The Last Conquistador
Page 2
Seigneurial families of Vizcaya at Guernica, El Besamanos, Francisco de Mendieta, 1609. (Diputación Foral de Vizcaia)
Of the lineage of Alvar Fáñez de Minaya, cousin of the Cid of Vivar, succeeded a knight who came to settle the lands known as Leguizamón, and there founded the House of Leguizamón the old many years before Bilbao was populated, and from father to son was succeeded by Diego Pérez de Leguizamón, a fine knight and held as the noblest of his name, who bore for arms horizontal bars as borne by the said Alvar Fáñez de Minaya in his sepulchre at San Pedro de Gumiel de Hizán where he is buried, and which this lineage bears, and who in turn was succeeded by Sancho Díaz de Leguizamón who was killed in the vega of Granada . . .15
What history records of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar is that he was born in the mid-eleventh century and that for several years he had served King Sancho of Castile as his constable until his murder at Zamora in 1072.16 Exiled from Castile by Sancho’s heir and brother Alfonso VI, for eighteen years he commanded the armies of the Emir al-Mu’tamin of Saragosa and his own Castilian and Moorish mercenaries, eventually capturing the Muslim city and kingdom of Valencia, where he died in 1099. His exploits and life were recorded in the twelfth-century poem chronicle Carmen Campi Doctoris, Song of the Campeador, and then later by a prose chronicle Historia Roderici, and in the epic medieval poem Mio Cid.17 Though Alvar Fáñez de Minaya is depicted in Mio Cid as his trusted commander, there is no evidence that he ever accompanied him in his exile as the poem purports. In the Poema de Almería, written in about 1152, Minaya is described as the most renowned of the Christian warrior knights, second only to the Cid: Mio Cidi primus fuit, Alvarus atque secundus.18 In 1091 he is recorded as commanding one of the armies of Alfonso VI against the Berber Almoravides which was defeated at Almodóvar del Rio. Six years later, Alfonso appointed him governor of the fortress of Zorita and then of Toledo, which he defended against the Berber siege. In 1114, while in the service of Alfonso’s sister, the Infanta Doña Urraca, he was killed in the defence of the castle city of Segovia.
Arms of Leguizamón: Azure, three bars Or, Palacio de Leguizamón, Echévarri, Bilbao. (Author)
The pride of the Leguizamón in their descent from Minaya was personified by the boastfulness of their motto: ‘Let none doubt my lineage nor dispute me in combat, for my arms recall my descent from the Cid.’ As one of the seigneural families of Vizcaya, parientes mayores, the Leguizamón for several centuries had governed the fueros of Vizcaya and of the Basque provinces, which the kings of Castile and León traditionally swore to uphold at Guernica, a city which was raised to the ground during the Spanish Civil War, and whose destruction is depicted in Picasso’s painting of that name. García de Salazar records the family’s recurring involvement in Vizcaya’s turbulent civil wars, in which one of the Conquistador’s forbears met his death.
In this year [1443] Tristán de Leguizamón, the younger, and Martín de Zaballa, entering the township of Bermeo at dead of night and armed with their swords, Boda en Begoña, Francisco de Mendieta, c. 1600. (Diputación Foral de Vizcaia) killed in the street of the fishermen Ochoa López de Arcayche and Pedro de Arna, who were partisans of the Zurbarán . . . in the year of Our Lord, 1446, the Leguizamón and Zurbarán fought in the square of Bilbao, and Tristán de Leguizamón, the younger, who had been asleep in his house, and armed with only a shield entered the square and was struck by an arrow in the chest, dying shortly after he was taken to his house . . .19
Boda en Begoña, Francisco de Mendieta, c. 1600. (Diputación Foral de Vizcaia)
Since 1382 the family had also held the patronage and lordship of Vizcaya’s shrine of the Virgin of Begoña, awarded by the illegitimate son and heir of the last feudal lord of Vizcaya to his uncle, as recorded in his deed of gift:
Be it known that We, Don Pedro Nuñez de Lara y Leguizamón, Conde de Mayorga and Lord of Castroverde, donate to thee Martín Sánchez de Leguizamón, my uncle, in recompense of your loyalty and the many services you have rendered me, and continue to render me each day, in free gift and in perpetuity to you, your wife, children and heirs, the monastery and sanctuary of Santa María de Begoña and its lordship, and all its goods, lands, fruit trees, waters and mountains and fields . . .20
Nuestra Señora de Begoña. (Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao)
Established as a centre of pilgrimage in about 1300 in the mountain above Bilbao, the shrine and its adjacent tower and later palace dominated the approach to the city. It remained in the family’s patronage for several generations until its partial destruction by Napoleon’s troops, who stabled their horses in its monastery church and desecrated the Leguizamón tombs – a pillage the shrine and palace would again suffer in the Carlist wars of the nineteenth century.
