Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  The most important edifice that the Christians inherited from Islam was, however, the aqueduct from the springs of Carmona, which brought water to Seville and which entered the city at the Carmona Gate, to the east.

  There was still everywhere in Seville an Oriental atmosphere, but the Renaissance was evidently on its way: the change was marked by the coming of wider roads, bigger squares in front of the palaces, and more obviously sumptuous buildings. Hitherto the streets had been narrow and labyrinthine, though mostly paved, but soon there would come the new “broad and happy” ones that so impressed Navagero, the Venetian ambassador, and also fine squares, though they were often full of rubbish.4

  With few exceptions, the Muslims had abandoned Seville after its conquest by the Christians, mostly for North Africa, and their properties had been handed out by the King to followers of his and to other soldiers, the decisions as to who would have which section being decided by lot. Most of the new inhabitants, “mothers of the new Castile that is Andalusia,”5 came indeed from Old Castile.6

  In the fifteenth century two great families came to dominate and dispute power in the city: the Guzmáns and the Ponces de León. The former had developed their interest in the land on either side of the lower Guadalquivir after the late thirteenth century, being lords of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the port where the river enters the Atlantic. They were the dukes of Medina Sidonia after 1445. The Ponces de León derived from Fernán Pérez Ponce, who became lord of Marchena, to the west of Seville, in the early fourteenth century, and his descendants became counts of Arcos de la Frontera in 1440, being afterwards marquises and dukes of Cadiz. The modern traveler may detect in Seville some remains of the old palaces of these families behind the Corte Inglés, in the Plaza del Duque de la Vitoria, and behind the Church of Los Terceros, in the Plaza de Ponce de Léon. But his imagination must be strong.

  A third family that began to rival the other two in the fifteenth century were the de la Cerdas, royal counts and then dukes of Medinaceli, lords of El Puerto de Santa María. A palace of the Medinacelis, the Casa de Pilatos, remains a center of both attention and affection. Other families who played a great part in Seville despite connections elsewhere were the Portocarreros, the Zúñigas, the Dávalos, the Saavedras, and, increasingly, the Afans de Riberas.7

  With much new commerce under way, the old aristocratic feud between the two most important families, the Ponces de León and the Guzmáns, had diminished in force. We should not forget a soothing intervention in the 1470s of Queen Isabel with Rodrigo Ponce de León, Marquis of Arcos, though the enmity between the two families was rekindled at the time of the rebellion of the comuneros. People with their surnames, younger sons of younger sons, no doubt, or perhaps bastards, had often gone to the Indies as emigrants in the first years of settlement.8 Francisca Ponce de León, daughter of Rodrigo, the redhaired hero of the war against Granada, financed one of the ships in the fleet of Diego Colón in 1509, and Mencía, the Duchess of Medinaceli, another. The multifarious role of Juan Ponce de León in the Caribbean has been much noticed in earlier chapters, and a member of the Guzmán family played a great part in the early history of both La Española and Cuba.

  Power in Seville, as elsewhere in cities in Castile, was vested in the town council. The cabildo, as this was known in Andalusia and soon in the Indies, had many privileges that disappeared during the course of the sixteenth century, but in 1522 these were still considerable, despite the increasing power of the asistente, by which title the centralizing official, elsewhere known as the corregidor, was known in Seville. This official was at the same time a mayor, a chief magistrate, the chief of the urban militia, and the local governor—in effect, the supreme local authority.

  The cabildo had judicial duties till 1553. The chief magistrates and their deputies administered justice alongside the judge of the Gradas (in theory appointed to decide disputes about marketing on the steps of the cathedral, but he acquired wider powers). The center of judicial authority was the Casa Quadra, in the Plaza de San Francisco, and the cabildo itself met in those days in the Corral de los Olmos (“Elm Tree Yard” might be a literal, though inappropriate, translation) in the Plaza del Arzobispado, next to the court of oranges.

