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

by Hugh Thomas

  The next Mam town to be occupied was Huehuetenango, where fine birds such as the quetzal, parrot, and cotinga could be found, with feathers for headdresses and cloaks, and whose inhabitants fled first to the fortress town of Zaculeu with ravines on three sides. This had been an important center of Mam culture for one thousand years. It had been captured by the Quichés in the early fifteenth century. But recently it had asserted what seemed to have been independence.

  Gonzalo de Alvarado demanded its peaceful surrender: “Let it be known [to Caibil Balam] that our coming is beneficial to his people because we bring news of the true God and of the Christian religion sent by the Pope, the Vicar of Jesus, as of the Emperor King of Spain so that you may become Christians peacefully of your own free will. But if you should refuse our offer of peace, the death and destruction which will follow will be your own responsibility.”23 Gonzalo gave his opponents three days in which to consider his offer. No answer came. Instead, a Mam army came from the north to relieve Zaculeu. Gonzalo left his deputy, Antonio de Salazar, to continue the siege (Salazar had been with Narváez in New Spain and had subsequently been in most of Cortés’s battles round the lake of Tenochtitlan).24 He turned on the relief force, though by now his men were hungry, without much hope of food until Zaculeu was taken. The Spanish mercenaries were as usual held by the Indians, who were forced into defeat by the horsemen. Gonzalo returned to Zaculeu with starvation threatening. His surviving Indian auxiliaries were forced to eat dead horses. But then Juan de León Cardona, whom Pedro de Alvarado had made captain of the conquered Quiché territory, sent a substantial shipment of food. Zaculeu surrendered in September 1525, and Gonzalo assumed the command of all the western Cuchumatans.

  By then, Pedro de Alvarado had recovered adequately from his wound to be able to contemplate a new expedition of his own, this time into Chiapas, seeking to meet his old commander and comrade Cortés, who was then en route for Higueras to punish the willful Cristóbal de Olid. Chiapas, it will be recalled, had some years before been conquered by Sandoval. Alvarado wanted Cortés’s support for his claim formally to become governor of Guatemala. But the dense jungles, the colossal rivers, and the wonderful mountains made any thought of meeting Cortés impracticable.

  Alvarado returned to Guatemala, where he found that several of his settlements, such as San Salvador, had been destroyed. All the same, he had become attached to Guatemala and its people, even though he had treated them so harshly. Perhaps the landscape counted for him, improbable though it may seem. Relentless men have soft sides. The range of altitude, climate, and vegetation along the Pacific coast is astonishing. Perhaps he liked the cypresses, the high fertile valleys, the temperate climate, the volcanic stone for grinding maize and sharp knives, the availability of lime for mortar. The narrow coastal plain is very well watered. There was obsidian for weapons and iron pyrites with which to make looking glasses. There was a little gold in the streams, as well as copper, and also abundant fresh fish, and shellfish at the coast. There was bark for making paper, silk and cotton for quilted armor, tobacco, pumpkins for music, bees for honey. Some Spaniards were impressed by the diversity of gods in Guatemala, as by the ritual invoked on all occasions of celebration and by the speed with which Catholic saints were identified with local gods. Certainly this was a territory much richer than Alvarado’s hometown of Badajoz in Extremadura.

  Hearing that Francisco de Montejo, a comrade of his in the early days of the campaign in New Spain, had been granted the governorship of Yucatán, Alvarado determined to return to Mexico-Tenochtitlan and then to Spain to obtain a similar nomination for himself in Guatemala. He had by then taken “such a fancy to this land of Guatemala and its people that he decided to stay there and colonise. So he laid the foundation for Santiago de Guatemala and prepared a cathedral.”25 He also established encomiendas and a town council for his new city, from whose members he went through the motions of requesting permission, as acting governor, to leave for Spain. His brother Jorge then became acting governor from August 1526.

  Though the conquest of Guatemala was far from complete, Alvarado had made his mark there, and as Tonatiuh, Son of the Sun, he would be remembered in his absence. The Quiché lords would perhaps echo the prayer of the lords in Popol Vuh: “Heart of Sky, heart of earth, give me strength, give me the courage, in my heart, in my head, for you are my mountain and my plain.”26

  9

  Charles and His Empire

  I counted from a mosque [in Cholula] four hundred and more towers in the city and all of them are mosques.

