by Hugh Thomas
On their return to Asunción, the quarrel between Cabeza de Vaca and Martínez de Irala became a public one, and basing himself on his local authority, which Cabeza had never replaced, the latter arrested his governor and sent him home to Spain in chains on a caravel, accompanied by his notary, Pedro Hernández. Several of the officers on board the ship thought this too great a dishonor for Cabeza de Vaca, who was not only the hero of North America but had, after all, been named governor by the King. At least Cabeza de Vaca could return as a free man. They reached home on August 15, 1545.
In Spain, things continued badly for him. After some months’ delay, he appeared before the Council of the Indies. There he was accused of robberies of food and horses in the Canary and Cape Verde Islands on his way out to South America. The prosecutor, Marcelo Villalobos, also presented a series of accusations made by the settlers in Asunción. They spoke with one voice about Cabeza de Vaca’s hard attitude to taxation and soft one toward Indians. Cabeza de Vaca suddenly found himself not a hero of the empire but an accused prisoner. He said that he was “poor, lost and bankrupt.” He was duly arrested, and though released with provisional freedom after a mere month in jail, he never recovered his health or his morale. Living in Madrid, he devoted his time to collecting material for his defense. Three years passed.
The Council of the Indies eventually found against Cabeza de Vaca. As punishment, he was stripped of the grandiose titles granted him in 1540 and prohibited from returning to the Indies, and it was ruled that settlers in Asunción could pursue private petitions against him. He was also, remarkably for the national hero that he really was, condemned to forced labor in the galleys of Algiers. This last he appealed against, and he secured the removal of that punishment. He died poor in Valladolid in 1556, leaving behind only the memory of his astonishing achievements, nevertheless a victim of his weaknesses.
Domingo Martínez de Irala, now established in Asunción, very far indeed from Buen Viento (Buenos Aires), was the master of the field in the region of the river Plate. He had come to the Indies for the first time with Mendoza. Then he had accompanied Ayolas up the Paraguay, and was with him at the moment of the foundation of Asunción. At Ayolas’s death, he was named governor—nothing more, no adelantado-ship or captaincy-general—of the Spaniards on the Río de la Plata. He was unceasingly active in the fortification of Asunción, naming a town council and controlling the countryside. The arrival of Cabeza de Vaca, of course, had confused him, even if the great walker was tolerant to him and named him his maestre de campo. Eventually, Martínez de Irala felt that he had to act against what he argued to be an improperly designated governor, whom, as we have seen, he sent home in ignominy.
Another Spanish proconsul, Diego de Sanabria, soon came with orders to establish himself in the Spanish ports on the Atlantic coast, to the south of the Portuguese colony of San Vicente, where many Spaniards had taken refuge.
Later, Martínez de Irala had to contend with a new rival for authority in those remote plains, namely, Gonzalo de Mendoza, and then Diego de Abreu. But Martínez de Irala survived these difficulties—though it seems probable that he had Abreu assassinated when he saw that he could not control him peacefully. For some years afterwards, though, this tiny colony lived in approximate peace—untouched by the journeys through what became northern Argentina of some conquistadors from Peru led by Diego de Rojas, Felipe Gutiérrez, and Nicolás de Heredia, including some two hundred wanderers in search of riches and fertile land. These expeditions included women, slaves, and Indian bearers. But Rojas was killed, Gutiérrez was discredited, and Heredia, a notary, eventually died in the Peruvian civil war, so nothing came of that initially promising incursion. Martínez de Irala, the least remarkable of all these conquistadors in the southeast of the continent, proved the most enduring. His grandson, Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, wrote the first authoritative history of his achievements.
A characteristic of his government was the swift development of a mestizo society based on the fact that Spanish women were rare and unusual. The percentage of natives who acted as wives to the conquistadors was far higher than anywhere else in South America. The mestizos were, therefore, increasingly numerous.11
40
New Spain with
Antonio de Mendoza
To the third question, he answered that “after the said lord Viceroy came to this New Spain, this witness used and exercised an authority from the accountant Rodrigo de Albornoz, that is the office of chief financier, for about two years more or less.”
