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

by Hugh Thomas

  Charles the Emperor received news regularly from Cortés in New Spain, from Santo Domingo, from Governor Rojas in Cuba, from Pedrarias in Panama, and from the north coast of South America. As for New Spain, the cabildo (town council) in Mexico-Tenochtitlan was continuing to allocate town and country properties, and that cabildo remained a mixture of new men and experienced conquistadors who had been through all the battles of Cortés.

  Twelve Dominicans had arrived in New Spain in July 1526, led by an enemy of Cortés, Fray Tomás de Ortiz, to add their presence to the well-established Franciscans. Ortiz was also, it seems, an enemy of Indians. He and three other friars became ill and returned to Spain as fast as they could. This left Fray Domingo de Betanzos, a Gallego, with a deacon, Fray Vicente de las Casas, as the spokesmen for the Dominican order.28

  After living modestly in lodgings for a while, the Dominicans moved in 1529 to a monastery being built specially for them at Tepetlaostoc, just outside Tenochtitlan, where Miguel Díaz de Aux, a survivor of the days of the conquest, received an encomienda in 1527. To begin with, their impact would be less than that of the Franciscans because they were not interested in founding schools and were unenthusiastic about the idea of teaching Latin to the natives.29

  All the same, the latter’s interest was increasingly secured: In October 1526, there is record of an indigenous marriage along Christian lines when “Don Hernando,” brother of “señor” Cacama of Texcoco, and seven companions were married to Indians. Several well-known conquistadors (Alonso de Ávila, Pedro Sánchez Farfán) were present, with gifts and, “the jewel most appreciated,” much wine. After the Mass in the monastery, there was a banquet and a ball attended by two thousand people.30 This wedding was, however, less imposing than that of Techuipo, favorite daughter of Montezuma, who married Pedro Gallego de Andrade, her previous Spanish husband, Alonso de Grado, having died. She most surprisingly had a daughter, Leonor, by Cortés, some months after this marriage.31Pedro Gallego was from Seville; he was a poet and later had an inn on the road to Veracruz. He also had the encomienda of Iscuincuitlapilco and a daughter, Juana Andrade.

  When Nuño de Guzmán arrived at San Esteban del Puerto in Pánuco in May 1527 to take up a new appointment, some sixty or seventy Spaniards lived there, in thatched houses surrounding a brick church also with a thatched roof, and a pomegranate-colored council house. Guzmán summoned the Spaniards and read out his instructions in the church. Guzmán dismissed most of the town council immediately and replaced them with new men who had come with him. Guzmán told the caciques that he was in Pánuco as representative of the King of Castile, who was his own supreme mentor, though there was always God in Heaven. If one lived a Christian life on Earth, one would one day live in His presence in Heaven. If not, one would go to an inferno of eternal fire and burn forever. To ensure that they went to Heaven, the Indians would have to build a large church in Pánuco and go to it regularly to beg forgiveness. In their souls, these caciques had to bear complete obedience to the King of Castile and to Guzmán in his name. They were to fulfill their duties to their new Spanish masters but not more. If their master asked more, he was to be reported to Guzmán, who would punish him.32

  Seeing that their new commander was going to be demanding, and would cost them something, several encomenderos, such as Cortés’s friend and fellow Medellinés Antonio de Mendoza, who had been lieutenant governor in Pánuco, left Pánuco–San Sebastián, taking their sheep and slaves with them. It was Mendoza who had returned to Castile with Diego de Ordaz on Cortés’s behalf in 1521, carrying the third letter of the great commander to the Emperor, written in October 1520.33 One encomendero who did not leave now was Diego Villapadierna of Matlactonatico, who told the Indians to avoid giving any presents to Guzmán since, he said, Cortés would soon come there to sweep him away. But it was Villapadierna who suffered, since he was soon tried for conspiring with Cortés to make him King of New Spain, an idea that was far from the captain-general’s imagination. He was sentenced to the pillory, a fine of 50 pesos, and the loss of his encomienda.