  CORTÉS FROM CHOLULA TO CHARLES V, Third letter, 1522

  Some modern historians have fallen into the trap of thinking that the emperor Charles paid little attention to his transatlantic possessions.1 These suppositions are not borne out, even considering his activities in Valladolid in 1522. For example, we hear that, early in that year, he prolonged for another four years the lucrative monopoly of Laurent de Gorrevod, the Savoyard governor of the Bresse, and protégé-friend of the archduchess Margaret of Austria, on the sale of black African slaves in the Empire. From November 1523, this arrangement was annulled, and the import of slaves was permitted to the Indies along new lines: 1,400 were permitted a year in Santo Domingo, seven hundred in Cuba, six hundred in Mexico, five hundred in San Juan and Castilla de Oro, and three hundred to Jamaica (Santiago). Gorrevod was compensated by receiving the duty (almojarifazgo) on the 1,400 slaves destined for Santo Domingo.

  That demanding but blunt and simple tax was always changing. In 1524, it was introduced on all goods entering New Spain, and 50,000 pesos were raised by it in the next seven years.2 Then, as we have seen, in October 1522, only three months after his return to Spain for his second stay, Charles sent there those four important officials to “assist” Cortés in the government of Mexico; and there was also the reception of the world travelers Elcano and Pigafetta when they came back from the journey they had made, at Charles’s cost, round the world on the initiative of the dead Magellan.3 First as an emergency, from 1523 onward the Crown seized all precious metals sent home from the Indies. Then as a matter of course all such private gold was automatically turned into juros, which resulted in periodic payments of a fixed rate of interest.4

  It is true that in the 1520s the Spanish income from the Indies was modest. The total amounted in 1520 to 1525 to a mere 134,000 pesos; the Crown’s share was 35,000. In comparison, between 1516 and 1520, these figures were 993,000, with the Crown’s share 260,000.5 Between 1526 and 1530, the income was more than a million pesos, of which the Crown’s share was 272,000. Very soon, events in Peru would transform this situation for the better.

  In 1526, Charles was persuaded to grant the government of Yucatán and Cozumel, which had often been visited by Spaniards but not yet conquered, to Francisco de Montejo, the hidalgo from Salamanca who had represented Cortés in Spain in the early days of his great adventure.6 Montejo had been a friend of Diego Velázquez, the governor of Cuba, before Cortés’s expedition had begun, but had become one of Cortés’s allies in consequence of his achievements. Montejo’s character was not grasping. He wanted glory more than gold. Now he was requesting a theater of operations for himself.

  The same year, it became normal that those who undertook to grow sugar in the Indies could obtain a government loan, as Juan Mosquera did in February 1523 in Cuba. Mosquera was a notary (escribano) as well as an encomendero in Santo Domingo, where he was once “visitor,” that is, an occasional inspector, and where he had the luxury of a stone house. He was said to have been “a man of very low manners, very passionate and the enemy of good men.”7 Mosquera’s laudable aim, however, was to achieve free trade for the settlers in Cuba with other islands in the Caribbean.8

  Another imperial concession of this time was to Licenciado Lucás Vázquez de Ayllón, an old hand in the Indies. Born in Toledo, he was the son of a certain councillor of that city, Juan de Ayllón, known as “the Good.” He had gone out to the Caribbean in 1504, in Ovando’s day, and to
begin with dedicated himself to agriculture and to mining, becoming alcalde mayor (chief magistrate), in Concepción, in Santo Domingo. Perhaps he was a converso.9 He made money on a property at Chicora, where he owned several hundred Indians.10 In 1505, he appears as a university graduate in support of the intelligent judge Alonso de Maldonado. Back in Spain for a year or two, he returned to Santo Domingo in 1509 to take the residencia of Ovando. In 1512, he was rather improbably (given his past) named judge in the first supreme court (audiencia) of the Indies.

