Mexica and Peruvian gold might fuel the galleys to keep the Turk at bay and pay the armies in Holland. Gold in the hand meant not beauty, but power, money, status—and so intricate Mexica golden lizards, ducks, and fishes, the products of hundreds of hours of careful New World craftsmanship, were melted down into portable golden bars that represented the purchasing power of both goods and services. To the Spaniard the shiny metal was an abstract and distant rather than an immediate and concrete pleasure; hours of native dexterity were of no value when compared to the goods, status, and security that such metal might buy. When Cortés saw the intricate goldwork of his hosts, his first thoughts were not merely of his own personal wealth to come, or even tribute to the Spanish crown, but of the stored capital to purchase more horses, gunpowder, harquebuses, cannon, and crossbows from ships arriving from Cuba and Spain. So bewildered were they by the conquistadors’ incessant demands for gold that the Indians of Mexico at first believed the Castilians’ ruse that they needed the metal as medicine for “their hearts”; some more thoughtful Aztecs believed that the Spanish even ate the silly gold dust!
The conquistador in the New World in the century after Columbus’s discovery was a law unto himself; there was little imperial oversight in the underpopulated and vast American domains. Foreigners were excluded from Central and South America—the French and English especially were not welcome. Governors arrived, became embroiled in petty local politics, typically were recalled, killed, died of disease—or looted the province under their care. The Spanish monarchy was nearly a five-week voyage away, and its bureaucracy transient, hard to locate, and notorious for inaction. One such audit looking into the retirement of the viceroy of Peru took thirteen years and 50,000 sheets of paper and even then did not conclude until 1603, long after the ex-viceroy had passed away.
There was a known propensity for the government to grant post facto sanction to any audacious explorers who might find new land and bullion for the crown. The way to beat a residencia, or royal inquiry into a provincial governor’s malfeasance, was to draw it out, to lead an expedition, colonize new territory for the crown, claim widespread baptism of the natives, and then send back the king’s fifth of all gold, silver, and jewels that could be looted from the Indians. Gold might trump insubordination; gold might mitigate the priests’ worries about decimating rather than converting the Indians of the Americas; gold might make a Castilian renegade or an Andalusian thug the equal of a viceroy in the eyes of the king’s ministers—earning him an imperial pension or at least a coat of arms in his old age. With the opening of the New World, Spanish society began to evolve more from a landed aristocracy to a plutocracy, allowing an entire sort of previously poor and middling adventurers to advance through the acquisition of a fortune in the Americas.
Few Castilian adventurers brought their families. Even fewer sought a new life through the drudgery of yeoman farming. The desideratum was not to plow a homestead, and thereby through self-sufficiency raise a family free and immune from Europe’s religious persecution and political oppression, but to become an absentee owner of a vast ranch, on which hundreds of Indians might tend cattle, mine, and raise luxury goods like coffee or sugar to guarantee the caudillo a steady income. Very few conquistadors had any doubts about the primacy of either the crown or the pope. Unlike the settlers of North America, the early Spanish came to the New World as emissaries of, rather than fugitives from, the church and state of their homeland. Some Castilian leaders in the Caribbean were battle-hardened veterans from the campaigns in Italy and continual wars against the Moriscos in Spain and the Ottomans on the Mediterranean. A few, like Cortés, were hidalgos of middling means but aristocratic pretensions, whose families enjoyed some relief from various imperial taxes. Most were young men in their twenties, keen to return to Spain by forty with rank, money, and vast estates—something impossible for most if they stayed in the homeland. The result was that Mexico was seen not as a place to start the world anew as in Puritan New England, but as a helpful source of Spanish vigilance against the forces of darkness.
