Empire Rising: Spain

The news and photos of Carlo personally receiving the first place bullfighter, Sebastian Sharp, were reprinted by major newspapers, becoming the hottest news in Spain in November 1877.

Sebastian Sharp himself held the highest honors, hailed as Spain’s most powerful bullfighter, idolized by many Spanish youths, and admired by many young Spanish girls.

This made many bullfighters envious; they secretly resolved to achieve better results in the new year’s bullfighting competition, to replace Sebastian Sharp as the nation’s idolized hero.

However, Carlo had no time to pay attention to this, as in mid to late November 1877, bad news came from the Congo Territory: some plantations established by Spain in the Congo Region were plundered by local indigenous forces.

The Congo Territory created by Spain was vast, estimated at hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Because no major powers had deeply colonized the African interior, Spain could occupy the land without restraint.

Of course, occupying without restraint didn’t come without costs. Currently, Spain’s control over the Congo Territory wasn’t strong; effective control was really only over the Guinea-Congo Passage covered by the railway and the few dozen upstream colonial points.

The total area of these colonial points was only tens of thousands of square kilometers, with a population of less than ten thousand.

Outside these colonial points lived at least millions of local indigenous people. At the beginning of the colonial establishment, relations between the colonial points and the local indigenous were quite friendly.

Colonial points could even trade materials to obtain food from local indigenous tribes, which was a reason for the considerable establishment of colonies despite initial material shortages.

After railways were connected, Spanish colonial points no longer needed to trade with indigenous people for food. On the contrary, whether building railways or developing colonies, plantation construction, etc., a large amount of indigenous labor was required.

This quickly destroyed the relationship between Spain and the local indigenous people, turning from initial friendly trade to hostility, and large and small conflicts broke out.

Fortunately, Spain had long dispatched a Colonial Defense Corps to station in the Congo Territory, which had ensured no major crises had occurred in the Congo Territory so far.

But a Spanish Colonial Defense Corps consisted only of 2,300 troops, with over half of the forces being drawn from indigenous people of various colonies.

This also resulted in the Colonial Defense Corps having weak combat capability, only barely maintaining the stability of the colony.

If the Congo Territory stayed at its current scale, this Colonial Defense Corps could barely protect the Congo Territory. However, the Congo Territory was constantly expanding to compete with Portugal for the scale of the Congo Colony.

Portugal’s colonization in the Congo had begun more than a hundred years ago, and they had achieved significant successes.

The purpose of Spain’s intensive expansion of the Congo Colony was to fully control the lower Congo River Basin before Portugal, allowing the Congo Territory to have its own outlet to the sea.

The importance of an outlet to the sea for a colony is self-evident, as the current international trade modes are mostly maritime, with overland rail transport capacities being quite limited.

If the lower Congo River could be controlled, providing the Congo Territory with an outlet to the sea, it would enter a period of golden development.

Moreover, the only competitor in the Congo Region is Portugal, which led the Spanish Government to expand the Congo Territory quite aggressively, having already expanded at least 300,000 square kilometers of land.

While the rapid expansion of the Congo Territory was good news, it also entailed a host of problems.

The most pressing was the security issue of the Congo Territory. Currently, the population of the entire Congo Territory was over ten thousand, mostly immigrants transported from Russia.

Meanwhile, the indigenous population of the Congo Territory was at least in the millions, posing a significant threat to the security of the Congo Territory.

More importantly, there were various indigenous tribes living on this land, with competitive relationships among them, making management quite troublesome.

East of Spain’s Guinea Colony inhabited by the Baka people, east of the Baka were the Zande people. South of both the Baka and Zande was the Spanish Congo Territory, with Bantu territories to its south and some indigenous kingdoms that had existed for centuries to the east.

In the lower Congo River, many indigenous states, including Anziku, Rungo, Engoye, Orenge, and Congo itself, still existed.

The presence of numerous indigenous nations and tribes made the order near the Congo Territory extraordinarily chaotic, making it no surprise that some indigenous, who hated colonizers, took advantage of the chaos to loot plantations.

Upon learning that some plantations in the Congo Territory were looted, Carlo immediately ordered the Congo Territory to organize a larger-scale army to safeguard territorial security and appointed Manuel Massias y Caduza, the Defense Corps commander stationed in the Congo Territory, as the commander-in-chief of the Congo Territory garrison, promoting his rank from colonel to major general.

Carlo had been vigorously cultivating Spanish mainland officers, among whom Manuel Massias y Caduza was a particularly outstanding representative.