Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  After making the normal enquiries, the tribunal arrested Cruz on 25 January 1572. He was interrogated and spoke freely for he felt he had nothing to fear; his answers occupy seven hundred pages of the official record. The statements of witnesses occupy a further seven hundred pages of text. It is a sign of the prestige Cruz enjoyed in Lima as a theologian that his words were taken seriously. Eventually the prosecutors drew up a list of 130 charges, of which the most important concerned his relations with a young Creole seer, Maria Pizarro; his alleged contact with ‘demons’ (whom Cruz referred to as ‘angels’); an alleged plan to stage an uprising of settlers; and his alarming prophecies relating to ‘Gabriel’. Gabriel, or ‘Gabrielico’, was the son born shortly after Cruz's arrest, to the Lima lady Leonor de Valenzuela, who while her husband was away on active service had developed a relationship with the Dominican preacher. Pizarro, a nervous and hysterical girl of twenty-two, who had built up a following among local Jesuit and Franciscan clergy, was taken into custody in December 1572 but became seriously ill in prison and died there a year later.

  The implication of a few notable people in the affair sufficed to give it importance. Cruz never emerged from the cells of the Holy Office. After seven years of examination and interrogation, the Inquisition condemned him as a heretic and he was burnt after a specially imposing auto de fe held in the main square of Lima on 13 April 1578 in the presence of the viceroy and all local dignitaries. José de Acosta, who arrived in Lima the year Cruz was arrested, was present at the burning and said that the accused died unrepentant, with his eyes fixed on the sky. Viceroy Toledo was convinced that the Dominican had led a plot to make Peru independent of the empire, and reported as much to Philip II, who accepted the version unquestioningly. The affair disappeared from sight and from all official histories for nearly four hundred years.131

  Francisco de la Cruz was a tormented spirit whose visions, imaginings and ravings reflected the torment of the New World with which he identified himself. In his years as preacher and thinker he had acquired a profound enthusiasm for the ideas of his friend Las Casas, just as he later became an ardent defender of the cause of the Indians of Peru. In his prison cell these and other influences combined to produce a strange cocktail of ideas, fruit of his own mystical reading as well as of the complex reality of the Andean world. He claimed to have had visions in which the angels foretold great things for Gabriel, who was viewed as a future saviour of the realm of Peru. In the end, his dominant vision was probably – if any logic can be given to his ideas – one that sustained the Creole hope of an autonomous regime in Peru.

  He maintained,132 as some thinkers of his own and other mendicant orders had done, that the Church would shortly collapse in the Old World, where it had become corrupt, and would set itself up in the New World. This was a millennial vision that still survived among the clergy working in America, but Cruz gave new twists to it. He asserted that in this new Church the clergy would be allowed to marry, and moreover that intermarriage between Spaniards and Indians would be the basis of the new Andean society. Both these ideas were fairly commonplace, for many Catholic clergy continued to argue against celibacy, and marriage of settlers with women from the Inca élite had been known. However, Cruz was moving in new directions. He reverted to the idea, found in some chroniclers of the time, that the civilized natives of America came from the lost tribes of Israel. On this basis, he arrived at the conclusion that the Indians would become the new Israel, the new People of God. ‘One of the reasons why God will punish Spain is because it has not given due care to the succour and salvation of the Indians.’

  In this panorama of a new Church and a new chosen people, there was virtually no role for Spain and its empire. Spain would in fact perish, and the peninsular Spaniards and their values would be destroyed. He cited an opinion of Las Casas that most of the Spaniards in America would be damned: ‘I remember some words that Las Casas said to me in Spain, in Toledo, when I was coming to this country; he said that all the Spaniards in America are going to hell, except for the friars who are teaching the Indians.’ The lust for gold would disappear, according to Cruz, for the silver of Potosí would dry up and vanish. The peoples of Peru would then indeed revert to the Age of Gold spoken of by classical writers, in which ‘they will dedicate themselves to agriculture and herding and manual work, and there will be an end to the troubles in the kingdom and to the ill treatment that the Indians receive in the mines’. The disappearance of Spain would lead to liberty for the Creoles: ‘the time will come when Peru will be ruled independent of Spain’.133

