A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age

by William Manchester

  On Cebu he stalked a more powerful figure, his majesty the rajah Datu Humabon, ruler of the great island. The rajah’s entourage included a Muslim trader who had just arrived from Siam on a junk and who, recognizing the cross of St. James on the sails of the arriving fleet, whispered that these visitors were the pillagers of India and Malaya. Humabon ignored the warning; warming to the capitán-general from their first meeting, the rajah immediately consented, through Enrique, to a perpetual treaty of peace with Spain. Pressed by Magellan, he also agreed to burn his pagan idols and worship Jesus Christ as his lord and savior. Once more Magellan played the role of stage manager; the rajah’s initiation in his new faith, celebrated on the second Sunday after Easter, was even more liturgical and ostentatious than the earlier Mass on Lima-sawa. Humabon’s subjects massed densely outdoors round a market square, in the midst of which an altar, decorated with palm branches, dominated a high platform. Behind the altar and beneath a sheltering canopy were two thrones wreathed in red and purple satin. Humabon occupied one throne; the other awaited the arrival of the capitán-general.

  Magellan made a spectacular entrance. Wearing an immaculate white robe and preceded by forty men in gleaming armor, he advanced beneath the fluttering silken banner of Castile and Aragon, unfurled here for the first time since it had been presented to him, twenty months earlier, in Seville’s church of Santa Maria de la Victoria. As a band played stirring marches, the armada’s officers paraded behind their leader. The Spaniards bowed their heads, a large cross was raised above the platform, and the fleet’s cannons boomed across the harbor. That nearly ended the ceremony. The native congregation, hearing gunfire for the first time, panicked, began to scatter, and returned only when they saw that their ruler—who had been forewarned—remained composed and enthroned.

  The rajah knelt and was baptized; Magellan, as his godfather, renamed him Don Carlos. His majesty’s heir, his brother, and his nephew, the king of Limasawa, followed him to the font; so, unhappily, did the Muslim trader from Siam, who had been given no choice. They were christened Hernando, Juan, Miguel, and Cristóbal. All that was pro forma, in Spain if not in the Philippines, but the rituals which followed would have stunned Christians throughout Europe, Catholic and otherwise. Worshipers of the Lord Jesus were expected to be monogamous, or at least to pay monogamy lip service. Humabon, however, had drawn the line there. He wanted to save his soul but refused to abandon his harem. After protracted negotiations Magellan had succeeded where the emissaries of Henry VIII, in their appeals to Pope Clement, had failed. Padre Valderrama was persuaded to overlook the rajah’s little quirk. Therefore the women, costumed and gaudy with lipstick and fingernail polish, were presented one by one (there were forty in all) and blessed with such Spanish names as Juana, Catarina, Juanita, and Isabella. Humabon’s favorite—Doña Johanna, as she now was, the namesake, unknown to her, of Spain’s demented queen mother—received special recognition. Because she outranked the others, Magellan presented her with a carved image of the Madonna and child. Then the spectators were invited to enjoy Christian rebirths themselves.

  Only a few hundred came forward then, but by the end of the following week virtually every inhabitant of Cebu—a total of twenty-two hundred, according to one of the flota’s crew—had chosen Christ. The surge in conversions was a personal triumph for Magellan. It was also a striking example of how a religious fanatic, which is what he had become, may be invested with psychic gifts. After the royal christenings at the outdoor Mass, Humabon, taking him aside, had told him that one member of the island’s ruling family longed to be baptized but had been too ill to attend, and was, in fact, dying. Investigating, the capitán-general had found the man so sick that, in the words of Don Antonio, he “could neither speak nor move.” Magellan discovered something else; the women nursing the afflicted man were also praying for him, but praying as heathens—thus seeking to propitiate the pagan idols their rajah had just repudiated. Shocked and indignant, the admiral-become-preacher denounced the infidel nurses, sent them away, and decided to try his hand at faith healing. With Humabon as his witness, he vowed to demonstrate how belief in Christ could cure the doomed. After baptizing the patient, the patient’s wife, and their ten children, he asked the man how he felt. Miraculously reinvested with the power of speech, the invalid replied haltingly that he felt well. Magellan put him on a regimen of milk and herbs, and within five days the man who had been given up for lost was up and about.

