Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  If partly inspired by Burgos, the connection with Aragonese precedents made the Casa more of a Spanish national institution than at first appeared. Its responsibilities were extended to include trade with the Canary Islands and the Barbary coast, while the mint in Seville was charged in July 1502 with coining the gold that the Casa should give it, though only a third of the gold of the Casa was to be treated in Seville, the rest being dealt with in Granada or Toledo.42

  The Casa began to function on February 25, 1503. Despite the advocacy of Piñelo, the motor behind this scheme was undoubtedly Fonseca, whose capacity for hard work and administration were shown to advantage.43 The establishment of the Casa in Seville also confirmed that city as the de facto capital of the Indies. A decree of January 20 had confined the government’s dealings with the New World to this new Casa, which was to be at once a market, a magistracy, a registry of ships, a center of information, and a registry of captains.44 A postal service was organized from it to ensure that the court, wherever it might be, would be informed of events affecting it within forty-eight hours. All trade with the New World was required to pass through the Casa. At the beginning, ships were allowed to receive their cargoes elsewhere and then go to Seville to register them, but after a while that was found impossible. All ships thereafter had to begin their journeys at Seville.

  Within a year or two an official map of the New World, the so-called Padrón Real, was being drawn and regularly revised by the cosmographer at the Casa for sale to the public.

  The Casa de Contratación’s powers were defined in a declaration from the Queen in July 1503.45 The Casa could from then on impose fines, send malefactors to prison, demand bail, and deviate from the city of Seville’s requirements. A decree of January 1504 allowed the officials of the Casa to issue licenses on whatever conditions they thought fit. Power was in their hands.46 But the words of the first declaration were as vague as they were far-reaching. Legal disputes between the Casa and Seville followed, and not until 1508 was it agreed that the judicial authorities in the latter should not intervene in the affairs of the Casa. In 1503, the disputes were continuous, as was to be expected with a new institution whose officials were feeling their way.

  Cadiz, with its deep bay, had, to be honest, a better, more accessible harbor than Seville. Ships leaving Seville had to pass Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the bar was dangerous, while the journey from there up the River Guadalquivir to Seville was difficult. But Seville had many advocates. It was easier to defend against piratical attacks than was Cadiz, on its peninsula, and it was closer to internal Castilian commerce. The goods that the settlers in the Caribbean wanted—wine, flour, olive oil—were more easily obtained in Seville than in Cadiz, which had no hinterland. The ports of the Río Tinto, such as Palos and Moguer, were too small and too close to the frontier with Portugal to be serious alternatives, for hard-won gold might have been easily smuggled thence to Lisbon if the Casa had been founded there. So, for two hundred years and more, the Casa de Contratación remained at Seville; and for two hundred years cannon would fire a signal indicating that within six hours heavily laden caravels bound for the Indies would cast off their moorings and begin to drop down the river to Sanlúcar and the sea.47

  The first dispatch of a ship for the Indies under the control of the Casa was in November 1503, when Pedro de Llanos, an old friend of Columbus’s, went out as factor to Santo Domingo to succeed Francisco de Monroy, who had died. Thereafter, as a matter of course, all emigrants to the New World registered first at the Casa.

  In March 1503, meanwhile, another decree provided that no more slaves—Berbers or black slaves from Africa—should be sent to La Española from Spain. The reason was that some of those who had been sent had rebelled and helped similar risings by Indians.48 The question of slavery in the Americas was left for a later decree. How many black slaves had already gone to La Española is obscure; such papers as refer to the matter are inconclusive. If the number exceeded fifty, it would be surprising.

