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

by Hugh Thomas

  The other members of this first Council of the Indies are less important. Luis Cabeza de Vaca, from Jaén, had been, while in the Netherlands, the emperor Charles’s instructor in reading and writing Spanish, as well as in the history of Spain. An Andalusian and related to the resolute explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, he returned to Spain with Charles in 1517. He seems always to have been trusted by the Emperor, but apart from later hearing of the life of the Indies from his cousin Álvar, he had no direct personal connection with it. But his grandfather Pedro de Vera had been the conqueror of Grand Canary. Thus it was appropriate that he should be named bishop of the Canaries in 1523. He was one of the few Spanish bishops to live in his diocese.

  Another member of the Council of the Indies was Gonzalo Maldonado, of Ciudad Rodrigo, a protégé of Alonso de Fonseca, who secured his nomination as bishop of his native town in 1525. He was used by Charles the Emperor in several unexpected missions, for example, being sent from Parma in 1529 to seek a variety of special financial support from Genoese bankers. Such a role was not then inconsistent with that of a provincial bishop.25

  The last member of this first Council of the Indies was Peter Martyr, the humanist from Lake Maggiore. He had been called after Saint Peter the Martyr, who had been canonized after his murder in a place somewhere between Como and Milan in 1252 and had been the object of a cult in fifteenth-century Lombardy. Peter Martyr descended from the ancient counts of Anglería, but his branch of the family was unsuccessful. Count Giovanni Borromeo, a rich man from Milan, paid for his education. In the late 1470s, Martyr went to Rome and worked for several cardinals before he became secretary to Francesco Negro, governor of Rome. He became friendly with Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, the richest cardinal after Borgia. He was then taken up as a brilliant young intellectual by Iñigo López de Mendoza, son of the great Marquess of Santillana, who had come to Rome as Spanish ambassador. Martyr went back to Spain with López de Mendoza.

  In 1487, he gave some lectures in classical literature at Salamanca, and new friends begged him to remain. He agreed, and Cardinal Sforza asked him to send regular letters about what was going on in Spain. He did so, writing to the pope as well as to Sforza. Peter Martyr’s letters, which talked very interestingly of Columbus and other adventurers in the New World, were eagerly awaited in Rome, their arrival constituting a literary event of the first magnitude. The King of Naples would request a copy from Cardinal Sforza, and Pope Leo X would have them read out at dinner. Martyr wrote in Latin, which he treated as a living language, though he sometimes used Italian or Spanish words, thereby incurring the mockery of his audience.26 He seems at some point to have lost the ear of López de Mendoza, his first Spanish patron, who began to think Peter Martyr verbose. But he continued to lecture with success at Salamanca,27 and he taught classics to young scions of the nobility in Spain: A list of his pupils was a who’s who of the up-and-coming.28 Martyr became chaplain of the royal household and then ambassador to the Ottoman sultan, who sympathized with the Muslims expelled from Granada and threatened to treat similarly the Christians in the Levant, not to speak of the Franciscans of Palestine. Martyr seems tactfully to have persuaded the sultan of the benefit of good relations with Spain.

  Given that success, it was not surprising that the royal secretary, Miguel Pérez de Almazán—a converso from Aragon who became secretary for international affairs to Isabel and Fernando, and was a favorite of the latter—should ask Peter Martyr to seek to promote similar good relations between King Fernando and King Philip. After the death of Fernando, however, Martyr wrote hostilely to Rome of the austere Cardinal Cisneros.29 He was later, under the emperor Charles, as hostile to the Flemings as any Spaniard, though he admired Gattinara. He was among the first men in Spain to realize the importance of Cortés’s conquests. Later, Peter Martyr acted as interpreter to Adrian of Utrecht—from Latin into Spanish—when he was the Regent in Spain. Perhaps he hoped for a reward from Adrian when he became pope. But Adrian did not give presents.

  From 1523, Peter Martyr enjoyed the benefits of the archpriestship of Ocaña, one of Queen Isabel’s favorite towns, about forty miles south of Madrid. (An archpriest is a senior secular priest.) He spoke of Jamaica as if he had been married to it: “My spouse,” he called it. “I am united to that charming nymph,” he commented, adding, “Nowhere in the world is there such an enjoyable climate.”30 One supposes that he had talked to those who had been there.

