Motivating Factors

In many of the books that we have read this semester, we have seen that the motivating factors for the Spanish conquest was that fact that they were looking to find power, spread their religious ideologies, and find wealth. In Sterns book, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest we see that these motivating factors are very similar to those of the other books we have read. For instance, Stern states that Pizarro would distribute encomiendas to his conquistador allies. It was said that these conquistadores were free to do whatever they wanted in terms of commanding “…tribute and labor from his wards,” but he needed hold a higher standard, “As the personal representative of the Crown in the field, the encomendero could use lordship over “his” people to enrich himself, but he also carried the burden of forging colonial relationships with the new Indian subjects” (Stern 28). This shows that Stern distributed power along the new Incan territory that he had just discovered, and this is how he slowly was developing power of his own. By handing out this power, he was successfully networking. He was making connections with the Indians through his conquistadores by not having to personally build relationships on his own. This right here is just one of the many examples in Sterns book of the motivational factors that led the Spanish to change during this conquest. This particular example shows how they conquered land in order to gain power over their people. It was pertinent that they build a relationship with the Incans because that is how they would acquire this land and later on find wealth.