Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The drive to evangelize Asia was unfortunately blighted continuously by rivalry among the religious orders. It was a long and unedifying story that brought no credit to any of the parties concerned. The incredible success of the Jesuits in Japan had been achieved through the channel of the padroado conceded to the Portuguese crown. The Portuguese clergy based their activities on the chain of settlements extending from Goa to Melaka and Macao, terminating in Nagasaki. It was also the route taken by the annual Jesuit trading ship. Though other religious orders had made periodic efforts to break into the Portuguese/Jesuit monopoly, Philip II always respected the system that divided Asia into Portuguese and Spanish spheres of influence. As soon as he died, the mendicant orders in 1599 pleaded with Philip III to rule that future missions to Japan should go from Manila and not from Goa and Macao. The pope, Clement VIII, decreed in 1600 that the priority of Goa should be maintained. The decision created uproar among the friars, principally the Franciscans, and the controversy did not abate until a subsequent pope revoked the decree in 1608.

  In the Philippines the Christian clergy had to face first of all the formidable obstacle of language. The natives spoke a bewildering diversity of tongues and dialects,106 which varied from one island to another. Of the six major languages on Luzon, the most important in the Manila area was Tagalog. With a few distinguished exceptions, priests from Spain were usually unable to cope with the problem, though most managed some form of basic communication with their parishioners. The lack of any social contact between the tiny Spanish-speaking population in Manila, and the dispersed mass of Filipinos throughout the provinces, had the consequence that after more than three centuries of Spanish domination less than ten per cent of the population in 1900 could speak Castilian.107 And the greater part of that ten per cent had learnt the language only after the end of the eighteenth century, when educational changes made the use of Castilian obligatory.

  The task of converting the natives was made worse by the fact that few clergy were willing to come all the way out to the islands from Europe. The total length of a journey from Spain to Manila could be as much as two years, with attendant risks of illness and death; unsurprisingly, many priests sent out to the Philippines refused to go farther than New Spain. Notwithstanding all the obstacles, the Church in the islands regularly claimed to be baptizing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos every year. Soon, by the early seventeenth century, it was claimed that the Philippines were Catholic.

  In reality the problems encountered by the Church here were much the same as in America, and the solutions were no more accessible. By the 1620s a leading friar was already expressing clear despair at the limited success achieved by missionaries. In effect, the quality of Catholicism never reached the levels hoped for by the clergy, but on the other hand the number of natives considered to be Christian in the mid-seventeenth century was well over half a million people. By the end of Spanish colonial rule, two types of Christianity could be found in the islands.108 One was the religion of the Spanish clergy and the small number of colonists of Spanish origin. The other was the ‘folk Catholicism’ of the people, sharply differentiated from the former by both race and language. Spanish clergy lamented and regretted the division, but in perspective there were many reasons for the Filipinos to be satisfied with the purely cultural consequences. They received from Iberian Catholicism many rich and colourful elements not to be found in their traditional religion, and at the same time were integrated into a broader social and economic role than they had hitherto experienced. Fray Domingo de Navarrete reported in the seventeenth century that ‘the fervour which people used to have in Castile has been passed to the native men and women in Manila. They celebrate feast days very well, in their processions they dance, and play on the guitar.’109 Catholicism of some sort managed to take root among the native people of Luzon and other islands. By contrast, it failed entirely among other Asians who lived in the archipelago. The Chinese feigned conversion because it helped their trade, but when in 1762 the British occupied Manila they unanimously abandoned the religion of the Spaniards.

  The Church was perhaps the only flourishing sector of Spanish society in the islands. It controlled the biggest agricultural estates (though the proportion of land it held, relative to land under cultivation, was always fairly small), and was numerically the most important Spanish presence. In 1722 there were said to be over fifteen hundred religious in the islands, a figure that exceeded the total of the Spanish lay population.110 And Church influence was always dominant. When they wished, the clergy could provoke riots against Spanish administrators they did not like. In 1719 they incited a mob that burst into the palace of Governor Bustamante and murdered him.

  The vast sea that washed the shores of New Spain, California, and Peru on one side, and Maluku and the Philippines on the other, was claimed by Spain in the sixteenth century as ‘the Spanish Sea’,111 and Spanish navigators certainly pioneered many of its waters. But the dimensions of the Pacific eluded any attempt to claim it as the mare clausum or ‘closed sea’ of a single nation. The Spanish and Portuguese enjoyed an initial advantage in that, unlike the civilizations of China and Japan, they were active long-distance seafarers and faced little competition from either Asians or Europeans. The natural hazards of the ocean route, particularly its terrifying storms, also deterred those who might try to break into the Spanish monopoly. But this happy situation only lasted half a century. The daring of the English, and the determination of the Dutch, soon exposed the weaknesses of Spain's claims in a virtually limitless space that they were unable to control and that became the arena, much later, for pioneers such as Cook and Bougainville. The expeditions of Malaspina around the year 1790 came too late to reclaim for Spain a significant role in the evolution of what had once been viewed, with an undeniable but naive optimism, as their sole preserve.