  Martyr had endless curiosity. He would ask people with experience of the Indies to dine with him. “I have often invited this young Vespucci [Amerigo’s nephew] to my table,” he wrote, “not only because he has real talent but because he has taken notes of all that he has observed during his journey.” “Cabot frequents my house,” he recorded, “and I have sometimes had him to my table.”31 He was referring to Sebastian Cabot, who had become piloto mayor (chief pilot) in 1518, in succession to Díaz de Solís. Martyr’s fellow Italian, for years a professor at Salamanca, Marineo Siculo, said that, when he dined with Martyr, he observed the beautiful chairs with much enthusiasm, for they were of a “perfection and unequalled art.” He had gold and silver in abundance, and also manuscripts and other books all piled up with some negligence.32

  Francisco de los Cobos was the secretary to the Council of the Indies from its beginning. Just as interested in his own financial prosperity as the late bishop Rodríguez de Fonseca had been, he had little real interest in the New World, over whose fate he was such a powerful influence.33 He was the essential cabinet secretary to Charles V—meticulous, dry, competent, interested in women, unimaginative. He was born in 1490, and his father was Diego de los Cobos Tovilla, who fought in the last battles of the war against Granada. Oviedo, in his Quinquagenas, wrote that the family originally did not have a penny.

  García de Loaisa wrote to the Emperor, “[Cobos] knows how to compensate for your carelessness in dealing with people, … He serves you with the highest loyalty and he is extraordinarily prudent, he does not waste your time saying clever things, as others do, and he never gossips about his master and he is the best-liked man we know.”34

  A modern historian wisely wrote that Cobos was “intelligent and resourceful, an indefatigable worker, an expert diplomat, charming to talk to, with some pretensions to be a humanist, a good writer (of letters), but, at the same time, hard, vengeful, and above all greedy for gain.”35 In Cobos’s own time, López de Gómara recalled that he was “fat, good-looking, merry and gay and so pleasant in conversation.” He did think, though, that Cobos “was diligent & secretive … he was very fond of playing the card game primera and of conversation with women.” He never seems to have read anything: he never mentioned Erasmus in his letters, in which there is no discussion of any of the great issues of the day.

  For Las Casas, he was “good-looking and well-built.” That great friar added that he was “soft in speech and voice.”36 Bernardo Navagero, the second Venetian ambassador of that surname, thought: “Cobos is very affable and very skillful. The greatest difficulty is getting to see him but, once you are in his office, his manner is so engaging that everyone goes away completely satisfied.”37

  Cobos had gained his entrée to the court through Diego Vela Alide, the husband of his aunt, Mayor de los Cobos: Vela Alide was the accountant and secretary to Queen Isabel. From the beginning, Cobos’s rise was steady. By 1503, he was named a royal notary at Perpignan. He became chief accountant (contador mayor) of Granada in 1508. That year he became a councillor of Úbeda, which remained his headquarters in Andalusia.

  Cobos was in Brussels for most of the time of Cisneros’s regency. Oviedo thought that it was Ugo de Urriés, Charles’s secretary for Aragonese affairs, who introduced him to the all-important Chièvres, with whom he worked.38 He became formally a secretary to the King on January 1, 1517, receiving 278,000 maravedís as salary, a sum greater than that of other secretaries. Charles wrote to Cisneros saying that he had appointed Cobos “to take and keep a record of our income and finances and
what is paid out and consigned to our treasurers and other persons, that all is done in conformity with what you have established and discussed.” Cobos took responsibility for the Indies after Charles’s return to Spain in September 1517, in truth succeeding Lope de Conchillos.

