Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (27 page)

THE MIND OF THE CONQUISTADORS

The brutal conquistadors (“the conquerors”) who followed Hernán Cortés into the valley of Tenochtitlán seem at first glance a poor representation of the Western rationalist tradition. Many of the most notorious were fanatical Castilian Christians who lived in a Manichean world of absolute good versus evil. Sixteenth-century Spain under Charles V was in the midst of the Inquisition (begun officially in 1481), and witch burning, torture, and secret tribunals terrorized the countryside. Jews, Moors, and Protestants were fair game, in addition to Catholics of dubious faith who were accused of anything from bathing daily to reading imported literature. Unwavering adherence to a beleaguered orthodox Catholicism was expected of all in royal service, and was the ideology of almost every conquistador who sailed westward—sometimes to the detriment of military and political logic.

Cortés and his followers, when surrounded by an enemy of some 200,000 Mexicas in the middle of Tenochtitlán, insanely demanded of Montezuma that he cast down Aztec idols so that his subjects might convert en masse to Christianity. Catholic priests were ubiquitous in the New World; various Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jeronymite friars were given imperial powers of audit to ensure that the Indians were converted to Christianity, rather than gratuitously slaughtered. What they saw—the tearing out of beating hearts from sacrificial victims, rooms smeared with human blood, racks of skulls, priests with flayed human skins on their backs—terrified the Spanish priests. They were convinced that the Aztecs and their neighbors were satanic, their rites of human sacrifice and cannibalism the work of the Antichrist. An anonymous conquistador summed up the Spanish revulsion:

All the people of this province of New Spain, and even those of the neighboring provinces, eat human flesh and value it more highly than any other food in the world; so much so, that they often go off to war and risk their lives just to kill people to eat. The majority of them, as I have said, are sodomites and they drink to excess. (P. de Fuentes, The Conquistadors, 181)

To protect the tiny forces of Christendom from the contamination of these purported legions of darkness, mass, confession, and absolution were prerequisites of the Spanish before battle. Throughout the vicious two-year campaigning the conquistadors were convinced that a series of supernatural beings hovered in protection over their heads. Shrines soon dotted the Mexican landscape to thank the Virgin and various saints for victories and salvation from Aztec infidels. The conquest was as much to convert souls as to gain gold and ground, the church’s de facto attitude often being that the conquistadors’ killing was wrong and counterproductive, but that Mexicas were better off dead than as live practicing agents of the devil.

Martin Luther was excommunicated in the year Cortés first occupied Tenochtitlán, yet nascent Protestantism and its accompanying debate about religious doctrine would find no receptive audience back in contemporary Castile. A mere three decades before Cortés set foot in Mexico Ferdinand and Isabella had at last finished the four-century-long
Reconquista,
by uniting Aragon and Castile and expelling the Moors from Granada in 1492, establishing in the struggle the modern nation-state of Spain. For much of the subsequent century the crown was busy putting down insurrection in southern Spain among the Moriscos, who agitated for a return of Islamic rule. Moreover, due to its presence near Italy and North Africa, Spain also found itself a frontline state in the European resistance to the Ottoman onslaught, as well as bogged down in its periodic fighting against the Italian city-states and the rebellious Dutch. Thus, the grim veterans who landed at Vera Cruz were a world away from the farmers and religious exiles who landed off Plymouth Rock.

Christian fanaticism and strict Catholicism were the bedrock defenses of southern Mediterranean cultures besieged by Islamic enemies to the south and east, and the newer Protestant adversaries of northern Europe. Protestant Europeans were far from the front lines of Islamic attack; and, without the strong traditions of adherence to a centralized autocrat in Rome, they might find religious reform an indulgence that beleaguered Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks could not afford. In the era of the conquest of Mexico, Spain increasingly felt itself besieged on all sides. Powerful Jews, through economic might and commercial influence, might exploit and dominate the Catholic peasantry; Protestant fanatics might scour the Spanish countryside, undermining local churches and papal estates; Moors and Ottomans might conspire to return Spain to the Islamic world and thereby overturn the new national creation of Ferdinand and Isabella. In the paranoid Spanish mind the Inquisition and the
Reconquista
alone had saved Spain, yet the new nation’s continued survival depended on a class of knights who might spread Catholicism to the New World before it, too, was colonized by northern Europeans and its treasures used to further religious strife in the Old World.

With real and perceived enemies such as these, no wonder that as the sixteenth century wore on, Spain would become even more repressive— foreign study sometimes discouraged, northern European scholarship often ignored, and research increasingly nonsecular. As Cortés set out for the New World, the old Mediterranean cosmos of the Roman Empire was soon to embrace a vast revolutionary shift. The exploitation of Atlantic trade routes, North American exploration, Protestantism, and radical economic changes would insidiously transfer economic power away from the Mediterranean world to the northern European Atlantic nations of England, Holland, France, and the German states.

Before the Castilians set foot in the New World there was already established a sense of missionary zeal and military audacity unknown to the same degree in the rest of Europe. Spain saw itself as the continuance of the Holy Roman Empire. The Hapsburg Charles V was not merely the emperor of the new nation of Spain but the proper inheritor of the domains of the old Roman imperators. The most gifted of the latter—Trajan and Hadrian come first to mind—had been born in Iberia. The courage of the ancient Iberians was legendary, both before and after the Roman conquest. Hannibal’s slaughter at Cannae, for example, would have been impossible without the audacity of his Iberian mercenaries. No more deadly and romantic figure exists in Roman literature than the renegade Sertorius and his army of Iberian rebels, which devoured Roman legions for nearly a decade in their Spanish redoubt (83–73 B.C.). Thus, it was particularly unfortunate for the indigenous peoples of Mexico that they experienced not merely European interlopers or religious pilgrims per se, but the most audacious, deadly, and zealous warriors of the sixteenth-century European world, the most vicious men Spain had to offer in its greatest century of imperial grandeur.

What drove on Cortés and his men were the quest for status back in Spain and the hope of material betterment in the New World: free land and vast estates in Mexico, of course, and, for the more idealistic, the spiritual rewards of converting millions to Christianity. But, above all, gold beckoned. Gold was the first topic of interrogation with the natives. Worthless trinkets, iron knives, and glass were traded for gold. Only gold, not the precious feathers, intricate cotton clothes, or even the elaborate silver plate of the Mexicas, satisfied the Castilians. Gold might make a man a noble in Spain; gold might ensure the bankrupt Spanish crown that it could keep up with the more efficient economies in England and Holland, and so maintain the Hapsburg empire in Europe. Eventually, a quarter of all imperial Spanish revenues would be bullion from Mexico and Peru: 180 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver were to reach Spanish shores from the New World between 1500 and 1650.

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.