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

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The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America Page 12

by Hugh Thomas


  The Emperor and King remained, and then celebrated at the Alcázar in Toledo. They were joined by the ex-queen, Germaine de Foix, and the Marquess of Brandenburg, whom she would soon marry; Mencia de Mendoza, the Marquess de Cenete, the rich wife of the count of Nassau and the granddaughter of the great cardinal Rodríguez de Mendoza, Columbus’s patron;22 and, above all, Leonor, the future queen of France and Charles’s sister, whom Dantiscus thought had lost her looks since he had last seen her at Brussels.23 He wondered whether, having lost her looks, she had not lost her purpose. Immediately afterwards, Leonor and Francis went north to Burgos, where he remained to await the arrival of the future hostages, his sons by his first marriage.

  Charles, on the other hand, went with the court south to Seville, where on March 10, 1526, he found the infanta Isabel already waiting. To his relief, he found that she spoke excellent Spanish, which he, too, had come to speak adequately by then. They were formally betrothed by Cardinal Jacopo Salviati, the papal legate to Spain, and married in the Alcázar almost immediately afterwards.24 There was a ball, opened by Charles’s favorite Fleming—La Chaulx, Charles de Poupet—who had much to do with the negotiation of the marriage.25

  The lovely Alcázar had been redecorated beforehand with Genoese motifs, an appropriate embellishment for a place that owed so much to that Ligurian city. The court remained in Seville for about two months. Dantiscus reported to King Sigismund that the wedding was not allowed to cost much because it was Lent. Also, the court was in mourning for Charles’s other sister, the Queen of Denmark. No ambassador seems to have been invited.

  In June, the imperial and Spanish court left Seville for Granada, a city that had by then been ruled by Castilians for thirty years. Here they remained till December, and here the court did welcome ambassadors.

  The stay was evidently a prolonged honeymoon for Charles and his young bride, Isabel (she had been born in 1503): Their heir, Philip, was conceived in September.26

  But the court now received much bad news. First, no sooner had King Francis I become free than he forged a new and entirely unexpected alliance at Cognac with Pope Clement VII, which became known as the Papal League.27 The papal legate, Salviati, left Granada in haste. Francesco María Sforza, in Milan, and the rulers of Florence and Venice, Duke Alessandro and the doge, gave support to Charles. The Emperor was astonished at what he saw as Pope Clement’s perfidy. Yet Clement now wrote to Charles denouncing him for disturbing the peace. A reply was drafted by Charles’s new secretary, the brilliant Alfonso de Valdés, secretary for Latin correspondence, who was the son of an old Christian who had committed the mistake, or had the good taste, to marry a conversa.28 A convinced Erasmian, Valdés sought to influence his master Charles to that end through the drafts of his speeches and his writings—as modern speechwriters often do also. Valdés had an idea of empire that would have made Charles a reformer precisely by becoming an Erasmian. In his dialogue Ánima, he wrote: “The first thing I did was to give everyone to understand that I had such influence with the King that I could do anything that I wanted to with him and that he could do nothing without me.”29 He was a natural ally of Alonso Manrique de Lara, the inquisidor general who thought that he had royal support to use the Holy Office for humane purposes.

  Charles was present in Granada at the lodgings of Gattinara on September 17, 1526, when the letter for Clement was handed to the new nuncio. This papal representative was amply competent to judge the weight of such documents, for he was none other than the Mantuan writer Baldassare Castiglione, who had earlier been ambassador to Leo X in Rome on behalf of the Duke of Urbino. In 1519, he had also been the Gonzagas’ representative in Rome, before going to Spain in 1524. He became naturalized there and was soon named bishop of Ávila. He really did not want to send such a sharp communication as was suggested, but Charles insisted. Castiglione was in 1526 at work on his study The Courtier, and it would be published in Venice in 1528. It would be a great success for many generations. Charles said: “My Lord Nuncio, after you accept that paper for His Holiness, in which I report several unjust accusations, I take occasion to express myself yet more fully by word of mouth and I can but hope that, hereafter, the Pope will resume towards me the attitude of a good father towards a devoted son.”30 The Emperor added that he wanted to see peace not only in Italy but in the whole world, for only by those means could the Turks be defeated. But if the pope acted not as a father but as an enemy, not as a shepherd but as a wolf, Charles would have to appeal to a general council of the Church.

  The nuncio reluctantly agreed to pass on this comment to his master in Rome.

