Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Over and beyond their physical presence the foreigners, like the Spaniards, brought their culture with them. It is a theme that has been little studied, though there can be no doubt of its relevance. Just as they had taken their culture to the Iberian peninsula, so the Netherlanders, for example, also brought it to the New World. The Antwerp artist Simon Pereyns, who arrived in Mexico in 1566, was held to be the best artist in the viceroyalty. In the same period the clergy and élite in New Spain imported tapestries and paintings from the Netherlands, and well into the seventeenth century dozens of Flemish landscapes found their way to Mexican churches and homes.49 In Peru in the same period the Italian painters Bernardo Bitti and Angelino Medoro made a fundamental contribution to art, and the works of the Netherlander Rubens were as famous in Mexico and Cusco as they were in Madrid.

  Spaniards were the people on top, but not always so. Those who emigrated to the colonies enjoyed new opportunities but they also faithfully reproduced their role in the peninsula. Many became rich and successful but others simply fell back into the poverty from which they came. Easy wealth certainly allowed more social mobility than in the home country, but at its core colonial society accepted status barriers and soon became rigidly aristocratic. The experience of being on top first occurred in the occupied kingdom of Granada, which became the testing ground for the attitudes and relationships that went with the exercise of power. Protests by Christian and Muslim members of the cultured élite who appreciated good relations between the races were overruled. After the rebellion of discontented Muslims in 1500, Cardinal Cisneros advised the government that they be enslaved. Many Spanish leaders were less harsh than this, but in general the peoples of Islamic origin within the peninsula continued for the next hundred years to be treated with rigour and contempt. In their everyday contact with others there was periodic irritation and conflict over dress, speech, customs and above all food. Moriscos slaughtered their animal meat ritually, did not touch pork (the meat most commonly eaten in Spain) or wine, and cooked only with olive oil whereas Christians cooked with butter or lard. They tended also to live apart in separate communities, which could lead to antagonism. In 1567 one of their leaders in Granada protested that ‘every day we are mistreated in every way, by both secular officials and clergy’. The conflicts led to rebellion, and then inexorably to the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609. By then most Castilians had become convinced of their own dominant role.

  From the early decades of the sixteenth century, Castilians identified themselves as the ‘conquerors’. Many pursued their soldierly career throughout the known world. They passed from one area of war to another, from Granada to Italy, from Italy to Flanders. Veterans were among the Spaniards who looked down for the first time from the great temple at Tenochtitlan on the immense causeways over the lake and the thousands of people thronging the marketplace. ‘There were among us’, Bernal Díaz recalled, ‘some who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, in Rome and all over Italy’, and who had never seen anything like that which now met their gaze. One Castilian noble who fought in the Araucanian wars, Alonso de Sotomayor, testified that he had gone to Chile ‘with many other valiant soldiers from Flanders, to aid the king in this war’.50 The memoirs of the heroes of the American frontier were genuine testimony to what Castilians achieved in the New World. But what they achieved was only one part of the military effort made on Spain's behalf by many nations.

  Castilians tended not to bear this in mind, and consistently claimed all the credit. Their hubris became proverbial. Seeing it at work in the Netherlands, the humanist Arias Montano, who had been sent there by Philip II, was horrified. ‘The arrogance of our Spanish nation here is insupportable’, he wrote; many Spaniards ‘have begun to call this sort of behaviour “reputation”’. It was an indictment by a Castilian of the developing insolence in Spain's imperial role. In Milan in 1570 an official asserted that ‘these Italians, although they are not Indians, have to be treated as such’, a curious attitude towards the princes, élites and soldiers who made Spanish power in Italy possible. No less memorable is the observation made by the governor of Milan, Requesens. ‘We cannot’, he wrote, ‘trust Italy to the Italians.’51 We now know that this was a common phenomenon in all imperial nations. Initial humility, if and when it occurred, was soon followed by cultural arrogance.

  Spaniards in the world empire were proud of and clung to their roots. Like all migrants, they had a basic loyalty to their place of origin. They displayed the debt openly in all the places of America to which they gave names of their home towns: Córdoba, Guadalajara, Laredo. Obeying a rule that has governed all emigration down to our own day, emigrants from the same place of origin tended to head for the same destination and recreate in a new environment the society from which they had come. A striking example is that of emigration from the Castilian town of Brihuega to Puebla, the second largest city of New Spain. During the period 1560–1620 over a thousand people from Brihuega emigrated to Puebla, taking with them much of Brihuega's expertise in textile manufacture. At the same time as they attempted to get on in their new home, they were intent on preserving their identity as natives of Brihuega.52