  This appointment did not prevent him from continuing to deal in indigenous slaves from the Lesser Antilles, many of whom were destined for the icy-cold pearl fisheries of Cubagua, off Santa Margarita. Mosquera was moreover a financial backer of Juan Bono’s expedition for slaves to Trinidad in 1516, and he also had for a time a monopoly on selling slaves from the Lucayos (the Bahamas or “useless islands”).11 His headquarters was Puerto Plata on the north coast of La Española. There he had by 1522 a half share in a new sugar mill. Thinking perhaps of the labor needed in that enterprise, he commented that it was “far better that these Indians became slave men than free beasts.”12 Difficult though it may be for a later age to face such a dilemma, the consideration was almost a normal one in the sixteenth century.

  Vázquez de Ayllón was the leading figure in the destruction of the free population of the Bahamas, as well as a leading colonist of Santo Domingo, where he married Juana, daughter of Esteban de Pasamonte, treasurer of the island after the death of his uncle Miguel.

  This Vázquez had been sent by the court of Santo Domingo, of which he remained a member, to Cuba to detain Narváez’s fleet against Cortés in 1520. But he was confronted by Narváez and, after a stay in New Spain as unfortunate as it was brief, he returned in a long sea journey to Santo Domingo.13 Going back to Castile, he was an influential witness testifying against Diego Velázquez in favor of Cortés. He became a Knight of Santiago. Now he pursued his new adventure in Florida, which he was told was ruled by a giant (“señoreado de un hombre de estatura de gigante”). He went back again to Santo Domingo and spent his fortune on the Florida expedition, which he would not embark upon till 1526.14

  The early decisions of the Council of the Indies included: a license to allow merchants from ports other than Seville to trade with the Indies without registering in the Casa de la Contratación (the board in Seville that managed relations with the New World);15 a contract for Santa Marta on the north coast of South America for Rodrigo de Bastidas, Cortés’s backer, an adventurous converso merchant of Triana; a permission to all subjects of the Spanish world to go to the New World without distinction as to whence they derived;16 and a ban on future conquistadors seizing people from the West Indies or the mainland except for those who might be needed as interpreters. This last was a benign idea, which was not carried through. A similar fate had befallen one of the most liberal orders to emerge from the Council of the Indies before it had formally taken shape on March 8, 1523, when it was decreed that henceforth no war should be made against the Indians nor should any harm or damage come to them.17 This was an early manifestation in Spain of the ideas of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, who at this time was still in his Dominican monastery in Santo Domingo studying for his subsequent campaigns.

  In July 1523, Charles gave a coat of arms to Tenochtitlan, or Mexico, as it was by then increasingly known. The grant was a great accolade, for no such concession had previously been made in the Caribbean. The device was characteristic: a shield colored blue like water to recall the great lake on which the city had been built, and a gilded castle in the center of it connected to the mainland by three causeways or stone bridges. A lion was guarding each of these bridges, and its arms lay on the castle as a memory of the victory the Christians had gained. The border of the design consisted of ten ears of green prickly pears (nopals) with thistles.18

  The year 1523 significantly saw the publication in Toledo of what became a popular novel, Clarín de Landanís, by Jerónimo López, as well as Raimundo of Greece by Francisco Bernal in Salamanca. The latter treated of a powerful king of Egypt named Cleopatro; a wise lady, Piromancia, who lived in Alexandria; and a duke, Pirineo, who lived in India. The kings of Scotland and Norway make fleeting appearances.19 All the signs are that this work, too, became popular and that it inspired, as well as amused, the court and, the conquistadors.

  The Council of the Indies was certainly active by April 1526,20 when it announced that, being in Seville for the wedding of the King-Emperor, it was asked to investigate the activities of the Casa de la Contratación, which continued to be based in that city. There had been many rumors of corruption. The council asked the chief magistrates of nearby maritime towns (Sanlúcar, Palos, Moguer, Puerto de Santa María, Niebla) and the corregidores of Cádiz and Jerez de la Frontera to proclaim this visit by town crier.

  The council began by taking statements from witnesses, and it undertook to make a report within thirty days. All the chief pilots were consulted. But the council took longer in their work than they had promised. In November 1527, they said that, having finished the accounts of the Casa itself, they would examine those of the officials and the treasure fleets’ accountants. In the end, they found one official guilty of corrupt practice: Juan López de Recalde. All the same, they did find much evidence of incompetence. For example, the administration of the goods of people who had died in the Indies had been spectacularly badly managed.

