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

by Hugh Thomas

  There were, however, obstacles to the Indies being able to confirm this weighty financial contribution. In consequence of the accusations of corruption, the Council of the Indies suspended its activities till February 1543. Dr. Juan de Figueroa carried out an investigation. He was, Cobos said, “a man of sound learning, very honest and, in official matters, nothing will deflect him an iota from that which is right.”14 Figueroa found that the only permanent long-term member of the council, Dr. Beltrán, was flawed. He had requested benefits in Peru from the Pizarros for his two sons, Antonio Beltrán and Bernardino Mella. The latter received the post of chief constable (alguacil mayor) of Cuzco, while the former received good Indians in an encomienda in Arequipa. Those benefits were illegal. Beltrán also admitted that in return for support or for favors, he had in his time received money from Almagro, Cortés, and Hernando Pizarro, and from Gonzalo de Olmos, a cousin of Beltrán’s wife, two emeralds and two beakers of gold.15 The emperor Charles was outraged.

  Beltrán defended himself: The money that came from Almagro had not been for him but for someone else, to whom he had given it. The bribes of Cortés had gone astray, and he then denied those of Hernando Pizarro. The presents of Olmos, he claimed, were worth only 220 ducats. But these defenses were not believed, Beltrán contradicted himself several times, and finally he was condemned to deprivation of office and salary. He lost all his special grants, and he was condemned by the magistrates of the court to pay a fine of 17,000 ducats, which almost ruined him. (It was twice what he was said to have received in bribes.) Suárez de Carvajal, bishop of Lugo, was also condemned, but the papers of this inquiry have been lost, so it is not clear of what he was accused. But he was deprived of his bishopric and fined 7,000 ducats.16 The emperor Charles strongly opposed tolerance in both these circumstances.

  So in the winter of 1542–43, Beltrán withdrew to the monastery of Our Lady of Grace in Medina del Campo. There this first civil servant of the Indies made an appeal, but no one wanted to listen. Juan de Samano, with whom Beltrán had collaborated for twenty years, said he could do nothing. A newly reconfigured council wrote to the Emperor asking for tolerance, but the Emperor instructed the magistrates to maintain their sentence.

  Afterwards, for the first time, the council received rules. These were prepared by Cardinal Loaisa, Dr. Figueroa, and Dr. Fernando de Guevara (speaking on behalf of the Council of Castile), with the help of Fray Domingo de Soto, Granvelle, and Cobos. The rules were publicly announced in a contract signed by Charles, among others, on November 20, 1542.17

  Another important innovation came in 1546: From then on, on the express petition of merchants in Seville, ships bound for the Indies were to sail together in convoys for safety. No vessel less than ten tons was to be cleared for departure to the Indies. The minimum fleet was ten vessels, and two such fleets would leave a year, one in March, one in September. This, to begin with, was only in time of war, but given that French pirates were active at all times, the idea was maintained in peace. In January 1546, all merchant vessels, not just those for the Indies, were instructed to sail in convoys and were to arm themselves.18 Over the years these arrangements would be further developed.

  Alas for the papal hopes of peace with France. On July 10, 1542, that country declared war against Charles, an act inspired by the Emperor’s designation of his son Philip as Duke of Milan. That caused a crisis in the Netherlands. Queen Mary of Hungary as regent led the defense herself, with the Prince of Orange. Antwerp beat off a rebellion of Gelderland, but there was much destruction. Then the French mysteriously withdrew, even as the Netherlands suffered from the lack of a general.

  Charles left Monzón in October for Barcelona. He had written to Pope Paul hoping that the Pontiff would cease dealing with France and the Empire as if they were equal powers. At Barcelona, Charles welcomed his son Philip for his first visit to the city. On November 8, 1542, Philip made a formal entry into the Catalan capital (having arrived secretly and in disguise the previous night). On November 9, Philip received the homage of the councillors, as of the multi-competent Francisco de Borja, still the Viceroy of Catalonia. In May, Charles left for Genoa, leaving the sixteen-year old Philip as regent, to be advised as before by Fernando de Valdés, archbishop of Seville, a hard and unbending churchman from Asturias who was also gran inquisidor. The Council of the Indies would be still chaired by García de Loaisa but in his frequent absences, the experienced ex-judge of the audiencia in Santo Domingo and Mexico, Ramírez de Fuenleal, would preside.

