These developments occurred at a time when western Europe as a whole was displaying a growing interest in the world overseas. Portugal in particular was active in voyages of discovery and exploration. With its long seaboard and its influential mercantile community it was well placed to embark on a quest for the gold, slaves, sugar, and spices, for all of which there was an expanding demand. Short of bread, it was also anxious for new cereal-growing lands, which it found in the Azores (rediscovered in 1427) and in Madeira. Like Castile it was inspired, too, by the crusading tradition, and the occupation of Ceuta in 1415 was itself conceived as part of a crusade which might one day encircle the earth and take Islam in the rear.
The traditional hostility of Castile and Portugal, exacerbated by Portuguese intervention in the question of the Castilian succession, provided an added incentive to Castile to acquire its own possessions overseas. One of the major battlefields in the Castilian-Portuguese conflict of the fifteenth century was to be the Canary Islands, which seem to have been discovered by the Genoese in the early fourteenth century. During the course of the Castilian War of Succession Ferdinand and Isabella attempted to substantiate their rights to the Canaries by dispatching an expedition from Seville in 1478 to occupy the Grand Canary. The resistance of the islanders and dissensions among the Castilians frustrated the intentions of Ferdinand and Isabella, and it was only in 1482 that a new expedition under Alfonso Fernández de Lugo laid the foundations for eventual success, beginning with the subjugation of Grand Canary in the following year. Even now, Palma was not taken till 1492 and Tenerife till 1493. But, in the meantime, the treaty of 1479 ending the war between Castile and Portugal had settled the dispute over the Canaries to Castile's advantage. Portugal renounced its claim to the Canaries in return for a recognition of her exclusive right to Guinea, the kingdom of Fez, Madeira, and the Azores, and so Castile acquired its first overseas possessions.
Castile's occupation of the Canaries was an event of major importance in the history of its overseas expansion. Their geographical position was to make them of exceptional value as an indispensable staging-post on the route to America: all Columbus's four expeditions put in at the Canary archipelago. But they were also to provide the perfect laboratory for Castile's colonial experiments, serving as the natural link between the Reconquista in Spain and the conquest of America.
In the conquest and colonization of the Canaries can be seen at once the continuation and extension of techniques already well tried in the later Middle Ages, and the forging of new methods which would come into their own in the conquest of the New World. There were marked similarities between the methods of the Reconquista and those adopted for the conquest of the Canaries, which itself was regarded by Ferdinand and Isabella as part of Castile's holy war against the infidel. The occupation of the Canaries, like the Reconquista, was a blend of private and public enterprise. Much of the Reconquista, especially in its later stages, had been conducted under the control of the Crown. The State also participated in the Canary expeditions, which were partly financed by the Crown and public institutions. But private enterprise operated alongside the State. Fernández de Lugo made a private contract with a company of Sevillian merchants – one of the first contracts of the type later used to finance the expeditions of discovery in America. Even an expedition entirely organized and financed under private auspices, however, was still dependent on the Crown for its legal authority. Here again the Reconquista provided a useful precedent. It had been the practice for the Crown to make contracts with leaders of military expeditions against the Moors. It seems probable that these contracts inspired the document known as the capitulación, which later became the customary form of agreement between the Spanish Crown and the conquistadores of America.
The purpose of capitulaciones was to reserve certain rights to the Crown in newly conquered territories, while also guaranteeing to the leader of the expedition due mercedes or rewards for his services. These rewards might consist of an official position such as the post of adelantado of Las Palmas conferred upon Fernández de Lugo – adelantado being a hereditary title granted by medieval Castilian kings and conferring upon its holder special military powers and the rights of government over a frontier province. The leader of an expedition would also expect to enjoy the spoils of conquest, in the shape of movable property and captives, and to receive grants of land and a title of nobility, like his predecessors during the Reconquista.
