by Hugh Thomas
Cortés had not been back more than two weeks when a new crisis arose personally for him. This was the arrival at Veracruz of Luis Ponce de León as judge of residencia. This was a normal procedure for retiring administrators. This official was a distant relation of the great Sevillano family with his name. He was young, with a high reputation for integrity. Named judge for Cortés in November 1525, he set off for New Spain in February of the next year in a fleet of twenty-two ships. According to Peter Martyr, he was told that if he should find Cortés alive, “he should overwhelm him with flattery and seek to inspire him with truly loyal sentiments.”44 He waited impatiently for two months in Santo Domingo for a ship to take him on to New Spain. When he arrived at Veracruz, he heard that Cortés had been there only a few days before. That was both unexpected and unwelcome.
Ponce de León went up to Mexico-Tenochtitlan in haste. He was offered a banquet on the way, at Iztapalapa. There he was offered presents, which he refused, and blancmange, which he ate. He and Cortés then met in the monastery of San Francisco in Mexico in the presence of Estrada, Albornoz, and most of the council of the city. A residencia of Cortés was proclaimed on July 4. This meant in theory that all executive power passed to the judge. Cortés, a stickler for correct conduct, and with his own legal training in his mind, prepared for the transfer of authority and handed to Ponce the vara (staff) of office. But Ponce was already ill, allegedly because of eating the blancmange at Iztapalapa. He must have been the first man to die of such a thing. For he and several of his traveling companions did succumb on July 20, and there were some who accused Cortés of poisoning them. The Dominican Fray Tomás Ortiz was the first to spread this rumor, though he only arrived in New Spain on July 2, with twelve colleagues. There is no evidence for the story.
Before he died, Ponce had placed his authority in the hands of an elderly lawyer, Marcos de Aguilar, who had accompanied him. He passed him the staff of office. Aguilar, a native of Écija, a fine Roman city between Seville and Córdoba, had gone out to the Indies in 1509. He had become chief magistrate in Santo Domingo and always supported the Columbus family, for which imprudent loyalty he was briefly imprisoned in 1515. He continued in office but was then expelled on the royal request for being a persona escandalosa. What could that have signified? Homosexuality? Hardly, for he had an illegitimate son, Cristóbal, by an indigenous girl.45 To live with an indigenous girl was not a scandal since almost everyone had at least one such liaison. Drink? Not a scandal at that time!
In any event, Aguilar assumed the title of justicia mayor in New Spain and for nine months exercised authority, though he knew nothing of the place and was so badly crippled that he had to be fed.46 Cortés conducted himself arrogantly but correctly. Aguilar for his part began the business of arranging Cortés’s residencia, the assembly of witnesses, the preparation of questionnaires and of counter-questionnaires, and the hiring of notaries, who it was hoped would write down with ease and grace all that was said by retired warriors. The process continued for years.
Among those who would be a witness was Jerónimo de Aguilar, a cousin of the licenciado and an essential ally of Cortés, since in 1519–21, he had interpreted Spanish into Maya for the conquistadors, leaving the process of translation of Maya into Nahuatl to the Indian Marina.
But then once again death intervened. In March 1527, Licenciado Marcos de Aguilar followed his legal leader into his grave. This was the fourth swift death encountered by Cortés, his wife’s, Garay’s, and Ponce’s being the previous ones; the accusations that he was in some way concerned were even more numerous.47
Aguilar had named the treasurer Estrada as his successor, justicia mayor. But Cortés’s captain, the resolute Gonzalo de Sandoval, was called on by the town council to assist him, and that captain moved into the justicia mayor’s suite for a few months, till Estrada received a notice from Spain that he alone was to rule New Spain. But Sandoval was not to take the residencia of Cortés, which was delayed endlessly.
Despite that concession, Cortés began to see that he was being sidelined in the arrangements to manage his own conquests. He seems never physically to have recovered from the privations of his journey to Honduras.
