The Spanish colonizers of Venezuela had established…
April 1546 CE
The Spanish colonizers of Venezuela had established their first permanent South American settlement in what is now the city of Cumaná in 1522. (Cumaná had been the first city to be founded by Europeans on the South American mainland, by Franciscan monks in 1515, but it will continue to have to be refounded several times due to successful attacks by the indigenous people.)
The Welsers, an important German banking and merchant family, originally from Augsburg, had promoted an expedition under Ambrose Dalfinger, which in 1528 had seized the province of Caracas in Venezuela.
German knight Philipp von Hutten, a relative of the Lutheran reformer Ulrich von Hutten, had passed some of his early years at the court of the emperor Charles V. He had later joined the band of adventurers, under Georg von Speyer, who had sailed to Venezuela, or Venosala as Hutten calls it, with the object of conquering and exploiting this land in the interests of the House of Welser.
The party had landed at Coro in February 1535 and Hutten had accompanied von Speyer on his long and toilsome expedition into the interior in search of treasure (El Dorado).
He had become governor (captain-general) of Venezuela in December 1540, after the death of von Speyer in June.
He had vanished into the interior soon after this event, returning after five years of wandering to find that a Spaniard, Juan de Carvajal, had been appointed governor in his absence.
Carvajal seizes him, with his traveling companion, Bartholomew Welser the younger, in April 1546; the two are afterwards put to death.
Hutten leaves some letters and a narrative of the earlier part of his adventures, this Zeitung aus India Junkher Philipps von Hutten being published in 1785.
The Welsers abandon their Venezuelan venture in 1546, although they will hold Caracas for another nine years.
An abortive plan for German settlement from German Habsburg lands, to be financed through the Fugger bankers, will never come to fruition.
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