Any attempt to explain the extraordinary success of an enterprise undertaken by so tiny a group of men against such overwhelming superiority of numbers must necessarily take into account both the aspirations of the individual conquistador and the readiness of the society from which he came to accept their validity and esteem their achievement. The conquistador knew that he faced sudden death. But he also knew that, if he survived, he would go back rich to a world in which riches conferred rank and power. On the other hand, if he should die, he had the consolation of dying in the Faith, with hope of salvation. The religion of the conquistadores gave them an unshakeable faith in the rightness of their cause and in the certainty of its triumph. Cortés always carried with him an image of the Virgin, and attended mass daily; and his banner, which bore a cross, was inscribed with the words: ‘Amici, sequamur crucem, et si nos fidem habemus vere in hoc signo vincemus.’ However often debased and traduced in practice, this conquering missionary fervour was sufficient to make the Castilians more than a match for Indians who fought bravely enough, but who lacked their zest for life.
While the conquistadores possessed an important advantage in the superiority of their weapons, it is in their personal characteristics that the secret of their triumph finally lies. A few small cannon and thirteen muskets can hardly have been the decisive factor in overthrowing an empire more than ten million strong. There must here have been a superiority that was more than merely technical, and perhaps it ultimately lay in the greater self-confidence of the civilization which produced the conquistadores. In the Inca empire they confronted a civilization that seems to have passed its peak and to have started already on its descent; in the Aztec empire, on the other hand, they successfully challenged a civilization still young and in the process of rapid evolution. Each of these empires was thus caught at a moment when it was least capable of offering effective resistance, and each lacked confidence in itself, and in its capacity for survival in a universe ruled by implacable deities, and for ever poised on the brink of destruction. The conquistador, hungry for fame and riches, and supremely confident of his capacity to obtain them, stood on the threshold of a fatalist world resigned to self-surrender; and in the sign of the cross he conquered it.
5. SETTLEMENT
The overthrowing of the Aztec and Inca empires represented no more than a first stage in the conquest of America. Having conquered the land, the conquistadores still had to take possession of it. The taking of possession, the settling of the land, the building of cities, the forcing of the native population into patterns determined for it by the Spaniards, and the gradual establishment of governmental institutions, represented the second, and perhaps the greater, conquest of America. This was to be a task extending over many generations – a task in the course of which the conquerors of the New World themselves fell victims to the bureaucrats of the Old.
This second conquest of America involved the transplanting of the institutions and the ways of life of the Castilians to the very different conditions of the new continent. In the process they were inevitably modified, and sometimes changed beyond recognition, but even the most distorted forms can shed unexpected light on the originals that inspire them.
The first task of the leader of a military expedition was to reward his followers. Before the expedition started, formal agreements were usually made about the distribution of the booty: a portion would be set aside for the Crown and the rest would be divided into fixed proportions according to the rank and status of the members of the expedition. As in the Reconquista the first repartimiento or distribution of the land after its conquest was effected on a temporary basis, the permanent division being left until it was properly occupied and surveyed. From the legal point of view it was early established that the Indians were the proprietors of all lands which they possessed and cultivated at the time of the Spaniards' arrival, while the rest of the land and all the sub-soil became the property of the State. The Crown would be expected to share out this land to the conquistadores as a reward for their services, following precedents already established in medieval Castile.
The land was divided among corporations and private individuals. The principal agencies for the settlement of lands recaptured from the Moors during the Reconquista had been the towns, and the conquest of America provided a faithful repetition of this pattern. In order to place their gains on a more permanent basis, the commanders in the New World would, as soon as possible, establish a town, secure its legal incorporation by the Crown, and put their own followers into the key municipal offices. Institutionally these towns were replicas of those of medieval Castile, displaying in their early years the same vitality as had been displayed by the Castilian towns in the heyday of municipal government during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but physically they were conceived on a different pattern. The principal buildings were the same – the church, the town hall, the prison fronting on to the plaza mayor – but the layout was more rational and spacious. The towns were built, like the camp town of Santa Fe outside Granada, on the gridiron pattern, and were probably inspired by Renaissance works on town planning, which themselves were derived from classical models. Like the Roman civitas and the Castilian commune, their jurisdiction extended far into the surrounding country, and the cabildos or town councils were immensely powerful bodies, whose independence gave the municipalities some of the character of city states.
