Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The neglect of the Indies was Fernando’s only serious mistake. But he was not the last Spanish king to prefer the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. A greater mistake was to trust so implicitly Bishop Fonseca, who chose people according to whether they came from a good family in Spain; a Bobadilla, an Ovando, a Ponce de León, an Arias, or a Velázquez seemed superior to someone who had come from nowhere: a Columbus, a Balboa, or a Cortés.

  The four largest islands of the Caribbean—La Española, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico—were, nevertheless, Spanish governorships, the last three being formally subordinate to the governor of the first, though the long absence in Spain of Diego Colón, the second Admiral of the Ocean Sea, had left an interregnum in the first of these islands. The Castilian Diego Velázquez, the Basque Francisco Garay (in succession to Juan Esquivel), and the Sevillano Juan Ponce de León now controlled the other three. An inquiry, or residencia, into the “columbine officials,” excluding Diego Colón himself, had been embarked upon. Then, on the mainland, Pedrarias, the Castilian with converso blood, “the Gallant,” still reigned in 1516 in uneasy tandem with Núñez de Balboa in Darien and Panama, while the Dominican prior Pedro de Córdoba, father of the Dominican mission in the New World, was planning a saintly colony near the Pearl Coast of Venezuela. All these colonies would soon have their spiritual leaders; in 1512, three bishops had been designated, for Santo Domingo, for Concepción de la Vega (also in La Española), and for Puerto Rico.

  The decline of the indigenous population had at last begun to seem serious to settlers in this New World, less, it would appear, because of the tragedy that this spelled for the people concerned than because of the shortage of labor that it implied. Expeditions were frequent to the Bahamas (the Lucays), to Trinidad, and to both the Lesser Antilles and the mainland in search of slaves, usually financed by the leading men of La Española, including, as has been seen, the judges of the audiencia.4 Still, the Dominican preacher Fray Antonio Montesinos and the priest Bartolomé de las Casas were in Spain to put the case for a new order in the treatment of the Indians. In these years, it would be fair to recognize that the gold produced in La Española had started to justify the great investment of effort that had begun there, and as yet no one suspected that the unsteady prices in Castile had anything to do with the import of precious metals from the Indies.5

  The King was certainly dying. Was it because the medicine given him by Queen Germaine de Foix—said to have been based on the testicles of a bull—to stimulate his virility and enable her to give him a male heir to the throne had damaged his heart? That medicine, if it existed, failed—so much for the unity of the Crowns. But Fernando himself in these last years seems to have hoped for a Spain divided between a Habsburg in Castile and a Trastámara in Aragon rather than one country under a German.6 Perhaps, though, after so many journeys, so many wars, such intrigues and brilliant arrangements, so many nights in so many uncomfortable beds in remote lodgings, Fernando was exhausted.

  He was in his middle sixties, a fine age at which to die in the Renaissance. He had his last confession with that Friar Tomás de Matienzo who had been a member of his enlightened committee of Burgos on Indian problems. Then he summoned Galíndez de Carvajal, of the Council of the Realm, the secretary Zapata, and the treasurer Vargas. (Galíndez de Carvajal had just been appointed chief of the post office of the Casa de Contratación, a job that entailed supervision of all transatlantic mail for a time.)7 Together they advised him to alter the will that he had made in favor of his second grandson, Fernando, whom he knew well since he had been brought up in Spain. The counselors suggested that unity between the advisers of the throne and the nobility would only be achieved if the will were changed to favor the elder Infante, Charles of Ghent, whom Fernando had never met.

  Fernando the King accepted this advice without complaint.8 The responsibility of these advisers for avoiding the “Fernandine succession” was considerable. They may have been mistaken. The Infante Fernando would have made a fine king who would have maintained himself in Spain and the New World and left the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire to his brother Charles.

  After King Fernando’s death, and until Charles arrived in Spain, the will specified that Cardinal Cisneros would once more be Regent in Castile; and Fernando’s illegitimate son, Alonso de Aragón, Archbishop of Saragossa, would have that office in Aragon. Legally, Fernando had no right to make such dispositions in Castile, for he was himself a mere Regent, and his daughter, Juana, was already Queen regnant. But King Fernando had long realized that Juana was at least half demented and that, above all, authority of some kind was necessary.

