by Hugh Thomas
At the end of 1531, in Mexico there had been a remarkable occurrence, which affected forever all relations between Spaniards and Indians. The Indian Juan Diego met the Virgin Mary on the hill of Tepeyac, just outside Mexico-Tenochtitlan, on the north of the town. Our Lady of Guadalupe, as she became known, left a picture of herself on a shroud, which was taken to Bishop Zumárraga, who organized a chapel there. She appeared three times. Cortés supported Zumárraga in his identification. The consequent cult soon began to seem of the greatest importance for the Christian faith of the Indians. It remains so. No matter that the skeptics included Franciscans and their brother fraternities, the Dominicans and Augustinians, who pointed out that the hill of Tepeyac had been a Mexican site of worship before the conquest. The idea caught on and transformed Mexican and Christian history.
There were also more practical ideas afoot. Early in 1533, Gaspar de Espinosa, the richest and most influential settler in Panama, later a great entrepreneur in Peru, suggested to the Council of the Indies that a canal might be dug from the Pacific to the Atlantic. This would be at the level of the river Chagres, near the line of the canal that was eventually built by Ferdinand de Lesseps in the twentieth century. But Espinosa died before he could do anything to help to carry that great project into being.
In July 1532, the supreme court in New Spain informed the Empress that they were sending a description and account of the land and the people of the conquistadors and settlers. The viceroyalty, they considered, should be divided into four provinces. In November 1532, ex-judges Matienzo and Delgadillo sailed for Spain, taking with them a wooden box that had within it the depositions of the supreme court and descriptions of the land. In a legal brief of 1535, Quiroga proposed that “the Indians be brought together in cities.”20 He suggested that the laws of which he had read in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia should be introduced. Thus a city of six thousand families—each composed of between ten and sixteen couples—would be ruled, regulated, and governed as if it were a single family. Each magistrate would control thirty families, and each governor would preside over four magistrates. These magistrates could be chosen by a method copied from Utopia. The supreme court would appoint a mayor-in-chief (corregidor).21
Such was the New Spain to which Antonio de Mendoza, now forty-three years of age, would devote the next fifteen years—in effect, the rest of his life. He arrived at Veracruz in October 1535 with a large number of followers and relations. It was as if he were really a monarch. Spanish viceroys in Galicia, Navarre, or Naples, though they had that title, never had enjoyed such a style. Mendoza then went up to the city of Mexico, as it was already being called, and there, on November 14, 1535, he was greeted by trumpets, acrobats, the public crier, and the whole of the town council. Indigenous Mexicans made very good acrobats, as is evident to this day.
The Viceroy was an absolute monarch. His rule seems to have been supposed to extend throughout the Spanish Indies as far as the northern frontier, if that is not an inappropriate word, of Peru—that is, it included Colombia and Venezuela. His domain thus in theory included all of Central America, Florida, California, the Antilles, and the north coast of South America from Urabá or Darien to the mouth of the Amazon.22 But absolute monarchs have their limitations, and this was provided in the Viceroy’s case in the shape of the supreme courts.23
In Mendoza’s day, the supreme court in New Spain sat daily from eight A.M. till eleven A.M. On Mondays, the Viceroy would attend all day. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, there were also sessions in the evenings, from two to seven o’clock, mostly given over to the affairs of the Indians. There were then hearings until ten P.M. (on Saturdays till nine P.M.), after which there would be a visit to the prisons. On Tuesdays and Fridays from eight A.M. till eleven A.M., the Viceroy would be present as the informal president of a court, as also would be the rapporteurs; and every day, the last hour would be given over to petitions. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, the judge would receive petitions from Indians in his own house, working with a notary and a translator. There were a vast number of the last named. The judges were all men well connected in Castile and would bring their wives and children with them. They would be expected to conduct themselves as if members of an aristocracy.