  Charles’s two letters from Palamós to Philip as to how to conduct himself as regent have a deserved place in history. It was now that Charles told his son not to give himself over too much to the pleasures of marriage (Philip had married his first cousin María of Portugal in November 1543). In respect of the American empire, Charles enjoined Philip to “remember how many lands you will be called on to govern, how far apart they are, how many different languages they speak … and you will see how needful it is to learn languages.” Latin, Charles insisted, was indispensable, though he himself had never mastered it.

  In August 1543, Cobos wrote to the Emperor: The difficulty of finding money was so great that there had never been anything like it. He assured Charles, “There is no way that it [more money] can be found, for there is none … To find 18,000 ducats every 30 days for the defence of Perpignan, Fuenterrabía, San Sebastián and Navarre, as well as Malaga and Cartagena has been, and is, extremely difficult … I am very truly perplexed.” In the end, he raised 420,000 ducats, much of it from a shipment of gold and silver from the Indies, and there were some loans from private persons. Tavera lent 16,000 ducats, Cobos himself advanced 8,000, but other rich men refused. The Duke of Alba said that he would serve the Emperor “pike in hand” but in no other way.19

  Such difficulties did not act as a brake on Charles, who in July 1544 led his armies under Orange, Este, Gonzaga, and Granvelle into French Burgundy. He besieged Saint-Dizier on the way to Vitry-le-François. King Henry VIII of England was ready at Boulogne. Charles proceeded with the slogan “On to Paris.” He did not besiege any city but drove on. There was panic in the capital. The cardinal of Lorraine, a Guise before he was a churchman, indicated that France was interested in negotiation. On August 31, a conference at Saint-Amand, to the north of the Marne, articulated a serious effort to make peace. This led in September to the Peace of Crépy. The public terms included: first, France would send ten thousand men, of whom six hundred would be cavalry, against the Turks. Second, both sides would restore all conquests made since the Truce of Nice of 1538. Third, Stenay, in the Ardennes, was to be given back. The French king’s son Charles, Duke of Orléans, was to marry the Infanta and inherit the Netherlands on Charles’s death; or he could marry the archduchess Ana and have Milan. More important, France would abandon its policy of encroaching on Spain’s empire in the new world and would not attack any more treasure fleets.

  There were also secret clauses: Francis would help Charles to reform the abuses of the church; France would support the planned general meeting of the church at Trent; France would do what it could to encourage the return of the German princes to the Catholic fold; Francis would give Charles the diplomatic help that he had promised against the Turks; France would support the return of Geneva to the Duke of Savoy; and Francis promised not to make any peace with England from which Charles was excluded. If Charles were to go to war with Henry VIII and England, France would support him.20

  On September 14, 1544, treaties along these lines were signed in the abbey of Saint Nicolas in the vineyards of Soissons. The peace was to be confirmed by a visit in October of the Queen of France, Charles’s sister Leonor, to Brussels, her birthplace, accompanied by her stepson (the Duke of Orléans), whom the Emperor already treated as a half son, and by Madame d’Estampes, the French king’s mistress. Charles had with him his sister Queen Mary of Hungary and his Austrian nephews, the archdukes Maximilian and Ferdinand. Also present was Ottavio Farnese, his son-in-law, the pope
’s son who had married his illegitimate daughter, Margaret of Flanders. There were balls and tournaments: “At the reception, it seemed as if they [the Emperor and his sister] would never have done with kissing and embracing each other.”21

  These celebrations were followed by discussions in Spain as to whether Charles should maintain himself in Milan or in the Low Countries. The Italian party was headed by the Duke of Alba, who was the new governor of Milan, supported by the Count of Osorno, who saw in Milan the essential point of entry to Germany, as well as the key to the defense of Naples, while Flanders was difficult to govern, easily open to French attack, and had never done anything for Spain. The opposing view was held by Tavera.22 Nothing was decided. Spain continued with pretensions to both territories.

  Another consequence of Charles’s continued preoccupation with war was that when at last that so-much-desired general council of the Church opened at Trent, in the far north of Italy, in the winter of 1545, his representative—Francisco de Toledo, a disciple of Fray Domingo de Soto and a lecturer at Salamanca—had a free hand to decide what he thought best.

