The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

by Hugh Thomas

  Charles was a remarkable figure. None of his predecessors had his ambitions. His grandfather Maximilian was a Renaissance prince and reveled in his Burgundian antecedents. But he was no intellectual statesman; rather, he was a German politician. Charles was a multinational king served by Burgundians such as Gattinara. He was the dominant statesman of his time and took his grandeur for granted. The New World seemed something that he deserved and needed. But he was not surprised by it. New Spain appeared a natural development.

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  Christianity and the New World

  The people owe you much but you owe them everything. Even if your ears have to hear the proud titles of “invincible,” “inviolable,” and “majesty” … do not acknowledge them, but refer them all to the Church to whom alone they belong.

  ERASMUS, Enchiridion

  In his third letter to the emperor Charles, which reached Spain in November 1522, Cortés requested that more churchmen be sent to New Spain. At that time, there were still only four there: two secular priests, Fray Juan Díaz, of Seville, who had been on Cortés’s expedition throughout; Fray Juan Godínez; and two friars, Fray Pedro Melgarejo de Urrea, a Franciscan, also from Seville, and Fray Bartolomé de Olmedo, a Mercedarian from a town near Valladolid. A little later, Fray Diego de Altamirano, a Franciscan and a cousin of Cortés’s, and Fray Juan de las Varillas, another Mercedarian, from his name also a distant cousin of Cortés’s, arrived in New Spain. They had, as they knew, multiple responsibilities.

  Cortés’s letter requesting further clerical help was supplemented by a letter signed by him, Fray Melgarejo, and Alderete, the treasurer. After speaking of the good services that Cortés and all the conquistadors had performed, the writers continued: “We beseech His Majesty to send us bishops and clerics from every order that are of good life and sound doctrine that they might aid us to establish more firmly Our Holy Catholic Faith in these parts.” The writers went on to request the King to grant the government of New Spain to Cortés, for he was “such a good and loyal servant of the Crown.” The letter ended on a wise note: “We beg the king also not to send us lawyers because by coming to this land they would put it in turmoil.” Such direct language was characteristic of the time. The writers of this letter also hoped that Bishop Fonseca would not “meddle” anymore in Cortés’s affairs and that Governor Velázquez in Cuba would be arrested and sent back to Spain.1

  Christianity had, of course, been engaged in the conquest of the Indies from the beginning. The cross was the symbol of conquest as well as of conversion. Columbus had had priests on his second voyage;2 priests accompanied most of the conquistadors in the West Indies; and there were two bishops in Santo Domingo by 1512, a third in Puerto Rico, and another bishop, Fray Juan de Quevedo, was appointed to Panama in 1513. Quevedo had taken a good suite of priests and canons. His remarkable argument with Las Casas about the treatment of natives, in the presence of King Charles, has been amply described.3 So have the controversies in Santo Domingo following the marvelous sermon of Fray Antonio de Montesinos. The conquistadors were in some ways the reincarnation of those Spaniards who recovered Spain itself from the Moors; but they also saw themselves winning new lands for Christianity against the natural allies of the sixteenth-century Muslims.4 The pope’s decision to grant rights in Africa and the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century to Portugal and to allocate to Spain a new zone of influence in the Indies had given the frame to all the conquests. In a bull of July 1508, Pope Julius II gave King Fernando the right to present to all bishoprics and other ecclesiastical benefices.

  In 1517, Cardinal Cisneros, Regent of Spain, received a letter from Las Casas suggesting that the Inquisition be sent to the Indies.5 Cisneros agreed. The pope made concessions. First, Alonso Manso, bishop of Puerto Rico, was named inquisidor general of the Indies. The bishop had been sacristán mayor at the court of the Infante Juan in the 1490s and had ever since been a protégé of Archbishop Deza. Then, as we have seen, the bull Alias Felicis of April 25, 1521, gave a license to two Franciscans to go to New Spain: Fray Francisco de los Ángeles (Quiñones), a brother of the Count of Luna in Seville, and Fray Jean Glapion of Flanders, the Emperor’s confessor. But they did not carry through the assignment, for the former became general of his order, and the brilliant Glapion died in Valladolid before he could arrange his voyage.

