Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  In this difficult scenario, which all imperial powers down to our own day have had to confront, there were a few bright moments that illuminated succinctly the nature of the problem. Let us consider one. The protagonist was Esteban de Gamarra, Spain's second ambassador to the United Provinces, who took up his post at The Hague in 1655.25 His predecessor, the Franche-Comtois Antoine Brun, had been appointed in part because of his mastery of French and Dutch, and Gamarra exceptionally also had a good grasp of these languages. At a time when France and Spain were vying for influence with the Dutch, Gamarra in the summer of 1657 happened to have a public dispute with the French ambassador De Thou in the streets of The Hague, before a crowd of Dutch passers-by who looked on with curiosity and interest. De Thou did not speak Dutch, and his words in French fell on deaf ears. Gamarra, by contrast, spoke also in Dutch, with (as he wrote back to the chief minister Luis de Haro in Madrid) extraordinary consequences:

  Over three hundred person followed me, crying out ‘The Spanish ambassador has won!’. The incident drives me to say to Your Excellency that it would be of the greatest service to His Majesty if my successor could speak Dutch, and if he were Spanish so much the better, for they are best won over if they hear their language. The citizens were saying, ‘We can speak to this one and understand him, but with the other we have no idea what he is grunting’. The crowd was so much in my favour that everybody was surprised. Yesterday the Pensionary of Holland26 told me that his father came to his house to visit that night, and said to him with astonishment, ‘What is this, my son? Who would ever have thought such a turnaround possible? The people, in favour of Spain?’

  It was an unusual moment of triumph, with very few parallels in the history of the empire. When the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, who lived during those decades in America, heard Spaniards criticizing their black slaves as ‘beasts’ for not being able to speak in Castilian, he retorted that ‘our people would be the same if they were captured by Arabs or by the English’.27 He tried to study the languages the blacks spoke. Other Spaniards made no such attempt.

  The failure of Spain to create an imperial discourse, that is, to create an understanding among its peoples based on shared interests, communication and language, may be termed ‘the silence of Pizarro’. In a piece of modern Quechua theatre that draws on old oral traditions and continues to be performed in various versions in Peru and Bolivia, the action centres on the capture and death of the Inca Atahualpa. When the Inca in the town square of Cajamarca demands that Pizarro and his men leave the country, Pizarro is unable to find the words and ‘only moves his lips’; the interpreter Felipillo has to speak for him because of his silence.28 The interpreter also addresses the following words on behalf of Almagro:

  It is impossible for me

  To understand your obscure language.

  To which a nephew of the Inca replies:

  I do not know what you are saying,

  There is no way I can make it out.

  When in addition the priest Valverde offers the Inca his breviary, Atahualpa brushes it aside because it says nothing to him. The theme of non-comprehension between the Spaniards and the Indians was a constant of post-conquest tradition among the subjected peoples.

  For the Indians it may have been a conviction of the superiority of their oral culture over the non-spoken, written culture of the invaders.29Spoken language was seen as power, the inability to speak was an absence of power, and the reliance on a mute written language even more so. In one version of the Quechua theatre, Almagro presents the Indians with a written sheet, and the Indians comment to the Inca on what it might be. ‘This way, it looks like a nest of ants. This other way, like the claw marks of birds on the river bank. This way, like deer, but upside down. No, no, my lord, it is impossible to make it out.’30 The notion of the primacy of a spoken over a written tongue was also to be encountered at this period among the Guaraní, whose myths spoke only of the sound of language being brought into existence at the creation of the world. For them their culture began to suffer barbarization when at the time of the Spanish conquest a written language began to be imposed. Centuries after the conquest, in Paraguay the two universes of a spoken and of a written culture continued to remain inherently distinct.31 Indian chroniclers who, like Guaman Poma attempted to bridge the gap between the two universes, ended up using a form of discourse that both sides found difficult to comprehend.32