  An auto-de-fe. A tragedy of the age was the persecution of converted Jews who were accused of continuing their old practices.

  Cardinal Cisneros, confessor to Queen Isabel, was hard, austere, honest, brave, and unyielding. He was twice Regent of Castile.

  Adrian of Utrecht was tutor to Charles, and later became Regent of Castile and pope. The Romans laughed at him because he liked beer.

  Guillaume de Croÿ, a Flemish aristocrat and chief adviser to Charles V, in whose bedroom he slept until the Emperor was twenty.

  The Chancellor, Mercurino de Gattinara, inspired Charles to dream of world empire.

  Toscanelli’s map, which influenced Columbus. Another Italian contribution to the discovery of America.

  In the cathedral of Seville, Our Lady of La Antigua was an inspiration for explorers and colonizers, and gave her name to boats, cities, and islands.

  Christopher Columbus: His face is a mystery, his origins unclear, his deeds incomparable.

  Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his Christian name to “America.”

  Bishop Fonseca, who, as de facto Minister for the Indies from 1493 to 1522, managed Spain’s new empire.

  Magellan,who in 1519 sought to be the first person to sail around the world, but was killed in the Philippines.

  Top and below Hernán Cortés conquered Mexico and considered conquering China with Mexican troops. It was a mistake to refuse him a command in Europe.

  Careening the ship.

  A captain awaits a favorable wind.

  Horses are hoisted on board.

  Strong wines from Jerez arrive at the quay.

  THE ARMS OF CONQUEST

  The sword of the Gran Capitan, the conqueror of Italy. This kind of weapon had a devastating effect on the Indians.

  A falconet would be taken with difficulty to the New World, but would then often be carried by indigenous allies of the conquerors.

  The lombard, an inaccurate piece of artillery, made a noise that terrified the Indians.

  A nobleman’s armor. The sight of these “iron men” was disturbing to the indigenous peoples.

  The Wheel of Fortune is turned by a servant of the blind Goddess of Fortune. In the Renaissance she was believed in almost as widely as Our Lady.

  Almost all the gold from New Spain was melted down. Here are some pieces that survived, found in Mexico in the 1930s.

  The King, in that rural, “undecorated, and unfurnished”9 house in a small town, Madrigalejo, in an impoverished part of Castile, wrote on January 22 to his heir, his grandson the Infante Carlos (it was thus that the Spaniards liked to think of him), an affectionate deathbed letter. He began by explaining “that it had pleased God our Lord to put us in such straits that we are more a dead man than a live one.” Fernando regretted that he and Charles could not meet and that Charles could not come to Spain before his death. He also hoped that Charles would look after “our most dear and most loved wife”—Germaine.10

  The King died soon after midnight on January 23, 1516.11 A message was immediately sent to Charles in Flanders. But long before that reached him, Cardinal Cisneros, knowing of the King’s instructions in respect of the Regency, left his palace in Alcalá de Henares and set off for the monastery of Guadelupe, which he reached on January 29. There a quickly assembled Council of the Realm confirmed his authority and regularized the legal position of his new gove
rnment. His first act was to confine the Infante Fernando, still a potential rival to his brother Charles, to his lodging; and he also placed under restraint Gonzalo Núñez de Guzmán, the longtime preceptor of Fernando’s.12

  Cisneros, with the Infante Fernando, Queen Germaine, and some members of the Council of the Realm, such as Galíndez de Carvajal, thereupon left Guadelupe, via Puente del Arzobispo, Calera, and Talavera, for Madrid, where they lodged in the house of Pedro Saso de Castilla (in the still surviving Plazuela de San Andrés), the court being partly lodged in the Alcázar and partly in the ample cloisters of the Convent of San Jerónimo.

