The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

by Hugh Thomas

  Many conquistadors would take the opportunity to send back to Spain gold to their relations. Most promising of presents in the long run perhaps was a rubber ball, such as used by the Indians in their strange but elaborate wall game. This would constitute one of the Americas’ most notable gifts to the Old World.

  Alas, much of this treasure was seized by French adventurers led by the piratical Jean Florin, acting on behalf of his master, Jean Ango, between the Azores and Spain, and the expedition home suffered other setbacks.4 But a brief letter from Cortés describing the final conquest of the Mexica did at last arrive in Spain in March 1522.5

  Before Cortés’s detailed account in this, his “third letter,” reached the court, however, in November 1522, Charles the King and Emperor had made several critical decisions. After meeting with those members of the Council of Castile who had come to deal with matters relating to the Indies, Cortés was, on October 11, 1522—that is, a month before his report arrived—named adelantado (commander in chief with proconsular responsibilities), repartidor (distributor) of Indians, and also governor and captain-general of New Spain. That seemed to represent a political triumph for Cortés, since it formally released him from any subservience to his old master, the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez. It was also a victory since it accepted Cortés’s grand name for the new land: “New Spain,” a designation that indicated the supranational character of this new monarchy of Castile. It seemed, too, to give Cortés complete command: governor and captain-general were substantial titles.6

  The territory covered by his appointment was, however, vague: No one knew where Cortés’s dominions began and ended.7 But it was assumed that at the least he would control the allies who had helped him so much in his conquest; not just the lords of the valley of Mexico who had been liberated from the yoke of the Mexica but also the Totonaca and the Tlaxcalteca and most of the five hundred other tribes established in the mainland of old Mexico.

  A decree issued four days later instructed Cortés about the proper treatment of the Indians and talked of grants of government money to finance representatives (procuradores) of New Spain in Castile.8 This decree had the advantage of accepting Cortés’s judgment of the coming of Narváez to New Spain in 1520: “The journey of Pánfilo de Narváez and his fleet was the reason for the rebellion and temporary loss of the great city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.”9 Charles also wrote to Cortés speaking warmly of his achievements.10 The latter could no longer complain about a lack of appreciation at home, though these decrees, and the Emperor’s letter, did not reach New Spain till September 1523, partly because of the curiously dilatory conduct of the messengers, Cortés’s cousins Rodrigo de Paz and Francisco de las Casas. They took an unconscionably long time to set off and decided to travel via Cuba, where they took the bad news of the success of “Cortesillo,” as Cortés once had been known in Cuba, to the governor, Diego Velázquez. He was distressed.

  The emperor Charles accompanied his praise for Cortés and his acceptance of him as his governor in New Spain with the nomination of four officials whose task would be to assist Cortés in administration of the new provinces. These were a new treasurer, Alonso de Estrada; a factor, or general administrator of the new empire, Gonzalo de Salazar; an inspector of administration, Pedro Almíndez de Chirino; and an accountant, Rodrigo de Albornoz.

  These men were important. Estrada had been in Flanders, admiral at Málaga and then corregidor (representative of the central government) in Cáceres. He was a permanent councillor in his native city, Ciudad Real. He would boast that he was an illegitimate son of the late King Fernando, and perhaps he was. Salazar was a Granadino but his family was originally from Burgos. He had been an attendant in the royal household and went to New Spain with quite a retinue. Almíndez de Chirino came from Úbeda and was seen as the agent of the principal royal secretary, Francisco de los Cobos, the powerful if unimaginative official who dominated that city politically and socially. The fourth official, Rodrigo de Albornoz, was probably from Lugo in Galicia, and seems to have also held a minor position in the court of Spain. He was asked by the Italian courtier Peter Martyr to send home reports by cipher about Cortés’s activities. Martyr once talked of Cortés’s craftiness, his avarice, and his “partially revealed tyranny.”11

  The nomination of these four courtly men to New Spain certainly showed that the Crown was taking the conquests of Cortés seriously. Yet they were obviously intended to control that conqueror and prevent him from undue assertion of his own authority. But these new councillors, like Paz and Las Casas before them, took a long time to reach the new country. Long before they arrived, Cortés had embarked on his greatest work of art and Spain’s greatest achievement in the Americas in the sixteenth century: the rebuilding of the city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica, which had been severely damaged during the fighting there between May and August 1521. (The Spaniards referred to this city as Temixtlan till 1524, when it gradually became known as Mexico.)

