In 1525, the very year that German nobles massacred those 100,000 peasants, the Spanish king Carlos I awarded the kingdom’s highest honour to Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who slayed 100,000 Indigenous people as his army marched through Mexico and destroyed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. The congruence of these two events is no accident. In the decades that inaugurated the rise of capitalism, enclosure and colonisation were deployed as part of the same strategy.
