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

by Hugh Thomas

  From the middle of 1542, there ensued a string of humane regulations. Thus on May 21, 1542, a royal decree forbade “any captain or any other person to make slaves of Indians, even if they were captured in a just war. No one was to be sold at all.” Then a special section of that decree condemned practices that might lead to the death of slaves “así indios como negros”—a very rare reference at that time to black slaves—while looking for pearls off Venezuela. The decree insisted that the life of those slaves was more important than any benefit that might be gained from the pearl fisheries.

  This order clashed with the views of the noble Vitoria, who in his Reflexiones de Indios of that same year wrote that the capture of Indians in a just war could result in slaves. Yet also in 1542 there came the Franciscan Fray Alonso de Castro’s treatise Utrum indigenae novi orbis,24 which argued that Indians should receive higher education. He added that the Bible should become generally available to Indians, a view he shared with Bishop Zumárraga, who, in his eloquent Conclusión exhortatoria, had urged that the Bible should be translated into the Indian languages so that it might be studied by everyone who could read in Mexico. After all, “no one could be called a Platonist if he had not read Plato. So no one could surely be called a Christian unless he had read the doctrine of Christ.”

  Castro wrote his Utrum, incidentally, at the request of the Crown in consequence of arguments about the school at Tlatelolco.25 That treatise was praised by all the prominent theologians of the day. Then Fray Luis de Carvajal commented, “It is ridiculous to admit [the Indians] to baptism and to absolution and the forgiveness of sins but not to a knowledge of the scripture.”26

  At that time, Las Casas was back in Spain seeking to inspire new laws about the treatment of Indians; he was accompanied by Fray Jacobo de Testera, who had come from New Spain with a letter from Bishop Zumárraga on the subject, as well as letters from several enlightened Dominicans. There were continual discussions on the matter in the Council of the Indies, where the president, García de Loaisa, was as cautious as always, though he clearly realized that the majority of his colleagues were against encomiendas. When Las Casas saw the emperor Charles again in Germany in 1541, his strong, attractive personality had an effect on his master, as it had before, in 1517.27 Charles was a seriously religious man and could be easily persuaded by Las Casas to act in favor of the Indians.28 Las Casas would also see Prince Philip very shortly.

  Sometime in the early part of 1542, a further series of meetings was held between Cardinal García de Loaisa and Cobos. Probably other advisers were at the meetings: for example, Granvelle, a good Latinist and linguist from Burgundy, who had become de facto chancellor of the empire, though he never had the title, and Dr. Juan de Figueroa and Dr. Antonio de Guevara, both of the Council of Castile. Dr. Ramírez de Fuenleal, with his experience in both Santo Domingo and New Spain—and, as we have seen, now as bishop of Tuy—was also called on to advise. They produced the so-called New Laws of the Indies.

  These laws deserve much consideration—first, because they were just, and second, because their proclamation in Peru and Mexico, as well as elsewhere in the Spanish imperial dominions, caused a crisis, as we have seen.

  The laws began with a personal statement by Charles. For years he had wanted to involve himself with greater intensity in the organization of the affairs of the Indies. Now he had settled to do so. We must assume that, though most of the rest of the text was written by Cobos and García de Loaisa, the Emperor himself made a contribution.

  In the text, dated November 20, 1542, there are forty paragraphs.29

  Paragraphs 20 to 40 constituted the heart of the new legislation, and it was these that caused such difficulties in the empire. The Indians were declared free if they were vassals of the King, as had been specifically urged by Las Casas in Remedy for Existing Evils. In order to free the natives who had been enslaved against all reason, the law now would provide that the supreme courts should act summarily and with true wisdom if the masters of Indian slaves could not show that they possessed them legitimately. The supreme court was to “enquire continually into the excesses and ill treatment which are (or shall be) done to [natives] by governors or private persons … henceforward [and this was a passage that caused outrage throughout the empire] for no cause of war nor in any other manner can an Indian be made a slave and we desire that they be treated as [vassals] of the Crown of Castile, for such they are.” Indians who “until now have been enslaved against all reason and right were to be put at liberty.” Indians were not “to carry heavy loads unless absolutely necessary and then only in a manner that no risk to life or health of the said Indians” may ensue.

