Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The inquisitor soon found work to do, for the first known case of an alleged ‘Lutheran’ in the New World occurred in the 1520s. A royal official from Venezuela, where the Welsers had just been given a monopoly contract, urged Charles V to ‘prohibit all Germans from taking part in the conquest, for it has been found that there were some in those provinces who shared the opinions of the heretic Martin Luther’.94 In particular a Fleming had been arrested, and details of his case were sent to the inquisitor in Puerto Rico. It is worth recalling that at this date the Lutheran heresy had barely come into existence, and was moreover completely unknown in Spain. Yet Las Casas, his eager eye fixed on all that was not quite right in the America he knew and loved, was alert before the menace of heresy. ‘The Germans who have gone there’, he wrote in 1535, ‘are all heretics and spawn of that wild beast Luther.’95 In practice, this early Inquisition in America did little of consequence, except pick on a few foreigners and irritate the Spanish settlers.

  Shortly after the overthrow of the high civilizations of Anahuac and Tawantinsuyu, the traditional rigour of the Holy Office asserted itself. Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the Franciscan who became first bishop of Mexico in 1530, was appointed inquisitor five years later and distinguished himself as an enemy of heresy.96 His most famous operation was the trial and execution of the Indian noble of Texcoco, Carlos de Chichimecateotl. It was one of the most cruel and also most unjust acts of inquisitorial severity, and earned the reprimand of the Inquisition in Spain, which informed Zumárraga in 1540 that the Indians should be brought in to the faith ‘more through love than through severity’, and that the execution of Carlos was quite simply wrong. ‘It is not just to employ so much severity in order to frighten the Indians.’ One positive consequence of the case was that the Inquisition prohibited any further action for heresy against the Indians, on the basis of the similar policy that it practised in Spain itself towards the Moriscos. Instead the New World tribunal in subsequent years dedicated itself primarily to rooting out Jewish conversos and arresting (and executing) those foreign sailors who fell into its hands.

  Despite the outcome of the case involving Carlos, the question of the Indian always remained at the top of the agenda. Other clergy in America decided to act on their own against superstition, bypassing the official Inquisition and its procedures. Las Casas himself proclaimed an ‘Inquisition’ of his own in his diocese of Chiapas in 1545. Had it ever been allowed to function, it would have turned upside down the lives of all the parishioners, both Spaniard and Indian, with undoubtedly blood-curdling consequences. Another bishop who claimed the privilege of having his own Inquisition, and certainly did achieve blood-curdling results, was the bishop of Yucatan, Fray Diego de Landa. For half a century, the clergy in America could count on the help of these informal ‘Inquisitions’, but pressure still mounted for a regular body that could be controlled from Spain. Eventually the same committee (the Junta Magna) in Spain that was preparing the king's Ordinance on Discovery, decided to establish two autonomous tribunals of the Holy Inquisition in America, as part of a general reform of the institution throughout the monarchy. A decree to this effect was issued in 1569, and shortly after there were tribunals functioning, along the lines followed in the peninsula, in Mexico City and in Lima.

  In the year 1569 Cristóbal de Albornoz, canon of the cathedral of Cusco, who had been in the viceroyalty of Peru since 1565, was entrusted with a visitation of the parishes in the area of the town of Huamanga, a task in which he was assisted by Guaman Poma de Ayala. His experiences with the religion of the Indians drove him to denounce the existence of a widespread movement of ‘idolatry’ known as Taki Onqoy (in Quechua, ‘the dance sickness’), whose existence had already been known to local clergy since at least 1565. On the basis of information supplied by Albornoz and other clergy, it became apparent that for many years the whole mountainous area of central Peru, focusing on the town of Huamanga but extending from just south of the capital Lima to the northern part of Arequipa province, had been home to a radical cultural movement that challenged all existing religion and society.

