Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  Juan Ponce de León, meanwhile, made another journey in 1521. He had by then been outmaneuvered in Puerto Rico by Judge Sancho Velázquez, who was the de facto governor and was, as it were, again looking for new islands to conquer. (Ponce had the title in Puerto Rico of “captain-general,” but that meant little.) He was now the only survivor from the early days of the settlements in the Caribbean, and he remained interested in Florida. He set out there once more in February 1521 from San Juan, with 250 men in four ships for which he himself paid. He carried some Franciscans with him, as well as a great deal of agricultural equipment, for he planned a colony. He wanted it to be established on Sanibel Island, at the mouth of the River Caloosahatchee, in west Florida (near present-day Fort Myers), but the Indians resisted the landing, and Ponce was wounded by a poisoned arrow. Carried back to Cuba, he died in pain near the present port of Havana in July, his remains eventually being transferred to Puerto Rico where they rest now in the Cathedral of San Juan.32

  The expedition, and the plans for settlement, were abandoned.

  At the end of May 1522, the King-Emperor Charles left Brussels and returned to Spain via England. This time he stayed in the latter country for several weeks, until July 6, when he embarked for Spain from Southampton, arriving at Santander ten days later. With him traveled four thousand German and Flemish soldiers. From there he went to Reinosa, then to Aguilar de Campoo and Palencia, which he reached on August 5 and where he held the first Council of the Realm after the rebellion of the comuneros. There was discussion about punishments after that conflict: Francisco de los Cobos and Bishop Ruiz de la Mota, like Bishop Fonseca and Hernando de Vega, took a hard line, while the men who had really saved the kingdom, Constable Velasco and Admiral Enriquéz, favored pardons.33

  There followed a short period of repression during which occurred the execution of most of the leading procuradores and others who had led the comuneros: Alonso de Saravia, of Valladolid, for example, and Pedro de Sotomayor, of Madrid, as well as Juan de Solier, of Segovia. One of the last executions in the first list, on August 16, was that of Pedro Maldonado Pimentel, after an unsuccessful appeal for a pardon by his uncle, the Count of Benavente, supported by the Regents Velasco and Enríquez. Also executed were some of those who seemed to have inspired the risings. It may come as a surprise, though, to the modern reader, used in the twentieth century to long lists of dead men after civil wars in Spain as elsewhere in Europe, that those who died in 1522, either as a result of the executioner’s axe or because of illness in prison, totaled about one hundred. There were few days in Spain in 1939 after the Civil War when that figure was not exceeded.34

  In Seville, capital of the empire as it was about to become, the revival of traditional authority was warmly celebrated. The prostitutes of the Compás de Mancebía danced on the steps of the cathedral, bulls were run in the Plaza de San Francisco, and there was a regatta on the river.35 It seemed as if the golden age was about to begin.

  Book Eight

  NEW SPAIN

  One weapon of the conquistadors in America was communication. Here is Cortés talking to Moctezuma through his interpreter, Marina.

  (Illustration credit 8.1)

  33

  “I am to pass away like a faded flower”1

  I am to pass away like a faded flower

  My fame will be nothing

  My fame on earth will vanish.

  A poem of ancient Mexico as translated by Father Garibay2

  In the wings of Spain’s imperial efforts in the Caribbean in the early sixteenth century were the two large and powerful societies of the mainland, those of the Mexica (Aztecs) and the Incas. They were in some ways closer in their wealth and sophistication to the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean of antiquity than to the societies of the Caribbean. No one in Europe knew anything of either of them before 1518.