  Seven years of rambling and often incoherent declarations, written down and certainly misreported by the secretaries, replete with extravagances that made the inquisitors suspect that the accused was uttering insanities in order to feign madness, cannot be condensed satisfactorily into the few phrases just outlined. We can, however, see in Cruz a sort of prism through which the multiple aspects of the New World identity were filtered and (evidently) distorted. The criticisms, aspirations and doubts of those who lived in that newly emerging society on the shores of the Pacific found in him a voice that converted him into a prophet, an Elijah in the deserts of the Andes.

  The empire helped to form the identity of Spaniards, but at the same time it aroused profound and continuous criticism from them. Few of its aspects provoked such controversy as the discovery and conquest of the New World. A persistent current in Spanish opinion viewed America as the cause of all subsequent ills. Easy wealth from the New World, ran this line of thought, undermined the wish to work. ‘Our Spain’, González de Cellorigo wrote in 1600, ‘has looked so much to the Indies trade that its inhabitants have neglected the affairs of these realms, wherefore Spain from its great wealth has attained great poverty.’134 ‘The poverty of Spain’, claimed Canon Sancho de Moncada even more firmly and succinctly in 1619, ‘has resulted from the discovery of the Indies.’135 For the next two hundred years there were always commentators to be found who repeated such sentiments as gospel. The opinion was always accompanied by a mordant corollary: foreigners were stealing the wealth of America from Spaniards. Criticism of the role of foreigners in Spanish commerce tended to end up as a raucous expression of Castilian nationalism. What we take from the Indies is ours, writers claimed. Why should others take it away from us?

  Criticism of the activity of settlers in America was largely the preserve of the mendicant orders in the first century of the Spanish presence. The relentless campaign of Las Casas, who had support in the very highest quarters, from both Charles V and Philip II, served to keep the issue alive.136 Not all the criticisms managed to find their way into print. Church writers who insisted on the theme were refused permission by their superiors to air their views. The most notable case was Gerónimo de Mendieta, whose History of the Church in America was consulted and used by his colleague Juan de Torquemada, but not published till 1870. Mendieta's criticism was typical. He claimed that the New World was Spain's by virtue of the pope's donation, and not because of any conquest. It followed that America was not discovered ‘merely that gold and silver might be shipped from here to Spain. God gave the Indies to Spain in order that she might cultivate a profit from the mines of so many Indian souls.’137

  There was an important corollary to the argument. Since Spain's role was spiritual, it had no right to dispossess the native rulers, except in special circumstances such as a justifiable conquest because of resistance to the gospel. The friars therefore presented themselves as the defenders of the oppressed Indians and of the natural rights of indigenous chiefs. The contention was obviously not acceptable to the Spanish crown, and Viceroy Toledo in Peru made it his special task (as we have seen in Chapter 4) to vindicate the direct authority of the king and the irrelevance of the papal donation. But the problem would not go away. Many clergy at the end of the sixteenth century continued to make a stand on the papal donation and by implication questioned the authority of the crown. In the faraway Philippines, Dominican friars in the
1590s argued that since the natives had peacefully accepted the gospel, their rulers retained all their natural rights and the king of Spain could not allege that he had conquered them.138 In October 1596 the council of the Indies in Spain formally debated the issue, and finally in 1597 Philip II issued one of the most extraordinary decrees of his reign. He ordered the governor of the Philippines to give back to the natives any tribute that had been unjustly collected from them in the period when they were not legally under his rule. At the same time, he ordered his officials to go through the islands and obtain formal statements from the natives accepting Spanish rule. For the next two years – a full generation after the arrival of Legazpi – the archipelago was witness to the strange phenomenon of meetings of the chiefs of the barangays in which they ratified before a notary their acceptance of the authority of the king of Spain.

