by Hugh Thomas
These men, Alaminos included, came to Spain with some remarkable news and treasure, as well as some Indian slaves from the territory where, according to their reports, Cortés with about six hundred men seemed to be carving out a new colony. Cortés, it seemed, had been condemned for rebellion by Governor Velázquez, who had written of his outrage to Bishop Fonseca and to others in Spain; and Fonseca had wanted to arrest, perhaps execute, the two men who had come impertinently as Cortés’s procuradores, technically representatives of a city that he had founded on the Caribbean coast and that he had named Vera Cruz.
Ruiz de la Mota and Cobos, both conventional but not always cautious, thought that the court should wait to see how matters were resolved between Cortés and Velázquez. They and their colleagues were much impressed by the treasure sent by Cortés, and as will be recalled, in his speech at Santiago a few weeks before, the King himself had referred to this territory as “a new land of gold.” The so-called procuradores of Cortés had traveled with the court throughout the winter and the spring, and the treasure they had carried with them had been displayed not only in Seville but also in Tordesillas. The gold had been held in the Casa de Contratación. The pride of the exhibition was two large, elaborately worked “wheels” of wood covered with silver and gold. They were presents from the Mexican monarch Moctezuma to Cortés.
The Indians whom the conquistadors had brought back (they were Totonaca; see chapter 33) had been shown at court, too, and the King himself had been constrained to intervene to ensure that they were properly clothed against the Castilian winter. Montejo and Portocarrero were accompanied by Martín Cortés, Hernán’s father, an ex-warrior in the war in Granada (and in the civil war between La Beltraneja and Isabel); while a cousin of his, Francisco Núñez, a lawyer of Salamanca, arranged a meeting between the emissaries of Cortés and that influential member of the Council of Castile, Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal, a distant cousin of Martín Cortés.21 This meeting was second in importance in Carvajal’s life to his talk with King Fernando the Catholic on his deathbed.
On April 30, the Council of the Realm discussed the requests of these emissaries. They merely asked that Cortés be allowed to continue his expedition free of obligations to Governor Velázquez. Present at the discussion seem to have been Cardinal Adrian; Gattinara; Hernando de Vega; Antonio de Rojas, Archbishop of Granada; Fonseca; and the Fleming Carondelet, along with such Castilian civil servants as Diego Beltrán, Zapata, Francisco de Aguirre, and García de Padilla. Galíndez de Carvajal was there, too, at least for part of the discussion. The council was now, if not well disposed to Cortés, at least not hostile, and though they did not rule on the main issue, they allowed Cortés’s father and friends to receive from the Casa de Contratación in Seville 4.5 million maravedís for their expenses.22 Cortés himself was not praised. But nor was he condemned; and so his friends felt that they had gained a famous victory.23
On May 19, 1520, the royal pilots in Corunna announced the wind right for England, and the King, Queen Germaine and her new husband (the Marquis of Brandenburg), Frederick Count Palatine, and the Duke of Alba set out for that northern country, being accompanied by such noblemen and courtiers as the Marquis of Aguilar, Diego de Guevara, Juan de Zúñiga, Galíndez de Carvajal, Bishop Ruiz de la Mota, García Padilla, Bishop Manrique, Cobos, and, of course, Gattinara and Chièvres. “With loud music from clarions and flutes, and with great demonstrations of joy [the court] weighed anchor and departed,” in a hundred ships for England and Germany.
There remained behind, in a Spain “laden now with griefs and misfortunes,” a new Council of the Realm, headed as before by Archbishop Rojas, of Granada, and including the eternal courtier Hernando de Vega, the Viceroy of Galicia, Bishop Fonseca, his brother the commander Antonio de Fonseca, and the treasurer Francisco de Vargas, while the Council of Aragon would be presided over by Juan, Archbishop of Saragossa (the illegitimate son and successor of the equally illegitimate Archbishop Don Alonso, now dead), and that of Valencia by Diego de Mendoza, Count of Melito, a legitimized bastard of Cardinal Mendoza.24 Fonseca and Zapata would act as the officials for the Indies, together with Vargas, Pedro de los Cobos (cousin of Francisco), the notary Juan de Samano, and the Italian courtier Peter Martyr, who had talked so much with men who had been to the Indies, for the benefit of his brilliant letters to Rome. Fonseca now liked him: “The Bishop of Burgos in whom I have much confidence has been very amiable with me,” Martyr wrote in September 1518.25 These men were already acting as a subcommittee of the Council of the Realm. But they, like all other royal committees, would soon be challenged and nearly swept away by an unprecedented upheaval.
