Conquest sixteen century

I think we all have different views of what "conquest" means and we saw it during the first day of class. we all came up with different meanings for the word. For some of us meant war, religion, wealth, expansion, dominance etc. conquest to me meant religion, wealth, war, taking over empires, and most important greed from the conquerors and and respective kingdom. After reading the first chapters of this book i started to change my mind. to me conquest started to become a bunch of spanish adventures looking for higher status. all conquerors or "conquistadores" followed a set of guidelines, when their exploration and conquest of new territory was over they had to report it to the king in order to get merit for it. This was called probanza de merito (proof of merit) this probanzas allowed this adventures to get rewards for their findings.(12) further conquest procedures were developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth century this were seven guidelines and strategies adventures followed in order to be successful. These strategies were't new, maybe analyzed a little further in order to be more successful. For example number four as described by Restall was the need for conquerors to acquire native allies. usually adventures were outnumbered by the natives, they couldn't communicate with them, also didn't know the landscape of the territory they were exploring, also helped as military force, the more allies the better.(23) this conquerors were fueled by the need of territory and governorship of a territory acknowledge by the spanish kingdom, it gave validation for their exploration and use of money. most of the gold and silver they found was to pay debts in order to keep exploring and finding new territories for the spanish kingdom. the native allies played a huge role in securing new lands for the Spaniards, like i stated earlier the importance of allies was immense for example in page 47 the support to cortes from native allies was incredible, they overpowered the spanish but were a key element to the conquest. before reading this book i had completely different views of the word "conquest" and the history behind it. now I see that many things that i was unaware of played a huge part in the presence and actions of the spanish conquest