Within Spain, during the sixteenth century, tax increase followed upon tax increase—at one point the tax load tripled in just two decades—in an effort to sustain the empire’s overextended growth, but still when Philip took the Crown at mid-century he inherited a debt of 70,000,000 ducats. By the time his reign was ending two-thirds of the Crown’s revenues were earmarked for interest payments alone, and on a number of occasions Philip was forced to convert short-term indebtedness to long-term debt because he simply was unable to pay his obligations.54 Immanuel Wallerstein has put it simply and well: “Spain was an empire,” he writes, “when what was needed in the sixteenth century was a medium-size state.”55
Much historiographical debate has taken place regarding the ultimate centrality of New World gold and silver to Spain’s economy in the sixteenth century, some scholars declaring it to have been much more important than others. What is beyond debate, however, is that Spain at the time perceived the wealth of the Indies and the Americas as absolutely essential to its economic health and pursued it with the cupidity of the crudest and greediest conquistador.
The conquistadors, meanwhile, were plying their lethal trade not only in the Americas. No doubt, that was where most Spanish soldiers would have liked to be spending their time—especially after stories began circulating in Spain of people like Gaspar de Espinosa, who was said to have returned home in 1522, after eight years in Panama, with the huge fortune of a million gold pesos—but there was fighting to be done within Europe as well. Indeed, during most of the sixteenth century the Old World was awash in what military historian Robert L. O’Connell calls a “harvest of blood,” as European killed European with an extraordinary unleashing of passion. And, of course, Spain was in the thick of it.56
In 1568, to cite but one example among many, Philip ordered the duke of Alva—“probably the finest soldier of his day,” says O’Connell, “and certainly the crudest”—to the Netherlands, where Philip was using the Inquisition to root out and persecute Protestants. The duke promptly passed a death sentence upon the entire population of the Netherlands: “he would have utter submission or genocide,” O’Connell writes, “and the veterans of Spain stood ready to enforce his will.” Massacre followed upon massacre, on one occasion leading to the mass drowning of 6000 to 7000 Netherlanders, “a disaster which the burghers of Emden first realized when several thousand broad-brimmed Dutch hats floated by.”57
As with most of his other debts, Philip did not pay his soldiers on time, if at all, which created ruptures in discipline and converted the Spanish troops into angry marauders who compensated themselves with whatever they could take. As O’Connell notes:
Gradually, it came to be understood that should the Spanish succeed in taking a town, the population and its possessions would constitute, in essence, the rewards. So it was that, as the [Netherlands] revolt dragged on, predatory behavior reinforced by economic self-interest came to assume a very pure form. Thus, in addition to plunder, not only did the slaughter of adult males and ritual rape of females increasingly become routine, but other more esoteric acts began to crop up. Repeatedly, according to John Motley, Spanish troops took to drinking the blood of their victims . . . .58
If this was the sort of thing that became routine within Europe—as a consequence of “predatory behavior reinforced by economic self-interest” on the part of the Spanish troops—little other than unremitting genocide could be expected from those very same troops when they were loosed upon native peoples in the Caribbean and Meso- and South America—peoples considered by the soldiers, as by most of their priestly and secular betters, to be racially inferior, un-Christian, carnal beasts, or, at best, in Bernardino de Minaya’s words quoted earlier, “a third species of animal between man and monkey” that was created by God specifically to provide slave labor for Christian caballeros and their designated representatives. Indeed, ferocious and savage though Spanish violence in Europe was during the sixteenth century, European contemporaries of the conquistadors well recognized that by “serving as an outlet for the energies of the unruly,” in J.H. Elliott’s words, the New World saved Europe, and Spain itself, from even worse carnage. “It is an established fact,” the sixteenth-century Frenchman Henri de la Popeliniére wrote with dry understatement, “that if the Spaniard had not sent to the Indies discovered by Columbus all the rogues in his realm, and especially those who refused to return to their ordinary employment after the wars of Granada against the Moors, these would have stirred up the country or given rise to certain novelties in Spain.”59
To the front-line Spanish troops, then, once they had conquered and stolen from the Indians all the treasure the natives had accumulated for themselves, the remaining indigenous population represented only an immense and bestial labor force to be used by the Christians to pry gold and silver from the earth. Moreover, so enormous was the native population—at least during the early years of each successive stage in the overall conquest—that the terrorism of torture, mutilation, and mass murder was the simplest means for motivating the Indians to work; and for the same reason—the seemingly endless supply of otherwise superfluous population—the cheapest way of maximizing their profits was for the conquistadors to work their Indian slaves until they dropped. Replacing the dead with new captives, who themselves could be worked to death, was far cheaper than feeding and caring for a long-term resident slave population.