No record survives as to the year the Conquistador’s father left Vizcaya and settled in the Castilian township of Pinto, lying a few miles south of Madrid, and which was held in the lordship of the Carrillo family.21 Neither, due to the loss of its early church archives, is there a record of his parents’ marriage, nor whether they had any other children. An agricultural region, renowned for its wheat, olives and wine, Pinto had for centuries formed part of Toledo’s north-easterly defence, its medieval tower, silhouetted in the cold Castilian winters against the backdrop of the snow-clad mountains of the Sierra de Guadaramma, was surrounded by its sombre mansions, market square and church of Santo Domingo de Silos. In a census in 1571 its population was recorded as 836 persons, nine of whom were hidalgos.22 Mansio’s companion in arms Alonso de Mesa, who had been born in Toledo, recorded that in his youth he had known Mansio’s relatives, who presumably would have been the senior branch of his family who resided at court in the city: Don Sancho Díaz de Leguizamón and Don Tristán de Leguizamón.23 Don Sancho, one of Bilbao’s grandees and patron of its church of San Antón, was for several years chamberlain to the Emperor Charles V. Don Tristán, a son of a former page of King Ferdinand, would later serve as a captain of lancers in Italy, where he was awarded the knighthood of Santiago by the Emperor at Bologna the day before his coronation. Nothing, however, is known of Mansio’s education or upbringing, nor of his father’s relationship with his relatives. Judging by the wording of his various petitions and testimonials he possessed the rudiments of a classical education that most children of his hidalgo rank would have received. His future, nevertheless, was decided neither at court nor in the farm lands of Pinto, but in the neighbouring township of Torrejón de Velasco, the lordship of which was held by the Conde de Puñonrostro, whose younger brother Don Pedro Arias Dávila was Governor of the colony of Nicaragua in the Indies.24
Romeria en Begoña, Sanctuary of the Virgin of Begoña. (Drawing by G.P. Villamil; Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao)
The dream of riches, inspired by the tales of the returning conquistadors of Mexico and from the islands of the Caribbean, the isthmian settlements of Castilla del Oro, at Panama and Nicaragua, had taken hold of the imagination of the entire country. Between the years 1520 and 1539 some 13,000 men and 700 women sailed for the New World: townsmen, merchants and yeomen, some of their names hispanicized to hide their converso origins, prostitutes and penniless daughters of government officials, friars of the Orders of St Dominic and Merced, driven by the zeal of their mission or charged to live out their penances in the exile of an unknown world, former criminals and conscripts of the Italian wars, peasants and hidalgos with only their black capes to hide their penury, queuing in their hundreds for their passage to the Indies and the fortunes each believed awaited them.25 It was a dream few would ever realize. Some time before 1529, aged no more than sixteen, the future conquistador of Peru left his native township never to return.26 It was a journey that would take him across the world and eventually to the great cordillera of the Andes, where he would live for the remainder of his life.
