God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  This imagined Muslim–Aztec link was expressed in other ways as well. In the summer of 1573, for example, an indigenous merchant in Mexico named Pero Ximénez reported spotting off the Pacific coast “ships that were said to be of Turks or Moors.” A few weeks later, another indigenous Mexican reported seeing in the plaza of the town of Purificación “seven vassals of the Great Turk, all men of the sea, the spies of the princes.” These reports were extremely worrisome for the Spanish administration, especially since these Muslim “spies” were seen off the western coast of Mexico, in what we now know to be the Pacific Ocean. Were the Ottomans about to invade New Spain from the far side? The Spanish had sailed west to escape the Ottomans and Islam in the Mediterranean. If the Ottomans were now about to land on the western coast of the Americas, clearly all was lost. Spanish officials immediately set out to investigate. “García [the Crown’s agent] noted that the ships had been reported only by indigenous peoples living in the coastal towns whom Spanish authorities considered to be less reliable witnesses than Spaniards.” Alarmingly, he added that these “less reliable” indigenous people were preparing to enter into an alliance with the “Turks or Moors” against the Spanish.

  Were Indians and Ottomans now in cahoots against Spain in Mexico? Had Spain’s historic nemesis outflanked them, to navigate up and down the Pacific coast? How had Islam reached so far? Were the Spanish perhaps close to Asia after all—but an Asia which the Ottomans had already conquered? In their paranoid imagination, Old World animosities and Old World threats had reached the New World and, in fact, surrounded it. Spain’s Reconquista would thus have to continue its march in the Americas.

  “THE CONQUEST OF THE Indians began,” wrote one of the earliest sixteenth-century Spanish historians of the Americas, “after that of the Moors was completed, so that Spaniards would ever fight the infidels.” From Old World to New, Ottoman to Taino, Muslim to Indian, Reconquista to Conquista, Spain conceived of itself as engaged in a perpetual Crusade against non-Christians. In the Spanish apocalyptic mindset, Islam had somehow penetrated every realm of human habitation. Europeans’ ventures in the Americas “began as a kind of proxy war,” in one scholar’s rendition, “against the Islamic ghosts that still haunted their imaginations” after Granada. Thus, while the name El Gran Cairo did not stick as a place name in Mexico, Matamoros did.

  Santiago Matamoros, St. James the Moor-slayer, was said to have descended from heaven on a white horse in the year 822 to save the armies of the king of Aragon from a far larger and more powerful force of Muslim invaders. St. James was often invoked in subsequent battles between Spanish Catholics and Muslims, and depicted on his white horse, brandishing a sword, in paintings commemorating these battles. He thus became the patron saint of Spain’s wars with Islam, the patron saint of Moor-slaying. When the Catholic war against Islam crossed the ocean, it was only natural that Santiago would go with it.

  In 1535, during the Spanish invasion of what is today the city of Cuzco in Peru, Santiago was said to have appeared when a Spanish garrison was surrounded by Andean Indians attempting to push the Spanish out of their territory. With their patron saint’s help, the soldiers turned what surely would have been a bloodbath into a slaughter of the Indians. Santiago then became the patron saint of Cuzco, where large paintings of him were hung in the town’s cathedral. In a telling reimagination, though, his sobriquet was changed from Matamoros to the more appropriate Mataindios (Indian-slayer). Santiago Matamoros was thus imported from Europe to Peru and recast to fight against Spain’s new enemies. Interestingly, during a nineteenth-century revolt against Spanish colonial rule, recently Christianized Indians in Peru reimagined Santiago as their patron, too, invoking his help as Mataespañois—the Spaniard-slayer. Such rhetorical inversions serve as telling markers of the durable influence of anti-Muslim Crusade in the Americas.

  Santiago Matamoros, the patron saint of Moor-slaying

  CHAPTER

  9

  CHRISTIAN JIHAD

  Catholic torture of Native Americans

  SPECTACULAR OCEAN CROSSINGS AND SHIPWRECKS, SIGHTINGS OF massive New World cities, and dreams of grand transcontinental alliances soon yielded to a more mundane, but far more crucial aspect of early modern imperial expansion. Whether in Asia or the Caribbean, Trabzon or Hispaniola, all successful imperial conquests necessitated the administrative integration of the newly acquired territories. This was as true for the Spanish as it was for the Ottomans. Thus, Selim in eastern Anatolia and Columbus and Cortés in the Caribbean participated in a common venture in the years around 1500—attempting to bring new territories more securely under their empire’s rule, co-opting conquered populations, and generating revenue.