  About 1950, a fine German scholar, Richard Konetzke, invented a new word for Mexico with Central America, in pre-Columbian days: Mesoamerica. It is a ponderous word that has not become part of the general vocabulary of well-educated people. It is useful, however, since it embraces the many diverse peoples, speaking more than five hundred distinct languages, who occupied these territories about 1500. There were probably 10 million people living in 1519 in these lands.3

  The history of old Mesoamerica can be divided into two eras: the time that can be learned about only from archaeology or from other artifacts, including painted remains, such as can be seen in the sites of Bonampak or Caxcala; and the era of the Mexica, whose regime survived into the sixteenth century and of whom much can be learned by conventional historical means, such as chronicles composed by persons with indigenous blood in the sixteenth century.4

  Many of the distinctive elements of ancient Mexico developed in the hot territory near what we now call the Gulf of Mexico, the provinces of Tabasco and Vera Cruz: for example, pyramids in ceremonial centers; human sacrifices on top of those pyramids; ball games; art based on clay figurines; hieroglyphs; arithmetic built around the number twenty; a solar calendar; a love of jade; and elaborate commerce, with markets. Later, societies developed in the higher, temperate lands, but those always seemed to need or to wish for tropical products: jaguar skins, say, feathers from fine birds, or cotton. But all these different peoples, in the coastal regions as in the temperate zone, participated in what can be represented as a single historical experience.5

  Consider first the Olmecs, who flourished between about 1200 and 600 B.C. The immense stone heads to be seen in many of Mexico’s museums, above all in the Garden Museum at Coatzacoalcos, much jade carving, and stone altars testify to these people’s ingenuity. They obviously had knowledge of astronomy, they carved wood imaginatively, and they had highly decorated ceramics, colored by paints and dyes. By 650 B.C. they seem to have had primitive writing in the form of simple glyphs on a cylindrical seal.6 They used drums, primitive flutes, and conch shells as musical instruments, and they had, too, awls, hooks, needles, and spatulas. The Olmecs lived in the coastal region, in what has been in the late twentieth century a zone for oil and known for its rubber; the word “Olmec” indeed signifies rubber in Nahuatl, the language used as a lingua franca in central Mexico in the early sixteenth century.7 The Olmecs constitute a mystery, though, in many ways. We do not know, for instance, whether they had an empire or whether their physical type was close to the sculpted heads for which they are best known. Though they were in many ways at a high level of civilization, they lacked two essentials: domesticated animals and the wheel.

  The reasons for this first “leap forward” of the Olmecs, comparable to what occurred in the Old World in Egypt or Babylon, are disputed. Probably the availability of water from rivers, lagoons, and rain was critical. The first constituted a channel of communication, the second were full of game and wildfowl. Also, malaria was unknown, as were yellow fever and the other tropical diseases brought by the Europeans and that afterwards flourished in these marshlands.

  The second formidable society of old Mesoamerica was the Maya, whose golden age was between about A.D. 250 and 900. Much characteristic Maya work may have been done long before that, and, indeed, there are those who believe that they “could even have acted as an influence on the emergent Olmec society.”8 Whenever they first appeared on the large map of Mexican experience, the Maya seem to have been the most refined of the predecessors of the Europeans. The stucco bas-reliefs at Palenque, the paintings on the walls of Bonampak, and their painted vases almost recall the designs of ancient Greece. Maya achievements included palaces of limestone, with fine vaulted rooms based on a false arch,9 as well as inscribed stelae that they placed in front of their buildings. The Maya were also mathematicians, able to make calculations as accurate as the Babylonians’. They had a solar calendar that began in the year 3133 B.C. that had an error of only 3/10,000ths of a day every year. Mayan scribes made beautiful painted books, of which five survive. They used turkey feathers to carry out this work, which they dipped into black or r
ed paint.10 They carved stone elegantly and built magnificent ceremonial cities, of which 230 have been identified. The largest of these, Tikal, in what is now Guatemala, with its three thousand buildings, was the home of anything between ten thousand and forty thousand citizens, on a site six square miles in size. Maya agriculture was primarily based on the so-called slash-and-burn method, but they probably relied on chinampas, an imaginative congeries of floating gardens—hence, perhaps, their use of the water lily as an emblem.

  At the summit of their achievement, the Maya probably numbered about a million people. They worshipped 160 gods and enjoyed much trade. Their most splendid achievement is the Temple of the Sun at Palenque. The Temple of the Inscriptions in the same magical city boasted the only tomb in a pyramid in Mesoamerica—that of Prince Pacal, whose dead body was covered with the finest jade.