The towns were the centres of a colonist population, which expected to live in style according to the domestic and gastronomic standards of the upper classes in Castile; and the colonists were dependent for their subsistence on a countryside that was being turned over to the cultivation of European crops, and was worked with the labour of the conquered Indian population. The legal possession of the land was thus from the start bound up with the problem of jurisdiction over the people who were to work it. In medieval Castile there had been essentially two types of lordship. In señoríos libres (or behetrías), the inhabitants freely placed themselves under the protection of a lay or ecclesiastical lord, but in process of time their status tended to deteriorate until it was often indistinguishable from that of the vassals in the other type of señorío – the señorío de solariego. The character of the señorío de solariego, which was still a fundamental form of tenure in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile, varied according to how much or how little land belonged to the lord. Its principal feature, however, was that the vassals obtained inheritance rights from their lords in exchange for dues or services. While the system of tenure in America was to develop special characteristics of its own, these Castilian models were always present in the background.
The problem of jurisdiction in America was both moral and material. The Spaniards could only survive in the New World by exploiting native labour, in the fields and the mines, but on what grounds could this exploitation be justified? This question raised the whole problem of the basis and extent of Spain's rights in the New World – itself an old problem posed in a new form.
During the Middle Ages there had been considerable discussion about the rights of Christians over pagans, and when Alexander VI issued his famous papal bulls of 1493 drawing a line of demarcation between Spain's and Portugal's spheres of influence, and confirming the status of the new territories as a papal fief held by the Spanish Crown, he was only acting in accordance with existing views about the supersession of pagan rights. The actual interpretation of the bulls, however, caused considerable difficulty in later years. It was far from clear whether the bulls unconditionally conferred full political and territorial rights on the Spanish Crown, or whether those rights were strictly subordinated to a religious end, and retained their validity only so long as Spain fulfilled its spiritual mission of converting its heathen subjects. The Spanish Crown always claimed that the bulls were no more than a reinforcement of the rights it had already acquired by conquest, but it was none the less careful to accept and insist on its own obligation to Christianize the Indians.
The Crown's o
bligations towards its new pagan subjects rapidly came into conflict with the economic demands of the settlers. These had their own ideas about the correct treatment of a conquered pagan population – ideas derived from the traditions of the Reconquista. The experiences of the Reconquista had led to the formulation of an elaborate code of rules about the ‘just war’, and the rights of the victors over the vanquished population, including the right to enslave it. These rules were extended as a matter of course to the Canary Islands. The conquerors of the Canaries used, for instance, the strange technique of the requerimiento, which was later employed in America, whereby the bewildered natives were presented before the opening of hostilities with a formal document giving them the option of accepting Christianity and Spanish rule. It could, however, be argued that there was a difference in kind between the Canary Islanders and the Moors of south Spain, since the islanders were totally ignorant of Christianity until the arrival of the Spaniards, whereas the Moors had heard of Christianity but rejected it. Slavery would surely seem an excessively harsh punishment for mere ignorance, and Ferdinand and Isabella did their best to prevent its growth in the Canaries.
The same problem inevitably arose again with the discovery of the Indies. Columbus sent home shiploads of Indians to be sold as slaves, but the theologians protested, the Queen's conscience rebelled, and enslavement of the Indians was formally prohibited in 1500. Exceptions were made, however, for Indians who attacked Spaniards, or practised atrocious habits such as cannibalism, and Cortés had no difficulty in finding pretexts for the enslavement of numerous men, women, and children.
With the imposition by the Government of restrictions on slavery it became essential to find some solution to the problem of providing a non-slave labour force, while at the same time giving the Indians the consolation of instruction in the rudiments of the Christian religion. The answer to this problem was provided by the institution known as the encomienda, which appeared to harmonize satisfactorily the Castilian ideals of lordship and the demands of pastoral care. The encomiendas belonging to the great Military Orders in medieval Castile consisted of temporary grants made by the Crown to private individuals, of jurisdiction over territory recaptured from the Moors. The American version of the encomienda, which represented a limited form of señorío or lordship, originated in Hispaniola, where Columbus assigned to the settlers a number of Indians who were expected to perform labour services for them. This repartimiento or distribution of Indians formed the basis of the encomienda system regularized and institutionalized by Columbus's successor Nicolás de Ovando, the Governor of Hispaniola from 1502. Under the system, the encomendero was given, on a strictly temporary, non-hereditary basis (at least in theory) a grant of lordship over a certain number of Indians. The encomienda in the New World was not, therefore, a landed estate, and indeed had nothing to do with ownership of land, the property rights of the Indians being formally respected. The encomendero simply accepted the obligation to protect a specified group of Indians and to instruct them in the ways of civilization and Christianity, and in return he received from the Indians labour services or tributes.
Inevitably the encomienda system came to assume characteristics which at times made it barely distinguishable from outright slavery. As the Spanish population grew, and a vast programme of secular and ecclesiastical building was instituted, the demand for native labour increased, and taxes in the encomiendas were commuted into labour services. By the middle of the sixteenth century, therefore, the economic exploitation of the New World had come to depend on the twin institutions of slavery and of labour service provided by the encomiendas. On these foundations arose a town-dwelling colonial society of Spaniards and mestizos, gradually evolving its own social élite of the families of conquistadores and encomenderos.