32
“The new golden land”
I have seen the things that they have brought the King from the new golden land.
Albrecht Dürer, 1520
The King-Emperor Charles left Spain on May 20, 1520, stopping in England as a guest of King Henry, his uncle by marriage—in Dover, Canterbury, and Sandwich. Apparently he there showed off the treasures that he had received from “the new golden land” of New Spain thanks to Cortés.1 Alas, no record seems to exist of what the English thought. Charles reached Flanders in June and arranged to be crowned “King of the Romans” at Aix-la-Chapelle on October 20.2
Charles was welcomed in Germany as if he were a new Messiah. Even Martin Luther had high hopes of him. In August 1520, that reformer spoke of Charles, in An Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, as the much awaited “young and noble” chief. That was the year of Luther’s two other great works: On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God and On the Liberty of a Christian Man. In the early autumn, the more radical Ulrich von Hutten again made a direct appeal for support from Charles V, telling him that the Church of Rome was the natural enemy of the German Emperor. Charles did not react. Did he miss an opportunity? Perhaps. But he was too good a Catholic to play with emotions.
While Charles was busy being crowned emperor at Aix-la-Chapelle, as all his predecessors had been,3 Cortés’s Mexican treasures were displayed in the town hall at Brussels. The Hungarian-German Albrecht Dürer, the favorite painter of the Archduchess Margaret, examined them with much pleasure, writing of them fulsomely in his “Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands.” Dürer would have earlier almost certainly seen an account of Cortés’s conquests in a letter, Ein Auszug Ettlicher Sendsbriefe, published in his own town of Nuremberg by a local printer, Friedrich Poel. So Dürer was prepared. He now wrote: “I have seen the things that they have brought the King from the new golden land.”4 Suddenly, the New World seemed, even to the hard-bitten courtiers around the new Emperor, to offer dazzling and exotic riches. Dürer met Erasmus, and that autumn the latter proposed a compromise in the Church whereby the Pope would suspend the bull (Exsurge Domine) that he had issued against Luther and submit the whole matter to a commission of wise men designated by the Emperor, his brother-in-law Louis, King of Hungary, and his uncle, the King of England. (The reputation of the future English rebel then stood high in Rome.) All would refrain from using any armed force while those wise men were sitting.5
For a time it seemed that this conciliatory policy might be successful. The world seemed, all the same, on the edge of profound transformations. The Emperor met Luther at the famous test of opinion known as the Diet of Worms. Charles appeared in person, as did Luther, who had a safe conduct, being protected by Elector Frederick of Saxony. Charles seems to have seen Luther as a heretic, but he implied that he did not oppose clerical reform outright. All eyes were on him and the papal conservatives, who were suspicious: the nuncio Gerolamo Aleandro even complained to the imperial court that Charles had agreed to listen to Luther at Worms. Chièvres replied: “Let the Pope fulfill his duty and let him not concern himself so much in our affairs and we will do what he wants.”6
Luther appeared at Worms on April 16. He spoke badly. But then two days later he spoke well, representing himself as a man leading a revolution. He made a great impression. The Reformation h
ad begun. But on Charles he had a wholly negative effect.
On April 19, Charles made a personal statement in French. He explained how he had inherited his loyalty to the Catholic Church from his ancestors and how he was determined to remain faithful to their memory. He had pledged his realms (including the empire), his possessions, his body, his blood, his friends, his life, and his soul to that cause. He thought that it would be a shame if any idea of heresy penetrated the hearts of his audience: “We have heard Luther speak, and I regret that I delayed in speaking against him. I shall never hear him again. Of course, he has a safe conduct, but from now on I shall regard him as a notorious heretic, and I hope that the rest of you will fulfill your role as good Christians.…”7
The great medieval scholar Menéndez Pidal thought that in this speech Charles was influenced by the memory of his devout grandmother, Isabel.8 She certainly would never have stooped to an armistice with evil. At all events, any idea of compromise was at an end. Leo X’s excommunication of Luther was thus seen as having been confirmed by Charles. On May 4, Luther was seized by soldiers of the Elector Frederick of Saxony and taken to the castle of Wartburg, in Saxony, where he was able to continue his writing in tranquillity.