To be sure, there were those who protested this monstrous treatment of the native people. Las Casas was the most outspoken, the most vigorous, and the most famous, although he was not alone in his efforts. However, he and his supporters were far from a majority, even within the religious fellowship. Here, for example, is what the pious Dominican Tomas Ortiz wrote to the Council of the Indies early in the sixteenth century regarding the New World’s peoples:
On the mainland they eat human flesh. They are more given to sodomy than any other nation. There is no justice among them. They go naked. They have no respect either for love or for virginity. They are stupid and silly. They have no respect for truth, save when it is to their advantage. They are unstable. They have no knowledge of what foresight means. They are ungrateful and changeable. . . . They are brutal. They delight in exaggerating their defects. There is no obedience among them, or deference on the part of the young for the old, nor of the son for the father. They are incapable of learning. Punishments have no effect on them. . . . They eat fleas, spiders, and worms raw, whenever they find them. They exercise none of the human arts or industries. When taught the mysteries of our religion, they say that these things may suit Castilians, but not them, and they do not wish to change their customs. . . . I may therefore affirm that God has never created a race more full of vice and composed without the least mixture of kindness or culture. . . . The Indians are more stupid than asses, and refuse to improve in anything.60
The only thing demonstrably true in this litany of Christian hate was that the Indians often were understandably reluctant to give up the faiths of their forefathers and adopt the foreign religious beliefs of the people who had come to kill and torture and enslave them. In addition, many of those who appeared to have undergone conversion turned out to be backsliders, or false conversions in the first place. The Spanish, of course, had a tried and true answer to problems of this sort: the Inquisition. So they instituted among the natives Inquisitorial proceedings to locate and punish those Indians who had given false witness or who had returned to “idolatry” after claiming to have seen the light. Thus, the friars joined the conquistadors in burning Indians at the stake.61
If the assertions of Ortiz and others regarding the habits of the Indians were fabrications, they were not fabrications without design. From the Spaniards’ enumerations of what they claimed were the disgusting food customs of the Indians (including cannibalism, but also the consumption of insects and other items regarded as unfit for human diets) to the Indians’ supposed nakedness and absence of agriculture, their sexual deviance and licentiousness, their brut
ish ignorance, their lack of advanced weaponry and iron, and their irremediable idolatry, the conquering Europeans were purposefully and systematically dehumanizing the people they were exterminating. For the specific categories of behavior chosen for these accusations were openly derived from traditional Christian and earlier Roman and Greek ideas regarding the characteristics of fundamentally evil and non-rational creatures, from Hesiod’s Bronze race to the medieval era’s wild men and witches. Thus, time and again, the enslavement and terroristic mass slaughter of Indians by the Spanish was justified by pointing to the natives’ supposed ignorance or their allegedly despicable and animalistic behavior—as, for example, when Balboa’s troops murdered hundreds of native people in one locale, hacking them to death and feeding them to the dogs, because Balboa claimed that some of their chiefs were addicted to the “nefarious and dirty sin [of] sodomy.”62
All this, of course—from the miraculous discovery of the Indies to the destruction of the heathenish Incas—was part of God’s master plan. Indeed, the very priest who had persuaded Las Casas to become a friar, Father Domingo de Betanzos, had widely and influentially proclaimed a prophecy during the early years of the conquest that “the Indians were beasts and that God had condemned the whole race to perish for the horrible sins that they had committed in their paganism.” Although Betanzos eventually repudiated the prophecy just before dying while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land—several decades after pronouncing it, and apparently under pressure from some of his gentler Dominican brothers—by then it was commonly accepted truth by those of both high and low station, within the sacred as well as the secular communities. In fact, no sooner was Betanzos dead than his repudiated prophecy quickly was edited, revised, and recirculated by the Dominican chronicler Dávila Padilla.63
Some explanation, after all, had to be given for the apparent ease with which the Indians went to their graves, whether from the storms of European epidemic disease (from which, said one Spaniard, the Indians “died in heaps, like bedbugs”) or from the blades of Spanish rapiers.64 Since, to the minds of Europeans at that time, such extraordinary events did not occur except by divine intent, what could God’s purpose be in permitting—or directing—the mass destruction of the native peoples?
The Spanish friars were divided on this question. Some of them argued, in line with Fathers Betanzos and Ortiz, that the Indians had such a terrible history of ungodliness—and especially of indulgence in sins of the flesh—that God was punishing them by exterminating them, and the Spanish were merely the means of carrying out his holy will. (As noted above, such ideas were rooted not only in early Christian thought but in Western classical tradition as well: it was about 800 years before the rise of Christianity, for instance, that Greek wisdom had described famine, plague, and infertility—the crushing burdens now being imposed on the Indians—as the divinely ordered and inevitable just due of those societies that behaved “wickedly.”)65 Others, such as the distinguished Franciscan monk and historian Gerónimo de Mendieta, contended that, on the contrary, the massive Indian die-off was God’s punishment to the Spanish for their horrendous mistreatment of the natives. Because of their great evil in oppressing the Indians, Mendieta concluded, God had decided to deprive the Spanish of their seemingly inexhaustible supply of slaves and forced labor. “Once the Indians are exterminated,” he wrote in his Historia eclesiástica Indiana from Mexico in the later sixteenth century, “I do not know what is going to happen in this land except that the Spaniards will then rob and kill each other.” He continued: “And concerning the plagues that we see among [the Indians] I cannot help but feel that God is telling us: ‘You [the Spaniards] are hastening to exterminate this race. I shall help you to wipe them out more quickly. You shall soon find yourselves without them, a prospect that you desire so ardently.’”66
In sum, whether God was punishing the Indians for their sins or the Spanish for their cruelties, both sides in this ecclesiastical debate were agreed that God wanted the Indians dead. The conquistadors were only too happy to oblige their Lord and be his holy instrument. If the divinely ordered immolation of these creatures—whom the wisest men in Spain, after all, had long since declared to be mere beasts and natural slaves—was in the end intended to be a punishment for the conquistadors’ brutality, they could worry about that in the future, while counting their gold and silver. But the Crown and the merchants who were funding the New World enterprise wanted their share of the treasure now. Moreover, apart from the diseases that God was using to kill off the native people, should anyone express concern over the massive killings that took place in the mines that were supplying all that treasure, the appeal to Aristotle—now enhanced with an insidious element of outright racism—was readily available, and ever more widely employed with every passing year.
