In October 1520, Cortés reported to the crown that he “[could] not describe one hundredth part of all the things which could be mentioned” about Tenochtitlán, before later attempting to relate the scale of the markets:
There is also one square twice as big as that of Salamanca, with arcades all around, where more than sixty thousand people come each day to buy and sell, and where every kind of merchandise produced in these lands is found: provisions as well as ornaments of gold and silver, lead, brass, copper, tin, stones, shells, bones, and feathers. … Finally, besides those things which I have already mentioned, they sell in the market everything else to be found in this great land, but they are so many and varied that because of their great number and because I cannot remember many of them nor do I know what they are called I shall not mention them.37
Cortés was also at the beginning of what would be a great biological exchange—he had no vocabulary for much of what he saw, and likewise the Mexica were not yet familiar with the wheat, cattle, pigs, and horses the Spaniards brought from Europe. Nor would they have names for the unfamiliar invisible and deadly microbes that accompanied the Spanish.38
After arriving in the city, Cortés accepted an offer to meet Moteuczoma and was taken to the court, a vast compound of palaces, apartments, libraries, warehouses, and even a zoo.39 Cortés was received with much courtesy and was shown the wonders of the capital by the emperor. In return, the Spaniard decided to take Moteuczoma hostage.40 Kidnapping a high-profile, non-Christian prisoner was a tactic that Spaniards had earlier used against Muslims.41 To Cortés, this was the final part of a legitimate imperial transfer of power from Moteuczoma to Spain’s Carlos V, Holy Roman emperor and successor to Fernando II who died in 1516.42
Into this delicate situation came Pánfilo de Narváez. Velázquez sent him in the spring of 1520 to arrest Cortés for insubordination after hearing what had happened from the crew on the ship that had left Veracruz, which had called at Cuba on its way to Spain. Cortés was forced to leave Moteuczoma under guard and settle matters with Narváez. In the end, Cortés convinced many of Narváez’s nine hundred men to join him, but while he had been away, Pedro de Alvarado, who had been left in charge, launched an attack on an unarmed crowd in the Great Temple during Toxcatl, a religious celebration.43 By the time Cortés returned to the capital he found the Spaniards under siege. In an attempt to stop the assault, he convinced Moteuczoma to appear in front of his people. According to some accounts, a stone thrown by a person in the crowd struck the emperor on the head, and he died three days later; other accounts pin his death on the Spanish.44 There was little left for Cortés to do but retreat. On June 30, 1520, as they made their way out of the capital, he and his men, including Tlaxcalteca allies, faced an onslaught which the Spanish later called la Noche Triste (the Night of Sorrows) because some four hundred Spaniards and thousands of Tlaxcalteca soldiers were killed. Cortés survived but he and his men retreated to Tlaxcallan, roughly today’s state of Tlaxcala, which is east of Mexico City, to regroup.
