Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The expedition bartered their merchandise successfully for cloves; for 10 ells of red cloth of good quality they obtained a bahar (over 4 kilos) of cloves. Another bahar was similarly gained by 15 hatchets—the great prized object of European civilization in the East, as in Brazil—15 ells of cloth of middling quality, 35 glass cups, 26 ells of linen, 17 ells of cinnabar, 17 ells of quicksilver, 125 knives, 50 pairs of scissors, and a kilo of bronze! When the expedition was ready to leave, each member of it did what he could to obtain as many cloves as possible, some of them selling their shirt, cloak, and coat to obtain some of the magic product that they knew they could sell prodigiously well in Europe. The Europeans observed, too, how cloves grew on high, thick bushes and how there were every year two harvests. They saw how the trees survived in the mountains, not in the plains. Mist apparently made the growth of cloves perfect. They also saw nutmeg trees and shrubs whose roots were ginger. They were in the Paradise for which they and so many Europeans had so long searched. The Spice Islands! They were there!

  The Spaniards also learned some more disquieting news: a Portuguese captain, Diego López de Siqueiros, was sending a fleet of six ships against them, not knowing that Magellan was dead. But now with only one ship, the Victoria—the Trinidad had been left for repair in the care of the King of Tadore, with some fifty-three of the men—the remaining forty-seven men sought to avoid his attentions and abandoned Tadore on December 21, 1521.

  The expedition, on its westward return to Spain, passed Java and Malacca, and sailed straight across the Indian Ocean before heading north, along the West African coast. These feats were described rather briefly by the Italian Pigafetta. He never much mentions Juan Sebastián de Elcano, the forty-five-year-old Basque of Guetaria, Guipúzcoa, who had become the new captain-general before they had reached Africa.32 Pigafetta talks instead of the stories of China that reached his expedition: how musk was obtained by placing leeches on special cats; how the Emperor never met anyone; and how, if he wished to go anywhere, he would be accompanied by six ladies dressed exactly as he was, in order to create confusion among possible assassins. He also spoke of how the royal palace had seven walls around it, each guarded by men with whips and dogs. Again, when reading these descriptions, we feel that we are in the grip of a chivalrous novel. Pigafetta says that a Muslim who had lived in Peking told him of these strange things.

  The Victoria eventually reached the Cape of Good Hope, “the most dangerous cape in the world,” and from there some of the surviving Portuguese sailed north in canoes to Mozambique. But the “greater number of us, prizing honor more than life itself, decided on attempting at any risk to return to Spain.” They sailed northwest to the Cape Verde Islands, where they obtained some rice and took on water for the final stretch home. All the way up the African coast they had to throw dead men into the sea, and, Pigafetta noted drily, “We made then a curious observation: that the Christians floated with their faces turned to the sea, but the Indians [presumably they had seized some in the Philippines] with their faces turned to the sky.”33 They discovered that since they had constantly sailed to the west, they had gained a day; it was a Wednesday, not a Thursday. They encountered some difficulties with the authorities, since of course the Cape Verde Islands were Portuguese, but eventually they left without hindrance.

  On Saturday, September 6, 1522, the Victoria at last reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda, with a mere eighteen men on board (out of the 276 who had set out), mostly sick. It has always been said in Sanlúcar de Barrameda that Elcano requested a glass of manzanilla, the exquisite local light sherry, as his first demand.34 The list of those who returned on the Victoria can be seen, proud if forgotten, on the wall of the old town hall in the Plaza del Cabildo in that town.

  Two days later, on September 8, the eighteen survivors arrived at Seville and triumphantly discharged artillery from their ship. They subsequently went to Valladolid and were received by the King, who had returned to Spain from Germany earlier in the year and to whom Pigafetta, the persistent citizen of Vicenza, then gave his vivid account of the first journey around the world. The King rewarded Sebastián de Elcano with five hundred gold crowns, and he was authorized to take for his coat of arms a globe, with the motto “Primus me circumdedisti.” Pigafetta’s account of his circumnavigation was published in Italian in Venice in 1524.