  Castiglione’s conversations with the emperor Charles continued at Granada. Charles admired him. On August 17, Castiglione reported that a French representative had, in the presence of himself and the Venetian ambassador, Gasparo Contarini, explained how the new Papal League had been founded. The Emperor was angry and said to the Frenchman, “Had your King kept his word, we should have been spared this. He has cheated me, he has acted neither as a King nor a nobleman. I demand that, if he cannot keep his word, the most Christian King should again become my prisoner. It would be better for us to fight out this quarrel hand to hand, rather than to shed much Christian blood.” This challenge to a hand-to-hand conflict was a typically chivalrous Caroline gesture. At that time, it still seemed to many good advisers that Spaniards counted for nothing in the formulation of the policy of Charles V; policy was the work of a narrow group of Flemish counselors.31

  Gattinara said that perhaps those who put their trust in France to the neglect of Italy now had something to answer for. In order to gain support from the German princes, including his brother, Ferdinand, Charles offered a general pardon to all who had defied him at Worms. On August 20, a brief reply came from Pope Clement. Charles seemed not to be angry, Castiglione noticed with pleasure. Gattinara prepared another reply, in twenty-two pages, which Valdés, with the pride of the official speechwriter, claimed that he himself had drafted. This was Pro divo Carolo … Apologetici libri duo. Gattinara presented it to the Council of Castile in the house in Granada of the Centurións, the family of Genoese merchants. It seemed in the circumstances excessively Erasmian, for it tried to destroy the political pretensions of the papacy and to reduce the pope’s role to a pastoral mission.32

  Then, however, news of a further disaster broke: The sunny world of Granada in the days of the royal honeymoon was transformed in September by terrible news from Hungary. On August 29, the sultan Suleiman in Hungary had smashed the Christian kingdom there at Mohács. King Louis (Charles’s brother-in-law), two archbishops, five bishops, and many noblemen were killed. New, accurate Turkish artillery played a large part in the defeat. The blow was utterly unexpected; the young king of Hungary had unwillingly taken part. A week later, Suleiman was in Buda. Where could the Turkish army be halted? At Vienna? King Louis’s widow, Charles’s third sister, Mary, was distraught. She did what she could to ensure that her brother, Ferdinand, who had married her sister-in-law, Anne of Hungary, Louis’s sister, should succeed her dead husband. There was for once a powerful Christian reaction: Nobles, prelates, cities—all the institutions of the realm were ready for a supreme effort. “Once more,” says a modern historian, “Castile showed her European and Christian vocation.”33

  All the same, the reply of Gattinara to Pope Clement was dispatched. The document denounced Clement for disloyalty and justified Charles in his treatment of Reggio, Modena, and Milan. The language was often sarcastic, for it commented that it was scarcely credible that any Vicar of Christ should acquire any worldly possessions at the cost of a drop of human blood—was that not a contradiction of the teaching of the Gospel?34

  In the event, the archduke Ferdinand was finally elected king of Bohemia, but most of what was left of Hungary was physically seized by a Transylvanian nobleman, John Zápolya, with whom, and with whose heirs, the Habsburgs would maintain an intermittent civil war for two generations.

  Generally delighted by their
long stay in Granada, the King, Queen, and court left that city on December 5 and made for Úbeda, where they for a time lodged in a new, and grand, house of the secretary Cobos. It was here that Charles signed a contract with Francisco de Montejo that allowed him to conquer and colonize Yucatán. This represented a cancellation of an older grant of Yucatán to Laurent de Gorrevod in 1519. On December 7, an edict was issued in Granada, to which the Inquisition established at Jaén had been transferred. The edict set out to eliminate many marks of local culture and identity—Arabic, local dress and costume, jewelry, and baths.

  A week later, Charles also signed an agreement with another veteran of New Spain, that experienced conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez, to “discover, penetrate and populate” the territory from the river of the Palma [near Pánuco] to the cape at the southern point of Florida—the entire coastline of modern Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida.35 Narváez needed a new mission, and here was one to which he seemed suited.

  Next day, on December 12, the bishop of Badajoz spoke of Charles as “monarch and lord of the whole world with the aim of persecuting and exterminating the pagans and the unfaithful.”36 In Andalusia, no one flinched at the use of exterminating. Before leaving Granada, the Emperor had accepted that the people of Granada should abandon Moorish dress slowly. They would have six years to wear out the clothes they had already. Charles named Gaspar de Ávalos and Antonio de Guevara to act as inspectors to check against the continuation of Moorish customs.37 These men were successful in resisting such interventions as those of Jerónimo Poda and the count of Ribagorza, who had been deputed by the Aragonese Mudejars to try to preserve their old status.38 Now these dignitaries as well as some Granadinos presented pleas on behalf of the old guard. Some had fought well for the royalists in the wars of the comuneros.

