Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The main subject of all such meetings, as in England and elsewhere, was the need of the Crown for money. The Cortes decided on eighty-eight other matters, of which some merely repeated petitions of the past, but one included a polite request to the King that he do his subjects the honor of speaking to them in Spanish. (Despite the efforts of Spanish councillors, such as Luis de Vaca in Flanders, Charles’s Castilian at this stage was modest.)36 The Cortes also wanted Charles to marry as soon as possible in order to provide an heir; they hoped that he would choose Isabel, Princess of Portugal, and not wait for another favored candidate, Louise de France, to grow up. They begged Charles, too, to maintain his control of southern Navarre and never to think of giving it back to France.

  The Cortes considered next a petition that the sixteen-year-old nephew of Chièvres, who had, remarkably (even for those times), been appointed to succeed Cisneros in the archbishopric of Toledo, should at least live in Spain, if not necessarily in his diocese. Chièvres had at the same time arranged his own nomination as chief accountant of Castile, though he sold the office soon to the rich Duke of Béjar for 110 million maravedís. Despite these extraordinary actions, he managed to deal cleverly with the procuradores, even the difficult ones. More important, by hard work and eloquence, he secured for the Crown from the Cortes a subsidy of 225 million maravedís a year for the next three years. The Cortes, all the same, ended their session not at all happy because of the continuing dominance of Chièvres and the Flemings in the country.37 It was an anticipation of twentieth-century resentment at rule by “Brussels.”

  Charles was then proclaimed king in San Pablo, Valladolid, the church of the Dominican convent that had been restored by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (the theologian who was the uncle of the first Grand Inquisitor), who had himself taken orders there. The leading Spanish noblemen accompanied the King on foot. The Infante Fernando, the Infanta Elena, the procuradores, the bishops, and the nobles all took the oath to Charles on February 7, 1518. Soon after, the first bullfight was arranged for the King: “a wonderful thing to see.” A great deal of money was spent on silk and gold cloth, reputedly 150 million maravedís. The historian Santa Cruz wrote without apparent irony that “his Highness was beginning to show himself very generous.”38

  Even as Charles, his court, and Chièvres worked to establish their legitimacy in Spain, voices continued to remind them of their troubled possessions abroad. Fray Bernardino Manzanedo, writing from his monastery in Zamora, repeated his demand that a license should be given to the priors to import blacks to La Española, “because the Indians are insufficient to sustain them in the island.” He urged that as many black women should be sent as men. All had to be bozales—that is, slaves straight from Africa, for slaves bred in Castile often turned out rebellious. They had to come from the best territories in Africa, too—that is, from south of the River Gambia—to avoid any Muslim taint.39 The stability of La Española, he repeated, depended on a supply of labor, and labor was precisely what was not available.

  More sensational, though perhaps less significant, was a sermon about this time in San Tomás, the Dominican college in Seville, by Fray Francisco de San Romá, against the tyranny of Pedrarias in Darien, Panama. The preacher said, with the exaggeration that characterizes fanatics through the ages, that he had himself seen forty thousand Indians put to the sword or the dogs.40 Fray Reginaldo de Montesinos wrote an account of this homily to Las Casas, who in turn described it to Le Sauvage, who asked Las Casas to show it to Bishop Fonseca, which he did. On March 20, Le Sauvage, his calm shaken, told Las Casas: “The King our lord orders that you and I put the Indies in good order. So send me your recommendations.”41

  This conversation occurred as Las Casas was coming out of the royal quarters in the palace of Bernardino Pimentel, in Valladolid. The exchange gave Las Casas new hope for his struggle on behalf of the Indians, if not of African slaves. For the second time the fate of the Indians seemed in his hands. What a victory for his eloquence, his persistence, his hard work, and no doubt, his charm!