  An empire was, above all, the land it held. Columbus therefore devoted himself to the administration of land for the Spanish Crown—claiming it, registering it, surveying it, cultivating it, all ultimately to gain profit from it. He wrote to Isabella and Ferdinand, “No prince of Castile is to be found . . . who has ever gained more land outside of Spain, and Your Highnesses have these vast lands, which are an Other World where Christianity will have so much enjoyment and our faith so great an increase.” To make such “vast lands” productive, the Spanish exported to the Americas a system of land tenure they had first developed in territories conquered from Muslim empires in the south of Iberia, known as the encomienda. As in the Ottoman system, plots were granted to soldiers and other settlers to cultivate; they did not actually own the land, but held the right to profit from its produce. Since the Spanish lacked the manpower to properly cultivate these encomiendas, they forced America’s natives to provide labor, which was considered their “tax payment” to the Spanish Crown, and were under legal order to ensure that these subjugated laborers lived “like Christians.” In certain gold-rich areas, such as Haina in Cuba, Columbus also demanded that the local people pay him tribute in gold. Soon, colonists were sending back to Spain gold, foodstuffs, timber, spices, cotton, and slaves. As the Ottomans did, the Spanish quickly converted territorial conquest to great profit.

  Given the obvious vast potential of land in the Americas and the lack of previous Crown administration there, colonists, bureaucrats, and soldiers, along with all sorts of parvenus and treasure seekers, took advantage of the relative chaos of the first few decades of Spanish rule. The transition from being a maritime adventurer in pursuit of wealth and glory to being an agricultural colonial charged with crop rotation and roof thatching was a daunting one for many of the men who joined Columbus on his four voyages. In an unfamiliar locale, often in stifling heat, with insufficient food and rampant disease, many settlers succumbed. Only the lucky few, like Columbus, managed to sail back to Spain.

  Once word reached Spain of the perils of life in the New World, fewer and fewer settlers crossed the Atlantic. Even though most Indians rejected amicable relations with the Spanish, a smaller number did cooperate, and soon learned how to use their labor as a weapon. In the end, the Spanish, quite clearly, needed the Indians more than the Indians needed the Spanish. Almost all of the settlers were men, and when their camps disbanded, which they often did because of disagreements or power struggles, some of them moved into Indian communities. To gain acceptance, these men quickly had to forgo the violence and greed, rape and destruction that dominated European life in the Caribbean in these early years. Relationships with indigenous communities throughout the Caribbean and Mexico were thus the key to Spanish survival and success. From these cominglings of people from entirely different worlds, a new, uniquely American culture would emerge.

  AS AN ADMINISTRATOR, Columbus was largely a failure. He cared little for bureaucracy or turning a profit for the Crown. Desperate to rid himself of mundane responsibilities in order to concentrate on reaching the court of the Grand Khan and finding the gold that would fund the conquest of Jerusalem, he lobbied Ferdinand and Isabella to send judges to administer the new colonies and priests to convert the natives. So focused was he on his greater mission that he even forc
ed all of the men who sailed with him on his four voyages to sign statements that they believed Cuba to be mainland Asia, and continued to bring interpreters whom he hoped would help him communicate with the Grand Khan and the Nestorians. He would spend his final years compiling a book of prophecies about a Spanish messianic figure who would lead the conversion of the world to Christianity. A far cry from land tenure and agricultural labor—or even the search for new trade routes to reach the riches of the East—imperial conquest and Armageddon are what consumed Columbus.

  Columbus’s administrative incompetence cost him whatever loyalty and respect he may once have enjoyed among the Spanish settlers. In part, this was because he had no royal rank or office that demanded deference. Complaints about his ineptitude made their way back to Spain, forcing him to spend valuable time defending himself. As he wrote to Isabella and Ferdinand about one accusation:

  [It] was brought out of malice on the basis of charges made by civilians who had revolted and wished to take possession of the land. . . . In this endeavor I have lost my youth, my proper share in things, and my honor. . . . I was judged as a governor who had been sent to take charge of a well-regulated city or town under the dominion of well-established laws, where there was no danger of everything turning to disorder and ruin; but I ought to be judged as a captain sent to the Indies to conquer a numerous and warlike people of manners and religion very different from ours, living not in regular towns but in forests and mountains.

