Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Another example of cultural independence comes from the Guajiro people of the province of Riohacha in New Granada.104 Two hundred years after the conquest, they were unconquered. They never accepted the new religion: ‘among all the barbarous nations of America’, a Jesuit reported in 1750, ‘none is more needful of reduction than the Guajiro Indians’. While maintaining their independence, they made free use of the settler population as well as of foreign smugglers in order to ensure their own survival. They sold livestock, hides and tallow to outside buyers, and in return received weapons, manufactures and liquor; in this way they sustained the settler economy without being formally part of it. Their relationship with the empire duplicated that of an untold number of other native peoples. ‘What would the whites do without the Indians?’, the Guajiros are said to have asked local Spaniards repeatedly and with deliberate irony. There was the same persistent autonomy among the peoples of northern Luzon in the Philippines. They were a variety of different ethnic formations but for simplicity the Spaniards called them all ‘Igorots’. For three centuries they successfully resisted assimilation into the Spanish empire. The first missionaries ventured to enter the territory in 1601 but were killed; after the 1630s no further efforts at penetration or evangelization were made.105

  In addition to natives who maintained their autonomy from colonial culture, there were others who were forced to modify their structures and outlook under the pressure of the advancing Spanish frontier. To a substantial degree, of course, all non-Spaniards had to take stock of their role within the empire. For some, however, there were radical consequences, which recent scholars have categorized under the term of ‘ethnogenesis’. The term can be understood as referring to the creative adaptation of certain peoples to the violent changes they suffered in the period of empire, and the consequent emergence of new identities.106 The adaptation involved a substantially new definition of every aspect of culture. A remarkable example is that of the Jumano people of the southern plains of Texas. ‘Jumano’, like ‘Pueblo’, was a Spanish word used to identify the Plains Indians, who from 1670 were drawn into the Spanish frontier by the founding of missions.107 As collaborators of the Spaniards, the Jumanos became the target of repeated attacks by the Apaches. The colonial presence, war, drought, all helped to undermine them; by the early eighteenth century they were extinct and the Apaches dominated the plains. That, at any rate, is what appearances suggested. The likelihood, however, is that under pressure the Jumanos simply displaced themselves, moved on and changed their profile, emerging in time as the beginnings of the Kiowa nation.108

  The rich and complex experience of the peoples under Spanish rule makes it clear that the familiar picture of a powerful colonial regime controlling and dominating a subjected population is no longer convincing and was never in any case plausible. A recent historian has affirmed with justice that ‘gone are the images of the colonial state as an iron arm of conquest, erecting caste barriers to create stable, nucleated villages of impoverished Indians’.109 Nor does it any longer seem credible to present a picture of cultures that collapsed instantly under the shock of confrontation with the superior Spanish world. The demographic catastrophe that afflicted the central regions of the empire in the New World and the Pacific, was by no means the counterpart of a generalized suicide wish. Over large extents of the New World landscape, the Indians survived and maintained their organization, even while accepting the pressures of the Spanish regime.

  The contrast of parallel societies is perhaps clearest in the Andean region. Here the big reality in the middle of the sixteenth century was the existence of the inferno of Potosí, where thousands of Indians laboured and died for decades in order to produce silver for the empire. But beyond Potosí, Andean communities built up their own economy and market structure: they worked as artisans, in local trades; they developed lands, in order to promote cash-crop agriculture; they controlled much of the overland transport industry.110 Both as individuals and as families, and working sometimes independently of the traditional ethnic groupings such as the ayllus, Andeans played an important part in the markets, to which they contributed through their labour and their landed produce.111 They maintained, in short, an essential sector of the economy of the New World, and without them Spain's empire would have ground to a halt. The classical image of the Indian as victim continues to be true in many respects, but it was only a section of the role played by the indigenous civilizations of America, where the Indian was no less a creator than a victim. The empire that the Spaniards directed was also influenced and underpinned by the native populations.

