by Hugh Thomas
There had been difficulties with Pope Julius in respect to these as well as other matters. For example, in December 1510, bulls were presented to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition whereby Julius had allowed Pedro López de Águila of Seville to escape the restrictions imposed on conversos, even though he had been condemned by the Holy Office.48
Then the economy in his European dominions must have given the King many a headache. For example, between 1510 and 1515 there was a fall in prices, the only such case in the century, followed in 1515 by a sharp rise.
But Fernando, for his own narrow economic reasons, no doubt, seemed to have become more interested in the Indies than previously. Thus in December 1509, we find him ordering a report about the instructions, rules, and other commitments sent to the Casa de Contratación in order to make, where necessary, new dispositions. That order was repeated on January 22, 1510.49
On July 30, 1512, a royal order was issued to Diego Colón appointing Bartolomé Ortiz as “representative of the [Spanish] poor in the new world.” His salary was the service of seventy Indians, a less than generous emolument in the circumstances.50 On September 26, 1513, the King summed up the grants and other liberties that had hitherto been made available to settlers on La Española. In this, he commented that the island had been populated by old Christians, not new ones, and that no child or grandchild of a burned heretic or a son of a reconciliado, or even a son or grandson of a Jew or a Moor, could be given Indians on the said island.51 Actually, in 1512 an arrangement had been made between the Crown and the converso communities in Córdoba, Jaén, and León: conversos could go to the New World if they paid the substantial sum of 55,000 ducats. Some did.52
But these orders were all drafted by Fonseca and Conchillos and put under the King’s eyes purely for signature, we assume, even if, as seems likely, they coincided with Fernando’s wishes. No doubt this was also the case when, in July 1513, the King asked his ambassador in Rome, Gerónimo de Vich, to establish a “universal patriarchate” in the Indies for Fonseca.53 For Fernando the new possessions in the Indies certainly now constituted an obligation, but it is impossible to detect any sign of enthusiasm for them.
In May 1512, the King began to suffer from a grave illness that is impossible to identify but from which he never fully recovered.54 He was fit enough, however, to send an army, under his friend the Duke of Alba, to occupy Navarre in July 1512. That was an act of realpolitik, which Fernando justified by claiming that a secret treaty between France and the family of Albret included a plan for an invasion of Castile. The removal of this French protectorate (as it seemed) south of the Pyrenees was a fulfillment of the strategically minded Fernando’s long-term ambition. Pope Julius II obligingly blessed the invasion and the subsequent occupation, and also the transfer of sovereignty. (This only applied to southern, or Spanish, Navarre; French, or northern, Navarre remained an independent, if French, state under the Albrets.)55
Fernando remained in Valladolid nearly all of 1513, save for journeys to Tordesillas, Medina del Campo, and the monasteries of Abrojo and La Mejorada. He went hunting both there and later in León. But his infirmity was now his perpetual companion. He was henceforth too ill to perform his usual work, and this permitted his secretaries to increase their power further. Even old allies, such as the Count of Tendilla, lost their habit of direct correspondence with the King, since all his letters were drafted by secretaries. In these circumstances, Fernando tried to arrange that the Duke of Alba should be the Regent if he were to die—a violation of Isabel’s will, which had stipulated that Cardinal Cisneros should so act if necessary. Tendilla supported Alba, but other powerful noblemen on whose approval so much hung, such as the Duke of Infantado and the Constable Velasco, backed Cisneros. The argument shows vividly the limitations imposed on even the most powerful of monarchs. Once again, meanwhile, Columbus’s dominions in the Indies were allowed to develop on their own due to Spanish domestic preoccupations.
