Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  What was the ‘mission’? Even when used by clergy, the word had different meanings. It was a typical product of the ‘Counter Reformation’, the spiritual movement active in the Catholic Church from the end of the sixteenth century.69 In Europe the mission was a temporary visit by groups of preachers who aimed to invigorate the spiritual life of the parishes. In the New World the mission became, by contrast, a permanent unit that was in effect the frontier parish and ministered principally to American natives, who were grouped into townships similar to the old ‘doctrinas’. It was the most typical institution of the frontier, establishing contact with frontier peoples and imposing on them the religion and culture of the Spanish people.

  But it was not a task that the Spaniards could achieve alone. In order to establish a link with the language and customs of the natives, they called upon the help of allies. There were none more reliable than their old friends the Tlaxcalans, who had made the conquest of Mexico possible. In the 1590s a colony of Tlaxcalans was imported to the northeastern frontier and settled at Saltillo, where they helped to teach the natives and also acted as a showcase for the possibilities of co-operation.70 In this way the Tlaxcalans continued to contribute not only to the native conquest of America but also to its conversion.

  Moreover, the friars were not usually so foolish as to go out alone into Indian territory. Learning from the sad experience of idealist priests who had undertaken conversion work without military support and been killed for their pains, in nearly all cases they went accompanied by soldiers. It was an explicit fulfilment of the 1573 Ordinance that had forbidden further conquests but recognized the need for a military presence in frontier areas. The mission community was a carefully organized settlement,71 normally taking the form of a compound with the church building in the middle and service huts and Indian residences forming a large circle round it. It was usually accompanied by the other basic feature of the frontier, the Spanish town, which might be as large as a thriving mining town or as small as a presidio, a fort manned by up to fifty soldiers.

  Soldiers and the use of force became an integral component of the missions. The soldiers were more than a defence, they kept order and served to pursue runaways and punish wrongdoers. Pious violence had typified much of the early work of conversion in Mexico, and it continued to be employed against the natives at every level, both in religious and in secular matters.72 The compulsion, which Mendieta had defended when writing about the Franciscans, was accompanied by the systematic use of violence as a way of educating the natives. The clergy never had doubts about the need for it. Whipping became a normal method of disciplining indigenous Christians and breaking their resistance. José de Acosta in 1576 testified that in Peru he had seen priests ‘strike Indian penitents with kicks or with their fists; if the penitents are too slow in what they say, or admit some grave fault, then they either flog them or have them flogged in their presence, often until the blood runs. It is a horrible thing to say, but I speak of true and attested facts.’73

  The communication of the Christian message followed European norms, with an emphasis on education and learning from memory. Everywhere, of course, language presented a grave obstacle. On the whole, Jesuits attempted to learn elements of native tongues. By contrast the Franciscans from the mid-sixteenth century stuck to Spanish alone and used no other language. In New Mexico during the whole seventeenth century only one Franciscan is recorded as being able to speak to the Indians in their own tongue.74 In Guatemala the clergy continuously attempted to eliminate the use of indigenous tongues and to impose the sole use of Castilian.75

  Perhaps the most successful weapon the clergy had at their disposal was technology. Captivated by what the priests had to offer – the novelty of their culture, the practical knowledge in agriculture and methods of defence against enemies – groups of natives collaborated with them and helped to set up mission centres. When they learned that the newcomers did not appear to be a threat, many tribes made positive moves and extended hospitality to them. From that moment the missionaries’ work was conditioned entirely by the availability of native labour, the prime support of the Christian enterprise. Three main changes, all of them fundamental, were slowly imposed on the affected natives.

  First, they were encouraged to live together, as we have noted, in a community organized for defence, with a church as the social centre. In the heartland of New Spain and Peru these church communities, originally run by Franciscans, continued to be called doctrinas, though the name was being dropped by the end of the sixteenth century. When the Franciscans went into the frontier lands of North America, they took the doctrina with them. Second, the Indians were encouraged to adapt their traditional social and sexual customs to the dictates of Catholic morality. Clergy were proud of the way that converts were taught to live and dress like ‘Christians’. The 1573 Ordinance stated expressly that they were to be taught to ‘live in a civilized manner, clothed and wearing shoes; given the use of bread and wine and oil and many other essentials of life such as food, silk, linen, horses, cattle, tools and weapons, and all the rest that Spain has; and instructed in trades and skills’.76 Finally, they were encouraged to change their food production and work methods. Natives had usually got by on a subsistence economy, producing sufficient for their own needs. Now the friars aimed to produce surpluses, which could be taken to nearby Spanish markets to earn income for the missions. The new system called for extra effort on the part of Indians, and they did not like it. It changed their routine of work and leisure, and quickly provoked discontent. The employment of Indians in this way also gave rise to one of the most enduring problems on the frontier: the competition between settlers and clergy for available labour,77 an issue that never ceased to provoke disputes and armed conflicts among the settlers themselves.

