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The Treaty of Tordesillas is signed, dividing newly discovered overseas lands between Portugal and Spain.
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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.
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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.
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Vasco Nuñez de Balboa becomes the first European to gaze upon the Pacific Ocean after cutting his way across the Isthmus of Panama.
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Ferdinand Magellan's ships are the first to circumnavigate the globe. Magellan himself is killed by natives in the Pacific.
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Cortés and his men conquer the entire Aztec Empire in what will later become Mexico.
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Fall of Tenochtitlan: Hernán Cortés and approximately 100 Spaniards capture the capital of the Aztec Empire.
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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.
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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.
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Francisco Pizarro invades the Incan Empire and begins the conquest of Peru.
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Silver is discovered at Potosí in Bolivia. Spain begins to reap huge financial rewards from its New World colonies.
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Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda debate the rights of Native Americans in the New World in Valladolid, Spain.
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Santa Fe, the capital of present-day New Mexico, is founded.
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It takes 12 years of fighting for the Spanish to subdue the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico.
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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.
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Mexico is founded with a Republican Constitution. Spanish rule in North America comes to an end.