  THIS FEAT made a tremendous impression on both the Filipinos and the officers of the fleet, though the two saw it very differently. The natives became passionate converts, while the officers worried. Increasingly they had been troubled by their commander’s state of religious exaltation. They considered themselves devout, but they were aware that God, in his wisdom, did not smile consistently upon those who sought to work miracles. All were familiar with, or had heard of, at least one religieux who had suffered a humiliating public disappointment, and they were chilled by the thought of what might have happened if their commander’s patient had collapsed before his eyes and died. Furthermore, they regarded Magellan’s altruistic, indulgent approach to the natives as folly, contrasting sharply with the Iberian school of colonial administration developed by earlier explorers. Had this expedition been led by Cortés, or the pitiless Da Gama, the Filipinos would now be unchristened slaves. Not all of Magellan’s lieutenants felt that way, and none was prepared to reproach him to his face, but all agreed that after three weeks on Cebu it was time to resume the voyage.

  At an officers’ council, called by their commander, they proposed immediate departure. No mention was made of the growing hostility of the native men, a consequence of the seamen’s goatish rampages. Instead they advanced their strongest arguments, and chose their ablest spokesmen to advance them. Serrano, now the armada’s senior captain, pointed out that they had been sent, not as colonizers or priests, but to find the western route to the Spice Islands. That was their sole mission. In fact, their royal orders specifically forbade deviation from it. Others spoke up. At their last council, they recalled, the capitán-general had justified the call at this port on the ground that, in reporting to the king, they could more fully describe the archipelago’s possibilities. They now knew all they needed to know about Cebu. There was no reason to remain any longer. It was time to go.

  Once again Magellan disagreed. Having discovered the Philippines, he believed it his duty to assure their loyalty to Spain. To him the Datu Humabon was no longer a native chieftain; he was Don Carlos, a Christian king. Then, to the horror of the council, he revealed that he had given this ruler certain assurances. They were, in effect, a repetition of his guarantee to the brothers Colambu and Siaui. The enemies of Humabon-Carlos, the rajahking, were also Spain’s enemies. Any man who refused to acknowledge his sovereignty—or the divinity of Christ—would be killed and his property confiscated.

  Such an enemy, he told the astonished council, existed. His name was Lapulapu, and he was the petty rajah of Mactan, a tiny isle nearby. Traditionally Mactan had fallen within the dominion of Cebu’s rajah, but Lapulapu was an irascible insurgent. He was also particularly hostile toward the men in the Spanish fleet; recently he had ignored a requisition for supplies to feed the visitors. Magellan regarded this refusal as an excellent reason for a trial of strength. He intended to form a punitive shore party, armed seamen who would teach the defiant pagan a lesson, and he had decided to lead it himself.

  His officers were appalled. The Spanish monarch had expressly ordered the capitán-general to remain with the fleet, aloof from all landing parties. Indeed, it was a basic principle of both the Spanish and Portuguese governments that the leaders of naval expeditions should never risk their lives in such hazardous adventures. Duarte Barbosa reminded his brother-in-law that the last man to ignore that rule, Juan Díaz de Solís, had been killed at the Río de la Plata. Magellan waved him off. Since his triumphant debut as a faith healer he had felt invincible. In the coming fight, he told the cou
ncil, he would rely on the cross of Jesus and the support of his patroness, Our Lady of Victory. Armed as he was by them, he could not fail.