  The coincidence of dates with the Inca resistance in the mountains at Vilcabamba was fortuitous, for the preachers of Taki Onqoy did not admit the principles of Inca religion either. According to a local priest,

  many people followed them, and were told not to believe in Dios97 or his commandments, nor worship images and crosses nor go into the churches nor confess with the priests, but to confess with them because they had come to preach in the name of the huacas Titicaca and Tiahuanaco and many other huacas; and that these huacas had overthrown the Christian ‘Dios’, whose time was now over.98

  The god of the Christians, moreover, was a mute god. The affirmation reminds us immediately of the breviary that Atahualpa had thrown on the ground because it did not speak. The Taki Onqoy preachers, to demonstrate the truth of their claim, would set up the Christian cross in the houses of the Indians and address it; but it would not speak. The huacas they brought with them, on the other hand, did speak to them. ‘See’, they said, ‘how this one speaks to us and is our God, and we have to worship it.’

  The huacas were devotional objects of all kinds, both domestic and public, both small and large, that formed part of the everyday life of ancient (and also modern) Peruvian religion; but the meaning of the word was notoriously imprecise. The Andeans gave the name huaca both to an object and to the spirit that was present in the object; it most frequently referred to stones, and the shape and direction of stones tended to have great importance. But huacas could also be rocks, mountain peaks and rivers. The shores of Lake Titicaca, with its ancient temple of Tiahuanaco, were a fertile centre of huaca devotion, and on the island of Titicaca there was a pre-Inca huaca in the form of a crescent-shaped rock that in old times the Indians covered in sheets of gold.99

  Taki Onqoy was in part a survival of some aspects of pre-Inca religion in the Andes. Its fundamental feature was the taki, or ballad,100 a common feature of social and celebratory gatherings in pre-Hispanic times. It also took distinctive forms that suggest millenarian ecstasy, of the type, for example, practised by the followers of El Mahdi in the nineteenth-century Sudan. Witnesses said that ‘they sang in a certain manner, which they called Taki Onqoy’, and that ‘some danced saying they had the huaca in their body’, ‘they shook and tumbled on the ground’.101 The adepts believed that

  all the huacas of the kingdom, all those which the Christians had pulled down and destroyed, had now come back to life; all were now going through the air in order of battle against ‘Dios’ to conquer him, and indeed they had already conquered him. And when the marquis [Pizarro] came to this land ‘Dios’ conquered the huacas and the Spaniards conquered the Indians. But now the world was turned upside down, and ‘Dios’ and the Spaniards had been overthrown this time, and all the Spaniards were dead.102

  The Jesuit counter-attack against the huacas was unremitting. In 1607 the parish priest of San Damián in Huarochiri, Francisco de Avila, a dedicated priest who spoke the Quechua language, claimed that he had discovered the practice of heresies among the Indians. He was appointed in 1610 as ‘the first judge for idolatry’ in the viceroyalty, to carry out a programme of ‘extirpation’. With the assistance of Jesuits he began a systematic enquiry into the worship of huacas in the area. The ‘enquiry’ was fundamentally an ‘inquisition’, but without the procedures of the traditional Spanish Inquisition; for instance the punishment it administered was corporal (whipping, or imprisonment) and it did not have the death penalty. Avila claimed to have destroyed during his missions over eight hundred ‘fixed’ idols (such as rocks), and over twenty thousand smaller idols (huacas).103 He led a campaign that imitated the methods of the Inquisition, even to the extent of holding a great ceremony resembling an auto de fe in Lima in December 1609, in the presence of the public, the viceroy and dignitaries.

  Subsequent ‘extirpators’ also helped in the campaign, which was at its most intense during the half century 1
610–1660.104 Some Spanish writers tried to understand and explain the significance of the objects revered by the Andeans, but came down regardless in favour of the use of violence. It was a violence not only of words, through sermons in which revered objects were condemned as idols and native teachers as sorcerers. It was also a physical violence, in which traditional objects were ritually burnt, and suspects publicly whipped. Throughout colonial America, clergy used the ritual of destruction systematically in order to eliminate elements of indigenous culture that they did not understand, ‘idols, offerings, masks and other things of the kind which the Indians use in their heathenism’, as a friar in New Mexico explained.105

