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

by Hugh Thomas

  On Saint Peter’s Day, February 22, Charles received the iron crown of Lombardy, and two days later, the imperial coronation was held on Saint Matthew’s Day, Charles’s birthday, in San Petronio in Bologna, the largest church in the city, with its light, then as now, superior to that in the Duomo in Florence. It was begun in 1390 in emulation of other large churches in Gothic style. It is the most highly developed creation in Gothic church architecture in Italy. Charles’s presence is still recalled in the small chapel of San Abbondio which, however, was reconstructed in 1865. We know nothing of the impression made on Charles by the other twenty-one chapels, of which one or two—the Chapel of the Magi, for example—contained fine pictures. Perhaps Gattinara showed these to Charles; certainly, at least the great door of the Basilica decorated by the Sienese sculptor Jacopo della Quercia. Of the German princes, only the elector palatine of the Rhine was present. He carried the orb of empire, the Marquess of Montferrat the golden scepter, the Duke of Urbino the sword of state, and the Duke of Savoy the kingly crown. These were great Italian noblemen.

  The Spanish delegation was also large and distinguished. It included the poet Garcilaso de la Vega and his great friend the young Duke of Alba.

  Charles’s head was anointed with oil by Cardinal Farnese, the most senior of the cardinals and Clement’s eventual successor. The pope officiated. For the last time in history, the two highest dignitaries of Christendom were present together in their robes. The historian, collector, and papal favorite Paolo Giovio stood in a doorway and, in a resonant voice, proclaimed, “Rex invictissime hodie vocaris ad coronam Constantinopolis.” Charles smiled and waved aside the aspiration to the recovery of the East.36 The people of Bologna cried “Imperio, imperio.” The Spanish contingent called out “Spain, Spain.” Gattinara, now a cardinal, felt his work as chancellor had been finally sanctioned the moment the imperial crown of Charlemagne was placed on Charles’s head.37 He died shortly after, and with him vanished the supreme proponent of the idea of Charles as universal monarch. In his baggage, Gattinara left a map of the world. He had no successor.38

  Six months later, at the beginning of December, the governess of the Netherlands, Charles’s cultivated, intelligent, and competent aunt the archduchess Margaret also died in her princely palace at Malines, age fifty. Her death was an accident deriving from a poisoned foot caused by broken glass in her embroidered slipper. Her career was one more reminder that the sixteenth century had as many women in great places as the twentieth. FORTUNE INFORTUNE FORT UNE was her mysterious motto, which is everywhere reproduced on the tombs, walls, woodwork, and stained glass of the church at Brou, which she had built near Bourg-en-Bresse. Her successor in Flanders would be Charles’s sister Mary, the erstwhile Queen of Hungary.

  Margaret’s library alone would have entitled her to a grand place in international society. Only the collections of Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg, of Fernando Colón, and of the elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony competed. In the library there were pictures as well as books.

  Margaret had planned her sepulchre at Brou for twenty years. There already rested the remains of her second husband, Philibert of Savoy. There was the tomb of her long-dead mother-in-law, Margaret of Bourbon. The three tombs were the work of the splendid German-born sculptor Conrad Meit. Her feet lay on a stone greyhound. There, too, would be in future the coffin of Laurent de Gorrevod, governor of Bresse, the first to enjoy a large monopoly to carry black slaves to the New World, a grant that he sold and whose proceeds presumably helped to finish this exquisite church. Gattinara advised her in the construction.39

  Margaret had been Charles’s best adviser, as her letters to him make clear. It was a tragedy for him and his causes that she died so relatively young and was not present for the brilliant conquests made in his later days.40

  12

  The Germans at the Banquet:

  The Welsers

  No rural household numbers less than forty men and women, besides which two slaves attached to the soil.

  SIR THOMAS MORE, Utopia

  An unexpected manifestation of the early days of the Spanish empire was the involvement in it of the German banking family the Welsers, of Augsburg. One optimistic genealogist claimed that their surname derived from Justinian’s great general Belisarius. However that claim might turn out to be, the Welsers traded many luxurious and expensive items such as silk, cloves, hemp, cinnamon, and saffron. Through a marriage with the Vöhlin von Memmingen family, they acquired Spanish interests, especially in the Canary Islands. They had representatives in Madeira by 1490; in India by 1505. Unlike their rivals the Fuggers, who were strong Catholics, the Welsers were neutral in the religious quarrels of the sixteenth century. Some were even Protestants. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal in Venice was their headquarters in that city, while in Amsterdam they could be found at the the Golden Rose.

