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

by Hugh Thomas

  In 1531, the Inquisition became interested in him.53 But he remained chief accountant of the order of Calatrava till his death in 1539. He received from that order 350,000 maravedís, of which 1,500 were in cereals, half in wheat, half in barley. The precise influence of Gutiérrez is impossible to judge. But he was always at court, always ready to advance money, and always becoming richer.

  One should not conclude that Charles gave up all his time to work and study. His brother Fernando’s representative at court, Martín de Salinas, wrote to his treasurer Salamanca in March 1523 that the news at court was that to give entertainment the Emperor devoted a lot of time to playing canes and to jousting; and Cortés in New Spain knew well that rulers danced as well as issued ordinances.54

  6

  Cortés in Power, 1521–1524

  Those who have written about your kingdoms in Peru, as well as the conquest, as writers, they don’t write what they saw but what they heard said.

  PEDRO PIZARRO

  Meanwhile, in New Spain Cortés ruled from August 1521 until October 1524. He acted as an absolute monarch and an active one. Thus, in early 1522, he sent the oldest member of his expedition, his fellow Medellinés Rodrigo Rangel, to Veracruz to bring back Pánfilo de Narváez. Narváez, still a prisoner from his expedition to New Spain in 1520, had talked to Cristóbal de Tapia, the agent of the friars of La Española and of Bishop Rodríguez de Fonseca, and assured him that Cortés had not reached the end of his luck. So he said he should return to Castile and tell the court what was going on in New Spain. Then Narváez went up to Tenochtitlan. Cortés received him in Coyoacán well, and Narváez was generous in his reaction: “The least of the things which you and your valiant soldiers accomplished in New Spain was defeating me.” He added, “Your Excellency and your soldiers deserve the greatest favours from His Majesty.”1

  Cortés reported to Charles that in his time in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and in addition to the several expeditions of discovery and conquest he had inspired, he had found a gunsmith among his followers. This was Francisco de Mesa of Mairena, Seville, who worked with Rodrigo Martínez, who had directed Narváez’s artillery. He was asked by Cortés to work for him as early as September 1521, only three weeks after the final victory. They found copper and tin at Taxco, about eighty miles southwest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and later, iron. At that time, Cortés had thirty-five bronze cannons, seventy-five lombards, and other small guns, many of which had been sent to him since the conquest. For ammunition, he had saltpeter and sulfur, most obtained so remarkably by Francisco de Montaño, an imaginative conquistador from Ciudad Rodrigo who had entered the volcano of Popocatépetl in search of it.2

  Within a few months of his victory over the Mexica, Cortés was already inspiring other journeys of discovery and conquest. He did this before the news of his triumph had reached Spain and long before the Council of the Indies had pronounced on what it wanted to see in the new empire of New Spain.

  First of all, Cortés dispatched his most successful commander, his fellow Medellinés Gonzalo de Sandoval, to Tuxtepec, halfway between Veracruz and Oaxaca, and then to Coatzacoalcos, on the Caribbean coast. Sandoval was a good soldier and a fine horseman whose mount, Motilla, was the best horse in Cortés’s army. Still in his teens at the beginning of the campaign against the Mexica in 1519, Sandoval rose to be a superior commander, since Cortés knew that he would always do well what he was asked to do. He was not impetuous and unpredictable, as was Pedro de Alvarado, with all his gifts. Sandoval now had to fight an indigenous monarch with some bowmen at his disposal before he was able to set up a Spanish settlement some twelve miles south of the mouth of the river Coatzacoalcos. This he named Espíritu Santo, after a settlement in Cuba where he had lived.

  It seems that this region was populated by Indians who worshipped stone and clay idols for which they had special sanctuaries (casas diputadas a manera de hermita). The word Coatzacoalco means “the sanctuary of the serpent.”3 The territory was well provided with maize, beans, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins, as well as many tropical fruits, game, and fish.4 Sandoval divided this newly conquered land between several followers of Cortés: Francisco de Lugo, the Genoese Luis Marín of Sanlúcar, Pedro de Briones, and the chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo. These men came from very different parts of Spain: Lugo was an illegitimate son of Alfonso de Lugo, lord of Fuencastín, in northwest Castile, and a distant relation of Diego Velázquez of Cuba; Briones, a native of Salamanca, was one of the few conquistadors in Mexico to have fought in Italy. He had been, Bernal Díaz wrote, sharply, “a good soldier in Italy according to his own account.”5 Luis Marín’s father had been born Francesco Marini, in Genoa, being one of the many bankers from that city to establish themselves in Andalusia at that time, especially in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Luis Marín had become a close friend of Sandoval during the campaign against the Mexica. A brother of his had been killed. There was also Díaz del Castillo, who would become the great chronicler of the conquest, being a native of Medina del Campo, home of the author of Amadís de Gaula, Montalvo, whom Díaz must have known as a child.6 He had probably been on two expeditions to New Spain before that of Cortés, those of Hernández de Córdoba and of Grijalva.7 Espíritu Santo, a small place, became a base for the subsequent penetration of Guatemala and Yucatán.8 Díaz subsequently married a Spanish lady named Teresa Becerra; they settled in Guatemala after Alvarado’s conquest of it, and there he planted oranges and wrote his legendary work.9 The Spaniards who settled there were pleased with the salt, pepper, cotton fabrics, sandals, jade, gold, amber, and large green quetzal feathers that were all to be found in this region.10