The Tlaxcalteca, over the subsequent centuries, were reduced to historical bit players, though they had leading roles in the events that followed, not least their contribution of more than thirty thousand soldiers.45 The Huexotzinca, Cholulteca, and Chalca provided another thirty thousand.46 While Cortés did not have the numbers among his own men, he did have technology, including cannons and guns. At the same time, European diseases began to spread, giving Cortés a silent and unrealized weapon.47 Indeed, a smallpox outbreak killed Moteuczoma’s successor, his brother Cuitláhuac, in October, leaving the next emperor, Cuauhtémoc, to prepare for war.48 Thousands of other people in the Valley of Mexico soon succumbed to diseases that would eventually kill millions.*
By May 1521, the offensive by Cortés and his allies had begun in earnest. It is not clear how many troops he had, but estimates range from one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand. Cortés was also aided by a plague sweeping through the capital. One indigenous account later described the outbreak as lasting “for seventy days, striking everywhere in the city and killing a vast number of our people. Sores erupted on our faces, our breasts, our bellies; we were covered with agonizing sores from head to foot.”49 Before long, Cortés and his men had reentered Tenochtitlán; they held it under siege until the surrender came on August 13, 1521. After justifying his actions to a Spanish crown that grudgingly accepted the conquest, Cortés acquired some of the largest landholdings in Mexico, which would become a source of immense wealth. This, however, was not enough to calm his restlessness, and the years to come would find him searching for another Tenochtitlán.50
Spain soon placed this territory firmly in the constellation of its kingdoms, calling it Nueva España, or New Spain. By 1526, a decree had put all the land under the crown, the mining of silver deposits had begun, and taxes and Indian tribute were collected.51 Shortly before this, in 1524, a Council of the Indies had been formally established to advise the king on governing these new lands. In addition, the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), which had been established in Seville earlier, in 1503, now controlled with a firm grip all the trade to the Americas.52
In New Spain, the military was now bolstered by the Tlaxcalteca, former members of the Mexica confederacy, as well as Maya, Zapotecs, and other groups, which they needed because only about half of the estimated two thousand Spaniards with Cortés managed to survive.53 Besides, these Spaniards had little interest in being soldiers: they were looking to become landowners, as Cortés had done. In these early years, a bureaucracy also took shape, one that would wield far more power with its pens than the conquistadores did with their swords, over both Spaniards and Indians.54 A judicial audiencia was set up and a president appointed by 1528, and layers of official posts were created for the towns and cities.55 In 1535 New Spain was proclaimed a vice-royalty, with the viceroy—appointed from Spain for a term that varied in length—to represent the king. New Spain was not a colony but part of the Spanish crown.56
Alongside the political world, the physical one also changed. During his final push, Cortés razed much of the capital. Soon, stone by stone, the Spanish placed their present atop the Mexica past.57 In the capital, the Templo Mayor, dedicated to the gods of rain and war, Tláloc and Huitzilopochtli, was destroyed. Next to this sacred site rose a Catholic cathedral, which today sits on the main plaza, known as the Zócalo, in Mexico City.58
Although Tenochtitlán provided the Spanish with a useful foundation for their city, it was Santo Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola, that had become the model for the urban colonial center. In general, cities and towns were to be the cornerstone of conquest. The built environment of these places, and the many administrators who governed them, reflected the Spanish familiarity with urban living, as well as a preoccupation with keeping order. The maze-like narrow streets of Muslim Andalusian cities, such as Seville or Granada, were thought to be counterproductive for such aims. Instead, a grid system was deemed more useful. This had been employed with success in Santo Domingo, and so it became the template—refined and adapted over time—for Spanish cities in the Americas, whose number began to grow throughout the sixteenth century.59 Not surprisingly, Cortés’s exploits had spurred other conquistadores to search for their own Tenochtitláns in South America. Francisco Pizarro began his campaign against the Inca empire in Peru in 1530, and within fifty years, Spain claimed the length of the continent for itself, from the Caribbean coast through the Andes Mountains and into Chile and Argentina. The way cities were built across these diverse areas followed a form that was later enshrined in Spain’s Laws of the Indies. Urban settlements were to have a main plaza, around which would be a grid of streets. The governor’s house, administrative offices, and a church would occupy the plaza, and the most prominent families lived nearby. The lower members of society—often indigenous—lived the farthest away from the plaza in houses made of wood or other poorer materials.60
The conversion of souls to Catholicism continued to be a prior
ity, and it, too, would be an important pillar used to reinforce colonial authority. In keeping with the religious nature of conquest, Cortés requested missionaries to come to New Spain.61 By 1524, a symbolic 12 Franciscans had arrived in Veracruz, growing to around 380 by 1550.62 Dominicans followed in 1526, and Augustinians in 1533. By 1559, there were around eight hundred friars in New Spain.63 The Franciscans were part of what is known as the regular clergy—from the Latin regula, meaning rule—who were priests and friars of religious orders. They were joined by the secular clergy—from saeculum, signifying of the world, or not living in cloisters—consisting of parish priests up to bishops and archbishops. In addition, the Spanish crown and not the pope made appointments of bishops and archbishops to the Americas, and it could collect the Church’s tithe income.
