by Hugh Thomas
Almost before Cartagena had time to settle down, Juan de Padilla, a judge in Santo Domingo, came to carry out the residencia of Heredia. A second and third such enquiry were commissioned. Heredia was accused of neglecting the defense of Cartagena, of dividing the land nearby into encomiendas that favored his own friends, of defrauding the royal treasury, and of forgetting the need to maintain public morality.19 All these accusations seemed unfair, premature, and inappropriate, and it transpired that the residencia had been introduced because Heredia was a mere commoner without the pretensions of a Montejo, the aristocratic Alvarado, or even Pedrarias.
Heredia later had great difficulties with his wife, who claimed that his adventures in the Indies had left her with no money. He eventually returned to Europe, but only in 1554; his fleet was wrecked off Zahara in January 1555, and he and more than one hundred others drowned. By that time, Cartagena de las Indias was a much-valued port in an empire that seemed to command two oceans, the Ocean Sea (the Atlantic) and the Southern Sea (the Pacific).
15
Cortés and the Audiencia in New Spain
You know, don’t you, that to the right hand of the Indias there is an island called California which is populated by black women?
Las Sergas de Esplandián, GARCI RODRÍGUEZ DE MONTALVO
Cortés returned in July 1530 from old to New Spain with no illusions. In his absence, there had been a political upheaval. Guzmán, the President of the audiencia, arrived in the capital of New Spain in December 1528; and there had appeared, too, the saintly, austere, intellectually determined, strong-minded, and unbending first bishop of the Mexicans, Juan de Zumárraga, a Basque Erasmian of originality and strength of character. He was of the great generation of liberal Spanish bishops, such as the inquisitor Alonso Manrique de Lara, and Alonso Fonseca, archbishop of Toledo. Zumárraga had met the Emperor in the Jeronymite monastery of El Abrojo, and Charles had asked him to eliminate the witches of Navarre—a task that he was said to have carried out to perfection. Nominated to Mexico in consequence of this triumph, Zumárraga proclaimed himself one who believed that the Indians were rational beings whose souls could be saved.1 He was a Utopian as well as an Erasmian.2
Zumárraga at once entered upon quarrels in Tenochtitlan with the supreme court, whose members, he thought, were neglecting their duties, spending their time “promenading in public gardens.” But Zumárraga was in a weak position since he had left Spain hastily, before his confirmation in office, so that it was easy enough to argue that he was just a “religious” man like so many others. Zumárraga presented his authority as “Protector of the Indians”; the court agreed to give him all necessary powers but argued that he had delegated his authority. The judges also insisted that Indian complaints were their business and that Zumárraga’s task was just to teach the catechism. They threatened the new bishop with exile, and the leading Indians, seeing how things were going, fled from their protector. Zumárraga denounced the judges in a sermon and threatened to report them to the emperor Charles.3
There then came the curious affair of Huejotzingo, a town on the eastern slopes of the volcano Iztaccíhuatl, some six miles from both Tlaxcala and Cholula. Cortés had taken the place as an encomienda in 1524. In 1528, the Indians there complained that, in addition to their tribute to him, they were being forced to pay dues to the court, including to the Crown’s representative, García del Pilar, an experienced conquistador who had accompanied Cortés throughout the campaign leading to the conquest. He had the reputation of being the first Spaniard to learn Nahuatl. Zumárraga, apprised of the problem, asked the court for a schedule of the tributes. Guzmán said that the court was not answerable to him and told Zumárraga that if he persisted in his troublemaking he would have him hanged, as Charles had hanged Bishop Acuña of Zamora after the war of the comuneros. Guzmán sent a magistrate to arrest the complaining Indians of Huejotzingo. Zumárraga warned the Indians in time, and they took refuge in the new Franciscan convent in their town. Fray Motolinía was the guardian of the convent, and soon Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta would be writing his books in his cell there.