  López de Recalde’s condemnation was a blow to the Casa de la Contratación. He had been a power in Seville since the institution had been founded and had been accountant of it since 1505. It had been he who, in 1518, had initially bought Gorrevod’s grant of a monopoly on slaves for the Spanish empire, though he had resold it immediately. He had been the chief assistant to Rodríguez de Fonseca in organizing the King’s fleet to Germany in 1520.21 He had been the great friend in Andalusia of numerous successful Basque merchants.22 He had married Lorenza de Idiáquez, a sister of Alonso de Idiáquez, who was Cobos’s majordomo and who would play a considerable part in bureaucratic policies in the next twenty years. López’s denunciation by Juan de Aranda (who had organized Magellan’s expedition and milked the participants) marked the end of the power of the old Fonsequistas in the Casa.

  For the moment, the only consequence of this investigation was the building in August of a chapel in the Casa de la Contratación, where prayers for the souls of the dead explorers could be offered beneath the Flemish painter Alejo Fernández’s beautiful picture The Virgin of the Mariners.23

  In November 1526, the Council of the Indies met in Granada in the Alhambra. Charles, unusually, was presiding. There were present the three bishops who played the determining role on the council (García de Loaisa, Maldonado, and Cabeza de Vaca), together with Cobos, Dr. Beltrán, Juan de Samano, and Cortés’s distant relation, Dr. Ladislao Galíndez de Carvajal, who was a member of the Royal Council and who had much curiosity about the Indies. There was also Urbina, secretary to the chancellor in the absence of his master, Gattinara himself.24

  The council took what seems to read now as a remarkably humane decision. Talking of “the disorganised greed of some of our subjects who go to our Indies” and of “the bad treatment which they show to the Indians native to those islands and on the mainland,” not to speak of the “great and excessive labour which they provide for them in mines to find gold” and “in the pearl fisheries and in other farming,” the conquistadors were accused of “making the Indians excessively and immoderately tired, not giving them enough to wear or to eat, treating them cruelly and with the reverse of love, much worse than if they were slaves.” That had been the cause of the death of “a great number of the said Indians on such a scale that many of the islands and part of the mainland remain barren and without any population.”

  In addition, there were so many Indians who fled from the mines that “it was a great hindrance to the enterprise of trying to arrange the conversion of the said Indians to our Catholic faith” …
“Too many captains, moved by the same greed, forgetting the service of our Lord God, went to kill many of those Indians in the discoveries and conquests and also seized their goods without the said Indians giving any cause for such a thing.”

  As for the Requerimiento, “when the captains of the King discovered or conquered a new territory, they were obliged to proclaim immediately to its Indian inhabitants that they had been sent to teach good customs” to “dissuade them from such vices as eating human flesh and to instruct them in the holy faith and preach it to them for their salvation.” A list of wrongs done to the natives followed. Every leader licensed by the Crown to carry out an expedition was to take with him a copy of the so-called Requerimiento and have it read by interpreters as many times as might be necessary. Every expedition henceforth also had to be accompanied by two churchmen, priests or friars, approved by the Council of the Indies. These men were to instruct the Indians in religious matters, to protect them from the rapacity and cruelty of (some) Spaniards, and ensure that the conquest was justly carried out. War was only to be waged after the ecclesiastics had given their consent in writing; and any such conflict had to be fought according to the methods permitted by law, the holy faith, and the Christian religion. In addition, no one could make a slave out of any Indian under pain of losing all his goods.25

  This remarkable declaration remained the formal rule for the conduct of Spaniards in the New World for two generations. It was written into all capitulations and grants of opportunities from that day on, including, for example, the grant already mentioned to Francisco de Montejo in respect of Yucatán on December 6 of that year. That did not mean, however, a complete end to trading in Indian slaves. Thus on November 15, 1526, Charles the Emperor agreed to allow Juan de Ampiés to take Indians from the “useless isles” off Venezuela—Curaçao and Cubagua, for example.26 The same day he gave full permission for any subject of his from anywhere in Europe to go to the New World.27 This was a special benefit to Germans who wished to share in the banquet of the Indies.