This duel process of the enslavement of the native population and the development of a new transatlantic feudal aristocracy was, however, halted by the combined opposition of Church and State. The friars in particular played a prominent part. Inspired by missionary fervour, the Mendicant Orders sent out their representatives in the wake of the Conquista to undertake the vast work of evangelizing the New World. The Franciscans appeared in Mexico in 1523, the Dominicans in 1526, and the Augustinians seven years later. By 1559 there were 800 Mendicants in Mexico, as against only 500 secular clergy. The first forty years after the conquest, before the secular clergy became strong enough to launch their counter-offensive against the friars, were the golden age of Mendicant evangelical enterprise. The missionaries were drawn from among the élite of the Religious Orders, and the majority of them were steeped in the humanist ideas which made so deep an impression on the intellectual leaders of early sixteenth-century Europe. The first Bishop of Mexico, for instance, the Franciscan Fray Juan de Zumárraga, was a prominent Erasmian whose policies were inspired by Erasmus's ‘philosophy of Christ’ and by Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Zumárraga and his colleagues saw in the primitive agrarian society of the American Indians the ideal material for the realization of the perfect Christian community, and they set themselves with heroic dedication to the enormous task of grouping the Indians into villages, building missions and churches, and imposing a new pattern of civilization on their bewildered charges. The results were remarkable. Within half a century the Mexican Indians had assimilated the superior techniques of their conquerors, and displayed a receptivity to European culture which had no parallel in other parts of Spain's colonial empire.
For all their own great gifts and aptitudes, the Mendicants could never have achieved so rapid a success if the Indians had not been ready to accept something of what they had to offer. The destruction of their own native civilization, controlled by a complicated calendar and based on the most intricate ceremonial, had inevitably left a vacuum in the lives of the Indians. The friars, by offering them a new set of rituals, and by occupying their time in ambitious building projects, helped to fill this vacuum. This was at once the strength and the weakness of the Mendicant achievement. After the old civilization of the Indians had been irrevocably shattered, the friars built for them a new civilization based on their acceptance of Christian ceremonial; but they were much less successful in eradicating old pagan beliefs, and in promoting among their charges a real understanding of the meaning of their faith. They entirely failed, for instance, to create a native priesthood. As the first, heroic, generation of missionaries passed away, this failure came increasingly to affect the Mendicants' general attitude to the Indian. Having at the beginning overestimated the Indian's spiritual aptitude, the friars became disillusioned by his lack of progress and began to change their views. In the end the majority probably disdained the natives, or at least came to regard them as wayward, if lovable, children to be kept in permanent tutelage; but there were some, like the great Franciscan, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who acquired a deep interest in native customs and language, and set out to record for posterity the characteristics of a disappearing civilization before it was finally swept away. The approach of Sahagún to the Indians resembled that of Talavera to the Granada Moors. Each was inspired by genuine curiosity, by a respect for certain aspects of an alien civilization, and by a determination to meet the natives on their own terms and to give them a thorough grounding in the principles of the Christian faith.
The missionaries naturally tended to develop an instinctive sympathy, however patronizing at times, for an Indian population as yet uncorrupted by the many vices of European civilization. Many of them, convinced of the natural dignity and rights of man, found it impossible to square the treatment that was being meted out to the natives with their own fundamental convictions about the status of mankind. ‘Are these Indians not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as you love yourselves?’ These were the disturbing questions asked by the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos in his famous sermon preached in Hispaniola before a congregation of outraged colonists in 1511.7 They were the prelude to a great storm of moral indignation which has become
associated for ever with the name of Bartolomé de las Casas. Converted to the views of Montesinos in 1514, Las Casas was to devote his life to the work of securing fair treatment for the Indians. In the New World and the Old he would insistently repeat the same refrain: that the Indians, being subjects of the Spanish Crown, should enjoy equal rights with the Spaniards; that they were intellectually capable of receiving the Faith and should be gently instructed in the ways of Christianity under the government of benevolent officials; and that the colonists should support themselves by their own efforts and had no right to enforced Indian labour.
The views of Las Casas aroused the most intense opposition, not only among those with vested interests in the supply of native labour, but also among theologians as convinced as himself of the righteousness of their cause. Chief among these was the great Aristotelian scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, for whom the Aris-totelian doctrine of natural slavery was entirely applicable to the Indians on the grounds of their inferiority. For Sepúlveda, war and conquest formed an essential prelude to all attempts at evangelization, since it was just and right to take up arms against those condemned by their natural condition to obey. The great debate staged between Las Casas and Sepúlveda at Valladolid in 1550 was, in fact, to turn on precisely this theme of whether it was lawful to wage war on the Indians before preaching the Faith to them, so that afterwards they might be the more easily instructed.
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