In these months people from all parts of Spain arrived in the New World, in particular New Spain. “Foreigners” were permitted to come between 1526 and 1538, which meant that all inhabitants of Aragon were allowed to venture there. Jews, Moors, Gypsies, and heretics were in theory forbidden, but it was in these years fairly easy to evade the regulations, and we find many new Christians entering the New World. Perhaps one thousand to two thousand immigrants would come every year, more men than women, of course.48
7
Charles V: From Valladolid
to the Fall of Rome, 1527
The year 1527 was full of atrocities and events unheard of for many centuries: falls of governments, wickedness of Princes, most frightful sacks of cities, great famines, a most terrible plague almost everywhere.
GUICCIARDINI
Between 1523 and 1529, Charles the Emperor, Charles of Ghent, was above all Charles the King—of Aragon, of course, as well as of Castile and its substantial entanglements overseas. He had, remarkably, been in Valladolid a year, from July 1522 to August 25, 1523, when he set off for Navarre and then Aragon, specifically Monzón, in the mountains between Barbastro and Lérida, where the Segre joins the Cinca, and where kings of Aragon customarily held their local parliaments. Thereafter he was in Catalonia, Andalusia, Seville, and Granada. By 1524, his travels seemed to combine to make him King of Spain, indeed.
Like every bachelor monarch in those days—and later days, too—he was being every day advised on his need for marriage. He seems to have settled by this time on the merits of his first cousin, the Infanta Isabel, daughter of King Manuel of Portugal by a Spanish princess, María, who was herself daughter of Fernando and Isabel. The English princess Mary, who had been talked of as a candidate, was too young, being only nine years old in 1525, and Charles had been persuaded that his marriage could not wait. He adopted a rather worldly view of such a wedding: “My marriage,” he wrote in a private notebook—he was the first monarch to confide thus—“will be a good reason to demand a great sum from the Spanish kingdoms.” He knew that the Portuguese princess was rich. He reflected that he could make the princess of Portugal, once she was Queen and Empress, his Regent whenever he left Spain: “In that way I ought to be able to set out for Italy with the greatest splendour and honour this very autumn.”1
He had his personal difficulties, above all with his mother. In January 1525, Fadrique Enríquez, the admiral of Castile, his cousin, wrote to him to say that he had visited Queen Juana and that she had complained to him of her ill-treatment by the Marquess de Denia, who was both his and her close relation.2 This dry and callous Marquess, Bernardino Sandoval y Rojas, was governor of Tordesillas and therefore warder-in-chief of Juana la Loca. Dealing with him that time, Juana had been lucid. But “in the rest of her conversation, she wandered.”3
Charles was also short of money. The Polish ambassador, Dantiscus, thought in February 1525 that he had never seen the court “so poor” as it was then. “Money is procured by unprecedented methods and all is sent to the army in Italy. The Emperor is suffering from an extreme penury,” he added in his diary after he received the Order of the Golden Fleece for his own monarch, the cultivated Sigismund I of Poland (conversation between Charles and Dantiscus was in German and Italian). Dantiscus himself was suffering from poverty, though in receipt of an income from Poland. With only 60 ducats a month, he could not live as an ambassador needed to: He could afford only six or seven horses and ten servants.4
Yet happier times were coming. Peter Martyr, in what turned out to be his last letter to Rome,5 spoke of two vessels arriving at Seville from New Spain, commanded by Lope de Samaniego, who would later play a part in the administration of the overseas empire, with two tigers on board, and a culverin made of silver sent by Cortés before he left Mexico-Tenochtitlan
the previous October.6 Dantiscus reported good news about the Indies, such as the “discoveries of new islands,” which he did not name but which he said were “abundant in gold, spices and perfumes” (aromas) adding that in just one day, seventy thousand men and women in New Spain had received the sacrament. He said that since there had been a severe drought, the Spaniards had persuaded the Indians in that land to form a procession preceded by a cross, whereupon it began to rain and the indigenous people saved their crops. “These Indians were more human than those who had been previously discovered [in the Caribbean] and the journey to their islands was shorter than the way of the Portuguese.”7
On March 10, even more remarkable news reached the emperor Charles: that his army in Italy, in pursuit of triumphs in Naples, led by the brilliant Francisco de Ávalos, who had become Marquess of Pescara, had defeated the French at Pavia. The King of France, the unscrupulous charmer Francis I, had even been captured.