Mendoza’s arrival in the city of Mexico coincided with a decision by the Empress and the Council of the Indies that settlers in New Spain would henceforth be able to buy land in Mexico from indigenous owners. The conquistador had first to establish that the land was empty but, if he did that, he could purchase innumerable acres for very little. This decision in Valladolid of October 27, 1535, was the real beginning of the history of the great estates of New Spain.24
One limitation on the Viceroy’s power was that he could not grant sites for building in established cities. That was for the council of that place. He could not even give permission to build churches or monasteries. Nor could he grant titles of nobility. He could not increase salaries, certainly not his own, nor could he extend his own term, although that term was without a date of completion.25
The supreme court had become the most important institution before the arrival of Mendoza, but now it lost much of its political power and became largely judicial. The court, with each judge being paid 500,000 maravedís a year, was still supposed to control the actions of the Viceroy, but it did not do so in the days of Mendoza. He conducted himself as a benign monarch more than a public servant. Mendoza’s court had to take the residencia of its predecessor, but there were no complaints except, bizarrely, against Quiroga, who was accused of having built his two hospital villages of Santa Fe on land belonging to Indians. But he was easily able to prove the benefit to the indigenous people.
In Santa Fe the bishop established the common ownership of property, the integration of large families, the systematic alternation between urban and rural people, work for women, the abandonment of all luxury, the distribution of the products of common labor according to the needs of the people, and the election of judges by families.26 Of the new judges, Tejada was once described as the first great promoter of land values in the New World. He was especially concerned in flour mills in Otumba.27
Beneath the Viceroy and the supreme court there was no administration except the municipalities, which in character were transplanted direct from old Spain. They were usually known as cabildos. They had a variable number of councillors, but in the city of Mexico, there were twelve of them, six elected each year. There were also two magistrates (alcaldes) while the councils themselves would name the others.
Mendoza had at first hoped to leave exclusively Indian towns to their native lords, but there was much confusion in this regard because some of them had their power from before the conquest, while others had been nominated by encomenderos or churchmen. It also seemed that such indigenous lords—in the spirit of Montezuma’s encouragement to his subordinates to be harsh—often treated their people worse than the conquistadors did.
On Mendoza’s arrival, the dominant figure in New Spain was the bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, whose early life and struggle against Guzmán and his circle we have already discussed. He was high-minded and resolute, and he and Fray Martín de Valencia destroyed more than five hundred temples in New Spain and smashed twenty thousand idols.28 Valencia noted that there were already twenty Franciscan convent houses in New Spain, even if most were no more than large huts.29 By 1532, on the other hand, the first cathedral of Mexico was completed, the builders using much of the stone of the old pyramids in the construction. Martín de Sepúlveda, the architect (he had worked on the rebuilding of Tenochtitlan as a master of works, having originally come with Narváez to Mexico), had built an aisled rectangular building with a flat wooden roof and wooden supports.30
Perhaps this explains the enthusiastic attitude that the supreme court had toward the Indians’ capacity for Christianity. At the first ecclesiastical junta in the city of Mexico—at which Ramírez de Fuenleal had presided, with Zumárraga in attendance—the learned good
men proclaimed that there was no question but that the natives had sufficient capacity, that they greatly loved the doctrine of the faith, and that they were “able to carry on all mechanical and agricultural arts.” The Indian, they thought, was a rational being entirely capable of governing himself.31
The first radical decision taken by Mendoza was one to suspend a dispatch to New Spain of a large new consignment of black slaves, which had been ordered and which he had wanted. The reason was not altruistic: The explanation was the discovery of a conspiracy of black slaves such as had led to ferocious rebellions in Puerto Rico in 1527, in Santa Marta in 1529, in Santo Domingo in 1522, and in New Spain itself in 1523. That last-named occasion had seen a threatening alliance of Zapotecs in the neighborhood of Oaxaca with the blacks. This was none the better for having been seen by some romantically minded Spaniards, such as the poet Juan Castellanos, as idealistic. Castellanos later wrote a poem in which figures the line “Skillful are the Wolofs and very combative, with a foolhardy presumption to be gentlemen.”32
Some black slaves fled their masters, and the viceroyalty of Mendoza saw the establishment of a small colony of escaped Africans in the forest near the mines of Tomacustla, in Veracruz.