  The end of the Maya civilization remains a mystery. But we do know that, in contrast with what was once supposed to be the case, these gifted people frequently fought among themselves. The paintings at Bonampak depict battles, and the annals of minor Maya tribes describe little else. But bellicosity was not the cause of catastrophe, any more than it would be in Europe. The Maya were probably conquered by a people from the north—from Teotihuacan. Toward the end of the seventh century A.D. there also appear to have been natural disasters—droughts, hurricanes—that led to social unrest. The ceremonial cities were abandoned. When the Spaniards began to arrive off the coast of Yucatan, the Maya constituted a collection of separate cities of a lower level of culture than their ancestors had reached five hundred years before. Just as modern scholars in Europe often cannot read Latin, it is not obvious that even their priests could read the inscriptions of their own golden age.

  Before the fall of the Maya, and apparently unrelated to them, the vast city of Teotihuacan had been built in a fertile valley to the northeast of the present capital of Mexico. Founded about the time of Christ, Teotihuacan probably had a population of 200,000 people in A.D. 600, on a site covering two thousand acres. The place was a commercial center, with ball courts, palaces, several marketplaces, and good drainage. Skilled craftsmen worked feathers and obsidian there, and painted ceramics, while merchants organized trade over long distances in all directions. In Teotihuacan itself, the long Avenue of the Dead, with its pyramids dedicated to the Sun and the Moon (the one to the Sun was as large, though not as high, as the Great Pyramid in Egypt) was a nobler road than any in Europe at that time, while the regular pattern of the lesser streets would have delighted the Roman architect Vitruvius. Unlike the Maya, the people of Teotihuacan did not prize sculpture, but mural painters flourished. The city seems to have been a theocracy, with the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl, occupying a place of honor in a pantheon that included other gods who were still recognizable under different identities when the Spaniards came, such as Tlaloc, the god of rain. Teotihuacan was served by an agriculture that, like that of the Olmecs, relied on those wonderful floating gardens as well as terraces and irrigated fields.

  As with the Olmecs, the politics of Teotihuacan constitutes a mystery since, despite its size and its high culture, no one knows who the people were who lived there or whether they had any connection with the Maya. As with the latter, no one knows if they had an empire. But all the same, the memory of this city dominated the imaginations of succeeding cultures much as that of Roma Antiqua influenced medieval and Renaissance Europe. Its influence stretched as far as present-day Honduras in the south and Colorado in the north, while the big pyramids of Cholula, to the east of the city of Mexico, and Tajín, on the coast, were probably built by colonists who came from Teotihuacan.

  Another mystery comparable to the end of the Maya is what eventually happened to the city. One supposition is that the people lost faith when rain failed for several years. The divided city may then have fallen prey to barbarians from the north.

  Teotihuacan became the archetype for subsequent societies in the country, even for modern Mexico. The city thus inspired Tollan, a military-minded state built on its ruins, and through Tollan it directly affected Mexico-Tenochtitlan.

  The Toltecs, who lived in Tollan, were less creative than the people of Teotihuacan and the Maya. Until the 1940s, their capital was believed to have been Teotihuacan, but it now seems that modern Tula, a bleak, windy city to the west of Teotihuacan, is a more likely candidate. At all events, the Toltecs dominated the valley of Mexico during what in Europe would be called the high Middle Ages, say A.D. 1000 to 1200. Their significance is fourfold: First, their language, Nahuatl, became widely spoken in the region. Second, they were warlike, and some Toltecs captured much of Yucatan in the tenth century. There they established a new version of Mayan civilization responsible for such remarkable cities as Chichén Itzá. The expedition there is sometimes associated with the story of the flight of the god Quetzalcoatl, who was reputed to have fled Tollan, perhaps because he opposed human sacrifice. Third, the Toltecs passed knowledge of all the old cultures of Mesoamerica on to the Mexica. Fourth, they had a cult of death, with an increasing use of human sacrifice, and they began the curious custom of building ceremonial walls of skulls.

