One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  “If you do accept this, you will do well,” the Requerimiento goes on to say. “We shall receive you in all love and charity, and shall leave you, your wives, and your children, and your lands, free without servitude, that you may do with them and with yourselves freely that which you like and think best.” However, as the commanding officer of any exploratory mission into the American mainland would hasten to add:

  If you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses.

  We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us.

  The Requerimiento ends with a bureaucratic flourish, declaring that the time and place of the statement’s recitation should be notarized. Both those who had comprehended the words and those who had not were understood as having served as witnesses that the conquerors had attended to all proper legalities; the dismantling of a culture could commence only after the proper forms had been filed.

  Scholars regard the Requerimiento as a legal formality, a necessary statement of the terms that would thereafter govern Spanish treatment of the native peoples they encountered. Most modern observers might retrospectively note, however, that the promise of “love and charity” proffered in the message was not a legal fiction but an outright lie. As the Spanish conquest continued through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, Native Americans who agreed to convert to Christianity were surely not safe from the “mischief and damage” that would be done by the men who had come from across the sea, despite promises to the contrary. Nor were Christians of the day unanimous in their agreement with this approach to spreading the faith. As the first historian of the Americas, Bartolomé de las Casas said of the Requerimiento, one is not sure whether to laugh or weep at its audacious departure from the fundamentals of the Christian faith. It was as if, he observed, Jesus had supplemented his order to preach the Gospel to all lands with a directive that his apostles should offer far-off people a choice between baptism or the sword.

  Even so, to those who delivered the Requerimiento—as the members of the Narváez Expedition did on Good Friday of 1528, in what is now St. Petersburg, Florida—it was not necessarily the example of bald hypocrisy that it may seem today. To Zemmouri it must have instead sounded like an honest statement of the logic upon which Christendom rested, and thus the underlying system of thought upon which the entire colonial enterprise would depend. Through the conversion process that had provided him with the Christian name Esteban, he no doubt had been given much the same offer, made with the understanding that those who did not believe in Christ were lost, and those who did believe bore responsibility for souls they failed to save.

  Europeans brought with them across the ocean a set of taken-for-granted facts about the world and its order that they could not unlearn simply because they had traveled to a new place and now addressed a people to whom such facts would have been utterly nonsensical in any language. Without granting any measure of absolution, it should be remembered that a civilization ignorant of the rules of order the Requerimiento described would not have seemed to the Spanish to be a civilization at all. The Europeans who arrived in America as the fifteenth century turned to the sixteenth lacked adequate categories for understanding who and what they had encountered. Most of them barely knew where they were on the globe, so it should come as no surprise that the moral compass of these explorers was similarly misaligned. The Requerimiento may have assumed ignorance on the part of those for whom it was intended, but it survives as evidence of the failings—both ethical and imaginative—of those who delivered it.

  In the spring of 1528, the Spanish governor of all North America decided to separate his land forces from their vessels, their lifelines back to the Spanish stronghold of Cuba. The result was disastrous: Within weeks, their cohort had been decimated. Scores of explorers were killed by disease or native attacks.

  With provisions quickly exhausted, the explorers slaughtered support animals for meat (“after we had eaten the dogs,” Cabeza de Vaca later wrote, “it seemed to us that we had enough strength to go further on”), and soon the hunger of some members of the expedition turned even to the human dead. On a particularly harrowing note, Cabeza de Vaca mentions five soldiers cut off from the rest, who in their desperation killed and ate each other one by one. Of the others, he notes, “One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.”

  In a last-ditch effort to find their way home, the two hundred or so yet living decided they would be better off getting as far as possible from the land that seemed intent on their demise. They built a makeshift forge—with flues made of hollowed-out logs and bellows sewn from deerskin—and melted military equipment including “stirrups, spurs, cross-bows and other iron implements” into the nails, saws, and hatchets with which they began to cut down as many pines, junipers, and palmettos as they could gather. They then butchered their remaining horses, wove the hair of manes and tails into ropes, and used these to bind together the tree trunks into several barges, each large enough to carry fifty men.

  Though hewn of superhuman effort and ingenuity, and labored over for nearly two months, two of these barges quickly sank in the Gulf of Mexico. (“None of us knew how to build ships,” Cabeza de Vaca admitted.) The supposed leader of this expedition, the bungling one-eyed Narváez, was among those lost beneath the storm-tossed waves. The remaining barges ran aground on an island off the Texas coast, most likely present-day Galveston, which the survivors came to call Isla de Malhado, the Island of Misfortune.

  By November of 1528, a force that once numbered in the hundreds had been reduced to little more than a dozen. As Cabeza de Vaca later described the situation of these survivors, they had seen most of their number die brutal deaths on land or disappear into the sea, and “the rest of us, as naked as we had been born, had lost everything.” With winter approaching, bitter wind and ravenous hunger seemed likely to accomplish what five thousand miles and months of suffering had not. “We were in such a state that every bone could easily be counted,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote, “and we looked like death itself.”

