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

by Hugh Thomas

  The frame of all these Christian activities was, of course, ultimately provided by Rome. Unusual things were occurring there at that time. Thus Pope Adrian VI, the last non-Italian pope till John Paul II, reached the Vatican only on August 29, 1522. His first consistory caused astonishment when it expressed the hope that the Christian Princes could unite against the Ottoman Turks. Then he turned to the Curia. He spoke as if he thought that in all the palaces of the cardinals, iniquity reigned. He urged those cardinals to be content with an annual income of 6,000 ducats and generally rebuked the way of living of the Roman court.24

  Alas, in December, the Ottomans captured the fortress of the knights of Saint John at Rhodes. The grand master was forced to surrender. Where would the Turks stop? The question seemed urgent. All the same, the states of Germany were reluctant to help. Adrian exclaimed, “I should have died happy if I had united the Christian Princes to withstand our enemy.” He added, “Woe to Princes who do not employ the sovereignty conferred on them by God in promoting his glory, and defending the people of His election, but abuse it in internecine strife.”25 Adrian continued in that style. For example, in January 1523, he was denouncing Luther and his extraordinary posture in Germany: “We cannot even think of anything so incredible that so great, so pious a nation should allow an apostate from the Catholic faith which for years he has preached, to seduce it from the way pointed out by the Saviour and his Apostles and sealed by the blood of so many martyrs.”26

  The swift reform of the Church was not to be: Adrian succumbed to a harsh illness in September 1523. On this occasion, the cardinals made no mistake about their choice of his successor. Thirty-five cardinals quickly assembled in the Sistine Chapel, the French ones arriving in riding clothes. Who would be the next successor to Saint Peter? Giulio de’ Medici, a son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, was the favorite, as he had been three years before. The conclave continued for several weeks. On November 19, Cardinal Medici was indeed elected, as Clement VII. The Duke of Sessa, the son-in-law of the Gran Capitán, who was now imperial ambassador in Rome, commented a shade optimistically: “The Pope is entirely your Majesty’s creature. So great is your Majesty’s power that you can change stones into obedient children.”27

  Neither Adrian nor Clement had a serious concern for the New World. They had to approve the nomination of bishops and Franciscan and other missions there. But they did not see yet the vast opportunities opening up there for Spain, for Europe, and for Christendom. Their nominations to sees had, of course, political consequences, as Charles the Emperor knew better than anyone.

  5

  Charles at Valladolid, 1522–1523

  Here people believe that His Majesty wants to reform his council and his household.

  MARTÍN DE SALINAS TO FRANCISCO DE SALAMANCA, TREASURER OF THE ARCHDUKE FERDINAND, VALLADOLID, SEPTEMBER 7, 1522

  Charles the Emperor was in Valladolid from September 1522 to August 1523, an unusual quiescence for a monarch used to travel, who grew up in a world of journeys in which his predecessors, Isabel and Fernando, had lived all their reigns. Charles spent most of this time in the rambling Enríquez palace, though twice, in September 1522 and in April 1523, he went down to Tordesillas to see his mother, the doomed Juana, in the convent of Santa Clara. Once or twice, too, he went for a retreat from the world to the celebrated monastery of the Bernardines (Cistercians) at Valbuena del Duero, a day’s ride to the east.

  Charles had set about reforming the administration of his realm, first reordering the number of officials attached to the Council of State, which was principally concerned with foreign affairs. That council in 1522 depended on an inner caucus headed by Gattinara, who was the motor of most of the changes.1 Other members were Charles’s gallant friend Henry of Nassau, who was great chamberlain in the Low Countries. Though lighthearted and charming personally, he was also responsible for introducing the rigid formalities of Burgundian ceremony into the Spanish court. Nassau had commanded the imperial army in 1521 and then accompanied Charles in 1522 to Spain, where he served as President of the new Spanish finance council. Despite becoming enormously fat, he married a Spanish heiress, Mencía de Mendoza, Marquess de Cenete, one of the two sisters about whom the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, would joke with his friends in Santiago de Cuba by saying he would one day wed. The ceremony was a royal occasion in Burgos in June 1524. Mencía was very well connected as well as very rich and had a famous salon in the Low Countries in the 1530s, encouraging Flemish painters and writers. The historian Oviedo spoke of her warmly as “very cultivated, knowledgeable and gracious, an echo of the marquess her father whom no knight in Spain of the time could equal in good manners and benign disposition.”2