  Similar punishments were met by others who challenged the new authority. For example, Guzmán had three of his compatriots hanged from an avocado tree for allegedly mistreating Indians when they had in fact merely tried to prevent Guzmán from presenting his commission in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Guzmán also approved a slave trade in Mexican Indians (Huastecs, principally) from Pánuco to the West Indian islands, the business being organized in 1527 by one of the new governor’s intimates, Sancho de Caniego, who had come to New Spain with him. Guzmán set the prices: No one, for example, could pay more than fifteen slaves for a horse. Slaves were not to be traded for items such as wine or cloth, only for livestock. Caniego was cruel: On the slightest provocation, he would beat an Indian to death.34

  Nor were Spaniards much better off: Caniego put the former comandante of San Sebastián del Puerto in irons and kicked him to death.35 Still, Guzmán tried also to be positive about “his” Indians. In August 1527, he decided that no Indian women were to be seized by the Spaniards (and several Spaniards were hanged in consequence), that no Spaniard was to seize agricultural produce from Indians, that vagrants were to be given permanent homes, and that Spaniards should limit the number of their bearers. None of them were to be made to carry more than an arroba (twenty-five pounds) of weight as well as his food. Nor were Spaniards to keep swine or livestock within half a league (say, a mile and a half) of an indigenous settlement’s fields. Blasphemy was roundly condemned. Thus Guzmán has to be judged at two levels: He was a characteristic man of his time; with a black side and a benign one. He also invited Fray Gregorio de Santa María, a Carmelite who had landed in Pánuco on his way to Tenochtitlan, to remain in his territory, and Santa María did so for a time.36

  Guzmán abandoned Pánuco at the end of 1527, when he accepted an invitation to preside over the new supreme court of New Spain (audiencia).37 The evidence is that this appointment was made to ensure that the Crown had a representative tough enough if necessary to oppose Cortés, whose motives in New Spain had been made to seem so suspect by his many enemies at court at home. Bishop García de Loaisa, President of the Council of the Indies, was responsible. There were to be four judges of first instance who had been named in Spain.38

  The supreme court was supposed to hear civil as well as criminal cases. Among the cases the court heard very early on was the strange case of the young Tlaxcalteca Cristóbal, who was killed by his father, Acxotecatl, for trying to convert him to Christianity.39 A parallel case was that of Hernando Alonso, a blacksmith whom the Dominicans found guilty of such Jewish practices as forbidding his wife to go to church during her menstrual periods and carrying out a baptism according to Jewish rites. Alonso was found guilty and was later burned in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the first conquistador to meet this fate.40

  When Guzmán went up to Tenochtitlan, he was succeeded in Pánuco by Licenciado Pedro de Mondragón, a judge who must have had some good feelings since he refused a pardon for a Spaniard who had violated an Indian girl aged eight, though he felt guilty the rest of his life because he thought that he had been too harsh.41

  In Cuernavaca in another part of New Spain, Cortés began to realize that despite his stupendous services and his remarkable letters about his achievements (his fifth letter to Charles V was written in September 1526), he would never overcome his difficulties with his rivals unless he had overt royal support. In April 1528, the emperor Charles had ordered him to come home, and he was advised to comply by supporters of his, such as the Duke of Béjar, who had befriended the Cortés family. Guzmán had behaved unacceptably in Pánuco. Estrada, now the supreme authority in Mexico, was distinctly unfriendly, though he had been explicitly told that he could not be the judge of residencia against Cortés; and Estrada’s assistant, Juan de Burgos, an experienced trader who had sailed a nao full of supplies to Cortés in New Spain from the Canary Islands in 1521, was equally hostile.

  So in early 1528, Cortés decided to go home
for the first time since his journey to Santo Domingo in 1506, more than twenty years before. He left almost immediately, leaving power over his property in New Spain to his cousin Licenciado Juan Altamirano, to Pedro González Gallego, and to Diego de Ocampo. He took with him Gonzalo de Sandoval and Andrés de Tapia, a large collection of treasure and works of art, plants and minerals, and numerous Indians, headed by a son of Montezuma (Don Pedro Montezuma) as well as a son of Maxixcastin, “Don Lorenzo,” of Tlaxcala. There also came eight Indians who could play elaborate ball games with their feet.42 He arrived at Palos, Columbus’s port in 1492, in May 1528. There, at the monastery of La Rábida, Sandoval fell ill. He was too weak to prevent the theft of his gold and died soon afterwards.43