  Such controversy over the crown's authority has sometimes been attributed to a peculiar Spanish concern for legality. But it may equally be attributed to their reluctant imperialism. It was a line of thought shared by a broad range of people in Spain including clergy, economists, merchants, political theorists and plain traditionalists who saw little of value beyond the horizon of their local communities, and refused to accept world power or the responsibilities that went with it. Their ideas surfaced repeatedly in times of crisis, during the rebellion of the Comuneros in Castile, during the wars in the Netherlands and during the invasion of Portugal in 1580. It would be misleading to call the attitude anti-imperialist, for it was very much more. There were also elements of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, and a profound concern for ‘little Castile’, the country which had been their own before it was taken over by the empire. Castile had always been enough for its people, they felt, why grasp for more? In 1565 Luis de Requesens, serving at the time as ambassador to Rome, criticized the view, which he ascribed to ‘old men in Castile who believe we were better off when we held no more than that realm’.139

  Perhaps the most bitter issue was the war in the Netherlands, which provoked among Castilians, from the government downwards, a long-standing debate centred on whether the country should sacrifice its revenues and the lives of its young men in order to win a pointless war far away from home. The passionate words of the Cortes deputy Francisco de Alarcón in 1588 were directed against thirty long years of imperialist war:

  My question is: why should we pay a tax on flour here in order to stop heresy there? Will France, Flanders and England be better off if Spain is worse off? The solution adopted for the sinners of Nineveh was not raising taxes in order to go and conquer them, but sending people there to convert them. The Catholic faith and its defence belong to all Christendom, and Castile should not have to bear all the burden while other realms, rulers and states just look on.

  Even more angry were the words of a pamphlet that circulated in Madrid just after the death of Philip II, in which the author (who was arrested for his pains) declaimed that ‘if two hundred thousand Spaniards, not to mention other nations, have been deliberately led like sheep to the slaughter to be killed in the bogs of Flanders’, then the late king was ‘worse than Nero’.140

  The successful occupation of Portugal, as we have seen, gave an enormous boost to Castile's imperialist dream. Among the few dissonant voices was Teresa of Avila. She commented that ‘if this matter is pursued through war, I fear great harm’. A leading Jesuit lamented that Christians should be fighting Christians: ‘This realm [Castile] is ailing and has little wish to see any growth in His Majesty's power.’ The opinions were by no means anti-imperialist. They reflected, however, a continuous concern over the implications and the possible negative consequences of belligerency. During the transition from the reign of Philip II to that of his son, all the doubts and criticisms came to the surface. One of the reactions was that of Alamos de Barrientos, a friend of Antonio Pérez, who felt in the 1590s that the empire, now barely two generations old, was already falling apart. He divided the realms of the monarchy into two categories. The first were the ‘inherited’ realms, which for him included Flanders and the Indies. The second were the ‘conquered’ realms, which for him included Portugal and Naples. None of them had brought any benefit to Spaniards, who were sunk in a ‘misery which comes principally from the burden of taxes and from spending all the proceeds on foreign wars’. All the burden of the empire had fallen on Castile alone. ‘In other monarchies the limbs contribute to maintain the head, and in ours it is the head that labours so that the limbs are fed and sustained.’141

  Castilians were suspicious and resentful of foreigners and their preponderant role in the monarchy. Clergy were second to none in their xenophobia. ‘Quite lately’, claimed Philip II's former tutor and opponent of Las Casas, Sepúlveda, ‘I notice that contact with foreigners has introduced opulence to the lifestyle of the nobility.’142 With writers both great and small, significant and insignificant, the theme was continuous and never failed to come to the surface. Foreigners (including both Jews and Moors) were held responsible for the evils besetting what would have been a perfect empire had it been controlled only by Castilians. As the empire developed, so too did the significance of the word ‘foreigner’. In the fifteenth century a Cortes of Madrid raised objections to ‘Navarrese and Aragonese and other foreigners’.143 In political terms, subjects of the different realms of the peninsula were indeed at that time ‘foreigners’ to each other. A century or more later, distinctions based on language, religion and power had demarcated more clearly what it was to be a foreigner, and Castilians drew quite specific lines separating themselves from others.