  Las Casas describes him as “surpassing all the others [among the Spanish secretaries] because M. de Chièvres [Croÿ] became fonder of him than of any of the others, since in truth he was more gifted than them, and he was very attractive in face and figure … He was also soft of voice and speech and so he was likeable. He was likewise greatly helped by the information & experience he had in all the years of the kingdom.”39

  By September 1519, Cobos became a Knight of Santiago; by November of that important year—important in New Spain, that is—he was named founder and inspector of Yucatán. In May 1522, this appointment was extended to cover Cuba, Culiacán, and San Juan de Ulloa (New Spain). Meantime, in late 1521 Cobos was named commander of León in the Order of Santiago, in succession to Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, who, however, would retain the income from that office for his lifetime. That was a useful sinecure with money attached. Cobos also made a good marriage with María de Mendoza y Pimentel, daughter of Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, count of Rivadavia, in October 1522, soon after Charles’s return. She brought a dowry of 4 million maravedís. A million of this came from the town of Hornillos, near Valladolid, next to the rich Jeronymite monastery of La Mejorada. María was a relation of the Count-Duke of Benavente, of Velasco the constable, and of Enríquez the admiral of Castile.40

  By 1522, Cobos had begun to have serious responsibilities in the Indies though he never went near them. He had a license to sell African slaves in 1524, which he leased. It was Cobos, founder, to whom the emperor Charles V gave Cortés’s famous silver phoenix; sadly, he had it melted down. In 1527, he was named by the King to be founder for the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Pánuco and from Darien to the Gulf of Venezuela. In November 1527, Charles gave Cobos and the questionable Dr. Beltrán the right to export another two hundred slaves each to the New World and, the next month, they agreed with Pedro de Alvarado to export six hundred Indian slaves to work the mines in Guatemala, each to pay for a third of the slaves at 10 pesos a head and share in the profits.

  Member of the Council of Castile in 1529, commander of León in succession to Fernando de Toledo, and from then on, with Granvelle (Nicholas Perronet de Granvelle, Keeper of the Seals), Cobos was soon the Emperor’s chief adviser. He had an accumulated annual income of 6,688,200 maravedís, a very large sum for that date: Judges in the supreme court in Mexico (the audiencia) were at that time paid only 150,000 maravedís a year.41 He was building a family of assistants to whom he was as loyal as they were to him: for example, Alonso de Idiáquez, a mediocre individual whom Cobos trusted; his nephew, Juan Vázquez de Molina; Juan de Samano, longtime co-secretary of the Council of the Indies; and Francisco de Eraso, an aristocrat whom the Duke of Alba called “cousin.” To them, Cobos was el patrón who dominated the administration. The most interesting of these men was Samano, who in 1524 had been named chief notary of the government of New Spain. Because of Cobos’s frequent absences, he was in fact the real secretary of the Council of the Indies for more than thirty years (1524–58). But Samano was uninspired. How strange that that should have been so when the most original empire in the world was being created!

  Cobos was soon also the controlling figure in the new Council of the Treasury, which had been founded in 1523. From then on, he was busy outmaneuvering the chancellor, Gattinara.

  His money enabled him to begin to commission great buildings, for example, the chapel of San Salvador at Úbeda, designed by Andrés de Vandelvira, the gifted pupil of Siloé and the future architect of the cathedral at Jaén.

  He owed his success to his decisive personality, his charm, and his indefatigable industry. Many years later, Charles wrote of him to Prince Philip: “I hold Cobos to be loyal. Up till now he has had little passion in his life. I think that his wife bores him and that explains why he has begun to have many affairs [such as that with the pretty countess of Novellara in Mantua] … He has experience of all my affairs and is very well informed about them … He is growing older and is now easier to manage … The danger with him is his ambitious wife. Do not give him more influence than I have sanctioned in my instructions … above all, do not yield to any temptation he may throw in your path. He is an old libertine and he may try and arouse the same tastes in you. Cobos is a very rich man, for he draws a great deal from bullion in the Indies, as also from his slate mines and other sources … Do not let [those appointments] become hereditary in his family. When I die, it would be a good moment to recover those rights for the Crown. He has great gifts for the management of finance. Circumstances, not he, nor I, are to blame for the deplorable condition of our revenues.”

