcane planters, and professional groups such as medical doctors, lawyers, and engineers. All were closely related by bonds of kinship and were tied to national power centers through political parties. In this sense they formed a ruling class.
As per encyclopedia, Conquistador was a military leader in the Spanish conquest of the New World in the 16th cent. Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, and Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, were the greatest of the conquistadors......