The Spanish magistrate Juan de Matienzo provides just one example among many. Writing of the native people of the Andes in his 1567 Government of Peru, following six years of service in the viceroyalty there, Matienzo declared that “men of this type or complexion are, according to Aristotle, very fearful, weak, and stupid. . . . It is clear that this is their complexion from the colour of their faces, which is the same in all of them.” In addition to the color of their skin, the distinguished jurist wrote, there was the evidence from the strength and shape of their bodies: “It can be known that they were born for this [forced labor in the service of the Spanish] because, as Aristotle says, such types were created by nature with strong bodies and were given less intelligence, while free men have less physical strength and more intelligence.” In sum, the Spanish were justified in working the Indians to death, and in killing outright those who were reluctant to serve their natural masters, because these brute creatures were nothing more than “animals who do not even feel reason, but are ruled by their passions.”67 Within a few years after Matienzo’s words appeared in print, the huge tide of silver pouring into Europe from the death-camp mines of Peru—silver now worth at least 8,000,000 ducats each year—reached its enormous all-time high. Meanwhile, upwards of 8,000,000 Peruvian natives had been turned into corpses by the Spanish, with barely 1,000,000 remaining alive. And before long, most of those survivors would be destroyed as well.68
Some years ago a debate took place among historians of early America concerning the priority of racism or slavery in what both sides agreed was the ultimately racist enslavement of African Americans. Some contended that, of the two, racism was the primary phenomenon, since without it racial slavery of the sort that emerged in the Americas could not have come into being. Others claimed that true racism actually followed on the heels of black slavery in the Americas, forming into a system of thought in large part as rationalization for an otherwise morally indefensible institution. Although the first of these assertions clearly is correct, so too, in a more limited sense, is the second: while sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western thought was thick with anti-African racist stereotypes, as black slavery as an economic institution took hold and grew so also did elaborate racist justifications for its moral propriety—justifications which then further encouraged the continuing expansion of the institution itself.69
This dialectic of ongoing mutual reinforcement between ideology and institution is what historian Winthrop Jordan has called the “cycle of degradation” that continually fueled the “engine of oppression” that wearied and broke the bodies of captive African Americans for two and a half long centuries.70 And that ideological-institutional cycle of degradation is precisely the dynamic that also emerged early on among the Spanish regarding the native peoples of the Indies and Meso- and South America.
Just as social thought does not bloom in a political vacuum, however, neither do institutions come into being and sustain themselves without the inspiration of economic or political necessity. In sixteenth-century Spain, as we have seen, that necessity was created by an impoverished and financially dependent small nation that made itself into an empire, an empire that engaged in ambitious wars of expansion (and vicio
us Inquisitorial repression of suspected non-believers within), but an empire with a huge and gaping hole in its treasury: no sooner were gold or silver deposited than they drained away to creditors. The only remedy for this, since control of expenditures did not fit with imperial visions, was to accelerate the appropriation of wealth. And this demanded the theft and mining of more and more New World gold and silver.
The Spanish possessed neither the manpower nor the inclination for mining America’s vast store of precious metals themselves. But, along with all those riches, God had provided more laborers than could be imagined—tens upon tens of millions—so many, in fact, that the first Portuguese governor of Brazil claimed it would be impossible to exhaust the supply even if the Europeans were to cut the natives up in slaughterhouses. There was, however, nothing to be gained from the wholesale butchery of Indians for mere entertainment—although that commonly did occur at the hands of enthusiastic conquistadors—while a great deal was to be achieved from working them until they collapsed. So enormous was the reservoir of native muscle and flesh that no rational slave driver would spend good money on caring for these beasts (and beasts they were, and natural slaves, so the wisest of wise men had come to agree); it was more efficient simply to use them up and then replace them.
Mass murder and torture and mutilation had their place, of course, as instruments of terror to recruit reluctant natives and to be sure they stayed in line. But the extermination of entire communities and cultures, though commonplace, was rarely the Spaniards’ declared end goal, since to do so meant a large expenditure of energy with no financial return. As with Hispaniola, Tenochtitlán, Cuzco, and elsewhere, the Spaniards’ mammoth destruction of whole societies generally was a by-product of conquest and native enslavement, a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end in itself. And therein lies the central difference between the genocide committed by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because it made economic sense.
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