The limpieza de sangre was, in effect, a particularly crude and malignant revision of this long-held exclusionary principle, and during the late fifteenth century and for all of the sixteenth it became a mania throughout Spain. Specialists in genealogy known as linajudo checked and scrutinized bloodlines and pedigrees. Neither fame nor even death provided escape for those accused of being tainted. Thus, the remains of the celebrated pioneer in medicine, Garcia d’Orta, were exhumed in 1580 “and solemnly burned in an auto-da-fé held at Goa, in accordance with the posthumous punishment inflicted on crypto-Jews who had escaped the stake in their lifetime.” Catholic Spaniards with distant Jewish ancestors changed their names and falsified their genealogies to avoid the ruination of their reputations or the loss of their access to professions and education. For even the most humble peasant of “pure” Christian ancestry now could proudly regard himself as superior to the wealthiest marrano. It was all just a matter of blood.38
Historically, then, it was within this evolving context of ethnic and racial discrimination that there emerged in Europe the idea that the people of the Indies might be a separate, distinct, and naturally subordinate race. By 1520 the popular Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus, whose eventual burial place became a Catholic shrine, was arguing that Africans, Indians, and other non-Christian peoples of color were not even descended from Adam and Eve, but from separate and inferior progenitors.39 Paracelsus advanced this thesis less than thirty years after Columbus’s first contact with the people of the Caribbean, although in that short time the Indies’ many millions of native peoples—whose ancestry in those islands long predated even that of the Vandals and Visigoths in Spain—had effectively been exterminated. But the assault on Mexico and the rest of Mesoand South America was at that moment only beginning.
Paracelsus’s notion of separate and unequal human creations was an early version of what in time would become known as “polygenesis,” one of the staples of nineteenth-century pseudoscientific racism. Even before the Swiss writer committed this idea to print, however, there was in circulation a complementary suggestion, put forward in 1512 by Spaniards Bernardo de Mesa (later Bishop of Cuba) and Gil Gregorio, and in 1519 by a Scotsman named John Mair (Johannes Major), that the Indians might be a special race created by God to fulfill a destiny of enslavement to Christian Europeans. Drawing on both Aristotle and Aquinas, the Spaniards—who were meeting at the king’s behest—placed the matter in the context of “natural law,” with Gregorio contending that since it was apparent that these creatures were “idle, vicious, and without charity,” it was a violation of the natural order to permit them to remain free. Mair, at the time a member of the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, first pointed out what by then was commonly accepted by most Europeans—that the recently discovered people of the New World “live like beasts” and indeed, in some locales, are truly “wild men.” Neither these facts, nor the late success of the Europeans in conquering these creatures, should be cause for surprise, Mair thought, since “as the Philosopher [Aristotle] says in the third and fourth chapters of the first book of the Politics, it is clear that some men are by nature slaves, others by nature free. . . . On this account the Philosopher says in the first chapter of the aforementioned book that this is the reason why the Greeks should be masters over the barbarians because, by nature, the barbarians and slaves are the same.”40
Few notions could have been sweeter to the minds of early sixteenth-century Spanish thinkers, and they lost no time in adopting it. From the time of that first royal junta in 1512, at which Mesa and Gregorio had used natural law to justify enslavement of the Indians, throughout the 1520s and 1530s and 1540s—while the indigenous peoples of Middle and South America were being consumed by the millions in the same inferno of disease and fiery carnage that had turned the Caribbean’s natives to ash—Spain’s philosophers and theologians debated among themselves whether the Indians were men or monkeys, whether they were mere brutes or were capable of rational thought, and whether or not God intended them to be permanent slaves of their European overlords. By the time these discussions reached their famous apogee in the confrontation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda at Valladolid, in the summer of 1550, more native people of the Americas had been consumed in the combined conflagrations of pestilence and genocide than the mind can comprehend.