  Cortés had been recommended by some of his friends and fellow conquistadors to rebuild the capital of New Spain in a place removed from the lake of Tenochtitlan, say at Tacuba or Coyoacán. They had argued that the old capital was exposed to the dangers of flooding, as had occurred on a large scale in 1502. Since the environs were swampy, there would always be difficulties of water supply. The critics argued that Coyoacán would be a more suitable site for a capital, as Cortés had surely appreciated since he had established his residence there after 1521 on the southern shores of the lake in a large, cool, spacious mansion built for him immediately after his victory in 1521.12 But in January 1522, Cortés went ahead with his plan to rebuild on the old site despite these criticisms.

  Some enemies of Cortés thought that their leader must be trying to arrange defenses in order to resist any attempt to detach him from power. He decided to rebuild where he did, however, because of the legendary nature of the site of Tenochtitlan. He did not want to leave the place a monument to past glory. The Indians wanted to rebuild, too, and a good workforce for the purpose was easily assembled.

  The essential part in the reconstruction was played by a “geometrician” named Alonso García Bravo, who had been born in Rivera, on the road between Málaga and Ronda, in Andalusia, and had educated himself in matters of town planning even before he left Castile in 1513 with Pedrarias. García Bravo reached New Spain with the expedition of Francisco de Garay and subsequently joined Cortés’s army. He took part in several battles as a conquistador, but then went to Villa Rica, Veracruz. He remained there during the siege of Tenochtitlan, having been asked to design its planned fortress.13

  The success of the building at Veracruz led Cortés to ask him to direct the reconstruction of Tenochtitlan.14 He went up to the capital in the summer of 1522 and studied the ground with Cortés himself. The city had been fought over fiercely. There had been much destruction, since Cortés had felt the need to destroy lines of two-story buildings to prevent the Indians dropping rocks on his men from above. Sometimes the Spaniards had used artillery in these endeavors. But the overall destruction had probably been more modest than has often been supposed. The causeways, the main streets, and the remains of many buildings were all evident even if the two main shrines of ancient Mexico, in the heart of Tenochtitlan and in Tlatelolco, had been damaged.

  García Bravo’s first commission was to build a fortress with two towers, at the eastern end of the city, beyond the ruins of the old Templo Mayor. This was a maritime station (atarazanas), where Cortés could keep his thirteen brigantines, built under the direction of the clever but embittered Sevillano Martín López, which had played such an important part in ensuring the Spanish victory over the Mexica. Again, Cortés’s enemies later argued, unjustifiably, the construction of these towers was an act directed against the royal power. These buildings were built under the supervision of Cihuacoatl (Tlacotzin), the high priest of the Mexica and now a rather improbable collaborator with the victors. One tower was high and had lodgings within it.


  In planning the main reconstruction of the capital, García Bravo proposed to accept the basic structure of the old Mexican city with its causeways and canals leading to a walled center, which in the past had been a sacred precinct, with the great pyramid and its sanctuaries. From all sides one saw the huge bulk of the great pyramid. The sacred precinct was approached by three causeways: to the north, the west, and the south. To the east, there was no communication with the mainland. The causeway to the north was aesthetically planned, since the direct way—via Tepeyac, now the site of the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe—would have been a parallel road a little to the east. To the south, beyond the walls of the city, there was a large marketplace where Indian buyers and sellers were busy within days of the conquest, on August 13, 1521.

