Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Before we blacks arrived the Indians lived here, in this same place. When we arrived the Indians fled, under the earth towards the mountains where the rivers have their sources. But before fleeing they took all the gold, and broke everything up with their hands and feet, turning it all into gold dust. And now we, the blacks, must break our bodies to find the gold dust and keep ourselves alive in the places where the Indians used to live before.131

  In the famous mines of Potosí, on the other hand, their role was only ancillary, for it was considered that they could not resist the altitude as well as the Indians. Above all, blacks served and slaved everywhere in Spanish America in the haciendas and the great ranches, helping to produce the crops and tend the animals on which Hispanic society depended.

  They were also the basis of domestic service. Europeans had been familiar with blacks in the Old World, and may for that reason have found them more acceptable for positions of trust in New World society. Blacks, moreover, were an uprooted people, and showed an amazing ability to blend into their host societies. In Peru, they were used extensively in domestic service, and a large population of free blacks developed as owners granted certificates of liberty to those who had served them well. By around 1650 possibly one-tenth of Peru's black population was legally free.132 Outside the domestic household, blacks occupied the service trades, as blacksmiths, cobblers, carpenters and tailors. The small shipbuilding industry in Peru – mainly in Guayaquil – was manned principally by blacks of different racial grades.133 Because they were mostly untrained and illiterate their success in the shipyards was relative; their efficiency was admirable, but the quality of vessels produced left much to be desired. In the long run, though there was a continuing process of manumission (that is, liberty granted on an individual basis) the blacks found it difficult to achieve a generalized legal freedom. It was a problem common to colonial societies. Indian slavery, which had been prohibited in the mid-sixteenth century, continued to be practised openly and illegally long afterwards. But at least the Indians had the protection of a law, even if it was not observed. Africans did not even have a law to protect them.134

  In no small measure, the black man created the empire that Spain directed in the New World.135 It is a role that, until recently, was wholly neglected by Spanish historians,136 unlike Portuguese scholars who were always conscious of the part played by blacks in the origins of Brazilian civilization.

  For the government in Spain, an even bigger problem than controlling Indians was that of controlling the settler class. In reality, the crown never managed to impose its will adequately on the colonial élite, which demonstrated from the time of the Pizarro revolt in Peru that it could dictate the rules of the game.

  The Spaniards in America were convinced that the continent was theirs because they had gained it through their own sweat and blood. ‘I shall declare’, wrote Vargas Machuca in 1599, ‘how much is owed to the discoverers and settlers of the Indies, since with the valour of their swords they have acquired for their prince notable realms, that have been discovered, conquered and populated.’137 The claim was absolutely true. Since the time of the occupation of the Canary Islands, the crown had no cash, men or weapons to carry out its aspirations to empire, but it used freely the system of granting military commands (adelantamientos) and authority over natives (repartimientos) in order to satisfy the adventurers. The extension of the Spanish presence was by no means a haphazard process involving random marauders. In an unknown world filled with menace, men came together only with those they trusted, and made agreements carefully stipulating the contribution each would make. The classic agreement made at Panama by the Pizarros was typical. Trust was extended to those who came from the same family, town or province. Men from Extremadura formed a closely knit group that supported the Trujillo conquistador Pizarro during the campaigns of Peru; they split up only after the defeat of the rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro.138 The men who pioneered the opening of Florida were a network drawn from families of Asturias who were linked by kinship. They came from the towns of Avilés, Gijón, Santander, Castro Urdíales and Laredo. The Asturian creator of Spanish Florida, Pedro Menéndez, specifically recommended that the crown choose its agents in that area from Asturians and Basques, ‘who are the people best fitted to work in Florida, some because of their nature and some because of kinship and friendship’.139

  Royal government was installed relatively late. It consisted mainly of a viceroy (in New Spain from 1535, in Peru from 1542) who in theory controlled the administration, supervised the treasury and dispensed royal patronage.140 He was meant to work together with the supreme administrative body, the Audiencia, consisting of senior officials sent from Spain. The first Audiencias were set up in Santo Domingo and Mexico City; by 1661 there were twelve in the Indies, and one in Manila (1583). The fact that all viceroys and judges (oídores) of the Audiencias were sent from Spain is significant. No autonomous organs of government were set up by the Spaniards, and no laws were made in America (other than administrative measures); all legislation was decided in Spain by the council of the Indies, and then sent to America to be implemented. In effect, the council of the Indies, set up formally by Charles V in 1524 and consisting of half-a-dozen experts in law, made all decisions for America. Questions of law and order, town-planning, disposition of the labour force, and other matters affecting the daily life of the settlers, could be decided only in Spain.

