The Conquistadors
Authors: Hammond Innes
Conquistadors
Hammond
Innes
Dedicated to
Billy and Pierre
1 The Eight-Hundred-Year Crusade
11 Massacre, Gold and Civil War
The period of the great Discoverers has always appealed to me, but for a novelist to be asked to write a history is a great challenge. It was one I hesitated to accept. Three things finally decided me: First, I am essentially a story-teller, and the stories of Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru are among the greatest and most terrible in history; secondly, all my novels have grown out of the realities of the countries in which I have set them, so that respect for the truth is a built-in habit of work; finally, the physical characteristics of a country have always seemed to me the key to the nature of its people and their history.
Three years' study of contemporary records, and the much more voluminous later accounts, left me far from satisfied. So many were politically biased and posed questions that could only be resolved when I stood where Cortés and Pizarro had stood. As a result of the journeys I then undertook, I came to realise how terrain had dominated, even compelled, events. Not only terrain, but the sea as well â and here, with a sailor's eye, I hope I have been able to add something to the reader's understanding of what it is like to be the first to probe the shores of unknown lands.
My thanks are due to Dr John Street, Director of the Centre of Latin-America Studies in Cambridge University, for reading and advising on the main body of the work, and to Dr G. H. S. Bushnell, Reader in New World Archaeology at the same University, for advising on the chapters dealing with the Aztec and Inca civilizations. Also to all those who, in their official capacity, or unofficially, assisted me in my travels and researches in Spain, Mexico and Peru â in particular to Sir Robert Marett for his information about Zempoala, to Captain B. Hokansen for making me free of his chartroom and his thirty years' experience of the South American coast on the run down from Panama to Callao, to Dr J. J. Wilson of the Carta Geologica Nacional for his very detailed information about the topography of the Andes above Cajamarca, and to Senora Elejalde for introducing me to all the private collections in Lima.
I would also like to thank my friend John Hadfield for initiating the project, and George Speaight, who not only edited the book, but has contributed so much to it in maps and pictures, many of these previously unpublished. Finally my thanks are due, as always, to my wife Dorothy for her assistance with the text, and also for her work in listing items of outstanding interest in museums and private collections, and to my secretary, Nora Anderson for her untiring efforts in keeping pace with all the various drafts.
H.I.
The Eight-Hundred-Year Crusade
The Conquistadors, like most human phenomena, were the product of history. They were Spaniards and they explored and conquered new worlds for the glory of God and their own profit in the early 1500s. Behind them they had centuries of constant fighting to clear their Iberian Peninsula of the Moorish invaders. They were men trained in war, crusaders in their own land who had pushed the infidel back step by step, breeding kingdoms and principalities as they advanced. The result was that their nobility were little better than armed and castled warlords. And then, in 1492, it was all over, the last Moorish stronghold taken. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain had newly emerged as a nation. The eight-hundred-year crusade was at an end, and her chivalry, born to the saddle and the sword, and burning with a wild religious fervour, was suddenly unemployed. The Italian wars provided an immediate outlet, but Spain's geographical position pointed inexorably west, to the new world Columbus had recently discovered.
The men who had fought their last battle against the Moors turned soldiers of fortune and followed the sailors across the sea to seek out new infidels and blaze a trail of murder and heroism that is unique in the history of European peoples. Their lust for gold was infinite, their religious fervour genuine. This strange mixture of motive, their fantastic fortitude in the face of the most frightening terrain and the most appalling odds, their ability to carve their way by guile and force through armies two hundred times their number, requires explanation. Otherwise all that is contained in this account of the conquistadors is incredible.
As always in history, geographical position and the nature of the country played a dominant role. The Iberian Peninsula is the
ultima thule
of Western Europe, its coast line part Mediterranean, part Atlantic, its southern apex facing Africa ten miles across the Gibraltar straits. It was from across these straits that the first known invaders came 4,500 years ago. Others were to follow. Placed as Spain is on the periphery of Mediterranean cultural growth, its rivers and rich valleys separated by wild mountains, the successive influences of Phoenician and Greek traders were confined to the southern and eastern coasts. So, too, was the
Carthaginian influence, which began about 540 B.C. and lasted for three centuries. More important at this time was the advance of the Celts across the Pyrenees, intermingling with the peoples of the central plateau to form the Celtiberi. Carthage never had a strong hold on the country, so that the Romans, by a policy of conciliation, gradually replaced them. At first, this infiltration followed upon the need to protect their Italian homeland from the incursions of the two great Carthaginian generals, Hamilcar and Hannibal. But by 197 B.C. the Romans were so firmly established in the Peninsula that the areas previously occupied by the Carthaginians were designated the Roman provinces of Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior. Conciliation was now replaced by a more positive policy, and in the two centuries B.C. the Roman legions steadily conquered the whole Peninsula. The Celtiberi, centred around the head-waters of Duero and Tagus, had never been conquered by the Carthaginians. Like all Celts, they were a brave independent people. They held Rome at bay for half a century, were defeated by Scipio in 133 B.C. and thereafter contributed greatly to Rome's auxiliaries.