Fray Pedro de Córdoba, the Dominican leader in the New World, after being reprimanded by the provincial of his order, Alonso de Loaysa, finally won his argument with the Franciscan Alonso de Espinal. On June 10, 1513, he persuaded Fernando to allow him to lead fifteen missionaries to convert the Indians of the South American mainland between the Gulf of Paria and what was already known as “Venezuela tierra firme.” Córdoba would himself lead this mission. There was no specific grant of territory.56 But in order to prevent clashes with Spanish slave-hunters, Córdoba convinced the King that no armada from Santo Domingo or Spain could, without his consent, sail to the mainland coast between Cariaco, just south of the island of Margarita, to what was then known as Coquibacoa, now the peninsula of Guajira. This was a stretch of about five hundred miles of coastline, covering most of what is now the western half of Venezuela. King Fernando was inspired to ask Diego Colón to give the friars everything they needed. That came to 400,000 maravedís’ worth of goods, including many pictures of saints and the Holy Family, some by distinguished painters such as Alejo Fernández or sculpted by Jorge Fernández, both of Seville, as well as thirty copies of Nebrija’s Grammar. (The pictures included depictions of Our Lady of Rosario, St. Dominic, and the thirteenth-century St. Peter Martyr.)57
Due to illness, Fray Pedro de Córdoba could not in the end lead the expedition on which he had set his heart. He asked the controversial preacher Montesinos to direct it instead. But though he accepted the daunting task, Montesinos, too, became ill in San Juan, and in the end, only one Dominican friar, Francisco de Córdoba, and a lay brother, Juan Garcés,58 set off from Santo Domingo on the heroic mission. The two men disembarked at the seaward end of the valley of Chiribichi, in the east of their prescribed territory. There they were well received by the cacique “Alonso,” who had been baptized by Alonso de Hojeda several years before.
Some months later, Gómez de Ribera, originally from Zafra, in Extremadura, sailed into Chiribichi with three ships. Ribera had been a notary in La Española, and in 1500, Francisco de Bobadilla had even asked him to carry out the residencia of the brothers Columbus. He had remained in Santo Domingo and, in the division of Alburquerque of 1514, he had seven naborías and twenty-five slaves. He was now looking both for pearls and for more slaves. There were several days of fiesta and for a time an amiable discussion between the newcomers and the Indians, at which the two missionaries were present. Then one of the members of Ribera’s flotilla invited the cacique and his wife to visit their flagship. “Alonso” accepted, with seventeen Indians. They were immediately seized, and the ship raised her anchor and set off for Santo Domingo.
The Indians on shore naturally arrested the two Dominicans, who explained that they would tell the captain of the next ship that passed to send a message to Santo Domingo that their lives were at risk unless “Alonso” and his companions were sent back. The message reached La Española, and a letter was taken to Fray Pedro de Córdoba. But by that time Alonso and his friends had been sold and separated. Montesinos denounced these events, and Gómez de Ribera fled to a convent of the Mercedarians in Santo Domingo, where he was protected by a relation, Judge Vázquez de Ayllón. In vain, Montesinos demanded the recovery of the Indians. As a result, after only four months, in January 1515, the two missionaries, Fray Francisco de Córdoba and Juan Garcés, were executed. A later inquiry, presided over by Francisco de Vallejo, a conquistador who had first come out with Ovando, ruled that the Dominicans had been killed by Caribs and, therefore, there was no crime in continuing to enslave their leaders.59 That dubious point established, the Dominican order was blamed for the deaths of their brothers, for they had been warned not to go to Carib territory. But then it was said that the Indians who had originally been kidnapped lived in the center of a group of Caribs but were really a people called Guaitiaos. Some of those who had been seized by Gómez de Ribera were then sent back to Chiribichi. This unfortunate conclusion obscures the fact that the Dominican friar Francisco de Córdoba and the obscure lay brother Juan Garcés were the first Spanish s
ettlers on the northern coast of South America, the forerunners of great waves of emigration there and, in the end, of two large independent states.
23
“Without partiality, love, or hatred”
And if you know that the said adelantado Diego Velázquez, in respect of the Indians and their encomiendas, has maintained all fairness, giving them to those who merit them the most and without partiality, neither love nor any hatred …?