  This impressive picture of control from the peninsula seldom accorded with what really happened.141 The colonial system as it operated in practice bore little relation to the intentions of legislators. Government in America, as could be seen by Viceroy Mendoza's suspension of the New Laws in Mexico in order to avoid a rebellion, could not function without the help of the settlers. Philip II realized this and was obliged to capitulate to demands for the encomienda to be continued. Because of the great distances involved, and the complete lack of necessary resources, Spain could not control America through conquest or coercion. Messages and messengers were sent out but then got lost in the vast expanse of mountain, forest and sea. ‘I am off to the kingdoms of Peru’, a trader wrote from Cartagena de Indias in 1575, ‘and shall be a whole year travelling there, for by land it is a thousand leagues away.’142

  The only possible way to exercise control was through a series of understandings and compromises. The world's greatest empire of the sixteenth century, consequently, owed its survival to the virtual absence of direct control. There were outstanding viceroys – the most famous was Francisco de Toledo, viceroy of Peru from 1569 to 1581 – who brought a semblance of order into the internal government of the overseas territories. But the reins of control from the mother country were never tightened, and only became looser as the decades advanced. By the late sixteenth century, effective political and economic power in America was firmly in the hands of the settlers rather than the crown. The case of the town of Tlaxcala, in central Mexico, was typical.143 The original policy of the government there had been to exclude white civilian colonists, so as to facilitate orderly administration by the Indians themselves. But the area abounded in fertile undeveloped land and a large supply of resident labour, a combination that Spanish settlers found irresistible. From around 1540 they managed to obtain grants of land within territory officially designated as belonging to Indians. Though the viceroy made some effort to cancel the grants, by the 1560s unauthorized intrusion by whites was widespread, and towards the end of the century extensive cattle ranches had taken over much of the fertile plains.

  The weakness of imperial control was most glaring of all in the area of commerce. From the beginning foreigners were prohibited from going to America. They went there. After a limited period of free commerce, they were prohibited from trading to the New World. They traded, regardless. They were forbidden to extract gold and silver and other items. They did so, but with the added advantage that they paid no taxes since they did so illegally. In every respect, the edifice of legal controls was evaded and ignored.144<
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  The pioneers of the European enterprise overseas were almost without exception laymen; even Columbus had no priest with him on his first voyage. Yet all had the words of the gospel on their lips, and in default of an ideology all proclaimed that their purpose was to advance the faith of Christ. Cortés during the march to Mexico insisted always on the importance of religion, preached the sermons himself, and was the first to cast down the statues of the Indians. Since their early days in the Caribbean, Spanish clergy did not cease to wonder at the unprecedented opportunity that had been granted to them, to evangelize barbarians who had been untouched by the corruptions of Western civilization. The ideology that they took out with them to the New World was by no means an exclusive product of Castile. Since the fifteenth century the ideas of literate clergy in Spain – especially in the three principal mendicant orders, the Dominicans, Franciscans and Jeronimites – had been open to Italian influences and the precepts of the Netherlands movement of piety known as the devotio moderna. Members of the Dominican order at the University of Salamanca were powerfully influenced by a revival of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. The ideals of the devotio moderna penetrated most deeply into the thinking of the Franciscan order, which sent out twelve of their number – the ‘twelve apostles’ - to New Spain in 1524 to preach the gospel there. Among the Franciscans who arrived in this period were three Netherlanders: Pieter van der Moere (known in Spain as ‘Peter of Ghent’, a kinsman of the emperor); Jan van der Auwera (known as ‘Juan de Ayora’); and Johan Dekkers (known as ‘Juan Tecto’).145 With them the prophetic spirituality of Netherlands Catholicism arrived in the New World.

  In early New Spain, the friars literally battled for control.146 The Franciscans arrived first, in May 1524; the Dominicans, also twelve in number, arrived in 1526, and were followed seven years later by the Augustinians. In the Atlantic world the missionaries faced a challenge with which they were only in part familiar. They had encountered in the peninsula the phenomenon of Islam, as well as evidence of ignorance and unbelief, but no systematic heresy. At all events, their training in the theology of a dual universe, in which God and the devil, good and evil, justice and retribution, played their appointed parts, ill prepared them for the culture of the non-sedentary peoples of the New World, in which belief in a Supreme Being appeared not to exist and religion was often defined by ‘animism’, the magical character of elements of daily life.

  Their remarkable efforts in America can to some extent be seen as a spiritual parallel to the secular conquest. Like the conquistadors, they had no doubts about their purpose; like them, they were responsible for the destruction of much of the cultural heritage of the region – buildings, art, statues – and had no hesitation about using violence against individual Indians. Within a generation of their arrival in New Spain the Franciscans had founded eighty houses of religious, the Dominicans forty. By the end of the century there were around three hundred monasteries in New Spain, with fifteen hundred friars in them. From mid-century they and the other mendicant orders were joined by the newly founded Jesuits, who first arrived in South America through the port of Bahia in Brazil in 1550.