  But at this point something unexpected happened. The original inhabitants of the Island of Misfortune, a tribe known as the Karankawa, approached the beachside encampment where the explorers had all expected to die. They could not have looked more menacing to the vulnerable castaways. “They seemed to be giants,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote. They also were apparently impervious to pain: “The men have one of their nipples perforated from side to side and sometimes both. Through this hole is thrust a reed as long as two and a half hands and as thick as two fingers; they also have the under lip perforated and a piece of cane in it as thin as the half of a finger.”

  Yet despite their warlike appearance, they did not attack. “Upon seeing the disaster we had suffered in our misery and distress, the Indians sat down with us and all began to weep out of compassion for our misfortune,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote. “For more than half an hour they wept so loud and so sincerely that it could be heard far away. Truly, to see beings so devoid of reason, untutored, so savage, yet so deeply moved by pity for us, it increased my feelings and those of others in my company.”

  Occurring long before the first Thanksgiving, that myth of shared maize and cross-cultural kindness, it was a moment of awareness on the part of
the Europeans that the people they encountered in the New World might be able to teach them something about surviving within it. “When the lament was over, I spoke to the others and asked them if they would like me to beg the Indians to take us to their homes,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote. The Karankawa took them to their village, installed them in a new hut, and then “they began to dance and to make a great celebration that lasted the whole night.” The starved explorers, however, could not believe these unlikely people might be their salvation. Despite the apparent goodwill of the Indians, “there was neither pleasure, feast, nor sleep in it for us,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote, “since we expected to be sacrificed in the morning.”

  They were not sacrificed, but most of them never did make it out of the Karankawa village. Weakened by malnutrition and disease, the last members of the Narváez Expedition began dying by the day, until only four remained. Those men were the three who were veterans of the Comunero rebellion—Andrés Dorantes, Cabeza de Vaca, and Mustafa Zemmouri—and a fourth, a doctor’s son called Castillo, who like the two other Spaniards had crossed the ocean hoping to make his fortune and his name.

  Of these men, only Zemmouri had already experienced the degradations of bondage they all soon would know. Only he had lived for years in the space between faiths, which is exactly where they all would soon find themselves when they realized they were no longer the guests of the natives but their prisoners. Only Zemmouri had moved through cultures, languages, and systems of belief in order to survive.

  While the challenge of communicating with a people who did not fit into preexisting categories cannot be overstated, the Spanish were obviously not unaware of the religious differences between themselves and the people they encountered in America. In some ways, in fact, the religious assumptions at work in their interactions were more complex than they might initially seem. They are still not very sympathetic from a twenty-first-century perspective, but nonetheless it is useful to consider that when Spanish explorers looked upon the people to whom the Requerimiento was read, they did not always see them as people lacking religion. Rather, the more often they saw them, the more they came to see—or thought they were seeing—signs of a familiar difference.

  The Spanish invaders looked upon Native Americans and sometimes thought they saw the difference by which their own culture had been most profoundly shaped: the divide between one set of religious assumptions and another. As unlikely as it seems, they frequently reacted as if the people encountered on the other side of the Atlantic were Muslims. This is not to say they truly believed the Indians had any connection to Islam. Rather, because the Spanish saw humanity defined and separated by known religious differences, they lacked a category for the native peoples of the Americas, and so used one of their existing categories to make sense of a form of difference they were encountering for the first time. In the documents detailing the exploration, whenever a native site of obvious religious or ceremonial significance is described, the Spanish word for church is never used. The word mosque—mezquita—on the other hand, appears again and again. In some ways this is not at all unusual. The Spanish language had developed over the course of centuries of alternating Muslim and Christian dominance over the Iberian Peninsula, resulting in thousands of words of Arabic origin in common usage (even the prototypical Spanish exclamation olé is thought by some to derive from the wa-Allah, “by God”). Naturally, some Arabic elements of the language might have been used by the conquistadors without intention or even awareness of their implications.

  Yet as Ana Marcos Maíllo of the Universidad de Salamanca has noted, in written accounts of the New World, “Arabic terms have been found to be used more often when the conquerors wanted to name what they found especially exotic or different.” For example, when explorers described the costumes and accoutrements of shamans and others performing a ritual role, the ornate vestments of Spanish Catholic priests are never invoked, even though they might have provided readers of these accounts with the most familiar analogy. Instead, the terms used most often relate to Islamic customs of decoration and appearance. As Bernal Díaz del Castillo, chronicler of the conquests of Hernán Cortés, wrote, the clothes of those they met in the region then known as New Spain were “a la manera de albornoces moriscos” (“in the style of Moorish robes”); and the women who danced at ceremonial gatherings were “muy bien vestidas a su manera y que parecían moriscas” (“very well dressed in their own way and seemed like Moorish women”).