  The men of the Trinidad who had been left behind in Tadore by Elcano in March 1522 eventually sailed their ship, after it had been repaired, back across the Pacific, making for Panama. But the ship foundered, they fell in with hostile peoples, most were killed, and only a few of them were eventually able to return to India. Some of them died in Goa, but a handful reached Lisbon, where, characteristically, they were immediately imprisoned. Four of the fifty-seven managed to reach Spain, including the pilot, Ginés de Mafra.

  The world had all the same been proved to be one planet. Thirty years after the first expedition of Columbus, Magellan—or rather, Elcano—showed that a route to the East could indeed be found by sailing west. The sphericity of the earth was demonstrated. No greater achievement has been performed. It has been claimed rightly as a great Spanish triumph, and so it was. All the same, the captain on whom all depended was a Portuguese, and the best chronicler was an Italian, as so often in the case of adventures of the sixteenth century. Most of the crew were Andalusians, but the captain who led the return was a Basque. It is not clear what happened to the English “constable,” Master Andrés of Bristol, who was among those who set out; we must assume, though, that he died in the Philippines. But we are therefore once again before a European triumph appropriate for one approved by the greatest of the European rulers, the Emperor Charles V, a European more than he was a Spaniard, a Fleming, a German, or a Burgundian. Magellan and Elcano had directed a voyage to the end of the world, which, of course, turned out to be the same port from which they had embarked, and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the racy city where the River Guadalquivir flows into the Ocean Sea, in the shade of the palace of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and on the edge of the sherry country, remains a place worthy to be considered the epicenter of the world.

  Book Ten

  THE NEW EMPIRE

  In the sixteenth century, Seville became the “capital” of the New World.

  (Illustration credit 10.1)

  37

  “The new emperor”

  All the things of this land … are so many and of such a kind that one might call oneself the new emperor of this kingdom with no less glory than of Germany which by the grace of God your Sacred Majesty already possesses.

  Hernán Cortés to King Charles V, October 30, 1520

  In April 1520, Pedro Ruiz de la Mota, Bishop of Badajoz, preceptor, and friend and adviser of Charles V, made a remarkable speech at Santiago de Compostela, at a meeting of the Castilian Cortes in the Convent of San Francisco. The Emperor at that time had not been crowned as such, but he had been elected. He was planning to go to Germany in about a month for his imperial coronation. In attendance in Galicia there was the court, the disgruntled procuradores of Castile, as well as Francisco de Montejo and Alonso Hernández Portocarrero, the representatives of Cortés. The last-named had come, it will be remembered, with glittering prizes: gold and silver, turquoise and feather mosaics, wooden carvings and weapons, musical instruments and even amazing people. These friends of Cortés were the sensations of the time.

  The Bishop declared that Charles was “more a king than all other kings.” The King was not like other kings, because Spain only represented “a third of our power” (un tercio de nuestro pan). He was a king of kings, having descended from seventy kings. The people of Spain seemed sad because the King was leaving for Germany. But why should they be sad? Charles had accepted the charge of being emperor and had to go to Germany to be crowned. Why? For ambition? On the contrary, for the glory of Spain! The King was not going to be only the king of the Romans and Roman emperor. He was going to be Emperor of the World. That world, of course, also included that “other w
orld of gold made for him,” New Spain, “since before our days it had not been born.”1

  What caused Ruiz de la Mota to talk in this way, using the word “emperor”? It was not one common to Spanish usage. True, the linguist Nebrija had said that language was also the companion of empire.2 The author of the “Requirement” of 1513, Palacios Rubios, had said that the kings of Spain never recognized any superior: “Rex es emperator in regno suo.” The courtier and historian Galíndez de Carvajal had written that “Spain never recognized the [Holy Roman] Empire, nor did the universal empire ever apply to her.”3 Spanish medieval monarchs had never formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, though King Alfonso X had contemplated being a candidate for that throne.