  Perhaps the most prolific critic of foreign influences was the seventeenth-century poet Francisco de Quevedo, who tirelessly presented fervently nationalist views, attributing to other Europeans all the vices to be found in his own country: ‘there is no vice we have that we do not owe to our contact with them’. If there was sodomy in Spain, he claimed, it had come from Italy; if there was gluttony, it had come from Germany; if there was an Inquisition it was because Calvin and Luther had made it necessary.144 Continuous wars against France nurtured a specially virulent polemic against that country, right down to the early eighteenth century. Shortly after the War of the Spanish Succession, a pamphlet published in Madrid in 1714 with the title Reply of a friend to one who asks when there will be an end to our ills, stated that ‘the principal reason for our lament is the innate hostility with which all foreigners have always looked on Spain’.145

  Though there was much cultural antagonism as a result of the coexistence of races within the empire, many Spaniards were also capable of looking more objectively at the question. The most outstanding early writer on the subject was the Jesuit José de Acosta.146 He inevitably shared in the prejudices of his time and his religion, but he attempted to define how one should assess the various peoples who composed the empire. During his travels in the New World he had made contact with people of all nations. He accepted the designation of ‘barbarian’ commonly given to non-Europeans by European thinkers, but attempted (like several other Spaniards of the time) to define what the word implied. 147 It boiled down, he felt, to differences in levels of communication.147 Three levels of communication, and hence of civilization, could be perceived among the barbarians. The topmost category was occupied by those who possessed civil society, writing and letters, such as the Chinese (whose books Acosta had seen in Mexico) and perhaps also the Japanese and some other Asians. The second level included those who had civil society but lacked formal writing; these included the Mexicas and the Incas. The last level was composed of those who appeared to have no civil society and no written method of communication; into this class fell most of the indigenous tribes of the Americas. Through this type of rational approach, Spanish thinkers attempted to explain to administrators and missionaries how they should approach the task of assimilating other nations into Spain's international commonwealth.

  The spiritual endeavours of the Spanish clergy have often, with some justice,
been viewed as the crowning glory of the imperial enterprise. Though other aspects of the colonial regime may have failed, it is claimed, the spiritual conquest succeeded and the Catholic identity was Spain's greatest colonial legacy. Bartolomé de las Casas had proclaimed that the principal purpose of the empire was not oppression but conversion. The missionary effort was certainly a very extensive one, thoroughly documented by those who took part in it. On all parts of the frontier, in old Granada, in Manila, in New Mexico, in the Andes, the old ways of life were substantially affected. Most of the clergy were professional optimists, concerned always to inflate the numbers of natives brought into the Christian fold, and reporting their activities always in the most glowing terms. Theirs is often the only evidence available, but it has to be approached with caution.

  Not all missionaries were optimistic. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún commented in the sixteenth century that ‘as far as the Catholic faith is concerned, [America] is sterile ground and difficult to cultivate. It seems to me that the Catholic faith will persevere but little in these parts.’148 It is possible that the Catholic faith survived with greater force than Sahagún perceived. Where it survived, however, the people chose what they wished and rejected the rest, hardly the results that the missionaries had hoped for. It will perhaps always be difficult to arrive at a balanced assessment of whether Spain succeeded in the religious aspect of its imperial venture. Nearly a century after the establishment of the Spaniards in Central America, the English Dominican, Thomas Gage, said of the Indians in his parish in Guatemala that ‘as for their religion, they are outwardly such as the Spaniards but inwardly they are slow to believe that which is above sense, nature and the visible sight of the eye. Many of them to this day do incline to worship idols of stocks and stones, and are given to much superstition.’149