  Another example can be found in the writings of the Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara, who interviewed Cortés and other conquistadors to compile his History of the Conquest of Mexico. Describing dances similar to those observed by Bernal, López de Gómara notes that it was not merely the dancers but their very movements that were like “la zambra de los moros” (“the zambra of the Moors”). In the centuries since these words were recorded, “zambra” has come to refer to a specific kind of dance associated with Iberian music and culture generally. At the time, however, the name of the dance itself had unmistakable religious significance: The zambra was the mark of identity among Muslims who had converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spain yet had maintained most of their beliefs and traditions. Not merely a dance of leisure or celebration, the zambra was a ceremony performed in hiding to keep the spark of communal history alive despite legal strictures on its existence. Performing the zambra, in fact, appears on a long list of heretical activities that marked Muslim converts to Christianity as stubbornly clandestine adherents of Islam. Documents of the Spanish Inquisition known as Edicts of Faith warned specifically against those who have “married or betrothed through the rite and custom of the Moors, and have sung songs of the Moors, or have danced the prohibited zambras.” The comparison of Native American dances to a Moorish ritual was not just about similarities in rhythm or movement; it concerned a form of religiosity regarded as an existential threat to Catholic Spain. This threat was made most explicit in the use of Arabic-derived terms to describe the ways in which the Spanish were resisted. Though the natives encountered had no advanced metalwork, their weapons were often called alfanjes, the same term that would be used for an ornate curved scimitar inscribed with Quranic verses. As early as 1517, friars on Hispaniola made the connection plain when they spoke of the island’s native inhabitants as estos moros, “these Moors.”

  Given the number of times the dress, customs, and even the facial features of the natives are described in specifically Islamic terms, one would think that it was not Christian bishops who were believed to have fled Spain to build the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola but Muslim imams. The historian Patricia Seed goes so far as to suggest that the Requerimiento itself, as a “military and political ritual” expressed in religious terms asking not just for surrender but “submission,” had more in common with the means through which Islam had spread across Iberia than with any other European approach to conquest. “The first formal step of jihad,” she writes, “is that a messenger must be sent announcing one’s intentions to the enemy.… Hence, Islamic rules on the Iberian Peninsula insisted strictly upon the sending of an announcement.… Like the Requirement it was a public ritual, addressing itself in a highly stylized way to the unbelievers.” The Requerimiento might then be considered a reenactment of that earlier ritual between “believers” and “unbelievers,” though now with Indians standing in for Muslims, and the roles symbolically reversed.

  The Spanish conquest of the Americas is often considered the opening of a new act in the drama of world history. Seen with a fuller view of the history of which it was a part, however, it was also a restaging of the tragedies that had long defined Europe. This was never truer than in the case of the role the centuries-old fight against Islam played in the psyche of Spanish Christians. The generation of sailors, priests, and military men that came to explore and colonize the Americas had been raised in the shadow of the glorious Reconquista of previous generations. Having no more Muslims at home to fight, they needed to venture into
the world to find a Reconquista of their own, a Crusade against the Islamic ghosts that still haunted their imaginations. The European adventure in America began as a kind of proxy war—or perhaps, more damningly, it was closer to a trip to a shooting range with the images of an uncatchable villain affixed to the targets. The conquistador Cortés made a particular effort to frame his actions in terms that made his personally enriching conquests seem a victory over Islam. Tasked by the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, with reporting back on any houses of worship (“mezquitas”) or masters of religious knowledge (“alfaquíes”) he found, Cortés claimed to have seen over four hundred mosques in a land known as Anahuac.

  Today we know Anahuac as Texas and Mexico. While the region would not be home to actual mosques for almost five hundred years, the man who first explored its northern reaches for the Spanish was indeed an alfaquí of a sort, a Morisco called Mustafa Zemmouri.

  As later recounted by Cabeza de Vaca, the few survivors of the Narváez Expedition would eventually travel for years through North America, passing months at a time as prisoners and slaves of one tribe, then traded to another. Having already made their way from their Florida landing site to the Texas coast, they now were moved about through what would become the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. In the process, they became among the earliest observers of American civilization.

  Through the years of their wandering, the lost explorers mostly made note of differences between the world they had come from and the one in which they were now stranded. Had they paused to consider it, however, they might have found signs that this civilization was not entirely dissimilar from their own. Complete with regional differences of language, governance, tradition, and belief, the land through which these four survivors trod was at the time very much like Catholic Spain in at least one other significant way: It was a home to cultures that had risen and fallen, and now faced uncertain futures.