Economic life was depressed in early-sixteenth-century Castile. Agriculture especially was on the wane, as petty lords and bishops presided over vast estates of cattle and sheep. The expulsion of the Jews and Moriscos—a quarter million of the latter in the fifteenth century— had decimated the economy of the Spanish countryside; immigration to the New World further robbed the Iberian Peninsula of hundreds of thousands of its most energetic citizens. While lucrative for a while, the Atlantic trade routes were perilous, given the weather, northern European raiders, and freelancing pirates. The exchange of New World bullion for Old World luxury goods—paintings, furniture, clothes, books—would eventually disrupt the economies of both Spain and Mexico, as each fell further behind northern Europe and North America, which were developing yeomen farmers and entrepreneurial capitalists. Simple mining and the crafting of luxury items were no substitute for large manufacturing production and market-oriented agriculture, as the gold of the New World hid for nearly a century structural deficiencies in the Spanish economy. There was a plethora of noble families and titles among the Castilian conquistadors, but little actual money and almost no opportunity back in Spain for upward mobility. No wonder nearly a million Castilians left for the New World in the two centuries after Columbus.
By 1500 printed books had spread through Spain, and an entire generation of aristocrats had versed themselves not only in religious tracts and military science but also in poems, ballads, and fantastic romances replete with Amazons, sea monsters, the fountain of youth, and legendary cities of gold. Bankrupt, would-be grandees sailed westward—more than two hundred Spanish ships voyaged to the Indies alone between 1506 and 1518—not only to escape poverty in Spain, not merely to enrich themselves and the Spanish crown, and not entirely to convert millions to Catholicism in the religious wars to come. The conquistadors also put to sea because the New World, with its bizarre flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples was seen as a fountainhead of popular myth, wonder, and sheer adventure—a suitable challenge for a young knight of courage and piety. Atlantis (the Antilles), Amazons (the Amazon River), and California (the island in the romance Las Sergas de Esplandián ) really did exist after all.
All the conquistadors shared a clear-cut agenda to crush indigenous opposition, loot the countryside for gold, convert heathens to Christianity, enjoy the local women, father mestizo children—Cortés seems to have had several—and then establish local estates and baronies in which landed Spanish magníficos might oversee vast gangs of Indian laborers in exporting New World foods and bullion. In his early twenties Cortés announced in his first year in the New World that he would either “dine to the sound of trumpets or die on the scaffold,” and then spent much of his twenties and early thirties amassing a fortune from gold mining and ranching on Cuba—capital to help finance an expedition to the new lands of Mexico that might bring in even more fortune.
Given free rein to explore and conquer an unknown Caribbean world between 1492 and 1540, within fifty years the conquistadors were anachronistic curiosities, if not nuisances altogether. Witness the decline in the fortunes of Cortés and his caballeros within a decade of the conquest of 1521. The great critic of Spanish imperialism in the New World, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, railed against the “forty years” (1502–42) in which a handful of his countrymen, through military conquest, disease, and economic exploitation, had wiped out the population of the Caribbean basin. By 1550 Spanish America was a world of bureaucrats, miners, and priests, with no room for impoverished Castilian loose cannon, who wished to intrigue without supervision in the affairs of the crown and pope and thereby ruin others’ more careful work of extracting souls and gold from the people and soil of the Americas. King and church alike were coming to understand that men like Cortés had a disturbing tendency to flay, rather than shear, the sheep of the New World, and they spared no effort in ensuring that the era of the conquistador was over just a few years af
ter its inception.
This first generation who settled and exploited the Caribbean basin were tough men like Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, seasoned from Columbus’s second voyage and the final battles to free Granada; Francisco de Garay, ruler of newfound Jamaica, another veteran of the Columbus explorations and in-law to the famous explorer; and Pedro Arias Dávila, caudillo of Panama, battle-hardened survivor of the Spanish civil wars, and at seventy-eight, the most ruthless of the Spanish governors. Hernán Cortés himself was a native of Medellín, the son of a legendary soldier with fifty years of military service for the crown.