  The court made its way from Úbeda to Valladolid, stopping on the way at Madrid, the small city in the center of Spain that Cardinal Cisneros had made his temporary capital. There Charles and Isabel remained, until they went to the nearby monastery of El Abrojo for Holy Week.

  The morale in Italy of the imperial army that had beaten King Francis at Pavia was now low. Payment to the soldiers was scandalously behind. The chivalrous Ávalos had died of his wounds. A cortes was held at Valladolid, where the nobles explained that if the King were to take part personally in a war against “the Turk,” their lives were at his disposal; but they refused to be taxed to provide money for a campaign. The prelates, too, said that they had no money to give, and the procuradores representing the towns of Castile, said that the country was too poor for any such extravagance. The mendicant orders said that their mission was to pray for victory. The Jeronymites did say that they would sell their silver chalices if it became evident that it was the Christians who had really made peace first. The Benedictines also offered 12,000 doubloons, while the military orders offered one-fifth of their pensions.

  Charles was considering the implications of these disappointments when yet more bad news came, this time from Italy. The previous autumn, the private army of the Colonna family had entered Rome. The pope had fled to his Castel Sant’Angelo on the Tiber. It was reported that the old papal palace in the Vatican had been stripped. Even the wardrobe and the bedroom of the pope had been ransacked.39 Given this encouragement, Charles’s unpaid imperial army took the hint. In May 1527, it, too, entered Rome, the constable of Bourbon as commander giving an order for an assault. The chaos was remarkable. No one was safe. Bourbon himself was killed, perhaps by a shot from Cellini’s firearm, which was an arquebus; the Prince of Orange was wounded; and the Sistine Chapel, as yet without Michelangelo’s attention, became a stable for horses. The abbot of Nájera said that nothing comparable had been seen since the destruction of Jerusalem.40 Most movable objects, such as the gold cross of Constantine, the golden rose presented to Pope Martin V, and the tiara of the reforming Pope Nicholas V, disappeared. Perhaps four thousand were killed. The library in the Vatican was only saved by the intervention of the Prince of Orange on his sickbed. The courtier Castiglione saw the death of Bourbon as a sign of divine fury against Charles’s army.41

  Charles the Emperor, learning of the event in mid-June, said that he had not wanted this denouement, and we cannot doubt that he opposed the cruelties practiced by his army. All the same, the pope in the Castel Sant’Angelo was now his prisoner, just as Francis I had been. Charles wrote to Bourbon before he knew of his death that what he wanted most was “a good peace” and he hoped that the pope would come to Spain to help to achieve it.42 Gattinara remained in touch, and his gifted secretary Alfonso de Valdés wrote in his dialogue Lactancio y un arcediacono, rather remarkably, that Rome got no more than it deserved.43

  Charles then gave himself up to the pleasure of celebrating at Valladolid the birth of his heir, the infante Philip, in the house of Bernardino Pimentel, of the great family of the Count-Duke of Benavente, just opposite the church of San Pablo. The Emperor had with him for the first time the beautiful set of tapestries made in honor of his coronation in Aachen in 1520, “The Honors,” they were called. They depicted all the necessary qualities of a prince.44

  In June, Francisco de Montejo, that most experienced conquistador who would have benefited from all those virtues himself, left Sanlúcar with his expedition of four ships and 250 men for Yucatán;45 and Pánfilo de Narváez left for Florida with his six hundred men in three ships.46

  Intellectual Spain settled down the same month to discuss the importance of the works of Erasmus, under the benign chairmanship of the remarkable grand inquisitor Alonso de Manrique de Lara, the liberal churchman to whom Erasmus had dedicated his Enchiridion militis cristiani. Manrique de Lara, a cousin of the Duke of Nájera, was a half brother of the great poet Jorge Manrique (“Our lives are rivers which flow into the sea”). The new inquisitor knew much. He had become a friend of Charles during his childhood in the Netherlands and had presided over the Mass in the cathedral of Saint-Gudule proclaiming Charles King of Spain in 1516.47 Earlier, Manrique de Lara had been bishop of Badajoz, where he spent much of his time converting Muslims, many of whom took the name of Manrique. He had been a strong felipista—a supporter of the late King Philip—and later was imprisoned by that monarch, but he was also a correspondent of Cisneros, who made him bishop of Córdoba. Manrique de Lara was with Charles at his coronation at Aachen and was named archibishop of Seville as well as chief inquisitor by him in 1524. A modern historian calls him “un hombre ilustre, cortesano, erasmista y abierto.”48 Such adjectives are not easy to apply to later chiefs of the Holy Office.