Called before the so-called Council of Fourteen by Charles V—the Holy Roman Emperor and the most powerful man in Europe—to argue whether the natives of the Americas should be considered natural slaves because, as Sepulveda claimed, they were mere “homunculi [contemptible little people] in whom you will scarcely find even vestiges of humanity,” Las Casas and Sepúlveda publicly argued back and forth for about a month. Even Las Casas—the most passionate and humane European advocate for the Indians of his own time and for many years to come—felt forced to acknowledge that the Indians “may be completely barbaric.” However, he contended, they were not so low in the order of things that they were totally “irrational or natural slaves or unfit for government.” To Sepúlveda and others, on the contrary, as Las Casas rightly said, the native peoples of the Americas were indeed so barbarically inhuman “that the wise may hunt [them] down . . . in the same way as they would wild animals.”41 As if to anticipate and underscore this point, only a few months earlier the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia proudly announced to Charles V that he and his men had just concluded a massacre against a large community of Indians in Chile: “some 1500 or 2000 were killed and many others lanced,” he wrote; among the survivors whom he had taken prisoner, Valdivia saw to it that “two hundred had their hands and noses cut off for their contumacy”—that is, for not heeding the conquistadors’ demands that they behave in a sufficiently obsequious way, consistent with that of the natural slave.42
After the debate ended, the members of the Council of Fourteen, selected by Charles as the best minds in Spain, fell to arguing among themselves and never rendered a collective verdict—although Sepúlveda later claimed, and there is some reason to believe him, that in the end all but one of the Council supported his position that the Indians were indeed divinely created beasts of burden for their conquerors.43 In any case, if the men considered by the Holy Roman Emperor to be the most learned in the realm could not agree on this matter among themselves, the same could not be said for the Spanish masses. As Bernardino de Minaya wrote, a decade and a half before the great debate at Valladolid, “the common people” had long “regarded as wise men” those who were convinced that “the American Indians were not true men, but a third species of animal between man and monkey created by God for the better service of man.”44 Or, as Oviedo had written, with widespread popular approval:
[The Indians are] naturally lazy and vicious, melancholic, cowardly, and in general a lying, shiftless, people. Their marriages are not a sacrament but a sacrilege. They are idolatrous, libidinous, and commit sodomy. Their chief desire is to eat, drink, worship heathen idols, and commit bestial obscenities. What could one expect from a people whose skulls are so thick and hard that the Spaniards had to take care in fighting not to strike on the head lest their swords be blunted?45
If that was popular opinion early in the sixteenth century, it doubtless was even more widespread after the Valladolid debate was over. For on at least one topic virtually all historians of this subject agree: as the sixteenth century wore on Spanish opinion regarding the Indians was marked by a decided “decline of sympathy and . . . narrowing of vision,” in J.H. Elliott’s words.46 Elliott uses as an illustrative example a series of meetings held by the Spanish clergy stationed in Mexico between 1532 and 1585, during which verbal depictions of the region’s native people drastically deteriorated. An even more vivid example of this transformation involved the fabled Tupinamba people of Brazil.
When first contacted by Europeans in the early years of exploration the Tupinamba were described as the most handsome and best-proportioned people in the world, virtually creatures of perfe
ction. They were, said Pedro Vaz de Caminha in 1500, people of “fine bodies and good faces as to good men,” and a kind and generous people of “innocence” and “pure simplicity” to boot. An imaginative Portuguese painting of the Adoration of the Magi from this time even replaced one of the traditional wise men with a young and handsome representative of these Brazilian natives, replete with distinctive feather headdress and gold earrings, bracelets, and anklets. At almost this same time, however, woodcut illustrations began appearing in other parts of Europe depicting the Brazilians as cannibals and sexual libertines. And by the 1550s, when Brazil was in the process of being denuded of its native people by European slavery, violence, and imported diseases, those very same gold and feather Tupinamba decorations could be found adorning the head and body of Satan in another Portuguese painting, a grotesque and horrific portrait of the Devil’s Inferno. Meanwhile, in concert with the change in visual representation, European writers had now taken to calling these lately dubbed Brazilian paragons of pure virtue and simplicity “beasts in human form,” to quote Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon.47
Such ideological transformation did not occur, of course, without a social context or without serving a larger political function. The same was true of the earlier intellectual innovations we have noted. The Priors of Florence had declared as acceptable the traffic in Christian slaves who were “of infidel origin” because to fail to do so might have undermined the slave trade, with which the Church was so profitably involved. And the limpieza de sangre, although initially inspired by religious hatred, soon became a valuable weapon of class struggle with which low-born Spanish Catholics could push their way into positions of authority that might otherwise be held by high-born persons of Jewish ancestry. As Elliott demonstrates in his discussion of the limpieza, the doctrine functioned as a “compensating code” for commoners “which might effectively challenge the code of the aristocracy.” After all, they would argue, “was it not preferable to be born of humble, but pure Christian parentage, than to be a caballero of suspicious racial antecedents?”48
In neither of these cases, certainly, was the social or political or economic function of the race discrimination in question the sole and sufficient motivation for its being institutionalized. Each one drew for its authorization on a deep well of centuries-old and symbolically embedded antipathy for its targeted victims. Once in operation, however, the racially oppressive institution justified, reinforced, and thus exacerbated the negative racial stereotypes that had made the institution permissible in the first place—which, in turn, further sanctified the institution itself.
In late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spain and Spanish America, the primary economic context within which anti-Indian racial ideologies were cultivated and institutionalized was the feverish hunt for gold. Then later, as the sixteenth century wore on, the context changed to the mining of silver, which was available in much greater volume. Spain at this time, as noted earlier, was a nation with effectively no manufactured items to export. It was an exporter of raw materials and an importer of finished goods. Even within its own borders Spain was plagued by a stagnating economy, with most local production intended for local consumption. With its broad and mountainous terrain, whatever goods were moved around were carried by pack mules. And despite the presence of perhaps 400,000 such primitive beasts of burden, as an exchange economy the nation was dormant.49 One consequence of this was both very small productive volume and a great deal of duplication, along with a steady outflow of capital to those other European countries on which Spain was economically dependent.