  In 1523, three other Franciscans went to Mexico-Tenochtitlan. These were Johannes Dekkus (Tecto), Johann van der Auwern (Juan de Ayora), and Pedro de Gante.6 The first named had once been a subsidiary confessor to the Emperor, as well as a professor of theology in Paris. He had taken the place of Fray Jean Glapion at Bruges. The second claimed to have Scottish forebears and was even said to be an illegitimate son of King James III of Scotland.

  Fray Pedro de Gante was born about 1490 in Iguen, Budarda, a part of Ghent near the abbey of Saint Pieter. He never mentioned the names of his parents but was perhaps the illegitimate son of the emperor Maximilian. After all, he would write to the emperor Charles in 1546: “Your Majesty and I know how close we are and how the same blood runs in our veins.” Fray Alonso de Escalona, provincial of the Franciscans, would tell King Philip of Spain in 1572, after Fray Pedro’s death, that Pedro had been “a very close relation of your most Christian father, thanks to which we had been able to receive many and large grants.”7 The way that letter is phrased rather suggests that Fray Pedro was a brother of Charles. But we know for certain of two illegitimate sons of Maximilian, both bishops in their maturity.8

  Pedro de Gante studied at the University of Louvain, then became a lay brother at the Franciscan monastery of Ghent, where he spent several years. He left there in 1522 with the Emperor, his supposed brother or nephew, and the next year embarked in May for New Spain, where he and his two comrades arrived on August 13, 1523, the second anniversary of the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Perhaps his decision to go to the New World was influenced by the failure of Glapion to do so. He passed three years in Texcoco, where he founded the school of San Francisco behind the chapel of San José. Here he developed workshops for blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, cobblers, masons, painters, designers, and candlestick-makers. This vocational work was of great importance for the Mexica.

  Pedro remained in New Spain all his life and taught thousands of Mexicans how to read, sew, and write. He deliberately fostered the fusion of Spanish and Indian ways. Thus if he was to observe an Indian ceremony, he would compose a Christian song for it. He drew new patterns for Indian cloaks in a Christian dance: “In this way, the Indians first came to show obedience to the Church.” Considered beautiful to look at by his innumerable friends, Habsburg or not, Pedro was a majestic figure, worthy of his alleged ancestry. He remained a lay brother and never accepted ordination, and so never had a grand position. All the same, the second archbishop of Mexico, the Dominican Fray Alonso de Montúfar, would say, “Pedro de Gante is archbishop of Mexico, not me.”9

  Several officials of the Inquisition were soon named for the New World. In 1523, the first auto-de-fé was celebrated in the Indies: Alfonso de Escalante was condemned in Santo Domingo. Escalante had been the notary of Santiago de Cuba. He had also been a witness in Diego Velázquez’s inquiry of 1519 into the conduct of Francisco de Montejo. All the same, he was burned as a practicing Jew.10 His execution was preceded by the usual vile torments that marked the Inquisition at this stage of its development.

  That same year, Pope Adrian VI conferred special privileges on the Franciscans in the New World. They would be able to elect their own superior every three years who would have all of the powers of a bishop except those of ordination. The consequence was the departure for New Spain of twelve further Franciscans early in 1524.

  These fine men reached Santo Domingo in February, Cuba in March, and Veracruz on May 13 of that year, and began to walk barefoot up to Mexico-Tenochtitlan. They were not just ordinary Franciscans but men from the province of San Gabriel in Extremadura, members of a reformed section of the order that sought to reflect in their
lives the poverty of the Evangelists or of the first centuries A.D They were radical friars, all of them of good birth, whose principles caused them to clash with ordinary settlers. This millenarian sect had been founded by Juan de Guadalupe in the new monastery of San Francisco in Granada in 1493. Soon there were six new such monasteries, five in Extremadura and one in Portugal.