  The Spanish translation of Erasmus’s Enchiridion, which issued from the press of Miguel de Eguía, printer of Alcalá, now had a popular success without precedent in the history of printing up to that time. The translator was a famous preacher, Alonso Fernández de Madrid, canon of Palencia and archdeacon of Alcor.

  Manrique made the effort to try to convert the Holy Office into an agent for the diffusion of Erasmian ideas, a most remarkable epoch in the history of that institution. Perhaps Bartolomé de las Casas had similar hopes for the Holy Office when in 1517 he urged Cisneros to support its establishment in the New World.

  All the great names in the Spanish Church were at the discussions of Erasmus’s ideas in Seville: Antonio de Guevara, author of The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, which he was still pretending that he had discovered in the library of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence; Francisco de Vitoria, the great jurist then still at San Esteban, the Dominican monastery in Salamanca; Siliceo, young but already known as a hard-line anti-Semite. They heard the chief inquisitor give a powerful defense of his Flemish friend Erasmus. This was the second such discussion, for there had been something similar, on a lesser scale, in March. The Council of the Inquisition firmly maintained their support for Erasmus. The Augustinian Fray Dionisio Vázquez, looked upon as the greatest of preachers at that time and renowned in Italy as much as in Spain, even made an elegy about the great Fleming.49 After all, even the pope had pra
ised the Renaissance humanist.

  But danger lay ahead for all friends of the great Rotterdam thinker. After the transfer of the chancellería to Granada in 1505, the Spanish bureaucracy took a harsh line in most matters. When the Inquisition that had been established at Jaén was also transferred there, this line was all the more emphasized.

  8

  Four Brothers in a Conquest:

  The Alvarados and Guatemala

  I again fitted out Alvarado and dispatched him from this city [Mexico] on the sixth of December 1523. He took with him 120 horsemen with spare mounts, a total of 160 horse, together with 300 footsoldiers, 130 of whom were crossbowmen and arquebusiers.

  CORTÉS TO CHARLES V, Fourth letter

  These heady theological uncertainties in Seville seemed far away from the practical politics of New Spain. For another remarkable expedition mounted by Cortés was led by the brilliant, brutal, unpredictable, fascinating, and brave Pedro de Alvarado, an Extremeño from Badajoz, to the Tehuantepec peninsula and subsequently to Guatemala. Far away Guatemala may seem, yet the Spaniards were conquistadors from Extremadura. In November 1522, Alvarado had obtained a large encomienda in watery Xochimilco, just to the south of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and then one in Tututepec in Tlaxcala.1 He had been used by Cortés since the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in August 1521, in a variety of ways: in Veracruz, in relation to Cristóbal de Tapia, the King’s representative (or the bishop of Burgos’s), sent improbably in December 1521 to seize command from Cortés; then in Pánuco in 1523 to deal with Francisco de Garay. But this complex and usually successful Extremeño now wanted a theater of conquest for himself.

  In December 1523, Cortés gave Alvarado the mission to go to Guatemala to see if indeed, as he had been told, there were there “many rich and splendid lands inhabited by new and different races.”2 Presumably Cortés had also been informed that the region was fertile, that it produced both cotton and cacao, and that it had once contained the wild forebears of such plants as maize, tomato, avocado, and sweet potato. Cortés was always anxious to give his close friends a chance to fulfill themselves. With Alvarado in particular, he was always generous, for he had known him since their childhood together in Extremadura and throughout the conquest of Mexico. Alvarado’s reckless valor (with his own life, as well as those of others) and insolent pride impressed Cortés, who was prudent, cautious, cultivated, and patient: it was the charm of opposites. Alvarado, sometimes known as Tonatiuh (Son of the Sun) or sometimes just El Sol (Sun), to the native Indians because of his fair hair, height, good looks, and blue eyes, was the most popular of the many brave men whom Cortés had in his army.3 Bernal Díaz wrote that Cortés had asked Alvarado “to try and bring the people [of Guatemala] to peace [with Spain] without waging war and to preach matters concerning our holy faith by means of the interpreters which he took with him.”4 He took the opportunity to say that Alvarado was “very well made and active, of good features and bearing, and both in appearance and speech so pleasing that he seemed always smiling.”5 He was an excellent horseman, liked rich clothes, always had round his neck a small gold chain on which hung a jewel, and he wore also a ring with a good diamond. Díaz del Castillo´s criticism was that he talked too much and sometimes cheated at totoloque.6 Others would complain that he was insensitive to the feelings of Indians, whom he treated as beneath contempt.7 Several of his soldiers in this journey to Guatemala later testified to his brutality.

 

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