  In 1519, the future emperor Charles borrowed nearly 150,000 ducats from the Welsers to help him bribe the seven imperial electors to vote for him (less than half what the Fuggers made available but still a large sum).1 Apparently, the Welsers saw Cortés’s Mexican gold in Brussels when it was exhibited in 1520 and were impressed. They also bought 480 quintals of cloves that had been brought back to Spain by Elcano in 1522 from the Philippines, and in 1524 they established a branch factory in Seville specially dedicated to trade with the Americas. Their factor there was the most powerful German merchant in Spain at that time, Lázaro Nuremberger, who arrived in Seville in 1520. He married a daughter of the famous printer Cromberger.2 In June 1526, the Welsers set up a similar institution selling pearls from Cubagua in Santo Domingo. The factors were two merchants, Jorge Ehinger and Ambrosio Alfinger, from the city of Ulm. Jorge was the brother of several distinguished merchants by then established in Constance, above all of Heinrich, who signed the letters lending money to Charles in 1519. Ambrosio Alfinger came from a family that had been prominent in the guild of tailors in Ulm. He had invested heavily in the voyage of 1526 of Cabot to the river Plate, and his father had made a fortune through the cloth trade.

  The emperor Charles was usually short of money. He asked the Welsers in 1526 for a new loan. They agreed, the collateral to be “the island of Venezuela.” In 1528, they arranged a contract to manage the settlements in that place, and they also secured the succession to Gorrevod’s grant of the import of African slaves into the Spanish empire.3 They had been led to assume that the large Lake Maracaibo would conduct them to the magic strait leading in its turn to the Southern Sea about which there was such fascinated speculation for so long. Subsequent loans were made by the Welsers to the Crown in Burgos on November 22, December 20, and December 30, 1527. More loans of the same kind were made in early 1528 by the merchants of Burgos.4

  The acceptance of these Germans as a power in the Indies was brought closer in early 1528 when the King and the Council of the Indies signed a capitulación that gave Jorge Ehinger and Jerónimo (Hyeronimus) Seiler the responsibility for sending an armada to assist to maintain order in Santa Marta, the new settlement near the mouth of the great river Magdalena in what is now Colombia. Seiler was one further powerful German to become engaged in the Indies. A native of the lovely city of Saint Gallen in Switzerland, he was ennobled by Charles V in 1525 and had succeeded Nuremberger as the chief factor of the Welsers in Seville in 1528.

  The contract of 1528 obliged the Welsers to send an expedition with three hundred men to Santa Marta within a year and to build three fortresses there at their own expense. They were to take with them fifty German “master miners” who would supervise the exploitation of gold in Santo Domingo and find new veins of that metal. The Welsers had experience of this kind of contract since they had married into a silver-mining family in the late fifteenth century.

  Santa Marta was a perplexing town in the expanding radius of Spanish interests. It had been discovered as a useful place for trade by Rodrigo de Bastidas, that son of a converso merchant in the Triana, across the river from Seville. Bastida
s was a man experienced in voyages and in the Caribbean. He seems to have first gone to the New World in 1500. Then captain on the nao Santa María de Gracia, he explored the Gulf of Uraba and the Río Hacha and was probably the first conquistador to bring back pearls from the Americas. After 1504, he was resident in Santo Domingo, and he assisted Cortés in February 1521 with reinforcements in three vessels. Among those who traveled thus to New Spain were the Franciscan Fray Melgarejo and the royal treasurer, Julian de Alderete. Already rich by 1510, he abandoned the sea and became a merchant in Santo Domingo. Old but still full of enterprise, he persuaded the Crown to make him the first governor of Santa Marta in 1524. He ruled there autocratically and was overthrown by his own followers in 1526. Bastidas was sent back to Santo Domingo but died on the journey, the rumor being that his end was hastened by his sometime subordinates. Then Santa Marta lived a year or two without an effective ruler (though Bastidas’s deputy, Palomares, assumed that he was in control). Finally, the Council of the Indies appointed a businessman, a man similar to Bastidas, García de Lerma, as governor.