Question 22 of the “residencia” taken of Diego Velázquez, 15251
The large, long, beautiful island of Cuba, sometimes in those early days known as “Juana” and occasionally as “Fernanda,” was circumnavigated in eight months in 1508 by Sebastián Ocampo, a caballero from Noia, Galicia, and a sometime member of the household of Queen Isabel.2 Noia is near Padrón, where the body of St. James, in his stone coffin, was miraculously found in the ninth century. Hence the center of pilgrimage, Santiago de Compostela. Ocampo’s achievement was one worthy of his origin. He had come to the Indies in 1493 on Columbus’s second voyage.3 Apart from a mysterious quarrel in Jerez in 1501, he seems to have remained in La Española thereafter.4 In 1507, Governor Ovando wanted to know for sure whether Columbus had been right in insisting that Cuba was part of a continent, or whether Peter Martyr had been on the right track when he said in 1505 that “there are not lacking those who—Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, for example—declare that they have circumnavigated it.”5
With two ships, Ocampo sailed around Cuba, entered Havana Bay, the admirable but to Spaniards as yet unknown port, passed the Punta de San Antón, visited a corral of mullet, and showed that Cuba was indeed an island—about as long as Britain. Cuba seemed to have copper, and Ocampo detected what he judged to be some signs of the presence of gold in the sierra in the east. He thought that the Bay of “Xagua,” the modern Cienfuegos, could offer a safe harbor to one thousand caravels.6 He also saw Baracoa and Manatí, the last point visited by Columbus on the island, where, on his first voyage, he careened his boats.
In fact, Cuba not only boasted a little gold but also nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese, and chromite. Nickel would one day seem particularly important. Las Casas, meanwhile, would say that Cuba was an island fresher and calmer than La Española.7
Early in 1511, the conquest of Cuba was carried through by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, a “corpulent and red-haired” hidalgo. Velázquez was, like Ovando, from a family of importance in medieval history. The cofounder of the military Order of Calatrava had been one Diego Velázquez, a monk who had offered to defend that city of La Mancha (Calatrava) against the Moors when the Templars had said they could not do so. A Ruy Velázquez had composed some of the best ballads in Spanish. Another Ruy Velázquez was the uncle in the story of the Infantes de Lara. Diego’s own uncle had been a councillor to King Juan II of Castile, and a cousin, Cristóbal de Cuéllar, in Santo Domingo with Ovando as treasurer, had been cupbearer to the Infante Don Juan, the ill-fated heir of the Catholic Kings.8 Another cousin, the Infante’s chief accountant, commander of the castle at Arévalo, had been the preceptor of the young Basque Íñigo de Loyola, later the founder of the Society of Jesus. Sancho Velázquez de Cuéllar, a judge of the supreme court, was a member of the first national council of the Inquisition in 1484. Antonio de Torres, a captain in Columbus’s second voyage and Ovando’s second in command, the virtual founder of the regular sailings to and from the Indies (la carrera de Indias), had also been a close relation.9
Cuéllar, whence Diego Velázquez came, is an ancient, long-decayed Castilian city halfway between Segovia and Valladolid. It is too far from Madrid to provide a weekend life for that capital, and the countryside nearby, though there are pine woods, is too austere for the tourist. The ten thousand people who live there now work in the timber industry and in agriculture, especially with cattle. The nineteenth-century English traveler Richard Ford reported that Cuéllar’s streets were steep and badly paved; and that judgment would apply today. But there are charming squares, churches and monasteries, some ruined, a colossal castle, and a few dilapidated mansions with crumbling but decipherable coats of arms over the doors.10 One of these, in the Calle San Pedro, leading down sharply from the main square, was once that of the Velázquez family.
The castle at Cuéllar had been built by Beltrán de la Cueva, first Duke of Alburquerque, the favorite of King Enrique IV and the lover of his second wife, Queen Juana. Cuéllar had been a town whose taxes had gone to Queen Isabel when she was a girl. Though Cuéllar now seems remote, it was in the late fifteenth century a center for many complex plots. The contemporary decay is symbolized by the castle and the church of San Francisco, both in ruins. Even the fine tombs of the Alburquerques now rest in the museum of the Hispanic Society of America, in northern Manhattan.
