The name derives from the Spanish main city on the island, Santo Domingo , which came to refer specifically to the Spanish-held Captaincy General of Santo Domingo , now the Dominican Republic. The borders between the two were fluid and changed over time until they were finally solidified in the Dominican War of Independence in The French had established themselves on the western portion of the islands of Hispaniola and Tortuga by In the Treaty of Ryswick of , Spain formally recognized French control of Tortuga Island and the western third of the island of Hispaniola.
France controlled the entirety of Hispaniola from to , when a renewed rebellion began. The last French troops withdrew from the western portion of the island in late , and the colony later declared its independence as Haiti, the Taino name for the island, the following year. Spain controlled the entire island of Hispaniola from the s until the 17th century, when French pirates began establishing bases on the western side of the island.
It was also called Santo Domingo , after Saint Dominic. The western part of Hispaniola was neglected by the Spanish authorities, and French buccaneers began to settle first on the island of Tortuga, then on the northwest of Hispaniola. Spain later ceded the entire western coast of the island to France, retaining the rest of the island, including the Guava Valley , today known as the Central Plateau.
The Spanish colony on Hispaniola remained separate, and eventually became the Dominican Republic , the capital of which is still named Santo Domingo. When Christopher Columbus took possession of the island in , he named it Insula Hispana , meaning "the Spanish island" in Latin. By the early 17th century, the island and its smaller neighbors, notably Tortuga, had become regular stopping points for Caribbean pirates.
In , the king of Spain ordered all inhabitants of Hispaniola to move close to Santo Domingo, to avoid interaction with pirates. Rather than securing the island, however, this resulted in French, English and Dutch pirates establishing bases on the now-abandoned north and west coasts of the island.