  As for encomiendas, those who held them without a proper title would lose them, and those who held an unreasonable number were also to lose them. Those who had been engaged in Peru in the “altercations and passions” between Pizarro and Almagro would have their encomiendas confiscated, as would all royal officials and churchmen (including bishops) and institutions. There would be no new encomiendas and, when the present encomenderos died, their lands would revert to the Crown. Their children would be looked after since they would be granted a sum drawn from their fathers’ revenues. That was a very complicated compromise.

  All Indians placed under the protection of the Crown would be well treated. “First conquistadors”—that is, those who had first been involved in the conquest of the place concerned—would be preferred in royal appointments, all new discoveries were to be made according to certain rules, no Indians were to be brought back as loot to Spain or New Spain, and the scale of tributes imposed on new Indians would be assessed by the governor. Indians living in Cuba, La Española (Santo Domingo), and San Juan (Puerto Rico) were no longer to be troubled for tribute but were to be “treated in the same way as the Spaniards living in those islands.” No Indians would be forced to work except where no other solution was possible.30

  These laws, proclaimed in Spain in November 1542, were published in July 1543 and were received with desasosiego (disquiet) in New Spain. Even before they were published, they caused “a true panic.”31 So a series of visitors (visitadores) were sent to the New World to explain the Crown’s thinking: Alonso López Cerrato would go to the West Indies and then to Venezuela and the Gulf of Paria; Miguel Díaz was to go to Santa Marta, Cartagena, Popayán, and the Río San Juan; Blasco Núñez Vela would go to Peru; and Francisco Tello de Sandoval would go to New Spain. In addition to publishing and enforcing the laws, these officials were empowered to take a residencia of all royal officials and to act as judge on the supreme court concerned, and were given a papal bull conferring the power to extend or restrict bishoprics and to hold meetings of bishops to consider the welfare of the Church.

  We know what happened to Blasco Núñez Vela. Tello de Sandoval was much more prudent, and the Viceroy in Mexico had already begun to educate the colonists in what they should do and think. Tello ordered the New Laws to be proclaimed (pregonado), but he delayed their introduction.

  Still, Jacobo de Testera, the “custodian” of the Franciscans in New Spain, who had been recently to Spain itself and who had undoubtedly influenced the text of the laws, was received in Mexico with vast enthusiasm by a large crowd of Indians “who bestowed gifts, erecting triumphal arches, sweeping clean the street which Testera was to pass [as if he had been Montezuma, who had been treated like that] and strewing on him cypress branches and roses, bearing him in a litter because he and the other Franciscans had informed the Indians that they had come to free them and restore them to the state in which they had been before they were placed under the rule of the King of Spain … the Indians went forth to receive Friar Testera as if he had been the Viceroy.”32

  It may be to emphasize the accidental more than is necessary to realize that 1542 saw the foundation of the Archivo Nacional de Simancas and also the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Lovers of literature will insist that the publication of the collected poems of Boscan and
Garcilaso de la Vega was as important as those events since, by introducing Italian verse forms, a large flood of new Spanish poetry was opened up. To those concerned with romantic geography, the publication of Felix magno by Claudia Demattè in Seville should be remembered because it speaks again of Califa, the mystic Queen of California. More realistic monarchists were pleased that the Infante Philip announced his marriage to the Infanta María de Portugal.

  Still, we are concerned with Dominicans as well as with treasure. Among the disciples of Francisco de Vitoria was Fray Domingo de Soto. He became a convert to Vitoria’s version of Christianity.

  After studying with Vitoria at the University of Paris, he followed Vitoria back to Salamanca in 1526. He took over some of Vitoria’s lectures when the latter was ill, and in 1532, he was elected to be professor of theology at Salamanca. He lectured there till 1545, when he resigned his chair to go to the general council of the Church at the request of the Emperor. Soto played an important part in the first years of the work of the Council of Trent, both as imperial adviser and as representative of the Dominicans. It is comforting to realize that this great Catholic thinker, with his knowledge of the New World, was present at the council’s meetings. Returning to Spain, he was professor again at Salamanca in 1551, a position he held till his death in 1560.