Diego Velázquez was born about 1464, the year when the Crown ceded Cuéllar to the Duke of Alburquerque. Because of the civil wars that in those years divided the Castilian nobility, the conquistador’s childhood must have been a turbulent one. There were also religious implications, for Cuéllar had a substantial Jewish district, one of whose rabbis was so eloquent as to draw old Christians to his synagogue to listen to his sermons, including, in the 1470s, the Governor of the city. We should assume, though, that Diego Velázquez’s education would have included more stories of chivalry than of Jewry, and much reciting of ballads, many of them with classical themes, for that was the fashion.
Diego Velázquez figures in a list of those who fought in the last campaign against Granada. From that war, it is said, he emerged “ill and poor.” But he seems to have recovered adequately to be one of the two hundred or so gentlemen colonists who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to La Española, in 1493. He never returned to Europe, much less to Cuéllar.11
Don Diego became rich in Santo Domingo and was soon recognized as a leader of the new Spanish colony. He must have been physically strong, for most of his colleagues on the second expedition of Columbus died, and the majority of those who survived went home when they found that the gold available was modest. He became an especial friend of Columbus’s brother, the austere Diego. He must also have been politically resilient, for few other leaders survived the disorganized days of the rule of the “pharoah” (as Columbus was known to the infuriated Spanish colonists), as well as the reforms of his successors.
Velázquez’s role as deputy governor in charge of the west (that part of the island now known as Haiti) is a puzzle. Las Casas, a strict judge, talks of him as an easygoing, good-natured man and, if quick to anger, swift to forgive. Velázquez enjoyed Las Casas’s sermons; Las Casas himself said so. Yet Velázquez must have been present at the brutal events that included the betrayal of Anacoana and her execution in 1503.
He was obviously an engaging man. Conversation with him when he was governor in Cuba was all banter, as often between undisciplined young men of good family who know one another well. Velázquez enjoyed banquets. He was also proud of his family, as his will made clear, and he passed that pride on to the many impoverished Castilian relations, most of them from Cuéllar or nearby, who accompanied him to the Indies.
After the pacification of Santo Domingo, there was discussion about the desirability of expanding Spanish rule to other neighboring places: Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and to the west, of course, Cuba. Ponce de León went to Puerto Rico, Esquivel to Jamaica. Velázquez was keen to follow up his defeat of the Taino leaders of the west of La Española with an expedition to Cuba; one of those caciques, Hatuey, had fled to that island across the sixty or so miles of the Windward Passage. Velázquez’s idea was backed by the all-important royal treasurer in Santo Domingo, Pasamonte. The King looked on Hatuey as a rebel, for there had been a time when it seemed that he was “in our service.”12
Cuba is a big island. The idea of Castile absorbing such a large new territory should surely have been a matter for discussion in the Council of the Realm. It seems not to have been. The Spanish Empire expanded as if it had been a vast growth, locally driven, locally motiv
ated. Diego Colón told the King his plans and received approval afterwards—the King objecting to Diego’s first idea that his uncle Bartolomeo should lead the Cuban expedition.
In 1509, Diego Colón gave Velázquez authority to carry out the conquest of Cuba. The instructions do not survive. It would seem that, through Pasamonte, Velázquez maintained a direct connection with the Crown that circumvented formal dependence on Diego Colón: Fernando seems to have recognized Velázquez as an independent authority, and Velázquez wrote letters directly to the King, not to Diego Colón.13
Velázquez assembled a small fleet of ships and about three hundred Spaniards at Salvatierra de la Sabana, in what is now known as the Bay of Les Cayes in Haiti. He financed these himself. His secretary, the thirty-year-old Hernán Cortés, who must have played an important part in making the arrangements, had been a protégé of Ovando. Until then he had been a notary and planter at Azúa, one of the towns that Ovando had founded. Just as Ovando had accepted Velázquez, though he was a Castilian, so Velázquez used Cortés, though he was an Extremeño. The retirement of Ovando perhaps caused Cortés to suppose that he had no future in La Española and needed to look for future opportunities.
Bartolomé de Las Casas was also on the expedition. Though, as we have seen, he had been ordained a priest in 1508, he still seems to have been more interested in participating in conquest than in saving Indian souls. There were four Franciscans, too. The son of Ponce de León, Juan González, who had served his father as interpreter, also sailed with Velázquez.14
