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

by Hugh Thomas

  Meantime, El Mozo dispatched his uncle, Alonso López, to Calotmul and the southeast of Yucatán. Here he encountered more Xiu, who had not followed their kinsmen of Maní into an alliance with Spain. He managed to control Calotmul, though without glory. Then in 1543, El Mozo led a well-equipped expedition into Cochuah, in the east, with a long seacoast. Montejo el Sobrino was more concerned with the northeast, where he established Valladolid in 1543 with a forceful leader named Bernaldino de Villagómez as chief magistrate: He had been El Sobrino’s field commander, and he was the younger brother of Jorge de Villagómez, who had been Cortés’s chief magistrate in Xochimilco and then in Tlaxcala, where Bernaldino had befriended the son of the old ruler Maxixcastin; he had even accompanied him to Spain with Cortés in 1528. Thus Villagómez was part of the new aristocracy of New Spain. Once more, forty or fifty soldiers were named residents of the new town. This was a successful settlement because, so a relación put it, it was healthier and drier than Chuaca: “It is the best town there is in the Indies … [It] is surrounded by a large and rough, stony, region covered with bushes … There are two wells of fresh water … Captain Montejo laid out this town north, east and east–west and gave it broad streets …”15

  The caciques of Saci concerted a new attack on behalf of many towns whose efforts they organized, but Saci itself was seized for El Sobrino by Francisco de Cieza with only twenty Spaniards. An incipient revolt at Mérida was forestalled by Rodrigo Álvarez. El Sobrino then continued through Ecab, where Cortés had first met the Maya in conflict, and then to Cozumel, an island to which he crossed with no opposition. Only a storm gave him reason to complain.

  Montejo el Mozo, with his father’s agreement, then gave the command in the southeast, Chetumal, first to Jorge de Villagómez, then to Gaspar Pacheco, his son Melchor, and his nephew Alonso. The latter two conquistadors reached Chetumal early in 1544. The Indians resisted, and one of the cruelest campaigns against them began. Gaspar Pacheco and Melchor were successful in reestablishing Spanish control, but they resorted to many acts of savagery. The Montejos were unable to restrain them. The Franciscan Fray Bienvenida denounced the Pachecos: “Nero was not more cruel than this man [Alonso Pacheco],” he reported. “Even though the natives did not make war, Pacheco robbed the province and consumed the food of the indigenous people who fled into the bush in fear … since, as soon as this captain captures any of them, he sets the dogs on them. And the Indians fled from all this and did not sow their crops, so that they all died of hunger … There were once pueblos of 500 and 1,000 houses here, but now one of 100 is considered large. This captain,” went on Fray Bienvenida, “with his own hands killed many with the garrotte, saying ‘This is a good rod with which to finish these people’ and, after he had killed them, he might say ‘Oh, how well I finished them off.’ ”

  Contrasting this were acts of education, which must seem now more significant. For example, in the mid-1540s, two thousand Indian boys in the Franciscan school in Mérida were already being taught to read and write Maya in European script. They also learned what Christianity was and how to sing in choirs. A Franciscan house was set up at Oxkutzcab in Maní, the land of the Xiu, the Spanish allies. There was a school attached to it by 1547.

  The Spanish military success—as the foremost modern historian of these events, Inga Clendinnen, has explained—was primarily due to “their superb discipline under pressure.” They understood the meaning of a light formation, they were aware of the value of every life, but they had the capacity to move through territory with no scruple about the cost of their actions. The crossbows, the muskets, and the mastiffs all counted. Horses enjoyed their usual success when the terrain suited. Nor should one forget the sword of Toledo steel.

  The Maya were nevertheless often strong and brave. They were innovative, too. They devised pits to trip up horses. But their traditions were against them in a war with Europeans. For, like the Mexica, they saw the purpose of battle as the taking of prisoners and the seizing of booty. The Spaniards were difficult to deal with partly because they brought new diseases as well as new weapons, and the diseases led to destruction of populations. For example, the town of Champoton, where Cortés had fought and Hernández de Córdoba had been defeated, declined from eight thousand in 1517 to two thousand in 1550. Perhaps the population of Yucatán declined from three hundred thousand in 1517 to two hundred fifty thousand by 1550.