In making capitulaciones of this type, the Crown was clearly bargaining away many of its rights, but generally it had no alternative. When it provided financial assistance, as it did for Columbus and Magellan, it could hope to make rather more favourable conditions, but the work of conquest and colonization had to be left largely to private enterprise. In these circumstances, the extent to which the Spanish Crown still managed to retain control over newly won territories is remarkable. It was clearly acknowledged from the start that the capitulación was the fundamental legal charter of any new settlement, and Ferdinand and Isabella made use of the capitulación to insist in writing, both on the religious purposes inherent in the conquest, and on the essential presence of the State, from which the expedition acquired its sole legal authority. Columbus and his successors would thus always take possession in the name of the Crown. Similarly, the greatest care would be taken on the conquest of new territory, to prevent the alienation of the Crown's sovereign rights to feudal lords. The earlier history of the Canary Islands had made Ferdinand and Isabella fully aware of the dangers of unrestricted settlement, and they took various steps to prevent a repetition. Governors of the islands were kept strictly subordinate to their own control; the Crown insisted on its right to organize repartimientos or distributions of land among the settlers, in accordance with a practice already well established during the Reconquista; and all new towns were made dependent on a royal charter for their rights and privileges. In this way the municipal organization of medieval Castile was faithfully transplanted to the overseas colonies.
The cautious attitude of Ferdinand and Isabella, and their ceaseless care for the preservation and extension of their royal rights, are admirably illustrated by their dealings with Columbus. Here the difficulties were both financial and political. When the Genoese adventurer made his first appearance at Court in 1486 there were good reasons for rejecting his proposals. The Crown was poor; it was heavily engaged in the Granada war; and Columbus's plans prompted a not unreasonable scepticism. The reasons why Ferdinand and Isabella changed their minds in 1491 are still not entirely clear. Columbus had friends in high places. These included Ferdinand's secretary, Luis de Santángel, who helped to arrange the financing of the expedition, and the Franciscan Juan Pérez, a former confessor of the Queen, whose monastery at La Rábida gave shelter to the explorer when he first sought favour at Court. But it is also probable that the approach of victory in Granada helped to incline the monarchs to a more benign view of some of the alleged advantages to be derived from the project. A successful voyage by Columbus would steal a march on the Portuguese, and might conceivably bring riches to an empty treasury. Above all – at least as far as Isabella was concerned – the project could be of crucial importance in the crusade against Islam. A successful voyage would bring Spain into contact with the nations of the East, whose help was needed in the struggle with the Turk. It might also, with luck, bring back Columbus by way of Jerusalem, opening up a route for attacking the Ottoman Empire in the rear. Isabella was naturally attracted, too, by the possibility of laying the foundations of a great Christian mission in the East. In the climate of intense religious excitement which characterized the last months of the Granada campaign even the wildest projects suddenly seemed possible of accomplishment. The close coincidence between the fall of Granada and the authorization of Columbus's expedition would suggest that the latter was at once a thank-offering and an act of renewed dedication by Castile to the still unfinished task of war against the infidel.
The authorization was only granted, how
ever, after some extremely hard bargaining. Columbus's conditions seemed preposterously high. He requested for himself and his descendants in perpetuity the post of governor-general and viceroy of any lands he discovered. At a time when Ferdinand and Isabella were struggling in Spain with a considerable degree of success to assert the rights of the Crown against feudal pretensions, it was clearly impossible for them to countenance a demand which would have turned Spain's overseas territories into the feudal domain of a Genoese explorer. They also refused to let the Duke of Medinaceli help finance Columbus's voyage, fearing that participation by the magnates in colonial enterprises might similarly lead to the creation of independent domains overseas. In the end, Columbus had to be content with what were, in fact, already very large concessions – the hereditary title of Grand Admiral, and a right to the tenth of the merchandise and produce of the new territories.