At first, the majority of missionaries were from religious orders, though the number of secular clergy rose as more dioceses were established. Although the orders were united in their efforts to convert, they had diverse reasons for doing so. Some Franciscans, for instance, believed that once the “last Gentiles” were found and converted—and the Mexica people fitted the bill—this would trigger the end-times, followed by a postmillennial heaven on earth.64 Whether they were secular or regular, conversion was difficult work for priests, hampered by many factors, not least linguistic ones. In order to swell the numbers of converts, mass baptisms were performed—sometimes on hundreds or even thousands of people at once, who may or may not have been clear on what was taking place.65 Priests tried to learn indigenous languages, such as Náhuatl, and some even wrote grammars and catechisms in these languages, while the new Christians were required to attend services and learn certain prayers.66 Amerindians may have lived in or near missions, but under the sixteenth-century policy of reducción, they were expected to form Christian, indigenous towns; Spain’s way of exerting control over often disparate groups was to forcibly resettle hundreds of thousands of people.
Despite all these changes, some indigenous beliefs and practices took longer to eradicate. Religious objects, such as small statues that depicted or symbolized Mexica deities, were considered pagan and often destroyed, and spiritual leaders who practiced banned rituals were punished. Yet indigenous forms proved adaptable. Perhaps one of the best-known examples of this in Mexico is the Virgin of Guadalupe. According to the myth, in 1531 an Indian peasant named Juan Diego claimed to have experienced an apparition in the countryside near Mexico City. The woman said she was the Virgin Mary and asked for a church to be built there. Diego reported what he saw to the bishop, who asked for miracles as proof. Diego gathered flowers that were not typical of the area and put them in his cape to take to the bishop. Once the blooms fell to the ground, the cape was left with an image of Mary; this is now a national symbol of Mexico. The church today is built upon the Mexica shrine to Tonantzin, the goddess mother of the earth.67 This incarnation of Mary was later interpreted as an embodiment of Mexicanness—that she was a unique symbol of the nation and this merging of ancient and modern, Catholic and indigenous.68
THE LEGACY OF Bartolomé de Las Casas in the Americas was no less dramatic than that of Cortés or Ponce, but his odyssey was spiritual. Las Casas’s father, Pedro, joined Columbus on his second voyage in 1493, when Bartolomé was a boy of nine.69 Pedro returned in 1498 and by 1502, Bartolomé was on his way to Santo Domingo, sailing in Nicolás de Ovando’s fleet.70 Las Casas began to oversee the encomienda his father had set up, though at the same time he had started the religious journey that would later lead him into the priesthood.71 Las Casas could not fail to see the brutality the Spanish were inflicting on the people of Hispaniola. He witnessed for himself the 1504 slaughter of the Indians in Higüey that Juan Ponce de Léon had participated in, later writing that the Spanish conquistadores were each “trying to top the others on novel ways to spill blood.”72 He was not alone in his discomfort. The Dominicans who had arrived on the island in 1510 were growing concerned. In 1511, the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos delivered a scathing indictment of Spanish behavior toward the island’s inhabitants, asking the congregation in Santo Domingo: “Are these Indians not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves!”73 The sermon stirred instant controversy on the island and within Las Casas, whose transformation was well under way and who may have already been ordained by this point.74
In 1512, Las Casas joined an expedition to Cuba led by Diego Velázquez, later ending up with Pánfilo de Narváez, who was also taking part. He wrote about this period much later in his life, reflecting that “these people [Spaniards] never abandoned a place until they had laid it waste and killed off the Indians.”75 Las Casas spent two years with Narváez, as he described it, “securing the island,” which for him meant trying to convert people peacefully. At the same time, Velázquez kept rewarding him with Indians for his encomienda.76 He saw the hypocrisy of his own position and began to renounce his holdings as an encomendero, deciding instead by 1514 to devote himself to ending the scourge of violence the Spanish had inflicted on Amerindians, an effort that later earned him the title “Protector of the Indians.”