  The asistente had as a rule a title of nobility, as did most of the forty or so senior councillors (known in Seville as the “Veinticuatros” because there had once been twenty-four of them), while the jurados (“the representatives of the people” in the phrase of King Enrique III, men popularly elected in the parishes) had to be of good family—which meant hidalgos. The six chief magistrates were great nobles named by the Crown (though soon the offices would be saleable): in 1522 they were the Dukes of Medina Sidonia and Béjar, the Marquises of Arcos, Tarifa, and Villanueva, and Martin Cerón, a commoner who conducted himself more ducally than most dukes. The chief constable (alguacil mayor) was the most important of the city’s executive officials, being named by the monarch for life, with lodgings in the cabildo. He was the executor of justice and presided at meetings if the chief magistrates were not there. He also organized nocturnal watches and was the commander of the prison.

  These noblemen of Seville controlled all municipal appointments, so it is not surprising that the chief notaries had been for several generations members of the Piñeda family; that the deputy to the chief constable, the alférez mayor, was always the Marquis of La Algaba; while the commander of the Alcázar was usually a Guzmán (the Count of Olivares). The commander of the castle of Triana was as a rule the Duke of Medina de las Torres. The officials carried out decisions of the cabildo (the fieles ejecutores), including two named by the councillors, two by the jurados, and two directly by the citizens. They controlled weights and measures, and such things as fishing rights. They visited the prisons and checked that the five hundred or more inmates were being fed, and were supposed to observe the enactment of punishments such as public beatings and executions to ensure that there was no untoward cruelty. They were never alone in such observations: the public liked to watch all such scenes, as well as the burnings inspired by the Inquisition just outside the city in the meadow of San Sebastián.

  These municipal activities were financed by the proceeds of local taxes: for example, the almojarifazgo, the alcabala, and the tercia. The first was levied on imports and exports, the second was a purchase tax on imports into the city, and the last was the Crown’s third share in the tithes offered to the Church.

  The Moorish walls of Seville, part Almoravid, mostly Almohad, surrounding the city, stretched almost four miles, with two hundred or so towers and twelve gates,9 as well as three or four small doors (postigos). Some stretches of the walls remain, for example near the Macarena Gate, though these are now scarred by bullet holes on the inside, a reminder that the executions carried out in Spain during the Civil War in the twentieth century were on a scale never seen in the days of Charles V. The most important of the towers in the sixteenth century were the Torre del Oro on the quay near the river and those of the Gate of Jerez, which housed the prison of San Hermenegildo. But each gate had towers, and most were lived in by relations or friends of officials on a wide variety of rents or other understandings.10 The Torre del Oro had been built by the Almohades as a watchtower and then used as a treasure chest. In 1522, it was employed by the Casa de Contratación to store the precious metals brought back from the New World. Cortés’s treasures sent back by his procuradores had been there for some months, to the fury of his father and friends. Seville, it was said, lay at the mouth of “a river of the Americas” that brought it gold and silver.11 Next to this tower there was always in the early sixteenth century an improvised crane that had been used to unload stone and other material needed for the cathedral.12

  From the walls to the east one could see the skillfully contrived three-hundred-yard bridge, also Muslim in origin, consisting of seventeen boats lying across the river, tied together by thick chains of iron; they linked the city with Triana, a dependent town, already really a suburb, import
ant for the manufacture of porcelain and soap. It was the home of many of the sailors who went to the New World, as it was of shipping, while its gloomy, half-ruined Moorish castle of St. George had become the local headquarters of the Inquisition—a prison as well as a secret magistracy.

  This bridge needed constant repair, the wood used being often obtained from the slopes of the Sierra Morena at Constantina. From time to time a stone bridge would be suggested to the cabildo or the Crown, but the idea always foundered, since it was thought that such a bridge would itself collapse because of the nature of the riverbed. Forward-looking citizens hoped that one day the River Guadalquivir would again be navigable up to Córdoba, as it had been in Roman days.

  The commander of the walls, and so the chief defender of the city in any emergency, was Fernando Enríquez de Ribera, Marquis of Tarifa. He had in 1522 been to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage—via Italy—and, bringing back a little holy soil from that doomed territory, would soon build the Casa de Pilatos in remembrance of the journey. He was accompanied by the poet Juan del Encina, whose imagination must have been put to good use when his patron suggested a reconstruction of the house of Pilate in Seville.