  There were four Spanish towns in Yucatán in the late 1540s, the biggest being Mérida, with seventy families. There were forty-five families in Valladolid and forty in Campeche, while Salamanca de Bacalar had twenty. Thus there were then two hundred Spanish families in all Yucatán. They lived in houses with courtyards, Spanish in design, certainly, but with “an ineradicable Indian flavour,”16 for now the Spaniards on land often slept in hammocks to keep cool and, like the Indians—their Indians included—would wake to the sound of women grinding maize on stone slabs. Only the most humble Spaniards would marry Indian women; the others would have Indian mistresses till their real wives, old or new, came from Spain.17

  Now that the Spaniards seemed well established in Yucatán and the surrounding territories, the work of conversion to Christianity could proceed apace. A great role was played by Bartolomé de las Casas, who was appointed bishop of Chiapas at the end of March 1544. Chiapas at that time comprised Coatzacoalcos, Tabasco, Champoton, and Cozumel, as well as Soconusco, Verapaz, and Chiapas itself. It was thus a large diocese.

  Las Casas had traveled from Spain via Santo Domingo.18 We hear of his arrival in Campeche from the visitor Tello de Sandoval.19 The captain of the ship on which this great friend of the Indians sailed from Sanlúcar refused to take him any farther than La Española unless he received more payment. But Fray Francisco Hernández, chaplain to El Mozo, gave him money to enable him to go on to Tabasco and then to Ciudad Real de Chiapas. Las Casas was well received in Mérida, however, and stayed with El Mozo, despite being threatened with death by a disgruntled conquistador from Ciudad Real in Castile: Las Casas in those years made no bones about saying that the Mexica and the Incas were as intelligent as the Greeks and the Romans. In 1544, he argued that the discovery of America was a providential decision to provide American Indians with the means of salvation. From the moment that he arrived in Yucatán, he set about preaching the faith without any consideration of the need for conquest. He infuriated the colonists by his decisions in favor of the Indians—his pastoral letter of March 20 had been a striking innovation along those lines. He even refused to confess Spaniards unless they said that they were willing to hand back land taken from Indians. He would advocate the complete enforcement of the New Laws of 1542 for the protection of Indians and continued to admonish the colonists in unmeasured terms. The colonists of Yucatán refused to recognize Las Casas’s spiritual jurisdiction over their peninsula and tried to cut him off from food. They also refused to pay tithes. Las Casas was thus encountering the greatest difficulty in the most important part of his diocese.20

  Then disaster struck. In November 1546, a great Mayan revolt erupted. It had been carefully coordinated by the caciques of the Cupul (the heart and soul of the revolt) the Cochau, Solita, and Vayonil-Chetumal Indians. All these peoples had formally accepted Spanish masters, but only after much protest, and all longed for the day of revenge. The Mayan priests especially dreamed of that. They found the encomienda system, with its obligations of the Indians to work a certain number of years for the conquistadors, unacceptable.

  At full moon, on November 8, 1546, the Maya of Yucatán rose with violent fury. The greatest attack was against the Spaniards in the new city of Valladolid. There, conquistadors, their wives, and their children were slaughtered, some being crucified, some being roasted over copal, some being shot to death by arrows as if they had been Saint Sebastian, some having their hearts torn out as in a Mexican sacrifice. Bernaldino de Villagómez, the chief magistrate of the town, was dragged by a rope through the streets over which he had so recently presided, and then his he
ad, legs, and arms were cut off. Those vital members were carried throughout the peninsula by swift Indian couriers in order to excite their friends to greater fury. They killed not only the Spaniards but all who had worked for them, as well as those Indians who would not join the rebellion. They slaughtered animals owned by Spaniards—horses, cattle, chickens, dogs, and cats. They uprooted European plants and trees.

  Some encomenderos were found on their properties. The rebels seized them and killed many, along with their families. They smoked some to death as if they had been dried meat.