Las Casas, like many of the friars, was concerned that indigenous people were often characterized as enemies of Christianity; he deemed this unfair given that they had never heard of the faith.77 In one attempt to address this, the crown had issued the Requirement (Requerimiento) in 1512. This legal concoction was to be read out loud by conquistadores to any future subjects. The document was supposed to explain to the Indians the Catholic and monarchist world of the Spaniards and the perils of not submitting to it. If the Indians were thus informed and did not acquiesce, then any fighting could be considered a just conflict, the vanquished could be taken as slaves, and their property could be seized. This document was put to use as the Spanish continued their march into Central and South America.78
It was not enough for Las Casas, and burning with desire for reform, he left for Spain in 1515, accompanied by Montesinos, with the intention of gaining an audience with the ailing king Fernando to convince him that the practice of encomienda needed to stop.79 By the end of the year, he had related to the king the brutalities that were taking place on the island, despite the Laws of Burgos. Fernando listened, but nothing resulted from that meeting, and the king died soon afterward.80 The following year, 1516, Las Casas wrote a Remedio, or Remedy, for the Indians, while he had the attention of two powerful advisers and regents to the sixteen-year-old king Carlos V: Adrian of Utrecht, who would become pope in 1522, and Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros.81 Las Casas laid out his vision for saving the Indians, though one of those suggestions would come back to haunt him. In that “remedy” he suggested that “blacks, or other slaves” be used in the mines instead of Indians.
In the same manner that the first conquistadores had enslaved Amerindian people and brought some of them to Spain to work or be sold, the Portuguese had done so with Africans from the west coast of the continent since the mid-1400s. Muslim North Africans—often referred to as Moors—had been a precursor to this, as they had been captured on the basis of not being Christian.82 This continued into the sixteenth century, and West Africans bought and sold on the Iberian Peninsula began to appear in Hispaniola by 1502. This was followed by licensing of such a trade in 1513, by which point it is likely enslaved people were brought directly from West Africa to the Caribbean, contravening the existing trade rules. By 1518, licensing for the direct transport of slaves was in place, and thousands of enslaved people could now be taken to all parts of Spain’s growing empire.83 Such were the growth and scale of African slavery that by 1547 Las Casas was forced to speak out against the slave trade, though this required another personal conversion.84 This time, it was triggered by his reading chronicles of Portuguese involvement in Africa. He realized that the enslavement there was not under the “just” conditions he had assumed. It occurred to him that he could not call for an end to Indian bondage without doing the same for Africans; he later w
rote that he “regretted the advice” he gave the king.85 Between 1514 and 1600, some 250,000 enslaved Africans were forced to disembark in Spain’s Caribbean and mainland colonies, with many destined to work in gold and silver mines during this period.86 By the 1570s, Mexico City alone had at least eight thousand enslaved Africans.87
Long before his change of heart about African slavery, Las Casas had returned to the Americas in 1516, and he spent much of the following decades traveling back and forth to Spain, drawing attention to the plight of the indigenous people. Although his intention was to end their suffering, he often discussed Amerindians in paternalistic terms, as did other writers at this time, describing them as “the simplest people in the world—unassuming, long-suffering, unassertive, and submissive,” as well as being “among the least robust of human beings,” with “delicate constitutions.”88 Yet he was livid about the abuses they suffered. Las Casas wrote to Carlos V in 1542 about their treatment in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies). He minced no words in explaining how Spanish conquistadores “forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there … they hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen.”89 Those who survived often fared little better as laborers, where “the men died down the mines from overwork and starvation, and the same was true of the women who perished out on the estates.”90
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