JUAN DE BURGOS, Información de servicios y méritos OF ANTONIO DE MENDOZA
In April 1535, Antonio de Mendoza was named viceroy of New Spain. He would also be president of the supreme court (audiencia) in succession to the wise Ramírez de Fuenleal. Cortés, the conqueror who had made New Spain possible and had given the place its name, would remain captain-general at the Viceroy’s pleasure: a title without weight in these strange circumstances.1
Mendoza was to represent the person of the monarch, to administer equal justice to his subjects of all races and his vassals, and to be active in everything to ensure the “peace, quiet and prosperity” of the Indies. He was to help in the conversion of Indians to Christianity, and govern his viceroyalty according to his best understanding. He was to have general authority over all appointments to ecclesiastical positions within his viceroyalty, even bishoprics, as the pope had agreed. He was to visit all the towns of New Spain so far as he could. He should make a census. Existing indigenous temples, “heathen” temples, should be sought out, for who knew whether they had gold and silver there. Abuses of the Indians should be, however, investigated and punished.
Mendoza’s salary would be 3,000 ducats as viceroy and 3,000 as president of the supreme court. This was a substantial increase in comparison with what was paid to Guzmán or to the governor of Cuba. Numerous grants of land, wood, water, and grazing rights completed his perquisites. As he was not formally a letrado, a university-educated man, he could not vote in the supreme court of which he was president, but all the same, his signature was necessary to make decisions of the court binding.
In her letter of appointment to Mendoza, the Empress suggested various ways of increasing the royal income of New Spain. Gold and silver could be sought more than they had been theretofore. To avoid having to pay civil servants to count what was due to the great institution, there should be payments of tithes directly to the Church. Perhaps silver mines might be directly run by the Crown, instead of it taking a fifth from those privately run. The Viceroy was also to help two German entrepreneurs, Enrique and Alberto Girón, to develop saffron and blue dyes.2
Defense also had to be considered. The Spaniards were always to be concentrated in one part of the city of Mexico, and a second fortress was to be considered for the causeway to Tacuba, to balance that existing in the shipyard to the east of the city. Mendoza should establish a mint.3 The Viceroy could distribute encomiendas if he thought fit.
The beneficiary of all these provisions, Antonio de Mendoza, was the son of Íñigo López de Mendoza, the count of Tendilla, who had been a successful ambassador to the Vatican and then a most effective, if liberal, governor of Granada. It would seem certain that his father’s determined tolerance and grand style influenced Antonio. Viceroys in Mendoza’s view had to live like kings—but wise kings. His mother, Francisca Pacheco, was the daughter of Juan Pacheco, the Marquess of Villena, who was the dominant nobleman in the reign of King Enrique IV of Castile. Antonio de Mendoza’s brothers and sisters included the all-too-famous María who married the hero of the comuneros, Juan de Padilla, and she herself was a heroine of that war after her defense of Toledo against the Crown; his brother Francisco was an ambassador and Viceroy of Naples; and another brother, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, would be the accomplished ambassador to Venice and Rome and would write a history of the last Spanish war against the Moors, in the Alpujarra mountains in the 1560s. Probably he was half brother of Pedro de Mendoza, the father of Argentina. O
f course, the Viceroy’s paternal grandfather was the famous Íñigo, first Marquess of Santillana, grandfather-in-chief to the Spanish aristocracy in its golden age.4 The memory of the great cardinal Rodríguez de Mendoza survived.
Antonio de Mendoza was born in 1492 in Alcalá la Real, a picturesque town between Jaén and Granada, built on a conical hill. Being taken from the Moors by Alfonso XI in person, it acquired the epithet Real (“royal”) in 1340. Visitors are shown a tower, La Mota (El Farol), which Antonio’s father built to be a light guiding those Christians who had escaped from Granada. This town was the headquarters of the Spaniards fighting the Moors, and when Antonio was born there, it was at “the front.”