  Columbus saw himself as a sailor, conquistador, and explorer, not as a fastidiously tax-collecting, people-managing bureaucrat. He excelled in the imagination of conquest, but he failed at the realities of its consequences. He was, essentially, nothing more than a driven, rogue explorer.

  Crippled by arthritis and denied the grants and privileges he had previously enjoyed, Columbus died on May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain, surrounded by his family and shipmates. In his last years, he lobbied the Spanish Crown for the profits from land in the Caribbean he thought were his due as stipulated in various agreements, but given his failings in the minutiae of governance, and the by now clear sense of just how lucrative these Indies (whether they were East or West) could be, the Spanish sovereigns refused to give him anything. This did not make him destitute, in the end, but it did make him angry. His will instructed that all his documents—including his unfinished book prophesying the apocalypse—be sent to his family in Genoa, and that his son Diego ensure that Mass was said for the souls of his father, mother, and wife. Filipa had preceded her husband in death by at least two decades; his testament is one of only two mentions Columbus ever made of her.

  AFTER COLUMBUS’S DEATH, THE Spanish realized that their possessions in the Americas needed a legal basis beyond the personality of any single administrator. In 1513, the Crown promulgated a document known as the Requirement (Requerimiento), which became the central assertion of Spain’s legal dominion over the peoples of the New World. As a writ of conquest, the Requirement was nothing less than a doctrinal manifesto announcing a Spanish Catholic jihad on American Indians. The inherently Islamic features of Columbus’s anti-Islamic mission were unacknowledged, even suppressed, by nearly all his contemporaries; subsequent historians have largely maintained this silence. The imposition of the Requirement in the New World, however, unquestionably proves that Islam continued to shape Catholic Spain, even after its supposed defeat in Iberia, and, still more important for our purposes, that it also shaped Catholic Spain’s forays across the Atlantic.

  The conquistadors, typically unaware of the motive, were legally obliged to recite the Requirement’s precepts aloud at the outset of each new conquest. For the native peoples of the Americas, witnessing such a puzzling performance paled in comparison to the violence it portended. The Requirement became a ritualized part of Spanish warfare, an unsheathing of the sword before it was plunged into flesh. Its words remain central to our understanding of the age.

  It opened by proclaiming Christianity as God’s one true faith. “God our Lord one and eternal created heaven and earth . . . God our Lord gave charge [of all peoples] to one man named Saint Peter, so that he was lord and superior of all the men of the world . . . and gave him all the world for his lordship and jurisdiction (señorio y jurisdicción).” It then acknowledged all those who had already chosen, rightly, to accept God’s message. “Almost all who have been notified [of this] have received His Majesty and obeyed and served him, and serve him as subjects . . . and turned Christian without reward or stipulation . . . and His Majesty received them . . . as . . . subjects and vassals.”

  From here, the Requirement pivots to its central threatening summons:

  Therefore I beg and require you as best I can . . . [that] you recognize the church as lord and superior of the universal world, and the most elevated Pope . . . in its name, and His Majesty in his place as superior and lord and king . . . and consent that these religious fathers declare and preach . . . and His Majesty and I in his name will receive you . . . and will leave your women and children free, without servitude so that with them and with yourselves you can freely do what you wish . . . and we will not compel you to turn Christians.

  It then states directly that the choice before the peoples of the Americas was either Christianity or suffering:

  But if you do not do it . . . with the help of God, I will enter forcefully against you, and I will make war everywhere and however I can, and I will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and His Majesty, and I will take your wives and children, and I will make them slaves . . . and I will take your goods, and I will do to you all the evil and damages that a lord may do to vassals who do not obey or receive him.

  In a final affront, the Requirement blamed native peoples for any hardship that might befall them. “And I solemnly declare that the deaths and damages received from such will be your fault and not that of His Majesty, nor mine, nor of the gentlemen who came with me.”