  The King and the court left Valladolid for Aragon.42 Their progress was slow, since there was an elaborate reception almost everywhere they passed, to mark the royal visit. The King again went first to Tordesillas, to greet his mother, Juana; to Aranda de Duero; to Almazán, once the seat of his dead uncle Juan’s court; and to Calatayud, to bid farewell to his brother.43 On April 20, that sad but loyal Infante Fernando set off from Santander for Flanders, where he became Archduke of Austria, leaving forever not only his beloved sister Elena but his chance of becoming king of Spain. The brothers embraced. Fernando always maintained his interest in Spain, where he had passed a happy childhood, and we owe to his subsequent instinct for collection many wonderful objects.44 The letters of his agent in Spain, Martín de Salinas, constitute an admirable source of information on life at the Spanish court from 1522 onward.45

  On May 9, 1518, the King and his court reached Saragossa. Here the Cortes of Aragon assembled. They discussed at length whether it was right to speak of Charles as “king” in the lifetime of his mother, Juana, and the subsidy that the Aragonese were being asked to pay to Charles, whether he was king or regent: 750 million maravedís. These issues kept the Cortes together until January 7, 1519; and the court remained in Saragossa also until then.46

  Las Casas retired to a convent at Aranda de Duero. There he prepared yet another of his many memoranda, to meet the request of Le Sauvage.47 In this, he spoke primarily of the mainland rather than of the islands, and put forward a plan to which, in one form or another, he remained attached for several years. It seems, however, to come from the pages of a chivalrous novel rather than the brain of a political reformer, for Las Casas suggested the establishment, along the Caribbean coast of what is now Spanish America, of a chain of fortresses and towns, a hundred leagues apart. One hundred Christian settlers would be established in each place, each under a captain. No entradas into the interior were to be made, under pain of severe penalties. The Indians would be guaranteed freedom, and all those who had been seized in the region in the past as slaves would be freed. There would be liberty of commerce, though the Indians would be told that the Spaniards wanted above all gold and pearls. Bishops would be named, friars from either the Dominican or Franciscan orders would go there, and those orders would control the evangelization. In La Española, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, all encomiendas would be abolished, and the Indians told that they were entirely free to live where they wanted. Every Spanish laborer who wanted to go to this part of the Indies could do so. Prizes would be given for the successful introduction of new crops such as silk, sugar, spices, vines, wheat, and cinnamon. Further, each Christian in the Indies “could have two black male slaves each and two females.”48 The ground was thus further prepared for a slave trade in Africans.

  While Las Casas was dreaming of a utopian future, the reality of life in La Española was approaching what seemed at first the end of autocracy. The two remaining priors, Figueroa and Santa Cruz, rousing themselves positively to their responsibilities, were arranging that procuradores in La Española be directly elected by the settlers. Those representatives were to make such joint petitions as they thought right, and there do seem to have been elections of a limited kind, though the electors were never more than about twenty male settlers or so. These men—and, of course, they all were men—were partly followers of Pasamonte, and partly “of the Columbus family.” They were not especially humane, but they were certainly representative of Spanish society in La Española. When they assembled in April 1518, in the monastery of San Francisco in Santo Domingo, they had, first, to name a procurador-general to go to Castile to represent their wishes. By seven votes to five, on May 18, the “pasamontista” judge, Vázquez de Ayllón, was elected over the “colombista” merchant, Lope de Bardeci. The judge of the residencia, Alonso Zuazo, argued that that idea was illegal, because, being a judge, Vázquez de Ayllón could not leave the island. Pasamonte, Judge Villalobos, the accountant Alonso D
ávila, and Vázquez de Ayllón himself opposed that interpretation and accused Zuazo of being “the executor of the passions of Diego Colón” against the needs of good people.