The Viceroy of Naples, Lannoy, received King Francis’s sword in person. But the victory was particularly the work of Ávalos, one of the most admirable gentlemen-warriors of the age. Captain-General of the light cavalry of Spain in 1512 when still young, he had been captured and wounded by the French at Ravenna that same year. He was known “for his strong frame,” and for “his fine large eyes which though usually soft and mild” in expression “shot fire” when he was roused. In 1524, he had skillfully covered the Spanish retreat from France and had given back to France the body of the valiant Bayard before the battle of Pavia.8 Connected indirectly by blood ties to Cortés, he inherited an Italian title, but he spoke only Spanish.9 In 1509, he had married in sumptuous style the beautiful poetess Vittoria Colonna, who would later be the great friend of Michelangelo and who forgave Ávalos his many absences and infidelities. He was a Renaissance man, for his life was full of extraordinary feats, his attitude to noble ardor and desire for glory being awoken by his heady reading of Romantic novels. The playwright Torres Naharro, a very Italianate Spaniard, dedicated his Propalladia to him in 1517.10 Vittoria Colonna wrote him poems: “Que fece il mio bel sole a noi ritorno/De regie spoglie carco e ricche prede.… ” The last chapter of Machiavelli’s The Prince suggests that many Italians agreed with Ávalos’s idea of patriotism. His wounds at Pavia distressed him and left him bitter at the lack of recognition by the Emperor. But Isabella, Duchess of Milan, wrote, “I would that I were a man, signor, if for nothing else than to receive wounds in the face as you have done, in order to see if they would become me as well as they do you.”11 But his last months were tarnished by the suspicion that he was toying with the idea of backing Italian nationhood, through the machinations of the gifted patriot Girolamo Morone.12 He died of his wounds in December.
The Emperor remained in Spain, and with the King of France in his control, he seemed to have the world at his feet. Charles’s dignified brother, Ferdinand, wrote enthusiastically, “Your Majesty is now monarch of the whole world.”13 What a tempting phrase!
But the strategic problems seemed as serious as ever: What was to be done with Francis I? How was Charles now to handle his ally Henry VIII of England, who, he was coming to realize, was self-obsessed? Gattinara thought that his Emperor should now claim the whole of his Burgundian inheritance. “Burgundy, no more, no less.” Perhaps, too, he should demand Provence for the constable of Bourbon. A general council of the Church should surely be called, and the Emperor should organize it, for Pope Clement could only organize excuses.
But nothing happened. It was apparently Francis who, at last in the castle of Pizzighettone, between Cremona and Piacenza, persuaded Viceroy Lannoy that it would be best if he were sent to see Charles in Spain. There, the Council of Castile was divided. Gattinara wanted territorial acquisitions, solutions hostile to France, and most of the other Flemings took that view. So did the Duke of Alba. But Lannoy and Ávalos, the actual victors in battle, advised a conciliatory treaty, as did the Emperor’s confessor, García de Loaisa.14 At a Mass held to give thanks for the victory, a Dominican gave a sermon asking for a common front against the infidel. He preached “universal concord.”15 The humanist philosopher Vives, then at Oxford, urged tolerance, for it was a wonderful chance “to do good, to gain merit before God and glory before men.”16
The indecision of Charles after Pavia was due first to the confusion in the imperial chancellery headed by Gattinara, who, though a fine intellect and an able official, was also always suspecting plots against him. For example, in July 1525 at Toledo, the Venetian ambassador, Gasparo Contarini, was reporting that Gattinara had complained to the Emperor that others were usurping his authority. Charles asked Gattinara to put his complaint in writing. He did so in a fierce denunciation of secretarial corruption that seems to have included not only the by-now-irreplaceable Cobos but also his own protégé, Lalemand, who was beginning to displace Gattinara himself. At another meeting in Toledo with Gattinara, on July 9, Charles explained that the chancellorship in Spain was different from what Gattinara imagined it. The chancellor was the supreme adviser to the King, not the head of the civil service. Gattinara immediately asked leave to retire from the court. Charles agreed to this sad request, then repented of his agreement and sent Laurent de Gorrevod to make things up. Gorrevod called on Gattinara, while the president of the Council of the Indies, García de Loaisa, asked Gattinara to dine with the King.