In contrast with its state of commercial impoverishment, however, fifteenth-century advances in ship design, primarily of Portuguese inspiration, along with developments in pilotage, navigation, and cartography—and the persistence of Christopher Columbus—allowed Spain, with its ideal geographic location, to lead the way in exploration of the Indies. Thus, it came about that one of the European nations that could least afford to finance colonization abroad—and that had a sudden over-abundance of experienced military men within its midst, due to the recent defeat of the Moors in Granada—was given first entry into the New World.
The stories of indescribable wealth available in the Indies to those who could seize it—of riverbeds filled with nuggets and of boulders that shattered and poured forth gold when struck with a club—fired the imaginations of individual adventurers, of course, but it did the same for religious and financial collectivities as well. The Church now envisioned the wealth of the Indies, both in gold and in souls to harvest, as the means for launching the final Crusades, while wealthy nobles and merchants knew that the Crown was in no position to direct the conquest and exploitation of the islands without deriving virtually all its financial backing from private sources.
For about a dozen years, from the launching of Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 to the eve of the conquests of Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico after 1506, the capital behind the provisioning of ships and stores and mercenary soldiers was raised by merchant and noble partnerships within Spain. From 1506 forward, however, the conquest of the rest of the Caribbean was financed by the gold that was taken from Hispaniola. (In 1499—after the great majority of the island’s millions of people had been destroyed—the long dreamed-of gold mine was discovered on Hispaniola, producing for a time between three and six tons of gold per year.)50 “Similarly,” writes Ralph Davis, “while the first attempts to settle the mainland coast were organized from Spain, the series of expeditions after 1516 which culminated in Cortés’s conquest of Mexico were backed by Cuban resources; and the wealth of Mexico paid for the northward and southward extension of exploration and gave some backing to the colonization of the Panama isthmus and, a decade later, to the conquest of Peru.” Thus, one after another, Caribbean and American locales were raided and drained of their wealth, a portion of which was divided among the Crown, the conquistadors, and those who provided the conquistadors’ financial support, while the rest was used to mount further depredations. By and large the Spanish were uninterested in building New World colonial societies, but rather in draining the New World of its wealth. “Indeed,” notes Davis, “by the 1570s the investment movement had been reversed and returning colonists were investing capital accumulated in America in entirely Spanish financial and industrial enterprises.”51
The first waves of Spanish violence denuded the Caribbean of its wealth in gold and, as we saw earlier, of its wealth in people as well. Once the islands were thus made barren, the Spanish found goals to pursue elsewhere, and moved on. There were about 8000 Spaniards living on Hispaniola in 1509, for instance, forcing the few surviving Indians to produce the remaining dregs of gold that the white men hungered for, but within a decade only a few hundred Spaniards remained to begin slowly building sugar plantations on the backs of growing numbers of imported African slaves. Not only had the island’s gold supply been depleted and its millions of native people effectively exterminated by then, but most of those who had done the exterminating had left for richer fields of exploitation. Davis describes well the pattern that was repeated for decades still to come:
Many of the early conquerors shared in the gold finds, from the small ones in the islands to the hoard in the treasure house of Atahualpa that astounded Pizarro’s followers in 1533. Yet these hoards were quickly distributed and when the king’s share and the leaders’ big portions had been taken out few rank-and-file soldiers secured enough to take them home to the longed-for life of luxurious idleness in Castile. . . . The followers and hangers-on of the conquerors, restless, unreliable material for permanent colonial settlements, were therefore constantly on the move to seek fresh opportunities of fortune. The opening of Cuba rapidly drained Española of most of its Spanish population after 1513; news of the entry to the mainland accelerated this exodus after 1517 and it turned into a stampede from all the island settlements when Cortés secured a firm grip on the Aztec Empire in 1521. But the palace and temple hoards of Tenochtitlán were
not adequate to satisfy the cravings of all the Spaniards who followed Cortés. Large numbers of them pushed on, under other leaders; into the jungles that separated Mexico from the little colony on the Panama isthmus, over vast desert plateaus towards California, south to Colombia where gold mines were found by Quesada in 1537, and above all, after 1532, to the new bonanza in Peru. Every township established by the Spaniards in Mexico, with the exception of Mexico City and perhaps Vera Cruz, lost most of its Spanish population within a few years of its foundation. 52
During these years—and especially after the Incas’ fabulous “silver mountain” of Potosí was discovered by the Spanish and converted, through the importation of forced Indian mine labor, into the most populous “city” in the entire Spanish empire—vast sums of wealth flowed back to Spain from the Americas. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, between 1503 and 1505, Spain imported 445,266 ducats’ worth of treasure from the New World; by 1536–40 that amount had increased more than tenfold to 4,725,470 ducats; by 1571–75 it had more than tripled again to 14,287,931 ducats; and by the end of the century, between 1596 and 1600, it had almost tripled again to 41,314,201 ducats—nearly 100 times what it had been a century earlier.53 But as quickly as those riches flowed back to Spain they also flowed out of Spain’s primitive and dependent economy into the pockets of the country’s European creditors. As the century wore on this bad situation steadily deteriorated, exacerbated in large measure by the imperial vision—and the pauper’s purse, once all the debts were paid—of Charles V and his successor, Philip II.
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