by Hugh Thomas
Philip was in Flanders when he received the news of his father’s death. On November 17, Mary of England died without heirs. On November 28, Philip held a glittering funeral service in Saint Gudule in Brussels for his father, and on December 2, another for his wife, the English Queen Mary.
At his death, Charles left his empire in Europe restored. He had Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and half of Germany under his control or that of his brother, Ferdinand. The empire in the Indies, though no one used that term, was effectively under Spanish direction. Some parts of it were economically successful, especially after the introduction of the use of an amalgam of mercury rendered the processing of silver much easier. Zacatecas and Potosí would become great sources of silver. Then in 1558, the Spanish Antilles produced sixty thousand arrobas of sugar to be exported to Seville.22 Great sums were still regularly paid to the Pizarro family, including the imprisoned Hernando Pizarro, who often received an illegal income through agents. Part of this wealth derived from the cultivation of coca, which was forty times greater than before the conquest.23
By the time of the death of Charles V, probably fifteen thousand African slaves had reached the Spanish empire. About five hundred had been bought by Cortés, no less, to work on his sugar plantations in New Spain.24 Already, too, there was a large subculture of lesser groups; for example, the children of African slave fathers and Indian women, zambos, were already making an impact on the society of the empire in both New Spain and Peru. The two large principalities based on those two large regions were the seats of Spanish viceroyalties, and most of the rest of South America, as well as the Caribbean, was governed by Spanish commanders. There were untidy gaps in the texture of the empire. North America, despite the efforts of Hernando de Soto, was far from being a Spanish outpost.
In 1559, another, even more elaborate funeral was held for the emperor Charles in the new cathedral in Mexico. That small edifice had been completed in 1525, on Cortés’s orders, using stones from the old pagan pyramids as the foundation. Inside this iglesia mayor, as it was known, was an aisled rectangle with wooden supports and a flat wooden roof. It was on the site of its colossal successor cathedral, begun in the 1570s.25
The empty sarcophagus in Mexico of the King-Emperor was on two levels, in Doric style. A funeral urn was placed on the first level, and was covered with a black cloth and a cushion on which a crown rested. On the second level, the Austrian eagle spread gilded wings beneath a painted blue sky. This remarkable tribute took the architect Claudio de Arciniega, from Burgos, three months to create. He had been busy since his arrival in New Spain in the late 1540s designing the viceregal palace of the city on the site of the old palace of Montezuma. He had built the first university building in Mexico as well as the beautiful staircase in the hospital of Jesus.
The funeral procession was led by Indian rulers in black cloaks, their hems dragging in the dust, carrying standards with embroidered coats of arms, their own and those of the dead Emperor. There followed the leading men of different towns of New Spain, and many Indian noblemen, followed by four hundred friars and priests, and then by the second archbishop of Mexico, Alonso de Montúfar, a Dominican friar from Loja near Granada (where he had once been inquisidor of the Holy Office), attended by the bishop of Michoacán (still the remarkable Utopian Vasco de Quiroga) and the bishop of New Galicia (Pedro de Ayala, a Dominican from a famous family of Toledo).
Quiroga was still firm in his determination to create Utopia in New Spain.26 He still believed that the Church in the New World could articulate the purity of customs lost among the Europeans, who were victims of ambition, pride, and malice.27
At that time, there were nearly eight hundred friars in New Spain, and they had established between them over 150 religious houses. Many of them in their day had converted thousands of Indians. Many of these friars must have been present at this great funeral. So were the six bishops of New Spain (Mexico, Oaxaca, Michoacán, Chiapas, Guadalajara, and Yucatán).
The secular part of the procession was headed by Bernardino de Albornoz, who carried the banner of the city. He had become a councillor of the city and magistrate (commander) of the fortress of Atarazanas. Albornoz was followed by two mace bearers, dressed in black damask and coats of mail on which the royal arms gleamed, in gold and silver. The city’s treasurer, Hernando de Portugal, a descendant of the royal house of that country, and a sometime courtier (contino) in Spain, carried a crown on a damask cushion. The constable, Ortúno de Ibarra, carried a bare, unsheathed sword, and the inspector, García de Albornoz, brother of Bernardino, a crossbow. Luis del Castillo, the great friend of the late viceroy Mendoza, also a member of an illustrious family, carried an imperial coat of mail.28 Somewhere in the procession there would surely have been seen Alonso de Vilaseca, possessed of vast cattle ranches as well as rich silver mines in Pachuca, who had endowed a chair of theology at the University of Mexico, a liberal friend of Franciscans on the savage frontiers. Other benefactors of New Spain would all have been present, such as the trustees of the two-story hospital of the Immaculate Conception (later known as Jesus Nazareño) founded so soon after the conquest and maintained by a fraternity (cofradía) of which Cortés had been the leading member. There was, too, Bishop Zumárraga’s hospital del Amor de Dios. Pedro de Gante would have been present, if only because of his establishment of the hospital for Indians known as Señor San José.