  It is true that once or twice the Catholic Kings had considered themselves as emperors in their own land. The thirteenth-century Archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, had also developed the idea of empire to describe the kingdoms then accumulated by the King of Castile. For him, the word “emperor” quite properly signified a ruler who dominated other monarchies. Perhaps Bishop Ruiz de la Mota had read the chapter in Amadís de Gaula in which the hero Apolidón is offered “the empire of Greece”?4 It is equally true that Las Casas wrote, in respect of the second voyage of Columbus, that the Catholic Kings might style themselves emperors and sovereigns over all the kings and princes of the Indies.5 In similarly chivalrous style, the hero of the war against Granada, Rodrigo Ponce de León, claimed to have been personally assured “by a very knowledgeable man and catholic Christian” that Fernando would not only drive the Muslims from Spain, “but conquer all Africa, too, destroy Islam, reconquer Jerusalem, and become emperor of Rome, of the Turks, and of the Spains.”6 (Fernando had for a long time thought that he would not die until he had liberated Jerusalem.)

  Nebrija wrote: “And now who cannot see that although the title of ‘empire’ is in Germany, its reality lies with the Spanish monarchs who, masters of a large part of Italy and the isles of the Mediterranean, carry the war to Africa and send out their fleet, following the course of the stars, to the isles of the Indies and the New World, linking the Orient to the western frontiers of Spain and Africa.”7

  The speech of Bishop Ruiz de la Mota in Santiago also harked back to the romantic visions of the abbot and prophet Joachim de Fiore, who about the year 1300 had talked dreamily of “a world emperor”; and some admirers of Fernando the Catholic had talked of him in that context. But Charles, Prince of Burgundy and the new Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of realms beyond the sea with names he scarcely knew, was more entitled to the designation.8 Columbus had not been alone at the court of Fernando and Isabel in envisaging just such a last emperor who would come to set the world to rights before its final days.

  A cousin of Ruiz de la Mota, Gerónimo, also a citizen of Burgos but younger, set off for the Indies in August 1520. He was the son of a councillor of Burgos, García Ruiz de la Mota, had been for a time a steward of Diego Colón’s, and had perhaps accompanied Colón to court. García Ruiz de la Mota was a procurador at the Cortes in 1520, as he had been on previous occasions. Gerónimo might even have heard his cousin’s speech.9

  After a short stay in Santo Domingo, Gerónimo left for New Spain in March 1521, in a vessel financed by the then veteran merchant Rodrigo de Bastidas, accompanying Julián de Alderete of Tordesillas, who would become royal treasurer in Mexico. There were several interesting fellow passengers, among them a cousin of Cortés’s: Licenciado Juan Altamirano, who would be the judge in the residencia of Diego Velázquez; Alonso Cano, from Seville, who would be a pioneer in the use of mules in New Spain; Jerónimo López, who would later write a famous letter to the King (Emperor) about misgovernment in New Spain; and Diego de Marmolejo, a veteran of the wars in Africa. They would obviously have told Cortés the latest news as they knew it from Castile. Probably they arrived in time to talk to him before he sent to Spain his second letter to Charles V, through the safekeeping of his friend Alonso de Mendoza. That letter was long and vividly described how Cortés had been well received in Tenochtitlan by Moctezuma and how matters had gone wrong after the arrival of Narváez. It was dated October 30, 1520, the very month that Charles was crowned in Aix-la-Chapelle, though Cortés would not have known that; but because of difficulties in communication, the letter did not leave until the end of March 1521. The fact that Cortés addresses Charles as “Your Majesty,” not “Your Highness,” shows, though, that he was adequately informed about recent thinking at court.

  Cortés explains that, unfortunately, he had not written regularly to describe his activities: “God knows how this has troubled me,” he wrote, “for I wished your Majesty to know all the things of this land which, as I have already written in another report, are so many and of such a kind that one might call oneself the new emperor of this kingdom with no less glory than of Germany which by the grace of God your Sacred Majesty already possesses.”10

  These words of Cortés’s come at the beginning of the letter, where perhaps they were slipped in as part of a revision after the rest of the document had been completed. So perhaps the idea of the Spanish Empire in those words was something conceived of by Bishop Ruíz de la Mota and then seized upon by Cortés, having had the very idea passed on to him by Gerónimo, the Bishop’s cousin and his own new recruit, or by some of the other experienced men who accompanied him to New Spain.