  At the end of that same month, the monarchs dictated a detailed rule for the education of Indians into a civilized Christian life. The decree was entitled “Of Innocence and Confusion.”49 It seems to have been a reply to a report of Ovando’s, now lost. Cisneros must have collaborated in the drafting. The Indians of the islands in the New World were not to be allowed to disperse; on the contrary, they should be brought together to live in families in towns, so that they could be more easily instructed in Christianity. Each Indian family was to have a house. There would, as a rule, be a church, a chaplain, and a hospital in every settlement, all under a Spanish protector, the encomendero, to avoid the injustice of the caciques. The Indians would be taught by the chaplain to respect the property of others, and the encomendero would protect his charges against exploitation. Indian children would be educated in the faith and instructed how to read and write. The Crown also supported mixed marriages between Spaniards and Indians.

  All Indians would be encouraged to dress decently, and there would be no blasphemy (an injunction, of course, as necessary to insist upon in respect of Spaniards as of Indians). All would pay tithes and taxes. All fiestas would be Christian festivals, and there would be no naked bathing. All would be baptized and informed how best to renounce pagan customs. To protect the Indians, they were not to be able to sell property to settlers.50

  Another decree of late March 1503 embroidered these rules. It provided that “in each of the said towns, and next to the said churches, there should always be provided a house where the children in those towns should go twice a day and where a chaplain would be able not only to teach them to read and write, but also to make the sign of the cross, and learn the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave María, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Salve Regina.”51 This instruction explains why 138 short primers (cartillas) were sent to the Indies in 1505, probably written by Hernando de Talavera, still the Archbishop of Granada—the addressees being Indians, not Spaniards.

  The regulations for Indians working in mines, however, contradicted these utopian visions. Another instruction to Ovando, for example, urged that Indian towns should be established close to mines.52 It would seem obvious that neither for the first nor for the last time in imperial history the government was speaking with two voices: two different people were advising the monarchs.

  The royal adviser concerned with economic matters was Fonseca. But the one who was preoccupied with ensuring the peace of the souls of the indigenous people was Cisneros. In relation to Muslims, the Cardinal had been inflexible. But his record in respect of the New World was benign. In the same way, the Dominicans would show themselves harsh to Jews at home, benevolent to Indians abroad.53

  Another important declaration concerning the relations of the Spaniards with the Indians in the New World, of October 30, was addressed by the Queen at Segovia to the future monarchs, Philip and Juana, her daughter and son-in-law.54 It was supposed to ensure that

  the King, my lord, and I, with the aim of ensuring that everyone who lives in the islands and mainland of the ocean sea [a somewhat strange way, it may seem, of expressing the matter] become Christians and be converted to our Catholic faith, have sent a letter stating that nobody of our administration should dare to take prisoner anyone, or any people, of the Indian inhabitants of those territories, to carry them to these my realms or anywhere else.

  And in order to convince those who are Christians to live as reasonable men, we have ordered some of our captains to go to the said regions and to take with them some monks in order to indoctrinate and preach our holy Catholic faith … to those places where there are a people who are known as cannibals,55 and who never wanted to hear them or welcome them, defending themselves with arms, and in that resistance have killed one or two Christians and afterwards, in their brutality and pertinacity, have made war on the Indians who are in my service, taking them to eat them56 … and … it must be right for the cannibals to be punished for the crimes that they have committed against my subjects.57

>   Isabel added that she had asked her “council to look into the matter and discuss it,” and the council had thought that, because of the cannibals’ “many crimes” and their reluctance even to hear the propagation of the Christian doctrine, “they could be captured and taken to the other islands” so as thereafter to be converted to Christianity effectively.58

  That was a double-edged statement. Indigenous people would be well treated, provided they were submissive and accepted Christianity as well as Spanish rule; but if they resisted and fought, they would be called cannibals and denounced for eating their captives, and so enslaved. There was, however, no racial distinction between the two: a rebellious Taino, such as the Spaniards would encounter in Puerto Rico, might be described as a cannibal; and a docile Carib, if one were to be found, might be a good Indian. Before the contradictions behind this declaration were resolved, the Indians of the Caribbean were, for other reasons, which will be explored later, close to extinction.