  NOW IN LATE APRIL of 1521, on the eve of this wholly unnecessary battle, Magellan was everything he had never been. He had never before been reckless, imprudent, careless, or forgetful of the tactical lessons he had learned during Portuguese operations in East Africa, India, Morocco, and Malaya. But he had not been a soldier of Christ then. Here, shielded by divine intervention, he scorned the precautions observed by mortal men preparing for action. Professional fighting men value deception, secrecy, surprise. He announced to Spaniards and Filipinos alike that he would invade Mactan on Saturday, April 27—he believed it was his lucky day—and he invited the people of Cebu to come watch. Before going into action professional fighters study the terrain, and, if the operation is to be amphibious, the tides. Because he disdained all he had learned, he was unaware of Mactan’s encircling reef, which at low tide—at the hour he had chosen for his attack—would prevent his ships from providing covering fire. Professionals court allies. He loftily declined the rajah-king’s offer of a thousand veteran warriors, rejected Crown Prince Lumai’s suggestion that he take the enemy from the rear with a diversionary landing, and rebuffed the Cacique Zula, a Mactan rival of Lapulapu, who proposed that he attack the flank of the rebel chief as the Spaniards waded ashore. Magellan urged each of them to join the spectators, including all the converted chieftains, who would watch from a score of balangays—native canoes—offshore. He needed no help, he said; he and his men could, and would, do the job alone.

  Magellan’s strategy was not without precedent. Samuel Eliot Morison points out that “almost every group of European intruders into Africa and America felt that to cement an alliance with the nearest tribe of natives they must deploy fire power against next-door enemies.” Champlain in Canada, Cortés in Mexico, the English in the Carolinas, the Portuguese in India and Africa —all had conquered by dividing. “But,” Morison adds, “for Magellan to do it here, when he had the local situation well in hand, was utter folly.”

  He might have pulled it off, had he picked the right men, and enough of them, and then handled them properly. Estimates of the force which would oppose him range from 1,500 to 2,000 natives, but they were an undisciplined mob, a prey to panic, armed with only the most primitive weapons. The whole lot could have been easily routed by 150 properly equipped Spaniards trained in the use of crossbows and harquebuses and led by Gómez de Espinosa, the armada’s alguacil, and his disciplined marines. Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, similarly outnumbered, vanquished the Mexicans and Peruvians. But Magellan spurned conventional approaches. He limited his landing party to 60 seamen because, he said, he intended to show the Filipinos a victory won by Christian soldiers against the greatest odds imaginable. And he wanted to lead only volunteers, 20 from each vessel. This meant that the party would include none of the tough marines, who, deeply offended, stayed on their ships. In the end, according to Don Antonio, Magellan wound up with a motley contingent of unseasoned, unblooded cooks, stewards, and cabin boys—crew temperamentally unsuited for the job ahead, unfamiliar with their weapons, and, as it turned out, inadequately protected by armor, which should have been one of their chief advantages in the fight; corselets and helmets were issued to them, but not —and this was to prove decisive—greaves or leg armor. Lastly, their capitán-general was to be their only officer. That, too, was his doing. Because the members of the council had disapproved of his plan, he had excluded them.

  Since the humiliation of Lapulapu would serve as well as his defeat, Magellan decided to give him a final chance. Late Friday evening, as the inexperienced volunteers prepared to pile into three bateaux and row ashore at midnight—undrilled, unrehearsed, unaccompanied even by petty officers—their admiral sent an ultimatum ashore, choosing as couriers his slave Enrique and the Siamese Muslim trader, now known to his fellow Catholics as Cristóbal. The rebel chieftain would be spared, he was told, if he acknowledged the local suzerainty of Cebu’s “Christian king,” accepted the Spanish sovereign as his overlord, and paid tribute to Magellan as commander of the armada. If, on the other hand, he persisted in his defiance, he would learn that Spanish lances could wound. Lapulapu scorned the terms. In a fractious reply he jeered that his troops were also armed with lances, fashioned from the finest bamboo, and with fire-hardened stakes. The Spaniards were amused by that, and laughed even harder at the naive postscript. He would be grateful, the petty rajah added, if the Spaniards would delay their attack until morning, when his opposing force would be greater. Here Magellan actually obliged him. Overestimating his foe’s intelligence, he decided that the request was an attempt to trick him into a night attack. He therefore postponed his operation. It hardly mattered. The landing party—sixty men—arrived in the dark anyway. After a brief pull at the oars the three craft ran aground three hours before daybreak.

  THEY WERE NOT, however, ashore. When the Saturday sun rose on an ebb tide, they found themselves stranded on the reef, still far from the beach. Realizing that the boats could not negotiate the intervening coral, Magellan detailed eleven men to remain aboard and cover the landing with the bateaux bombards. Then he stepped out into thigh-deep water and ordered the remaining seamen to follow him and storm the shore. Several of the crew repeatedly implored him not to lead, writes Pigafetta, “but he, like a good shepherd, refused to abandon his flock.”