  The clergy did not by any means bring with them the traditional faith of the Iberian peninsula. Theirs was a much purer version of Catholicism. Heirs to the epoch of humanism, they had a more idealized concept of religion; heirs to the medieval tradition, they had a more theocratic, pre-Reformation, vision of priestly power; heirs to the millenarian vision, they laboured in the conviction that the conversion of the Indians heralded the fulfilment of prophecies about the imminent end of the world. The great argument that the friars offered to their own and to future generations, was that they aimed to comply with the simplicity of the gospel, and save the souls of the native population of America. In the long period that stretched from the famous sermon of Montesinos in 1511 in Santo Domingo, to the end of the century, the majority of the friars never ceased to criticize the Spanish settlers and proclaim themselves as the true defenders of the Indian. The view of the mystical school of Franciscans, as represented by one of their historians Gerónimo de Mendieta, was that conversion of the Indians formed part of a divine plan for the world. Inspired by the apocalyptic vision that many members of the order shared, they saw the conversion of America as the final prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ. History was drawing to an end: ‘the day of the world is already reaching the eleventh hour’, the twelve friars bound for Mexico were informed by their superior as he took leave of them at the quayside in Hispaniola.147

  It was a heady dream. Going out into territory untouched by Christians, they envisaged creating again in America the early Christian Church of the apostles, with the opportunity this time of rectifying the mistakes made by the official Church in the fifteen centuries of its turbulent history. The problem was that the vision they brought with them operated as a filter that both distorted what they saw and modified the impact of what they did.

  Their first great obstacle was the fundamental issue of communication. The problem was posed starkly in the open square of Cajamarca, as Atahualpa and his warriors faced the poised Spaniards. When the interpreter Felipillo translated the requerimiento for the Inca (we are told by the historian Garcilaso) he came to the phrase ‘God, three in One’ and rendered it ‘Dios tres y uno, son cuatro’, by which Atahualpa was made to understand that the Spaniards were offering him four gods. Then almost as though in imitation of the gesture of Nebrija offering his grammar to the queen of Spain, the friar Valverde approached the Inca and offered him a breviary, explaining through the interpreter that it ‘spoke’ the word of God. Guaman Poma depicts the scene in the following words:

  ‘Give it to me’, said Atahualpa, ‘so that the book may speak to me.’ He took it in his hands and began to turn over the pages of the book. ‘Why does it not speak to me? The book does not speak to me!’ Speaking with great majesty, seated on his throne, Atahualpa Inca threw the book from him.148

  It was the provocation the Spaniards were waiting for, and they took advantage of it.149 The failure of either side to understand the other at Cajamarca signalled the end of the old order in Peru and the triumph of the Christian God. But the lack of communication was never overcome. Half a century later, when Guaman Poma prepared his commentary on the Spanish experience in Peru, the distance between the languages of the conquered and the conquerors remained as evidence of the unbridged gap of comprehension.150 It is an issue to which we shall return.151

  The friars came to a continent rich with exotic tongues, whose mastery was their first major challenge. Peter of Ghent and the Flemings soon learnt Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica empire, but in some areas the predominant language might be different – Zapotec or Totonac or Otomi – and difficult to master. Peter of Ghent helped to draw up the first instruction manual in Nahuatl, which was published in Antwerp and then reprinted in Mexico. In Peru the missionary Domingo de Santo Tomás compiled the first lexicon and grammar of the Quechua language, and a few years later in 1590 the Franciscan Jerónimo Oré drew up the first catechism in Quechua. Both authors were optimistic about the ability of Indians to grasp the concepts of European philosophy and felt that Quechua was an adequate vehicle for transmitting the gospel message.152 The intellectual labour of some of the early clergy in philology and natural sciences was impressive, and they were actively supported both by their bishops and by the Spanish crown. But others were not so certain that conquerors and conquered were speaking the same language or communicating the same concepts.

  There were serious obstacles.153 In early Mexico, reported Mendieta, ‘there were not enough friars who could preach in the languages of the Indians, so we preached through interpreters’.154 Around 1580 in Peru, half a century after the capture of Atahualpa, the majority of clergy was still ignorant of the language of the natives. When they preached the text had to be translated by interpreters, and ‘we do not know what they are saying’, admitted one friar.155 The problem of the great multiplicity of languag
es in Peru – what the Jesuit José de Acosta called ‘a forest of tongues’ – was solved in a way that the Incas themselves had practised: by imposing only one, Quechua, the Inca tongue, as the general language. But for many Andeans the Quechua tongue was and would continue to be a foreign language, and one may doubt whether the missionaries attained an adequate knowledge of it. Clergy who attempted preaching in Quechua would often make a complete hash of what they thought they were saying.156 The major problem in instruction was the absence of words in the indigenous languages to express European concepts. All the basic vocabulary of Catholic belief, words such as Trinity, Grace, Sacrament, Heaven and Hell, were absent from native languages. In the end many Spanish words, most significantly of all the word ‘Dios’ for the single true God, were introduced bodily into common Indian speech. It takes little imagination to conclude that for very many natives the entity referred to as ‘Dios’ became one more god in their traditional pantheon.

  The attempt to penetrate the languages of the indigenous population formed one part of the programme that the European missionaries set themselves. They set about accumulating knowledge of the New World, for knowledge was power.157 They wished to know about the land, the people, the customs, the rites and religions. Systematically, they drew up reports, analyses and studies. The consequence was a remarkable output of publications, mainly by Castilian clergy but also by some royal officials, about the ethnography of America. It was a literature that has few equals in the history of empires, either then or since. Those who wrote were conscious not only that they were collecting knowledge, but also that the world around them was changing rapidly and that they must seize the information before it disappeared.