  The leading role of clergy in the labour of colonization gave them an incomparable importance in the formation of the Spanish empire. Beyond the great ranches, the busy trading ports, and the bustling mining centres, there was very little Spanish settlement. In catering for the spiritual needs of the Indians, the missionaries had to take care to uphold the essentials of Spanish culture, particularly the use of Castilian and of Castilian personal names, respect for peninsular norms of morality, and the wearing of clothing. At the same time, however, they attempted to introduce Spanish social norms, such as the eating of bread and meat. Food of some sort had to be made available, for example, to natives of the great plains of North America who were being dissuaded from their former lives as nomadic hunters. The inevitable consequence was that some missionaries had to run their missions as a practical business in which the means of production was a fundamental priority. The Catholic faith in the Spanish empire also became a business concern.

  Perhaps the most famous of all missionary enterprises in the Spanish empire was the experiment conducted by the Jesuit order in the interior of South America, among the Guaraní people.106 From around 1540, when the town of Asunción was founded, white settlers were moving from Peru into the territory watered by the Río de la Plata. From 1585 the Jesuits were active locally, and founded a college of the order in Asunción. In the same years the pioneer of preaching among the Guaraní was the Franciscan Luis de Bolaños, who produced the first word-book and prayer-book in their language. Another Franciscan, Francisco Solano, dedicated himself to the same task among the Chaco Indians. Then in 1587 the Jesuits came: two Spanish Jesuits came from Peru, and a Portuguese, an Irishman and an Italian were among the four who came from Bahia. These were early explorations, doomed to failure. Not until a quarter of a century later, in 1610, did they establish their first permanent missionary base in Guairá province. The pioneers were two Italians, fathers Maceta and Cataldino, who established the first ‘reduction’, a community of Indians that resembled the doctrinas and from which all outsiders were excluded.107

  Against the opposition of local Spanish settlers, the Jesuits obtained in 1611 and 1618 ordinances that gave them official permission to set up further reductions. The experiment attained enormous success. By the 1700s there were between eighty thousand and a hundred-and-twenty thousand Guaraní in the reductions. At the same date there were two hundred and fifty Jesuits in the province of La Plata (Buenos Aires, which was re-settled in 1580 after the collapse of the first colony a generation earlier), of whom one quarter worked in the reductions. Thirty Guaraní missions were located within a vast area stretching from the River Paraguay and beyond the River Uruguay towards the south Atlantic. The zone became known as ‘Paraguay’, but in effect covered a huge swathe across mainland Spanish South America.

  The enterprise captured the imagination of contemporaries and continued to stir passions long after it had ceased to exist. Starting from the principle of the ‘doctrina’, officially in practice elsewhere in America, the Jesuits organized each community into a carefully constructed compound, circular in formation for defence purposes and with its social life based on a church constructed in the centre. The community was entirely self-sufficient and also heavily armed against regular attacks by hostile natives, notably the Chaco Indians and the frontiersmen of Brazil, the bandeirantes. No contact with Europeans was permitted. The obviously ‘utopian’ character of the settlements was of course not original, for others such as Las Casas and the bishop of Michoacán Vasco de Quiroga had also attempted similar schemes. The difference in this case was that the Jesuit experiment worked, and endured more or less successfully for nearly two hundred years.

  The international contribution to this apparently ‘Spanish’ scheme can be easily overlooked. The utopian idea may have filtered in though various channels, since the Jesuits came from all corners of Europe. As with the early Franciscan mendicants, the Netherlands contingent was always present. A group of Belgian Jesuits came to the reductions in 1616, then another in 1628, and another in 1640. This last group included François du Toit, the first historian of the Jesuits of Paraguay. From the end of the seventeenth century, the entry of Jesuits from central Europe, here as in the northern frontier of New Spain, was notable. In 1691 when Antonius Sepp, a Tyrolean priest, came to Buenos Aires to join the reductions, the Guaraní towns owned 698,300 cows, 44,200 oxen, 11,400 calves, 240,000 sheep, 28,200 horses, 45,600 mares, 3,000 fillies, 770 young mares, 700 young fillies, 15,200 mules, 8,000 asses, 150 stallions and 343 pigs.108