Charles had other anxieties; for example, in April 1521, King François I declared war, and soon after, three Spanish transatlantic caravels heading for the New World were intercepted by the French. Defense of the new empire suddenly became a concern, especially when the next year French ships were observed for the first time off Santo Domingo. The age of diplomatic innocence in which Spain’s only rival in the Indies was Portugal was coming to an end. Thanks to the diplomacy of the Spanish ambassador in Rome, the astute and courtly Juan Manuel, Charles organized a diplomatic reversal leading to an alliance with the Pope, Leo X, against France. An edict against Luther was also prepared. At the end of May, a different alignment was achieved by the marriage at Linz between Charles’s brother, the Infante Fernando, now the Archduke Ferdinand, to Anne, sister of King Louis of Hungary, who himself at the same time married María, sister of Charles and Fernando.
Alas for the hope of friendship with France! Charles’s master, Chièvres, who had slept in the royal bedroom for so long and who had always wanted peace with that country, which he respected as Burgundy’s suzerain, died in May. He was replaced as grand chamberlain by Henry of Nassau, who never had much effect on policy. The Chancellor, Gattinara, was now in control, though, when in July 1521 he was away for some months at Calais to meet his fellow chancellors, the proud Cardinal Wolsey of England and Du Prat of France, Charles began to develop a taste for making his own decisions. He began to rely more and more on secretaries, such as the two experienced Aragonese Ugo de Urríes and Pedro García, as well as the charming Burgundian Jean Lalemand, Lord of Bouclans, once clerk of the Parlement at Dôle, of which Gattinara had been president. Lalemand would rise steadily under Gattinara’s influence until, as often occurs in bureaucracies, he judged the time ripe to challenge his benefactor.9 Cobos also from then on saw the Emperor regularly to discuss Spain and the Indies. When in late May the court left Worms for Brussels and stopped at Cologne, the Emperor gave Cobos a present: four of the heads of the eleven thousand virgins allegedly killed in that city during the first century A.D. Cobos took them as a treasured relic to his house at Úbeda. (As may be remembered, there had only been eight of them.)
While Charles appeared to be reaching for greatness in Germany, his first monarchy, Spain, seemed to be falling apart. On May 29, 1520, Whit Tuesday, nine days after the King had set sail from Corunna, a real rebellion of the comuneros, the councillors of the cities, began in Segovia.10 Juan Bravo, a determined man who had married a Mendoza, was the leader in that city. He raised a flag that appealed to many protesters: to those who wanted the King to remain always in Spain, to those who hated the Flemish and Burgundian advisers, to those who desired the preservation of the old Spain of greater urban independence, and to those who thought that the centralizing reforms of the Catholic Kings had gone too far. Like most movements of protest, that of the comuneros was Hydra-headed, and for that reason dangerous.
On June 6, Cardinal Adrian, the improbable Regent named by Charles, reached Valladolid with the Council of the Realm. Archbishop Antonio de Rojas, of Granada, the president, was already there with the Constable of Castile, Íñigo Fernández de Velasco. They discussed the problem created by the astonishing attitude of the comuneros in Segovia. All thought it essential to act decisively for fear that the unrest would spread.
But that was precisely what occurred: even remote Murcia peacefully proclaimed the “comunidad” (which implied increasingly the virtual independence of the city), while Juan Negrete “pronounced” in Madrid. Pedro de Coca, a carpenter, and Diego de Medina, a tiler, did the same in the Mendozas’ capital of Guadalajara, while in Burgos the popular corregidor of Córdoba, Diego de Osorio, who had come home expecting only to meet his wife, Isabel de Rojas, also swept the city into rebellion. A mob demanded the burning of Bishop Ruiz de la Mota’s house, because of what was seen as the destructive vote of that prelate in the Cortes of Corunna.
