Olid, Cortés marched overland hundreds of kilometers through the steamy jungles of Yucatán and the Petén to subdue Olid himself The 19-month-long campaign was a disaster When he finally reached Honduras, his forces thinned and exhausted, Cortés found that Las Casas and González had already vanquished and beheaded Olid Despite a Mexican tribunal’s sentences of death, Cortés ensured that neither was punished for the act civil wars From the 1520s to the 1550s, in short, much of Central America became a vast killing ground Civil wars between rival conquistadores continued, while divisions and fractures among indigenous polities led the Spanish to adopt a piecemeal strategy, prolonging the process of conquest and the violence that accompanied it Frustrated in their efforts to discover large caches of gold and other treasures and repeat the experience of Cortés in Mexico, the Spanish invaders turned to whatever marketable commodities from the region might turn a profit In the late 1520s, gold was discovered in Nueva Segovia in north-central Nicaragua The mines soon proved disappointing By this time it had become apparent that the region’s most valuable marketable commodity was human labor The slave trade thus became the most important pillar of Central America’s early colonial economy Many indigenous peoples fled into the interior, joining other native groups that maintained stiff resistance against determined Spanish efforts to subdue them What the Spanish called indios bravos (wild Indians) in the tropical mountains and jungles of eastern Nicaragua and pockets of Honduras, Guatemala, and elsewhere remained outside the orbit of Spanish control throughout the colonial period Estimates for the Pre-Columbian population of Central America vary widely By the best estimates, as many as million people inhabited the isthmus before the Spanish arrival, with well over million in western Nicaragua and southern Honduras From 1528 to 1550, an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 indigenous inhabitants of this latter region were enslaved Many died en route, the survivors shipped primarily to Panama and Peru A report to the Crown of 1535 estimated that by that time approximately one-third of western Nicaragua’s Indians had been enslaved The slave trade peaked between 1536 and 1540 In 1550, the practice was banned, by which time it had slowed to a trickle, for the simple reason that there remained few Indians left to enslave By this time, warfare, forced labor, the slave trade, and diseases had reduced western Nicaragua’s indigenous population Charles I 69 by around 90–95 percent Following a larger pattern in the Americas—wherein lowland indigenous populations experienced more precipitous declines than highland populations—the highlands of Guatemala saw a lesser decline, but still of enormous magnitude As elsewhere in the Americas, the Spanish intended that a spiritual conquest accompany the military conquest Religious conversion of the natives was meant to be integral to their economic and political subjugation In practice, the spiritual conquest was much more partial and incomplete than the military conquest, as many indigenous spiritual beliefs and practices survived for centuries beneath a veneer of Roman Catholicism In sum, and by almost any measure, the Spanish conquest of Central America represents one of world history’s most destructive holocausts, one that bequeathed to subsequent generations across the region a legacy and social memory of violence that endure in various forms to the present day See also Brazil, conquest and colonization of; Caribbean, conquest of the; sugarcane plantations in the Americas; voyages of discovery Further reading: MacLeod, Murdo J Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973; Newson, Linda A Indian Survival in Colonial Nicaragua Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987; Recinos, Adrián, Delia Goetz, and Dionisio José Chona, trans The Annals of the Cakchiquels Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958; Woodward, Ralph Lee, Jr Central America: A Nation Divided, 3rd ed New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 Michael J Schroeder Charles I (1600–1649) English monarch Charles I, the most tragic king of the House of Stuart, was born at Dunferline in Fifeshire in Scotland on November 19, 1600 Charles was the second son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark When Charles was three, his father became king of England in March 1603, on the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the last from the House of Tudor Charles became heir to the throne in 1612, when his elder brother Prince Henry died In November 1616, he was made Prince of Wales, and thus first in line to succeed his father on what were now the combined thrones of England and Scotland