  6

  The Frontier

  Everybody says there is not a man who would not bring his wife and children to this country so as to take them away from the want and poverty in Spain, because a single bad day here is worth more than any good day in Castile.

  Alonso Herojo, from New Granada, 15831

  The expansion of horizons in the imperial age offered to Spaniards an almost endless range of opportunities to better themselves. They saw before them a constantly evolving frontier, whose essential component always was the hope of freedom.2 There were enormous obstacles, such as those of distance and climate, to achieving what they sought, but very many were able to adapt to the difficulties and overcome them. The going was not always easy, as they quickly realized. Spaniards in the New World were able to overthrow the regime of the Mexicas and the Incas, but then came up against the very obstacles that had limited those native empires: the unconquered frontier. One example at the confines of the South American lands may serve. The Incas had never been able to extend their control south of the Bío-Bio river in Chile, and the Spaniards in their turn lost out to the indomitable Araucanians who controlled the area and fiercely resisted all outsiders. The conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, who was appointed governor of Chile by Pizarro, successfully penetrated southwards and in 1541 founded the town of Santiago in a land that he named Nueva Extremadura after his native country. But the way forward was blocked by the Araucanians, who captured him during an expedition in 1554, and apparently put him to death by pouring molten gold down his throat.

  The frontier towards which the Spaniards pushed was also pioneered by women.3 They were, in the first place, the women of the new lands. The Europeans and Africans who came were overwhelmingly male, and immediately accepted the need to take indigenous women as companions. The early conquistadors were delighted to meet acceptable women among the tribes, like those in Colombia who were said to be ‘fair of feature, not too dark in complexion, and with more grace than the other women of the New World’. From the beginning, Europeans were impressed by the ability of American women to defend themselves, a phenomenon that gave birth to the pervasive legend of the
Amazons, whose existence was mentioned in the letters of Cortés. Even far out in the Pacific, Pigafetta claimed to have heard a report that ‘on the island of Ocoloro, south of Java, there live only women, who kill men if they dare to visit the island’.4 By the 1530s in Colombia a report from Bogotá stated that ‘we heard of a nation of women who live apart, without men, for which reason we call them Amazons’.5 The historian Oviedo mentioned several Spaniards who claimed to have heard of the phenomenon, although by contrast at least one conquistador, Nuño de Guzmán, when he spoke to Oviedo in 1547 referred to the legend as a ‘monstrous lie’, because he had been in those parts and seen nothing to confirm it.

  The chroniclers without exception narrate stories of heroic native warriors, like the girl in the vicinity of Cartagena who killed eight members of a landing party before she was overpowered, or the women of the Urabá region who ‘go to battle with their men’. Without the support of the women of the new lands, life for the invaders would have been intolerable. Cortés owed the success of his expedition in large measure to Marina, who had been given to him along with nineteen other women of the Tehuantepec coast, when he was on his way to Mexico. He already had a wife in Cuba, Catalina, and he never married Marina. But she gave him invaluable help as an interpreter, and bore him sons; later she married an encomendero of Xochimilco. ‘Without Doña Marina’, Bernal Díaz wrote succinctly, ‘we would not have understood the language of Mexico.’ Many other conquistadors, great and small, took native mistresses or wives, particularly from among the native nobility.6 The alliance between Tlaxcala and Cortés, for example, was sealed through the marriage of Spaniards with native ladies who were first formally baptized. Ladies of Montezuma's family likewise married Spanish soldiers. One of the most significant of these unions, because it offered (like the relationship of Marina with Cortés) a bridge between Europeans and the New World, was the marriage in Cusco of the conqueror Garcilaso de la Vega with Isabel, a niece of Atahualpa. Their son, who spent his adult life in Spain, was the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the illustrious historian of his own Inca forebears.

  Women who went out from the peninsula were truly valiant, considering the enormous distances they had to overcome: first from their home towns to Seville, then the fearful crossing from Seville, and finally the long journeys within the continent of America. A lady in Mexico in 1574, writing to her father in Spain, recalled the terrors of the voyage and hesitated to recommend that he come. ‘You have written to say you wish to come here’, she commented, ‘but the sea voyage is so dreadful that I did not dare send for you, and on every crossing there is an outbreak of sickness; the ships on which we came lost so many people that only one in four survived. Valdelomar [her husband] is fine on land, but he suffered so badly on the crossing he made that he and the children nearly died, and they still have not recovered.’7 It is easy to understand why the even more extended crossing to Manila deterred both men and women from going to Asia.