  The procuradores asked for many things in Santo Domingo; most important, they urged once again the introduction of black slaves directly from Africa. The Crown, they expected, would benefit from the organization of any such slave trade. The importation of Indians as slaves from the Bahamas, as from the mainland, should also be freely permitted, and settlers in coastal towns should be allowed to go and seek them without let or hindrance.49 All encomiendas allocated to the Crown, to absentee landlords, such as Hernando de Vega and Bishop Fonseca, or to officials in Seville should be abolished, in the hope that this would make for better treatment of Indians. The obligation to send Indians to the mines should be ended, or if that was impossible, the time that they spent there should be reduced. At the same time as improving the conditions for Indians, the settlers wanted to insist on the perpetuity of the encomiendas, making them inheritable and increasing their number by reducing the allocation of Indians to eighty as a maximum. Procuradores should henceforth be freely elected by councils, and the concentration of authority in the city of Santo Domingo reduced, though the authorities there would continue to be responsible for building roads. Merchants there should be able to trade anywhere in the Indies. Vines and seeds of cereals should be loaded on every ship from Castile, and sugar factories should be encouraged by the Crown by tax-free loans.50

  The detailed examination of these ideas was prevented, first, by Las Casas’s bout of typhus, and then by the death of Le Sauvage from the same disease, on June 7, 1518.

  Le Sauvage’s death was not regretted in Spain. He was thought to have accumulated nearly 20 million maravedís during his stay in the country. But it marked a setback for Las Casas, since the eternal bishop, Fonseca, was returned to power after (so it was said) a payment by himself and his brother Antonio, the chief accountant of Castile, to Chièvres. The latter was the person to bribe; even Anne, his wife, received a present of 160 marcos of pearls from the Indies from conversos desirous of diminishing the power of the Inquisition.51 She and a friend, the wife of Charles’s equerry, Charles de Lannoy, also obtained passports to take out of Spain three hundred horses and eighty mules laden with jewelry, gold, and clothes.52

  Fonseca acted fast. The very day that Le Sauvage died, he and his protégé Cobos prepared eighteen decrees, which purportedly were drawn up by Le Sauvage without his having had the time to sign them. In fact, they were the work of Cobos. Among other things, Judge Zuazo was suspended without a salary. He was also ordered (in June 1518) not to leave La Española until a residencia had been completed against him. Yet it will be remembered that he, Zuazo, had arrived in the Indies in order to carry out a residencia of the other judges! All power in the Indies seemed suddenly to rest again with Fonseca, who now acted with the connivance of Chièvres and the silent neglect of Jean Carondelet, the Flemish nobleman, who, in addition to being dean of the cathedral of Besançon and Archbishop-Elect of Palermo, was acting chancellor. Knowing that Mercurino Gattinara, a Savoyard protégé of the Archduchess Margaret, had been appointed the successor to Le Sauvage and was about to leave the Low Countries for Spain, Fonseca and Cobos realized that they had to do what they wanted while they could. In such circumstances, Las Casas could for a time no longer count on access to authority. In these weeks, indeed, the secretaries García de Padilla and Zapata did what they could to ruin the whole plan of Cisnerian reform.53 The priors lost their judicial power, Conchillos had his income from the benefits of the melting down of gold in the Indies restored, and many new licenses for slaves were granted for the benefit of old bureaucrats.

  But soon Las Casas began to be listened to again, first by Cardinal Adrian, still in Spain with a rather uncertain brief—he could not be “co-Regent” after the arrival of the King—and then by Charles de Laxao, the Flemish courtier who had been sent by Charles to be close to Cisneros but who had been suborned by old friends of King Fernando, such as the Duke of Alba and also even to some extent by Bishop Fonseca.54

  It was to Cardinal Adrian that Las Casas spoke of a letter from Fray Pedro de Córdoba in Santo Domingo. This told how the survivors of a new massacre of Indians in Trinidad had been sold in Santo Domingo. Córdoba managed with difficulty to persuade the priors to withdraw these from the market and take them back to the lodgings of the dealers who, he believed, put them up for sale secretly. He suggested that all Indians henceforth should be encouraged to stay a hundred leagues away from Spanish settlements.55

  On receiving this letter, Las Casas wept as he talked of its contents to Fonseca and the Council of the Realm, while Fonseca drily responded that the King would be mad to follow Fray Pedro’s advice. How would Spaniards survive without Indians? He said to Las Casas, “You, too, were once involved in the same tyrannies and sins as those that you now denounce.” Las Casas answered: “If it’s true that I did once imitate or follow those unfortunate ways, do me the justice to accept that I did at least abandon them and the other robberies, murders, and cruelties which continue to this day.”56 Las Casas understandably never talked much about his own actions as a young man in the Indies, even if he never sought to escape blame for them.