  The news of King Fernando’s death reached Malines, fifteen miles north of Brussels, where the Infante Charles was living with his intelligent aunt, the Archduchess Margaret, on February 10, 1516. His principal adviser, Guillermo de Chièvres, Seigneur de Croÿ, summoned all the Spanish officials in Flanders and promised not only to confirm them in their positions but to triple their salaries.13

  These advisers and their friends revolved around three personalities: Charles himself, then aged sixteen; the Archduchess, his aunt, who once so many years ago had been married to the Infante Juan; and Chièvres. There was also a fourth influence, the austere and erudite Adrian of Utrecht.

  The young heir Charles had been born on February 25, 1500, in Ghent, heart of the old Burgundian principality, and he was given the name of his great-grandfather, the impetuous last Duke of Burgundy.14 Almost no one in Spain had been given the name of Charles until that time.15 His namesake, the old Duke, exerted an influence: “No one was so consciously inspired by models of the past, or manifested such a desire to echo them, as Charles the Rash. In his youth, he made his attendants read out to him the exploits of Gawain and of Lancelot.…”16 The young Charles of Ghent did the same.

  Charles had been christened in the splendid church of Sainte-Gudule in Brussels on March 7, 1500. No representative of the court of Spain was present. The only Spaniard there was, indeed, Diego Ramírez Vilaescusa, then chaplain to Charles’s mother, the Infanta Juana, and later bishop of Malaga. Margaret of Austria, recently back from Spain after the death of her husband, the Infante Juan, was a godmother. Given this background, it is scarcely surprising that Charles was a prince who, for the first fifteen years of his life, had no desire to be other than a Burgundian nobleman.

  The court of Burgundy was known for elaborate and serious ritual, and its example gave Charles all his life noble principles, the necessity of a courtly bearing, the cult of the ambience of a great prince, the idea of knightly honor, and of fighting for the Christian faith, as embodied in the code of the Burgundian Order, the Golden Fleece. Burgundy also inculcated in Charles a sincere piety and an attachment both to the ideals of chivalry and to a rigorous court ceremonial. Was that the ideal of the passing age? Or was it that of a New World?17 Charles seems to have always lived between two eras.

  Charles was more drawn to bodily than intellectual exercise, a preference shared by all his pages,18 and early in life he mastered the arts of hunting, jousting, and falconry. He could soon splinter an opponent’s lance without losing his seat on his own horse.

  Charles’s childhood had been chiefly spent at Malines. It was an education marked at first by austerity bordering on indigence, being directed by the saintly scholar Adrian of Utrecht, from whom much of his own piety derived. But from 1509, the influence of the aristocratic Guillaume de Chièvres grew, and after 1515, the demands of Burgundian splendor grew dominant. Charles always showed a tendency toward being dressed “very richly and very gallantly.”19 His chivalrous grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian, was proud of him and said that he was glad that Charles was making such progress as a huntsman, for had it not been so, it might have been supposed that the boy was a bastard.20

  Charles was richly endowed with good qualities, but from his earliest youth he was surrounded by rapacious courtiers. Vincenzo Querini, the Venetian representative in Brussels, said of Charles that he was “in all his actions cruel and willful [voluntarioso]; he also looked rather similar to Charles the Rash, in imitation of whom he well captured the strong chivalrous spirit.” He added spitefully: “He has no value of any kind and is completely governed by others.”21

  This negative comment was unfair, but another Venetian, Lorenzo Pasqualigo, said of Charles: “He was of a mediocre stature and so thin that one cannot believe it, pale, melancholy, always with his mouth open.”22 Juan de Longhi thought that Charles was an unhealthy mixture of passivity and impatience. One ambassador said that he looked as if his eyes had been glued onto too long a face. But in England, where he had been in 1513 to present himself as a possible candidate for the hand of the Princess Mary, he had impressed everyone by his lanky dignity. The comments made about Charles in his early youth are a striking contrast to what would be said of him when he was more mature.