  From these walls one could see several monasteries outside the city: Las Cuevas, whose gardens delighted the Venetian Navagiero; the beautiful San Isidoro; and Los Remedios. Numerous orchards could also be seen: the Huerta del Corso, where the poet Baltasar del Alcázar would one day live, and the Huerta de la Flor in Triana, “the key to Aljarafe.” Beyond the walls to the north lay the remains of Roman Itálica and, closer to the southeast, the execution ground in the meadow of San Sebastián, as well as the Jewish cemetery, just beyond the Puerta de la Carne. One could also see how Fernando Colón, the learned and bibliophilous bastard son of the first Admiral, was building a garden near his house outside the Puerta de Goles. Then there was the beautiful Huerta del Rey opening onto the Campana countryside, where the Marquis of Tarifa had a lovely country house, surrounded by orange trees and with a lake.

  But the main sight to be seen lay to the east: the River Guadalquivir, the golden link with the Atlantic and the New World and, indeed, with the Old World as well. There were still innumerable fish in this river, from lampreys to perch. On the banks there was the Arenal, a word that literally signified a place of sand, but here it had been dignified to indicate a world. One could observe each year ever greater maritime activity, for here Seville’s commerce with the New World was organized. It was an activity already too extensive for the Arenal: there were not enough quays (and only one was of stone), too few moorings, and little space for expansion. Every year new shipbuilders would seek to break into the old circle of competitors, some being on the brink of great fortunes.13 Merchants and sailors, captains and galley slaves, sellers of the goods needed for a journey to the Americas and notaries listing them, beggars and pilgrims, criminals hoping to arrange an escape, and adventurers dreaming of fortunes, all met on the Arenal. Poets were to be found there as well as prostitutes; the wives of galley slaves and of sailors could all be easily observed.

  By 1522 the principal interest of the merchants was already the Indies. The ships being built for that trade were not large in comparison with the galleys that plied the Mediterranean, being rarely over one hundred tons’ burden, but there were many of them: between 1506 and 1515, 289 ships sailed for the Indies; and between 1516 and 1525, 499.14 The shipping register for Seville shows that the main destinations of vessels in these years were the Canaries and the New World.15

  The ships that sailed to the New World were of many types, but the food carried on them was usually what it had been on the expedition of Pedrarias: chickens and horses, but no cows or other large animals. The average sailor could expect a liter of wine a day and perhaps a half kilo of ship’s biscuits. To these might be added oil, vinegar, chickpeas, beans, dried or salted meat, and fish.16 Every day an observer on the walls would see packing of one sort or another.

  The merchants were beginning to bring back a diversity of American products: “brazil” dyewood and slaves, as well as gold and pearls. Soon there would be sugar from Caribbean cane, pineapples, potatoes, and tomatoes. These last three products were still scarcely known, but King Fernando had eaten potatoes and had tasted a pineapple and a few of both would soon be seen on the Arenal.

  Within the walls of Seville the main buildings were connected with religion. Christianity dominated life. Men built churches to inspire, to overpower, and also to impress, for they were works of propaganda as well as of spiritual comfort. Private houses and palaces, however noble, seemed by comparison modest edifices in Seville, hiding in the Arab manner in impasses rather than facing avenues, though a few were just beginning to have a square in front of them, as was the case of the palace of the Duke of Medina Sidonia in what is now the Plaza de la Victoria. The exception to this was the magical palace of the Alcázar, a Moorish building enlarged and improved by the Christian King, Pedro the Cruel.

  The biggest square was probably that of La Laguna, now the Alameda de Hercules, where bulls were regularly fought. But there was also the arcaded Plaza de San Francisco, already with pretty miradores and a fine fountain at one end, bordered by the town hall, the supreme court, the monastery of San Francisco, and the prison. A market in the square sold bread, fish, meat, and fruit and vegetables. Nearby there was the Plaza de San Salvador, in front of the old mosque, where rope sellers, candlemakers, and greengrocers plied their wares with zest.

  The city was full of fountains: some public, many private in the patios of large houses. Perhaps they numbered three hundred in all,17 the water coming by the aqueduct from Carmona.