When Columbus set sail in August 1492 with his three ships and his crew of eighty-eight, he was therefore the legatee of several different, and sometimes conflicting, traditions. Like a commander in the Reconquista he had made a private contract with the Crown for very considerable rights over the new lands that he was to win for it. But Columbus himself did not belong to the tradition of the Reconquista. As a Genoese, settled in Portugal and then in southern Spain, he was a representative of the Mediterranean commercial tradition, which had begun to attract Castilians during the later Middle Ages. His purpose was to discover and exploit the riches of the East in association with a State which had conferred its protection upon him. For this enterprise he could draw upon the experience acquired by Castile in its commercial ventures and its colonization of the Canaries. But unfortunately for Columbus, Castile's mercantile tradition was not yet sufficiently well established to challenge its military tradition with any hope of success. While he saw his task essentially in terms of the establishment of trading bases and commercial outposts, most Castilians were accustomed to ideas of a continuing military advance, the sharing-out of new lands, the distribution of booty and the conversion of infidels. Inevitably the two opposing traditions – that of the merchant and that of the warrior – came into violent conflict, and in that conflict Columbus himself was defeated and broken. It proved impossible for him to compete with the deeply engrained habits of a crusading society; nor could he stand alone against the growing power of a State which was quick to see both the possibilities and the dangers of overseas expansion, and was determined to keep the process of colonization firmly under its own control.
4. CONQUEST
When Columbus died in 1506, two years after Isabella, he was already a figure who belonged to the past. His attempts to colonize Hispaniola (Haiti) and to establish a commercial monopoly had failed by the end of 1498. As fresh discoveries were made, and the prospects of finding gold grew brighter with each new traveller's tale, the settlers were anxious to be up and away. Between 1499 and 1508 expeditions from Spain, sent out to explore the northern coast of South America, were establishing the existence of an American land-mass, while Columbus himself on his final voyage of 1502–4 touched Honduras and the Nicaraguan isthmus. From 1508 the pattern of discovery began to change. By that year Hispaniola was fully under Spanish control, and would replace Spain as the base for future expeditions for the discovery and conquest of Cuba and the Antilles.
By 1519 the first tentative probings were done. Núñez de Balboa had sighted the Pacific six years before, and the founding of Panama in 1519 gave Spain control of the isthmus and its first Pacific base. The years 1519 to 1540 represented the final, heroic phase of the conquista - the years in which Spain won its great American empire. This empire was built on the ruins of the two native empires of the Aztecs and the Incas. The conquest of the Aztec empire of Mexico was undertaken from Cuba in 1519 by Hernán Cortés with a brilliance and a daring which was to fire the imagination both of contemporaries and of future generations; Pizarro's destruction of the empire of the Incas, in fact, proved almost a carbon copy – sadly blotted in its later stages – of the triumph of Cortés a decade before Francisco Pizarro set off from Panama in 1531 with an even smaller band of men than that of Cortés; and successfully surmounting the challenge of enormous distances and almost impassable mountain barriers, his little company overthrew the great Inca empire in the space of a mere two years. From the heart of this fallen empire the conquerors fanned out over South America in the pursuit of El Dorado. By 1540 the greatest age of the conquista was over. Vast areas remained as yet unexplored and unconquered; the advance into Chile was successfully checked by the fierce resistance of the Araucan Indians; but in all South America with the exception of Brazil (which fell in the area allotted to the Portuguese by the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494), the Spanish ‘presence’ had been triumphantly and almost miraculously established.