  Around this open space there were the palaces of the old noblemen. Within the walls, the streets in the past had often been of water, in Venetian style. In the center, those highways were straight, though there were twisted ways beyond the grand heart of the city. To the north of the sacred precinct, outside the walls, the city of Tlatelolco had its own large market and the remains of its pyramid. Perhaps Santa Fe, the artificial city built outside Granada by Fernando and Isabel in 1491, was an inspiration for the new city of Cortés and García Bravo, even though it was smaller.15

  The great temples of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were in ruins; many others survived. Sixteen years later, in 1537, the bishops of Mexico, Guatemala, and Oaxaca wrote to Charles the Emperor in Spain to say that many Indians were still using their old temples for prayer and worship, though not for sacrifice, which had come to an abrupt end in 1521. Cortés permitted the old worship to continue, though he would encourage proselytization by, first, the Franciscans, and then the Dominicans. The bishops asked the King for his agreement for the destruction of those buildings and the burning of any idols within them, and an agreement that the stones of the old temples be used for making new churches. The King, or the Council of the Indies, wrote back the next year that indeed these buildings should be destroyed “without scandal” and the idols burned. The stone of the old temples should certainly be used for building churches.16

  Cortés decided to preserve the two main palaces of Montezuma as government buildings, one as the national palace where he, the viceroys, and later, the presidents of independent Mexico would live and have their offices; the other, which Cortés had used as his headquarters in the heady months in the city from November 1519 to July 1520, would eventually become the national pawnshop. In addition, he and García Bravo made an important decision: In the heart of the city there would be a Spanish quarter, where the conquistadors and pobladores (the name usually given to later arrivals) would be allotted plots on which to build or reconstruct substantial houses. This was according to the so-called traza, a word meaning “plan.” Between 1524 and 1526, in consequence, the town council of Mexico-Tenochtitlan allocated 234 solares (plots), as well as 201 orchards or gardens in the city.

  Outside the traza, the old Indian quarters would be maintained without change even though their names would receive a Christian prefix: The districts would henceforth be San Juan Moyotlan, Santa María Cuepopan, San Sebastián Atzacualco, and San Pablo Zoquipan. Each of these districts would have a church—an iglesia de visita, as the expression was—under the direction of Franciscans, who from 1522 had their headquarters in a large straw-roofed building a block away from the causeway to Tacuba, the future monastery of San Francisco. Each of these Indian quarters was governed, much as had occurred in the past, by a local elder referred to by the conquerors as a “señor.” Meantime, Tlatelolco would be left to its own devices, as a separate town, under a new name, Santiago.

  The district within the traza began to be rebuilt in the summer of 1522. García Bravo tried to ensure that water would be piped to all houses, that all houses would be built according to a pattern, and that all big roads would be fifteen varas wide.17 The patterns of old canals would be approximately followed, though some canals would be re-dug, while others would be filled in.

  García Bravo was assisted in these arrangements by a well-born conquistador, Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia, a man of some complexity. Born in Torralba, near Oropesa, Vázquez de Tapia was the nephew of Francisco Álvarez, abbot of Toro and inquisidor of Castile. His father, as we have seen, had been on the Council of Castile (Consejo Real de Castilla).

  The Franciscan monk Motolinía thought that four hundred thousand Mexica were working in the city in 1524 under the direction of the high priest Tlacotzin, who had by then assumed the name of Juan Velázquez before his Mexican designation. More people, Motolinía asserted, worked there “than those who had worked on the building of the temple of Jerusalem.”18 They included many from the nearby town of Chalco, in the valley, who were specialists in building and plastering and whose ancestors had probably worked on the original construction of the great city. Several secondary architects came to work under García Bravo, such as Juan Rodríguez, whose task was to adapt Montezuma’s palace to serve Cortés. Prominent Mexica such as Montezuma’s son, Don Pedro Montezuma, helped the Spaniards to recruit the workers. Motolinía recalled the latter singing and chanting, a normal procedure in the old days during such building projects, “all day and all night (los cantos y las voces apenas cesaban ni de noche ni de día).”19 The historian of imperial architecture George Kubler pointed out that however distressed the Indians might have been at their defeat, they were delighted, and probably won over, by the new mechanisms brought to New Spain by the conquerors—mostly the consequence of the wheel, such as pulleys, carts, and wheelbarrows, but also mules and nails, chisels, and iron hammers. To have a beast of burden also constituted a wonderful revolution in technology. But the nail seemed almost as important, while the pulley had a special fascination.20 These were the stupendous contributions Spain made to the technology of the New World.