  Following these decrees, there was some discussion in the court while it was at Medina del Campo at the end of 1503 as to the basis of Spanish rule in the Americas. Members of the Council of the Realm and other lawyers and theologians took part. Fray Diego de Deza (now Inquisitor-General of Castile as well as Bishop of Salamanca) was present. They made little progress. It is true they decided that Indians “running away from the Christians, and from work, would be treated as vagabonds.” They carefully considered the statements of Pope Alexander VI and seem to have agreed, in the presence of the Archbishop of Seville, that it was in accord with divine as well as human law that Indians should serve Spaniards.59 But all present seem to have realized that the issue was far from settled.

  Another decree, issued at Medina del Campo by the Queen on December 20, 1503, regularized the idea of the division, repartimiento, of Tainos among the Spaniards, making the surviving caciques responsible for the recruitment of the workers.60 Those who worked in mines were to be there not more than six to eight months and were then, by a rule known as “the delay,” to be sent back to their villages, where they could busy themselves again in vegetable-producing allotments. A visitor would be named for each town to ensure that the work was fairly carried out. Perhaps Ovando had been influenced to achieve these so-called encomiendas on the basis of what he knew of them from being a comendador of the distinguished Order of Alcántara.

  This was a refinement on the earlier arrangements of Columbus and Roldán. For the plan now was that each native would be given over for exploitation to an individual Spaniard, unless he was assigned to the Crown for work in the mines or in agriculture. In theory, the Tainos as subjects of the Crown would only work for wages. They were to be known not as slaves but as naborías, a word that derived from the Taino language.61 In practice, they were treated much as if they had been slaves, or even worse since their masters had no incentive to treat them well.62 It has been suggested that the status conferred on the Indian was one of “pupil” of the Crown, with rights and duties. The state would undertake, through the settler, to protect, feed, and “civilize” the Indian, looking after his physical well-being as well as his everlasting soul. But the settler had the right to the work of the “pupil” in return.

  Encomiendas in Spain in the Middle Ages had implied a grant of jurisdiction as well as of manorial rights, and encomenderos had received rights to services from the people concerned. In La Española and later elsewhere in the Indies, an encomienda now included an obligation to instruct Indians who worked on land on which landlords were beginning to produce cattle, pigs, cassava, yams, and sugar.

  The Indians must have looked on the matter differently, for in practice they were worked beyond their strength. If they ran away, they were treated much the same as fugitive slaves. People soon began to notice a demographic decline, though when that was first remarked upon is surprisingly obscure.

  These were also difficult years in Spain. The monarchs were still much more worried about the country’s economy, bad harvests, hunger, and the high mortality in the peninsula than about what was happening to a few thousand emigrants to the New World. The harvest in Castile of 1504 was so bad that the price of wheat went up to 600 maravedís per fanega.63 Galicia, Asturias, and Vizcaya had never been able to feed themselves, but now even Castile was becoming reliant on foreign grain. Partly, this was a consequence of laws such as that of 1501 by which all land on which migrant sheep had pastured was reserved forever for the sheep cooperative, the Mesta. Vast swathes of Extremadura and Andalusia were therefore kept from agriculture. Royal encouragement of wool meant the ruin of arable farming. Ironically, 1504 was the year when there appeared the successful pastoral poem Arcadia by Sannazaro, about the charms of country life.64

  But not all the news was bad.65 The monarchs could rejoice in the remarkable series of successes in Italy achieved by the Gran Capitán; thus, in May 1503, he entered Naples in triumph after defeating the French at Cerignola. On December 28, 1503, he gained another victory over the French at Garigliano. On January 1, 1504, Gaeta capitulated. The French recognized that they had lost Naples forever. Southern Italy was confirmed as the eastern bastion of Spain’s possessions. Naples and Sicily were henceforth part of the Spanish Empire.66 Like the Caribbean, they remained so for generations.