The conquistadors were a world apart from the priests and men of the quill who followed to solidify and bureaucratize what these far more brutal men had won by the sword, men who shared what to us now seems an uneven morality: slaughtering unarmed Indians in battle brought no odium, nor did turning an entire conquered population into gangs of indentured serfs. In contrast, human sacrifice, cannibalism, transvestitism, and sodomy provoked moral indignation and outrage, as did the absence of clothes, private property, monogamy, and steady physical labor. Much of the Castilian ethical world was predicated on professed status, manners, and the presumption of civilization, not fundamental questions of life and death:
The member of a civilized polity, then, as conceived by the sixteenth-century Spaniard, was a town-dweller who was dressed in doublet and hose, and wore his hair short. His house was not overrun with fleas and ticks. He ate his meals at a table and not on the ground. He did not indulge in unnatural vice, and if he committed adultery he was punished for it. His wife—who was his only wife and not one among several—did not carry her children on her back like a monkey, and he expected his son and not his nephew to succeed to his inheritance. He did not spend his time getting drunk; and he had a proper sense of respect for property—his own and other people’s. . . . (J. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 55–56)
SPANISH RATIONALISM
The legacy of Cortés’s men and of men like them was brilliant military conquest—and the decimation of the indigenous population of the Caribbean and Mexico in a mere thirty years through military conquest, the destruction of native agricultural practice, and the inadvertent importation of smallpox, measles, and influenza. Like the “Hellene” Alexander the Great, the “Christian” Cortés slaughtered thousands, looted imperial treasuries, destroyed and founded cities, tortured and murdered—and claimed he had done it all for the betterment of mankind. His letters to Charles V proclaiming interest in establishing a brotherhood among all natives and Spaniards read a great deal like Alexander’s oath at Opis (324 B.C.), in which he proclaimed a new world embracing all races and religions. In both cases the body count told a different tale.
The conquistadors were far from ignorant fanatics. For all their religious devoutness, they did not live in the mythic world of the Mexicas— Montezuma sent an array of wizards and necromancers to hex and bewitch the approaching Castilians—but in a romantic cosmos that, ultimately despite its wild tales and improbable rumors, ceded to sensory perception and hard data. The Spaniards, for all their bluster, did not believe that the Mexicas were superhuman agents of the devil, but sophisticated indigenous tribes, who could be met, thwarted, and conquered through a combination of political intrigue and Castilian arms. The Mexicas were as unfamiliar to the Spaniards as the Spaniards were to the Mexicas, but the difference—besides the obvious fact that the Spaniards, not the Mexicas, had sailed halfway around the world to conquer an unknown people—was that Cortés’s men drew on a 2,000-year-old tradition that might account for strange phenomena without resorting to religious exegesis. Through sense perception, reliance on a prior body of abstract knowledge, and inductive reasoning, the Castilians quickly sized up the political organization of Tenochtitlán, the military capability of its army, and the general religion of the Mexica nation.
They had never seen anything like the Mexica priests with their matted hair, caked blood, and cloaks of human skins, nor mass sacrifices or the rites of tearing bleeding hearts from drugged victims. But they soon surmised that these Indian holy men were no gods. For all the rhetoric of the Catholic church, they were not even devils, but humans, conducting some sort of bizarre religious rites which might logically incur the hatred of their subjugated allies. Christianity told them the Aztec religion was evil; but the European intellectual tradition gave them the tools to investigate it, probe its weakness, and eventually destroy it. In contrast, the Aztecs for weeks after the entry of the Castilians were still baffled as to whether they were up against men or demigods, centaurs or horses, ships or floating mountains, foreign or domestic deities, thunder or guns, emissaries or enemies.
Cortés himself was half-educated, and for a time worked as a notary, studied Latin, and read Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Livy, and other classical military histories. At least some of his success in the darkest hours of the Mexica wars was due to his mesmerizing oratory, laced with classical allusions to Cicero and Aristotle and punctuated with Latin phrases from the Roman historians and playwrights. Spain, we must remember, in the first century B.C. during the latter days of the Roman Republic and early years of the Principate, was the intellectual center of Europe, producing moral philosophers such as the elder and younger Senecas, the poet Martial, and the agronomist Columella.