  Few first-hand accounts communicate more directly the contribution of women to the enterprise of the Indies than the report, written twenty years after the event, of the lady Isabel de Guevara, one of those who participated in the ill-fated expedition of Pedro de Mendoza (Chapter 4, above) to the Río de la Plata in 1536. It merits a lengthy quotation:

  On reaching the port of Buenos Aires our expedition contained one thousand five hundred persons, but food was scarce and the hunger was such that within three months one thousand of them died. The men became so weak that all the tasks fell on the poor women, washing the clothes as well as nursing the men, preparing them the little food there was, keeping them clean, standing guard, patrolling the fires, loading the crossbows when the Indians came to do battle, even firing the cannon. Afterwards they decided to ascend the Paraná, in which voyage the women worked the sail, steered the ship, sounded the depth, bailed out the water, took the oar when a soldier was unable to row, and exhorted the soldiers not to be discouraged. And the truth is, no one forced the women to do those things. Thus they arrived at the city of Asunción. And the women had to turn to their tasks anew, making clearings with their own hands, clearing and hoeing and sowing and harvesting the crop with no one's aid until such time as the soldiers recovered from their weakness.8

  Though the colonists always accepted marriage with native women, they prized highly the possibility of bringing over Spanish ladies. Several women featured among those who took part in Columbus's third voyage to America in 1497. One of those who arrived in Hispaniola in 1509 later married Cortés. In 1539 the new bishop of Cusco, obviously concerned to create the beginnings of a civilized Hispanic society, wrote to the government asking it to send ‘genteel young ladies to these lands’ who were ‘of good blood’ and ‘peaceable’. But this was the very moment, in May 1539, that Charles V decided to prohibit ‘single women from going to the Indies, and married ones may go only in the company of their husbands or if their husbands are already there and they are going to join them’.9

  Both government and clergy were concerned at the danger to morality, family life and social stability represented by the uncontrolled movement of men and women. In 1541 single women were specifically forbidden to go to America, and in 1549 married men were prohibited from emigrating unless they did so with their wives or unless it was for a short business visit. The rules may often have been applied efficiently, for there is ample evidence of the efforts made by Spaniards to get round them. The degree of prolonged separation of men in America from their wives in the peninsula could often reach alarming proportions. In 1535 the bishop of Mexico reported that in the area under his jurisdiction there were ‘absent from their wives’ no less than 482 Spaniards.10 Despite the prohibitions, hundreds of single women emigrated. They made a fundamental contribution to the colony, by giving the restless adventurers a motive to settle down and form stable households and townships. Without them, the creation of a productive and organized colonial empire was literally impossible. Life in the colonies was by no means easy: many women soon became widows, and had to marry again. Some had to transform their life-styles and become administrators of their estates and directors of personnel. Others became pioneers of the religious life in the new lands.

  An entire generation of settlers went out alone to make their fortunes and then took measures to bring their wives over. ‘Without my wife I am the unhappiest man in the world,’ wrote a young settler in Guatemala; ‘without you I cannot live’, wrote another from Puebla.11 Men who had begun to make their new life function found that they sorely needed European women to make their existence satisfactory. ‘Over here women of your condition are very much in demand’, a father in Lima wrote to his daughters in Seville.12 ‘You can imagine what sort of life the men can manage here without their wives’, wrote a man from Santo Domingo to his wife in 1583. Many wives of course went over: ‘one thousand bored women have just arrived in search of their husbands’, commented a Spaniard from the port of Cartagena (New Granada) in 1587.13

  There is no reliable figure for women emigrants. The official records, recognized to be deficient, suggest that women were no more than five per cent of emigrants from Seville to America prior to 1519. By the 1550s they were a sixth and in the 1560s their numbers rose dramatically to nearly a third of licensed passengers. Despite their small numbers, they participated in every stage of the creation of empire. They were, like the men, conquistadors.14 Women came to Mexico with the troops of Pánfilo de Narváez, and were present when Cortés captured Tenochtitlan. They also accompanied the expeditions into North America, where the intention was always to create settlements. Many are memorable for being warriors. An early example was Maria Estrada, who with other Spaniards fought her way out of the Aztec capital during the Noche Triste, and later fought at Otumba. The conqueror of Chile, Valdivia, had as his companion and comrade-in-arms the Extremaduran Inés Suárez, who distinguished herself in a defence of the town of Santiago against the Indians in 1541.

  Males suffered a higher death rate than females,
and the latter might sometimes almost equal them in numbers: in Lima in 1610 the European population consisted of some 5,500 males and 4,400 females. Women's contribution to the colonial economy cannot be minimized. The men might write home that there was easy money in the Indies, but in some areas, at least, money could be made only by application. A lady in Mexico City wrote to her sister in Seville in 1572 that ‘in these lands money cannot be earned except by hard work, just like over there, for things are no easier in this land than over there’.15 There were richer women, Spaniards who were proud to be wives of their conquistador husbands. ‘I am married to a conquistador and settler of these provinces who has three towns, and I am a lady with vassals. God has blessed me to share in his fortune, and given me such a husband that in all these parts there is no woman better married or better off’, a lady of New Granada wrote home in 1565.16

  The first generation of Spanish settlers in the New World established their towns on the seacoast, both in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. It gave them a useful environment for subsistence and trade, and avoided conflict with the inland peoples. Some two decades were to pass before they ventured into the unknown North American continent in search of riches. The lands to the north were a formidable challenge, ranging from tropical forests in Florida to the barren mountains and plains beyond New Spain. The first Spaniard to venture into that area was Juan Ponce de León, who reached Florida in 1513 and died in 1521 after being wounded in an unsuccessful attempt to enter the territory to which he gave its European name. The real expansion did not take place until the 1520s, in two principal waves: towards the Atlantic from the Caribbean islands, and towards northern New Spain from Mexico.