  Charles consulted two other Burgundians frequently: Charles de Poupet, Lord of Chaulx, and Gérard de la Plaine, Lord of La Roche. Poupet had been born in Burgundy’s golden age, in 1460. He had served Philip the Handsome in Spain but most of his life was spent in Flanders. He was back in Spain to negotiate with Cardinal Cisneros, the Regent, and then Adrian VI, when he had just been named pope. Poupet had already seen the positive qualities of the great Cortés.3 He had been for a time a preceptor, as well as a member of the secret council of Charles.

  The Lord of La Roche, Gérard de la Plaine, who had been in Germany to confirm Charles in his imperial title, had been in England as ambassador and would soon join Henry of Nassau on the Castilian finance committee.4 He was a grandson of Margaret of Austria’s great friend Laurent de Gorrevod—who had been the lucky contractor of the African slave trade to the Spanish Indies in 1518—and was also a member of the Council of State.

  The two Spanish members of the inner circle of Charles in early 1522 were Bishop Ruiz de la Mota, a native of Burgos of converso origin, and Juan Manuel. Ruiz de la Mota had been chaplain and preacher to Queen Isabel and then in Flanders to the emperor Maximilian. He had been a tutor of sorts to the emperor Charles, too. Back in Spain, he had at a meeting of the cortes in Santiago coined the phrase “the new world of gold” to describe New Spain. Named bishop of the then rich diocese of Palencia, Ruiz de la Mota had little opportunity to enjoy being on the supreme council of the empire, for he caught a fever in England on his way back to Spain and died in September 1522. Some alleged that he was poisoned. That was a setback for the interests of the Indies, for Ruiz de la Mota had a first cousin who was with Cortés at Tenochtitlan.5

  Juan Manuel had much property in Spain, including the fortress of Segovia. He was son of a counselor of the same name who had worked for Kings Juan II and Enrique IV of Castile. He was a bastard member of the royal family. His first important post had been as ambassador of the Catholic Kings in 1495 to Philip the Handsome in Flanders, who married Juana la Loca. He worked to prevent the growth of French influence on the Habsburgs. He accompanied Philip to Spain in 1506 and was the architect of that Prince’s triumph there. Then he remained in Flanders throughout the childhood of Charles. Juan Manuel played his cards so successfully that he became the first Spaniard to be given the Order of the Fleece. His patience in Flanders was rewarded: From 1520, he was imperial ambassador in Rome, where he helped to ensure the papacy of Adrian of Utrecht, with whom he was, however, on bad terms. Charles the Emperor asked Juan Manuel to return to Spain; he did so in February 1523 and began to serve his old masters on the Council of Finance. The chronicler Jerónimo Zurita wrote of him that he was both “valiant and astute and, although small of stature, full of imagination and a great wit, very discreet and a great courtier, of a resolution and sharpness so alive.”6

  The Council of State, which affected all Charles’s kingdoms in the 1520s, had upon it in 1519 six Flemings or Burgundians—Gattinara, Gorrevod, Plaine, Lannoy, Henry of Nassau, and Poupet—or seven if one adds to the list the confessor-counselor Glapion. There were just two Castilians, Ruiz de la Mota and Juan Manuel. It is easy to understand that this large number of “bureaucrats from Brussels” must have seemed an imposition in Spain. Even the secretary was a Saxon: Jan Hannart, who had worked
for Maximilian as well as for Charles. In 1524, he was accused of corruption and replaced by a clever Burgundian, Jean Alemán, sieur de Bouclans, who assumed the role in 1521 of controller-general of the realm of Aragon, which gave him responsibility for Naples.7 Charming and intelligent, dispatching much work with alacrity, Alemán made himself indispensable to both Gattinara and to Charles in 1522, when the former was away many months in Calais. Alemán and Gattinara had both served their time at the parlement of Dôle, the former as a mere clerk, the latter as President. They both emerged from Franche-Comté, which gave so many great public servants to the Habsburg family. By 1526, Alemán seems to have become already more a rival of Gattinara than a protégé.