  These conquistadors did not have an easy time. They would approach several pueblos where they assumed that there would be friendly Indians and propose peace—of course on their terms, an offer of vassaldom of the emperor Charles being invariably included. Often they were attacked. Díaz del Castillo was wounded in the throat. Luis Marín returned to Mexico-Tenochtitlan to ask help from Cortés, who sent him back to Coatzacoalcos with thirty soldiers, led by Alonso de Grado from Alcántara, one of the most interesting of Cortés’s critics at the earliest stage of his campaign. Bernal Díaz, his companion in 1522, said of him that he was well informed, with good conversation and a fine presence, but “more of a troublemaker than a fighter.”11 He was an encomendero in Buenaventura, La Española. Despite his reputation, and despite his constant quarrels with, and punishments by, Cortés, the latter allocated him Techuipo (Isabel), daughter of Montezuma, as a wife.

  Having assured himself of the subservience of Coatzacoalcos, Sandoval and his friends set out in the spring of 1523 to conquer what is now the state of Chiapas. They then had twenty-seven horsemen, fifteen crossbowmen, eight musketeers, and a black gunner with a cannon. They led seventy foot soldiers and rather more than that number of native Mexicans, principally from Tlaxcala. There was a good deal of sporadic fighting against the Chiapenec Indians, who were armed with fire-hardened javelins and bows and arrows, as well as long lances with cutting edges. These Indians had good cotton armor, plumes and swords (macanas), slings for stones, and also lassos for catching horses. These natives sometimes used burning pitch against their enemies as well as rosin,12 and blood and water mixed with ashes. There was a battle at Ixtapa (Estapa), twelve miles from San Cristóbal, which became the capital of Chiapas. The Indians killed two Spanish soldiers and four horses, and wounded Luis Marín, who fell in a marsh—these were victories of bows and arrows.

  In the end, the Indians were defeated and the Spaniards slept in triumph on the battlefield, eating cherries which they found nearby. Some Xaltepec Indians, who were enemies of the Chiapanecs, assisted the Spanish with guides over the fast-flowing River Chiapas. That help enabled Grado and Marín to besiege the town of Chiapas itself. They summoned the chiefs there and asked them to give tribute to the emperor Charles, which they did. They found three jails with wooden railings full of prisoners with collars round their necks. The Spaniards freed them and then wen
t on to conquer Chamula, whose siege was more difficult. Díaz del Castillo entered first and was accordingly allocated the town by Cortés (he already had Teapa as an encomienda).13 As frequently occurred in those days, the defeat of the Indians was followed by a dispute between the Spaniards; arguments between Marín, Grado, and Godoy, the notary, led to the dispatch of the complicated Grado as a prisoner to Mexico-Tenochtitlan under armed guard. Godoy and Díaz del Castillo then quarreled as to whether the prisoners should be branded as slaves.

  In the summer of 1522, Cortés also dispatched his lieutenant Cristóbal de Olid to Michoacán.14 This kingdom had withstood the Mexica in the past, most famously in 1478–80. It was a small empire—or is that a contradiction in terms?—of about twenty cities roughly coterminous with the modern state of Michoacán. The people called themselves the Purépecha, but the Spaniards knew them as the Tarascans. They were the only people of the region to possess advanced metallurgical techniques such as gold-plating, casting, soldering, and cold hammering, which enabled them to produce remarkable copper masks, copper bells shaped as turtles and fish, lip plugs of laminated turquoise, and above all, copper weapons. With these they had decimated the Mexica in the 1470s; the Mexica had died “as if they were flies which fell into the water.”15 Cortés had earlier received an embassy from the Tarascans led by Tashovo, the brother of the cazonci, the ruler there.