  There could have been an even more interesting source—not, as might be supposed, one of the characters with that title in a chivalrous novel. Despite the references to the empire of Greece, the emperors in Tirant lo Blanc or Amadís are on much the same level as other kings. But Cortés had defeated “the great Moctezuma,” to whom he had referred in his first letter to Charles V as “un grandísimo senõr.”11 Usually those who wrote of Moctezuma in the sixteenth century spoke of him as “lord.” But he was an emperor by Archbishop Ximénez de Rada’s definition: a ruler of other kings, in Moctezuma’s case the kings of Tacuba and Texcoco, not to speak of those of the Chalca, the Otomi, and the Totonacs. Then, as will be remembered, Cortés reported that Moctezuma had agreed to be a vassal of the Spanish Emperor. The example of the conquered Moctezuma could thus have influenced Cortés’s expression.12

  The notion of the Spanish Empire was thus launched by Cortés. For a long time the word was not generally used, and it certainly had no legal meaning. New Spain was a “monarchy” (reino). There would soon be other Indian monarchies (reinos indianos). But empire the Spaniards had, and eventually the lands became known as such, even if the king of Spain never assumed the title of emperor. These territories in the Indies were ones where the king of Castile had not only sovereign rights but rights of property, too. He was the absolute owner of all the American dominions.13 The Crown was careful to exclude any possibility that the complicated arguments that existed in Aragon/Catalonia and Valencia might be transferred to the New World, even though, after the death of Queen Isabel in 1504, numerous individuals from those regions traveled to the Indies and though Aragon had had something close to an “imperial” experience in the Mediterranean.14 Those educated men who grew up in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century may have been “Renaissance men,” and all had a vision of ancient Rome that inspired them, even if that old empire was deemed by all wise men unsurpassable.15

  In 1522, Spain’s right to this New World was already being contested. King François I of France had declared that he would like to see the clause in the will of Adam that excluded France from the division of the world.16 Certainly, corsairs from that country had captured two Spanish caravels bound for Spain from the Indies in 1521, and a fleet under Pedro Manrique, financed by a special tax (avería), was formed to face the danger. The next year, three armed caravels were sent out under Domingo Alonso de Amilivia, financed by the Casa de Contratación, to convoy eleven ships to the Canaries on their way to the Indies. A few months later, two ships of Cortés’s coming from Vera Cruz were seized by the French captain Jean Florin off the Azores with a considerable quantit
y of booty, much of it feather mosaics, from Mexico.17 The new empire was thus beginning to need bulwarks. It would soon have them—for example, Seville, a city where, as a modern historian once said, “the world’s heartbeat” could be felt.18

  38

  “From the poplars I come, mama”

  From the poplars I come, mama,

  To see how the breeze moves the leaves;

  From the poplars of Seville,

  I’ve come to see my pretty friend,

  From the poplars I come, mama,

  To see how the breeze moves the leaves.

  Carol, c. 15001

  The city that by 1522 had become the unofficial capital of this new empire of Spain in the New World was Seville. A generation later, Fernando de Herrera, the so-called divine poet of the place, remarked, “You are no city, you are a universe.”2 Of Seville, it was bravely stated on its Gate of Jerez: “Hercules built me, Caesar gave me walls and towers, and the Saint-King won me, with García Pérez de Vargas.”3 The city had indeed been conquered, “liberated,” as the Christians thought, from the Muslims in 1248 by King (afterwards Saint) Fernando III. Yet memories of the old Islamic dominance were still everywhere to be seen—for example, the old court of oranges next to the cathedral and, towering above it, the Giralda, whence the muezzin had once called the faithful to prayer and which was now an elegant bell tower. Other memories of Islam were to be found everywhere: there were churches, such as the one in the newly named Plaza del Salvador, that had once been mosques. There were many houses within the city that had been built by Muslims, and those walls themselves were the work not of Caesar, but of the Almohades, a fanatical sect, the al-Qaida of the Middle Ages, that had conquered half of Spain in the twelfth century. In Islamic Seville there had been many bathhouses, and they were only slowly abandoned: the Baths of Queen Juana and those of San Juan de la Palma remained fashionable in the 1520s, even among the Christians.