For nearly five centuries the country had peace. The influence of Rome on the development of Spanish culture was thus very great. The people became Christian, lived under Roman law, and, because of the nature of the land and the Roman method of garrisoning, the towns increased in importance at the expense of tribal organization. But at the beginning of the fifth century A.D. Spain, or Hispania as it was then called, suffered with the rest of Europe the effects of the power vacuum created by the decline of Rome. The Vandals, Alans and Sueves poured in from Europe, to be followed fifty years later by the Visigoths. The conquered Romano-Hispanic people remained Catholics, continued to live under their Roman laws, whilst the conquerors, who were Christians of the Arian sect and whose social structure was based on Germanic customs, were a Teutonic élite under their own elected kings. By the beginning of the seventh century, however, with the conversion of their king to Catholicism, and many of the clergy also conforming, the segregation of the two races ceased to be effective. Latin became the official language, Catholic bishops assumed a dominant role in politics, and about 654 a unified legal system was established. Part Roman, but basically Germanic, the
Forum Judicum
was a powerful influence that outlasted the Visigoth kingdom by many centuries to provide the basis for the local codes or
fueros
of the Spanish medieval towns. Moreover, the unification of law and religion had the effect of breaking down the barriers between conqueror and conquered. Inter-marriage, banned by Roman, not Visigothic, custom, now produced a mingling of the races, so that the Iberian Peninsula became a single unit under a king who remained elected and not hereditary. Short though this domination was, the Visigoths exercised an extraordinary influence on Spanish race and customs, an influence that was to make medieval Spain entirely different from the rest of medieval Europe.
The third great moulder of Spanish character fell upon the country in 711 in the
form of Islamic hordes from across the Gibraltar straits. In seven years the Moors â mainly North African Berbers, but including Arabs and Syrians â had conquered almost the entire Visigoth kingdom of Spain and had killed the king, Roderick. They then swept across the Pyrenees into the land of the Franks. Only the north and north-western Atlantic coastal areas remained, secured by their mountain bastions, to form a nucleus for the later Christian kingdoms.
The essential weaknesses of the Moslem state were that Spain was administered as a province, subject, rather nominally, first to faraway Damascus, later to North Africa, and that its provincial
emirs
and
caliphs
were absolute and hereditary rulers. The inevitable result was that, whenever the central rule weakened, the country disintegrated into smaller provincial units. Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Valencia, Toledo, Badajoz, Saragossa were all at one time or another separate states, the unit dictated by the geography of mountain, valley, river or coast. Nevertheless, in spite of the weaknesses of the system, the Moslems were in Spain for almost eight centuries.
The basis of Moorish domination was their Arab cavalry and their single-mindedness. They were conquerors carrying the word of the Prophet at the point of the scimitar, their fast Arab horses the motive power to drive the point home. At first there was no pressure on Christians to change their religion or their laws; there was even some degree of integration. And the Moslem invasion brought to Spain the culture and knowledge of the older civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean. The development of irrigation opened up arid lands to agriculture. Education was encouraged; the townships became literate; music, poetry, arts and science, particularly mathematics, all flourished.
But the wars went on, the free Christians, from their mountain fastnesses, pushing into the plains, in search of the crumbs of better living, hating the infidel who had raped the best of their country's land, building up within themselves a religious fervour quite as strong as that which had carried the Moors to Spain. Other European countries might embark on strange crusades to wrest the Holy Land from the Saracens; the Spaniards, locked away from the rest of Europe by the formidable barrier of the Pyrenees, had their own crusade always on their doorstep. The Cross and St James was their battle-cry. No man with any claim to breeding regarded himself as other than a fighting machine. This was his job, his life, an integral part of his faith for eight centuries. It stamped him indelibly.
This crusade against the Moors was, however, an intermittent one. True to their history, the Spanish were cursed with internecine strife. Split by racial origin and terrain into petty states based on fortified towns, or on the castled strongholds of traditional nobility, they lacked the national unity and community of interest necessary to drive the invader into the sea. Indeed, they spent more time, energy and blood squabbling amongst themselves than in fighting the Moors, and it was only the lure of the lush valleys, so well developed by the conquerors, that brought them down from their bleak mountain fastnesses. Here in the plains,
they were at the mercy of the speedy Arab cavalry, and when they were successful, it was often only to exchange bleak impregnability for futile vulnerability, their labour and their crops exposed to ruthless counter-attack. Not until they had pushed the invader back over the Duero river did they have a natural barrier along which they could erect some proper form of defence work, and this was only achieved after a century and a half of sporadic fighting. Six hundred years were to pass before they reached the Tagus.