Born Then1493–1530
Life during the Collapse of the Taíno population
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
After Columbus arrived in 1492, the Spanish forced the Taíno of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica into labour for gold and food. Overwork, violence, famine and new diseases, especially smallpox from 1518, reduced them to a small remnant within a generation. The Spanish then began importing enslaved Africans.
Deaths: the Taíno population of Hispaniola fell from several hundred thousand (estimates vary widely) to a few thousand by the 1520s.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Sengoku period 1467–1590
- Expulsion of the Jews from Spain 1492
- Collapse of the Taíno population 1493–1530
- Atlantic slave trade (West Africa) 1501–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola) 1514–1799
- Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire 1519–1521
- Smallpox epidemic in Mexico 1520–1521
- Smallpox in the Inca Empire 1525–1527
- Ethiopian–Adal war 1529–1543
- Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire 1532–1572
- Cocoliztli epidemic of 1545 1545–1548
- Plantation slavery in Brazil 1550–1799