  The news to reach Spain in 1528 from Panama was that Pedrarias had punished the rebellion, as he put it, of Hernández de Córdoba by having him executed. González Dávila had died. This last information led Isabel de Bobadilla to secure the renomination of her husband as governor and captain-general of Nicaragua (in July 1526).44

  Florida, meantime, remained an unsuccessful venture for the Spaniards. Váquez de Ayllón set out from Puerto Principe in Santo Domingo in mid-July 1526; it was the first expedition that he led in person. He had three good ships—his flagship La Bretona, the Santa Catalina, and the Chorruca—as well as a brigantine, which carried five hundred men and about eighty horses. His comrades included Fray Antonio de Cervantes, Fray Pedro de Estrada, and Fray Antonio de Montesinos, a cousin of the great preacher of that name. He reached a river, which he called the Jordan, where La Bretona ran aground, though other vessels navigated it successfully. They decided, however, that it was a bad place for a colony and instead went far north, to a river that seems to be in what is now New Jersey. There Ayllón died, and all his plans came to an end.45 His expedition limped back to Santo Domingo.

  There were other journeys in these years: For example, Sebastian Cabot’s voyage from Corunna to the river Plate and then the Paraguay River. He was, it will be remembered, piloto mayor for the Casa de la Contratación. He was in search of the mysterious great white chief of the region (El Gran Cacique Blanco). There he came upon Diego García, who had come on a similar journey from Seville. They could not agree on whose rights were at stake but continued together all the same. They left behind a small garrison at Espíritu Santo, the site of the future Buenos Aires. Sailing up the Paraguay and the Pilcomayo, they were severely attacked, and so returned to find all the Spaniards whom they had left at Espíritu Santo dead and the garrison destroyed. Upon returning together to Spain, they embarked on a lawsuit against each other, which, like so many at that time, never ended.

  Cabot was one of the half-dozen great men of the new generation of conquering explorers. But great man though he was, his standing never approached that of the conqueror of New Spain nor that of the Extremeño Pizarro, who knew that his mission lay in Peru.

  11

  Giants of Their Time:

  Charles, Cortés, Pizarro

  Though your goodness rouses great hopes in me, I shall never cease to fear until you have bid farewell to this most unjust and dangerous world and have withdrawn to a monastery as to a safe harbour.

  ERASMUS, De Contemptu Mundi

  In 1528, the three greatest men of the age were in Spain: Charles, King and Emperor, and his two most important subjects, Hernán Cortés, conqueror of New Spain/Mexico, and Francisco Pizarro, the future conqueror of Peru. Charles that year was still at war with King Francis I of France and had sent Balthasar Merklin, vice-chancellor of the empire, to urge the German princes to arm against that country. Heralds from England as well as France had appeared in Burgos with a declaration of a war for “the safety and soul of Christendom.” Charles had replied with a challenge to a duel with King Francis I, whom he accused of failing to meet the code of honor that they both accepted. Francis I accepted the challenge, and demanded time and place for the duel. Afterwards, rational counselors on both sides dissuaded their monarchs from a such a personal test.

  At the same time, Charles was preparing to visit Italy, where he hoped to be crowned by the pope, perhaps in Bologna. That meant a preparation also of his empress, Isabel, for her work as regent. Charles sent her advice on her bearing, as well as on affairs of state. She was to have a meeting of the Council of the Realm every Friday. He issued a general authority for the Queen. He explained to her how the President of the Royal Council was now Don Juan Pardo de Tavera, the archbishop of Santiago (he received the cardinalate in 1531), and he explained something of Tavera’s cautious, correct, and cultivated personality. Tavera was an enemy of the exuberantly liberal Erasmian Alonso de Manrique de Lara, the general of the order. Tavera is now remembered for his magnificent hospital at the gates of Toledo. Technically the hospital of San Juan Bautista, it was also known as the “hospital outside the walls” (hospital de Afuera). It is the great building of the Toledan Renaissance, designated as a hospital for all ailments, perhaps as a copy or at least a successor to the great hospital of Santa Cruz in Valladolid. Like Santa Cruz, Tavera’s hospital began as a mortuary as well as a clinic. It was begun in 1540; the first architect was Alonso de Covarrubias, and then Hernán Gonzalez de Lara. Afterwards there was the exquisite Nicolas de Vergara, who was working on the towers of the hospital in the 1570s.