Zumárraga set out for Huejotzingo, being followed by the magistrate, who proceeded to arrest the Indians and take them to Mexico. Zumárraga remained in Huejotzingo, where a town meeting was held. This called on a Franciscan, Fray Antonio Ortiz, to go to Mexico to insist that the court respect justice. He preached thus at a pontifical Mass chanted by another Erasmian, Fray Julián Garcés, the Dominican bishop of Tlaxcala. Guzmán tried to silence Ortiz, and an alguacil on his orders expelled him from the pulpit. Next day, Garcés’s vicar-general announced that all those who had been involved would be excommunicated—that is, both Guzmán and the constable. Guzmán ordered the vicar-general exiled and dispatched another magistrate to escort him to Veracruz. The vicar-general went to the church of San Francisco in Tenochtitlan, where Cortés’s friends used to forgather, and which Guzmán now had surrounded. Zumárraga returned to the capital and persuaded the two junior members of the audiencia (Delgadillo and Ortiz de Matienzo) to go to Huejotzingo to perform a penance and recite a Miserere.4 They went and withdrew a document that they had previously issued denouncing the Franciscans. But Guzmán sought his revenge by giving orders to hold up all the bishop’s letters to Spain. That seems certain to have become normal practice.5 One letter, though, reached its due destination. This letter to the emperor Charles recalled how many in Mexico had looked forward with pleasure to the coming of the new supreme court. It would surely be a breath of fresh air and a legal respite after the rough rule of Estrada. But the supreme court had seemed well-disposed to nobody. Helped by the interpreter García del Pilar, Guzmán was robbing the land.
Zumárraga also reported that Pánuco had become a slave emporium, for many slaves were kidnapped there, and thence shipped to the West Indies.
Guzmán, probably aware that he would soon be relieved of his responsibilities as President of the court, cleverly turned his attention to the conquest of the northwest. He had remarked that only fifty miles from the capital, the Chichimeca (a wild Indian people) were still in control. To mount an expedition against them, many horses were seized from private individuals, 10,000 pesos were taken from the treasury, and four hundred men were dragooned to take part. Juan de Cervantes was designated lieutenant of the captain-general in Pánuco and ordered to drive north from there at the same time as Guzmán drove northwest. He hoped that they would together fulfill a “grand design” of an empire running from sea to sea, north of New Spain. Guzmán asked the Crown to approve his title as governor of “Greater Spain.”
The Crown refused to concede that, but agreed that the new territory might be called New Galicia, a territory to which Guzmán was indeed named governor in February 1531. But his larger ambition failed because the distances were too great. Guzmán did, however, conquer what became the future states in Mexico of Jalisco and Sonora, founding Compostela and Guadalajara in the first, San Miguel and Chametla in the second.
While these negotiations continued, the Council of the Indies in Valladolid was coming to terms with the fact that it had made a mistake in relation to the government of New Spain.6 It took the unusual step of meeting in November 1529 in conjunction with the councils of Castile and of the treasury. Archbishop Pardo de Tavera, the president of the Council of Castile, presided. The letters of Zumárraga, a man known to be of a just spirit, had distressed all who had read them. The councillors studied an información critical of Guzmán, and also a response that Guzmán treated as a rebuttal.7 The council decided to change the composition of the court there and then. In the long run, they thought, there should be a viceroy but, in the interim, a new court would serve. Both Gattinara and Pardo de Tavera, as well as García de Loaisa, took it upon themselves to suggest possible presidents, but the matter was difficult to decide. Though he would not be receiving a large salary, a man of great integrity was essential. A further discussion was held on December 10, 1529, when the count of Osorno and some members of t
he Council of the Treasury agreed that the new president of the court in New Spain should be a prudent, strong man of good birth with, if possible, a fortune in Castile. Such a person was hard to find.8
The Empress, who was present, suggested a clever young Gallego, Vasco de Quiroga, whose father had been governor of the Priory of San Juan in Castile. Tavera was his father’s friend and had always been helpful to the Quiroga family. In 1525, he had been judge of the residencia of a corregidor in Orán, Alfonso Páez de Ribera. At court, Quiroga later became friendly with Bernal Díaz de Luco, the secretary to Pardo de Tavera, and it was with him that Quiroga discussed a controversial passage in Antonio de Guevara’s play El Villano en el Danubio. Perhaps it was this Bernal Díaz, as well as the Empress, who suggested Quiroga as a judge.