  44

  Controversy at Valladolid

  One of the guardians, a horseback rider, explained that they were slaves condemned by His Majesty to the galleys and so there was no more to be said.

  MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote

  Las Casas returned to Spain in 1547 and went to stay at the monastery of San Gregorio in Valladolid, the splendid palace-convent next to the church of San Pablo. He came with Fray Rodrigo de Andrada, who represented the Indian tribes of Oaxaca and Chiapas, and who wanted to represent them before the Council of the Indies. Las Casas had something more to his taste in his agenda: a riposte to the able lawyer and polemicist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s latest Socratic dialogue, Demócrates segundo. Las Casas insisted that that book should be examined by the universities of Alcalá and Salamanca.

  Sepúlveda was an accomplished, if conventional, scholar with conservative views. He had just finished a great translation of Aristotle’s Politics. He had also completed a new tract about how to treat Indians. It was rejected by the Council of the Indies, but then it was transferred for approval of the Council of Castile—which, as Las Casas said, knew nothing of the New World. Las Casas supposed Sepúlveda thought that “men who knew nothing of Indian affairs would not notice the poison.” In fact, the Council of Castile referred Sepúlveda’s latest treatise to the theologians at Salamanca and Alcalá, where they discussed whether to publish it on many occasions. On mature consideration, they found that the work was unworthy since the teaching in it seemed unsound. Dr. Diego Covarrubias at Salamanca gave lectures criticizing the idea that the Indians’ low culture justified the wars against them. He doubted whether American Indians should be looked on as among those people born to obey.

  One who surprisingly seems to have remained on the sidelines in the controversy was Bishop Quiroga, who in 1548—while still bishop of Pátzcuaro, the onetime capital of Michoacán—returned home to work out the boundaries and rights of the bishoprics of New Spain. While in Castile, he wrote a treatise (now lost), De debellandis Indis, about whether it was ever just to make war against the Indians. Quiroga, in contradictory fashion, thought that war was usually just since it brought Indians closer to Christianity.1 Some Muslims had said much the same of slavery.

  Sepúlveda wrote to Prince Philip asking for a meeting of theologians to discuss his book. But Philip had left Valladolid for a European tour before he had time to answer, and Sepúlveda instead went to Rome, where, for good or evil, his book appeared. In April 1549, King Charles issued the extraordinary ruling that all conquests and expeditions (entradas included) were to be suspended till the dispute between Las Casas and Sepúlveda had been decided and it had become clear whether they were to be looked upon as legal. A declaration of April 1549 entitled “The manner in which new discoveries are to be undertaken” elaborated on this matter. Churchmen were to explain that they had come to the New World principally to secure the friendship of the Indians and to secure their acceptance of their subjection to the Emperor and to God. Conquistadors had been enjoined not to seize Indian women and were to pay for everything that they took from Indian properties, at the low prices set by men of the Church. No force was to be used by Spaniards except in self-defense and then only in proportion to needs. Any breach of these rules would be severely punished “inasmuch as this matter is so important for the exoneration of the royal conscience and of the persons who undertake these conquests, as well as for the preservation and increase of these lands.” Perhaps this remarkable declaration was drafted by Las Casas.2 Whether that was so or not, the very next month, Las Casas was found writing to Fray Domingo de Soto, now at the forefront of Spain’s theologians and much preoccupied by the matter of how to treat the Indians.