  These new Franciscans were led to New Spain by Fray Martín de Valencia, from Valencia de Don Juan. He was fifty years of age when he reached New Spain and, though one of the most pious of men, did not have the ability to learn a new language. He strove to compensate for that by praying in public places so that, by imitating him, the Indians might come to God, because, he said, “the natives are very prone to do what they see others doing.” They were, that is, excellent mimics. All the same, he is said to have beaten Indians in order to hasten their learning when he thought it was too slow. Not long before his death, he thought that he ought to sail across the Pacific to seek “men of great capacity in China.”11

  Once while preaching in Spain of the conversion of infidels, he experienced a vision about a great multitude being converted. Exclaiming three times “Praised be Jesus Christ,” he was assumed by his brother Franciscans to have lost his senses and was locked up till he exclaimed that his vision was leading him to a mission of conversion.12

  The other Franciscans included Fray Luis de Fuensalida, who, from his name, must also have come from Old Castile. He had a most humane view of the task ahead of him. He knew that Christianity was a creed for all the world and those who refused to accept that fact were men who had never taken the trouble to learn any Indian language (a thrust, perhaps, at Fray Martín) and had never preached to them nor confessed them. He praised the Indians’ fear of God and seems to have considered that their piety exceeded in many respects that of Spaniards.13 In order to catch the imagination of the Indians, whose souls he desired to capture, he would one day write a play in Nahuatl, in the form of a dialogue between the archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. The archangel was depicted presenting the Virgin with letters from patriarchs in limbo asking her to receive her ambassadors. He was the first Spanish cleric to be able to preach in Nahuatl and was offered the bishopric of Michoacán, which, however, he declined.14

  Fuensalida was the second-in-command of this remarkable expedition. He was a friend of Cortés and supported his cause in his residencia (judicial inquiry), defending him against the accusations of, for example, the Dominican Fray Tomás de Ortiz, who, like most members of his order, was an opponent of the captain-general.15

  Of the other friars, the most interesting was Fray Toribio de Paredes, who was born in Benavente and took that place as his name before assuming the name Motolinía, which signified “poor man” in Nahuatl—he apparently heard himself being so referred to. He was a clever, passionate, and noble individual, who expressed his admiration for old Mexico’s grandeur but his repulsion for its religion. His walk made a great impression on him: “Some of the villages [in New Spain],” he said, “are on the tops of mountains, others are on the floors of valleys, so religious people are obliged to climb up into the clouds and at times they must descend into the abyss. Since the country is rough, and because the humidity causes it to be covered in mud in many places, there are slippery places where it is easy to fall.”16 Motolinía wrote extensively of his experiences, and both his Memoriales and his Historia remain of great value in depicting whatever he was an eyewitness to.17

  The other Franciscans included the aged Francisco de Soto, the austere Fray Martín de la Coruña, the able Fray Juan Suárez, who became the first guardian of the monastery of Huejotzingo, Fray Antonio de Ciudad Rodrigo, Fray García de Cisneros, who was the inspiration for the imaginative college of Tlatelolco, the jurist Fray Francisco Jiménez, and two lay brothers, Fray Andrés de Córdoba and Fray Juan de Palos. These were great men who took the lead to ensure that New Spain became a fine province of Christianity.

  The twelve walked up barefoot to Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Cortés, however, had roads swept for them, and huts were built whenever they wanted to sleep. The journey was disagreeable because the weather was hot and they were always crossing ravines or streams, while mosquitoes and snakes did not relax their attacks. These Franciscans went first to Tlaxcala and then, in mid-June, were received in Mexico-Tenochtitlan by Cortés on his knees, a gesture that much impressed the old Mexican rulers, such as Cuauhtémoc, who saw it. When they arrived, the twelve naturally attached themselves to the three other Franciscans who were already in the capital.