  As they stumbled forward, encumbered by their armor and waist deep in water, it dawned upon the more experienced of them that there would be no covering fire. The reef was too far out; the boats’ small cannons could not reach the enemy. Broadsides from the more powerful guns of the fleet might have been feasible, but Barbosa and Serrano, having been excluded from the mission, were sulking in their bunks below decks, and there was no way their commander could reach them.

  The attackers, wading in with all their equipment, were exhausted even before they reached the surf line. There they became confused. Facing them were three forces of naked warriors drawn up, not at the water’s edge, as they had expected, but well inland. According to Pigafetta, Lapulapu, displaying an intuitive grasp of tactics, had deployed his troops behind a triple line of trenches, forming a crescent to envelop the advancing invaders. He had also stationed himself and his bodyguard behind the deepest part of the crescent, out of the Spaniards’ range. If they wanted him, they would have to come after him. Magellan’s experience dictated a prudent withdrawal, but after all his grandiloquence that would mean a shaming loss of face. Instead he issued the command to open fire. Those seamen trained in the use of harquebuses and crossbows responded as best they could, but their ragged volley accomplished nothing. None of the balls, bolts, and arrows reached the mini-rajah, and the rest of them rattled ineffectively off the wooden shields of his men. According to Pigafetta, who was to remain with his capitán-general until the end, the noise of the muskets at first frightened the defenders into backing away, but the respite was brief. Magellan, “wishing to reserve the ammunition for a later stage of the encounter,” in Don Antonio’s words, called out, “¡Alto el fuego!”—“Cease fire!”—“but,” Pigafetta continues, “his order was disregarded in the confusion. When the islanders realized that our fire was doing them little or no harm, they ceased to retire. Shouting more and more loudly, and jumping from side to side to disconcert our aim, they advanced simultaneously, under cover of their shields, assailing us with arrows, javelins … stones, and even filth, so that we were scarcely able to defend ourselves. Some of them began to throw lances with brazen points against our captain.”

  The landing party advanced until Magellan realized that the natives were trying to draw them into a trap. In an attempt to panic the enemy, he sent a small party to fire a nearby village. “This,” Don Antonio writes, “only increased their ferocity.” Actually it was worse than that. The party was cut off, and despite their armor all of them—including Serrano’s son-in-law —were speared to death. Alarmed at la
st, the capitán-general ordered a withdrawal to the boats. He handled it skillfully, dividing his vastly outnumbered party in half, one half to hold the spearmen at bay while the others recrossed the ditches. All went well until, negotiating the last trench, they struck a snag and were held up. Lapulapu scented triumph. Splitting his own force, he sent men racing around both Spanish flanks in a bold attempt to cut them off before they could reach the bateaux.

  It was at that point that Magellan paid the ultimate price for having left his marines behind. Discipline in the landing force disintegrated; nearly forty of his men broke for the sea. They lurched across the coral, reached the boats, and cowered there, leaving their embattled leader to fight his last, terrible fight with a loyal remnant: Don Antonio and a handful of others. The uneven struggle lasted over an hour and was fought out in full view of a floating, mesmerized, horrified, but largely immobile audience: the rajah-king of Cebu, Prince Lumai, the Cacique Zula, the other baptized chieftains in the balangays, and the timorous men in the bateaux. The newly converted Filipinos awaited divine intervention by the Madonna, the saints, Our Lady of Victory, or Jesus Christ himself. It never came. Ferdinand Magellan, Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago and emissary of His Christian Majesty of Spain, had no miracles left. Toward the end a small band of his new Christians, Cebu warriors unable to endure the awful spectacle, landed on Mactan to rescue their godfather, but the moment they were ashore a Spanish gunner out in the armada, where no one had stirred till now, fired a medieval culverin at the beach. Castilian luck being what it was that Saturday, the wild shot scored a direct hit on the rescuers, killing four instantly and dispersing the others.