  He had been proclaimed of age as duke of Burgundy on January 5, 1515, when he was fifteen and Maximilian thought that he would be ready to exercise authority. The Archduchess Margaret’s Regency was over. The court changed. Charles then traveled in a leisurely fashion around the Low Countries and established himself in Brussels. Challenged to a ceremonial duel by Charles de Lannoy over the accusation that the music he loved was effeminate, he chose to fight with lances on large horses, and though he won in the end, his horse fell and for a long time the Prince bore signs of injuries.23

  The influence of Charles’s aunt had been decisive till 1515. Margaret of Austria, born on January 10, 1480, had been named after Margaret of York, her own godmother, the last wife of Charles the Rash. As a result of the Treaty of Arras, of December 1482, between France and the burghers of Ghent, she, “Madame Marguerite,” became “Madame la Dauphine,” the putative bride of the Dauphin Charles, the future King Charles VIII of France, nine years older than she. Her dowry had been substantial: Artois, the Franche-Comté, Maçon, Auxerre, Bar-sur-Seine, and Noyon. She went to France at the age of three, being welcomed into French society at Hedins as “La Marguerite des Marguerites.” She was duly betrothed to Charles and stayed in France, at Amboise, until 1491 as, first, dauphine and then, after Louis XI died, really as queen, being advised by the King’s daughter, Madame de Beaujeu (“Madame ma Bonne Tante”). In those happy days of royal childhood, Margaret had as her chief companion a green parrot. But in 1491, the young but already callous Charles insisted, for dynastic reasons, on marrying Anne of Brittany to bring that duchy to France. Margaret left Amboise, staying for a time at Melun in semicaptivity, but returning to Malines in June 1493.24

  The next chapter in this princess’s remarkable career occurred when two years later, on November 5, 1496, she married the beloved heir of King Fernando and Queen Isabel, the Infante Juan. After spending a few days with her brother Philip (not yet married to her future sister-in-law Juana), in the abbey of Middleburg, Margaret set off for Spain on January 22, 1497, stopping in England at Southampton to escape storms. She reached Santander and then met the Infante. They went together to Burgos, where the marriage was reenacted on April 3, 1497, in the Convent of the Holy Trinity. The honeymoon in the monastery took place before the wedding. Peter Martyr wrote: “If you saw her, you would think that you were contemplating Venus herself.” Martyr also recalled “our prince, burning with love,” who persuaded his parents “to suspend protocol in order to enable him to obtain the desired embraces” before the ceremony. But on June 13, Martyr thought the prince was bearing himself sadly. He died on October 4: “There was buried the hope of all Spain,” Martyr added. Perhaps, as mentioned earlier, he died from eating a dirty salad at the feria in Salamanca. But the Habsburgs always said that he had made love too often with his wife.

  Margaret was pregnant, but she had a premature birth of a daughter who soon died, and once again she returned to the Low Countries.

  The young widow was affianced again in September 1501, to Duke Philibert of Savoy. She traveled again through France to Dôle, where a marriage by proxy was celebrated, the “Grand B�
�tard,” Philibert’s overbearing brother, standing proxy for the Duke. Then she went south and, at a convent near Geneva, met Philibert. She soon outmaneuvered the rest of the family and essentially took over the government of the duchy, controlling the administration from a château at the Pont d’Ain.

  But once again tragedy struck, for, alas, Philibert too soon died after a boar hunt in September 1504, much as Philip, the husband of Juana, would die, drinking too much water when he was hot from exercise. Margaret had her pearls ground down to make the best medicine—to no avail. She comforted herself by creating a lovely memorial at the church at Brou, thereby fulfilling a vow made by her long-dead mother-in-law, Marguerite de Bourbon. But she lost her task of governing Savoy.

  Margaret’s brother Philip next sought to make her queen of England, and a contract of marriage with the future Henry VIII was even signed in March 1506. Margaret wisely refused the entanglement, even if it might have been good for England if she had accepted. Maximilian then named her Regent of the Netherlands. She left the Duchy of Savoy and on March 18, 1507, was formally established in the government of one of the richest territories. She took numerous Savoyards to assist her, such as the hardworking Italian Mercurino de Gattinara. She also became foster mother to the Infante Charles and established herself at Malines, in a palace where Margaret of York had been happy until her death in 1504. The Archduchess surrounded herself with poets, musicians, and painters. Her library became famous. She played chess with the Savoyards, and backgammon with Chièvres.