  The barrier of language was seldom crossed. The ritual of the requerimiento, read out by Felipillo to the uncomprehending Inca warriors assembled in Cajamarca, was a parable of the impenetrable screen separating Europeans and the colonial peoples. When the first Franciscans came to preach in Mexico among the conquered Nahuas, they like Pizarro spoke in silence. Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta in 1525 described how the friars just after their arrival in Mexico decided to instruct the Nahuas in Latin because they were unable to speak Nahuatl. And ‘in so far as they could, like dumb men they used signs in order to make themselves understood’.33 It was a silence that proved difficult to overcome. Half a century after the conquest of Mexico, the Spanish judge Alonso de Zorita asked an Indian leader from Mexico City why the Indians were so prone to evil ways, ‘and he said to me, “Because you don't understand us, and we don't understand you and don't know what you want. You have deprived us of our good order and system of government, that is why there is such great confusion and disorder.”’34 ‘The older Indians say that with the entrance of the Spaniards all was turned upside down’, Zorita reported. It was almost the same response, word for word, that the peoples of Peru subsequently gave during the years of Taki Onqoy.

  At some points of the colonial world, the written word did indeed penetrate with success. This occurred in Mexico thanks to the abilities of the Indian nobles who studied at the College of Santa Cruz of Tlatelolco, where they helped to standardize the written form of Nahuatl. Thanks to them, the friars were able to use Nahuatl in their religious work and European literature began to penetrate the indigenous world.35 But the fusion of cultures through the written word was always more apparent than real. Beyond the written word, the real world for the natives of America consisted of the sounds, colours and presences that remained beyond the reach of the perceptions of Spaniards.36 It was a universe quite alien to the Europeans, who failed to understand it and rejected it as pagan.

  At the level of culture, the intuition of Nebrija that Castilian should become the ‘language of empire’, that is, that Castilian culture should predominate, never quite succeeded. A Castilian writer boasted forcefully in 1580 that ‘we have seen the majesty of the Spanish language extended to the furthest provinces wherever the victorious flags of our armies have gone’.37 Seventy years later Baltasar Gracián claimed that there were two universal languages, Latin and Spanish, ‘which today are the keys of the world’.38 It was good imperialist rhetoric, but it was not true.

  During the period covered by this book the most notable world empire was that of Spain, with settlements and fortresses in every continent of the globe. Yet in Europe the only language with any pretensions to cultural universality was Italian, soon to be succeeded from the seventeenth century by French. Italian was, after Latin, the most common language used by diplomats in Renaissance Europe.39 It was used, read, studied and spoken by élites from London and Brussels to Vienna and Warsaw. The famous Castilian speech of Charles V in Rome in 1536 was seen on all sides, and particularly within its Italian context, as innovatory and aggressive. The emperor did not repeat the performance, and thereafter limited himself to speaking the appropriate language within the appropriate context. As we have seen, after his speech he spoke in Italian to the French ambassador. At this early period, there were in reality few serious objections to the use of Castilian, for Castilians had not yet become a hated imperial power. But the revolt of the Netherlands a generation later changed the situation considerably. When Alessandro Farnese became governor there, he encountered a great tide of hostility to things Spanish. As a consequence, he took
care to present himself as an Italian, and his public discourse was always in Italian or in bad French, never in Spanish.40

  There were many admirers of Spain and of Spanish literature in Europe. One of them was Johann Ulrich von Eggenberg (d.1634), a Bohemian noble whose love for Spain began during a visit in 1600–1 and who collected the works of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. He also supported the Habsburgs during the Battle of the White Mountain. Today his rich collection of books is preserved in the beautiful but half-empty41 castle library of Cesky Krumlov in the mountains outside Prague. In the years that he bought foreign works he collected 28 items in Spanish, but he also collected 24 in French and the overwhelming bulk of his purchases was in Italian, 126 books.42 The Latin culture that penetrated central Europe was, despite Spain's power and influence, predominantly Italian. When the Austrian nobility of this period wished to broaden their cultural horizons they went to study at Padua, Bologna and Siena, rather than to Spain. When they bought foreign books, they preferred works by Italians.43 The same happened in France, where the marriage in 1614 of King Louis XIII to a Spanish princess, Anne of Austria, stimulated a great vogue for things Spanish. It was a fashion that lasted little more than a decade. From mid-century the vogue returned to Italian culture, which had never lost its predominant position.44