  Olid—from Baeza, in Andalusia—had an excessively turbulent temperament but was a magnificent fighter, Bernal Díaz considering him a veritable Hector—classical comparisons were frequent at that time—in hand-to-hand combat. He had allowed himself to be courted for a time in 1521 by Cortés’s enemy Cristóbal de Tapia, and Cortés had reprimanded him. He had a beautiful wife, Felipa de Arauz, who joined him in New Spain in 1522. He went up to Michoacán with 130 foot, twenty horse, and twenty crossbowmen. He had with him Cortés’s great friend Andrés de Tapia and his cavalry commander, Cristóbal Martín de Gamboa, who had fought with Ovando in La Española, where he had a good encomienda.16

  When Tzintla, the cazonci, heard that a detachment of Spaniards was making its way toward his principality, he very sensibly fled from his capital city of Tzintzuntan. He had previously good relations with two Castilians, Antonio Caicedo and Francisco de Montaño, the last of whom was the hero of Cortés’s singular recovery of sulfur from the volcano of Popocatépetl.17 But the cazonci realized that two Spaniards were different from the 150 or so who rode up so nonchalantly with Olid. The latter, finding Tzintzuntan empty of authority, had no hesitation in sacking the cazonci’s palace and destroying his idols, even though he had been well received by Tashovo, the cazonci’s brother, and by an Indian leader, “Pedro” Curiánguari. When the sacking was done, the cazonci bravely returned, to say that he was astonished that the Spaniards were so interested in gold. Why did they not prefer jade, as the Tarascans did? Olid had the cazonci sent to Tenochtitlan with three hundred loads of gold, and there the former leader was fêted. He became, for a few years, a willing collaborator of Spain, alongside Tashovo and Curiánguari.

  This conquest concluded, Olid moved west to the Pacific coast, leaving Juan Rodríguez de Villafuerte, a Medellinés and friend of Cortés, in his place. Olid joined Sandoval, and after avenging a minor defeat suffered by Juan de Ávalos and Juan Álvarez Chico at Zacatula on the Pacific, he and Sandoval established a shipyard at what soon became known as the Villa de la Concepción de Zacatula. Blacksmiths, marine carpenters, and sailors were dispatched from Veracruz with anchors, rigging, and sails, these being carried across the center of old Mexico by 1,600 bearers recruited by the cazonci. Within months, brigantines and caravels were being built. Cortés would report to the emperor Charles that his plans for a fleet on the Southern Sea were more ambitious than anything else he was working on in the Indies. His schemes would surely make Charles “lord of more kingdoms and realms than up till now we have in our nations heard of.”18 Perhaps that would entail a new claim to China.

  For the moment, however, Cortés contented himself with prizes nearer at hand. Thus Miguel Díaz de Aux—an experienced settler of Santo Domingo, son of the enterprising conquistador who had discovered a famous “nugget of gold” with Francisco de Garay—went with Rodrigo de Castañeda, by this time a good interpreter, to conquer Taxco, where they knew that iron could be found. Then, on February 5, 1524, Cortés sent the elderly Rodrigo Rangel and Francisco de Orozco, a conquistador from Cobos’s city of Úbeda, southward to Oaxaca to fight the Zapotecs and the Mixtecs, with their long flint-headed lances. They took 150 foot and four pieces of artillery.

  Oaxaca was characterized by tropical coastlands, the humid region of the Papaloapan River, a large temperate valley, and high mountains with a colder climate. The two peoples in this territory were the Zapotecs, centered on the wonderful ancient site of Monte Albán, and the Mixtecs, associated with Mitla. The Zapotecs were admirable architects; the Mixtecs were better known for their production of beautiful smaller objects such as turquoise mosaics, jade and gold jewelry, polychrome pottery, and carvings in hard stone. The Mixtecs were known, too, for their pictographic books, which the admirable Ignacio Bernal thought the “most important feature of Mixtec culture.”19 But there was an extraordinary palace of many courts at Mitla, and something similar at Yagul.

  The conquistadors from Spain would soon have become aware of many characteristic elements of local culture in Oaxaca—for example, funerary paintings, a style of writing that became associated with figures known as danzantes, fine ceramics (Monte Albán “grayware,” cream ware, and the coarser brown and yellow ware), much lapidary work, copper work, and gold work. There was interesting jade work. Of these crafts, the extraordinarily skilled work of the people of Oaxaca as goldsmiths stands out. From them, the Mexica seem to have learned the art of working metals. The Franciscan Sahagún later attributed the invention of metallurgy to the Toltecs.20 But that legendary origin should not displace the real achievements in Oaxaca, whose metallurgical tradition came there from Panama and Costa Rica21 or possibly Peru.22 We know about the quality of Zapotec and Mixtec gold work—and, to a lesser extent, silver work—from the opening in the 1930s of the famous Tomb 7 in Monte Albán. But Spaniards of the sixteenth century had much broader knowledge of it because of the abundance of such objects known in the old royal treasury of Mexico, which were often melted down to be sent back to Spain. But there were enough pieces sent back in an original form to dazzle men in Europe as sophisticated as Albrecht Dürer.