  Before he was surprisingly named governor, Lerma had been a page in the household of Diego Colón in 1510. His own economic activity began with his interest in a gold mine in Puerto Rico. Oviedo summed up his character: “He is short of money but not of words.”5 He went to Flanders on Diego Colón’s behalf in 1516 and there became a courtier and a friend of Charles, who later always treated him well. He intrigued successfully to obtain a monopoly of the pearls of Cubagua and, in succession to Francisco de Vallejo, became inspector (veedor) of the north coast of South America, where he concerned himself in trading brazilwood. In Santa Marta as governor, Lerma seems to have acquired an immediate name as a hard taskmaster.

  The Welser business in Santo Domingo was asked to organize the dispatch of slaves to the New World, and it did so, but Licenciado Serrano, a rising lawyer in the Welsers’ factory, wrote, “The Germans bring in very black blacks, so much so that, despite the great necessity that we have for them, no one buys.”6 (Later, “very black” Africans rather than paler ones enjoyed a vogue among slave buyers.) There was evidently a profitable collaboration between Governor Lerma and Ehinger, the Welser factor: Ehinger estimated the value that he had to make to help Lerma maintain order at 6,000 ducats. Lerma used his influence at court to preserve Ehinger’s monopoly on slaves.7

  These arrangements did not work very well for the employers of slaves: In 1524, Alonso de Parada, a friend of Diego Velázquez, the governor of Cuba, who in 1528 became a judge in the audiencia in New Spain, proposed a contract whereby the King of Portugal would provide slaves to the King of Spain in a good cousinly exchange.8 Actually Charles gave another small grant to take slaves to the New World to his secretary for American affairs, Francisco de los Cobos: two hundred black slaves exempt from all taxes. Of course, no one expected that that license would be taken advantage of by Cobos in person; sure enough, he sold it to Seiler and Ehinger in Santo Domingo and also gave a share to three Genoese: Leonardo Catano, Batista Justiniani, and Pedro Benito de Basiniano. In February 1528, Ehinger and Seiler received a license to introduce four thousand slaves in the next four years, a third of them to be women.9 This was in effect a continuation of the old grant to Gorrevod.

  The Welsers profited. The new grant of Venezuela to them was based on a sketch map by the veteran geographer Fernández de Enciso, who had received a contract for the governorship of Tierra Firme—that is, Venezuela. The contract was worked out by Ehinger, Seiler, Gessler (a new employee of the Welsers in Seville), and also Bartolomé Welser and his associates in Augsburg, who controlled several large warehouses in Andalusia. The contract not only gave the Welsers the right to trade in “metals, herbs and spices” between the Indies and Spain but allowed them to arrange their commerce directly between the Indies and Flanders—something never granted before and, indeed, refused to the city of Santo Domingo the previous year.10

  The agreement with the Welsers did not mention their name but spoke of the factors in Santo Domingo, Alfinger and Ehinger. They were, as usual in these circumstances, to be governor and captain-general for life; they would also be in perpetuity the captains (alcaides) of the two fortresses that they would build. The task of these men would be to found two Spanish pueblos with three hundred citizens each and introduce the miners.11 The Germans would be free of taxes for six years; they could introduce cows as they wanted and take with them a hundred pine trees from Tenerife to plant. The governor could enslave all Indians who were shown to be rebels but no one else.

  All the enterprising Spanish merchants of Santo Domingo who had already been extensively trading with the north coast of South America were distressed by this arrangement. For the 1,500 miles of coast of South America from Urabá to the mouth of the Orinoco was depopulated because so many Indians had fled into the interior to escape enslavement. There were in 1528 only two settlements, Santa Marta and Coro, as well as one improvised fortress at Cumaná.12

  The experienced Juan (Martínez) de Ampiés had been permitted by the supreme court in Santo Domingo to go to Coro, which clearly needed an injection of life. His journey was delayed by a shipwreck in Saona, an island off La Española first visited by Columbus, and by a request from the supreme court in Santo Domingo to reinforce the fleet because of a recent French attack on San Germán in Puerto Rico. (It had ruined San Germán’s short-lived prosperity.) Ampiés fell on the French fleet by surprise and killed thirty of their sailors in what must have been the first European Caribbean sea battle. Then he went on with fifty men to Coro via Higüey in Puerto Rico and Curaçao just off the coast of Venezuela. His aim was to prevent the Welsers from establishing themselves on the Colombian–Venezuelan coast. He hoped that they (whose representatives in Santo Domingo he knew) would content themselves with the coast to Santa Marta, while he, Ampiés, would hold on to the longer shore near Coro. Ampiés succeeded in persuading an ally of the past, the chief Manaure, to receive him with affection. Manaure even became a Christian.