  Like the rest of Europe, the Iberian peninsula was one of strong regional ties that extended through all aspects of daily life: family, politics, religion. Those who came from Spain were never simply ‘Spaniards’: they were primarily people of Jaén, of Cáceres, of Avilés, and tended to remain so. The ‘tierra’ of origin was the fundamental source of their identity. ‘This territory’, a settler in Mexico wrote to his wife in Madrid in 1706, ‘is made up entirely of people from Spain, and those who are from the same tierra esteem each other even more than if they were relatives.’53 Prominent among emigrants from the tierras of Spain were the Basques, who played an important role in the push towards northern New Spain, where a province was named New Biscay. Often distinguished from other Spaniards by their language, Basques continued for a long time to maintain a separate profile in their American communities. In the city of Puebla in 1612 a total of 113 Basque merchants and citizens made an independent offer of financial support to the administration.54 The feeling of separateness might often, even in distant America, lead to conflict between Spaniards. There were cases of tension between Basques and other settlers, especially Andalusians, who were sometimes perceived by them as ‘Moriscos’.55

  Economic realities tended bit by bit to separate the emigrants from their homeland. Those who had now rebuilt their lives successfully could not go back to the poverty of their origins. The correspondence that survives from early settlers is completely unequivocal about the issue, repeated insistently in letter after letter. America offered more options, more wealth, more mobility of status. Why return to an Old World that offered little? In Peru the rumour was that wars and high taxes were ruining those who lived back home in the peninsula. A settler of Potosí complained in 1577,

  Here we get bad news that there in Seville they are seizing all the silver for the king. Many who were on their way to Spain have changed their mind for this reason. And they also relate so many misfortunes of wars and suchlike and many other things, that it clips the wings of those who think of going to Spain. Instead they are buying goods and estates and many are getting married with the idea of not returning to Spain. I don't know what to do. To tell the truth I have no wish to die in this country, but back where I was born.56

  There in America, wrote a settler from Lima, ‘they are interested more in whether you have something than how you got it, and if you have it they shut their mouths and don't ask’. In short, he stated, ‘if people over there did as they do here, it would be enough to stay in Spain and not need America; there is work that even beggars would not do in Spain, but which here is highly esteemed’.57 The New World offered, at least in the post-conquest period, a new ethic based on achievement rather than on inherited status, work rather than idleness. ‘My aim has been’, a settler wrote from Mexico in 1740 to his daughter in Spain, ‘to acq
uire property by dint of very hard work, in order to keep you as you deserve’, so she should come over to join him.58 The Spanish concepts of honour had little relevance in America, a merchant from Lima wrote indignantly and ironically to a brother in Spain who had mentioned the possession of honour as his chief qualification for coming to America: ‘I don't know why you want to come to America; for a man who has so much “honour”, why look to gain more?’59

  Bit by bit, the colonists began to identify themselves more with their new home than with the place where they had been born, the ‘patria’ of their hometown, their village, their kinfolk, their familiar countryside. When a citizen of Cartagena wrote in 1590 urging his wife to come over and join him, he told her to forget about the pain of leaving her homeland: ‘don't keep thinking about your “patria”, because the real “patria” is the country that looks after you’.60 ‘I always used to have the deep wish to return to my “patria”,’ explained a merchant of Mexico City in 1592 to his parents in the Canary Islands, ‘and if I had done so I would have been greatly mistaken.’61 Instead, members of the family should come over to join him. Colonists observed the clear contrast between their life-style in the New World and what they had known in the Old. ‘I am not saying to you that I don't wish to go to Spain’, a husband wrote from Lima in 1704 to his wife in the peninsula, ‘for I really do wish to go.’ The problem was, he explained, ‘the ruin that is Spain, with so many debts and dues and taxes, none of which we have over here’.62

  The first generation of settlers in New Spain and Peru thought of themselves as the conquerors, with an inherent right to supremacy in the new lands; by extension, they rejected the pretensions of Spanish officials who continued to come over from Europe. A distinction grew up between those identified with America and who came to be called Creoles (criollos), and those who were from the peninsula, the gachupines. The Creoles felt that they, by their efforts, had created the new America, and that they had a unique right to hold office in their cities. The claim provoked constant tension between the colonial élite and the organs of peninsular control represented by the Audiencia and the viceroy. Already in the 1560s the settlers in southern Chile were resentful of the cost to them of the wars against the Araucanians. ‘It was no small grievance to them’, a witness reported, ‘to see that after they had conquered the country they were still imposed upon, and every day their goods were appropriated in order to pay for the wars, while those who had just arrived from Europe, their hands unsoiled, were granted administrative posts.’63 After the Pizarro period, however, no major disturbances occurred in America until the revolt of the Creole élite of Mexico in 1624.64

  The urge to political autonomy was only one aspect of a broader attempt to define the position of the Creoles in the world. Though they continued to retain a pious memory of their roots, the colonizers in time merged into their new environment. The administration of the empire quickly fell into the hands of the colonial élite. From the 1560s, when cash problems became serious, Philip II resorted with frequency to selling offices to officials and their families. In the American colonies, this led to a situation where local élites rather than peninsular Spaniards came to control the administration.