Another nomination was Antonio de Mendoza, the son of Fernando the Catholic’s favorite public servant, the Count of Tendilla, a notably liberal governor of Granada. Eminently a gentleman and not an intellectual, Mendoza had been a victorious commander, if on a small scale, in the war of the comuneros and then an emissary in Hungary. Apparently when chamberlain to the Empress Regent in Saragossa in 1529, he had told her that he would like to go to New Spain in some capacity.9
Things were still going politically from bad to worse in Mexico itself. Perhaps to distract attention from his other failings and setbacks, in late 1529, Guzmán led a large and well-equipped force up to Michoacán. He was accompanied by the old monarch of the realm there, the cazonci, who had been a compliant dependant on Spain since 1523. In February 1530, Guzmán had the cazonci tried, tortured, and then executed for organizing an attack on the Spaniards near the beautiful Lake Chapala.
The surviving judges (oidors), Diego Delgadillo and Juan Ortiz de Matienzo, were conducting themselves almost equally badly in the city of Mexico itself. Two conquistadors, García de Llerena and Fray Cristóbal de Angulo, had been imprisoned by an episcopal court in the Franciscan convent. Both had offended the judges, who had the two men arrested and tortured in the common jail. Zumárraga and the superiors of both the Franciscan and Dominican orders, along with numerous friars, made their way in procession to that building to demand their release. Zumárraga lost his temper and Delgadillo’s guards chased away the procession. Zumárraga threatened to suspend all religious services in the city unless the prisoners were released in three hours. The judges then ordered Angulo to be hanged and quartered, and Llerena to have a foot cut off and be whipped one hundred strokes. Services were indeed suspended, and the Franciscans left their convent for Texcoco. The horrifying sentences seem to have been carried out. Negotiations began between Fray Garcés, the bishop of Tlaxcala, and the Dominicans acting for the judges. Services were revived for Easter 1530, but suspended once more on Low Sunday. The judges, who had not begged for absolution, remained under their excommunication.10
But they were now to be removed. On July 12, a new court for New Spain was at last chosen. The President would be Bishop Ramírez de Fuenleal, at that time President of the audiencia in Santo Domingo, a responsible and hard-headed civil servant who showed that he could work effectively with Zumárraga. There were also Juan de Salmerón, who had been a judge in relation to Pedrarias in 1522, and Alonso Maldonado, who had married a daughter of Francisco de Montejo, whose interests in Yucatán and elsewhere he supported. He was a great gambler and games player. There was, too, Francisco de Ceynos, who had once been prosecutor in Spain for the Council of the Indies. These men assumed office on January 12, 1531. Their arrival marked a fundamental change from the anarchic rule of the cruel Guzmán, who, however, managed to remain for a time as governor of his vast realm of New Galicia (Jalisco, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, and part of San Luis Potosí).
The first action of the new court was to remove the restriction that the old one had put on the movements of Cortés. He had in 1531 been forbidden even to approach the city that he had fought, destroyed, and rebuilt. He had brought his mother, Catalina, and his new wife, Juana, to see the sights, but they had only been able to observe it from afar: a fitting commentary on how the world has often treated the memory of its greatest men. Another initiative by the court was to seek to collect all the sons of Spaniards by Indian women to give them a Spanish education.11 This audiencia was asked by the Council of the Indies gradually to eradicate the encomienda, an instruction that clearly contradicted an order of October 1529 by the first supreme court to allow encomiendas in perpetuity. But we must not expect consistency as yet in Spanish imperial administration. The encomienda was confirmed as a system of labor and of landholding in 1535.12
16
Montejo in Yucatán
Hernando Pizarro gave his word that … good soldiers are not to be judged by their horses but by the valour of their persons. Whoever showed himself brave would be rewarded in conformity with his service; for not to possess horses was a matter of fortune and no disparagement of persons.