  Probably there was a drought in Tollan in the twelfth century that led to political upheavals from which, once again, northern barbarians are said to have profited. The city is said to have fallen about A.D. 1175. Another Toltec city, Cualhuacan, also in the valley of Mexico, lingered longer.

  By that time, a nomadic people of the north, who survived into historical times, had reached the great lake in the middle of the valley. They were at first considered barbarians by the other sedentary people around the lake. Legends at the time of the Spanish conquest in 1521 linked them with a legendary birthplace called Aztatlán, or “the place of cranes.” (The Lake of Mexico was drained by the Europeans.)

  These Mexica made their way south on the suggestion of the priests who accompanied them. They were apparently divided into clans (calpulli), and took about a hundred years to reach the valley of Mexico, which was by then studded with villages, and had been dependent on the Toltecs and, before that, on Teotihuacan. The prehistory of this people is unknown since it was reconstructed to serve contemporary politics in the fifteenth century. But it seems that when the Mexica arrived, the dominant people near the lake were the Tepaneca, who exerted their influence in the usual way, extorting tributes and threatening war. They had occupied all the best sites, so the newcomers found it hard to find a resting place. The Mexica first went, myths insist, to the hill of Chapultepec, “the hill of the locusts,” now in the center of Mexico City, but then on the edge of what was the great lake. Expelled from there, they moved to a rocky island in the lake itself already known as Tenochtitlan. The priests told the Mexica that they were destined to settle there, since they had seen an eagle on it sitting on a cactus, eating a snake—a clear guide, as it seemed by the interpretation of legends, as to where to settle.

  The Mexica remained the vassals of the Tepaneca for a hundred years. They absorbed from them much of what has subsequently been thought of as typically Aztec; for example, the cult of the god Quetzalcoatl and that of Tlaloc, god of rain, the use of the pyramids for sacrifices, the growth of a priestly class, commerce in obsidian and in feathers, craftsmanship in jade, and the use of calendars. The Mexica, as the Spaniards later found, were adept at copying other peoples’ inventions. But they maintained some of their own traditions, such as the worship of their cruel god of war and of hunting, Huitzilopochtli, who became a co–supreme deity alongside Tlaloc—a most unusual cohabitation.11

  Much as the Goths seized political control from their masters, the Romans, so did the Mexica from the Tepaneca. The decisive coup d’état occurred at the end of the 1420s. Itzcoatl, a Mexica leader apparently of Toltec blood, first killed his own appeasement-minded predecessor and then the last Tepanec monarch. He and his descendants—there were six emperors between him and Moctezuma II, who was reigning in 1519—established a bigger empire over central Mexico than any th
at had preceded them. It extended from the line of Guanajuato-Querétaro in the north to the Tehuantepec peninsula in the south. Within this territory about thirty identifiable peoples paid tribute to the Mexica in return for protection—protection from the Mexica themselves, if from no one else.

  Like Rome, Tenochtitlan was a city-state writ large, and the center of power remained in the capital: an astonishing achievement of urban planning. Its central square was twice as large as that in Salamanca, or so said Cortés, while to the impressionable conquistadors the canals, markets, and palaces caused the place to resemble Venice.12 But Mexico-Tenochtitlan was bigger than Venice was in 1519 and larger than any European city of that time, save perhaps Constantinople.

  The Spaniards described the ruler of the Mexica as an “emperor.” Despite some criticisms, the word has remained. The usage has its point, since the ruler of Mexico was the overlord of a number of other monarchs, who were usually referred to as “kings.” So his standing seemed comparable to the relation of the Holy Roman Emperor and the subordinate electors and dukes in Germany. But the literal translation of the word that the ancient Mexicans used, hueytlatoani, is “high spokesman.” The lesser states were ruled by tlatoanis, “spokesmen.” The words remind us that the rulers of Mexico were expected, above all, to be able to talk eloquently. In the pioneering work of anthropology known as the Florentine Codex, compiled by the indefatigable Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in the middle of the sixteenth century, there are many examples of the kind of oration that the emperor or his colleagues at the court of the Mexica might have used.