  As a consequence of taking control, they assumed a colonial identity and distanced themselves from their origins. By around 1600, Basques in Mexico had largely ceased to speak Basque.65 Earlier Creoles had little alternative to identifying themselves with the only historic past they had, that of the native civilizations of the New World. Conquerors frequently married into the Nahua and Inca nobility. They felt therefore that they were part of a new American nobility,66 and strongly defended the Indian heritage. From the end of the sixteenth century they began to outline an argument based on a mythical vision of the American past, in which both conquerors and Indian peoples were seen to have participated. In Mexico men like Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl, descended through his mother from the rulers of Texcoco, and in Spain itself Garcilaso de la Vega ‘the Inca’, descended from a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, wrote histories that claimed for pre-conquest Indian civilization a rightful and even an illustrious part in the character of the evolving Spanish empire.67 The first generation of settlers, living in lands they had worked and among a native population they appreciated, did not find it too difficult to identify with America, like the successful encomendero in Peru who expressed a paternalistic concern for his Indians:

  I treat them as if they were my children, who have helped me to gain a living, and I relieve them of taxes and of anything else I can; they have served me for over thirty years and I owe them a lifetime's debt. I spend most of the year here, it's a habit I cannot shake off, and I have herds of sheep, goats, pigs and I used to have cattle but now I have sold them because they did harm to the Indians.68

  In the century after the conquest, however, this vision was complicated by the rapid racial changes in the American population. The Indians and their leaders, the curacas and caciques, were now increasingly despised and relegated to a subordinate position in society. Racial mixture, the appearance of a poor mestizo population and even more of those descended from blacks, caused the native peoples to be marginalized in colonial society. Creole theorists could no longer appeal simply to the theme of noble origins.

  The need for a new approach was met by the writings of the seventeenth century Mexican scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (d.1700), who defended the nature of what he called in 1681 ‘our Creole nation’. Because the settlers did not wish to appeal to European antecedents, he elaborated an argument based on the ancient civilizations of the Americas, whose origins he traced back to the Egyptians and Greeks. Even this elaboration of an historic identity, however, did not prevail, and other writers took up the task again in the later eighteenth century. In the confusion of racial terms that existed in colonial times, labels were not always clear descriptions of identity. All colonial whites were considered ‘españoles’, and the term ‘American’ was most commonly used simply as a distinction from European. The words ‘mexicano’ and ‘perulero’ tended to be used of both the native and the white population. Words were powerfully emotive, but symbols even more so, as the evolution of the symbol of Guadalupe in New Spain was to demonstrate. In the middle of the sixteenth century in Mexico the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared to an Indian on Mount Tepeyac (site of a previous native devotion to the goddess Tonantzin) and identified herself as the Virgin of Guadalupe (the name of an important shrine in Spain).69 By the seventeenth century devotion to the Tepeyac Virgin was fully developed, and had become a powerful expression of the autonomous Christianity of Mexico. A great basilica was erected on the site, and in 1648 a Creole priest, Miguel Sánchez, wrote the definitive work proclaiming the glories of the first Virgin of the Creoles, the first Virgin indeed of colonial America.

  Once they had crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific, or passed to other lands in Europe, emigrants from the peninsula were able to overcome some of their regional differences and recognize that they came from a common home, for which they still yearned. The Valladolid writer Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa (d. 1644), who spent half his life in Italy, recognized that ‘even spirits that are most opposed in the patria, become reconciled when they are outside it, and learn to appreciate each other’. He expressed forcefully the yearning of those who had left Spain, and with it the ‘skies, rivers, fields, friends, family and other pleasures that we look for in vain when we are away’.70 Thousands, no doubt, found themselves in the position of the settler in Cajamarca who wrote in 1698 that ‘though my body is in America, my soul is in Navarre’.71 For generations of Spaniards, there was a perennial pull between their adopted homeland and the one they had left behind. The persistent longing for home, however, had to compete with and seldom overcame the practical satisfaction that emigrants found in their corner of the worldwide empire.

  A settler who passed through alternate phases of enchantment and disenchantment with America was Diego de Vargas, governor of N
ew Mexico from 1688. Born in 1643 of a noble family of Madrid, he first went to New Spain in 1673. After holding various minor posts, he succeeded in obtaining that of governor, during the period when the count of Galve was viceroy. Sent in 1692 to the Rio Grande on the comfortless assignment of recovering authority over the Pueblo Indians, he lost a large sum of money as well as his health in the task, and eventually died of dysentery in 1704 in a lonely outpost of New Mexico. One of his personal letters home in 1686 has the passage: ‘Spain was but a stepmother to me, for she banished me to seek my fortune in strange lands. Here, I do what I could not do there. I have asked for nothing more since I left my homeland.’72 He was proud of being essentially a self-made man, advancing not because of his merits but because of pushing and striving. Wealth in America, he wrote, ‘does not come because silver is plucked from trees or rivers, but because he who does not work ends up without it and without position, as in Spain’. ‘The Indies’, he wrote in the fall of 1690, ‘are good for shopkeepers but not for men of honour who flee the trades; this is a dangerous land.’73 The reverses in fortune he suffered during his years in the Rio Grande, however, rudely shook his confidence in America. In April 1703, the year before his death, he lamented the ‘thirty years that I have lost since I left Spain and my beloved patria, that lovely town of Madrid, the crown of the earth’. Had he remained in Spain, he assured his family, he would have been able to enjoy their company without suffering the ‘bottomless pit’ of miseries where he was at that moment.74