Mendoza’s childhood was mostly passed at Granada just after its conquest by the Castilians. Eminently an aristocrat, he was brought up to despise the letrados who, as civil servants, increasingly dominated the Spanish government. In 1521, Mendoza was at Huéscar with five hundred foot and one hundred horse and defeated the comuneros there. In 1526, he went to Hungary as an emissary of the emperor Charles to his brother, Ferdinand, the King of the Romans, just after the terrible Battle of Mohács, with some letters of credit worth 100,000 ducats. He was in England in 1527 and encountered King Henry VIII at Greenwich. He later became chamberlain of the Empress, to whom Mendoza said that he would be interested in going to Mexico. In 1530, he went as the personal messenger of the Empress-Regent to the Emperor, who was then at Bologna. He was named viceroy in April 1535, an appointment of Isabel’s.
The country for which he assumed responsibility was in a far better condition than it had been when the second supreme court had taken over. Then it had seemed as if the president of that body’s predecessor, Nuño de Guzmán, had been seeking to link the province of New Galicia, which he was busy conquering, with his old responsibility of Pánuco in order to create a big new realm for himself. The disorder in the city of Mexico was considerable—despite its illegality, the trade in slaves in Pánuco was out of control. 5
Because Guzmán had seized 10,000 pesos from the treasury of the city of Mexico in order to conquer New Galicia, the second supreme court confiscated all Guzmán’s property in the capital. All his property in Pánuco was also seized. Many settlers in New Spain thought that Pánuco should be merged with New Spain as a province. This business of the disentangling of Pánuco from its union with the rest of Guzmán’s realm occupied much of the early 1530s.
The second supreme court had found itself immediately in difficulties over recent decisions in Spain. For example, on August 2, 1530, an ordinance had been proclaimed in Madrid on the subject of enslavement. It was resisted by all officials of the Spanish Crown in the Indies. It stated that no person should venture “to make a single new slave whether in peace or in war … whether by barter, purchase, trade, or any pretext or cause whatever.” The penalty for a breach of this law would be the loss of all wealth and of Indians so enslaved. Within thirty days, everyone who owned (Indian) slaves was to register them and prove that they were true chattels. After that, there was to be no more enslaving.6
In August 1531 the supreme court of New Spain wrote to the Crown saying that if the law about slaves was enacted, the colonies would be in rebellion once the Indians learned of their freedom. No Spaniard would want to help to put down such a rebellion, for there would be no reward for his efforts. The Council of the Indies, therefore, hesitated over its policy.
There had, however, been some positive new policies during this uneasy period before Mendoza’s arrival. One was the foundation of Puebla de los Ángeles, in Tlaxcala, in 1531. It was to be a city of workers, not of encomenderos. The creator there was Alonso Martín Partidor, who had arrived in New Spain in 1522 and married a conquistadora, María Estrada Farfán, who had accompanied Narváez and, indeed, had been in the classic battles on the Causeways and at Otumba.7 She was first married to Pedro Sánchez Farfán, who had died, and she inherited herself his encomienda of Tetela del Volcán.8 In his endeavors, Martín Partidor received the enthusiastic help of 7,500 Tlaxcalteca. To encourage people to live in this new city, the Crown gave numerous fiscal benefits to settlers there so that by the time of Mendoza’s arrival as Viceroy, there were eighty-two citizens in Puebla, among them thirty-two conquistadors of the first wave.9
In 1533, a large Augustinian convent was built in the city of Mexico, reflecting the arrival in May of that year of seven friars of that order. The Mercedarians also built their own refuge, appropriately, considering the role played by the Mercedarian friend of Cortés, Fray Bartolomé de Olmedo, in the conquest of New Spain.
Dr. Ramírez de Fuenleal had reached New Spain only in September 1531, but his arrival brought an immediate transformation in how political matters were managed. The new judges petitioned the Crown for their number to be increased, for, they said, they found that their work needed twelve hours a day, the residencia of their predecessors was itself a Herculean task, and they were absorbed all the time by the conversion of the natives, as they were by the regulation of relations with the Church.