  Cobos wrote sycophantically of Philip to the emperor Charles: “King Philip … is already so great a monarch that his knowledge and capacity have outstripped his years [he was then sixteen], for he seems to have achieved the impossible by his great understanding and his lofty comprehension. His diversions are a complete and constant devotion to work and the affairs of his kingdom. He is always thinking about matters of good government and justice, without leaving room for favouritism nor for idleness, nor for flattery nor for any vice … Where it is necessary to hold meetings, he listens to the opinions of each one with the greatest gravity and attention … He is frequently closeted with me for hours at a time … afterwards, he does the same thing with the president of the council [the inquisidor] Valdés to talk about justice and the Duke of Alba to talk about war … I am astonished at his prudent, well considered recommendations.”23

  Charles wrote in 1546 to his son Philip that he was determined to take the field against the German princes. He proposed to borrow the money needed for these campaigns from bankers in Nuremberg, Augsburg, Genoa, and Antwerp. The security? Why, the shipments of gold and silver from the Indies of 600,000 scudi. He hoped that Cobos would undertake the negotiations. He was optimistic: The Emperor’s fifth in 1545 had been 360,000 ducats.24

  Cobos acted quickly: On May 22 he and the Castilian Council of Finance signed a contract for a loan with the Fuggers’ agent in Spain. The Fuggers were still the richest bankers in Germany, and the requested funds needed to be explained and justified. Cobos also raised money by diverting some already allocated elsewhere. Still, he wrote to the Emperor that the financial situation remained difficult: “We are at the end of our tether unless God our Lord in His mercy and Your Majesty can find a remedy.” Cobos suggested “a counsel of despair”: to seize all the cash in Spain and ship it to the Emperor by galleys. That would provide ready money in Genoa, where it was so needed. This mad plan was approved by Philip and the council. Philip then wrote to his father: “These Kingdoms are so bare of gold—you cannot find a scudo—that there will be no lack of complaints and outcries.” But somehow they did manage to gather 180,000 scudi by October 10.25

  Long before that, in June, Charles had written despairingly to his sister Mary about his efforts to rein in the rebellious Protestants:

  All my efforts … have come to nothing. The heretic Princes and electors have decided not to attend the Diet in person; indeed they are determined to rise in revolt immediately the Diet is over, to the utter destruction of the spiritual lords and to the great peril of the King of the Romans and ourself. If we hesitate now, we shall lose all. Thus we are certain, I, my brother and the Duke of Bavaria, that force alone will drive them to accept reasonable terms. The time is opportune, for they have been weakened by recent wars. Their subjects, the nobility in particular, are discontented … Over and above this, we have good hope of papal help of an offer of 800,000 ducats or more. Unless we take immediate action, all the estates of Germany may lose their faith and the Netherlands could follow.

  After fully considering all these points, I decided to begin by raising war in Hesse and Saxony as disturbers of the peace and to open the campaign in the lands of the Duke of Brunswick. This pretext will not long conceal the purpose of this war of religion but it will serve to divide the protestants from the beginning. Be assured I shall do nothing without careful thought.26

  Charles’s letter to Mary was an implicit order to the Netherlands to mobilize.

  35

  Federmann and

  Jiménez de Quesada

  Between the province of Santa Marta and that of Cartagena, there is a river which divides these territories, it is called the Magdalena and it is known because it is a great river and also because it runs with great fury and impetus into the sea, carrying sweet water out for a league’s distance.

  GONZALO JIMÉNEZ DE QUESADA, 1536

  In 1529, there were several German subjects of the Emperor in Venezuela connected with the banking house of Welser. These were Ambrosio Alfinger, Nicolás Federmann, and Sebastian Rentz, from Ulm; Jorge Ehinger, from Konstanz; and Juan Seissenhofer, often known as Juan Aleman, who came from Augsburg. Alfinger was formally the governor, but being on an expedition in the Andes, he allowed himself to be briefly substituted by Seissenhofer. Upon his return, he handed authority over to Federmann while he went, at the end of July 1530, to rest in Santo Domingo.1

  Federmann, who was, of course, a citizen of Ulm, had courage, energy, and originality. He spent the early days of his new responsibility looking for pearls off the peninsula of Paraguaná. Then, a month later, he set off on his own expedition into the interior, leaving Bartolomé de Santillana as his deputy. Federmann’s object in exploring the interior was to seek the Mar del Sur (the Pacific), by which route it would surely be a short distance to the Spice Islands. He set off on September 13, 1532, with a hundred Spaniards on foot, sixteen on horses, and about a hundred porters from the nearby tribes. Federmann’s activity clashed directly with the instructions of Alfinger to stay where he was.