  This group of men, with the two secretaries, met every other Monday and was Charles’s best source of advice. He would also see the members on other occasions, including privately.

  Castile itself was at that time governed by a series of councils, of which the Council of Castile (Consejo Real de Castilla) was the most important.8 It met every Friday, as it had done in the time of King Fernando. Whereas the Flemings dominated the Council of State, which concerned itself with foreign policy, the Council of Castile was concerned with the detailed administration of Castile. It constituted the real government of the country—a cabinet, as it would be termed in a later age. The President in 1522 was the bishop of Granada, Antonio de Rojas. He came from an important Castilian family that had members in Cuba and later in Peru. Antonio de Rojas had been preceptor of the Emperor’s brother, the infante Fernando, whom his grandfather and namesake, the King of Aragon, had seemed to favor as his heir. In 1522, he was prominent among those seeking, in Gattinara’s shadow, to improve the effectiveness of the government. He earned superlative attention in a report made by the reliable Extremeño Galíndez de Carvajal, who wrote in 1522 that Rojas was a faithful public servant, with clean hands and a zeal for doing justice. Sometimes Rojas was impatient and indignant, but Galíndez himself commented, “I believe one could not find a better man for the work which he has.”9

  From 1523 or so, there were seven other councils: that of war, which met every alternate Wednesday except when the country was actually in conflict; the Council of the Inquisition; of the military orders; of the Contaduría Mayor (finance); and that of Aragon. There was a council for raising money as well as spending it. The latter, the Council of Finance, was new. Most of these bodies had in the 1520s some Flemish membership: For example, the president of the Council of Finance was Henry of Nassau. (The Finance Office was for raising; the accountant’s office was for spending.) Finally, there was the Council of the Indies. This committee had previously comprised a group of councillors of the Council of Castile managed by Rodríguez de Fonseca, the omni-competent bishop of Burgos, but it was now more formally independent. The date when this body began to have a separate function is not quite clear, but by 1520, something close to such an institution was in existence.10 All the same, it never lost its close relation to the Council of Castile.

  The first president of the Council of the Indies was not Rodríguez de Fonseca, who for so long had been the Crown’s “Minister for the Indies without the name,”11 but the general of the Dominicans, Fray García de Loaisa, who had succeeded Jean Glapion as confessor of the Emperor. He was also bishop of Burgo de Osma, a bleak town with a fine cathedral whose splendid grille had been recently paid for by the cardinal archbishop of Toledo, Alonso de Fonseca.

  The other members of the Council of the Indies were: Peter Martyr de Anglería, the Italian humanist who in the 1490s had educated so many members of the Castilian nobility and had always had a consuming interest in the Indies, being, on his own insistence, the Vatican’s chief informant on the subject in Spain; Luis Cabeza de Vaca, bishop of the Canary Islands; and Gonzalo Maldonado, bishop of Ciudad Real. Dr. Diego Beltrán was the only full-time councillor. It was these men, with Francisco de los Cobos as secretary, who took the critical decisions in respect of Spain’s American empire. They named the governors—later the Viceroys—approved new expeditions (entradas), and decided on the salaries of judges. They appointed minor officials, listened to complaints, and heard appeals. They gave themselves sinecures and benefits in the New World, though no member of the council had any firsthand idea of what the Indies were really like. Francisco de los Cobos was chief “founder” of the Indies, an office that brought him a helpful salary. Equally concerned with foundries, Gattinara, the imperial chancellor, collaborated with enthusiasm from the beginning.12

  Of these men, the President was of course the most important. García de Loaisa is elusive, and there is no biography of him.13 Gattinara, who was not a good judge of men, had apparently suggested him for his office.14 García de Loaisa came from Talavera de la Reina, where his father, Pedro, had been a councillor; and he had studied in Salamanca, where he became corregidor. His mother was a Mendoza, though it does not seem that she derived from the main branch of that great family. García de Loaisa entered the Dominican order early in his life. He became prior of Saint Thomas in Ávila, with the exquisite if simple church in which there had been already for ten years the delicate white marble sepulchre of Charles’s uncle, the infante Juan, the only son of Fernando and Isabel. This beautiful tomb was the masterpiece of the Florentine Domenico Fancelli. The first inquisidor general, Torquemada, is also buried there (he founded the monastery). García de Loaisa was general of the order by 1518.15 His subsequent success seems to have derived from his ability to win over rebel comuneros in 1521–22.16 He was offered the archbishopric of Granada and refused it, presumably because it was too complicated a post. He settled, improbably, for Burgo de Osma, which was then a rich diocese. But he was the chief preacher at court from 1523.

