-
Columbus arrives in the Bahamas. Europeans are in the Americas to stay. Columbus eventually makes four voyages to the New World, but dies dejected and forgotten in Valladolid, Spain in 1506.
-
The Treaty of Tordesillas is signed, dividing newly discovered overseas lands between Portugal and Spain.
-
The encomienda system begins, granting Native Americans to Spanish encomenderos as slaves. The Spaniards are tasked with protecting the natives and teaching them Christianity. The system is rife with abuses.
-
Geographer Martin Waldseemüler is first to use the name "America" to refer to newly-discovered continents, after Italian merchant, explorer, and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. Columbus loses out on lucrative naming rights.
-
Vasco Nuñez de Balboa becomes the first European to gaze upon the Pacific Ocean after cutting his way across the Isthmus of Panama.
-
Juan Ponce de León discovers Florida.
-
Fall of Tenochtitlan: Hernán Cortés and approximately 100 Spaniards capture the capital of the Aztec Empire.
-
La Noche Triste: The "Night of Tears" in which almost two thirds of Cortés' men—nearly 800 in total—are killed as they try to escape Tenochtitlan after the death of Moctezuma.
-
Ferdinand Magellan's ships are the first to circumnavigate the globe. Magellan himself is killed by natives in the Pacific.
-
Cortés and his men conquer the entire Aztec Empire in what will later become Mexico.
-
The Spanish import the first African slaves to the territory that will later become the United States.
-
Juan Diego, a Mexican peasant, has an apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Before long, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe becomes the patron saint of the New World.
-
Francisco Pizarro invades the Incan Empire and begins the conquest of Peru.
-
A Basque army veteran named Ignatius Loyola founds the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. Their mission is to become an "Army of God" under papal authority to root out heresy and Protestantism. They set up missions throughout the New World in an effort to win souls for Catholicism by converting Native Americans.
-
The first printing press is set up in Mexico City. Printing comes to the New World.
-
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado leads an expedition in search of El Dorado, the mythical Seven Lost Cities of Gold. He travels for two years through the territories that will later become the American Southwest. He finds much desert but no gold.
-
Silver is discovered at Potosí in Bolivia. Spain begins to reap huge financial rewards from its New World colonies.
-
Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda debate the rights of Native Americans in the New World in Valladolid, Spain.
-
St. Augustine, the first permanent Spanish settlement in what will later become the United States, is founded in what is now Florida.
-
Madrid rises against Napoleon's occupying troops, beginning the Spanish War of Independence. Spanish colonies in South America use the opportunity to start agitating for independence themselves.
-
Mexico is founded with a Republican Constitution. Spanish rule in North America comes to an end.