  By the summer of 1518 all responsible people in the Indies as in Spain had become convinced that the only viable solution to the problem of labor in the new empire was the provision of African slaves. These seemed stronger than Spaniards when faced with tropical diseases, and they were able to cope much better with work in the heat. How odd it should have been that no one seemed at this time to have any hesitation about using Old World slaves, including Africans, while many were skeptical about the morality of enslaving Indians of the New World! Yet Africans were far closer to Europeans in their knowledge of animals and agriculture than Indians were.

  No one put the contrary view. On matters of the Indies, King Charles and his advisers found it natural to accept the recommendations of the purportedly humane Judge Zuazo, the benign Las Casas, and the wise priors. If they agreed in their recommendations, could they be gainsaid? The only question seemed to be, how many African slaves were needed?

  Fonseca, Carondolet, and, no doubt, Cobos consulted the Casa de Contratación in Seville. That was, effectively, Juan López de Recalde, the accountant there, who sent back the suggestion that for the four main islands of the empire (La Española, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica), four thousand Africans would be adequate to begin with. Las Casas agreed.57

  The court was then still at Saragossa, where the King was trying to placate the Aragonese. Subsequently the most conscientious of monarchs, he was at that time only eighteen years old. He was only King Charles I of Spain, for his imperial grandfather, Maximilian, was still living. As far as policy in the Americas was concerned, he was in the hands of his advisers. On August 18, 1518, a decree signed by Fonseca and Cobos gave permission to none other than Gorrevod, the protégé of the Archduchess Margaret and the Governor of La Bresse, to import the four thousand black slaves. “The second most avaricious of the Flemings” (after Chièvres), as he was considered by the Spaniards, Gorrevod had wanted (as we have seen) to receive, as a commercial opportunity for himself, the market of Yucatan, which Hernández de Córdoba and Grijalva had visited.58 But now, as a compensation for not receiving that benefit, he was to be allowed to carry these four thousand slaves, direct from Africa if need be, to the new territories of the Spanish Empire.59 A subsequent document (signed by the King, Fonseca, Cobos, and García de Padilla) instructed the royal officials not to collect any taxes on these slaves.60 This of course was a far higher number of slaves than had been sent altogether to the New World until that time.

  The young King signed the document approving Gorrevod’s asiento (contract), and if he thought twice about the matter, he probably considered that he was acting to save the lives of the American Indians by agreeing to the petitions of the priors and to the eloquence of Las Casas. All
those people who knew anything of the Indies, and who were usually in disagreement, seemed to speak with one voice when they talked about the need for black slaves. Charles must have been pleased, too, at last to assist, as he must have thought it, one of his aunt Margaret’s friends and supporters. Gorrevod did not mention the contract in his letters to Margaret. In July 1518, indeed, a month before the signature of his contract, he ended a letter by saying: “I know of nothing further worthy to tell you.”61

  Gorrevod seems only to have been interested in the money to be made from his license, not in the social consequences, good or evil, for he soon sold his great privilege to Juan López de Recalde of the Casa de Contratación in Seville; he was, indeed, the very man who had suggested that four thousand slaves was a reasonable figure to send. But that official himself then resold the contract in turn to others, using as negotiator the converso banker Alonso Gutiérrez of Madrid, who, as we have seen, had been concerned in commerce in the Indies from the beginning; he was the man who in 1506 had resolved the question of the final settlement to the knights who accompanied Columbus in 1492. He would have his difficulties in the end with the Holy Office, but for the moment his wealth, influence, and public standing prevented any such thing.62