The key to Mendoza’s rule in Mexico was his court of thirty to forty gentlemen (caballeros), who served as both his bodyguard and in his private office. This was headed by Agustín de Guerrero, his majordomo and also the chancellor of the supreme court, the keeper of the official seal, which could not be removed from the courtroom and without whose stamp no document could be looked on as legal. His assistant, Juan de Salazar, became almost as powerful. Luis del Castillo, a descendant of King Pedro the Cruel in the male, if illegitimate, line, was also a constant assistance to the Viceroy. Castillo had first come to New Spain in 1529 as a companion to Juana de Zúñiga, Cortés’s second wife, his distant cousin. Earlier, he had fought against both the comuneros and the French. He received an encomienda at Tututepec in 1534 and lived sumptuously, as perhaps a king’s bastard cousin should: “Even the servants drank from silver,” commented Dorantes de Carranza admiringly.33 But Castillo gave away a great deal to the poor, especially to the Spanish poor in New Spain.
Mendoza had sixty Indian servants. He received the harvests from numerous ranches: one in the valley of Matalingo; five near Marabatio, in Michoacán; two near Tecamachalco, including the site of Cortés’s victory after the Noche Triste at Otumba; and one, a ranch for horses in the valley of Ulizabal. These ranches produced the meat and the wool needed in the Viceroy’s household.
Mendoza lived in the city of Mexico in the great house of Axayactl, which Cortés had converted into a Spanish palace, next to the onetime sacred precinct of the ancient Mexica. He lived there with his son, Francisco, and his sister. Mendoza’s wife, Catalina de Vargas y Carvajal, seems to have died before he left for Mexico. Mendoza himself rose early and would listen to petitioners at all hours, not just those prescribed by the supreme court. He was always friendly, if always brief. He traveled continually. He insisted that his Indian servants were taught music, and everything to do with “minstrelsy.” He was able to grant corregimientos, encomiendas, and the services of Indians, so he was powerful. No act of a town hall had validity unless he approved. He could proclaim laws and, in that respect, was dependent only on the approval of the distant Council of the Indies.
From all these discussions, Cortés the conqueror was excluded. Mendoza as viceroy found the overpowering personality of that great conqueror difficult to manage. But he had also been previously excluded from consideration at court in Spain. He had been made a Marquess, he had married an aristocrat, he had a family, he had become rich. What more, people asked in Valladolid, did he want? There was a sense that the court was afraid of Cortés. He had done too much to be easily pleased by a second-rate position. Cortés’s resentment at this was expressed by him in a memorandum to Charles the Emperor in June 1540: Having alluded contemptuously to an expedition northward led by Fray Marcos de Niza, he went on to talk of his own discovery and conquest of the land and how he had sent four fleets at his own cost (300,000 ducats) in order to discover the north.34
It was not just Marcos de Niza whose plans offended Cortés. There was the fact that Pedro de Alvarado had also secured a contract to discover islands—those of the Santa María, off Puerto Vallarta (as it later became). He took six hundred men and twelve ships from Guatemala, met and negotiated with Mendoza’s friends Luis del Castillo and Agustín de Guerrero, and worked out an agreement whereby Alvarado would have a quarter share in the profits of the Viceroy’s expeditions, while Mendoza could have a half interest in Alvarado’s fleets. This looked like an effective prohibition on Cortés from making further conquests.