  There were, inevitably, very many movements of protest and revolt, not only in the Andes or the New Mexico plains but throughout the empire. This is not the place to tell their story. It is common to think of them as uprisings against a firm and dominant imperial structure, whereas the reality was (as in the case of the Araucanians or the Pueblos) that conflict was a permanent aspect of the flabby frontier of the empire. Attacks by Indians against the invader occurred regularly in Apalachee, in New Mexico, in Chile, and everywhere that the white man showed his face. It was a way of expressing a divergent identity, just as silent survival was. In the long run the Indian consciousness of not belonging to the empire was expressed most forcibly through the conviction that though they and the Spaniards were now on parallel paths, in the future those paths would diverge. They might now be sharing the same society and the same religion, but each side had profoundly different perspectives.

  Among the earliest high Indian cultures to suffer from religious repression was the Maya. After the ferocious campaign against ‘idolatry’ carried out by Fray Diego de Landa in 1562, the Mayas consented to the implantation of Christianity, but their leaders conserved details of their history and customs in the compilations known as The Books of Chilam Balam. In these writings there is no explicit rejection of the new religion of the Spaniards, but the Christian ‘gods’ are inserted into the Maya scheme of things.112 When Christ comes again to rule, say the Books, the Maya lords will rule under him. These beliefs suggest that Indian leaders did not accept a syncretic form of belief, in which elements of Maya and Spanish religion were merged together; rather, the two paths remained autonomous, and coincided only for the moment.

  When, however, would the paths diverge? Though native beliefs and culture survived, few such beliefs managed to take on the characteristics of a millenarian substitute, in the way that Taki Onqoy did in late sixteenth-century Peru. ‘Our Lord “Dios” created the Spaniards and Castile’, claimed the preachers of that movement, ‘but the huacas created the Indians and this land, and so they have deprived Our Lord of his omnipotence.’ Pizarro had triumphed temporarily over the huacas in Cajamarca, but now the huacas had returned to claim their own land and people, and ‘would battle against’ the Christian god.113 The impatient waiting for a future divergence helped to keep alive the sense of a differing identity.

  Taki Onqoy was a movement of rejection, an attempt to assert the original identity of the people of the Andes. However, it transformed that identity to a higher plane. ‘The said huacas’, the preachers claimed, ‘no longer enter into stones and trees and streams, as in the time of the Inca; now they enter into the bodies of the Indians and speak through them and that is why they shake, because they have the huacas in their bodies.’114 It flourished only in the inland regions of Peru, and within about ten years had been largely extirpated. There were other assertions of identity in Peru, of which the best known is the resistance at Vilcabamba, but perhaps the most penetrating comment on the issue was that expressed in the famous Chronicle of Guaman Poma.

  Guaman Poma was completely unknown to scholars until the manuscript of his New Chronicle was discovered in a library in Copenhagen in 1908. It was another three-quarters of a century before his thousand-page text, replete with ingenious line illustrations and long passages in Quechua, was adequately presented to the public. Descended from a line of the Incas, Guaman was a pure Indian whose mind
encompassed two worlds. He was proud of his Christian faith and by no means hostile to the rule of the king of Spain, but at the same time he bitterly criticized the injustices of the Spanish conquest, and vindicated absolutely the culture of the Andeans. As the supporters of Taki Onqoy did, Poma viewed the Spanish conquest as a cosmic earthquake, a pachakuti, which had upset the natural order of things. ‘After the conquest and the destruction’, wrote Poma, ‘the world was turned upside down, and all things impossible had come to pass.115 In the present age of the world, all the vices were triumphant, but the nature of a pachakuti was that it presaged a cyclic change to another epoch, and held out the hope of better times. With this in mind, he was writing his Chronicle, which was addressed to Philip III of Spain, who would help to bring about the ‘good government’ that Peru wanted.