The Tower of Pinto. (Author)
The small flotilla of caravels in which he sailed from the Andalusian port of San Lúcar de Barrameda took a route by then well established in the
crossing of the Atlantic: of some thirty days to the Canary and Windward Islands and a further twenty days to the Caribbean port of Nombre de Dios in the Isthmus of Panama. It was a route Don Pedro Arias Dávila, the Governor of Nicaragua, had himself taken when he had led an armada of 17 ships and 2,000 men in the conquest of the Isthmus 15 years previously, piloted by Juan Vespucci, nephew of the Florentine navigator Amerigo whose name would be given to the continent of the New World. The right of Spain’s claim to the Indies had been established by the Valencian Pope Alexander VI in his bull Inter Caetera, issued in May 1493, in Castile’s favour, and amended a year later to include Portuguese rights of conquest – 300 miles to the east of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. During his tenure as Governor of the Pacific port of Panama, whose colony he had founded in 1519 as the settlement of Our Lady of the Assumption, Arias Dávila had succeeded where most men would have failed in the exploration and conquest of its tropical terrain, and of its westerly region of Nicaragua and Veragua. A veteran of the reconquest of Granada, he had imposed his authority on a ruthless and often corrupt administration, and had been responsible for ordering the executions of the conquistadors Hernández de Córdoba and the elderly Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who was his son-in-law. Córdoba, an Andalusian, had commanded his expedition in the conquest of Nicaragua in 1523, founding its capital at León and exploring the Desaguadero River as far as the Atlantic coast. His subsequent appeal to the Crown for his recognition as governor of the territories was intercepted by Arias Dávila, who ordered his hanging on a charge of sedition. Nuñez de Balboa had met a similar fate. An Estremaduran and one of the early colonists, he had founded the township of Darién, in 1513, commanding that same year an expedition that had made the discovery of the Pacific, and among whose sixty-seven volunteers had been the then relatively unknown slaver and future encomendero of Panama: Francisco Pizarro.
The explorer Vasco Ñúñez de Balboa. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)
In the years of his governorship Arias Dávila had transformed what had been little more than an outpost on the borders of the great Mayan empire of Central America into one of the most lucrative settlements in the Indies. The commodity that had enabled him to achieve his ends had been neither the by then diminishing deposits of gold for which the Isthmus had earned its name, of Castilla del Oro, nor the spices its early explorers had believed existed in its hinterland, but in the human gold of slavery. In an age when scholars at the universities of Salamanca and Bologna were deliberating on the theological implications of recognizing the natives of the New World as human beings, while others were advocating the theory that they were one of the lost tribes of Israel, slavery under the guise of evangelization would become the labour force of Spain’s colonial wealth.27
Francisco Pizarro. (Antonio de Herrera, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierrafirme del Mar Océano: BL, 783. g. 1–4)
Queen Isabella had prohibited the enslavement of the Isthmians unless they were prisoners of war – a code to which her grandson Charles V would also in principle adhere – but it was a mandate that would never be implemented with any rigour, nor possess any real validity. Its irrelevance had been marked even further by the introduction of the encomienda system, which would be far more apparent in its function as a slave labour force than in the Muslim land enclosures of southern Spain, whose subject people would rise in rebellion in the later part of the century. It was a trade from which both the Crown and the colonists would acquire their principal revenue, enhanced over the years by the importation of Africans from Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, and which would eventually dominate the society and economy of Central America and the Caribbean. The natives of the early Spanish settlements, moreover, faced an even greater threat to their survival because of their vulnerability to disease from Europe and Africa, principally smallpox.28 Within fifty years the epidemic would kill nine-tenths of the indigenous people of Mexico and Central and Andean America. Malaria and syphilis,29 which had been introduced to Spain by Columbus’ mariners, and which had spread to King Ferdinand’s army in Italy between the years 1494 and 1495, had also taken its toll on the lives of the Isthmian colonists.