In the event, several palaces in Burgos were indeed sacked, including that of the commander of the Castle of Lara, Jofre de Cotanés (who, furious, said that he would rebuild his house with the heads of the conversos of Burgos, putting two heads for every stone destroyed; he fled but was captured by the rebels and hanged). Jews were not to blame: people of old Christian blood were the chief motors of turbulence. There were also successful risings in other cities of Castile and Extremadura. The representatives of Ávila demanded the dismissal of Chièvres, Ruiz de la Mota, Padilla, and Cobos because they were rumored to have carried off a fortune from the treasury. Adrian had already written to Charles saying that the comuneros were insisting that “money from Castile must be spent for the benefit of Castile and not of Germany, Aragon, Naples, and so on; and that his Majesty ought to govern each territory he controls with the money that comes from it.”11 Gattinara agreed.
In September, a junta of representatives of the rebel cities met at Tordesillas and set up a revolutionary government. Thirteen cities were represented: Toledo, Salamanca, Segovia, Toro, Burgos, Soria, Ávila, Valladolid, León, Zamora, Cuenca, Guadalajara, and Madrid. The Council of the Realm was declared dissolved, and it was announced that Charles did not have the right to be named king during the lifetime of his mother. The new junta later began to issue decrees in the names of the “comunidades” and of Queen Juana, without mentioning the name of the King.
The old royal regime was thus experiencing its most severe crisis. What could the outcome be? Cardinal Adrian made intelligent concessions: the King would renounce the grants that had been voted in Corunna. No more foreigners would be appointed to any important posts, a concession that went a long way to satisfying the rebels. Then Gattinara, in Flanders, named two Castilians (the Constable, Fernández de Velasco, and the Admiral, Fadrique Enríquez) as co-regents with Adrian—a move that began to recover the great nobility for the King.
Before that order arrived in Spain, the comuneros had sent a detachment of soldiers to Valladolid with orders to arrest the old Council of the Realm. That they failed altogether to do, but they did catch two royal secretaries, Bartolomé Ruiz de Castañeda and Juan de Samano. The rest of the council—even the proud Bishop Fonseca—fled. The royalist forces, commanded by Bishop Fonseca’s brother Antonio, who had a name for prudence gained in the war against Navarre, rallied to try to attack Segovia. They were defeated, and directed their efforts to finding artillery in the rich city of Medina del Campo. Fonseca failed yet again and was attacked by the townsmen. The city caught fire, and much of its famous market and royal quarter burned to the ground. The consequence was nearly fatal for the royalists, since the destruction of the market excited tempers in the hitherto quiescent cities of the south, for Medina del Campo had been the nerve center of the whole Spanish economy.
September 1520 saw an attempted coup in Sevil
le, the de facto capital of the new empire in the Indies, by Juan de Figueroa, brother of the Duke of Arcos. The conflict of the comunidades there had the character of a new act in the ancient feud between the Ponce de León family and the Guzmáns, the former incensed by the alleged rapacity of the municipal treasurer Francisco de Alcázar and other conversos in power, who were assumed to be protégés of the Guzmáns. The Crown’s representative, the corregidor, was afraid to return from Corunna, where he had voted for the King’s subsidy, and such authority as there was lay in the hands of Andrés de Vergara, the chief magistrate, who established his headquarters at the palace of the dukes of Medina Sidonia. Other cities in Spain experienced similar eruptions: all might begin with new ideals, but old politics soon took over.12
In the Dominican convent of San Pablo in Seville on September 2, Juan de Figueroa and a group of disgruntled aristocrats, including the ruined treasurer Luis de Medina and Francisco Ponce de León, together with Pedro and Perafan de Villasis, proposed a massacre of conversos. Were there not many deserving citizens who had no income because the good posts had been seized by those most dubious Christians?13 The first target was the Alcázar family, for the treasurer, Francisco de Alcázar, had recently raised local taxes.14
Figueroa led about four hundred followers to the cathedral along the Calle Sierpes. It is a route now familiar to those who attend Holy Week in Seville. But they found themselves barred by armed men near the convent of San Francisco. Though stopped, there were ominous cries for hangings, which created such a sense of panic that prominent conversos, such as Juan de Córdoba, the silversmith-banker, Juan Varela, the bookseller, and other worried businessmen of the Calle Génova prepared a letter of loyalty to the Crown, asking for the government’s protection.15 This would be later signed by many respected citizens, including the printers Tomas Ungut, Diego de Talavera, Gonzalo de Roelas, and Juan de Valladolid, several of whom were conversos and some even reconciliados.16