  A tranquil, discreet, and far from adventurous man, García de Loaisa had reprimanded his colleague, Fray Pedro de Córdoba, for allowing the famous sermons of Montesinos in Santo Domingo. For the presidency of the Council of the Indies, he would be paid 200,000 maravedís a year. He had been for a time also inquisidor general, when he aspired to reduce the Inquisition to its medieval size.17 He lived at court, and the meetings of the Council of the Indies would be in his lodging there. Of course, García de Loaisa’s work as the Emperor’s confessor enabled him to be well-informed. The splendid Dr. Pastor wrote of him that, though he was a great ecclesiastic and a man of “high moral character, being full of energy and loyalty to the Emperor,” he was “wanting in the qualities of statesmanship.” He showed “a lack of consideration and a rigid hardness … which gave general offence.” He had no tact. He would show his vehement nature even to the pope. That was in the future. In 1524, he seemed an honest man, a contrast with his predecessor, Rodríguez de Fonseca. Still, he was a churchman, selected at a time when bishops were thought to be the right men to rule empires.

  García de Loaisa was firm to the point of intolerance about Protestantism. He was in no way an Erasmian and so found himself in opposition to such shining lights of the age as the humane archbishop Alonso de Manrique de Lara, who succeeded him as inquisitor in 1523, and Alfonso de Valdés, the Erasmian secretary to Gattinara. He was nevertheless brave in relation to his master, the Emperor. Thus he wrote to Charles deploring the fact that he, the Emperor, “had lowered himself to try to persuade heretics that they take account of their errors … And if they just want to be clogs, Your Majesty closes his eyes because you don’t have force at your disposal to punish them.”18 He later reflected about the Reformation: “Force alone suppressed the revolt against the King [the war of comuneros]. Force alone will suppress the revolt against God.”19 He once urged Charles “to raise himself from the deep pits of sin to embark on a new book of conscience.” The bishop continued harshly: “You should rest assured that God gives no one a kingdom without laying on him an even greater duty than on ordinary men to love Him and to obey his commands.… In your person indolence is perpetually at war with fame. I pray that God’s grace will be with you in government and that you will be able to overcome your na
tural enemies, good living and waste of time.”20

  Charles later wrote of García de Loaisa, perhaps appropriately in view of these last comments: “He would do better to go back to his clerical duties rather than live at court. If his health were not so bad, he would have been outstanding in politics. He has always advised me very well. But his feeble health and his inability to get on with the cardinal of Toledo [Tavera, for many years president of the Council of Castile] are two great drawbacks.”21 Yet García de Loaisa had two children by the saintly María de la Torre.22

  Though García de Loaisa had never been to the Indies, he was not quite isolated from the reality of imperial life, since his first cousin, Fray Francisco García de Loaisa, knight of San Juan and till recently ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, was even in 1522 preparing to lead an expedition to the Straits of Magellan and then the Moluccas. His purpose was to seize the Moluccas for Spain from Portugal. The pope had decreed, and the two governments had agreed, in 1494, that the world to the west of the line of the Treaty of Tordesillas should be given to Spain, and that to the east to Portugal. But there had been no discussion of where the west was to begin in the world of the Far East. Spain now believed that the west was theirs, the Far East included. Francisco García de Loaisa wanted to prove the point, and an expedition set off from Corunna on July 24, 1525, with seven ships, one of which was commanded by the immortal Elcano, who three years before had returned in command of Magellan’s Victoria. The journey did not prosper. But at least it gave the President some personal knowledge of some of the affairs over which he was to preside.23 Meantime, some discussions were held in Valladolid about the dividing line with Portugal. Peter Martyr reported them with his customary competence.24