Behind walked Viceroy Mendoza’s successor, Luis de Velasco, an eminently noble and dignified figure, a relation of the constable of Castile, whose train was held by a chamberlain. He was married to Ana de Castilla, who had a weakness for the persecuted Archbishop Carranza. There followed other officials, such as the judges of the supreme court, the chief bailiff, the chief of the treasury, and the rector of the new University of Mexico. Velasco had in 1553 introduced a kind of rural guard in New Spain, a Santa Hermandad comparable to what had been created in old Spain under Fernando and Isabel. We cannot doubt that this ceremonial viceroyalty was an advance on what existed before; as the great Burckhardt put it, “the State founded on sheer crime is compelled in the course of time to develop a kind of justice and morality, since those of its citizens who are just and moral gradually get the upper hand.”29
Thus did Spain carry across the Atlantic ancient ceremonies attended by new aristocrats and recently recognized great men and women. The indigenous population played their part. Had they not done so, the moment would have seemed a self-assertion of nouveaux riches.30 But they, too, prayed for the soul of the conquering emperor Charles.
Appendix 1
GENEALOGIES
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Appendix 2
MAPS
Map 1
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Map 2
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Map 3
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Map 4
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Map 5
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Map 11
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Map 15
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Map 17
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Map 18
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Map 19
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Map 20
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Map 21
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Map 22
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Map 23
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Map 24
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Map 25
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Map 26
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Charles V, age about twenty-two, with the Golden Fleece around his neck (Master of the Magdalen Legend) (Illustration Credit 1)
Mercurino Gattinara, chancellor to Charles V, who dreamed of world power for his master (Illustration Credit 2a)
Gonzalo Pérez, Charles V’s chief secretary in the 1540s (Illustration Credit 2b)
Francisco de los Cobos: reliable, covetous, patient (Illustration Credit 3a)
Granvelle, chancellor to Charles V in all but name, who, like many servants of the Habsburgs, came from Franche-Comté (Illustration Credit 3b)
The empress Isabel of Portugal, named regent of Spain by Charles V during his many absences (Titian) (Illustration Credit 4a)
The archduchess Margaret of Austria, the governess of the Netherlands as well as of Charles V (School of Bernard van Orley) (Illustration Credit 4b)
Clement VII, the second Medici pope, whom Charles ruined at Rome in 1527 (Sebastian del Piombo) (Illustration Credit 5a)
Paul III, Alessandro Farnese, who, though preoccupied with his family, also concerned himself with American Indians (Titian) (Illustration Credit 5b)
Quiroga, Bishop of Pátzcuaro, tried to apply More’s principles in Utopia to New Spain. (Illustration Credit 6a)
The Erasmian Zumárraga, first bishop and then first archbishop of Mexico, was Mexico’s first prince of the church. (Illustration Credit 6b)
Antonio de Mendoza, first viceroy of New Spain, a great aristocrat who organized an empire (Illustration Credit 7)
Spanish galleon full of passengers. Galleons carried gold, silver, passengers, and crews across the Atlantic throughout the sixteenth century. (Illustration Credit 8a)
The lombard was an early type of artillery that terrified natives all over the Americas. (Illustration Credit 8b)
Bartolomé de las Casas, the apostle of the Indies (Illustration Credit 9a)
Portable altars were used everywhere in the New World. (Illustration Credit 9b)
A bust of Francisco Pizarro, above that of his mistress, in the Palace of the Conquest, built by Hernando Pizarro (Illustration Credit 10a)
Hernando Pizarro, second in command to his brother Francisco in the conquest of Peru, kneeling in the Palace of the Conquest (Illustration Credit 10b)
(Left) Inca architecture: a street wall built to last, in Cuzco (Illustration Credit 11a)
(Below) Inca walls: the fortress of Sacsahuamán, Cuzco, whose stones were put together with immense skill (Illustration Credit 11b)
The barefoot friars who walked to Mexico from Veracruz, 1524. Mural in the Franciscan monastery at Huejotzingo. (Illustration Credit 12a)
Augustinian monastery of Acolman, completed in 1560, with plateresque façade and open chapel in the center (Illustration Credit 12b)
The Franciscan monastery in Quito, built in 1533–81, was an inspiration for all the New World. (Illustration Credit 13)
San Pablo, Valladolid, where Philip II was christened, where the nobility took an oath of loyalty to Charles V, and where Las Casas debated with Sepúlveda (Illustration Credit 14)
Philip II, regent of Spain in 1542, king in 1556 (Moro) (Illustration Credit 15)
Charles V at Mühlberg: the great battle picture of Charles V, who was always at war (Titian) (Illustration Credit 16a)
The Jeronymite monastery of Yuste in the Gredos mountains, where Charles V retired and died (Illustration Credit 16b)
Bibliography
The reconstruction of Mexico-Tenochtitlan is well analyzed in Lucía Mier and Rocha Terán, La primera traza de la ciudad de México (2 vols.; Mexico, 2005), and there is also Jaime Montell’s excellent México: el inicio (Mexico, 2005). Cortés’s time in power, his journey to Honduras (Hiberas), and his later life are to be seen in José Luis Martínez’s careful biography Hernán Cortés (Mexico, 1990), and four useful accompanying volumes of documents. The Welsers have been magisterially studied by Juan Friede. The Montejos in Yucatán can be followed in Robert Chamberlain’s admirable The Conquest and Colonization of Yucatan 1517–1550 (Washington, D.C., 1948).