  The Valencian scholar Gregorio Mayans, a fervent admirer of Italian culture, admitted in 1734 to Spain's chief minister, the Italian Jose Patiño, that Spain had failed to extend the influence of its language. ‘One of the things that a nation should take particular care to achieve’, he wrote, ‘is that its language become universal.’ That had only happened, according to him, in the great days of Philip II, when Spanish had reached the furthest corners of the earth. Now, by contrast, it had been superseded by English and French, whose literature, science and languages were supreme in the world. ‘The fault’, he said, ‘is ours, through our inadequacy.’45 It was no doubt comforting to Mayans to believe that at some unidentified stage in the age of Philip II ‘the Spanish language became universal’, but the truth was somewhat different.

  In Asia, during the age of early European commerce, the accepted lingua franca was Portuguese,46 spoken even by Asian traders to each other and adopted perforce by Spaniards if they wished to communicate with Asians. Hindu rulers in Ceylon and Muslim rulers in Macassar spoke and wrote Portuguese.47 To communicate with other Europeans the non-Portuguese missionaries habitually spoke Portuguese, with the consequence that some began to lose fluency in their own language.48 The Navarrese Jesuit Francisco Xavier used the language as his main medium of communication in Asia. As late as the eighteenth century, officials of the British East India Company in India had to learn to communicate with their employees in it.

  But in what language could Spaniards communicate to the peoples of their empire the message of imperial power and eternal salvation? It was little more than an ignis fatuus to imagine that the Castilian tongue could take root as the universal language of the empire, for few natives of America in the colonial period managed to speak more than a pidgin version of the language of the conqueror. When Guaman Poma wrote his Chronicle, he depicted a confrontation between Indian and Spaniard where the inability to communicate was total. Poma saw the Spaniards as interested neither in the country nor the people of America but only in their gold: ‘driven by greed, many priests and Spaniards and ladies and merchants took ship for Peru, all was Peru and more Peru, and more and more gold and silver, gold, silver from this land’. In one of the most telling of the drawings in Poma's Chronicle, the Inca Huayna Capac addresses a conquistador and asks: ‘cay coritacho micunqui’ [Do you eat this gold?]. To this the Spaniard replies, not in Quechua, which he does not understand, but in Spanish: ‘este oro comemos’ (We eat this gold).49 The irony is that the communication barrier was overcome by a commodity, gold, that made all communication superfluous. Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote his monumental Commentaries in Spain, observed the lamentable inadequacy of many Spaniards in matters of language and the consequent gap of comprehension between cultures. The Indians, he wrote, ‘do not dare to give an account of things with the proper meaning and explanation, seeing that Christian Spaniards abominate everything they see’. Even the learned Spanish missionaries confused basic terms in Quechua.50

  In a colony such as Manila where Spaniards were a tiny minority, Castilian had a slim chance of survival. The earliest Spanish missionaries came face to face with the phenomenon of Chinese preponderance. The first books to be turned out in the islands were printed by Sangleys, who used their experience from the Chinese continent to introduce block printing and pioneer the necessary typography. Books were, of course, on the Christian religion and written by Dominicans. But they were printed in the native tongues, at a time when the government in Spain was officially trying to discourage native tongues in favour of Castilian. The first known printed work, in 1593, was in Chinese and written by a Dominican. The second, a Christian Doctrine or catechism published that same year, had facing pages in Castilian and Tagalog. In a Memorial on the life of a Christian published in 1606 in Chinese, Fray Domingo de Nieva explained (in Chinese) that ‘when religion does not use language it is obstructed, when faith is explained in an unknown script it will not be recognized’.51 Like many of his fellow missionaries on the American mainland, he had come to the conclusion that the Castilian language was, in reality, an obstacle to empire. Unless and until Castilian could overcome the language barrier, no proper communication was possible. He and his colleagues patiently devoted themselves to Chinese studies, less because of the Sangleys that were awaiting the gospel in the Philippines than because of the mighty Chinese empire that lay beyond them and, in their eyes, awaited conversion.