  It is evident that the mission settlements affected only a small proportion of the peoples living in the territories that Spaniards claimed to control. But it was an achievement to have converted even a few. The dedication of the Franciscans, who first came to Florida in 1573, was notable. By the 1670s they had a string of Christian settlements through the north of the region, mainly in Apalachee. When the bishop of Cuba made a lengthy ten-month pastoral visit to the area he found that the Christian Indians in the missions totalled some thirteen thousand.78 In view of the evident hostility of the majority of the tribes, the willingness of the few calls for an explanation. The missionaries adopted shrewd strategies based on long experience.79 Friars always came bearing gifts, especially iron tools; it was a fundamental tactic that seldom failed. They brought trinkets, bells, clothing, images, musical instruments and food. The objects did not serve merely to entertain, they established a bond of hospitality that created an obligation to friendship. They concentrated always on winning over and educating the children, who would later serve to win over the adults. Some tribes sought to ally with the friars in order to secure an advantage against other tribes, or even against other Spaniards, particularly soldiers. The nomadic peoples outside the confines of the frontier were a continuous threat to the Christianized villages. A report from the Pueblo villages in 1607 stated that ‘the Spaniards and the Christians and peaceful natives of New Mexico are frequently harassed by attacks of the Apache Indians, who destroy and burn their villages, steal their horses and cause other damage’.80 In some cases, local leaders thought that the missionaries were magical persons who offered solutions they themselves did not have, especially in medical matters. The friars invariably came in the company of European animals – dogs, goats, horses, sheep – that promised to change the Indian way of life.

  And changes happened, to a degree that altered irremediably the geography and ecology of the new lands. It is a story that scholars have only recently begun to explore.

  Animals imported by Europeans thrived in their new environment and took over the plains of the New World. Every type of European domestic and outdoor animal was brought over, from dogs and horses to chickens, sheep, pigs, goats and cattle,
all necessary in order to reproduce for Spaniards the environment they knew. Some vessels crossed the Atlantic as veritable arks of Noah. ‘We brought pigs, chickens, dogs and cats’, a passenger on Columbus's 1493 voyage reported, ‘they reproduce there in a superlative manner.’ A few of the animals revolutionized the society and economy of America. The preferred animal of Spaniards, the pig, first introduced to Hispaniola in 1493, was by the 1530s swarming all over Hispaniola, Cuba, Mexico and Peru. Pigs were easy to transport by ship from Spain, and repaid the effort. In 1514 governor Velzquez in Cuba reported that the pigs he had brought had increased to several thousand.81 De Soto took thirteen pigs with him to Florida in 1539, and had seven hundred of them by the time of his death three years later.

  Cattle were especially good at reproducing themselves: it was reported from Hispaniola in 1518 that thirty or forty cattle left in the wild could increase to three hundred in three or four years. In Mexico they multiplied effortlessly. The French explorer Champlain related that during his visit there at the end of the century he had seen ‘great, level plains, stretching endlessly and everywhere covered with an infinite number of cattle’.82 In 1619 the governor of Buenos Aires reported that eighty thousand cattle a year could be killed in the area round the city for their hides, and a century later a witness estimated that the cattle in the southern pampas numbered around forty-eight million.83 Horses were certainly the most difficult animal to transport across the Atlantic, and a high proportion died on the voyage. The first of them came to America with Columbus in 1493. They reproduced slowly, but soon became essential to all Spanish activity, given the vast distances in the New World. Pizarro brought the first horses in 1532 to Peru, where they played a crucial role in the subjugation of the Andean peoples. On the pampas of the Río de la Plata horses were in the environment they best loved. When Spanish settlers began the permanent occupation of Buenos Aires in 1580 they found that they had been preceded by hordes of wild horses, and a generation later the horses in Tucuman were reported to be ‘in such numbers that they cover the face of the earth’.84 The only animal to have difficulties in reproduction was the sheep, which also arrived with Columbus in 1493. Timid, and intolerant of the tropical climate, sheep had a hard time in the Caribbean, but in the more hospitable regions of New Spain and in the Andes they came into their own.

  The animals changed the life of colonial peoples permanently. Prior to the coming of the white man, the Nahuas had enjoyed a largely vegetarian diet. The availability of animals persuaded very many to become meat-eaters. In the same way, the arrival of the horse revolutionized the quality of Indian life. The change was sometimes slow. In the 1550s in Cusco the natives fled in fear if they met a horse. By the 1580s, however, in the Quito region the richer Indians rode horses when they went out to their fields, and were ploughing with ox-teams. Around Cusco, ‘many of them have mastered horse riding and shooting from horseback’.85 In North America the Plains Indians first acquired horses after 1600, drawing on the herds of wild horses that by now were roaming the frontier north of Mexico. The Apache and the Navajo, who emerged in time as the principal horsed tribes of the continent, seem not to have had them before the 1630s and the 1680s respectively. The horse became an integral part of their economy and culture. A Navajo song much later represented the horse:

  He stands on the upper circle of the rainbow

  The sunbeam is in his mouth for a bridle

  He circles round all the people of the earth

  Today he is on my side

  And I shall win with him.86

  The spectacular multiplication of European animals was brought about by two simple factors:87 the abundance of rich vegetation in the New World, and the complete absence of any competition from tamed indigenous grazing animals. Castilians introduced into the open spaces of the New World a form of life that had sustained a section of their economy for centuries: pastoralism. The grazing animals were allowed to occupy vast spaces and to move on to yet more spaces, eating as they went. It was a type of economy that had immediate consequences on surface vegetation. It also required new forms of land management, to make sure the animals had what they needed. This consequently had social and political implications. The indigenous communities, which relentlessly resisted the advance of the animals that ate their crops and occupied their lands, stood in the way and had to be dealt with.

  Not only animals but all forms of Old World life travelled with the Europeans. As we have seen, they brought with them their own plants for food, as well as trees and flowers; weeds also came across, mixed in with the plant life, and so too did pests, such as ship-rats. They all formed an essential ingredient of the invasion, for they went everywhere with the newcomers. In the process, they permanently changed the environment of the colonized world, a process that has been termed ‘ecological imperialism’.88 Above all, as we have seen, they brought diseases, whose lasting consequence was the destruction of part of the indigenous population of the New World and the islands of the Pacific.

  Stated briefly, the arrival of outsiders altered the entire eco-system in which the indigenous peoples had existed. In perspective the loss of population was the most striking feature of the extension of Spain's religious frontier. The Spaniards carried infectious diseases with them. The missionary programme in the southwest of the United States had the involuntary consequence of reducing the native population by upwards of ninety per cent prior to 1678.89 By the early eighteenth century it resulted in cutting the population of the Pueblo Indians by at least half, and depopulating permanently the majority of their settlements.90 The disaster in its turn had a profound impact on the native cultures, which were often unable to offer themselves a satisfactory explanation of what was happening.

  As population numbers shrank, the available labour force declined and patterns of land use changed dramatically. Outside areas inhabited by nomads, agriculture had supported life. This was now fundamentally affected, as encomenderos took over control of land, tricked Indian caciques into selling them farms and villages, or in many cases simply claimed land and drove the resident Indians off it. Communal lands were transformed into private estates, fences were erected, streams were diverted, and above all the normal Indian crops, such as maize and manioc, were suppressed and substituted by wheat, olives, sugar, grapes and whatever else was necessary or profitable to the white man. Spanish officials in America collaborated fully in the expropriation of the natives, and government orders from Madrid to protect the Indian were simply ignored. The process began very soon after the coming of the Spaniards, and took many shapes and forms, all of them exhaustively studied by modern historians.

  A careful study of the case of the Valle del Mezquital in central Mexico gives one indication of the consequences on the environment of the New World. By the end of the sixteenth century the native population here had declined ninety per cent from pre-contact levels. By this time the Indians were no longer in possession of the land, and Spaniards had begun to settle and to plant the foods they required: wheat, barley, grapes, pears, peaches, apples, oranges, dates, figs and walnuts.91 Then the animals came in. By the end of the century nearly two-thirds of the land surface of the Valle was given over to pastoral use.92 The plains became barren deserts, erosion set in, deforestation advanced. Sheep, directed usually from a rural hacienda, dominated the landscape. What had been a fertile and productive agricultural region was converted during colonial times into a desert.

  The valour of the Catholic missionaries, many of whom lost their lives in the course of their efforts, had few parallels in the history of the Christian Church. The clergy were, however, no mere purveyors of faith. Their own experience taught them that in order to plant the faith with success, they must also re-shape the civilizations of the territories perceived to be within the empire. The entire missionary enterprise of the colonial period must consequently be seen as an extended confrontation between European culture and the distinctive cultures of the non-European world. Early worries that the missionar
ies may have had in Mexico, about being able to communicate convincingly the fundamental tenets of the faith, were soon replaced by a conviction that the medium of discourse – through social education – was no less important than the gospel message. Education brought with it, as always, the need for discipline. And discipline meant, for Spaniards, the Inquisition.

  The Inquisition did not come to the New World with the Spaniards, for its role was concerned only with heresy, a problem that was not considered to exist among the primitive Indians. However, in the same way that he had proposed the introduction of black slaves in order to save the lives of the Indians, so now Fray Bartolomé de las Casas proposed the introduction of the Holy Office in order to save their souls. ‘I beg you’, he wrote to Cardinal Cisneros in 1516, ‘to send the Holy Inquisition to those islands of America.’93 The cardinal did not see the need for implanting the tribunal in a few poorly populated islands on the edge of the Atlantic, but he was concerned about the emigration of conversos and Moriscos to those lands, so he chose a half-way solution, issuing commissions as inquisitor to select bishops (at this early date three had already been appointed in the Caribbean). The first commission as inquisitor of America was accordingly issued to the bishop of Puerto Rico in 1519.