In the first few years of the eighteenth century, the rivalry between Spanish Florida and English South Carolina reached its most violent and destructive stage. At the beginning of the century the Spanish area of nominal jurisdiction still ranged from St Augustine to the new settlement at Pensacola across the Indian mission provinces of Mocama, Timucua and Apalachee. While their physical presence had retreated somewhat, Spanish influence among the Indians still remained relatively strong and, at least at the beginning of the 1700s, thousands of Indian allies remained loyal to St Augustine. Nevertheless, English power was ascendant. By the end of the first decade, Spanish power would be decimated and the remaining Spanish colonists and Christianized Indians confined to the immediate areas around the two fortified settlements remaining to the Spanish in Florida.

The violent events and quick and utter destruction of the mission system in Spanish Florida during this period were remarkable, in part, because one decade earlier, St Augustine and Charleston both held to a convenient if shaky alliance dictated by events in Europe. That reluctant alliance of convenience for the Carolinians, however, soon fell apart as circumstances in Europe set England against Spain and the colonists in Charleston were finally freed to strike the rival that had so long contested English influence in the American south-east.