On Valladolid in the 1520s, there is Bartolomé Bennassar’s Valladolid au siècle d’or (Paris, 1967). On Charles V, I still like best the biography of Karl Brandi, translated by Veronica Wedgwood: The emperor Charles V: The Growth and Destiny of a Man and a World (London, 1949). But there are also excellent works by Fernández Álvarez (Carlos V, el césar y el hombre [Madrid, 1999]), Federico Chabod (Carlo V e il suo imperio [Turin, 1985]) and the former’s great collection, the seven-volume Corpus documental de Carlos V (Salamanca, 1973–82). Now we can also study the remarkable collected works of J. Martínez Millán, ed., La corte de Carlos V (5 vols.; Madrid, 2000). Very late I came upon the useful life of the empress Isabel by Antonio Villacorta (Madrid, 2009).
On Pizarro and the conquest of Peru, there is now John Hemming’s masterpiece The Conquest of the Incas (London, 1970), and his more recent Monuments of the Incas (London, 2010), with admirable photographs by Edward Ranney. The work should be supplemented by James Lockhart’s remarkable The Men of Cajamarca (Austin, 1972) and the same author’s Spanish Peru, 1532–1560 (Madison, 1968). New lives of Pizarro include J. A. Busto Duthurburu’s Pizarro (2 vols.; Lima, 2001). A work of consummate skill is Guillermo Lohmann’s Les Espinosa (Paris, 1968). Other important secondary works on Peru include Rafael Varón Gabai’s La ilusión del poder: apogeo y decadencia de los Pizarro en la conquista del Perú (Lima, 1996), and the same author’s Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers (Norman, Okla., 1997). Teodoro Hampe’s brilliant biography of Pedro de la Gasca, Don Pedro de la Gasca (Lima, 1989), deserves translation.
On the conquest of Peru, like my many predecessors in this fascinating field, I have depended a great deal on a series of contemporary accounts such as the works of Pedro Pizarro, Cieza de León, Martín de Murúa, Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán, Francisco de Jerez, Garcilaso de la Vega, Pedro Sancho de Hoz, and even Hernando Pizarro’s letters to the judges in Santo Domingo. But I confess I missed the literally hundreds of informaciones de servicios y méritos that characterize the similar events in New Spain/Mexico.
Valdivia’s life has been well written, and his companions are studied in Thayer’s Valdivia y sus compañeros (Santiago de Chile, 1950). On Jiménez de Quesada, there is the edition of his own memoir by Demetrio Ramos, Ximénez de Quesada (Seville, 1972), and there is also Friede’s Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada a través de documentos históricos, estudio biográfico, 1509–1550 (Bogota, 1960). See, too, Vida y viajes de Nicolás Federmann (Bogotá, 1964). Here we encounter another illuminating work by John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado (London, 1978).
De Soto in North America is magnificently recalled by David Ewing Duncan in Hernando de Soto (New York, 1995), one of the outstanding biographies of the century.
The extraordinary journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in the southern United States is analyzed well in Castaways, Roberto Ferrando, ed. (Madrid, 1984), and Enrique Pupo Walker (Berkeley, 1993).
Of the many works relevant to the life and work of Bartolomé de las Casas, there is Lewis Hanke’s deservedly famous The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia, 1949) and a more recent biography, Luis Iglesias Ortega’s Bartolomé de las Casas: cuarenta y cuatro años infinitos (Seville, 2007
). There is also the astonishing life of Las Casas by Manuel Jiménez Fernández. Its two volumes cover three years but illuminate an age. On ecclesiastical matters, I was guided by the great history of the papacy by Ludwig von Pastor, trans. Mgr. Ralph Kerr (vols. 5 to 20; London, 1898–1930). The challenge of Erasmian thought is marvelously studied by Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, Mexico, translated from the French, 1950.
MANUSCRIPT DOCUMENTS
I have, as in previous works of mine, consulted several legajos (files) of the Archivo de Indias in Seville, especially the sections named Justicia, where there are the texts of so many residencias (inquiries as to the conduct of officials) and Patronato, and in particular legajo 150, which contains a mass of documents loosely referred to as Informaciones de servicios y méritos. Other sections that I saw included Escribanía de camera and the magnificently named Indiferente general.
I relied heavily on the Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descub-rimiento … de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía, eds. Joaquin Pacheco and Francisco Cardenas (42 vols.; Madrid, 1864–89). What a work! To possess these volumes as I do is a pleasure. The references to them are abbreviated CDI.