Charles greeted his longtime adviser with affection and declared how much he loved him. Then they settled down to dine extensively on beef and beer, as was then the Emperor’s custom. It now seemed that Gattinara had been upset by the destruction caused by imperial troops to his own territory in Piedmont. He had written to Charles: “The abuses which your troops commit are so abominable that the Turks and infidels would not do them and, instead of naming you ‘liberator of Italy,’ people will be able to say that you have introduced the greatest tyranny that ever was.”17 No doubt Charles was aware of these scandals, but he did not like to hear them from his chancellor, of whose tirades—and even of whose exhortations—he was wearying.
Soon afterwards, Francis I arrived as a prisoner in Madrid. Charles did not hasten to see him. Only when Charles heard that the captive king was seriously ill did he visit him, and then only briefly.18 After a month, Margaret, duchess of Alençon, a sister of Francis, a cultivated, beautiful Renaissance princess, arrived in Madrid to open negotiations on Francis’s behalf. She was a poet, playwright, and Neoplatonist, as well as a reformer in so far as the Church was concerned, and that side of her is well expressed in her play Le miroir de l´âme pécheresse. She later married the King of Navarre, Henri d’Albret, and was the grandmother of Henri of Navarre. Charles received her with courtesy, and negotiations followed in Toledo.
The second reason for Charles’s lack of attention to Francis and the treaty of peace to be made with him was that he had decided, as he told his brother, Fernando, in June 1525, to marry his cousin the infanta Isabel of Portugal. A marriage with a Portuguese princess would help to cement the good relations that Castilian monarchs had coveted with Portugal since the days of Isabel.19
A courtier, Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán—eccentric and indiscreet, but modern minded and articulate—had gone to Lisbon to tell the King of Portugal of Charles’s victory. On his return, Charles told him: “Don Alonso, you have performed this service well. Now tell me of the people whom you met in Lisbon.” He replied, “Sire, I saw a fat monarch, rather short, with a very small beard, youthful and not very discreet [King John III the Pious, who had been King since 1521]. … I saw the Queen, his wife who seemed very well prepared and on the spot, honourable and wise [Charles’s sister]. Then I saw an Infanta very self-possessed [bien ansi] and more [más], and more, if one can say so, who seemed to look like you, sir.” This was the Emperor’s cousin and future wife, whom he came to love deeply. She was beautiful, as we can see from Titian’s portrait of her.
On October 24, wedding arrangements were agreed between Charles and the Infanta, the titles of Charles inclu
ding that of “monarch of the isles of the Canaries and of the Indies, the isles of the mainland and the Ocean Sea.”20 The Infanta would bring a handsome dowry: 900,000 doblas de oro castellanas.21
The negotiations with Francis I over peace and those with the Portuguese Infanta over marriage overlapped. Thus on December 19, Viceroy Lannoy produced a list of fifty articles upon which the King of France would have to agree with Charles. The most important one was that Francis would accompany Charles in a crusade. The King of France would be released when his two elder but still small sons, Henry and Charles, were exchanged as hostages for him. France would renounce all claims to Milan, Naples, and Genoa, and abandon her overlordship of Flanders and Artois. Francis also assented, in somewhat distant terms, to the cession of Burgundy to Charles.
There was drama in the King’s room in Toledo. Charles agreed to let his sister Leonor (Eleanor), the widow of King Manuel of Portugal, marry Francis. It seemed a moment of promise even if Gattinara the chancellor did not agree and did not countersign the treaty.