CITED BY SIR JOHN ELLIOTT, Empires of the Atlantic World
Francisco de Montejo was an accomplished conquistador from Old Castile with experience in Cuba, Panama, and New Spain. He knew something of the two oceans already in Spanish control, and he had helped in the conquest of Panama as well as of New Spain. On December 8, 1526, he obtained a contract from the Emperor, while he and the court were still in Granada, for the conquest and settlement of Yucatán, and of Cozumel, a delectable island surrounded by the deep blue water of the Caribbean Sea, off the Mexican mainland, where both Grijalva and Cortés had stopped before embarking on their serious adventures in New Spain. Montejo was given the titles of adelantado, governor, and captain-general, designations intended to continue for two generations. He would have a salary of 150,000 maravedís as governor and another 100,000 as captain-general.
Up to that point, there was nothing unusual in the contract. Other terms in it, however, were unexpected. Thus the conquistadors would be asked to found two pueblos, inhabited by a hundred men each, both with fortresses, in “the most convenient and most necessary places.” Montejo would have to finance his own army but would not have to pay any taxes. He and his heirs were granted “in perpetuity” 4 percent of all income generated in Yucatán, and only one-tenth would have to be paid to the Crown for three years after the conquest. Then the figure would fall to one-ninth and slowly thereafter to one-fifth. Each conqueror would receive two caballerías1 of land and two solares in the towns. Montejo would be able to name town councillors for his towns, as captains of these expeditions usually could, and it was assumed that they would be chosen from among his closest followers. A bishop would be named for Yucatán within five years, and from then on, a tithe would be gathered to support the clergy and to build churches. Montejo was entitled to enslave Indians if they refused to accept the benefits of Spanish rule. Neither Jews nor Muslims, nor indeed criminals, were to be allowed to go to Yucatán. Finally, a few humane articles were written in November 1526 into Montejo’s contract, which was signed by the Emperor and all the court bureaucracy of the Indies—Cobos, as well as by the three bishops who then participated in the Council of the Indies (of Osma, of Ciudad Rodrigo, and of the Canaries), that is, García de Loaisa, Maldonado, and Cabeza de Vaca.2
Montejo was of a good family established in Salamanca. He was born sometime between 1473 and 1484 and so was of the same generation as his onetime commander Cortés. He was a man of medium height, with a cheerful countenance, a good horseman, and of an openhanded nature. He usually spent more than his income, as the censorious Bernal Díaz del Castillo put it.3 Montejo went to live in Seville in the early 1500s, where he seduced Ana de León (daughter of Licenciado Pedro de León, who was probably a converso), by whom he had a son who took his name and who later became famous as Francisco de Montejo, “el Mozo” (the Boy).4
Montejo the father went to the Indies in 1514 with Pedrarias, who sent him ahead to recruit volunteers in Santo Domingo.5 Disappointed by what he found in Darien and Panama, Montejo went to Cuba, where a personal friendship with Diego Velázquez enab
led him to establish a large farm near what is now the pretty port of Mariel. There he met Hernández de Córdoba returning from New Spain/Mexico looking very “badly treated.” Montejo himself went to New Spain in Grijalva’s expedition and was a captain of one of his naos. Then, like Ordaz, he went as one of Diego Velázquez’s friends in Cortés’s expedition in 1519, but he seems to have been easily persuaded by Cortés to work with him—at a salary of 2,000 pesos, said Bernal Díaz.6 He started late in 1518 from Santiago in his own ship and caught up with Cortés at Havana, where he sold the latter five hundred rashers of bacon.7 He went across to Cozumel, an island that he said, in the residencia of Cortés, he had visited “many times”—a claim which, by 1530, may have been true. At Veracruz, Cortés sent him north to look for a good harbor at a time when he himself was carrying out his coup de main against the friends of Velázquez. When Montejo returned, he was rewarded for his lack of complaint by being named first magistrate of Veracruz. He then returned to “the kingdoms of Castile,” as he put it, on Cortés’s behalf, being accompanied by another hidalgo, a cousin of the count of Medellín, Alonso Hernández Portocarrero.
On the way, Montejo stopped off at his Cuban property at Mariel, where he committed what a modern historian calls “an unpardonable indiscretion”: Montejo could not resist showing his old friend and neighbor Juan de Rojas the breathtaking treasures that he was taking back to Spain—“an infinite amount of gold, so much so that there was no ballast in the ship except for gold,” as a servant on Montejo’s property put it, grossly exaggerating.8