  Alfinger set off by sea from Santo Domingo for Coro with fifty men of his own in January 1529 and arrived on February 4. All seemed desolate. Ampiés was living in a stone house, which he had built for himself, on the island of Curaçao, and Lerma was in Santo Domingo, too, awaiting his own journey to Santa Marta, some of his men being among Alfinger’s troops.

  Alfinger was horrified at the misery of Coro. His putative capital consisted of a few incomplete and dull buildings on the edge of a dusty plain. This was not what he had expected when his contract had been negotiated. The fact that Ampiés had abandoned his pretensions was little consolation—he had proclaimed himself justicia mayor and was now claiming to have founded Coro only in order to export brazilwood. It was Alfinger who without enthusiasm now laid out the town in Spanish metrical style with grants of sites (solares) to appropriate settlers. Alfinger found that Ampiés had left nothing behind him and was even stirring up the Indians against him. He seized him when he returned and put him on a ship bound for Santo Domingo, with orders not to return to Coro under any circumstances. In this, Alfinger was eventually supported by the Council of the Indies, whose members declared that they would condemn anyone new going to Venezuela if he did not have the permission of the German governor.

  Among those who had reached Santo Domingo with the miners was a remarkable man who would make his mark on the history of South America. This was Nicolás Federmann, like Alfinger originally from Ulm. Federmann had been born about 1505, so in 1529 would have been in his mid-twenties. In Ulm, his father, Claus, had a property with a mill next to the church. Federmann had been educated at the famous Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, which was assuming educational significance. After that, he began to work for the Welsers. They sent him to Seville. Thence he went to Santo Domingo, where it was supposed that he could help Alfinger, who was still away, now supposed lost, on an expedition to Maracaibo.

  Federmann reached Santo Domingo in December 1529, and went post-haste to Coro. He summe
d up the situation quickly and returned to Santo Domingo to seek supplies. He persuaded another employee of the Welsers, Sebastián Rentz, also of Ulm, to help him. He was assisted as well as hindered by the arrival of three ships direct from Spain under the command of Juan Seissenhofer (Juan Alemán to the Spaniards).

  Once he had settled in Coro, Alfinger began preparing an expedition to Maracaibo, the entrance to which lagoon he had seen on his first journey to Venezuela. In August 1529, he captained 180 men out of the 300 whom he had brought from Santo Domingo. He found sweet water and concluded, in consequence of some primitive calculations, that the lagoon must be about six hundred miles in circumference. He was convinced that this led to an even bigger sheet of water, which in turn would open onto the Southern Sea. He and his friends ascended a mountain, which seemed to be called Coromixy and which marked the entry to a province where the men had beards and the houses were stone. It seemed that the Southern Sea was only fifteen miles away. Hugo de Vascuna, one of Alfinger’s captains, reported that there was a valley there called Unyasi, where there were large “sheep”—the llamas found in the land of Birú.

  Alfinger crossed the mountains of Jideharas, south of Coro, to find the east side of the lagoon, founding the settlement of Maracaibo on September 8. He also founded a less long-lasting settlement, which he named Ulma after his own faraway city in Germany. But he did not find a way to the Southern Sea.

  Alfinger returned to Coro after losing a hundred men, mostly to Indian attacks, for the Indians on that coast were by then strongly opposed to Spain, having lost so many of their number as slaves, in a trade that also interested Alfinger. Coro soon began to compete as a slaving port for that trade with Cubagua. Of course, Alfinger and his German fellow controllers needed Spanish lieutenants for this undertaking. In December 1529, we hear for the first time of the name Venezuela being applied to the entire territory of the settlement, and Alfinger was being spoken of as its governor.13