  Federmann’s aim was to go due south from Coro. He journeyed through the territories and villages of three new and unknown peoples, the Xideharas, the Ayamanes, and the Xaguas. Of these, the Ayamanes were so small that they seemed to be dwarfs. The illness of many of his men caused them to travel in hammocks, “more like hospital patients than men of war.”2 In those humid valleys, he strove to ensure that his sick colleagues were treated as if they were great lords. He wanted the Indians to think the Spaniards were immortals, immune to all diseases.

  As usual with Spanish adventurers of this kind, he met many difficulties. For instance, his accountant, Antonio Naveros, made an unwise comment criticizing him.3 He was sent back in chains to Coro and was killed on the way by a poisoned arrow in his throat. That was a serious setback to the Welser cause in Venezuela, for Oviedo had looked on Naveros as an excellent person, and it was said that he had a calm disposition.4

  On his way south, Federmann reached the large pueblo of Acariagua, on the river Tocuyo. There he had a serious battle in which almost all the Spaniards were wounded. He then returned to Coro. Alfinger, who by then had returned from his rest in Santo Domingo, was furious with Federmann for undertaking a grand journey without his permission. He decided to send Federmann back to Europe, and he accordingly went home to Seville in the company of his friend, Sebastian Rentz. He even made his way back to Augsburg, where he wrote his Historia Indiana to inform the Welsers what was happening. At first he was requested to stay away from the Indies for four years, but he then negotiated a new contract for seven years in Venezuela, for which he would receive a small salary. When news came that Alfinger had been killed by Indians near Lake Maracaibo, Federmann was named his successor in July 1534, with the titles of governor and captain-general of Venezuela.

  Alfinger had made another fruitless journey west to find the elusive strai
t to the Southern Sea, for he remained convinced of the strait’s existence. He went to Lake Maracaibo, he went to the mountains of Perijá, and he reached the banks of the great river Magdalena. But there was no strait; and Alfinger was killed by Indians.

  Federmann’s rise to the governorship was confused by the fact that for a time he had a rival in Venezuela, another German, Georg Hohermuth von Speyer (known among Spaniards as Espira), from the ancient ecclesiastical city of Speyer. But Federmann was restored before he left Spain.

  Federmann’s second departure for Venezuela from Sanlúcar was attended by an astonishingly lavish ceremony: There were shawms and bagpipes; processions of priests with candles; bandsmen with trumpets and trombones; Dominican friars, barefoot Franciscans; drummers; soldiers with fighting dogs, eleven columns of horsemen, soldiers with axes, arquebusiers, shield-bearing captains, and soldiers in deerskin to ward off poisoned arrows. There followed flags, units of infantrymen, shoemakers, tailors, builders, and then the whole troop of Federmann’s army. This included Flemings, Englishmen, Albanians, even Scots, as well as Germans and Castilians. They went as a procession to the convent of the barefoot friars to swear loyalty to the Emperor, as well as the governor.5 Provisions on the journey would be generous (a pound of meat three times a week, on other days fish).

  The expedition reached Santo Domingo and then made for Coro. For a year or two, Federmann negotiated his way more or less successfully through a jungle of conflicting interests in northern Venezuela. Espira then set off for the interior and was not seen again for three years. The municipality of Coro clashed with Federmann, whose activities they sought to limit. Federmann, like other German governors in Venezuela, looked on his post primarily as one that could give a justification for journeys of discovery: Espira was looking for the apparently rich territory of Xeriva; Antonio de Chaves, another Spanish adventurer, made his way along the coast to the mouth of the Magdalena; Federmann himself tried to found a port on the Río Hacha, on the way to the coastal city of Santa Marta, beyond Maracaibo. Life in Coro declined severely; the population of this new Spanish “city” fell to a mere 140, of whom two-thirds were ill. Bishop Bastidas, son of Rodrigo, who came from Santo Domingo as acting governor in the absence of the Germans, gave a gloomy picture: “It was part of my infirmity to have to see the place’s great poverty. And we went to our church and there found poverty and ruin. Everything both smelled and appeared of sovereign impoverishment.… The pueblo has fifty cottages, or a few more, and there are not four bohíos which could be described as reasonable. The church is covered with the poorest kind of straw … and at present people do not have shirts with which to dress themselves.”6 There were later denunciations of cruelty: For example, Federmann was accused of transporting his Indians in a long chain with their necks in irons, and of cutting off their heads when they were ill or tired. This evidence emerged during a later residencia, which had to be interrupted by the judge because he ran out of paper.7