  Though the Jesuit enterprise was directed to the instruction of the natives, it did so through the medium of a social discourse that aimed to Christianize Guaraní culture by isolating it. The Guaraní towns, which of course were only a small segment of the indigenous population of the area, formed a network of economic production that did not escape the attention of European writers who saw it as a form of idealistic communism. The Jesuits, as we shall see, by working through small units such as the reduction or the hacienda, were able to perfect a type of economic organization that exploited the resources available in the Spanish empire, and at the same time gave support to the empire while preserving its own character and autonomy. This autonomy never failed to attract criticism, especially from the local settlers in Asunción.

  Our primary concern, however, is with the role of the Jesuits as frontiersmen in Paraguay. There was no perceptible Spanish presence in the heartland of the South American continent. At the very time the reductions began, the slave-hunting and gold-seeking bandeirantes of Brazil (also called paulistas because many came from São Paulo) were making expeditions inland that took them into territory that theoretically belonged to Spain but was now part of the joint Spanish–Portuguese empire. The only obstacle in their way was the Jesuit reductions. The bandeirantes, consisting normally of a small number of Portuguese supported by black slaves and thousands of Indian allies, attacked the Jesuit missions, carrying off or murdering the Indians in them. In 1629 their first big expedition succeeded in driving the missions completely out of Guairá; the Jesuits led their Indians out of the area in a long march that took them up the River Paraná in canoes and through the forests. In 1636 further murderous attacks were made on the reductions, the motive being that it was easier to seize settled rather than nomadic natives. The Jesuits eventually responded in a way that turned them into the true defenders of the Spanish American frontier.

  Though many settlers objected, the priests set about arming and training their Indians. They received official permission to import weapons, and the reverend fathers became military instructors and generals, teaching the Guaraní how to defend as well as attack. The Indians also became expert horsemen, producing an efficient cavalry that formed the core of the armed forces. By the mid-seventeenth century the Jesuits were in charge of the only available army in the whole of the trans-Atlantic empire. By 1647, when the army numbered seven thousand armed soldiers, the Guaraní had become the empire's only defence, protecting colonists against hostile Indians and the mines of Potosí against the Portuguese threat. Altogether between 1637 and 1745, when the reductions were eventually abolished, the Guaraní armies entered the field at least fifty times on behalf of the king of Spain.109 In 1697 a force of two thousand drove back the French from Buenos Aires; in 1704 a force of four thousand
accompanied by their horses and cattle and a store of weapons came down the Paraná on barges in order to defend the city against the English; and in 1724 they expelled the Portuguese from Montevideo. Without the amazing prowess of the Guaraní soldiers, the power of Spain in South America could have been extinguished.

  Like the other great religious orders, the Jesuits also made a fundamental contribution to the economy of the empire. They everywhere attempted to extract a living from the available resources, and seem to have succeeded amazingly. The bishop of Puebla, Juan de Palafox, who entered into a famous controversy with the order in New Spain, was scandalized by their dedication to materialist enterprises. He reported with disgust to the pope in 1647 that the Jesuits ran their estates with black slave labour, herded hundreds of thousands of cattle, ran six large sugar plantations worth a million pesos each, owned vast haciendas four to six leagues across, as well as factories and shops, and participated in the trade to the Philippines.110 The Jesuit missions on the northern New Spain frontier, which began from the 1590s, were likewise run as a profitable economic concern.111 In the valley of the upper reaches of the Sinaloa and Sonora rivers, by the mid-seventeenth century the Jesuits had established thirty-five missions that took in, according to their calculations, thousands of native converts. They had planted wheat and other cereals throughout their lands, and had covered the plains with thousands of cattle that served the Indians for food which they had previously obtained by hunting. The Indians were both Christianized and weaned away from their former nomadic existence. The Jesuits in this way changed the entire economy of the areas they evangelized. At the very end of the seventeenth century Father Kino was one of the great ranchers of his time, transporting hundreds of cattle from one mission point to another, and encouraging the spread of wheat cultivation in the river valleys.