  The great building of Seville was the cathedral. Still today an object of awe with its seven aisles and its great height (145 feet in the nave, 170 in the dome), in the early sixteenth century it was for a time the largest building in Europe. Completed in 1506, and opened for services the following year, it had been begun in 1402 when the Almohad mosque, built by Al-Mansur but used as a church since 1248, had been at last pulled down. The archbishop responsible had determined to build on a large scale. The chapter is supposed to have said: “Let posterity when it admires it completed say that those who dared to devise such a work must have been mad.” The cathedral was then bigger than the old St. Peter’s in Rome, though Pope Julius II’s new version would overtake it.

  The cathedral was built on the basilicalike site of the old mosque and influenced by it: 430 feet long by over 300 wide. The first architect was probably Charles Galter of Rouen, on whose cathedral he had also worked. The detail indeed owed a great deal to French models. The chapter planned one hundred windows, of which the finest had been finished by 1522, including those by the master craftsman Cristóbal Alemán. There were numerous side chapels, some incomplete, though the legend was that the pretty Virgin of La Antigua—in the chapel of her name, with a rose in her hand and so admired by Columbus—had been painted by St. Luke himself and had remained miraculously hidden throughout the five hundred years of Muslim domination. (She had then played her part, so romantics said, in the liberation of the city by St. Ferdinand.) Columbus called a Carib island in the Leeward Islands after this Virgin, and Balboa’s capital at Darien had been named for her, too.

  Another picture in the cathedral was that of the Virgin of the Remedios on the main screen, painted about 1400 by a follower of the Sienese school. That Virgin had been a favorite of Hernán Cortés, and a friend of his from Medellín, Juan Rodríguez Villafuerte, had carried an image of her to Tenochtitlan and placed her in the temple of Huitzilopochtli in 1519.18 Cortés had prayed to her near Tacuba on the west bank of the lake of Tenochtitlan, the day after the noche triste. Already in 1522 there were plans for the building of a sanctuary there, which would become in time the favorite church of Mexico’s criollos.

  The cathedral in Seville, like the commerce to the New World, was an international undertaking, for the golden reredos behind the high altar was a collaboration between the Castilian Jorge
Fernández and the Fleming Pieter Dancart. Nearby stood the rich tomb, finished in 1510, of Archbishop Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who died in 1504. This was the work of the Italian known as Miguel Florentino, while some of the external sculpture was the work of a Frenchman, Michel Perrin.

  Beside the cathedral stood the Giralda, the Muslim tower built in the twilight of Almohad rule, whence, for 250 years, bells had summoned Christians to Mass on behalf of St. Justina and St. Rufina, the two patrons of Seville, Christian daughters of a potter of Triana who had insulted the goddess Salambo and had been put to death in the days of Diocletian.19 The cathedral probably employed three hundred people, not counting servants. These included archdeacons of nearby towns as well as the priors of the local hermitages. There were 40 canons, 20 prebendaries, 230 assistant prebendaries, 29 clerks, and many choirboys. The chapter of the cathedral owned a substantial number of towns outside Seville.20

  On the steps, las gradas, that surrounded this vast building and next to stone pillars that had served both the Roman temple and the Muslim mosque were to be found traders, sellers of trinkets as of jewels, big merchants and small shopkeepers, and, above all, money changers, the majority Jewish in the fifteenth century, many Genoese in the early sixteenth. The observant Venetian Navagero would write of how the merchants lingered all day in this, “the most attractive corner of Seville.”21 If it rained, the merchants would go into the cathedral itself, their horses and other animals accompanying them.

  In the shadow of the cathedral (metaphorically speaking) lay nearly thirty parish churches and forty monasteries or convents. The most important was surely that of the Carthusians in Cuevas, founded in 1400. (Columbus’s bones were there, with those of his brothers,22 and Columbus’s great friend at the end of his life, Fray Gaspar Gorricio, had lived his last years in that retreat.)23 Navagero wrote that the gardens were so pretty that they constituted the best stepping-stone possible on the way up to Heaven. Then there were the Franciscans, three hundred brothers in two houses, the most significant one being just outside the old walls (on the site of the modern Plaza de San Francisco); and the Dominicans at their four sites of San Pablo, La Magdalena, Santo Tomás, and Nuestra Señora del Valle (refounded in 1507), with about 250 brothers all told. Both these orders had already made an impact on the islands of the empire in the Caribbean. The Dominican monastery of Santo Tomás was much associated with the Inquisition, for the first two Inquisitors of Seville in the 1480s had been friars there.