  Another essential adviser of Emperor Charles in those years was Cardinal Juan Tavera, archbishop of Toledo and for many years President of the Council of Castile. He was born in Toro in 1472, and his father, Arias Pardo, was a Gallego. He was named a canon of Seville in 1505 and in November of that year became a member of the general council of the Inquisition. In 1507, Tavera was President of the town council of Seville, and he sustained his uncle Deza in his local disputes. He was the protégé par excellence of Deza, who helped him. Bishop of Burgo de Osma till 1523, member of the royal Council of Castile already with Fernando the Catholic, in 1524 he was named archbishop of Santiago, where he remained for ten years. A man learned in law, Tavera was rarely in Santiago but lived mostly at court. That did not prevent him giving benefices and other prizes to his relations, which infuriated the local clergy of Santiago. Clever, if taciturn and narrow in his approach, he opposed most of Charles’s universal policies. He became a cardinal in 1531. He was the chief of the Africanistas in the councils of Charles, hoping for conquests in Africa rather than in the Indies. After Manrique de Lara fell from favor in 1529, Tavera took most of the decisions in respect of the Inquisition, whose chief or general he would eventually become.42

  Tavera was an efficient adminstrator. When later he became chief inquisitor he cut the number of informants (familiares), demanded regular hours of work for the employees, concerned himself with the need to ensure good food for the prisoners, and limited investigations of purity of blood to the children and grandchildren of suspects.43

  Dr. Diego Beltrán, the one permanent official on the Council of the Indies and also a councillor from 1523, is a more shadowy figure. He was probably of converso origin.44 He belonged to the Fernandine party at court in 1506, and his first mission seems to have been to act as judge in respect of an enquiry into the conduct of the corregidor of Granada in 1506. Earlier, in 1504, he began to work in the Casa de la Contratación, the essential institution of Spanish commerce in the New World. Beltrán moved to Brussels, along with other ambitious civil servants, and then went back to Castile to prepare for the coming of Charles, in whose Council of Castile he figured as early as 1517. He was in Spain during the dark days of the war of the comuneros, between 1519 and 1522, but he was considered a dangerous individual who was said to have sold state secrets to the count of Benavente. Beltrán was even supposed to have lent money to the comuneros.45 But all the same, Peter Martyr evidently thought highly of him, asking, “In the Spanish world, who is there more exquisite?”46 In March 1523, he became the first salaried member of the Council of the Indies. He was, it turned out, a great gambler, for which reason he needed much money. Dr. Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal, an older and much more austere courtier, wrote of him harshly: “He is certainly cultivated [tiene buenas letras] and he is sharp. Yet his defects are so many that, even publicly, one could say that there is not enough paper to write them down.” He added, “Neither in his birth nor in his way of living, nor in his habits, nor in his faithfulness to the secrecy of the Council, is he worthy to be a counsellor of a great lord, much less that of a great King and Emperor.”47 In fact, Beltrán
was already corrupt, for twenty years later, when his career was being investigated, he confessed to having had financial dealings with Cortés. Cortés at one point before 1522 had needed assistance in the council and perhaps Beltrán helped to achieve it, for payment, which the conqueror of Mexico was usually ready to make.48

  Other constant advisers in the shadow of Charles’s court was a group of bankers known as the four evangelists. These were Juan de Fonseca and Antonio de Rojas, both archbishops, and Juan de Vozmediano and Alonso Gutiérrez, both bankers of verve. Alonso Gutiérrez was from Madrid and was treasurer of that city, though he was also apparently a councillor, a veinticuatro, of Seville, where he had lived since 1510. He was a converso.49 He was a regidor of Toledo and treasurer of the Casa de Moneda as of the Hermandad, in which capacity he resolved the question of the payment to the knights whose horses were taken by Columbus in La Española in 1493. He was one of those who received the national taxes. He had many minor financial activities, such as being the accountant of the orders of Santiago and Calatrava.50 He became controller of the income of the order of Calatrava in 1516, and from 1519 to 1522 he was accountant of all the feudal grants. Later he was the link between the court and the Fuggers. He assisted López de Recalde in 1518, selling the license—to old associates of both of them—that he had bought from Gorrevod, to carry four thousand slaves to the New World.51 He seems to have made money by cheaply buying up possessions confiscated from the comuneros after their defeat. In 1523, Gattinara wanted him as treasurer in the new Consejo de Hacienda, but he was outmaneuvered, by Cobos probably. He appears to have been chief accountant in 1523. In 1530, Charles described him in a letter to the Empress as being “muy servydo”;52 and Charles wrote to him, also in 1530, thanking him for his efforts to find money to send to him. He had a contract with Juan de Vozmediano, the treasurer, and Enciso, which was apparently treated hostilely by Archbishop Tavera.