Cortés’s protest was serious, but the Viceroy had his own problems. For example, there was the Mixton War. This was a serious rebellion of Indians. It was probably inspired by the brutality of many encomenderos in the north of New Spain. The Viceroy, who had been preoccupied by new plans of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado and Marcos de Niza, thought that the new religiosity and rebellion was one of wild Chichimeca Indians from the far north, with a new religion of a kind, brought to them by “messengers of the devil.”35
There was also much brutality attached to work in the mines, such as those at Oaxtepec, where Fray Motolinía—who, it is true, often exaggerated—said the work was so destructive that for “half a league around it one could not walk without stepping on dead men and bones and so many birds came to scavenge that they darkened the sky.”36 The tale told was that Indians were dancing round a pumpkin when a gust of wind carried it away. Their sorcerers said that that meant that the Indians should rise against the Spaniards.37
In this region to the north of the viceroyalty, ancient rulers and some of their families assembled on the hill of Tepetiquipaque and revived some of their ancient religious practices, including human sacrifice. Several local encomenderos were forced to leave; some were wounded and fled to Tlatenango, where Diego de Ibarra sought to establish an armed force to fight the rebellion, assisted by four Franciscans.38 There ensued the most serious conflict between Christians and Indians since the conquest.
The indigenous rebels were cheered by supposed messages from the alleged devils of the old days. For example, in the valley of Tlatenango, a rebel leader declared: “We are the messengers of Tecoroli [the devil, according to the Spaniards]. Accompanied by his ancestors, whom he has revived, he is coming to seek you. He will make you believe in him, not in [the Christian] God, on pain of never seeing the light again and being devoured by wild beasts. Those who believe in Tecoroli and renounce the teaching of the friars will never die, but will become young again and have several wives, not just one, as the friars order and, however old they may be, they will beget children. Whoever takes only one wife will be killed. Tecoroli will come to Guadalajara, Jalisco, Michoacán, Mexico and Guatemala, in fact wherever there are Christians, and will kill them all. After that, you will be able to go home and live happily with your ancestors, suffering no more hardship or pain.”39
Among the leaders of the rebels was Tenemaxtli, who had once had a mission to take the catechism to the converted. Under his leadership, the rebels burned the churches at Tlatenango and at Cuzpatelan. They also burned the convent at Juchilpa. Christian Indians were made to do penance for the time that they had been Christians, washing their heads to free themselves from the memory of the cross. They killed Fray Juan de Esperanza at Tequila, outside Guadalajara; they killed Fray Juan Calero near Etzaltán; and Fray Antonio de Cuéllar was assassinated near Ameca.40
Diego de Ibarra, an able conquistador, was persuaded to face the rebels. He had only seventeen Spanish horsemen, but he had about 1,500 Tonalá Indians, who had always opposed the Mixton people, and he also had the more doubtful support of some Cascan Indians. Some of the Tonalá told of a planned ambush by the Cascanes in a cedar-lined gully where the Spaniards would be unable to use their horses very well. Ibarra had several Cascane
s executed, but all the same they attacked, wounding Ibarra and some others, as well as some of the precious horses. The Spaniards retreated first to Suchilpala, then to Guadalajara, rescuing numerous fellow countrymen en route. By then the rebels were established throughout the area of the river Tololotlan.
Mendoza at first thought that this rebellion was a local affair. Then he realized that the threat was colony-wide, and he hastened to Guadalajara. There he sent out a peace mission headed by Fray Martín de Jesús and guarded by Ibarra. Its failure convinced Mendoza that force had to be used. He assembled a council in Guadalajara, where there were Licenciado Francisco Marroquín, the bishop of Guatemala; Ibarra, who was recovering; and Cristóbal de Oñate, who had been Nuño de Guzmán’s deputy in New Galicia and had founded Guadalajara in 1531, naming it after Guzmán’s birthplace. They resolved to dispatch Oñate with fifty horsemen against the Mixton camp on a hillock. The Indians fought well, thirteen Spaniards being killed as well as six black slaves and a large number of Indian allies. This battle was the signal for many further revolts throughout New Galicia and Jalisco.