  The achievement of the clergy in language studies was of fundamental value, since in many cases they rescued dialects from probable oblivion and opened bridges to communication. The Franciscan Francisco de Pareja in 1612 produced the first word-book, designed for the confessional, of the Timucuan dialects used in northern Florida. It was the first time that the language appeared in printed form. But it was also for all practical purposes the last, since both the Timucuan Indians and their language very soon became extinct. The efforts at ethnology were admirable, but usually served little. Many religious orders, among them the Franciscans, very soon gave up the attempt to teach Indians in local dialects and limited themselves to teaching only in Castilian. In the peninsula, they gave up the attempt to learn Arabic. The consequence was an exclusive reliance on Castilian, with all the attendant consequences. In 1642 a Portuguese writer commented that during the years of their presence in his country ‘the Castilians permitted use of their language alone, and treated the Portuguese language worse than if it were Greek’.52 Chauvinism in matters of language was common to all empires. It eventually gave rise to a misapprehension that the Castilians had in some way suppressed and destroyed local languages. The truth was that those who most cared about communication, namely the clergy, made extensive efforts to keep alive the dialogue between their own tongue and that of their parishioners. But the policy seldom worked. Well into the eighteenth century parish priests in the Andes would preach their sermons in Castilian while the uncomprehending natives would listen in polite silence.

  Some clergy in Manila, like the Dominican Domingo de Navarrete in the mid-seventeenth century, assiduously learnt Tagalog, Mandarin and Fukien. The first grammar of the Tagalog language was the achievement of Francisco Blancas, Art and rules of the Tagalog language (1610).53 All these pioneering works had a single purpose: to enable the European to understand, speak and write the native language. They therefore adopted an exclusively one-way process of the transfer of meaning: the Castilian language was translated into native terms. By contrast, little attempt was made to translate native concepts into Spanish. By grasping at perceived words and actions and freezing them within a recognizable vocabulary, the colonial missionaries brought into existence something that was defined according to Castilian concepts al
one. The result was an often-neglected aspect of the impact of empire: its failure to understand the way that subject peoples really thought.54 Missionaries lived with native Americans and Asians for decades and claimed to be able to speak their language and even write it, but at certain moments of conflict they suddenly realized that they had no real comprehension of the way the people thought. Conquerors and conquered appeared to be speaking the same language, but they were really living in two different worlds of meaning.55

  Despite the universality of its imperial experience, Spain appeared to many outsiders to be a closed world, divorced from European reality. Spaniards were to be found in every corner of the world, certainly the most-travelled people of any in Europe, yet at home they appeared reluctant to let the world in. The testimony of foreign visitors was impressive. They ‘are not naturally friendly to foreigners’, commented the Florentine ambassador Guicciardini in 1513.56 Italians commented repeatedly on the apparent hostility towards them in the peninsula. Worse still was the fate of the French, who were disliked everywhere in Spain and with particular ferocity in Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia, where the large number of French residents provoked animosity and violence. The reluctance of foreigners to visit Spain may explain the surprise expressed by natives at seeing them. When Francis Willughby visited Castile in the 1660s he commented that people were ‘uncivil to strangers, asking them, What do you come into our Countrey for? We do not go into yours.’57

  With time, of course, people of peninsular origin immersed themselves in the culture of the lands to which they went, and learnt to identify with their environment while still conserving their memory of Spain. By contrast, metropolitan Spain itself seemed to remain aloof from the cultural interchange. In the pioneering report drawn up by Juan and Ulloa after their return from South America, they expressed their astonishment at the almost total ignorance about the New World prevailing in Spain two hundred years after the birth of empire. The authors pointed out, as others had done before, that the lure of easy wealth in gold and silver had blinded Spaniards to the possibility of exploiting the immense cultural resources of the empire.