  Oaxaca perhaps held about 1,500,000 people in 1519. They were established in some twenty or so towns that paid tribute to the central city, which was ruled by a monarch—or a local chief (cacique)—who was independent of, but allied to, the Mexica. Mitla would seem to have been, anomalously, ruled by a priest, whose subjects were accustomed to pay to Tenochtitlan tributes of gold dust, gold disks, cotton mantles, turkeys, rabbits, honey, and slaves.

  This society had had in the past no draught animals, nor did they have the wheel. The only form of conveyance was that of men and women. War was continuous, the wooden sheathed macana (sword) being in perpetual use. The main conflicts were those against the Mexica. The purpose of the latter was to capture slaves and, by winning a victory, gather tribute. The religion of the region was comparable to that in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, but human sacrifice was on a smaller scale. All religious ceremonies were elaborate and marked by the usual marriage between music, dancing, and the consumption of pulque. The main crops were maize, chile, sweet potatoes, and squash; turkey, bees, and dogs were bred; and many other animals were used for food. A native tobacco was used for medicinal purposes.

  Ancient Oaxaca had a sophisticated society in which a trained priesthood educated the public into an ancestor cult, a culture of sacrifice, ceremony, and a respect for the calendar. The society was built on the idea of a settled agriculture supplemented by hunting and fishing. The local priests and nobility led their people into traditional ways.

  Led by the elderly Rodrigo Rangel, th
e venture of Cortés to absorb this society was completely successful. At that time, Cortés himself had gone down to Veracruz to inspect the old sites of the towns on the coast. He wanted a good port on the Gulf of Mexico. In the end, he found one a few miles from the first place where he had landed in 1519, to which he ordered the town of Medellín to move. This became La Antigua, on the river Canoas. This move was rendered easier by the fact that the Mixtecs were still in a state of conflict with their neighbors, the Zapotecs, the Mixes, and indeed, the Mexica. Rangel died shortly after his success, of syphilis.

  Meantime, on Midsummer Day, June 24, 1523, Francisco de Garay—the governor of Jamaica, veteran of Santo Domingo, where he had arrived in Columbus’s second expedition in 1493—mounted a fleet of twelve ships with nearly 150 horse and 850 Castilians, as well as some Jamaican Indians, to go to Pánuco on the Bay of Mexico. Garay had in his army two hundred musketeers and three hundred crossbowmen and stocked his ships with merchandise, taking care before he left to receive the permission of the audiencia of Santo Domingo to mount an expedition in an area already conquered by Cortés. According to Díaz del Castillo, he was inspired to act by a series of conversations with Cortés’s brilliantly intelligent pilot, Antonio de Alaminos.23 He, too, had been fascinated by the idea of establishing a settlement in the region for many years. Garay had known Cortés in La Española. So it was not surprising that the conqueror of the Mexica should write to Garay encouraging him to come, saying that if he encountered difficulties with the Huastec Indians, he, Cortés, would help him. Garay thought that Cortés’s offer was treacherous and continued with his plans, which he did not explain to anyone.

  Garay reached the Río de Palmas to the north of the Río de Pánuco. He founded a city, which he bombastically named Vitoria Garayana. Councillors and magistrates were appointed from among several aristocrats with Garay’s troops, and then Garay set off by land to Pánuco, while the old hand in that territory, Juan de Grijalva, directed the fleet along the coast. The land journey was a terrible one for men used to the relative comforts of Jamaica. The march was long, the heat overpowering, the mosquitoes relentless, the forest trackless, the suffering appalling. There were desertions. Men walked desperately away from the expedition into the jungle to seek relief, never to be seen again. Morale collapsed. Garay sent his lieutenant, Gonzalo de Ocampo, to San Esteban del Puerto, where Cortés’s representative Pedro de Vallejo, a survivor of Narváez’s expedition, greeted him. Ocampo was experienced in the Indies and even had a brother, Diego, an equally experienced conquistador who had fought in both La Española and Cuba before going to New Spain with Cortés. Vallejo sent a messenger to Cortés requesting instructions, while telling Garay that he could not possibly feed so many newcomers. So Garay established himself at nearby Tlacolula, where he unwisely told the Indians that he had come to punish Cortés for having harmed them. This ill-judged comment led to an affray between a number of Garay’s men and Vallejo’s, in which the latter, more experienced in the land and more accustomed to the climate, though less numerous, emerged triumphant. Numbers, however, were on Garay’s side. Surely they would eventually win any pitched battle against Cortés’s men.