Conquista

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The concept encompasses the Spanish military campaigns in the Americas aimed at dominating local tribes and establishing colonies
2. it signifies a historical phase of territorial expansion and cultural domination by Spain over indigenous societies
3. Refers to the campaigns by Spanish forces to take control over native populations in the New World

Etymology: The Spanish noun "conquista" comes from the Latin "conquisita," the feminine past participle of "conquirere," meaning "to seek out, acquire, or gain," built from "com-" (an intensifying prefix) and "quaerere," "to seek." Its basic sense was simply acquisition or gain. Through Vulgar Latin, the word developed in Iberia into "conquista," and in Spanish it came to mean winning territory by force, and by the medieval period it was closely tied to the Reconquista, the centuries-long Christian campaign to retake the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule. Its sixteenth-century application to the Americas carried that older sense of conquest forward. The word was used for the expeditions led by figures such as Hernán Cortés against the Aztec Empire and Francisco Pizarro against the Inca, and it later became the standard label for the wider period of Spanish military expansion in the New World. English borrowed the term in the nineteenth century, and it appears in historical writing as a name for that era.