  Las Casas agreed that the New World was far away but the issues involved were close. He regretted that even pious missionaries offered conflicting advice as to what to do. He said that some friars had been suborned by money from conquistadors, others did not learn the languages necessary to progress in conversion (Las Casas included!), and still others knew nothing of what had happened. One friar (perhaps de Soto) had eaten the paper on which he had previously signed his support of the perpetuity of the encomienda. “Where else in the world,” Las Casas continued, “have rational men in happy and populous lands been subjugated by such cruel and unjust wars called conquests, and then been divided up by the same cruel butchers and tyrannical robbers as though they were inanimate things … enslaved in an infernal way, worse than in Pharaoh’s day, treated like cattle being weighed in the meat market and, God save the mark, looked on as of less worth than bedbugs? How can the words of those that support such iniquities be believed?”3

  On July 4, 1549, the aristocrat Luis de Velasco was appointed as Mendoza’s successor as viceroy of New Spain (the King had quietly pushed aside Mendoza’s suggestion that his own son Francisco might be temporarily named in succession). Velasco was worthy of the charge, being of the family of the constable of Castile. He had been Viceroy of Navarre and, like so many, had married a granddaughter of the first duke of Infantado. Thus he was accustomed to grandeur and would soon establish a tradition of having forty people to dine every day.

  Mendoza wrote to Velasco about the mission that he was leaving him: Everyone wished the government to conform to his own notions, and the diversity of views was remarkable. Mendoza would listen to all kinds of advice and usually said the ideas were good and that he would adopt them. His aim was to avoid sudden changes, especially in respect of the indigenous people, for so many changes had been made already that he wondered that the populace had not become insane. Though many gave advice, few gave help. The secret of good government was to do little, and slowly, since “most affairs lend themselves to being handled in that way and in that way alone can one avoid being deceived.” His chief concern was to maintain good relations between himself, the judges, and the lesser officials.

  Mendoza told Velasco that the Spaniards had respect for nothing said to them if they were not treated as gentlemen. The wealth from which the Crown’s revenue derived came from them, of course: They had brazilwood, they had mulberry trees for silk, and they had sheep. The Indians’ production was of much less value. That had to be taken into account.

  Mendoza also said that the Indians should be treated as sons of the Crown and both loved and punished in that spirit. Services and carrying (porterage) should be done away with slowly, so as not to offend the Spaniards. All the same, many Indians were undoubtedly cunning and mendacious. When a legal case was decided against them, they had a habit of bringing the matter up again once they thought that the judge had moved on or everyone had forgotten the case. He, Mendoza, never punished Indian
s for telling lies, because he feared that otherwise they would not come to him with their stories at all. He had regular hours for them on Mondays and Thursdays, but he was also ready to see them at any time, notwithstanding their “smell of perspiration and other evil odours. Many people thought that the Indians were humble, abused and misunderstood. Others thought that they were rich, idle vagabonds. Neither view was correct. They should be treated as men like everyone else.”4

  On July 3, 1544, the Council of the Indies had told the Emperor that dangers both to Indians and to the royal conscience were so great that no new expeditions should be licensed without his express permission and that of the council. Also, a meeting of theologians was really needed to discuss “how conquests may be conducted justly and with security of conscience.” Although laws had been promulgated on these matters, “we feel certain that these have not been obeyed, because those who conduct these conquests are not accompanied by persons who will restrain them and accuse them when they do evil.”5

  Matters continued thus for several years. Pamphlets were written by Las Casas and others discussing the injustice of these wars (in the Indies) “according to all law, natural and divine.” Others were contributed by Sepúlveda and others, to the effect that the conquests were just as well as wise.

  On September 23, 1549, Sepúlveda (in Valladolid) wrote to Prince Philip saying that “by falsehoods, favours and machinations,” Las Casas had succeeded in preventing his Demócrates alter from being published and that any copies that reached the Indies were immediately confiscated. Las Casas—“this quarrelsome and turbulent fellow”—had written a “scandalous and diabolical confessionary” against Sepúlveda. He thought that the case ought to be debated before the Council of the Indies. But Las Casas, Andrada, and several doctors of the Church argued fiercely against the idea and managed to shake the opinions of some members of the council. Las Casas was able to delay a decision till the emperor Charles returned from Germany. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who came home from Guatemala to assert the need for the heritability of encomiendas, returned to New Spain with this comment: “In this manner, we proceed, like a lame mule, from bad to worse, and from one Viceroy to another, from governor to governor.”6