  A major consequence of the impact of Spanish power in Europe was the creation of regional identities based on opposition to Spain. Peoples who shared little else in common, came together in their common dislike of Spaniards. The empire helped to create nations, in this case nations that were bound together by their resistance to imperialism. In Italy, in England, in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany, writers and statesmen called for a common front against the threat from the enemy, and appealed for a solidarity that transcended internal differences.116 The Netherlands revolt, the French wars against Spain, the Armada threat to England, the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, in each case served to rally sentiment against foreign intervention and create consciousness of a ‘national’ character. The Spaniards wished, according to a Dutch pamphlet, ‘to treat our patria as they have treated the Indies; but they will not find it so easy here’. In Germany one of the first vociferous anti-Spanish writers was Johann Fischart, author of the Antihispanus (1590). Legend and propaganda served to promote anti-Spanish hatred, which became a fundamental element of the national myth as it evolved in succeeding generations. Very soon, of course, issues of religion complicated the issue, and fragmented the opposition to Spain. In the Netherlands, in particular, a united front against imperial power was split by sharp religious differences, leading in the end to the creation of two separate states instead of one national state.

  Because of its long and intimate relationship with the empire, the case of the Netherlands is particularly interesting. From the beginning of the conflict there, many Spaniards had sympathized with the ‘rebels’ and were ready to see their point of view. Prominent advisers of Philip II, such as the humanist Benito Arias Montano, were criticized by the king for their inclination towards the side of the Netherlanders. Throughout the years of war, the people in the Netherlands, both north and south, continued to feel that they had more in common with each other than they had with Spain. In any case, the line dividing them was always artificial and always on the move, dependent on military successes. Only the victories of Farnese and the recovery of Antwerp in 1585 imbued the line with a solidity that would turn out to be final.117 But the finality was not apparent at the time. A Brabant noble writing in 1589 (in Dutch) to the geographer Abraham Ortelius could still refer to his homeland as ‘Netherland’,118 a word which when used in the singular applied to the totality of the provinces that outsiders always preferred to describe as a plurality. As late as 1621 when the famous intellectual Hugo Grotius escaped from his confinement in Amsterdam he was invited to the university of Louvain by a colleague who wrote: ‘Come here, this is your fatherland, we also are Netherlanders.’119 The feeling of a common heritage lingered on, and facilitated – as we shall see – subsequent moves to a rapprochement between the Dutch and the Spanish.

  It would be superfluous to observe that Spanish power provoked hostility and hatred in every corner of the globe. Spaniards were, in the early days of empire, puzzled and not a little hurt by this reaction. Why, they asked, should there be animosity if they were not posing any threat? By the 1590s they had come to accept the situation. ‘There is a general desire in Italy to expel the Spaniards’, recognized the Spanish governor of Milan in 1597. In the Southern Netherlands in 1629, at Arras, a parish priest from his pulpit denounced the Spaniards as traitors to the country.120 Painfully aware of the animosity towards Spain as an imperial power, Spaniards tried to understand why they were hated. ‘The name Spaniard’, the writer Mateo Alemán admitted in his 1599 work Guzmán de Alfarache, ‘is now of almost no consequence.’

  Alien domination is always detested, and the domination of Castilians was bitterly resented in every corner of the European territories associated with Castile. It is unnecessary to cite the causes of the resentment, for they were many and only too apparent. In the Mediterranean, where the religious issue did not arise, opposition to Castile was no less profound than in northern Europe. Castilian officials were saddened by the hostility. ‘I don't know what there is in the nation and empire of Spain’, an official in Milan lamented in 1570, ‘that none of the peoples in the world subject to it bears it any affection. And this is much more so in Italy than any other part of the world.’121 Throughout the imperial centuries, Italians did not cease to find fault with Spaniards, their character, their culture, and above all their military presence.122 Though Italians and Castilians served together in military campaigns in the Italian peninsula from the time of Ferdinand the Catholic, they never got on well, and continuously ended up fighting each other, with considerable loss of life.123 The humanist Sepúlveda, who lived in Italy during the years about which he wrote, commented that the Spaniards ‘during the Italian campaigns tended to despise the Italians, both friends and enemies, as conquerors despise the conquered. The Italians are hostile to the Spaniards because of this, and because of the many ills they have suffered at their hands. It is for this reason that Italians always want to attack the Spanish soldiers in Italy.124 Rubens saw from his personal experience that in the seventeenth century ‘the Italians have little affection for Spain.125