The overthrow of the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas was achieved by no more than a handful of men. Cortés destroyed the empire of Montezuma with six hundred soldiers and sixteen horses; Pizarro, with thirty-seven horses, had only one hundred and eighty men. Little is known about the background and personalities of these conquistadores, less than a thousand all told, who captured a continent against almost inconceivable odds. There is no doubt, however, that they were drawn overwhelmingly from the Crown of Castile. America was legally a Castilian possession, in which the inhabitants of Navarre or the Crown of Aragon were regarded as foreigners. Within the Crown of Castile, it seems that natives of Andalusia and Estremadura predominated: both Cortés and Pizarro were Estremadurans by birth. The first arrivals in the New World were, naturally enough, young unmarried men, most of them with previous military experience. Socially, they were drawn from the gentry class and below, for the upper aristocracy played no part in the conquest and tended to look askance at projects for emigration which would take labourers from its estates. The strength of the mayorazgo system – the system of entail – in Castile did, however, provide a strong incentive for emigration by younger sons of aristocratic and gentry houses, who hoped to find in the New World the fortune denied them at home. Hidalgos in particular were well represented in the conquista – men such as Cortés himself, who came from noble but impoverished families, and were prepared to try their luck in an unknown world.
The character of these men, and especially the predominance of the hidalgo class in the leadership of the expeditions, inevitably set a special stamp on the whole pattern of conquest. They brought with them from Castile the ambitions, the prejudices, the habits and the values that they had acquired at home. First and foremost they were professional soldiers, schooled to hardship and war. They were also intensely legalistically minded, always drawing up documents, even in the most improbable places and situations, to determine the exact rights and duties of each member of an expedition. They had, too, the capacity for infinite wonder at the strange world unfolding before their eyes, interpreting its mysteries as much from their store of imagination as from their past experience. But their imagination was itself inspired by what they had learnt at home. The coming of printing to Spain around 1473 had given an extraordinary vogue to romances of chivalry, and Amadis of Gaul (1508), the most famous of them all, was known in affectionate detail by a vast body of Spaniards who, if they could not read themselves, had heard them told or read aloud. A society soaked in these works, and touchingly credulous about the veracity of their contents, naturally tended to some extent to model its view of the world and its code of behaviour on the extravagant concepts popularized by the books of chivalry. Here was an abundance of strange happenings and heroic actions. What more natural than that the mysterious world of America should provide the scene for their enactment? Uneducated and illiterate as Pizarro, Almagro and their companions may have been, all had heard of and hoped to find the kingdom of the Amazons; and it is recorded that their first sight of Mexico City reminded Cortés's men of ‘the enchanted things related in the book of Amadis’.3
Their heads filled with fantastic notions, their courage spurred by noble
examples of the great heroes of chivalry, the conquistadores were prepared to undergo every kind of hardship and sacrifice as they penetrated through swamps and jungles into the heart of the new continent. The spirit that animated them was later to be graphically described by Cortés: ‘he highly praised the captains and companions who had been with him in the conquest of Mexico, saying that they were able to suffer hunger and hardship, that wherever he summoned them he could do heroic deeds with them, and that, even when they were wounded and in rags they never failed to fight and to capture every city and fortress, however great the risk to their lives’.4 These men were dedicated fighters – tough, determined, contemptuous of danger, arrogant and touchy, extravagant and impossible; examples, perhaps a little larger than life size, of the kind of man produced by the nomadic, warrior society which inhabited the dry tableland of medieval Castile.
The dedication, however, required a cause, and the sacrifice a recompense. Both were described with disarming frankness by Cortés's devoted companion, the historian Bernal Díaz del Castillo: ‘We came here to serve God and the king, and also to get rich.’5 The conquistadores came to the New World in pursuit of riches, honour, and glory. It was greed, cupidity, the thirst for power and fame that drove forward a Pizarro or a Cortés. But their ambition deserves to be set into the context of their background. They came from poor families and a poor land, members of a society acclimatized to the winning of wealth by the waging of war. Rank and social distinction were achieved in this society by the possession of land and of riches, both of them the fruits of valour in battle. Cortés, like any caballero of medieval Castile, aspired to obtain a fief and vassals, to secure a title, and to make a name for himself in the world – and all of these ambitions he attained through his conquest of Mexico. He ended his life as Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, his son and daughters married into the ranks of the great aristocracy of Castile; and ‘in everything – in his manner, in his conversation, in his mode of eating and dressing – he showed himself to have all the outward signs of the gran señor’.6
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