Although the Inquisition and religious intolerance that were sweeping Spain would soon isolate the Iberian Peninsula from the main centers of learning in northern Europe, leading to clear decline by 1650, in the sixteenth century the Spanish military was still at the cutting edge of military technology and abstract tactical science. Many of the men who marched with Cortés were not merely notaries, bankrupt hidalgos, and priests acquainted with Latin literature but avid readers of contemporary Spanish political and scientific tracts. More important, they were trained as bureaucrats and lawyers in the inductive method of adducing evidence, prior precedent, and law to prove a point before an audience of supposedly disinterested peers.
Cortés’s conquistadors may not have been intellectuals, but they were equipped with the finest weapons of sixteenth-century Europe and buttressed by past experience of fighting the Moor, Italian, and Turk. The fundamentals of some two millennia of abstract Western military science, from fortification, siegecraft, battle tactics, ballistics, and cavalry maneuver to logistics, pike and sword fighting, and medical treatment in the field ensured that it would take literally hundreds of Mexicas to kill each Castilian. When rushed and swarmed, the Spaniards fell in rank and file, fought in unison with unquestioning discipline, and fired group volleys. In the myriad sudden and unexpected crises that arose each week, Cortés and his close advisers—the brilliant Martín López, the courageous and steady Sandoval, and the mercurial Alvarado—did not merely pray but coolly met, argued, and worked out a tactical or mechanical solution to salvage their blunder of marching into an island fortress of thousands. Cortés also worried that his actions would be recorded, criticized, audited, and made known to thousands back in Spain.
Spanish individualism was evident throughout. The most unlikely came forward with ideas—some half-baked, like the veteran of the Italian wars who, as powder grew short, convinced Cortés that he could build a vast catapult (it would prove an utter failure). There was a familiarity between soldiers and general that was unknown among the Mexicas: no Aztec warrior might dare approach Montezuma or his successor Cuauhtémoc to propose a new approach to ship construction, tactics, and logistics. Just as Alexander’s “Companions” enjoyed a level of intimacy with their king unimaginable between Darius and his Immortals, so Cortés ate, slept, and was rebuked by his caballeros in a manner unthinkable among the Mexicas.
Westerners had ventured in non-Western lands to travel, write, and record since the emergence of the Ionian logographers of the sixth century B.C. Periegetics such as Cadmus, Dionysius, Charon, Damastes, and Hecataeus—ultimately to be followed in Asia and Egypt by explorers and conquerors like the Athenian imperialists, Xenophon’s Ten Thousa
nd, and Alexander the Great—had written didactic treatises on Persia (Persica) and voyages outside Greece (Periploi). In contrast, during Xerxes’ great invasion of Greece (480 B.C.), the king apparently had little, if any, information about the nature of the Hellenic city-states.
This rich Hellenic tradition of natural inquiry was continued by Roman merchants, explorers, conquerors, and scientists whose canvas widened to include the entire Mediterranean, northern Africa, and Europe. Unlike the Aztec emperors, Cortés had the benefit of an anthropological tradition of written literature describing foreign phenomena and peoples, cataloging and evaluating them, and making sense of their natural environment that went back to Herodotus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Pliny—the age-old and arrogant Western idea that nothing is inexplicable to the god Reason, if only the investigator has enough empirical data and the proper inductive method. Montezuma either feared or worshiped the novelty that he could not explain; Cortés sought to explain the novelty that he neither feared nor worshiped. In the end that is one reason why Tenochtitlán and not Vera Cruz—let alone Seville—would lie in ruins.
WHY DID THE CASTILIANS WIN?
The Inexplicable
Nearly a quarter million people lived in the twin island cities of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco. More than a million more Nahuatl-speaking Mexicas surrounding the lake were tributary subjects of the Aztec empire. Even more people outside the Valley of Mexico gave Tenochtitlán their obeisance. The great marketplace of Tenochtitlán could hold 60,000 people. The city itself was larger than most of the major urban centers of Europe—Seville, the largest city in Spain, had fewer than 100,000 inhabitants. Ingeniously crafted causeways with numerous drawbridges, a huge stone aqueduct, pyramid temples larger (in volume) than those in Egypt, and fleets of thousands of canoes on an engineered lake made the island fortress impregnable and an architectural marvel.
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