  The papacy, essentially an Italian institution, took part in the denigration. It was in some measure a love–hate relationship, for Italians participated wholly in the empire and benefited substantially from it, but when they committed their feelings to paper they conveniently forgot the benefits and saw only the disadvantages. The diplomats of Venice, Rome and other independent Italian states sometimes gave a balanced perspective of what they saw, but just as frequently were capable of gross distortions that have misled many modern historians. Much of the wholly unfavourable image of Spanish rule in Italy rests on uncritical acceptance of the savage portrait painted by anti-Spanish diplomats from other Italian states. The Venetian envoys of the late sixteenth century were notable in this respect. Ambassador Donati called Naples ‘the kingdom of the damned’, Paolo Tiepolo claimed Milan was suffering ‘crimes, oppression and robbery’ at the hands of the Spaniards, and Tommaso Contarini stated that Spain's policy was to ‘keep the Italian princes disunited’. Spain had ruined all the territories it governed, according to these diplomats. The Tuscan envoy in Naples in 1606, unable to understand why the south was poorer than his native Tuscany, concluded that all was the fault of Spain: ‘everywhere there is great despair, ruin and discontent’.126

  Through all its history, Italy had struggled to free itself from outside invaders, termed universally ‘barbarians’. Writers applied the term especially to the French in the early 1500s, but during subsequent centuries it was the Spaniards who had the unique distinction of being considered ‘barbarians’. Princes and poets united in clinging to a dream of a country that would be their own, as it had been (so they claimed) in Roman times. ‘I would’, one prince wrote to the queen of France in the late sixteenth century, ‘go so far as to ask for help from the Turk, in order to rescue my fatherland [patria] from the hands of the tyrants who torment and oppress it.’ ‘Italia, nostra patria’, was the stated aspiration of another in 1558.127 The wish to drive Spaniards from Italy helped to de the idea of national unity. One of the first writers to see this as a practical proposition was Girolamo Muzio, from Capodistria, who in 1574 called for h
is country's liberation from ‘foreign and barbarian nations’. The key to liberation, he felt, lay in Genoa rejecting the Spaniards. When Genoa regained its freedom, Milan would follow suit, and after that all Italy. The princes should then unite, select a capital for the nation in the middle of Italy, and set up a federal parliament, with its own army and navy.128 It was a deeply felt aspiration, shared by many sections of the Italian élite, but doomed to frustration because of the very deep divisions among themselves and destined not to be realized for another three hundred years.

  Not all Italians, of course, pursued these pipe dreams. Many recognized that the Spanish connection was not inherently negative. An observer in sixteenth-century Milan stated that ‘this city is not ill dis-posed towards the Spaniards’. The expulsion of the French had brought peace to the peninsula. ‘Italy’, wrote Paolo Paruta, ‘has through the great prudence and moderation of Philip II been able to enjoy a long, secure and tranquil peace, to the great satisfaction of its people.’129 But it was precisely this peace that anti-Spanish writers such as Boccalini in the seventeenth century saw as an obstacle to the liberation of the peninsula.

  In 1561 a thirty-two-year-old Dominican took ship at Seville in the company of fifty other friars, all of them with their eyes fixed on the challenge of winning the Indies for the gospel. Francisco de la Cruz, a native of Jaén, had studied in the college of San Gregorio in Valladolid, where he came to know and admire his illustrious colleagues Bartolomé de las Casas and Bartolomé de Carranza. When Carranza was arrested by the Inquisition, Cruz became deeply disillusioned and made for America, where he settled into the Dominican convent in Lima. In 1568 he was sent out to teach in a doctrina of Andeans, but after a year returned to live and teach in Lima. His stay coincided with the early stages of the imposition of crown control in the province. Cruz himself had asked for the crown to take a more active role. He also made a plea to the king in 1566 – the first of a number of strange decisions he was to make – asking for the Inquisition to be established in Peru. A committee in Spain was soon to look into the feasibility of this. The first Jesuits arrived in Lima in 1568, and in 1569 the crown issued decrees for setting up tribunals of the Inquisition in Mexico and Lima. Inquisitors arrived at the end of 1569, the same year as the arrival of the new viceroy, Francisco de Toledo. The Inquisition did not begin any activity until the summer of 1571. Among its first acts, ironically, was the receipt of a denunciation against Francisco de la Cruz.130