  The Spaniards came together as best they could. Thus even in Valladolid a few organized resistance under Alonso de Villanueva, while the council of Mérida raised as many as they could to go to help Valladolid under the leadership of Rodrigo Álvarez, the reliable secretary of Montejo el Mozo. Francisco Tamayo Pacheco took forty men and five hundred loyal Indians from there to Valladolid and relieved the garrison. Francisco de Bracamonte moved against the Indian chief Sotuta, but waited at Cheguan for reinforcements. El Sobrino also set off for Valladolid, where Tamayo Pacheco was now the commander. He sought to break the siege and eventually did so, while Juana de Azamar, wife of Blas González, acted as the nurse of the garrison, after her brother and all his family had been killed on their encomienda: “I being of but slight age was with my husband, living in our home which we refused to abandon. I gathered into our house many wounded and ill soldiers and, with great care, I healed them and cared for them till they were cured … for there were then no doctors in this town. I likewise encouraged them not to leave this land but to remain for the service of His Majesty.”21

  The three Montejos, El Padre, El Mozo, and El Sobrino, met in Champoton to discuss how to crush the rebellion. El Mozo assumed general responsibility for a broad military answer, while El Sobrino would be concerned with reconquering the district of Cupul, the heart of the revolt. He and Tamayo Pacheco stormed the religious center of Pixtemax, whose fall was to prove decisive for the eventual Spanish recovery. El Sobrino then turned against the province of Cochant with a relatively large force, which brought it under Spanish control. Juan de Aguilar was sent to relieve the Spaniards in Salamanca de Bacalar: He was told, “If it should prove that the natives greet you in peace, receive and protect them in accordance with how His Majesty commands.”22 Aguilar relieved Salamanca de Bacalar, the settlers there naming him their military captain, and he and they then moved against the island fortress of Chamlacan. Aguilar persuaded the chief there to surrender and to accept Spanish authority.

  By March 1547, after a winter of fighting, the revolt had been quelled. Hundreds of Indians had been burned at the stake; the caciques and priests believed most responsible had all been captured and executed, among them Chilam Anbal, a priest who had claimed that he was the son of God. Only Chikinchel remained to be conquered, and Francisco Montejo the senior sent Tamayo Pacheco—who had proved such a successful commander—to bring that province to obedience.

  The campaign to suppress the revolt was carried out more brutally than previous ones mounted by the Montejos. Even the usually just Montejo el Sobrino committed acts of cruelty, for he used dogs and killed some Indian women. But after the end of the crises, the elder Francisco Montejo took legal action against some intemperate captains.23 After the revolt, El Sobrino summoned the surviving chiefs and addressed them, first assuring them that he would rule with justice and for the benefit of the whole province and, second, asking them why they had risen in rebellion. They replied, no doubt accurately, that it had been the responsibility of their priests.24

  The Montejos then mounted a serious campaign to capture anew the loyalty, “the hearts and minds,” of the Indians. They invited the chiefs to their houses and sought in a hundred ways to gain their goodwill. Fray Villalpando preached in Maya about the essentials of Christianity and invited these lords to send their sons to Christian schools. This educational revolution was among the most noble and successful of Franciscan enterprises—and one that had no obvious precedent in the Old World. That initiative seems to have been successful. Some important chiefs became Christians. Villalpando and Benavente thereafter went to Maní, where in the monastery they established another similar school.

  These moves at last helped to secure the political tranquillity of Yucatán. There were still difficulties to be resolved in the Golfo Dulce, where the different competences of the Montejos, the supreme court of “the Frontiers,” and the Franciscans seemed certain to lead to conflict. But though there were many complexities, they were resolved eventually in 1550.

  Montejo senior has received high praise for what he did in Yucatán. Professor R. S. Chamberlain, the best student of the conquest of the last generation, wrote: “He was a great conquistador and had all the qualities of a good administrator. He could fight implacably but he could negotiate. He could be both magnanimous and stern. He was far from ruthless. He always sought good relations with the Indians.”25 In addition, he introduced sugarcane into Yucatán.

  His daughter-in-law Andrea del Castillo, the wife of El Mozo, is remembered for her comment: “No less of a conquistadora can I say that I am; and, many times, the principal women of my quality when they find themselves in such conquests are as good fighters as men are.”26

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  Las Casas, Pope Paul,

  and the Indian Soul

  I have the hope that the Emperor and King of Spain our lord and master Don Charles V of the name who began to understand the cruelties and treasons which have been committed against these poor people … will extirpate the ills and give them a remedy in this new land which God has given him.

  BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS, The Destruction of the Indies, 1539

  The Trans-Isthmian Highway had by now become the vital link in transport between Peru and Spain, the goal of pirates, but it remained for a long time nothing but a primitive mule path maintained by fifty black slaves. To build and maintain forty miles of road over mountains covered with tropical forest, through swamps and jungles, in one of the most deadly of climates imposed a big demand on a new community. The inhabitants of Panama suggested that goods might be best carried five leagues to the upper reaches of the river Chagres and then floated down to the Caribbean, eighteen leagues (fifty miles) from Venta Cruz to the river’s mouth. These inhabitants urged that the settlement of Nombre de Dios be moved west toward the mouth of the river. But even the river Chagres was only explored for the first time in 1527.

  In 1534, a new governor, the persistent Francisco Barrionuevo, ordered a warehouse to be built where the river joined the sea. A third of the cost would be borne by the King, the rest by a tax on local merchandise. Efforts were also made to improve the overland route, at least in summer, and much hope was placed in the efforts of Bernardino Gozna and Diego de Enciso, who were to be allowed an unlimited export of wool from Peru to Spain provided that they contributed to the maintenance of the Trans-Isthmian Highway. When the level of the river Chagres was high, the transit could be accomplished in three or four days, but at other times, eight to twelve days were needed. To transfer goods from the mouth of the river to Nombre de Dios was only a matter of eight to ten hours.

  The so-called Tierra Firme fleet carried cargoes to Nombre de Dios even if that port, a little to the east of what is now Colón, was never more than makeshift. The bay was shallow, full of reefs, and open to the sea; the town of Nombre de Dios was not walled. There were 150 wooden houses. There was a sandy beach before it, the jungle lay behind, fever raged. Between the comings and departures of fleets, the population was reduced to about fifty households. The east side provided the best natural harbor on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, but it was just as unhealthy. The removal of the port from Nombre de Dios took ten years because of the need to reroute the road from Venta Cruz.

  The river San Juan was mapped in 1521 by Alonso Calero, but its direction was west to east, so it linked Lake Nicaragua to the Atlantic but not the Pacific. Alonso de Saavedra proposed an enlightened scheme for a ca
nal, it seems, but the project was left aside for the attention of a future generation.

  Panama in the west had most of its three to four hundred buildings still built of wood, even the churches. Most of the five hundred inhabitants were of Andalusian origin and were merchants or transportation agents, the few exceptions being engaged in pearl fisheries or ranching or agriculture. The carrying of goods across the isthmus provided most of the income of the city. Some merchants maintained stables of pack animals for use on the highway to Cruces and Nombre de Dios; others had large flatboats on the river Chagres, directed by slaves. There were probably four hundred blacks. The cathedral of 1521 had but one canon, even if there was a supreme court in the town.

  There were in 1521 three convents, but together they had only eighteen inmates. Prices were high. By 1607, there were five convents and a hospital, with forty-five monks and twenty-four nuns. There were still no more than 372 dwellings, of which only eight were of stone (these were the town hall and the council chamber and six private dwellings). In 1607, there were 550 European households (of which fifty-three were not Spanish, being mostly Portuguese or Italian), together with a hundred thatched huts occupied by about 3,700 black slaves, of whom one thousand were concerned in transport. There were sixty-three colonists of Creole birth.

  But fleets by then came only every two or three years. Brokerage licenses sold in 1580 for 6,550 pesos were worth only 4,200 pesos in 1607. The town crier, who in 1575 was hired for 2,200 pesos, only received 150 pesos in 1607. The rents of the main meat market had fallen from 700 to 200 pesos a year. There were only 250 or so foot and eighteen horses available for the militia. The harbor in Panama was shallow and exposed, the tides being so great that all larger ships resorted to nearby Perico, two leagues to the west, which was partly enclosed. In 1575, sixty-ton vessels could approach at high tide, but in 1607, even small boats had difficulties.