However, the English were NOT in Carolana (what it was called at the time), nor in Virginia, nor in New England and yet the Spanish persisted in this idea that one of their missions in life was to simply exterminate any Huguenot (Protestant) settlers who showed upon the East coast.
I gather the Spanish were not particularly influenced by local signs of anti-Catholicism (way back then).
Actually, there was a Protestant movement or two that took place in Spain. Most such folks ESCAPED to nearby France, or to England, or even to the Americas.
Pizzaro and his crowd were MOSTLY (not totally) Protestant in inclination. They were eventually suppressed by the Spanish Crown ~ many of them were subjected to torture, then were sliced up and their body parts tossed to the dogs which is almost certainly a sign Mother Church didn't consider them to be good Catholics eh!
A later expedition into "La Florida" appears to have had both Protestant and Catholic members ~ DeSoto's group had folks handpicked by his champions in Madrid ~ who can only be described as having Huguenot interests at heart (rather than Catholic interests), although that would be better described as French vs Spanish interests.
Part of the problem in digging up information on the Protestant cause in Spain is the Spanish crown was fairly successful in killing them, or driving them away.
At the same time the Spanish empire suddenly became so enormous Protestants, and Moors, and even Jews could escape into that frontier and simply disappear.
So, let's go all the way to the top to the Spanish court itself. Half those people were blood relatives of Rene d'Anjou ~ his great grandsons had actually founded what turned out to be the two major political factions in the French Religious Wars ~ the de Guise (Rene was, of course the Duc du Guise himself, but from an earlier time), and the political arm of the Huguenot (Protestant) movement.
Although those wars were yet to come (1514) the political divisions in the Spanish court closely reflected the political divisions in the very related French court.
The Protestants in France put off their Doomesday until the 1600s. Those in Spain were not so lucky.
In the end an exceedingly large percentage of the French Protestant families moved to America and became remarkably important to the development of our system of government ~ several Huguenots were very instrumental in writing the Bill of Rights for example.
We need not go into all the personalities of course, but the Religious Wars of the 1500s were more political than religious in nature, and by the 1600s, the French, very much dominated by Catholic interests, was allied to the Swedish Empire, then the epitome of Protestant belief.
Together those two powerful states CARVED UP EUROPE and pretty much killed most of the people in the German speaking areas.
Ever wonder why Italy didn't manage to follow up on its early discoveries in the New World? Check Religious Wars and 30 Years War. They turned into a backwater in that period.
Bringing up the notion that America was somehow peculiar, or mean, because there was some anti-Catholicism lurking around in the 1800s does nothing but draw upon a set of emotions and a body of politics that was supposedly put at rest through the mechanism of the Peace of Westphalia ~ which established the concept of the modern nation-state.
It was Jefferson himself, hardly pro-Catholic, who set in motion the very idea that Catholics should be free to immigrate into America.
Frankly, I'm still waiting on my reparations check from the Spanish ~ that'd better come quick before I run out of money.
There were NO Huguenots in the South after their one-month residence in what is now Jacksonville, where they were sent by the French king (a Catholic but considered to be a crypto-Protestant) as a combined militar and settlement expedition to set up a base from which the French could attack the Spanish treasure fleets and hopefully seize the land claimed and explored by the Spanish 50 years earlier.
The Huguenots at that time were mostly Normans, a seafaring people, and this was one of the reasons that most of the original “Pirates of the Caribbean” were actually Protestants. They roamed the area attacking the Spanish and Catholic communities in general, and in fact one of the reasons that Haiti is French is that a group of French Protestant pirates had settled there. The Spanish were never able to drive them off Hispaniola, because it was a remote location and the Spanish king would never cut loose with enough money to fund a serious attack. Eventually the pirate town became simply another French town, and that was the birth of Haiti. But look at Haiti, a basket case, and the now prosperous Dominican Republic (with virtually the same heavily African ethnic component) and you’ll see what lousy settlers the French were!
Huguenots came back into the South from the north many, many decades if not centuries later.
BTW, the Catholic Carroll set up the first truly free, non-confessional community in the US in what is now Maryland. His grandson converted to Anglicanism after marrying an Anglican and immediately started to attack Catholics and in fact revoked the tolerance acts put in place under Carroll.
And the poor UU’s are nuts. I know some very nice elderly UU’s, but they’re all living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Italy didn't because it's ports are in the Mediterranean and Italy didn't discover the new world -- Italians did but flying under the flag of Spain or Portugal -- both Atlantic facing powers
In the entire thrust of History you see different forces that move nations
In Sumeria and Harappa and the Nile what was important was to be on a river, not near the sea
At the time of Sargon II to Alexander the important thing was to control the land passages.
Then the Eastern Mediterranean opened up (or rather it always was, but now it became strategically important) and Italia was a back-water
But then, as the Western Mediterranean and British tin trade grew, Italy with it's ports on both the east and west was now strategically important, hence the importance of Rome AND Carthage
But this lasted until Columbus discovered America -- remember that in 1400, the population of England+Wales was 2.5 million, Scotland was 0.5 million and Ireland the same, all of Germania + the Netherlands was 12 million and France was 12 million too --> but much of France's population was near the south as it had always been. Ditto for Spain and Italy's population was comparatively huge - 11 to 12 million and with massive trading powers in Pisa, Genoa, Naples and Venice.
Italia (I use that as Italy was not a united country then until the 1800s) declined for the same reason that other Mediterranean powers declined -- the world passed by them.
Italy was not involved in the 30 years or religious wars and was hardly affected by the Reformation, so their decline, was, as I stated, purely because the trading region passed them by
the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was still in control of her territory that includes most of what is now Poland, Lithuania, Kaliningrad, Belarus, Western Ukraine, Bessarabia etc.
The only "carving up" was the Germanic lands and the real victors were the Swedes. The French just got a divided Germany (which was a big win for them).
Finally, these two states didn't "pretty much killed most of the people in the German speaking areas." -->Neither France nor Sweden can be blamed for what the Germanics did to themselves
Again, the population loss, while huge was not "most of the people" -- the reduction in population is estimated at 15% to 30% including deaths due to disease and of course the scorched Earth policies etc. The Peace of Westphalia did not give the concept of the nation-state. That was more formed due to the French Revolution and in the middle 1800s.
until the middle 1800s, you could be "French" or "Russian" or "British" and speak "Breton" or "Polish" or "Welsh", but by the mid to late 1800s there was a drive to stamp out this and make the states one in language, etc. etc.