The supreme court, it is true, made some astonishing reforms. For example, Indians were formally to have equal rights with Spaniards, and they were to be trained in Spanish methods of administration. The two “republics,” as it was put at first, were to be treated equally. Of the judges, it seemed that only Vasco de Quiroga was up to the burdens, and even he was more interested in the problems of the Church than those of general administration. The other judges, Alonso de Maldonado, Juan de Salmerón,10 and even Fuenleal, were old and tired. Still, they maintained themselves. Perhaps the most surprising innovation was a decree of December 10, 1531, by which officials in New Spain were instructed to keep a ledger in which they were to strike a balance between good and bad conduct of each encomendero every two years.11
Of the members of the second audiencia, the most remarkable was Vasco de Quiroga, or Tata Vasco as he was universally known, a son of a Gallego nobleman who had become governor of the Priory of San Juan, in Castile.12 Tata Vasco, who was born in Madrigal de las Atlas Torres in the late 1470s, had been at the University of Salamanca; he had been a letrado and was a judge. He lived at the court, where he became friendly with Juan Bernal Díaz de Luco, a Sevillano who became bishop of Calahorra, a protégé and then secretary of Archbishop Tavera, and later a member of the Council of the Indies.13 With Díaz de Luco, Quiroga is said to have discussed the role of Spain in the Indies in the criticism included in Antonio de Guevara’s El Villano en el Danubio.14 (Here an uncivilized peasant astonishes the senate by his wisdom in condemning the greed of his conquerors.) Perhaps it was Díaz de Luco who suggested him as a possible judge in New Spain, but the Empress also favored him.
Quiroga went to a monastery to obtain divine guidance as to whether he should accept his nomination. The voices of the friars spoke favorably for going ahead. Once in New Spain, Tata Vasco set about planning his first pueblo-hospital, of Santa Fe, at Tacubaya. His aim was to create a place where Indians would be educated by friars to live in a Christian way, to carry out conversions and to effect benevolent missions among the sick. He explained all this in a letter to the Council of the Indies in August 1531.15
We need to recall that this was the era of the humanist Juan Maldonado, who, from a tower on the walls of Burgos in 1532, evoked a Christian America in his writings. The worst savages would acquire in ten years the purest of orthodox faith. Being blessed by nature, they could live an idyllic life free from both fraud and hypocrisy. There would be no false modesty or decorum, only shame for morally reprehensible actions. Men and women would mix together in games, like brothers and sisters. The shops would be so well supplied that the customers could help themselves. Such heavy agricultural labor as was needed would be carried out by all. Quiroga had a similar view, since he said: “Not in vain but with much cause and reason is this called the new world because in its people and in almost everything it is like the first golden age.”16
In 1533, still a member of the supreme court, Quiro
ga went up to Michoacán. He reported how surprised he was to find the natives so capable of juridical expression and to find the conquistadors so evil, for they were already exploiting indigenous people in copper mines. So he founded his second pueblo-hospital in Santa Fe de la Laguna, near Tzintsuntzan, the old capital of Michoacán. There was a protest by encomenderos. For example, Juan Infante said that he had received land there from Cortés himself.17 There, in 1535, Quiroga would say firmly, “The people of this land and of the new world generally are almost all of one quality, very mild and humble, timid and obedient. They should be brought to faith by good Christian influence not by war and fear.” He strongly opposed the use of Indians as slaves; he thought slavery an invention of the devil. He said: “Those who allege Indian vices have their own profit in mind. I have never seen the abominations charged by those who desire to defame them … [but] persons who have Indians serving them use them not as men but as beasts and worse.”18 Thus Quiroga began his mission in a quite new mood. By this time, he had already written to the Council of the Indies suggesting that the life of the native Indians should be regulated by placing them in villages, “where by working and tilling the soil they may maintain themselves with their labour and may be ruled by all good rules of policy and by holy and good and Catholic rules; where there may be constructed a friar’s house, small and not costly, for two or three or four brothers who may not leave their task till such time as the natives have acquired the habits of virtue.” Quiroga wanted to establish “a priest in each district.” He talked hopefully of “the simplicity and humility of the aborigines; men who went barefoot, bare-headed but long-haired as the Apostles were.”19