  These victories were the consequence of the Gran Capitán’s transformation of his troops into a powerful infantry—itself the result of good protective armor, such as cuirasses and light helmets. A skillful reconstruction of the army was achieved on the basis of colonelcies of four companies supported by cavalry and artillery. New weapons such as lombards and arquebuses had also been added to the swords, spears, and javelins of the past. Henceforth, Naples (like Sicily and Sardinia) was run by viceroys appointed by the Aragonese Crown.

  These victories went some way toward compensating Spain for the loss of a friend at the Vatican: Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) died, and following the brief papacy of Pope Pius III, who died only ten days after his coronation, Cardinal Juliano della Rovere, the French nominee, a magisterial Genoese who was a nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, succeeded as Julius II—a prince of the Church determined, as the Venetian ambassador Domenico Treviano would put it, to play “the world’s game”—and play it he did.67

  The Queen finally took to her bed at Medina del Campo in May 1504. She seemed to suffer considerably. Thus Peter Martyr wrote in October that “the doctors have lost all hope for her health. The illness spread throughout her veins and slowly the dropsy [hidropesia] became obvious. A fever never abandoned her, penetrating her to the core. Day and night she had an insatiable thirst, while the sight of food gave her nausea. The mortal tumor grew fast between skin and flesh.”68 She ceased to see ordinary documents and now only signed important ones.

  The Queen signed nothing at all after September 14 except her will. That document of October 4 began by begging her daughter and her husband—in that order—to dedicate themselves without rest to the conquest of Africa and the crusade against Islam. After all, one could argue that the Visigothic kingdom of Spain had included Morocco. She wanted to be buried in a habit of St. Francis in the Franciscan monastery of St. Isabel. Her heirs were never to alienate the marquisate of de Villena, which Isabel had won for the Crown, or indeed Gibraltar. Her oldest daughter, Juana, would be her heir: “Conforming with what I ought to do and am obliged to do by law, I order and establish for her, my universal heir … to be received as the true Queen and natural proprietress.” She expressed gratitude for what King Fernando had done in Castile and reaffirmed his rights to all his Castilian undertakings.69 Fernando was also to have half the income that Isabel had received from the Indies.

  A codicil to the Queen’s will, dated November 23, 1504, added an allusion to the New World: “At the time when we were conceded by the holy apostolic see the islands and mainland of the Ocean Sea … our main aim was to arrange the introduction there of our holy Catholic faith and to ensure that the people there accepted it, and also to send prelates, monks, priests, and
other learned people who fear God to instruct the people in the faith and to teach and indoctrinate them with good customs.”70 This codicil suggests that she considered her title to the Indies secure.71 Later, the Dominicans used these paragraphs to confirm that the Crown had accepted the mission to convert the Indians as the chief aim of Spanish rule in the New World.

  Isabel’s last actions in relation to the Indies were to approve a new expedition to the north coast of South America directed by Juan de la Cosa and Pedro de Ledesma72 and to appoint, on September 30, 1504, the ambitious son of Cuenca, Alonso de Hojeda, as governor of the Colombian bay of Urabá and its surroundings, on what is now the border of Colombia and Panama. It was one of the most desperate assignments ever granted by any Crown. Urabá then, as now, was unfit for human life. The heat and humidity were intolerable. Yet it was to be the first colony on the mainland. Tribute to the monarch would be paid on the sixth part of everything sold. Hojeda’s backers were a curious combination: the converso merchant Juan Sánchez de la Tesorería; Lorenzo de Ahumado, a lawyer who may also have been Jewish in origin—a Catalina Sánchez de Ahumado had been “reconciliada” in 1494; the heirs of Juan de Vergara, who had sailed with Hojeda in 1499 and whose mother had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment in 1494 as a false Christian; and García de Ocampo, an Extremeño who alone of these men seems to have been an old Christian. But this improbable undertaking had made no headway before Isabel’s death.