  In April 1528, the court was in Madrid. In May, the infante Philip was recognized in the church of the monastery of San Jerónimo in Madrid as heir to the throne. In September, Charles addressed both the Royal Council of Castile and the Council of the Realm. He told their members that he intended to go to Italy to be crowned Emperor by the pope. He would also seek to persuade the pope to call a general council of the Church so as to give a formal answer to Luther.1 Charles did not ask the councils for their permission to go to Italy. He merely told them that he was going. Gattinara later explained that there were many who tried to prevent Charles’s departure. They hated the idea of important decisions being made by the unknown Empress Isabel, who would be regent. The grand duchess Margaret of Burgundy, like the Empress, was also urging Charles not to go to Italy.2 She believed that all his efforts and money should be spent on defending Europe against the Turks.

  But the plan to be crowned had its idealistic side. Erasmian schemes for the future of the Church were constantly heard. Could not the Church show itself tolerant as well as generous? A speech that Charles delivered in Madrid announced a great rendezvous with the pope in Bologna. Charles imagined that he was going to Italy for a spiritual renovation as well as a coronation.

  Only a little before Cortés’s return to Spain in May 1528, his erstwhile lieutenant, Pedro de Alvarado, received from the Crown the title of governor and adelantado of Guatemala at 562,500 maravedís a year, and was named to the Order of Santiago. It was an honor that he had in his youth pretended to have received in his father’s stead. As a preparation for his new appointment in Guatemala, Alvarado married a cousin of the Duke of Alburquerque, Beatriz de la Cueva. The conquistador had earlier married an elder sister of hers, Francisca, who had died.

  The court at that time was at the mercy of contrasting reports about Cortés. On the one hand, Alvarado and Fray Diego de Altamirano spoke in favor of him, but Estrada and Albornoz, as well as the Dominican Fray Tomás de Ortiz, were hostile. In the circumstances, Charles thought that the best he could do was to appoint a cousin of his to go to New Spain with three hundred armed men ready to cut off Cortés’s head and those of his friends if Cortés turned out to be guilty of the high crimes of which the Dominicans had accused him (the murder of his wife and of other associates).

  Cortés’s return to Spain in 1528 was, all the same, full of contradiction. It was difficult to know how to treat him. Columbus, too, had returned with a train of treasure, having discovered a new world, but since Cortés had done something just as remarkable, the question was should he be given a title, a pension, a European command?

  Landing in Palos with an escort of fifty persons, Cortés went first to the
Franciscan monastery of La Rábida, Columbus’s favorite retreat nearby. At La Rábida, Cortés is sometimes said to have met his distant cousin Francisco Pizarro. But that meeting could not have been in May 1528 since Pizarro was then still in Panama. If such a thing happened at all, it must have been later, in Toledo.

  Cortés traveled from La Rábida to Seville, where he stayed with the Duke of Medina Sidonia in his palace in the west of the city.3 The Duke gave him good horses with which to continue his journey to the court in Toledo. The conqueror of the Mexica went on, perhaps stopping to salute his mother at Medellín and then remaining for some days at the Jeronymite monastery of Guadalupe, where he is said to have flirted with Francisca de Mendoza, sister of Cobos’s wife. But with the support of his now dead father, Cortés had already been formally engaged to Juana Ramírez de Arellano, niece of the Duke of Béjar, a marriage that would ensure his entry into the aristocracy, as it would ensure the further enrichment of a great Castilian family, the Zúñiga. Everywhere Cortés offered presents: not least to the Mendoza sisters and also to the monastery of Guadalupe, giving the latter a golden replica of that scorpion such as had once bitten him in Pátzcuaro, the body being covered by emeralds, pearls, and mosaics.4

  Cortés was presented to the Emperor at Toledo by his prospective father-in-law, the Duke of Béjar, by Fadrique Enríquez, the admiral of Castile, and by Cobos. Cortés talked of his conquests, his travels, his Indians, his jaguars, and his privations. But Charles had little time to spare: He was preoccupied by his disputes with the King of France, and by his first serious attack of gout. Cobos was charged to inspect Cortés’s treasures. But when Cortés, still in lodgings in Toledo, seemed to be on the verge of a serious illness (brought on, said Bernal Díaz, by the revival of heavy Spanish dinners), the Emperor, “very accompanied by the nobility,” went to visit him, a great honor.5