The settlement at León, in the Isthmus’ western region of Nicaragua, to which the young Mansio made his way, following the mule packs from the Atlantic port of Nombre de Dios, was little more than a stockade of wooden buildings. Its markets were filled with its Spanish traders, many of them barefoot and dressed in tafetta and lace, accompanied by their manacled Indian slaves, men, women and children, which they would sell to one another for the labour of their land or the solace of their sexuality. The world he would have witnessed was far removed from the austere landscape of Castile: deafened by the colour and sounds of its tropical vegetation and native markets, with its stalls of exotic fruit and cane alcohol, parrots, caged monkeys and newly arrived African slaves, who had also made the long journey across the Isthmus from the caravels that had brought them from the islands of the Spanish Main. At the time of his arrival in the township, armed possibly with little more than the letters of recommendation he carried from the Conde of Puñonrostro to his brother the governor, an expedition was being organized by Arias Dávila for the conquest of the westerly region of Veragua under the command of the captains Juan de Pánes and his treasurer the slave merchant Juan Téllez.30 Its purpose was ostensibly to search for mineral deposits and to found further settlements, though in all likelihood it was to supplement the growing loss in numbers of Indian slaves due to the smallpox epidemic. The few facts to survive of the expedition, in which the by then seventeen-year-old Mansio had enlisted, record that its volunteers were devastated by the oppressive climate and disease. In his testimonial Mansio recalled he had ‘experienced great risk’ to his life and the ‘loss of many pesos of gold’.31 The hardship he undoubtedly endured in the three years he spent in Veragua was confirmed by his witness the Conquistador Nicolás de Ribera, who had first met him there: ‘. . . as for what [he] says of the province of Veragua, so devastated by rain and with such bad aspect, it would have been impossible for him, and for those who were with him in its conquest, not to have suffered greatly’.32
Ribera had two years previously returned from an expedition led by Pizarro along the equatorial coast of the southern Pacific, the lands of which an earlier explorer Pascual de Andagoya had mistakenly called Peru. It had also been three years since Pizarro and his partner Diego de Almagro had reached an agreement with the priest Hernando de Luque to share in the conquest of the empire they knew to exist in the hinterland of its continent. It had been a contract to which Pánes, one of the commanders of the Veragua expedition, had been a signatory on behalf of the illiterate Pizarro, as recorded by Panama’s notary:
I, Don Hernando de Luque, priest and vicar of the Holy Church of Panama, and the captains Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, who are citizens of this city of Panama, declare our agreement to form a contract33 that will forever be binding: in as much as the said captains Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, who have been granted permission by the Governor Pedro Arias Dávila to discover and conquer the lands and provinces of the kingdoms known as Peru . . .34
Charles V, by Eneas Vico from the title page of The Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V by William Stirling.
The tales of their discovery had by now spread across the Indies, and the proofs they had brought back with them to Panama, of gold and silver artefacts, emeralds and other jewels, together with several natives, llamas and equatorial birds, Pizarro had taken with him to Spain in order to obtain the Crown’s permission for the right of conquest – a request Arias Dávila had later denied the partners. Pizarro nevertheless had arrived in Spain to a hero’s welcome in 1528, and had been received by the Emperor Charles V at Toledo. Awarding him the habit of Santiago and the rank of a hidalgo, the Emperor authorized his expedition of conquest, leaving the details of his decree to be finalized by his Portuguese Empress after his departure to Italy. What would
be known as the Capitulación de Conquista, dated 26 July 1529, would carry the name of Queen Isabella’s daughter Doña Juana, titular monarch of Spain and mother of the Emperor, who had spent most of her life incarcerated because of her madness. The presence at court of the conqueror of Mexico, Hernán Cortés, had possibly influenced the Council of Castile in authorizing Pizarro’s sole command of the expedition: an appointment that would cause the understandable enmity of his partner Almagro who had remained in Panama. The articles of the decree stipulated that the name New Castile be given to the conquered territories, of which Pizarro would be governor and captain-general.35 Almagro was only awarded the future governorship of the coastal settlement at Túmbez and the rank of a hidalgo. The priest Luque was awarded the bishopric of the future colony. Various clauses were added, among them the prohibition of any conversos or moriscos enlisting in the expedition: a clause that would have been met with some incredulity by Nicaragua’s colonists in view of the fact that Arias Dávila was of converso stock, and which highlights the paradox of racism in contemporary Spain.
Map of Peru, engraving by Bleau. (Private Collection)
The evangelical purpose of the expedition was emphasized by the inclusion of several Dominican friars. Provision was also made for the limited purchase of artillery in the Isthmus and the award of twenty-five horses from the island of Jamaica and of thirty African slaves from the island of Cuba. Though each of the partners was awarded an annual pension from the Crown’s future revenue from the territories and booty of their conquest, they were in effect to receive no direct financial backing for its implementation other than an advance on their future incomes. Nor were they compensated for what they had already spent in out-fitting and manning their earlier voyages of exploration, as the Conquistador would recall some forty years later in an address to King Philip II: