Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The idea was opposed by Oviedo, who said that his own similar scheme could assure a more serious income. He had already come to dislike the fanaticism of Las Casas in a way that would eventually be reflected in his history of the Indies. But Diego Colón, like so many, had become fascinated by the priest, and wrote to Gattinara in favor of his ideas.

  Another opponent wrote: “There is no assurance that the proposal of Las Casas will succeed, for it conflicts with the privileges of people now in La Española, and there are other weighty and secret reasons against Las Casas that cause me to recommend disapproval of this plan.” But Gattinara was persuaded and advised the King to ignore both Oviedo and Fonseca. The situation was eased by the death of Quevedo on Christmas Eve 1519 from a fever probably contracted in the Indies. The outstanding questions raised by Las Casas—in particular, how exactly his plans would be put into effect—were left for a decision of the Council of the Realm, which, it was assumed, would soon be held at Burgos.32

  31

  “For empire comes from God alone”

  At last, empire has been conferred on me by the single consent of Germany, with God, as I deem it, willing and commanding. For truly he errs who reckons that by men or riches, by unlawful canvassing or stratagems, the empire of the whole world can fall to anyone’s lot. For empire comes from God alone.

  The King-Emperor Charles at Santiago de Compostela, 1520

  While these learned discussions were under way at court, they began to be overshadowed by sensational international matters.

  The question of what was going to happen in the German Empire was beginning to dominate the minds of Gattinara, Chièvres, and Charles. Ulrich von Hutten’s dialogue Vadiscus, about the evils that the author thought had been caused to Germany by the Catholic Church, was a patriotic gauntlet flung down before Rome. It exalted the memory of ancient German liberty. On February 20, 1520, the electors of Mainz and Saxony wrote to Charles urging him to come quickly to help them. Unless he came soon, there would be a disaster such as had never been seen before,1 and in March, von Hutten called on Charles V to lead the struggle against Roman oppression.

  This was also the year when the Sultan Suleiman I came to the Ottoman throne and reversed the conciliatory policy of his father, Selim I, who had hitherto been desirous only of attacking Persia and Egypt, not the Christian Empire. Henceforth Charles was continuously at war with the Turks, who themselves were often in alliance with France, which seemed scandalous to the rest of Europe. At the same time, Barbarossa, a renegade Greek pirate, was also emerging as a formidable enemy in the western Mediterranean (he occupied Algiers in 1516).2

  Gattinara was determined to ensure that Charles faced all these challenges and managed all his vast dominions efficiently. In early 1520, he penned another letter to the Emperor (as, of course, Charles now was), giving him further advice: “Each of the countries of which you are the ruler should be allowed to govern itself according to its ancient laws and customs. Each country, too, should try to arrange that its expenses do not exceed its income.”3 But Gattinara also thought that a controller-general should supervise all the royal finances.4 The implications for the empire in the Indies were not mentioned.

  On January 23, Charles and the Spanish court left for Burgos. On the way, at Calahorra, for years a Mendoza see, Secretary Cobos summoned a Castilian Cortes for Santiago de Compostela on March 20. The King as usual needed more money. Why Santiago? Primarily because the King wished to be near Corunna, which had been chosen as his port of embarkation. Perhaps, too, he wanted to be away from such a dangerously lively place as Burgos. Chièvres tried to persuade the municipal authority in Valladolid, independently of the Cortes, to make a direct grant immediately. But the city was in turmoil because the procuradores of Toledo had arrived and were trying to persuade those of their colleagues who cared to listen to oppose any new grant to the Crown until all their demands had been met.

  Valladolid rang with rumors: was the King perhaps going to Corunna in order to abandon Spain forever? The bell of the church of San Miguel was sounded; crowds went into the streets in protest. The King received two procuradores from Toledo, Alonso Suárez and Pedro Laso, who asked him to hear their petitions. But Charles said he had to go immediately to Tordesillas in order to see his mother, Juana. He knew well that Valladolid was the most divided of Spanish cities. Chièvres, hearing the crowds in the streets, determined to leave there and then, in heavy rain. Some tried to prevent the royal escape by closing the gate. But the King’s guard, small though it was, dispersed them, and Charles and Chièvres galloped the short distance of fifteen miles to Tordesillas, where they arrived at the end of the day. The court would eventually catch up to find a King shaken to the core, much as his great-great-grandson, Louis XIV, would be shocked by the Fronde, 130 years later.5

  Charles, having seen his sad mother once again and consigned her to the far from considerate care of his cousin, the Marquis of Denia, left Tordesillas on March 9 and made for Galicia, stopping at Villalpando, once a Templar fortress, where he again found some of the difficult councillors from Toledo, now joined by the procuradores of Salamanca. They were received by Bishop Ruiz de la Mota and García de Padilla, the secretary to King Fernando, who had cleverly managed to intrigue his way back to influence with Charles. (From 1518 he was to be found signing documents about the Indies and acted as temporary chairman of the little group of officials who dealt with imperial matters in the Council of Castile in place of Bishop Fonseca, who was in Corunna.) Ruiz de la Mota said that unless the Toledans explained exactly what their request was, they could not be received. They revealed something of what they wanted: they wished to be consulted—the demand of parliamentarians throughout the ages. So the Bishop told them to return at two o’clock in the afternoon. They did, and presented their petitions.

  Ruiz de la Mota then told them that the King was leaving for Benavente. There they were received again, but by Antonio de Rojas, the Archbishop of Granada and president of the Council of the Realm, and Padilla, who told them peremptorily not to meddle in the King’s affairs. They decided to continue to Santiago, where, indeed, the monarch and the court arrived on March 24, having spent nearly every night since leaving Tordesillas in a different place and having seen many of the wilder parts of Galicia. King, court, and procuradores were greeted by Bishop Fonseca’s cousin Alonso, who, as his father and grandfather had been, was archbishop there. The Archbishop arranged fiestas with the fine fish, fruit, and other delicacies for which Galicia was always known.6

  It seemed to most courtiers a mistake to hold the meeting in Santiago de Compostela, a remote place where only pilgrims ever went. Still, the assembly opened as planned on April 1 in a chapel of the cloister of the monastery of San Francisco, an institution said to have been founded by St. Francis in person.7 The participants were eclectic, for the procuradores included many friends of the King: García Ruiz de la Mota, brother of the Bishop, and Juan Pérez de Cartagena, of the great converso family, attended from Burgos, and the royal secretary Cobos was one of the two representatives of Granada.8 The ubiquitous courtier Hernando de Vega, for so many years viceroy in Galicia, was present, as were García de Padilla and Luis Zapata, the latter acting as secretary.

  Here in the cloister Bishop Ruiz de la Mota made an astounding speech launching the imperial idea. It was apparently written by the royal doctor, the Milanese intellectual Ludovico Marliano, the best friend of Gattinara. Peter Martyr thought that he was “half Gattinara’s soul.” It was he who had devised for Charles the motto Plus Ultra and, as a reward (or so it was said), had been named to two Spanish bishoprics, that of Tuy and Ciudad Rodrigo. The first is one of the most beautiful of frontier cities. Charles, said Ruiz de la Mota, was more of a king than any other monarch had been, because he had more realms,9 even if “Castile was the foundation, the protection, and the real engine of all the others.” Looking back, he recalled that in the remote past Spain had sent emperors to Rome: for example, Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosi
us. Now the empire had again come to seek in Spain its king of the Romans and its emperor.10 Yet “the orchard of his pleasures, the fortress for his defense, the place to attack, his treasure and his sword, would remain his Spanish inheritance.”11 Ruiz de la Mota was one of those who had done his best to teach Charles Spanish—a good choice, since “nobody managed that language with more facility and elegance.”12

  Charles then spoke. His speech was probably written by Gattinara. He said:

  At last, empire has been conferred on me by the single consent of Germany, with God, as I deem it, willing and commanding. For truly he errs who reckons that by men or riches, by unlawful canvassing or stratagems, the empire of the whole world can fall to anyone’s lot. For empire comes from God alone. Nor have I undertaken the charge of such great measures for my own sake, for I was well able to content myself with the Spanish imperium, with the Balearics and Sardinia, with the Sicilian kingdoms, with a great part of Italy, Germany, and France, and with another, as I might say, gold-bearing world [the Indies presumably; this was Charles’s first public reference to the New World].

  But now a certain necessity compels me to set off on my travels. My decision is taken out of a proper respect for religion, whose enemies have grown so much that neither the repose of the commonweal nor the dignity of Spain nor the welfare of my kingdoms are able to tolerate such a threat. All these are hardly able to exist or be maintained unless I link Spain with Germany and add the name of Caesar to that of king of Spain.13

  Charles then made two promises: first, though he had now to go to Germany, he would return to Spain within three years; second, he would appoint no more foreigners to Spanish offices. He added that he was in agreement with everything that Ruiz de la Mota had said.

  The procuradores of Salamanca listened to these high-flown words with interest, but they had their own, more earthy demands. They did not want a foreigner such as Gattinara to preside in the Cortes at Santiago any more than they had wanted Le Sauvage to be at Valladolid. They refused to take the oath to the King unless their petitions were granted. They were then dismissed. Pedro Laso of Salamanca insisted that the King must heed the protests of the cities, while the nobles of Galicia were beginning to rouse themselves from their ancient lethargy to demand that their cities, too, should send procuradores to the Cortes of Castile. Why should that body be limited to the representatives of a few Castilian cities and exclude both Santiago and Corunna?

  Chièvres sent Cobos and Juan Ramírez, the secretary of the Council of the Realm, to the lodgings of the men from Toledo to tell them that the King ordered them to leave Santiago. Led by Alonso Ortiz, those procuradores then saw Chièvres, who accepted a compromise: they would retire to El Padrón, twelve miles west of Santiago, the town where James’s body in his stone coffin had been washed up in the River Ulla. But the King still refused to see them. He instead retired to the ancient Franciscan monastery of San Lorenzo for Holy Week. Ortiz continued to press Chièvres, Zapata, and Cobos. The debate went on. Cobos, in his improbable guise as member for Granada, proposed the grant of a generous subsidy to the Crown. Gattinara, in a later memoir, claimed that he had opposed Charles’s request for a grant to pay for his journey to Germany, but the record shows that the Chancellor spoke several times in favor of it.14 It does not suggest that this great Piedmontese felt the slightest timidity at speaking forcefully before a Spanish audience.

  After Easter, the court left Santiago for Corunna. Charles ordered the Cortes, that is, the procuradores, to follow him the short distance to that port, which was already established on both sides of its elegant peninsula. The eastern side had a fine harbor, and the plan was that the King would sail from there to his northern empire with a brief, diplomatically useful stop in England on the way. In the interval between the meetings in the two cities of Galicia, Charles’s courtiers cleverly persuaded most procuradores to support the subsidy.

  The King himself spent much of his last days before going to northern Europe discussing the Indies. Thus on May 17, 1520, Charles reinstated Diego Colón as governor of the Indies without a clear definition of his power, for he would be governor and, at last, viceroy of the island of La Española, as of all the other islands that the Admiral—Columbus—had discovered in those seas. That seemed to imply that not only would Diego recover the islands in the Caribbean, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico as well as La Española—but also the north coast of South America, from the Orinoco to present-day Honduras, which his father had visited in his third and fourth journeys, of 1498 and 1502.

  This decree seemed to do away with the loose independence of Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, based on the earlier nomination as “lieutenant governors” of Velázquez, Esquivel, and Ponce. But, in reality, nothing would change. The “lieutenant governors” would be the proconsuls on the spot, and Diego Colón would only constitute a distant court of appeal. One other concession was made to Diego: he would not be subject to a residencia when he abandoned his authority. But all the same, he was declared subject to investigation by comisarios who could institute what might seem to be a residencia without the name.15

  The decree of May 17 relating to Diego Colón was detailed. It was signed by Gattinara, Cobos, Ruiz de la Mota, Luis Zapata, and a Dr. Joose, a new letrado from Catalonia. It included an Article 12 that declared, in words that read as if they had been written by Las Casas, that God had created the Indians as free men, subject to no one. Nor were they obliged to carry out any service to Spaniards.16 Article 13 was equally positive, for by it the King and his council miraculously agreed that “the Indians were free men, ought to be treated as such and persuaded to accept Christianity by the methods that Christ had established.”17 Another article provided that Don Diego would receive a tenth of all the gold, pearls, silver, and other precious stones found in the Indies, as well as of all other products. The foundation of new cities and municipalities could not be made without Diego’s approval. The empire might be built by and for free men, but their freedom of action was to be limited by Castilian rules.

  Cardinal Adrian had been silent, even invisible, for many months but was now, improbably and unwisely, named as regent in Spain in the forthcoming absence of the monarch. Chièvres was responsible for that nomination. Adrian made a solemn and learned speech in Corunna in which he said that “by natural reasons, by the authority of divine law, and by the works of the Holy Fathers, as through human and ecclesiastical laws, the Indians were to be brought to a knowledge of God by peaceful means, not by Muslim methods”—presumably force.18 Las Casas thought that this statement would enable him to go ahead with all his schemes of colonization. Diego Colón had by then made a de facto alliance with Las Casas and guaranteed himself to work for the evangelization of the Indians on the mainland.

  The territory that Las Casas was now to think of as his own for special development was still that from Santa Marta to Paria, that is, most of the coast of what is now Columbia and all of Venezuela. He was not given the monopoly on pearls for which he had now decided to ask, and the recovery of those, as well as all violent actions against the Indians in South America, was prohibited. Once again, Las Casas pledged that Indians seized as slaves in the past from any part of this territory and now in La Española would be set free and taken home.

  In return, Las Casas guaranteed to pacify and convert the Indians under his auspices and to organize them into towns so that within two years the King might have ten thousand or so new tax-paying vassals. Las Casas would pay the Crown a rent of a little more than 5.5 million maravedís after the third year, 11.25 million after the sixth, and 22.5 million after the tenth.

  The fifty Knights of the Golden Spur, who were to articulate these splendid dreams and be the nerve of these operations, would be, in Las Casas’s words, “modest persons, subject to reason, who would, by good will, concern themselves in such good work more for virtue and to serve God than by greed, though they could certainly seek to enrich themselves by legal means.”19 But such “modest” people in th
e sixteenth-century Indies were hard to come by.

  The King also instructed the Governor of La Española, Figueroa, to give the appropriate Indians their freedom “with all reasonable speed.” He was to begin with those who had been taken away from nonresident encomenderos. Indians left alone by the death of their encomenderos were also to be freed. Some “good Spaniards” were to be placed among these Indians to tell them how to live in the future. Free Indians would be provided with food and tools until they began themselves to produce crops. A priest and an administrator would be assigned to each place. Figueroa was to seek other Indians desirous and capable of living in those towns, even though their encomenderos might complain. These arrangements were to be repeated in Puerto Rico by Antonio de la Gama, a newly appointed judge from Seville.20

  Another decision seemed less pressing at the time but in the long run was more significant than anything else agreed in Corunna in those May days of 1520. The previous autumn, two Spanish conquistadors, one from Salamanca, Francisco de Montejo, the other from Medellín, in Extremadura, Alonso Hernández Portocarrero, had arrived in Seville from the Indies. Montejo had first gone out there in 1514 with Pedrarias, and Hernández Portocarrero had gone to Cuba in 1516. In 1518, they had sailed with Hernán Cortés to the west. Then, on Cortés’s orders, they had returned from Vera Cruz via Florida, guided by the famous pilot Alaminos, veteran of Ponce de León’s expedition to Florida and of Columbus’s fourth voyage.

  To begin with, Montejo had seemed to be a friend of Diego Velázquez, but he had become an unquestioning supporter of Cortés and for the rest of his life his actions would be concentrated in what became New Spain. Hernández Portocarrero was a cousin of the Count of Medellín, in which city he was born. So he was probably an old friend of Cortés. His mother was a sister of Alonso de Céspedes, judge of Las Gradas, in Seville, a most useful connection, if a converso one.