  The tableau is ghastly to envision: bearded sailors about to make landfall screaming these Spanish imprecations from their ships to people who had no idea who these white men were or what they were shouting about. These indigenous Americans were required to acknowledge that the Catholic Church was the universal power of the world and that, by extension, their own belief system and culture were inferior if not infinitely wrong. They were granted the “freedom” to choose not to convert, at horrendous cost, though even this choice was eventually taken from them as the years wore on. What the conquistadors ultimately sought was an acknowledgment of the superiority of their religion. As long as this was recognized, native peoples could maintain their traditional beliefs and practices. Failure to acknowledge Christianity’s perfection and authority, however, ensured death and slavery. For the indigenous people of the Americas, the equation was simple: whether they converted or not, they had to accept the superiority of Christianity or seal their own death warrant.

  Warfare is always an arena of both belligerency and exchange. The Requirement’s “unique ritual demand for submission,” as opposed to conversion, derived directly from Spain’s historical experience with the Muslim practice of jihad. Despite modern-day distortions, jihad does not always, or even usually, have a military connotation. Its most general meaning is to struggle, to accept the summons to follow the path designated by God. Most commonly, this meant to endeavor to become a better person, a better servant of God—to strive toward the advancement of one’s personal faith, moral character, and religious practice. On occasion, when jihad did refer to taking up arms against an enemy, strict rules defined the combat. The first step of any jihad was to invite a non-Muslim enemy to convert to Islam, an act that, if performed, would eliminate the need for war. This invitation, which always occurred on the cusp of a potential war, was not only a way to avoid costly bloodshed but also a means of winning acknowledgment of Islam’s superiority.

  The summons in the Requirement was nearly identical in intent; Catholicism took the idea from Islam. In both the Cathol
ic Requirement and Islamic jihad, “refusal to acknowledge religious superiority was the moment of truth, for in both cases rejection justified war.” Again tracking Islamic beliefs, Catholicism’s jihad against native peoples assigned the responsibility for the unbeliever’s death solely to that individual. The Requirement was effectively jihad in Christian garb.

  “No other European state,” in the words of historian Patricia Seed, “created a fully ritualized protocol for declaring war against indigenous peoples.” Other European powers found the Spanish Requirement odd, if not barbaric; British, French, and Dutch officials criticized and mocked it as a recognition of and concession to Islam, their collective enemy. It was, as we have seen, a direct descendant of a culture that had dominated Spain for centuries, and it was thoroughly alien to the rest of Europe, where Islam had never ruled.

  There were Spaniards, too, who disapproved of the Requirement. The most famous dissenter was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who served as the first Bishop of Chiapas and is often memorialized as the “Protector of the Indians.” Las Casas eventually came to recognize that the atrocities Europeans were committing against indigenous Americans were indefensible. Unfortunately, his solution for overcoming this barbarity was no less barbaric—to ship African slaves to the New World instead of enslaving the natives. He wrote scathingly of the Requirement, considering the document vile. What would happen, he asked, if “Moors or Turks came to make the same requirement?” With this rhetorical question, he obviously meant to poke fun at the Requirement’s manifest Islamic origins. “Did the Spaniards show superior proof by witnesses and truer evidence of what they declared in their requirement . . . than the Moors showed of their Muhammed?” Criticizing the Requirement and the entire project of Spanish conquest in the Americas it supported, he wrote that it was inspired by “the Mohammedan procedures that our Spanish people have had since [Muslims] entered these lands.” He added, “Those who war on [indigenous American] infidels mimic Muhammad.” He also noted that the Requirement mentioned neither the Trinity—for Muslims, evidence of Christianity’s polytheism—nor Christ himself, both clear indications that the document was not born of the one true faith. For Las Casas to point to the Islamic origins of Spain’s statement of its political and legal authority in the New World was to challenge that authority’s legitimacy. As Spain’s most vocal advocate for the Indies and its peoples, Las Casas aimed to strike at the very heart of Spain’s violent overseas colonial project with his critique of the Requirement, while also cursing “Turks and Moors” as “the veritable barbarian outcasts of the nations.” Because all Spanish Catholics agreed that Islam was an abomination, Las Casas believed that if the Requirement’s connection to Islam was clarified, his fellow Spaniards would abandon it, along perhaps with the whole project of colonial empire. He was wrong.