  Soon after they arrived, the Franciscans held a general meeting. Probably all fifteen Franciscans then in New Spain attended. They agreed to build four monasteries—in Mexico, Texcoco, Tlaxcala, and Huejotzingo—for which they would obtain the necessary financial support from the captain-general. Each would have four friars, and each would dominate both teaching and converting over a large territory.18 These friars had already engaged in formal conversations with Mexican priests, hoping to convert them. The latter had answered: “Is it not enough that we have lost? That our way of living has been lost? That we have been annihilated? Do with us as you please. That is what we answer, all that we reply to your words, O our Lords!”19

  The only texts available describing how this early instruction was carried out are the sermons preached by the twelve Franciscans and some conversations reported by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún in his Florentine codex. The catechism proper is missing but the preliminary discourses are interesting. The friars said to the Mexican priests:

  Do not believe that we are gods. Fear not, we are men, as you are. We are merely the messengers of a great lord called the Holy Father who is the spiritual head of the world and who is filled with pain and sadness by the state of your souls. Yours are souls which He has charged us to seek out and to save. We desire nothing better and, for that reason, we bring you the book of the Holy Scripture which contains the word of the only true God, the Lord of Heaven whom you have never known. That is why we are here. We do not seek gold nor silver nor precious stones. We seek only your health.

  You, on the other hand, say that you have a god whose worship has been taught you by your ancestors and your Kings: Is that not so? You have a multitude of gods, each with his own function. And you yourself recognize that those gods have deceived you. You insult them when you are unhappy, calling them whores and fools. And what they demand of you, in sacrifice, is your blood, your heart. The images [of those sacrifices] are loathsome. On the other hand, the true and universal God our Lord Creator and dispenser of being and of life … has a character different from your gods. He does not deceive. He does not lie. He hates no one. He despises no one.… He is the essence of love, compassion and mercy … Being God, He has no beginning and no end, for He is eternal. He created heaven and earth, and hell. He created for us all the men in the world and also all the devils whom you hold to be gods.

  The Mexican priests replied by saying that it seemed unjust to call on them to abandon ceremonies and rites that their ancestors had praised and held to be good. They were not yet learned enough to discuss the propositions of the Franciscans. But they wanted to call together their priests and discuss the matter. They did so. But these priests “were greatly troubled and felt sad and fearful and did not answer.” Next day, they returned and the leaders said that they were very surprised to hear the Franciscans say that their gods were not gods, for their ancestors had always thought them so, had worshipped them as such, and had taught their descendants to honor them with sacrifices and ceremonies. It could be a folly to set aside ancient laws, which had been introduced by the first inhabitants of these places. The priests thought that it would be impossible to persuade the older men to abandon their old customs. They thought that “if the people were told that their gods were not gods, there would be a popular uprising. They repeated that it was difficult enough to have to admit defeat and they would prefer to die rather than have to give up their gods.”20

  In 1525, Tzintla,
the indigenous monarch in Tzintsuntzan, begged Fray Martín de Valencia to send him some friars. He did so, under Fray Martín de la Coruña, though Tzintla must have been shocked at Fray Martín’s insistence on destroying his temples and his idols.

  This was a harsh time. Christian opinion was divided. Several friars were optimistic about the possibilities of conversion, generous, and patient, such as Pedro de Gante and Motolinía. Others, like the first Dominican to come to New Spain, Fray Tomás de Ortiz, had opposing views. Fray Tomás testified to the Council of the Indies: “The Indians are incapable of learning … They exercise none of the humane arts or industries … The older they are, the worse they behave. About the age of ten or twelve, they seem to have the elements of civilisation but, later, they become like brute beasts … God has never created a race more full of vice … The Indians are more stupid than asses.”21 What seems evident, however, is that all the main orders—the Augustinians as well as the Dominicans and Franciscans—were allies of the Crown in their frequent clashes with encomenderos.22

  In 1525, Peter Martyr wrote: “To tell the truth we hardly know what decision to make. Should the Indians be declared free and we without any right to exact labour of them, without their work being paid? Competent people are divided on this point and we hesitate. It is chiefly the Dominican order who, by their writings, drive us to an adverse decision. They argue that it would be better, and would offer better security for both the bodily and spiritual good of the Indians, to assign them permanently and by hereditary title to certain masters … It may be shown by many examples that we should not consent to give them their liberty [for] these barbarians have plotted the destruction of Christians wherever they could.”23