  By the summer of 1523, a new city was taking shape. The place needed, for political reasons, to be grand and imposing, for it had to reflect the power required by both conquerors and conquered. Tenochtitlan had not been a mere collection of mud huts, it had been a great city of a European size—a capital of a kind that Spain itself did not yet have. Throughout the year, the surroundings of the city were alive with workers carrying cut stone and large tree trunks. The striking arches in the great square were beginning to be admired, for the European arch, which the ancient Mexica had never known, was soon seen everywhere in the capital.

  By early 1524, one could see the beginnings of monasteries and churches, too, chapels crowned with cupolas, as well as private houses with battlements and buttresses, nail-studded doors, and grilled windows. A temporary cathedral was under way. After a time the trees of orchards could be seen rising over the vast walls of new monasteries. A gibbet and pillory, reminders of civilization in one sense, were not forgotten.

  Cortés was accused by his critics of having been interested primarily in building palaces for his followers. But by 1526, thirty-seven churches were also being erected.21 One of Cortés’s secretaries, Juan de Ribera—a rather unreliable Extremeño, probably from Badajoz and possibly a cousin, who had come first to New Spain as a notary with Pánfilo de Narváez—would give an account to Peter Martyr of the great effort in New Spain of the master conquistador: “He is striving at this moment to restore the ruins of the great lake city damaged in the war: the aqueducts have been revived, the destroyed bridges and many ruined houses have been rebuilt and, little by little, the city is taking on its former appearance.” Ribera added that the old commercial life had also recovered: Markets and fairs were to be seen again, boats came and went as “actively as before,” and “the multitude of traders” seemed to be “as great as during the time of Montezuma.”22 In addition, two hospitals had been built, one specifically for lepers—San Lazarus, near Tlaxpana—and one for all other diseases except madness and syphilis.23

  Soon after the great business of the restoration of Tenochtitlan had begun, Cortés w
rote his third letter to Emperor Charles about the conquest. In this Cortés not only made the comment that he was distressed that his previous letters had received no answer but explained that, in the circumstances, he had been “almost forced (casi forzado)” to grant encomiendas to his fellow conquistadors because of his need to do something for those who had helped to achieve the great victory over the Mexica. He could not, unfortunately, offer them gold or pearls enough with which to retire to Spain! He had discussed the matter with his captains, including, we assume, such beneficiaries of his decisions as the Alvarados, Tapia, and Sandoval. He commented: “I entreat Your Majesty to approve.”24

  Encomienda was a medieval term. It indicated not a grant of land but a grant by the governor, or captain-general, of the labor and tribute of a certain number of natives (naturales) living in a specific place. There were precedents in the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims, and the scheme had been used in the Spanish dominions of the Caribbean. Several of Cortés’s men had had such in Cuba or La Española, now the island of Hispaniola, including the modern Haiti and Dominican Republic. The grant of an encomienda satisfied the desire of conquistadors for lordships. It did not indicate territory but in some circumstances led to it.

  The encomienda would have a controversial history throughout the sixteenth century, since the Crown soon wanted to argue that the grant only applied to one generation. The encomenderos wanted it for several generations if not indefinitely.

  The first encomendero in New Spain appeared in April 1522: a relatively unknown conquistador, Gonzalo de Cerezo, who, though he had gone to New Spain with Narváez, had become a page of Cortés. He received the encomienda of the important town of Cholula, probably because he had helped to carry wood from Tlaxcala to Texcoco to make López’s brigantines. Later, he made a fortune in commerce, and played a significant part in the early life of the colony.25 Other early encomenderos were the golden-haired leader Pedro de Alvarado, who obtained the encomienda of Xochimilco; Francisco de Montejo, then in Spain, who was granted the silversmiths’ rich town of Azcapotzalco; and Alonso de Ávila, who accompanied Cortés’s letter of May 22 to Spain and was captured by the French on the high seas, and who had received Cuautitlan, Zumpango, and Xaltocan. Cortés allowed himself Coyoacán, the builders’ town of Chalco, Ecatepec, and Otumba, the scene of the great battle of 1520.